Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (25 page)

Dionisio was concerned. ‘I love these cats, but they are too young to take from their mother. With me they will die.’

‘These are different cats, Señor. You will be their mother. You will discover that you do not have even to feed them. They eat only for pleasure, and despite that, they still grow. They will be black and very big, as you will know if you have ever been to my city. These are two cats of Cochadebajo de los Gatos.’

‘I have heard of these cats, but I do not believe it. If INDERENA hear that I have two of a protected species I will be in big trouble. Aurelio’s gift is a prison sentence and a fine. I cannot keep them.’

Pedro smiled again. ‘INDERENA are good people, but these are domestic cats of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. They will not know of you, but if they do, they will have no case against you. They are a species that protects itself, as you will come to know.’

Dionisio lifted the kittens out of the sack and put one upon each shoulder. He felt the warmth of their tight bellies against his bones, and the needle-pricks of their claws as they clung to his shirt for balance. ‘Tell Aurelio that I thank him with a full heart, but that I do not understand why it is that he has given me these cats.’

‘He wants people to know who you are, and with these cats, everybody will. And now I am leaving.’ He held out his hand, and once more Dionisio felt that his hand was tingling as if recovering from ant-bites. Hastily he put it into his pocket, and went back into the house with the cats pulling at his hair and biting his ears. Don Pedro called his dogs together and began to walk home. From his window Dionisio watched Don Pedro go, and then he put the kittens down and tried to coax them with goat’s milk. They refused it, and upset the dish. All day he tried them with different foods, and began to fear that they would starve to death, but later on he found that the door of the frigo was open, that there were scraps of silver foil everywhere, and that the cats had eaten all the chocolate that he had been keeping to give to feed Anica’s new appetite. He was still counting on being reunited with her.

In the meantime Pedro the Hunter had turned mayombero. He never used evil magic except against evil, and even this caused him some uneasiness from time to time. One had to be very powerful to prevent it from turning against oneself; one could end up like that Congo in Asuncion who had called down evil upon his own father, and had been consumed by ulcers and died.

In his mochila Pedro had a jar which contained the skull-bones of a black dog, the skull-bones of a black cat, sulphur from the volcanic field in the mountains, dust from the grave of a bad priest, salt, a tarantula spider, and guao poison ivy. This powerful bilongo he tossed over the wall of the Hacienda Ecobandoda before he left for Cochadebajo de los Gatos. He was satisfied that El Jerarca would soon be in for all kinds of trouble.

‘EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED,’
said Velvet Luisa.

Downstairs in Madame Rosa’s whorehouse it was just getting to the time when everyone begins to vomit all at once, except for the men who are dancing awkwardly with the whores in the attempt to make their erections less obvious. The record player was playing a sentimental bolero from Cuenca, and Rosario was weeping in a corner because the bolero was too much to take on top of all the chicha and the good company.

Upstairs in Velvet Luisa’s arms, Dionisio Vivo was saying, ‘Yes, everything has changed, and I think that I am going mad.’

Luisa said, ‘Maybe she had good reasons. It often happens that one never knows the true reason for things for years, and sometimes never. Your problem is that you think that just because she has left, then there must be something wrong with you.’

‘There must be,’ he replied, laying his head upon the voluptuous black skin of her shoulder. ‘This always happens to me. I think that everything is perfect and that I have done everything exactly right, and then suddenly the sky falls in on my head and I am left in the dark.’ He looked at the crucifix on the wall and continued, ‘So there is something wrong with me that is so bad that no one has the heart to tell me. Can you tell me what it is, Luisa?’

She sighed a little impatiently and stroked the hairs of his chest. She made that chirring sound with her teeth and tongue that black people make to express disapproval. ‘Everybody loves you,’ she said, ‘except for you. And that is all the wrong way round.’

‘I am just rubbish. I am learning to hate myself, and I know that I am going loco. You know, I wake up in the morning and my pillow is drenched with tears that I cry in my sleep. I dream terrible dreams where I take revenge upon Anica and cut her to pieces, and I rape her and knock out her teeth, and I wake up sweating like a pack-animal and shaking. And then in the morning before my classes come in I stand at the desk in my classroom and I want to cry all over again. When I come home I go running until I am nearly dead and I drive my car so dangerously that one day I will go over a precipice. What am I supposed to do when I am going mad?’

