Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (17 page)

Dionisio’s mother on the other hand showed every sign of once having been a fan of Carmen Miranda, a fact principally betrayed by her coiffure, which she had not changed since her youth and which still became her now as it had then. She was a paradoxical vegetarian who delighted in serving up succulent roast meats, which she would watch her family eat with voracity while she herself toyed with Spartan portions of braised vegetables. She had a gift for embarrassingly acute naivety and always understood other people better than those acquainted with the gloomy metaphysic of psychology or the equally pessimistic one of Christianity. She was a fanatical connoisseur of obscure superstitions, which she practised assiduously as a kind of hobby, without believing in any of them. Her husband was convinced that she had been born a century too early, since she was known throughout the area as a rescuer of wounded animals and birds; he believed that a civilisation can be judged by its treatment of animals, and he calculated that it would be a hundred years before the rest of the nation treated animals as well as she did, an hypothesis he had worked out with the aid of statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and a large graph which was now framed and hung in a corridor, next to all the pictures of the units with which he had served.

When the couple arrived and passed the inspections of the guards at the gate, they drew up in front of the house and were still climbing stickily out of the windows of the car when they were deluged by a welcoming committee consisting of servants, the General, the family pets, and all the other wounded animals who joined in out of a need not to be excluded. The General kissed his son on both cheeks and enclosed him in a martial hug, and then gallantly kissed Anica upon both cheeks as well, uttering well-chosen compliments and congratulating Dionisio upon having found such a tall lady. Mama Julia appeared from the house and embraced everybody, including her own husband, and summed up Anica’s character with one glance. In the evening she informed her son that she loved Anica already, because of her purity of soul. Dionisio explained at enormous length all of her virtues and attractions, and Mama Julia snorted and said, ‘That is exactly what I said, except that I needed only one phrase.’

Anica fell immediately into the routine of the house, and Dionisio slipped instantaneously back into the role in the family decreed for him by fate, which was to be the only one out of all the household (including the servants, whom his parents treated like honoured guests) who had the courage and lack of imagination to clean up catshit, get rid of snakes and spiders, despatch maimed birds, and catch rodents that had been let go in the house accidentally.

EVER SINCE HIS
Excellency and his wife had begun the practice of sexual alchemy, the former had taken great pains to ensure that his performance was underpinned by adequate metabolical foundations.

On this day of his implacable revenge against El Jerarca he had consumed litres of tea made from damiana specially flown in from Mexico. This efficacious herb not only possesses aphrodisiac qualities, but has similar effects to marijuana upon the psyche, which His Excellency also found to be an excellent source of erotic predispositions. On days when he practised his hermetic mysteries he was usually not in a fit state to govern the country, and consequently his office would be closed while he ambled about the palace gesticulating and murmuring to himself, as untoward events perpetrated themselves within the sealed doors of his altered consciousness.

His Excellency also consumed prodigious quantities of guarana and catuaba, which he had brought in from the Amazonas region, where an Indian chief had introduced them to him during one of his rare presidential visits to the interior. This induced an excellent state of affairs in both mind and body which almost rendered the ginseng and the vast doses of vitamin E superfluous.

His Excellency had recently heard that in the United States it was possible to be fitted with a curious device; this device was an hydraulic sac that could be fitted within the erectile tissues of the penis. In the abdomen, at the end of a tube, was a reservoir of inert liquid, and in the scrotum was a pump. All that one had to do was squeeze the scrotum in a discreet but vigorous manner, and the fluid would flow from the reservoir to the penis, erecting it magnificently, and all one had to do to detumesce with the dignity of a king was to palpate the pump in the correct fashion. It occurred to His Excellency that theoretically it should be possible to perform sexual alchemy continuously with this device installed. He had already sent off for the brochures, under an assumed name, and the two reasons that he had never got around to having the miraculous operation were that in the first place the pressure of executive business was too great, and secondly the thought of having an incision made in his penis filled him with irrational horror. The ingenuity and the humanitarian nature of the concept, however, altogether changed his perception of the United States, and he began to regard that enterprising country as a model of civilisation. This predisposed him to a greater sympathy towards the demands of their government that something should be done to crush the coca cartels.

