Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord Read Online Free PDF Page A

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