We're in Cochadebajo de los Gatos, a town nestled in the Andes Mountains where enormous black jaguars, completely tame and regarded by inhabitants with friendly awe, patrol the streets. Magic realism, you say? Of course! However, this town in an unnamed country resembling Colombia is also the place where the tale's main character, Dionisio Vivo, wakes up to find a corpse in his garden - a crumpled young man in a bloodstained shirt with his tongue sticking out from the slit in his throat in what drug lords term a cravate. It's this combination of the fantastic and the brutally realistic that prompts critics and reviewers to liken Louis de Bernières to Gabriel García Márquez.
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord is the British author's second volume of his Latin American Trilogy; however, this superb work can be read as a standalone novel.
I listened to a provocative interview where Louis de Bernières spoke about his writing of Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord. A few striking statements are noteworthy, including how he sees himself as old-fashioned, an author who values narrative and character above all else. He also emphasized the need to provide the reader with a fully developed location: he envisions the novel's setting, its location, as a character as alive as any person gracing the pages. More specifically, in Señor Vivo, he wanted to drive home the fact that any romantic notions about war are completely misguided – war is cruel, vicious, and barbaric, giving rise to sadism that results in extreme, unspeakable suffering and hardship, especially among women and children.
There’s so much going on in this sumptuous, multilayered tale. It's not for nothing that A. S. Byatt places Louis de Bernières in the direct line of great British novelists, following Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. To give a taste of what the reader is in store for, here’s a highlight reel from Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord:
Dionisio Vivo, One – There's good reason our twenty-eight-year-old main man wakes up to corpses in his garden or a hand nailed to his front door: Dionisio, a philosophy professor at the local college, has taken to writing scathing letters that are published in a newspaper reaching all corners of his country. These letters detail the evils of the coca traders, such as scouring the countryside for very young girls who are abducted and raped continuously over several days by the coca lords and their lackeys, then either killed or dumped, bound and gagged, anywhere in town. Reading these letters myself, I could feel my stomach turn.
Dionisio Vivo, Two – One of the more endearing parts of the novel is Dionisio falling deeply in love with Anica Moreno, a tall, beautiful twenty-year-old with strawberry blonde hair and gray eyes who moves with captivating grace and aspires to be a great painter and photographer. Louis de Bernières writes of their love and lovemaking with sweet tenderness. “Voluptuously he soaped her all over until every bit of her was covered with such froth that she took on the appearance of being feathered with down. He took her breasts reverently, one in each hand, and massaged them upward with conscientious circling motions so that her nipples were teased and began to shrink and harden into buds.” But...but...but, we can ask, does being Dionisio's lover involve an element of danger? You bet it does.
Coca Lord – Meet the local kingpin, Pablo Ecobandodo aka El Jerarca: a self-centered lout, despicable dodo, and disgusting fat pig. Stereotypes can be easy to fall into, but in the case of this swine, all the negative ones are a perfect fit.
Ramón Dario - This gentleman is that rare creature: a police officer who doesn't take bribes. A friend and blood brother to Dionisio, Ramón urges his friend to stop writing those letters that amount to nothing less than a death wish. In Ramón's version of a perfect world, Dionisio would take Anica on the next flight leaving the country.
Dionsio Vivo, Three – Driving his ancient car out of town, Dionisio and Anica look forward to a picnic in the country. Unfortunately, they're headed to where El Jerarca's men have set up a roadblock. The drug lord's plan is to stage an accident that will make it look like Dionisio lost control of his car and plunged into a ravine. Suddenly, along the way, Dionisio turns off and drives his car into a cliff face. Anica screams and hides her face. Moments later, Anica can see they've entered a cave where creepers completely hide the opening. As far as El Jerarca's men are concerned, the pesky philosophy professor has, as if by magic or voodoo, vanished. This incident adds to Dionisio's mythic status, making him seem like a powerful brujo, a sorcerer who can quash or reverse assassination attempts or any other action meant to cause him harm.
Rainforest Devastation – A man by the name Lazaaro passes through a shantytown where destitute migrant workers, greedy opportunists, and romantic optimists are mining for gold. “In the great pits men were working like termites, carrying their pails of mud up the sliding, glistening faces of these arbitrary holes in the earth. They were burrowing amid the heaps of spoil, slaving by the river, poisoning both it and themselves with the mercury of the separation process.” And downstream Indians die from eating fish poisoned with the metal.
Tantalizing Tickler - Gabriel García Márquez has stated repeatedly that the opening sentence in his novels carries enormous weight. Take a gander at the first sentence in this novel where the country's President engages in a bit of reflection. “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 loosing its force at the precise distance of 6.56 feet from the source of its blast, President Veracruz had thought of himself not only as an adept by also as an intellectual.”
What I've highlighted above is but a few slivers of this incredibly rich tale told by an author with a breathtaking imagination—magic meets realism, gut-wrenching tragedy meets idealism and romanticism. How can it all possibly turn out? For Louis de Bernières to tell.
British author Louis de Bernières, born 1954
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