Diogenes,
Your father has foolishly revealed your true identity in a letter to La Prensa. Now that they know that you are not only a pain in the ass, but also the son of the governor of Cesar, they will want to get you even more. Climb out of your barrel, and leave town as soon as possible.
Ramon.
Dionisio read it through twice, and said aloud to himself, ‘Very funny, Ramon.’
7 Dionisio Is Given A Hand
DIONISIO WAS AWOKEN by a bizarre tumult outside. He lay in bed waking up as slowly as possible, blinking his eyes and fighting off the urgent pressure in his bladder. He speculated drowsily as to what the noise could possibly be; there were furious croaks, screeches, flutterings, and a series of single knocks on the door that sounded like someone tapping very hard with their bunched fingernails.
He pulled the covers over his head to block it all out, but was forced to give up. He threw the cover aside, lay still for a moment, and then got out of bed and went to the window. He leaned out, but the racket was just outside his line of view, concealed by the creepers. He leaned out as far as he could, and saw to his astonishment that just in front of the door were two large vultures who appeared to be jumping up and down and knocking at the door, in between taking jabs at each other. He watched them with puzzlement, and then shouted ‘Shut up’ at them. They stopped jumping up and down for a minute and looked at him with an expression that looked like contempt, and then recommenced. ‘For God’s sake,’ he thought, and went downstairs.
When he opened the door the two birds were momentarily very surprised, and craned their necks to inspect him. They hopped backwards and croaked in protest, and he waved an arm at them and said, ‘Go on, go away. Let’s have some peace around here.’
At that point he discovered the cause of the fracas. He glanced sideways and discovered that there was a hand nailed to the door at chest height. At first he thought it was a model hand, because it seemed waxy and the bloodstains on it somehow did not seem to be the correct colour for blood. He was wondering who would play such a bizarre joke on him, and he touched the object. He took his hand away quickly because he immediately realised that it was not a model.
He looked at it closely. It was an olive-complexioned hand, plainly belonging to a man. It had ragged fingernails, and there was a scar, probably from a knife, across the back of it. Dionisio had the inconsequential thought that a man with fingers as long as that would have made a good pianist. The hand was covered with marks where the vultures had succeeded in pecking it, and between the thumb and forefinger a pen was held in place with rubber bands.
He went upstairs to telephone Ramon, and then telephoned the college to say that he would be late again. The Principal said, ‘Vale, this makes a change from dead bodies, only to get a bit of one. I will start off your class, and you get here as soon as possible. What are you doing with them?’
The Principle of Sufficient Reason,’ replied Dionisio. ‘Tell them to look it up in all the books and work out in what ways Leibniz’ version is different from Schopenhauer’s, OK?’
He went downstairs again because the vultures were once more leaping up and down and fighting with each other. Ramon shortly arrived in a car with the same young policeman as before. Ramon got out, stroking his stubble as usual, and stopped a moment to give Dionisio an ironic weary look. ‘Agustin,’ he said to the other policeman, ‘since we are likely to come here repeatedly, let me introduce you to Dionisio properly, except that I am going to start calling him Empedocles, who misguidedly threw himself into a volcano in order to prove that he was a god. I find that analogy very apt.’
Dionisio smiled wryly, and shook Agustin’s hand. He caught Ramon’s eye, and pointed wordlessly at the hand nailed to the door.
‘Ay,’ exclaimed the policeman, ‘so that is where it got to.’
Dionisio said, ‘Were you looking for it, then?’
‘Not exactly, Empedocles. Its owner turned up without it on the municipal dump this morning. You will be pleased to know that this is the hand of a gentleman who refused to loan his daughter to El Jerarca and his band of upright followers. They took the girl anyway, and both of them are at this very moment being loaded into a van at the dump in order to be restored to a wife who now has only four children to support without a husband.’
