Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (26 page)

He put the noose about his neck and climbed up into the tree, barely able to see what he was about on account of the mirages in his eyes. He sat on a limb and tied the rope to it as far out as he could reach. He stayed like that for several minutes in order to steady his mind and to ensure that he died thinking of Anica. Then he let himself drop away sideways.

But the bough was thin and flexible and the fall did not break his neck. He hung there with the rope tightening about his throat and he began to feel the fog of obstructed blood clogging up his brain and the unnatural sensation of his tongue swelling in his mouth. His eyes rolled upward and he saw that he was in the womb of Pachamama and that there was a spinning silver light. There was a beautiful young girl with black hair cascading down her back; she was reproaching him and pushing him backwards, and nowhere in the reverberating womb of Pachamama could he find Anica.

THERE WERE THREE
tambos built on the outskirts of the city, installed there by the inhabitants for the benefit of travellers. It was to one of these that Aurelio directed Pedro and Misael when they arrived with the recua of mules.

Normally one slings hammocks in a tambo, but Aurelio made a bed in there and laid Lazaro upon it. By this time, having been carried so far by the mules, having been cared for and fed upon the itinerary, and having descended to a lower altitude, Lazaro was already feeling much better. But he was so bitterly ashamed of his appalling appearance that he had the strength to resist his confinement and to insist to Aurelio that he be set free.

‘Have you seen the soles of your feet?’ asked the Indian, and Lazaro answered in the negative. ‘If you saw the soles of your feet,’ continued Aurelio, ‘you would know that if you walk upon them in these mountains, on these rocks, then they will be destroyed utterly, and if they do not rot off you, then they would have to be cut off, and you would walk nowhere ever again.’ Aurelio showed Lazaro his hands. ‘These hands are cut and scarred from a life of climbing and walking in the sierra. Your hands likewise would have to be cut off if you travel in these parts and bring them to further ruin. You will stay here and I will end your disease.’ Aurelio looked at Lazaro with such certainty and authority that the latter sank back upon the bed. ‘Will I be restored?’ he croaked.

Aurelio shook his head. ‘I will rid you of these sores, and I will arrest your disease entirely, but I cannot restore what has been lost. Neither will the sensation return where it has gone. I will meditate upon these things later, and perhaps I will think of something. Perhaps a god will come in the form of a bird and whisper to me, but now the important thing is to kill the evil.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I will build your strength. I will take away the cause in your spirit, and then I will make you very ill. I shall make you so ill that you are nearly dead for a long time, but this illness will kill the cause in your body. After that I will do practical things to prevent you from destroying yourself for the lack of pain.’

For two months Aurelio fed Lazaro on a mush that could pass down his shrunken gullet. It contained ground meat, potatoes, maize, cassava, garlic, and herbs. He made Lazaro drink the juices of mango and guava, lime and lemon, and he made him drink litres of the freezing water that ran down from the mountains and fed the river.

Every day Aurelio rubbed the body with the oil of avocados until the fishscales softened and began to look like skin. He squeezed citrus juice into the sores and lacerations, killing the infections so that new flesh grew over them, and, when the throat was healed by the paste of honey and vinegar, he removed the tube of cane, and Lazaro found that he could breathe without rasping.

In the town there was anxiety, and many people said that Lazaro should be driven out before the infection spread. But Aurelio said that only children should keep away from the tambo, because the illness was caught solely by the young. Such was the awe in which he was held that nobody dared to argue, and there were grumblings only behind his back, and that not very often. Don Emmanuel, he of the big belly and the ginger beard, acted with compassion according to his humour by putting it about that Lazaro really had a severe case of syphilis that was past the infectious stage, and some people believed him.

When Lazaro was cured of the ulcerous obscenities that had blighted his appearance more than anything else, Aurelio summoned Pedro and Misael to the hut for the killing of the cause in the spirit.

