Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (21 page)

Even so, the couple developed a routine for their vacation. They would get up late, when it was too hot to lie together any more. They would eat a breakfast of eggs and bread and strong coffee. They would go to the sea to swim and sleep, they would eat arepas and drink freezing beer at midday, and then take siesta back on the seashore amid the shade of the palms. When the sun began its precipitate descent to the horizon they would walk home through the strafing of the mosquitoes to take a shower before going into town for a meal. They tried every restaurant one after the other, and Dionisio said, ‘This country runs on sancocho more than it runs on petroleum.’ They would drink iced wine, and then they would go home to make love late into the night. He reminded Anica of her stepmother’s warning of what could befall innocent virgins when alone with a man in a strange place, saying, ‘She thinks you will come back pregnant.’ Anica smiled secretly, and fervently wished.

The old couple in the room nextdoor moved out and were replaced by two plump and Rubensian nymphs whose life was a permanent party for all manner of local Romeos. There was much shouting, ribald laughter, slamming of doors, scuffling, rattling of bedheads against walls, and orgasmic wailing, so that one day at four o’clock in the morning Dionisio could not stand it any more and he burst in on them in mid-orgy.

The two naked girls and the four naked men sprawled amid a chaos of bottles and bedclothes stopped dead in mid-frolic and all four men lost their erections simultaneously. They were terrified of this huge man with the wild eyes and disarrayed hair who shouted at them with Hephaestan fury and overturned the beds on top of them, demanding an instant cessation to their interminable racket every night. The next day when they saw Dionisio they did not believe it was the same man because he seemed half the size of the man who had terrorised them, but they conducted their bacchanalia thenceforth in frightened whispers that somehow augmented the pleasure because it was like the teenage thrill of making love with a handkerchief in one’s mouth in order to remain inaudible to one’s parents.

Anica was deeply dismayed by the arrival of her period because it demonstrated the failure of her intentions to come to fruition, and she became fractious until the time of her fertility recurred.

During this time when Anica was distressed by the normally welcome appearance of her menses and Dionisio was involved in acute self-questioning as to what he could have done to make Anica’s mood so changeable, it began to rain. It rained for three days, imprisoning them in their room. They sat on the balcony watching the water rise in the street like a river, and listening to the enervating splash of the incessant torrent of water that rose up again as steam only to fall down again as rain. Dionisio read to Anica the story of the ‘Monologo de Isabel Viendo Llover en Macondo’, and then she read romantic novelettes whilst he struggled with the inscrutable Portuguese of
Viva o Povo Brasileiro.
On the second day of reading this masterpiece the frustration of the rain and the power-cuts overwhelmed him quite suddenly and he hurled the book at the wall and started shouting, ‘Why the fuck cannot Ribeiro write in goddam Spanish? Why do I have to read epics in some godforsaken bastardised language like this? Why do not the fucking Brazilians speak the same as the rest of us?’ Anica looked up from her book in which the tall director had just fallen in love with an actress with a hidden past, and held out her hand to him.

When it rains like this, all one can do is read books or make love. But such drastic limitation of choice makes the soul rebel against doing either, and one has to rediscover the meaning of love to make it bearable.

‘I am bleeding,’ she said, ‘but come here, mi amor.’ He took her hand and she drew him down, making penance with her actions for the dreadful thing that she would have to do one day soon. She petted him until it was physically painful for him to lie alongside her beautiful, smooth young body. He smiled and kissed her softly. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘who gives a shit if it is your period? Go and take that cotton cigar out.’

Anica made love to him with her eyes tightly closed because she was analysing and memorising every smallest sensation against her future without him.

IN THE PUEBLO
of San Martin the young men formed a club. It was in the nature of a Leticia Aragon Appreciation Society, except that they called it El Club del Dolor. It met informally up to two times a week in their respective homes, and no meeting was declared closed until everyone was too drunk or too lachrymose to continue.