President Veracruz and his amenable wife spent the whole day attempting not to think about sex, in order not to dissipate any psycho-sexual energies that might be useful later during copulation. The attempt not to think about it concentrated their attention upon it in the most paradoxical manner, and this explains why it was that they frequently slapped themselves in the face in order that the pain should prove a distraction. (Rumours and reports that he and his spouse were mad should be confounded by this explanation, and the Mind of the Nation should be set at rest.)

In the early evening when the moon was full, and shining directly into the windows of the highest boudoir in the land, His Excellency and Señora Veracruz took a bath and carefully washed each other all over in order to irrigate away not only the daily grime of high office, but also the invisible spiritual contagions that are a fact of daily life. They dried themselves in towels freshly laundered in Andean spring water, guaranteed to be free of all chemicals and industrial additives, obtainable on the Calle Fernando in bottles from Erasmo Hidalgo’s Emporium, Purveyors of Rare Artefacts and Recondite Luxuries.

The ceremony having become refined over the years, the couple then robed themselves in their respective chambers. His Excellency emerged as Osiris, complete with the atef crown, which looked somewhat like a very large white condom with a vast green worm at front and back. Pasted to his chin was a long waxed beard which curled forward at the bottom, and his body was swathed in a white robe that was designed to resemble the bandages of a mummy, Osiris being not only the God of Resurrection but also the God of the Judgement of the Dead. In his hands he bore the crook and flail, and upon his countenance he wore an expression of the most prodigiously earnest loftiness of purpose.

Señora Veracruz emerged as a very fetching likeness of Isis. In her hand she bore a sistrum, and upon her head was an impressive confection consisting of a pair of elegantly curved cow’s horns encompassing a burnished solar disk. Upon her forehead was the upper neck and head of a taxidermised cobra, and a lock of hair fell in front of her ears in authentic style. Around her long black wig she wore a gold band, her throat was adorned with an ornamented necklet, and on her upper arms and her wrists she carried triple bracelets. Her slender body was encased in a sheathlike white strapless dress, her feet were bare, and her eyes were made, by means of a black pencil, into superb likenesses of the eyes of Horus.

Their giant black jaguar, being the first of their magical children, was brought into the room with a red collar sparkling with gems, and in this way the atmosphere of authenticity could be augmented by having present a beast that could pass either for the Goddess Sekhmet or the Goddess Bast. This impressive animal curled up on the rug and fell asleep during the ritual that followed.

The couple, having assumed the form and therefore the powers of their respective divinities, stood opposite each other and placed their hands upon each other’s shoulders. They then intoned with great conviction and solemnity the entire forty-two verses of the noble Protestation of Innocence, which is to be found in all reputable declensions of the Book of The Dead.

Having recited this with the aid of the entire text pinned up on the wall as an aide-memoire, Señora Veracruz announced to her spouse, ‘You are my King, you are the Risen Osiris, you are my priest,’ at which point he uncrossed his arms that had been resting upon his chest in the sign of Osiris Dead, and raised them up, palm outwards, in the sign of Osiris Living.

He then declared, ‘You are my Queen, you are the Living Isis, you are my priestess.’

They undressed each other where they stood, resisting the temptation to ungodlike haste, and sank down upon the bed. There followed a lengthy period in which they caressed each other in all apposite areas with the utmost languor, occasionally stopping for refreshment in the form of freezing champagne, which the French Ambassador had once recommended as a very potent aid to erotic enterprise. This gentleman maintained that there is at the base of the stomach a flap which closes whenever something very cold enters it. When the temperature is more amenable to digestion the flap opens and dumps all the champagne at once into the gut, which explains its exhilarating effects.