They kindled a fire that filled the place with aromatic smoke, and, when it was very hot, they stripped naked and sat down around it. Lazaro was bidden to sit down with them, and he left his bed to join them. Aurelio passed around a large gourd filled with a bitter tea, and they drank from it in turn until each one of them had drunk a gourdful. The three men began to sing in a low monotonous chant, and Lazaro heard Indian drums even though there was no drummer present. He looked up and found that there was someone else with them whom he could not properly see through his semi-blindness, but it was Aurelio’s daughter, Parlanchina, who always came back from the spirit world at these times and stood behind her father with her long black hair about her waist and her mischievous smile that would have reminded him of Raimunda.

The world distorted suddenly, and Lazaro was watching from the moon through his belly. Everything turned green, and he felt nauseous because he was being tossed about by a whirlwind full of faces and scarlet macaws. He saw a piranha eaten by a capybara, and a dolphin with reproachful eyes gave him an armadillo with a rotted face and an emerald set in its shell. He screamed when the armadillo turned into a human skeleton that raked at his face with a jaguar’s jaw, and then suddenly he came down from the moon and was lying on his back in the hut.

The three healers each lit a puro and blew smoke over him. Aurelio put a hand against Lazaro’s stomach and turned it in a corkscrew motion, so that it seemed to disappear inside his belly. He drew it out holding a vampire bat flapping in his grasp, and he cast it into the fire. He repeated the operation and drew out a huge earthworm that he treated likewise. It was still sizzling and shrivelling in the flames when he cast beside it a cipo snake and a huge handful of the parasitic espiga de sangre fungus. Aurelio reached up behind him and the girl gave him the orchid known as ‘The Flower of the Holy Spirit’, which he placed upon Lazaro’s stomach, where it seemed to sink slowly and disappear. They gave Lazaro more ayahuasca and some yague, and he fell into a long dream in which he discovered that his own animal was the hawkhead parrot, and he travelled amid the canopy of the forest observing it through his new eyes.

On the next day Aurelio demanded of Lazaro whether or not he felt strong enough to see death face to face, and still return alive. Lazaro, not knowing what was in store, said that he was. Aurelio explained to him that his disease preferred to be cool, which was why it always attacks the extremities and keeps away from the scalp, which is the hottest part of the body. ‘I am going to give you a great and terrible fever,’ he told him, ‘and I will make it worse with fire.’

The old Aymara moved Lazaro to the centre of the room and built up a fire upon either side of him until he felt that he would burn alive and choke in the smoke all at once. Then he made him drink the poison that he had prepared with the barks and herbs that he had gathered in the forest. It tasted oily and sour, and it burned in Lazaro’s stomach as he swallowed it.

One of the effects of Lazaro’s malady is that one cannot sweat from the affected parts, and one therefore loses some of one’s capacity for cooling down. The combined force of the fever and the fire soon brought him to a state of delirium in which he writhed and twisted, cried out, and trembled, for an entire week. Aurelio placed his hand frequently upon his patient’s brow, and sometimes cooled it with water when it became too heated. In his nightmares Lazaro saw before him a human skull, gigantic in size, with open jaws that snapped at his face and threatened to engulf him. One time he found himself rising up out of his body, and was able to drift through the smoke and away from the tambo, over the mountain. He knelt by the side of a lake and looked at his reflection in the water, seeing himself whole and handsome once more, but then it was as if he had received a message of great urgency, and he went back to the hut and gazed upon the atrocity that was his body, and lay down in it to return to his dreams and his terrible fevers.

When he awoke at last to see the Indian still beside him and the great fire merely cinders, he felt so ill that he wished that he had died. ‘This always happens,’ said Aurelio, ‘there is nothing to be done. I am afraid that you will find that your cojones have swollen to a terrible size, and will give you agonies, but that will pass. The disease is dead.’ He gave Lazaro water to drink and said, ‘You must sleep a long time.’

During the days that Lazaro slept, Aurelio himself slept, recovering from the debilitation of staying awake in that inferno for so many days, feeding the fire and keeping death at the distance of a hand’s breadth. At the end of this time, while Lazaro slept still, he made a cast in clay of the soles of each of his patient’s feet. Very carefully he used the casts to fashion shoes.