Ramon went up to the door and inspected the hand carefully. ‘This is a nail of the type that is used on haciendas in order to nail together a corral. The pen is a very ordinary and common one, and the hand was severed with one blow of a machete. Yes, indeed, this an agricultural murder, and we all know who owns a big hacienda outside town.’ Ramon paused, and wiggled the nail until it came out of the door. Still holding it, he stuck the hand in front of Dionisio’s face, and said, ‘You are the semiologist. You tell me what it signifies.’
Dionisio backed away from it and replied, ‘It means that they want me to stop writing the letters to La Prensa.’
Ramon looked at him for a moment and laughed without humour. ‘You attribute too much subtlety to them, Empedocles. It means that before they kill you they will cut off your hands. I suspect that they may deliver them to the police station, which will save me from having to look for them, eh my friend? They will cut off your hands that wrote the letters, and then maybe they will torture you a little bit more than they have already, and then maybe they will make you a little cravate and let you bleed to death in peace.’
The two friends looked at each other in silence, and Ramon raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Do you see this pen? On it there will be the fingerprints of the man who put it there. That is how much confidence they have, cabron, they don’t care that we know who did this.’
‘Are you going to arrest him?’
Ramon gave him a glance that would have been patronising if it had not been accompanied by his usual ironic smile. ‘Arrest him? No, we will shoot him as soon as possible, without formality.’
Dionisio was shocked, and it showed in his face. Ramon put his arm around his shoulder and walked a few paces with him. ‘Let me tell you, my friend, if we arrest such a man there will be those rich enough to bribe a thousand judges and a thousand policemen to let him go on a technicality. In order to avoid becoming corrupted, we just shoot them.’ Dionisio was about to protest when Ramon suddenly became serious. ‘This is now officially our unofficial policy, Dionisio. It is a civil war where the rules are different. Don’t get caught up in it unless martyrdom particularly appeals to you. I will tell you a secret, OK? The police and the navy are the only relatively uncorrupted forces in the nation. From now on all the battles will be fought not by the army, but by the police. The police are not only the police now, but also the army, so don’t give me extra work to do by becoming another pointless victim. Just pack your guitar and a couple of books, and leave.’
‘No, Ramon,’ replied Dionisio, ‘I am obstinate, and I am angry, and I have to do what I can, even if it is only writing letters.’
‘Get a gun, then, my friend, and carry it with you all the time.’
Just before the car departed, Ramon wound down the passenger window and pointed at the vultures. ‘Tell those two to go and wait down at the dump. Also, do you know the only thing that was left after Empedocles jumped into the volcano?’
Dionisio looked at Ramon spinning the hand on its transfixing nail and said, ‘His sandals.’
As the car started to move, Ramon winked and said, ‘Goodbye, Empedocles.’
8 How El Jerarca’s Helicopter Turned Into A Deepfreeze
SPANIARDS WHO TRAVEL in South America sometimes have difficulty in buying butter. They ask for ‘mantequilla’, and receive only a puzzled look. When they explain that it is for spreading on bread, the proprietor of the shop says, ‘Oh, you want “manteca”,’ and the Spaniard thinks he is being offered lard and says, ‘No, that is not what I want.’ The conversation continues and the confusion becomes more confounding until the proprietor produces some butter and says, ‘This is manteca, we spread it on bread around here.’ The
Spaniard looks at it dubiously; it is whitish, and really it looks more like lard than butter, but it has the texture and consistency of butter. It is really very puzzling. He buys it and spreads it tentatively on his bread, to find that it is not too bad, and tastes half-way between lard and butter.
The Spaniard has become a victim of the social history of a word. In past times there were no dairy herds to speak of, and so one spread lard upon one’s bread. And then slowly as herds increased and improved it became possible to market butter. But by now two things had happened; firstly, the word ‘mantequilla’ had been forgotten, and what went upon one’s bread would always be ‘manteca’, and secondly, people had got to like the taste of lard on bread, and so the butter was made in such a way that it tasted somewhat like lard.
