Once the good landowners were identified, he would facilitate the
great sun-god of capitalism to shine his grace upon them, dragging
them out of their festering nationalistic swamps. In the end, these
exalted apostles would raise up behind them earnest armies of
innocents who plucked the very elixir which had energized the sun-
god himself. And the cycle would be lubricated further upwards.
As his confidence grew, he phoned Ellie more and more often. He
shared with her his vision and his undying love. And Ellie, a woman
who had studied mental illness in the past, knew that she was
studying it now. She begged Roy to come home, but he refused to
until his mission was complete.
When he came back, it would be on his own terms, in a position
of glory and status. He now envisioned his life as an epic, like Dante
or Milton, which started bad but where everything worked out in the
end. This was a Divine Comedy, a Paradise Lost and Regained. From
Heaven through the world to Hell and back. It was Hell now. But it
would not be for long.
The thing about epics, though, was that they were epic. Roy had
somehow managed to overlook this.
*
In Java, Roy employed a driver named “Tex.” Comically obsessed
with American culture, the seats of his old black Ford sedan were
upholstered with American flags and the front bumper sported a
gigantic pair of bull’s horns. The cheerful fellow wore a beat-up
cowboy hat, smoked Marlboros and preferred to be paid in US
dollars. Expatriotic Tex had never chauffeured an American before
and hoped Roy would consecrate his mobile shrine to cowboy
capitalism with the imprint of his ass. As much as he may have
wanted to, he really could not decline the offer.
There were no candidate farms in Java at that point, as tea had
almost completely replaced the arabica bean as the cash crop of
choice. In the 1870s leaf rust annihilated the Javanese coffee
industry and the resulting shock on the economy was never forgiven.
Indonesian coffee was now grown mainly on other islands and the
Javanese switched to the hardy tea leaf. Which is why Roy’s trip
through Java was more for sentimental reasons. This, after all, was
where the patriarch of the vast majority of the world’s coffee trees
ABYSSINIA
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