The club listened sympathetically as each member expounded the depth of his passion and the extremity of his despair. They applauded each other’s ballads and boleros, discussed sightings and words exchanged, laid wagers upon who would receive the first kiss, the first caress, the first consummation. On this latter subject there was heated debate over whether it was possible to sleep with Leticia and not die of ecstasy, and the more romantic amongst them declared that to sleep with her would in any case be a profanation. This suggestion was always shouted down and ridiculed, but there was not one of them who did not know in his heart that it was perfectly true; Leticia was just not one of those women that one might seriously aspire to bed.

While the young men burned with desire, formed groups for the purpose of performing serenades and retretas, wrote poems on the lids of cigarette packets and burned her name on trees with magnifying glasses, Señor Aragon burnt himself out with his self-imposed restraint.

He had married young, and was only thirty years old when his daughter was fourteen. He was a man in his physical prime, alert and vigorous, handsome and strong, with a perfect black moustache, stubble by noon, and curly black hair that he was only just beginning to lose. He was also a man of the strictest honour who never gave more to whores than he gave to his wife, and who never reached a natural understanding of his demented passion for his exquisite daughter.

He became morose and quick-tempered, nearly struck his wife once when she argued with him, and, completely contrary to the tenor of his nature, he took to disappearing for days at a time and coming back drunk and reeking of vomit.

Leticia in the meantime had become a creature even more detached. Sometimes in the house she reverted to her infantile habit of nakedness, and on those occasions her father would gaze upon her hungrily at the very time that he was commanding her to dress herself and not to bring shame upon the house.

She took to voracious reading, living in a world of novellas inhabited by tycoons and enraptured beauties, handsome politicians and ladies of dubious intentions. But she was not so detached that when people began to talk about this Dionisio Vivo, who was bound to get killed one day, she did not notice. She asked her mother about it, sensing in her very marrow that here was someone who was not from a novel who was a real tragic hero. Leticia confounded her family by placing a permanent order for
La Prensa
with the tienda, and read it avidly even though it was always two weeks late by the time it had travelled by aeroplane, truck, tractor and mule all the way from the capital to her own little pueblo.

There was something mesmeric about the tone of the coca letters; she found compassion and anger, taut argument and breadth of vision, and discovered that there was a world outside where there really were atrocities, international politics, and power-hungry villains. She also discovered that in the world there were genuine Don Quijotes who stand up to anything regardless of the consequences and who attempt the impossible and the improbable without the slightest chance of success.

Leticia became preoccupied with Dionisio Vivo. She would eagerly turn to the letters page of every edition that she received, and if there were not a letter from him she would throw it to the floor in anger, until she would pick it up again to read the news pages. Frequently she would sit perfectly still in the doorway, or outside amongst the platanos, contemplating the thought of Dionisio Vivo as if she were expecting a communication from him upon the airwaves of the ether.

Being what she was, Leticia received her communications. In the candomble she was the child of the Orisha Oshun, goddess of everything that makes life pleasant, who is also the saint Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre. For this reason Leticia kept her money in the dried shell of a pumpkin, and she wore one red bead to every five yellow beads in her necklace in order to commemorate the love affair of Oshun with Chango. She rubbed her belly with honey and she washed herself in the river at least once every day.

It happened one day that as Leticia was walking to the river to fetch water for her mother, Oshun appeared to her in her disguise as a Catholic Saint, and, shimmering somewhat like a mirage, informed her that she should go to Ipasueño and do what she subsequently did. Oshun told her that in token of her sincerity she was giving her a special gift that no one must ever be allowed to see. Puzzled because Oshun had handed nothing over, Leticia went home with the water, and found in her hammock a bracelet made of five strands of burnished copper. She hid it on a string above her breast, and its presence there, along with the green stain that it made upon her honey-coloured skin, served as a perpetual reminder of her mission.

