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

because he knows more than we do, and always delivers his punishments by a theft or an accident. He can be reasonable, however, and is satisfied with gifts of mousetraps, rum, puros, toys, and coconuts, as long as you remember to give him a white candle and three drops of water every Monday.
    Eshu exists in twenty-one versions of himself, and so it is perhaps not surprising that there is plenty of scope for thinking that he is the devil. Some misguided souls think that he might be Saint Anthony of Padua, or Saint Benito, or even Saint Martin of Porres, but this is beyond the intellect of mere mortals to establish, and so we leave the question undecided.
    Some people thought that it was the work of Eshu when Raquel gave birth to a child who looked like an Indian. Antonio, her husband, killed her in jealousy, and later it turned out that the child was a mongol. Little Rafael grew up to be slow, immensely strong and affectionate, and also incontinent. If it was a trick of Eshu, it was in poor taste.
    It was also in poor taste when the coca people took Rafael away and made him carry fifty-pound packs of coca leaves day and night across the forest and the sierra, so that he nearly died a hundred times from heat exhaustion, from hypothermia, from frostbite, from tropical ulcers, and from starvation. When he finally collapsed behind the mule to which he had been roped, they set the gigantic alano dogs on him, and had a vast amount of amusement from watching him being torn to pieces and eaten. Perhaps it was not Eshu who was responsible for this, and perhaps it was Eshu who worked out ways to get a little retribution later.
    When Father Garcia had his revelations about the nature of the universe and began to become a heretic, people naturally had to translate his message into terms comprehensible to santeria. So when Father Garcia said that the world was really created by the devil, and that the devil had enticed the divinely created souls into bodies, people began to say, ‘Well, maybe it was Eshu who made the world, and that is why there is so much mischief in it,’ while others said, ‘No, it was Olofi who made all of it.’ But the fact is that it does not matter very much, for real intellectuals believe everything at once, because this is the best way of being able to explain anything whatsoever, as the need arises. Father Garcia’s Albigensian heresy merely became syncretised into the santeria of the people of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, who believed in it whenever it seemed like a good explanation for something.
    Father Garcia, with his lugubrious face, very like a hare, and his tattered ecclesiastical robes, considered that St John’s gospel was the only true portion of the bible, and he had gained considerable respect on account of his past as a Christian communist guerrillero and his ability to levitate spectacularly while preaching. When he levitated at exactly the point when he was announcing that a Deliverer would soon appear, and that he had been told this by God’s messenger, Gabriel, the people naturally thought that Gabriel must be Eshu, since Eshu is the messenger of the Orishas. And when he said that they must hold a great ceremony to honour Him with gifts, the people rejoiced, because any excuse for a grand candomble was more than welcome. What drunkenness there would be, what golden rivers of piss, what splendid fornication, what a scent of incense and herbs, what a twanging of berimbaos, what a thundering of atabaque drums; and all the Orishas would appear in person and dance amongst them, honouring the Deliverer with gifts.
    Amongst the crowd of folk who had gathered to watch Father Garcia levitating and talking mystical gibberish was Hectoro, who was mounted on his horse as usual, wearing his leather bombachos, and smoking a puro which he held clenched between his teeth. He rode up to where Garcia was stationed upon his invisible perch two metres above the ground and looked up into his face. ‘Tell me,