Odd things have happened also to the meaning of ‘padrino’. To a good Catholic it still means a ‘godfather’ who swears to bring up a child christianly in the event of the decease or incapacity of the parents. To one who practises santeria it means the man who initiated you into the mysteries of the magical religion that was exported to Latin America in the slave ships, along with leprosy and a thousand equal miseries. In santeria the padrino takes on an importance greater than one’s parents; when a santero meets his padrino, he throws himself at his feet. The padrino leans over and blesses him, and the santero arises, crosses his arms over his chest, and kisses his padrino upon both cheeks. The bond is a touching one, full of trust.
But now the word means a coca lord, a cacique like El Jerarca; it means a ‘godfather’ in the mafia sense. ‘Godmother’ has not changed its meaning, and neither has ‘godchild’, because it is only men who aspire to great depths of evil. Sadly, also, ‘compadre’, which used to mean one’s closest, most esteemed and trusted friend, now means just as often a partner in crime – the person one trusts the least.
El Jerarca was a padrino in the new sense – a man no one trusted, liked or respected – and he was thinking of colonising the arcadian city of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. His intention was to shorten his supply routes for the transport of coca, it was to make it difficult for the law-enforcement agencies to pursue him, and it was to move to a place that everybody knew about locally but which was not on any maps in any army or air-force headquarters.
The first one to see the helicopter was Sergio. He was walking home with a burn on his hand because he had tried to lasso his horse up on the pajonale and the rope had somehow caught the running horse’s right foreleg. The rope had whistled through his palm and scarred him before he could let go. When he got into the town the helicopter had already landed in the courtyard of the Palace of the Lords, and the two occupants were already walking through the streets softening up the population.
The two men were pressing huge wads of thousand-peso notes into the hands of everybody they met. Very soon there were hordes of folk pouring out of the doorways to take advantage of this unexpected munificence, and people were shoving and pushing, shouting and trampling. The two men were saying, ‘There is more of this when El Jerarca arrives, you just wait and see. All of you will be rich, and he gives you this to show how he will be a padrino to you and look after you,’ and some people were shouting ‘Viva El Jerarca’ without even knowing who he was.
Sergio watched as Hectoro sensibly collected his wad of notes and then rode away to regard the mayhem with growing contempt. Hectoro was observing through half-closed eyes because the smoke from his puro was drifting into them, and his hard mouth was set into a frown, turning down at the corners. As he sat there in his saddle he looked more like a conquistador than ever, with his black beard, his face of a Spanish aristocrat, and his black glove on his rein hand. For a few moments he thought of taking his revolver from his holster, taking the money from those two slick-looking types, giving it to the people himself, and ordering them to leave. There was something about the lack of dignity in the stampede that repelled him.
But just then Remedios approached and stood by him. She was still dressed in the khaki of her days as a guerrilla, and she still carried a Kalashnikov wherever she went. ‘Hectoro,’ she said.
‘Si?’ replied Hectoro, who never used more words than a man should.
‘I have seen this before. This is what the coca people do when they come to take a place over. Go and get Misael and Josef and Pedro; we must do something.’
Hectoro tossed his head and his frown deepened. ‘I never take orders from a woman; you know this.’
Remedios sighed exasperatedly, put her hands on her hips, and then smiled. ‘Give the order to yourself, then, but do it quickly.’
He looked down at her. He was fond of Remedios, as everyone was, but he would never let it show, and he would never slacken his lifetime’s dedication to the cult of machismo, even for her. He called over a child and told it to go and fetch Pedro and Josef and Misael.
When they came Remedios informed them of the situation, and Misael immediately suggested asking Don Emmanuel for advice, but Remedios dismissed the idea. Lately she had got fed up with his relentless jokes about parts of the body, and he had begun to think that she was a prig. And in any case, Misael himself had an idea that would get rid of them for good without anyone knowing who was to blame. It would have been most undesirable had El Jerarca ever found out, and maybe the people would have blamed them if it was revealed that Hectoro had deprived them of riches.
Hectoro was a man with a liver that had been on the point of collapse for several years, but which was to last him a lifetime against all the prognostications of medicine, the laws of probability, and the inscrutable workings of natural justice. He was an indefatigable drinker of fiery liquors whom no one had ever seen drunk.
