Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (29 page)

It was the tigres who, when he was watching from his window with the taste of volcanic ash in his mouth Anica’s blank window on her twenty-first birthday, with one accord went up on their hindlegs and forced him to the floor so that he would roll around with them in a mock-battle laughing in between his fits of loss. And it was the cats who brought Leticia Aragon.

When Leticia arrived with a bag of her things claiming that the cats had dragged her by the sleeve all the way from the camp, Dionisio did not believe her because he had not let the cats out and had been playing with them minutes before by tickling their whiskers with the feather of a troupial. But Leticia was there at the door all the same, flanked by the cats.

Leticia was one of the ephemeridae of the human race. She had the fragility of a porcelain twig and the colours of a hummingbird. Her hair was as fine as cobweb and as black as onyx, and her eyes seemed to have no colour of their own but changed according to the refraction of the light. Her Venusian clothes hung upon her in such a way as to intimate that her natural state was nakedness in starlit forests, and when Dionisio formally shook her proferred hand it felt as though it was made not of flesh but out of coagulated light. ‘I have come to stay,’ she said, and then added, as if explaining some obscure point, ‘I am a virgin.’

When Leticia left for Cochadebajo de los Gatos six months later with Dionisio’s second child stirring in her womb, he was unable to remember anything about her that might have established who she was. But he knew that he had treated her appallingly and that she had never wept or even reproached him. She had always known that when he made love to her it was really to someone else, and she had agreed when he had said that if her child was a girl she should call it Anica. Only Leticia knew what it was that she had been doing for all those months.

She left leaving a note which said ‘Now you should go to the other women. I have loved you without possessing nor being possessed, and that is the way it will always be.’ She tied red cords with interwoven gold wire about the necks of the cats as a farewell present, at roughly the time that Anica would have given birth.

IT WAS NOT
obvious to the people of Ipasueño what Lazaro was; his face, his hands and his legs were concealed in his monk’s habit, and the special shoes hid his feet. It was true that he walked in spasmodic jerks and that his voice was like that of a vulture, but it was common to see things such as that, and who knew if there were not some good reason for his voice?

Everybody knew, however, that there was something out of the ordinary about Lazaro. Some said that he was an omen of death and that he had been seen carrying a scythe, and some said that he was a monk of a mendicant order. But others would say that no, a mendicant does not have an embroidered habit, and especially not a habit embroidered with jaguars and palms. He was a mystery, but perhaps not so much unlike all the other beggars who collected in the plaza or on the steps of the churches to gather alms.

Lazaro slept with some of the other beggars in the crypt of the church where Don Innocencio was cura. This priest had begun to lose the wealthy and respectable members of his congregation at exactly the time when he had started to preach the universal brotherhood of God’s children, and had expounded the duty of the fortunate in the family to succour the less. He had lost them completely when he had begun himself to practise as he preached, and harbour the destitute in the crypt. Some of the scandalised respectable people even went so far as to attend El Jerarca’s tasteless temple in the coca barrio rather than sit in the same church as the indigent.

In the company of beggars Lazaro learned something about humanity. There were some who were perfectly strong and healthy, but who hated work and responsibility, preferring poverty and carefree improvisation. Others were mad, and were clinging to reality only by the tips of their fingernails. Some were the victims of the most atrocious mistreatment by landlords or spouses, and some were fugitives of the law in some other department, who had arrived with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Others were those too sick or lame to work, who were begging just during the time that it would take them to die forgotten in a corner of the town. There were those who were alcoholic or in the terminal stages of coca dependency, who were easily confused with the insane, and who were more than likely to die suddenly of drinking rat-poison or gasoline. There were the mentally retarded, who lived permanently confused, and who were victimised and exploited the most by the other beggars, and it was for these that Lazaro felt the most pity, for they were the most likely to die from unnecessary accidents and self-neglect.

The company of the beggars called themselves ‘Los Olvidados’, not only because they were non-existent in the eyes of the world, but also because they themselves forgot who and what they were. For each one of them the memories of family and childhood seemed to pertain to another reality belonging to someone else. Those who had been strong and happy had been so, as it were, in a life before this one that had nothing any longer to do with it. For many of them, to be forgotten was all that they demanded of the world.

Lazaro learned from them about the great sorcerer Dionisio Vivo, who walked about the town with an empty look in his eyes and two giant black jaguars of Cochadebajo de los Gatos at his heels. Dionisio Vivo had the scars of a hanged man about his neck and the gash of a knife where his throat had been cut and he had not died. Dionisio Vivo knew how to conquer death and had worked miracles.

One day on a Saturday morning, in the plaza, Lazaro saw a man walk by who could be no other than the brujo himself, and he threw himself down at his feet. Dionisio stopped, and people who had been watching him anyway took a new interest in this sudden turn of events.

Lazaro threw back the hood of his garment, and some of the people screamed or gasped with horror. Dionisio Vivo looked down at Lazaro, who was extending his arms in supplication: ‘Heal me, dueño,’ he said.

WHEN LETICIA LEFT,
writing him a note with all the ambience of a testamental deposition and a last request, Dionisio stood in the impermeable darkness of his renewed solitude and considered its proposition that he should go to the other women. He rolled up the piece of paper, and then unrolled it and read it again.

