Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (16 page)

Less welcome to the women was the persistent company of gangs of wolfish men who gathered at their encampment and pestered and nauseated them with suggestive remarks and salacious invitations. These were treated with the haughty disdain that they deserved, but less easy to deal with were the constant sexual assaults and attempted violations. Matters came to a head when a band of armed thugs from the Club appeared in a jeep and attempted to abduct some women at gunpoint, to save themselves the trouble of raiding the pueblitos.

The crucial mistake that these men made was connected with their ignorance of the ways of Santandereanas, who made up by far the greater proportion of the women’s number. As soon as it became evident what was happening, they emerged from their tents and hovels armed with machetes, revolvers, shotguns, and clubs, and overwhelmed the ruffians in a few frenetic seconds. One of the women, without a moment’s thought to her own comfort, removed the ropes from her little barraca, which then descended sideways to the ground, and tied them all up in a bundle. They pushed the wild-eyed and protesting parcel straight over the mountainside, without having failed to attach with a pin a lengthy letter stating the reasons for their action to the shirt of every one of them. The warrior-like Santandereanas cheered as the bundle bounced down the rocks, and they repeated the performance with every subsequent invasion of would-be rapists until the gorge was black with vultures, confounding a local saying that the chasm was so deep that no bird would overfly it, and the raids ceased.

More subtle and insidious were the attentions of the dozens of men who travelled in from far and wide claiming to be Dionisio Vivo. To begin with a number of women fell for this ploy, but realised the deception almost immediately afterwards, having found the experience of making love to the impostors insufficiently mystical. One or two of them fell for the charm of the more engaging deceivers and ran off with them, having waived the purpose of their visit, but thereafter the remainder of the women began to operate a simple vetting system, which can be illustrated by what happened to Jerez.

Like most others who arrived claiming to be Dionisio Vivo and hoping for free love, Jerez’ appearance immediately aroused suspicion. To begin with he was almost completely bald, had a flabby stomach, a dirty shirt, huge bags under his eyes, a syphilis chancre on his lip, and a ridiculous support bandage around his knee. His face displayed none of the intellectual acuity expected of Dionisio Vivo, and none of the anticipated Christlikeness, not even the nimbus. The redoubtable Fulgencia Astiz demanded to know the exact date when Dionisio’s last letter had appeared in
La Prensa
, and the nature of its contents. Jerez divagated unconvincingly and with extreme vagueness upon the supposed contents of the letter, and then Fulgencia demanded to see his cedula.

‘My cedula?’ echoed Jerez.

‘Yes, your Certificado Judicial, which the law requires you to carry. Produce it.’

Another Santandereana with her black hair cascading about her face and a formidable magnum in her hand stepped out and took his cedula from his shirt pocket. She inspected it carefully, noted the ornate renewal stamps and the print of the right index finger, and then she noticed the name. She showed it to Fulgencia, who looked contemptuously at Jerez, who looked very embarrassed, and started to say, ‘I am very sorry, ladies, but you are very charming and . . .’ But the magnum was jabbed into his back, and he was seen off to jeers, amid a shower of rocks and refuse, and he never came back to repeat the trick. Instead he went to the Casa Rosa, and they would not have him either because of the chancre on his lip.

Living so close to nature and with so few amenities, the women very soon took on a wild and dishevelled appearance, and became an object of curiosity and occasional ridicule to the people of Ipasueño. They were often overheard having fairly raucous celebrations, and all sorts of bizarre rumours started to circulate about them, of which the only ones that bore any semblance to the truth were that they were capable of tearing people to pieces and were followers of Dionisio Vivo.

Curiously enough, the women never took the obvious step of going to Ipasueño College to find him. It was as if they all entertained the suspicion that meeting their hero in the flesh might be a disappointment. There grew up a tacit understanding in their own mythology that one day he would come to them.