It was on the day before she planned to depart that her father returned home drunk. He had been absent for two days, sleeping at the finca at night, his dreams boiling over with the bitterness of the unavailability of his daughter. Finally he had decided to go home and confess to her upon his knees, begging her understanding and her forgiveness, in the hope that confession would cleanse his soul.

But it did not work out like that. When he came into her room she was sleeping in her hammock, looking in the semi-darkness like a sleeping angel. Señor Aragon was overcome with emotion, and tears rolled down his cheeks as he stroked her body through the thinness of her shift. At first this was no more than paternal, but it could not remain so. The thought came to him that he might take her in her sleep, that she might dream it. Gently he attempted to raise her garment, to unlace it at the throat, but the drink made his fingers clumsy, and as he leaned over her his shadow fell across her face.

‘I am awake, Papa,’ she said. Desperate, he lost control of himself, thinking that now that he had been caught there was nothing to lose by taking as much as he could before the world finally caved in on him and closed him up forever.

He threw himself upon her, clawing at her body, attempting to kiss her lips as he had so often dreamed. But the hammock swayed, and under their combined weight the old fabric split. He had her cornered and was ripping off her shift when Señora Aragon came in and said with soft reproach, ‘Alberto.’

The next morning Leticia left a note that said, ‘I am going to give away my virginity, suffer much, and bear a child for Oshun,’ and after she had gone they discovered the body of Alberto Aragon, who had gone to the river at the place where Leticia used to fetch the water for her mother and sliced his own throat.

ANICA’S
MENSTRUATION BEGAN
to ease off at the same time as the rain. Equally relieved, she and Dionisio began to go out a little during the respite of periods. The streets ran with brown water which carried with it the usual bizarre fluvial moraine of cat corpses, wardrobes, confused peccaries, and bright blue shirts. At first the air was so freshly washed that the lungs hurt to breathe matter so clean, but then the sun sank its claws into the water and heaved it up and scattered it as steam, so that all cold surfaces were coated with condensation, and elaborate fungi sprouted insolently from every crevice. The hypodermic mosquitoes were replaced by an anaesthetic humidity which caused the steam to seep out of the pores of the skin at the slightest movement, and the only recourse was to immerse oneself in the sea and conduct as normal a life as possible up to one’s neck in water.

Anica and Dionisio hired a motorcycle, leaving as surety a gold ring that had originally been given by the King of Portugal to the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura in 1530 in gratitude for his mercenary services, and which had been passed down the Sosa family ever since. They thought of going into the great Spanish castle which had been built by African slaves who, upon release, had become the parents of the Nation, but it seemed too huge, too monolithic, and they both were depressed by what must have happened within its walls over the centuries. So they drove on through the dust, speeding past those tinselly little shrines erected every few metres to mark the spots of fatal accidents, in each of which was a daguerreotype of the deceased and some wilting flowers. They flew past old campesino women with dejected mules laden with unidentifiable vegetation and persecuted by flies, past whitewashed barracas with their unsociable cats and incurious children, past Satan-eyed goats and trees laden with dusty grenadillos.

Anica wanted to stop every half-kilometre in order to take photographs, because she had noticed that the sea was shifting from one of her favourite shades of turquoise to another. In these photographs Dionisio posed, in one flexing his biceps, in another crossing his eyes, or standing with a banana in his shorts, a leering grimace on his face, and a pineapple on his head. In later years he would look at these photographs with the incredulous feeling of having survived an age of innocence that was as distant as the Wars of Independence and as impossible to recreate. It was a feeling that was always accompanied by an empty yearning, the feeling of ‘saudade’ that he had always tried to capture in his music.

Anica took him many times around Nueva Sevilla town, looking for those Indian designs that were easier to find here than they were in the pueblos of the Indians themselves. He bought her some beads because she would not allow him to buy anything expensive; she felt guilty enough as it was, and she did not buy him a present in return because it would have been a farewell present.