On the way down to the camp Dionisio entered the police station and left a note for Ramon:

Fulgencia Astiz, formidable Santandereana with a revolver in her belt instead of her superannuated Corpus-Christi anti-rape charm, with her bottles of aphrodisiacs and her campesina’s muscles, matriarch of the camp, recognised Dionisio as soon as he entered the encampment. She took one glance at the man with the lope of an Indian, the scars of a hanged man, and the two hypnotic cats with yellow eyes and paws shod in black velvet, and she knew without doubt that this was the Dionisio Vivo of her maternal ambitions. She strode out and confronted him with her hands on her hips and her legs apart, and she addressed him with the impatient familiarity of an exasperated wife. ‘Ay,’ she exclaimed, ‘now where the hell have you been all this time? We wait for months and nothing happens. We wait so long that we are so bored that when nothing happens even nothing seems exciting.’

‘It was never the right time,’ he replied. ‘You have my apologies for the discourtesy. But now I am here.’

The young women of the camp emerged from their barracas, their plastic hovels, their shelters of corrugated iron and corrugated cardboard, and began to gather around Fulgencia and Dionisio with the self-confident courage of women who have fended for themselves, repelled armed rapists, thrown thieves and molesters over the cliffs, ignored ridicule, hunted vicuna in the sierras armed only with rocks and cunning, survived avalanches, and travelled hundreds of kilometres equipped only with an intuition of being a part of something momentous.

Looking at them standing with their arms at their sides, cooked by the sun of outdoor life, and battle-hardened by the enforced resignation of patient waiting, Dionisio had the impression of being surrounded by soldiers. He was confused by the feeling that here in one place were the representative types of all the women of all the diverse regions of the Nation; hardy, strong, inflamed with the very idealism absent in most of the men, practical as the en never were, incorruptibly themselves. One by one they stepped forward solemnly and kissed him formally on the cheek as comrades do.

Dionisio turned to Fulgencia Astiz, and said, ‘I have a plan,’ to which she replied, ‘As do I.’ Squatting before the flames of the campfire that night they discussed their plans, which turned out to have been almost the same.

In those months Dionisio achieved an anaesthetisation of his grief, which was transformed into a kind of awe. The women organised everything in their lives into strictly fair rotas that were never without a human touch; they suckled each other’s children and did each other’s washing in the streams, operated with no serious sense of hierarchy, embraced as old friends at the end of arguments in which they had been tearing out each other’s hair and casting aspersions upon each other’s legitimacy, and freely transcended all the incomprehensible restrictions of received morality in order to pursue the fireflies of their purpose.

In that musky jungle of women’s bodies and the infinitely surprising varieties of love, Dionisio felt as though he was absent from himself. In the darkness of the improvised dwellings of cardboard and pieces of cars, out in the palpable starlight of the rocks and the momentary fireworks of meteors, he was puzzled by the sensation of being a man operating with the energies of someone else. He made love with the women with dead eyes and not a spark of passion in his heart.

It was the effortlessness of it that often struck him as he returned in the morning after no sleep in order to inform his classes that today he would tell them about more crap at the foundations seeping from the crevices of the culture which they had to understand in order to come to know intimately what they should under no circumstances believe or take seriously. It was the effortlessness of it that aroused in him the suspicion that he had been taken over, and yet he felt none of the knee-jerk rebelliousness of his nature that, if someone said, ‘Eat, you are starving,’ would cause him to lose his hunger. In his National Service, when the corporal had said, ‘Clean your rifle, maricon, you pansy, or I will have you cleaning latrines,’ Dionisio used to go and clean the latrines in order to bypass the obeying of an order, and the corporal would have to say, ‘Clean your rifle, hijo de puta, or I will have you up before the Capitan,’ and Dionisio would report himself immediately for having shit in his barrel, Sir, and several threads of pullthrough, Sir, which are dangerous, Sir, because if the Soviets invade tomorrow, Sir, as everyone around here thinks that they will, Sir, then the bullet might get stuck in the barrel and blow my own balls off, Sir, and then you have one more useless soldier, Sir, who is no more good against the barbarian Commies coming to destroy civilisation as we know it, Sir, and the Capitan would sigh and have him locked in the guardroom and go and listen outside the door and hear him scrounging cigarettes and telling jokes with the military police who were supposed to be giving him a hard time, and he would write another long letter to the then Brigadier Hernando Montes Sosa about the incorrigibility of his son, and would go and talk to the Corporal who would beg him to put that man in another platoon, Sir, I cannot take it any more and he is subverting the whole company and as far as I know, the whole battalion as well, Sir.

It often occurred to Dionisio that he was an honorary Colonel of a regiment in which he had prestige but no power; where the real Colonel was Fulgencia Astiz, and the General was as far behind the lines as generals always are. Alternatively, he thought, he was like the standard of a regiment that everyone salutes, and is stored up in the regimental chapel, and of which everyone scrambles for the honour of polishing the silver bands and the ebony staff.

And yet it neither amused him as it would have done in former days, nor did it cause him to doubt that he had lost control of his autonomy, and nor did it cause him a moment’s guilt.

In the fullness of time, amongst those women who chose to stay in Ipasueño, amongst those who returned to the regions to take their own men, amongst those who chose to go with Dionisio and Aurelio to Cochadebajo de los Gatos to settle there, there were eventually born twenty-nine children. Of these, sixteen grew up to be women with the unusual name of Anica. Thirteen children grew up to be men with the stocky build of an Indian, and the startlingly blue eyes of the Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura. Every one of them bore upon their neck the henceforth hereditary scar of the rope and the six-centimetre gash.

‘
WHAT IS YOUR
name?’ asked Dionisio.

‘Lazaro, dueño.’

Dionisio was puzzled and had to think about it before he realised. ‘What is your real name?’

‘Procopio, dueño.’

‘Come with me, Procopio,’ said Dionisio, and he reached down and took Lazaro’s arm by the elbow in order to help him to rise to his feet.