Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord
Read Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord Online
Authors: Louis de Bernières
Contents
1 President Veracruz Summons The Minister of Finance
4 Dionisio Renounces Whores Out of Love For Anica
8 How El Jerarca’s Helicopter Turned Into A Deepfreeze
10 The Justice Minister Resigns
12 The Grand Candomble of Cochadebajo de los Gatos (1)
14 The Grand Candomble of Cochadebajo de los Gatos (2)
15 A Joke, Another Warning, And An Unexpected Bonus For Jerez
17 Mythologising And Making Love
18 El Jerarca And His Excellency The President Fail To Arrive At An Historic Compromise
20 The Grand Candomble of Cochadebajo de los Gatos (3)
21 Dionisio Gets A Nocturnal Visit
22 His Excellency Is Saved By The Intercession of The Archangel Gabriel
23 The Grand Candomble of Cochadebajo de los Gatos (4)
30 His Excellency’s Alchemical Assault
31 Guacamole Sauce And The Naked Admiral
34 Hope Is When Army Officers Are Democrats
56 Extraordinary Events In Ipasueño
Dionisio Vivo, a South American lecturer in philosophy, is puzzled by the hideously mutilated corpses that keep turning up outside his front door. To his friend, Ramon, one of the few honest policemen in town, the message is all too clear: Dionisio’s letters to the press, exposing the drug barons, must stop; and although Dionisio manages to escape the hit-men sent to get him, he soon realises that others are more vulnerable, and his love for them leads him to take a colossal revenge.
Louis de Bernières’ works include seven novels, a short story collection and a radio play. His 2008 novel, The Partisan’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and his most recent work, Notwithstanding: English Village Stories, was published in 2009. An international best-seller, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Novel in 2004.
The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World
Birds Without Wings
Red Dog
A Partisan’s Daughter
To the Honoured and Respected Memory of
Judge Mariela Espinosa Arango
Assassinated by Machine-Gun Fire in Medellin,
on Wednesday 1 November 1989
Louis de Bernières
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
The Song of Solomon
President Veracruz Summons The Minister of Finance
EVER SINCE HIS
young wife had given birth to a cat as an unexpected consequence of his experiments in sexual alchemy, and ever since his accidental invention of a novel explosive that confounded Newtonian physics by losing its force at the precise distance of two metres from the source of its blast, President Veracruz had thought of himself not only as an adept but also as an intellectual. His speeches became peppered with obscure and recondite quotations from Paracelsus and Basil Valentine; he joined the Rosicrucians, considering himself to be a worthy successor to Doctor John Dee, Hermes Trismegistus, Sir Francis Bacon, Christian Rosencreuz, and Eliphas Levi. He gave up reading his wife’s women’s magazines, from which he had previously derived most of his opinions, and took up reading
La Prensa
. He usually ignored the domestic news, since he knew that most of it was supplied by his own Ministry of Information, and was therefore probably fiction, turning instead to the foreign news, and then to the letters page. This latter was the forum in which the nation’s intellectual elite and its coterie of the powerful and the wealthy expressed their opinions, and just recently His Excellency had become an avid reader of the frequent letters from Dionisio Vivo, which were always about the coca trade. He read the latest of the coca letters and made a note on his pad that Señor Vivo should be awarded the Gold Condor Medal for Gallantry, and then crossed it out, remembering that it could only be awarded to military personnel. He substituted a memorandum that a new order of chivalry should be created for civilians, and decided to call it The Order of Hermetic Knights. His secretary was later to misconstrue this instruction owing to his lack of faith in the President’s ability to spell and his own inability to read the latter’s handwriting, and this explains why there is now an Order of Knights Hermit with its own coat of arms, which has never had any members except President Veracruz himself, who had automatic membership of all orders of chivalry, a privilege voted him by a grateful congress after the Los Puercos war.
His Excellency became irritated by constant interruptions from the telephone, his personal secretary, his wheedling wife, and the large black cat that he had never become used to thinking of as his daughter, and retired with
La Prensa
to the presidential lavatory. He turned off the loudspeaker in there which played Beethoven in order to drown out the rumblings and explosions of the foremost intestines of the Nation, and sat down on the pedestal to read the letters page, mentally making a note to get some kind of heating coil installed in the seat.