When they could bear the tantalisation no longer and the correct ambience for mystical copulation had been created, Señora Veracruz lowered herself upon the presidential polla with divine aplomb, and employed the most subtle and exquisite Panamanian muscular contractions to keep them both on the brink of explosion for a very lengthy period of time. Whenever His Excellency felt the urge to melt into orgasm he would contemplate his wife’s extraordinary headdress, and found that this had the effect of bringing him back from the precipice.

During this sublimest of rituals there were always some interesting paranormal phenomena caused by the intensity of the concentration and the magnificence of the bliss. Upon this occasion the huge black jaguar levitated, and slept on in its curled-up posture fully one metre from the ground, and the hands of the palace clocks bent at right-angles. In addition the room filled with the aroma of asafoetida and toasted cumin, and Señora Veracruz distinctly felt the hands of an angel running up and down her back.

When this happened she could restrain herself no longer and she broke into a climax so shattering that her headdress of cowhorns and solar disk flew from her head, and that of His Excellency fell forward over his eyes. But this did not distract them from their supreme concentration, for at the moment of supernal disintegration they were visualising with all their power their longed-for ‘magical child’, which was the sudden death of El Jerarca.

Afterwards, when the great cat had crashed suddenly to the floor and all the clocks in the palace had lost ten minutes, Señora Veracruz lay sobbing and panting in her husband’s arms. ‘Oh Daddikins,’ she cried, ‘I want more,’ at which point an expression of dismay passed over his face and he thought all over again about having the operation.

MAMA JULIA WAS
scandalised by the creaking of the floorboards at night as the lovers flitted to each other’s rooms under the impression that the noise of the excusado flushing and the chirring of crickets would drown out the sound. But the General said, ‘Shit, woman, it is perfectly obvious that they have been married longer than we have,’ and so she held her peace, and generously colluded in the respectable pretence that all nights in her house were nights of Catholic chastity.

Mama Julia and the General departed on their own holiday, to Costa Rica, and did as custom dictated, which was to summon La Prima Primavera to take charge of the house. No one knew exactly who she was or whether she was in fact a cousin or not, but she had been a member of the family for so long that it no longer mattered if she was an impostor, or even if she was really herself or somebody else. Mama Julia was convinced that even with a squad of servants Dionisio was incapable of taking care of things, and would have been very put out if she had ever discovered that he could. La Prima Primavera was a Zamba woman in her late sixties, who had devoted her youth to outrageous promiscuity and her old age to finding a husband. She suffered from a personality disorder which no doctor would ever have been able to cure, which was that she could not understand jokes, despite having an earthy and risqué sense of humour and a disconcerting habit of uttering obscenities. Less seriously, she always put the wrong answers in Mama Julia’s books of crosswords in indelible ink, causing Mama Julia many moments of despairing rage until she got into the habit of remembering to hide the books in a trunk before she arrived. La Prima Primavera was inquisitive about everything, but paradoxically never seemed to know about anything; she took offence when none was intended, and did not take it when it was, but she shared with Mama Julia a gift for caring for wounded animals, and she shared with her a weary sense of the inevitable whenever Dionisio brought a girlfriend home. But she fell instantly under Anica’s spell, and forgot to feel bitter whenever they embraced. Dionisio told Anica that La Prima Primavera had had a passion for lamb in guacamole sauce ever since she had worked in Mexico, and that she could expect them to have it served every day, a prophecy which was accurately fulfilled.

After La Prima Primavera had arrived, laden with suitcases that seemed to be filled with lead and compressed igneous rock, and after the General and Mama Julia had departed, there began the time when Dionisio and Anica were at their happiest. Anica suddenly threw away all her inhibitions as if they had been ragged clothes. She held his hand in public, kissed him voraciously before the very eyes of the guardians of public decency, and accepted at last that each of them was better together than either of them could have been apart.