Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord by Louis De Bernières Read Free Book Online

a laugh of complicity such as conspirators always laugh; it was the laugh of men who have been guilty for so long that the only choice is to give up hope of remission and sink further into guilt. It was the laugh of men who have been conditioned not even to trust their blood brothers, and feel so uneasy in the world that they continually avenge themselves further upon it.
    Dionisio told Anica that he had a secret place where he used to go in order to think, or to wallow in his depressions so thoroughly that they were over with more quickly. ‘It is just south of town,’ he said, ‘I think you will like it, and we can be alone there.’
    Anica was in her tempting shorts again, and Dionisio had put on his swimming shorts under his baggy trousers to save having to change into them when they arrived. Anica hated his baggy trousers because they were not fashionable, but Dionisio refused to wear the skintight ones that she advocated. ‘I am not going to squash my cojones even for you, querida, and furthermore they make one too hot, so that rashes develop, and they restrict one’s movement too much.’ Anica would shrug and make faces that were supposed to indicate how horrible his trousers were, and then launch into a tirade against his belt, which Dionisio also refused to abandon because his mother had bought it for him in Bucaramanga, when she had visited a cousin in Colombia. He would also decline to stop wearing the badges that she referred to as his ‘hippy badges’. One of them had a dove on it with an olive branch in its beak, and the other bore a garish representation of the rising sun. He wore them because he wanted to brighten up his appearance and because he approved of the sentiments that they seemed to imply.
    Dressed, then, in a manner thoroughly distasteful to Anica, and with her shifting the gears to provoke him, Dionisio drove his ancient car out of town towards the roadblock set up by the gangsters, who had been duly alerted by a man who had appeared to be sweeping the street. About half-way there, he suddenly turned on the lights and swung the car dramatically into the cliff-face. Anica yelled, tried to grab the wheel, and hid her face in her hands.
    When she peered through her fingers at last, she saw that they were in a cave. With incredulity on her face she turned sharply in her seat and looked behind her to try to understand how they had driven through solid rock. Dionisio smiled smugly at her. ‘See, the creepers completely disguise the opening.’
    Anica threw back her head and breathed deeply with one hand on her heart. ‘O bastardo,’ she said at last, ‘you nearly gave me a heart attack. Truly, I shit myself.’
    ‘Not truly, I hope,’ he said. ‘Did you bring spare underwear?’
    She pretended to hit him, and said, ‘Pedant.’
    He left the lights of the car on while they got out and looked around. It was a very large cave with a wet floor, and everything seemed to be furry with some kind of lichen. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘stalagmites and stalactites. I can never remember which is which.’
    To their surprise they found a brand-new shoe abandoned; they swapped idiotic theories as to how it might have got there, and then they decided to leave it there in case its owner returned for it, perhaps dishevelled from her frolics. ‘I hope it is not there for something sinister,’ said Anica. ‘It seems very odd that something as new and expensive as this should have been left.’
    Dionisio went and turned off his car lights, and Anica found that it was still quite light. She looked up and there was a hole on the roof of the cave. ‘I reckon it fell through there,’ she said. ‘Is there a flat patch up there?’
    ‘Yes, querida, and we are going to go up there. There is an easy climb to it through another hole. Up there is a little piece of paradise, like the garden of Eden.’
    They went a little further into the cave towards the second patch of light, and scrambled up the rocks. Anica