His Excellency was still, after all these years, obsessed with the problem of the budget deficit. It was true that at last the insatiable greed of the military for stupendous and apocalyptic weapons had been curbed; it was also true that prices for coffee and tin were not too bad these days, and, best of all, the emerald mines were producing well. But it was also a fact that the country had never recovered from the backfiring of the ‘Economic Miracle’ which had demolished the industrial base in the time when Dr Badajoz was Minister of Finance. Nor had the capital ever regained solvency after the pharaonic construction spree of its former Mayor, Raoul Buenanoce. To make things worse, the government-sponsored expeditions to discover El Dorado had all failed, having consumed perplexing amounts of cash in the process, and the President’s alchemical experiments had yielded up only some very interesting paranormal phenomena and a great deal of sexual ecstasy. His Excellency regarded his consequent rejuvenation and spiritualisation as an unmitigated bonus, but he was tormented nonetheless by the intractable manner in which the economy always failed to arrive anywhere near the targets set by even his own most pessimistic projections. He came to the conclusion that none of his lackeys could be trusted, and decided to believe only what he read in the press. Sitting on the lavatory in the presidential suite, he made two decisions. One was to abolish the Ministry of Information, and the other was to summon the Minister of Finance in order to demand from him an explanation about a point that Dionisio Vivo had just made in his most recent coca letter. He flushed the lavatory out of habit, even though he had done nothing to disturb its fragrant waters, and went to his office to make a telephone call.
Emperador Ignacio Coriolano, known (because of rumours about his private life rather than because of its similarity to his name) as ‘Emperor Cunnilingus the Insatiable’, arrived at five o’clock in the evening. He was a man of fastidious dress but poor hygiene, who had for several years borne upon his shoulders the heavy responsibility of reducing the preposterous burden of the national debt, without ever having been given any means by which to do so. He spent his days with his head in his hands poring over documents which only proved the impossibility of his task, and his evenings obliterating his sense of inadequacy in the arms of certain tractable ladies whose fees he set down to ‘personal expenses’, thereby adding to the nation’s overdraft.
He arrived to find that His Excellency the President of the Republic was attired in a dressing gown of Persian silk, but that this rich garment had slipped a little and was indiscreetly revealing a presidential testicle. In the interview that followed Señor Coriolano found this a severe obstacle to clear thought.
‘Good evening, boss,’ said the Minister of Finance, extending his hand. His Excellency shook it, frowned, and said, ‘How many times do I have to tell you that you must address me as “Your Excellency”? One of these days you will shame us both in public.’
‘Sorry, boss, it’s difficult to forget the old days. You know, sometimes I still think that you and I are still selling canned beef in Panama. Those were the days, eh, boss?’
His Excellency cast his mind back and repeated. ‘Those were the days.’ Then he picked up his copy of
La Prensa
and said, ‘I want you to listen to the new letter from Dionisio Vivo, and then give me some explanations.’ He read:
‘“Not so long ago the Colombian Government received the humiliating offer of the paying off of the ten billion dollar national debt in return for total freedom from government intervention in the drug trade. Naturally, and to its credit, it refused . . .” Now what I want to know, Emperador, is why they have never made a similar offer to us.’
‘Our debt is too big even for them, boss, and I guess they couldn’t afford to pay off two debts at once, so they chose the smaller.’
President Veracruz made a rueful expression, and then said, ‘Now listen to this: “I oppose those who claim that the coca trade is indispensable to our national budget. It is estimated that the coca mafia earns some ten billion dollars per annum. Of this, nine billion apparently finds its way via Switzerland and other countries into investment in legitimate European and United States industries. The one billion that finds its way back again leaves the country immediately because it is spent on luxury foreign goods destined to embellish the palaces of the caudillos. It is very clear, then, that the destruction of the coca trade would be positively beneficial to our balance of payments.” Now tell me, Emperador, why is it that this philosophy professor knows more about all this than you do? You have always told me that without a blind eye to the coca trade this country would go to the wall. What is the truth of the matter?’