Those of a classical disposition immediately saw the parallels, and started to call them ‘The Bacchantes’, or ‘The Maenads’, depending upon whether their inclinations were Latin or Hellenic. Ramon, probably the only policeman in the department who knew anything about ancient myth, mischievously took advantage of this and put about a lot of stories about Dionisio which were intended to reach the ears of El Jerarca, but which he had sedulously culled from an encyclopaedia.

He would entertain the credulous habitués of bars with wonderful tales of how Dionisio had once turned into a little goat and been tended by water nymphs, about how he had been seen in a chariot pulled by tigers, about how he had once turned a river into wine so that his pursuers became drunk in it and drowned, about how vines grew up around him and how someone attempting to cut them down with a machete had instead cut off his own foot. He told them that when anyone attempted to bind him the bonds just fell off, that he could change into a lion, and that he had once rescued his mother from the spirit world by swapping her for the one he loved the most. These tales rapidly spread all over town, and Ramon would sometimes be greatly amused to find them retold to himself with even greater exaggeration than that with which he had ornamented them in the first telling.

Anica and Dionisio were aware of the women’s presence and their purpose from the very beginning, but it seemed to them that it all had nothing to do with their daily life or their love affair. Dionisio thought of them only with a sense of the quizzicality of the world, and Anica only rarely felt endangered by them, when he made dirty jokes about them or pretended that he was about to go and see them. Like everyone else, other than the classicists, Anica and Dionisio referred to them as ‘Las Locas’.

AT LAST THE
time came for them to make the arduous journey to Valledupar, a city so frivolous that the natives hang pineapples on lemon trees just to confuse the tourists, and the same place that General Fuerte’s donkey had once given birth to kittens. It was also the root and foundation stone of the burgeoning movement towards local democracy in the nation, and had been ever since Dionisio’s father, General Hernando Montes Sosa, had called an election and confirmed his position as governor without resort to electoral fraud. From that town had set out the military expeditions to quell the imaginary communist insurgencies in the region of Chiriguana, which itself was inundated in the spectacular flood which resulted in the discovery of the ancient Inca city named by Aurelio as Cochadebajo de los Gatos.

The couple loaded the antique vehicle with their possessions. It was a notably sultry and lugubrious day, and they sweated in rivers on account of their fetching and carrying. They loaded numerous musical instruments so that Dionisio might compose songs and play to himself, and soon found that there was not much room for anything else. Then they decided to take Anica’s Norton because Dionisio wanted her to be independent if she wished. This proved to be an impossibility on account of its size and asymmetrical shape, until they had the inspiration of tying it to the roof with ropes that came through the windows. This meant that they could not open the doors any more, and so they had to enter and leave the car by climbing through the windows themselves.

As the couple began the two-day excursion down to the torrid Llanos, Dionisio had the sensation that one of his lives was ending and that nothing would ever be the same again. For the first time that he could recollect he had been sublimely happy for several months without interruption, he was strong and bulging with health, and he had realised with astonishment that he was young. It had been a very long time since the days when he had woken up each morning unable to decide whether or not he had died during the night. Anica in her turn had forgotten to cry about her mother’s death for several months.

The drive to Dionisio’s home was largely uneventful except for his car’s token protests. It burst a water hose at one point, and at another the distributor worked loose so that the engine backfired abruptly and stopped. The worst thing, however, was that the home-made silencer began to come off after hitting a hump in the road, and the racket made conversation very difficult. Apart from this, the roads were in their usual state of grotesque deformation, full of potholes, ravaged by floods, so that only drunks would keep to one side of the highway, and only optimists such as Dionisio ever expected to arrive anywhere.

