THE DEATH OF COCO

THE SMALL FARM IS FALLING apart, the fields around it lying fallow, asters and goldenrod growing up to the windowsills. Fat Coco will never be a farmer, any more than he’ll be a global navigator. The writing is on the wall, and in the long line of pure Colombian that he straightens on the table with a Gillette razor blade. Dirty pizza boxes and empty beer bottles jam up the kitchen in the small house bought with a suitcase full of cash. On the table, between the large metal Drum tobacco tin and the bag of Humpty Dumpty chips, is a torn envelope and, next to it, a letter from Commissioner Lavergne, the special investigator assigned by the Parti Québécois government to shed light on the events of October, demanding that he testify. Coco’s line of coke starts around eight centimetres from the bottom of the page and drags on toward the edge of the dirty green melamine table, a good ten centimetres long. Cardinal sniffs it all in one go, with a morbid concentration and a touch of the soft quivering of resigned pleasure. He’s put on some weight, greying at the temples. His face has less character, a dirty T-shirt covers his belly. His heart pounds, his eyes float in old memories of things that once were but are no more.

If it weren’t for the patchy beard, the double chin would not have looked out of place on a Vatican banker’s face.

There’s a tractor in the yard, an old Massey Ferguson that hasn’t seen action for a long time. Next to the tractor, a car has been parked, a real boat. A Lincoln Continental Mark II in mint condition, a true collector’s item, looking like it just drove off the assembly line, same as the one of his youth. Except it’s black.