In the bar of Consuelo’s whorehouse he treated the two slickers to drinks. Whenever they showed unwilling or declined another dose of aguardiente, Hectoro would say, ‘Are you men? Come, drink now,’ and they would look at him with growing desperation, understand that they were scared of him, and agree, ‘OK, cabron, just one more, but then we go.’ There was a relentless force behind Hectoro’s unsmiling eyes, his haze of blue smoke that reminded them of El Jerarca, his tight lips, his sinewy leanness, and the imperiousness of his order to drink up, cabron. They were terrified of the way in which Hectoro became more icily sober as he tossed down one copa after another without flinching and without losing one iota of his cold intensity.
Misael and Pedro came in and clapped them on the back, engaging them in a torrent of conversation which they could not follow and in which it was impossible to participate. Their eyes grew steadily more glazed and unfocused. They slurred pointless responses, saying, ‘Si, si, amigo, I agree, just so, that is the way it is,’ even when their heads were on the bar and Misael was amusing himself by saying, ‘You are an hijo de puta, your mouth is vertical like a woman’s chucha, your mother bore you by a pig, your culo has known a thousand pricks, your mother’s milk was rat’s piss, your cojones are smaller than raisins,’ and everyone in the bar was laughing overtly at the humiliation of the slickers, even the whores, who were happy to take a break for a while from all the kissing and cuddling.
And then Misael produced two pitillos. They were no ordinary pitillos, but were thick as a millionaire’s Havana, and full of the best smoking marijuana. They were the kind of pitillo that one smokes in bed with one’s lover before making love somewhere in the outer spaces of reality, the kind of pitillo that is the ultimate, one true Platonic Idea of a pitillo. Misael gave them to the slickers, and Hectoro made them smoke them down to the stub until the whole brothel smelled aromatic and the victims were giggling every time they fell over, and demanding more drink every time they vomited.
Hectoro and Misael dragged them to their helicopter as night was falling in, and heaved them into it. They slapped their faces and pinched their thighs until the machine was started and warmed up, and then they watched it depart at a crazy speed in the wrong direction.
The machine was discovered a few days later high up in the snows of the sierra.
The Indians who found it came from the village of Chachi. The two slickers were frozen solid, and it gave the cholos the idea of keeping meat in it instead of burying it in the snow and marking it with a stake. The two gangsters remained frozen forever to their seats, having been appointed by the cholos to be the perpetual spirit guardians of the metal meatbox that had been vouchsafed to them through the beneficent dispensations of Viracocha.
9 Knives
‘OK CHICOS,’ SAID El Jerarca, ‘you have the picture? I want it to look like a perfectly ordinary theft that became a little violent, you understand? Make sure you take his money and anything else valuable, OK? And as far as I am concerned, what you take you keep. And when you have done the job you both get your little ganancias, and you both get your new motorcycle, and maybe then I will promote you and you will both be sicarios, OK? And then I will give you both a magnum that can blow the balls from an elephant, OK?’
Dionisio and Anica were walking hand in hand through the streets, taking a little paseo before meeting Ramon for a drink. The two assassins were following ten metres behind, their hands going nervously to the concealed hilts of their knives, and they were talking in subdued tones.
‘What if he resists?’ said one.
‘Mierda,’ said the other, ‘you can see he is fat, so he is probably slow as well. We just spill his guts and run for it.’
‘We will rob the girl as well?’
‘Well, why not? Maybe she has her pocket money with her. She has a fine ring.’
‘El Jerarca said not to harm her, though.’
‘He did not say not to rob her.’ He winked, and the other nodded and smiled his assent.
Anica was feeling very relaxed and happy, and she was feeling affectionate. ‘I want to kiss you, querido; come up here a second.’ She pulled him up into a little alley and in the shadows she pinned him to the wall and closed her eyes to kiss him. They were locked in this embrace when the two assassins seized their chance, darted round the corner, drawing their knives as they did so, and ran towards the couple. As they drew near they suffered a moment’s hesitation because Anica was in the way of the knives, and one of them kicked a can by mistake. Dionisio opened his eyes and saw them.