Down on the Llanos everything was different. Down here the cattle were not sleek and fat as in the sierra, but were bloated with parasites and afflicted with picturesque despair. The cats were not philosopical and elegant, but scabby and dishonest. The grasses were not lush and generous, but paltry, and seared by a heat that distorted the view in every direction, had such a radical effect upon the metabolism that it was necessary to urinate only once a day, in the evenings, and made it possible to bake cassava bread by simply leaving it on the roof. The humidity was so profound that not even the famous saunas of Finland could rival it for the sensation of being a prisoner in one’s own body, which in turn felt as though wrapped in a sodden military blanket. The adobe and palm-thatched huts of the poor pueblitos seemed each one to have a buzzard or a vulture perched upon the roof in the posture of bored sentries from a conscript army. In each doorway there seemed to be the same bundles of ragged clothes surmounted by the inscrutable faces of their occupants, always with a large puro clenched in the teeth, and often with a dirty child hanging on with one hand and eating guava jelly with the other.

They stopped by a lemon grove for the night and slung Dionisio’s Acahuatec hammock between two trees. The night had cooled the world to a balmy temperature and there was no sign of rain, so they sat amongst the trees listening to the redskin monkeys and watching the fireflies while they drank coffee and talked about whether or not bats could spread rabies. When they climbed into the hammock there were comical episodes caused by the fact that it is very difficult to get into a hammock two at a time without suddenly being tipped out. Anica lay across the hammock crossways to stabilise it so that he could come up as well, and they discovered empirically a secret known to Indians for centuries, which is that it is easiest to make love in a hammock by lying in it diagonally. They slept a guiltless and profound sleep, and woke up in the morning swollen with bites, but already reaped and harvested by the sun.

They drove at furious speed to keep the air circulating in the car, and also to get to Puesto Grande by four o’clock in order to see the famous mechanical negro in the town clock sally out and strike the bell with a hammer. On the hour the little mechanical negro was propelled unsteadily from out of his alcove and hesitantly banged on the bell four times before retreating backwards again. They felt a sense of anti-climax as one often does with technological wonders, but went into the Miami Motel to celebrate nonetheless. In the bar, which was full of chickens and where there lived a monopolising hog that ate cigarette-ends and cigar butts, Anica said ‘Do you think that we are both locos?’

As they neared his parental home he began to feel a warm sensation growing in his body. Even though the family had originated in Ipasueño, the General had been resident in Cesar for so long now that Dionisio regarded Valledupar as his real home, especially as its quirkiness and eccentricity suited his nature almost to perfection, despite the stupefying heat and catastrophic rainstorms, the ravenous and insatiable insects and the intrusively raucous darktime chirring of the crickets.

His parents now lived in a neo-colonial mansion with peeling paint and cool courtyards. There was a reconstruction of the original Aristotelian peripateticon draped with bougainvillea, and a vast garden that his horticultural mother had turned into a beneficent forest by marking every important event with the planting of a tree, which meant that they suffered from a prodigious surfeit of avocados, guavas and citrus. The General was used to organising military fatigue squads to collect these up in baskets; these he would place in front of the guards at the gates with orders to give them away for nothing to poor women and to hungry travellers.

The house itself possessed the air of a place reconciled to time. It spoke of the recollection of glittering celebrations and presidential visits; it was a house that had gone into genteel retirement in order to cultivate roses and relax upon its foundations without any bitterness or regret. In its hallways were family portraits, including one of the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, complete with a hole in his nose which, out of a feeling of vengefulness against the portrait’s stern and reproachful expression, the General had put there in his youth with the aid of an air-rifle. On the walls were a collection of swords, pikes and muskets from the colonial age, and there was a clock so old that it dated from the time when no one was so hurried that they felt it necessary to have a minute hand. One of the family cats had once got into the habit of dropping live mice into the mechanism, where there was now a small but thriving colony that had mastered the art of knowing the precise times when it was essential to avoid the various pieces of machinery.

Dionisio’s family was an old one with a documented history that gave each member of it the reassuring feeling that they had the right to exist. The General himself was so enmeshed in the family traditions that he sometimes forgot which century he was in and had to be reminded by his wife. He possessed a conciliatory frame of mind and a puzzled expression, and supervised his own emotions with a military sense of order coupled with a discreet humanity.