The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [2]
Manuel had gleaned from his brother’s letter that prisons in Sweden were completely different from those in Mexico, and he tried to make a great deal of the fact that they were allowed TVs in their cells, and that they could study. But what would he study? Patricio had never liked books. He was a person who had lived his life studying others and nature. He went about his work reluctantly, regardless of whether it was sowing, weeding, or harvesting. He wielded the machete as if it were an enemy in his hands. Despite his strength, his blows were often weak and without concentration.
“If you think I am going to remain a pathetic campesino, then you are mistaken,” he repeated when Manuel reminded him that they had a tradition to uphold.
“I do not want to sit in the mountains like a ranchero, eating beans and tortillas, come down to the village once a week and drink myself silly on aguardiente and just get poorer and poorer. Can’t you see that we are being cheated?”
Could he handle eight years of jail? Manuel feared for his brother’s life and health. To Patricio, being locked up was essentially a death sentence. When Manuel wrote to say that he was coming to Sweden, his brother had immediately replied that he did not want any visitors. But Manuel did not care. He had to find out what had happened, how everything had evolved, how and why Angel had died, and how Patricio could have been stupid enough to get involved in something as dirty as drug smuggling.
As the plane descended through the clouds, banked, and went in for the landing, Manuel’s thoughts returned to the mountains, his mother, and the coffee beans. How beautiful the beans were! When they had dried and lay in open, bulging jute sacks, wedged into every nook and cranny in the house, even next to their sleeping quarters, they invited his caress, and Manuel would slip his hand down into the strangely unscented beans and feel pure happiness filter through his fingers.
La vida es una ratita, he mumbled, making the sign of the cross and watching the foreign country spread out below him.
Two
Slobodan Andersson laughed heartily. His face split into a wide grin that revealed his tobacco-stained teeth. They resembled wooden pegs that had been filed down into needle-sharp weapons.
Slobodan Andersson laughed often and as yappily as a little dog, yet he was not what one would call a happy sort.
His enemies, and they had grown in number over the years, would talk disparagingly of “the lying poodle.” Slobodan did not appear to take offense. He would lift one leg and yap a little extra whenever someone reminded him of this nickname.
“The poodle,” he would say, “is related to the wolf.”
It was not only his face that was wide. All of him had swelled up over the past two decades, and he had an increasingly difficult task of maintaining the pace that had brought him both admiration and fear as a pub owner. What he had lost over the years in physical mobility he made up for in experience and a growing ruthlessness. He left people behind often perplexed and at times crushed, and he did this with an indifference that was not mitigated by any amount of laughter or backslapping.
His life’s story, which barflies in the city loved to tell and embroider with amazing additions, was full of obscurities, and Slobodan liked to support this with a mixture of unusually detailed and drastic anecdotes from roughly thirty years in the business, alternated with vague statements that were left open to interpretation.
What one knew for certain was that he had a Serbian mother and a Swedish father, but no one knew if they still