Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (8 page)

So Dionisio never had the chance to test on himself his psychological theory of bribery, which was that anyone could be corrupted by being offered a sum that exceeded their annual income by a factor of ten, and he carried on writing the coca letters. But that night he noticed a turd on the stairs, and wondered how on earth a cat had got in.

DIONISIO SEALED THE
envelope of his latest coca letter, addressed it, and took it down to the post-office, only to find that he had been pre-empted by the destruction of the latter. In the early morning a bomb had removed its front external wall, and a notice pinned to the broken doorjamb announced that the service would temporarily be relocated in the town hall. When he arrived there he found that the postmaster was going about his business with his usual inflexible sang-froid. ‘Hola, Dionisio, and how is the Pythagoras of Ipasueño?’

‘He is perturbed,’ he replied.

‘You should be; they did this to prevent you from posting your celebrated epistles to the intelligentsia and the powerful elite who govern us with so much enlightenment and humanity. I wish to thank you personally. This is far more salubrious and spacious than the old office, and the number of cockroaches is far less.’

Dionisio smiled and handed him the new letter. ‘Seriously, Dionisio, you should stop writing these. Local people are taking out bets on the precise date of your assassination, and the stakes are so high that there is a peril of one of them assassinating you himself just in order to win his bet.’

‘I think that people are saying these things out of a love for drama.’

‘And they say that several attempts have been made already, so you surprise me. They say that you have lived because you are a brujo and can make yourself invisible, amongst other things.’

Dionisio put his hand on the postmaster’s shoulder and said, ‘Vale, well you tell everyone that I am a brujo indeed, and that anyone attempting to reduce my lifespan will himself die instantaneously, OK? We will amuse ourselves by mythologising Dionisio Vivo, is that a deal?’

‘That would amuse me very much,’ replied the postmaster. ‘You have a deal. And I have a letter for you.’

Outside the town hall Dionisio tore open the envelope and found that it was his very first piece of personal fan-mail. By some extraordinary omission it had occurred to no one in the media either visual or printed to request interviews, and so Dionisio had missed the opportunity to become a media star and appear on quiz shows. But all over the country, and completely without his knowledge, Dionisio Vivo societies had sprung up in which people met to discuss his opinions and fantasise about his appearance.

This is not as surprising as one might otherwise believe, because it was a country where all the television stars were foreigners in imported series, where almost no one could afford to buy books, and consequently one could not become lionised as an author. But it was a literate country, thirsty for knowledge and education, which were perceived by most as the most important rungs on the difficult ladder out of poverty. As a result, the country had what was probably the best collection of newspapers in Latin America, if not the world. There were vast numbers of quality local papers, and several highbrow papers which were read avidly and appreciatively even by those who in other lands would normally read the tabloids. It was one of the few countries in the world where journalists could build up the kind of fanatical following normally associated with rock stars. Dionisio’s impassioned letters in the most prestigious newspaper of all had, unbeknown to him, won him the status of a star in a country wearied and disgusted by the anarchy of the coca trade.

But it was also a superstitious country, a country where it was possible to believe every religion all at once, where devout Catholics could pray to Oxala, practise santeria, and attend spiritualist seances with a clear conscience. One simply selected from one’s gamut of beliefs whichever one was appropriate for whichever occasion.

And so clairvoyants and mediums were hired to give detailed descriptions of the new journalistic superstar to portrait painters, and some members of the Vivo societies with natural psychic powers and artistic inclinations even painted his portrait themselves. There was a general consensus that he was a white man with a beard and long brown hair with the gentle eyes of a doe and the hint of a nimbus about his head. There developed a fashion for portraying him with a scarlet heart in his breast that bled for his country, and so he became a kind of crossbreed between Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin. The proliferation of these societies caused a boom in commissions for the artistic world, and an unprecedented increase in the circulation of
La Prensa,
which helped towards rebuilding its offices in bombproof British granite and bullet-proof glass. There was such a demand that when a society for expatriates in Paris was inaugurated,
La Prensa
even contemplated opening an office there to receive enquiries and requests for back issues.

As was to be entirely expected, a fair number of the members of these societies were the kind of young women who in general find their vocations in cloisters. That is to say, they nourished their powerful but sublimated libidos upon fantasies about a distant, unattainable, and idealised man who would haunt their dreams and give them actual verbal messages during their seraphic raptures. For these women who knew that they were too base to pursue their divinity in the flesh there existed an admirable substitute in the postal service. There were others, however, who like the Mary Magdalen of unbiblical myth yearned for him with such hyperbolical ardour that they reported to their friends that they were able to reach stupendous orgasms without even touching themselves. For these it became their unrelenting intention to offer themselves to him in the flesh and, if possible, to bear his child. The phenomenal efforts of concentrated visualisation that these women performed gave rise to numerous and bizarre psychic effects, such as that reported by a virgin of Antiochia, Leticia Aragon, who had purportedly nearly suffocated in a shower of white feathers.

Dionisio opened his first fan-letter, and found inside it a dog-eared photograph of a plump mulatta who was offering him her favours gratis in return for a lock of his hair and travelling expenses. He read it several times with disbelief, and began to compose in his head a tactful refusal. When he got home he found Anica waiting on the doorstep, and he showed her the letter. She read it, torn between jealousy and amusement, and then told him that she had come round because she had had the idea that it would be good to take a shower together.

They undressed in indecent haste and ran into the bathroom, where Anica removed the gekko from the wall ‘so that it does not get soap in its eyes’ and put it higher up on the tiles. She turned on the shower and they jostled for space beneath its thin stream of water. The shower was Jerez’ single successful improvisation, and was made of two hoses which were stuck respectively onto the hot and cold taps and fed up to a saucepan which had had holes punched in the bottom and was then fixed to the wall with a twisted coathanger. The water supply was subject to sudden variations in both pressure and temperature, so that it was often necessary to leap out of the tub in order not to be either scalded or frozen.

They drew the plastic curtain around the shower, and Dionisio noticed that Anica had forgotten to remove her earring, but he did not inform her of the omission because he was reluctant to delay the proceedings. Voluptuously he soaped her all over until every bit of her was covered with such froth that she took on the appearance of being feathered with down. He took her breasts reverently, one in either hand, and massaged them upwards with conscientious circling motions so that her nipples were teased and began to shrink and harden into buds. He massaged her backside, her stomach, and then her long legs, working upwards with the maximum of tantalisation towards her thighs. He worked the soapsuds salaciously into her fine gingery hairs and rolled his hand with the firmest and gentlest of pressures so that she closed her eyes and moaned and clutched his shoulder as if she were entering a trance.

When he had finished he gave her the soap and she performed the same operations for him, except with greater delicacy and tentativeness. When she had finished they took the hose out of the saucepan and sprayed each other with it so that the suds flew all over the bathroom and gently subsided into puddles. Then Anica grabbed the cold-water hose and sprayed Dionisio on the polla so that he shouted and struggled to get it away from her. Then they held each other tight, and she felt his little bird jumping and twitching against her. She stuck her tongue in his ear and said, ‘You wait until I rub you all over with olive oil and cocoa butter.’