Luisa saw the fear in his eyes and said, ‘Listen, Dio’, just come to this whorehouse and talk to me. There is nothing I have never heard.’ She told him confidingly, ‘Most of the men who come here don’t even want to make love. Most of them want to cry and talk. It is OK with me, it is part of the service.’

Dionisio’s face took on a perplexed expression. ‘I don’t want to make love either,’ he said, ‘but I will pay you anyway. I want to hold you and feel how warm you are. I feel less sick like that.’

Later on, down in the bar, Dionisio was sprawled across the table with several empty glasses. He had taken enough copas to deaden his loss and bring him to the edge of a stupor.

Big Simon Esteso came in looking for trouble. Most people referred to him as Crazyface, because he had a staring look and a cut across his face that had left his lips badly aligned.

Crazyface was dedicated to the cult of his own machismo; he was one of those types who picks upon people bigger than himself and taunts them until they take a swing at him, and he used to boast about winning these fights even when everyone else considered that he had been the loser by a big margin.

Crazyface knew all about Dionisio and the legends of indestructibility, and he did not even bother to taunt him. ‘I hear you have been calling me an hijo de puta,’ he shouted, picking up a stool.

With absolute lack of interest his intended victim raised his head from his arms and looked at him groggily through an alcoholic haze. Slurring his words he replied, ‘Why should I say that? Everyone knows it already.’

Crazyface uttered a demented yell and brought the stool down across Dionisio’s shoulders. The whole brothel fell into a shocked and expectant silence, and for a few seconds nothing happened. Dionisio stood up and glared at Crazyface balefully. With all the pent-up anger of the inexplicably betrayed he said vehemently, ‘Hijo de puta, your father was a donkey and you are a mule because your mother was a horse who gave rides to everybody.’

Even Crazyface was shocked, and he did not know what to do. Madame Rosa was about to intervene and ask them to sort it out in the street, when Dionisio overthrew the table and advanced upon Crazyface.

What ensued was probably the grandest brawl ever seen in a whorehouse outside of the capital. It appears that some people were trying to pull Dionisio off Crazyface. Dionisio was on top of Crazyface and was so angry that he was punching the floor in the mistaken impression that it was the man’s head. There were a lot of people there who wanted to see Crazyface get his just deserts, and they started to pull off the people who were trying to pull Dionisio off. Elbows started to fly, and then fists. Tables were upset and chairs broken over heads. The rooms upstairs emptied and the clients and whores came downstairs in many states of undress to watch, but somehow found themselves involved as well.

Madame Rosa, with great aplomb, was darting about the room breaking bottles over people’s heads in order to reduce the number of combatants as quickly as possible. Naked whores and nymphets were pulling hair and kicking out at groins, campesinos were waving guns and shooting them at the ceiling so that the adobe plaster was falling in a rain of dust, and sly old men were taking advantage of the mayhem in order to empty the shelves of bottles and transfer them to their mochillas. Meanwhile Rosalita, having disentangled herself from the embrace of Juanito, who had been trying to make love with her behind the bar, ran off to the Police Station to fetch help.

When Ramon arrived with Agustin the fight was already over. Crazyface was unconscious in the street, having been thrown through the window, and Dionisio was crouching in the middle of the room in an attacking posture demanding at the top of his voice to know whether or not anyone wanted to die, because he, Dionisio Vivo, was ready to oblige. Madame Rosa was waving a bottle and exclaiming, ‘Ay, ay, it was magnificent, but who will pay for the damage?’ Her fat bosom was heaving, her face was glowing with perspiration and excitement, and one of her circular earrings that she wore for a gitano effect had been distorted into an irregular ellipse.

Ramon took stock of the crushed furniture, the pools of alcohol, the reefs of broken glass, the groaning bodies and cracked lips, and realised that Dionisio was the only one left standing apart from Madame Rosa. He raised an eyebrow after his fashion and called out, ‘Hola, Parmenides, a word with you outside.’