The soles were made of car tyres, like anyone else’s, but on those soles he laid a felt made of the wool of a vicuna, compressed into shape with the aid of the casts. He made the uppers of the softest leather from a wild goat.

When Lazaro was well, Aurelio allowed him to walk for only two hours a day, wearing the shoes. After two weeks he allowed him to walk for only four hours a day wearing them. After a month he allowed him to walk as much as he liked, but he made him show his feet every evening.

Lazaro had been naked beneath his heavy blankets for all the time that he had been ill, and when he received back his cowl he found that it had been washed, and embroidered with pictures of jaguars and piassaba palms. It was the compassionate labour of Felicidad, the most beautiful and contrary whore in the whole sierra.

He became a familiar figure in the city, even though no one ever saw his face. He lived alone in his own choza, visited by those who brought him food, and sometimes surrounded by the huge black cats that seemed to sense his loneliness, and did not care about his appearance. The fact was that, however arrested his disease, he still lacked a face, still lacked his fingers and his toes, still lacked the use of his testicles and his manhood, and still carried on his chest his hermaphroditic breasts. He would sit upon the steps of the old palace or at the base of the jaguar obelisks, weeping silently beneath the hood and knowing that he was a freak that no one would ever be able to look at without turning away. Sometimes the little children threw stones at him and shouted out ‘vulture’ after him as he passed. He would ask Aurelio whenever he returned from the forest about how he might be restored, but the Aymara always only ever replied, ‘If there is a way, I do not know it yet.’

This is the reason why Lazaro went once with Pedro and Misael to Ipasueno and never came back, because he was hoping to find there an even greater brujo.

DIONISIO VIVO, EVEN
though he was not a coward, often felt that he had died many times in his life. On this occasion the goatherd on the crag who had watched his doings with morbid fascination had contemplated his swinging body and the steadily spreading patch of urine for several moments whilst working out what to do. He knew very well that people only do this sort of thing when they choose of their own free will to die, and he felt that it would be a sacrilege against the sacred liberties of man to interfere with a desperate creature’s last rational act. He turned and walked away.

But he could not help but return. With a sigh he laid down his staff and his antara side by side on the ground and began to climb the tree. Then he thought better of it and he came down again. He picked up his staff and leaned out to see if he could hook the rope. It was just not long enough, and so he grabbed a branch and leaned out over the abyss to hook it. With all his strength he pulled against Dionisio’s weight and the friction of the rope, and hauled the dangling body with its upturned eyes and its protruding blue tongue towards him. With relief he found that there was enough rope to bring the corpse over the edge of the chasm. Hastily he attempted to loosen the rope, but it had pulled too tight. ‘Mierda, mierda, mierda,’ he intoned as he tugged at the unrelenting hemp, and then he changed his appeals and addressed them to Viracocha. He took out his knife and began to saw at the rope over a place where a quick inspection of his own neck with his fingers revealed that he had no arteries. When the knife finally broke through and the last fibres parted, it left a gash in Dionisio’s neck six centimetres long that became a scar almost as livid as the permanent violet and magenta imprint of the rope.

During his National Service years before, the goatherd had reluctantly learned the art of smiting a dummy upon the sternum and giving it artificial respiration. But with a real corpse it was different. He knew that one can stop a heart just as easily as start it, and he put an ear against the cadaver’s chest. He detected only the pounding of waterfalls in his own ears. He felt for a pulse, but then could not remember which finger it was that gave one only one’s own pulse and not that of the victim. He thumped the corpse’s sternum anyway, and then pumped air into the chest cavity by a series of rapid depressions with both hands upon the chest. Then he remembered to clear the body’s throat with his fingers, and he began to breathe into its mouth, but at first he forgot to pinch the nostrils, until he felt his own breath coming back at him, and then remembered.

For the goatherd it became a matter of manly defiance of fate to revive this man. He persisted beyond the call of duty, all the time resolving to give up smoking because all this breathing was killing him, and in between his efforts he called the corpse an hijo de puta and an hijo de perra, until in the end he was convinced that the corpse only came back to life because its spirit returned in order to find out who had been insulting it.