Dionisio whirled round as if to attack his friend, but when he saw who it was all the anger and aggression left his face and he threw himself about Ramon’s neck. He burst into sobs, and Ramon patted his back and said to Madame Rosa, as if by way of explanation, ‘He is often like this these days.’

Ramon led Dionisio out and sent Agustin back to the Police Station. In the van Ramon reminisced: ‘Do you remember that time when Jerez called us up to the house because he heard screaming and shouting in your room and thought that you were being murdered, and when we arrived it was you and Anica having a fight with the cushions?’

Dionisio felt a terrible pang in the space that Anica used to fill, and he moaned and doubled over in his seat. Ramon watched with consternation as his friend wept, and he realised that he had said the wrong thing. He tried another story: ‘Did you know that we had a policeman here once who could hardly read? We were wondering why it was that all his arrests were in the Calle de Marte, and it turned out that whenever he stopped someone he took them to the Calle de Marte to arrest them, because that is the only street in town that he was sure that he knew how to spell on the reports. And we had been thinking that the Calle de Marte must be a new hotspot for crime or something. And did you know that El Jerarca is so bad at reading that he has to pretend he can do it? He tries to run his rackets as though they are a business, and he has board meetings where people take minutes, did you know that? Vale, one day he is standing up addressing the meeting when someone sends him a note saying “Your flies are undone,” and anyway, he looks at the note and says, “Something very important has come up but we don’t have time to discuss it at this meeting, so we will discuss it at the next meeting,” and he hands the note to the secretary and says, “Put this down for discussion next week,” and then goes back to business. That made everyone realise that he couldn’t read, and now they hand him notes which say, “Your mother is a whore, your sister is a lesbian, your sons have no balls, you are a fat stupid shit,” and he pretends to read the notes and he always says, “Something very important has come up but we don’t have time to discuss it this week,” and he hands the notes to the secretary who is taking the minutes.’

Dionisio was laughing, but outside his house, when Ramon was virtually carrying him in, he turned around and embraced his friend. ‘Ramon,’ he said desperately, ‘I am going loco, and I can’t hold on much longer.’

Ramon sighed and asked, ‘Have you tried writing to her?’

‘It is that which makes me realise that I am mad.’

Dionisio’s letters had started to change in quality; they had begun to be letters full of anger and reproach, heaping her with culpability, accusing her of betrayal, pleading with her that she should change her mind. Each letter contradicted or qualified the previous one. One would be an hysterical outpouring of bitterness and heartbreak; the next would be a cataract of rage and defamation; the next would be a treatise full of reason, resignation, and tenderness. For a while Anica replied, but she could not bear the pain of her lies, and so she stopped. But that made Dionisio believe that she did not care at all, and he grew worse. Anica read his letters and kept them bound in green and lilac ribbons in a trunk.

Almost immediately Anica could discern in his letters what appeared to be the commencement of a slide towards insanity. Dionisio too knew that it was happening because there was always a part of him that stood apart and watched it happen. This part would peer from the wings making ironical asides and wry observations; it was able to chronicle with exactitude the moral and intellectual decline that was like a hand of God pushing his head ever deeper and more firmly below the waters.

It was the most terrifying experience of his entire life, and at its root was his belief that if Anica had rejected him it must have been because he was unworthy of her. He wrote arduous lists of involved and remote possibilities as to what she had found repulsive in him and sent them to Anica, who did not reply. Her silence made him abject. He ran around his house with his face clutched in his hands in a state of desperation and infernal confusion, until he would throw himself upon his bed and the cats would climb up gingerly to lick his face and steady him with their bodies’ warmth, until he fell exhausted into a sleep full of panic and nightmares about beating Anica’s face to a bloody pulp. He would wake up and strike himself on the temples and bite his knuckles in the hope that the pain would restore his reason and provide him with explanations.

So it was that one empty Sunday, a week after the most memorable brawl in the history of Madame Rosa’s whorehouse, he concluded that he was so base that he would have to improve the world by leaving it. He fetched a rope from his car and tied in it a hangman’s knot. He drove out into the mountains and found a cliff, walking along it in a fever of delirium until he found a tree on the cliff’s edge.