by L.H. Thomson
***
Preview - PROLOGUE
The community hall was dark, a single bulb in the main door’s exit sign doing little to illuminate the rows of folding chairs, set up in perfectly straight lines.
“All right, hit the main spotlight.” The man’s voice was authoritative, deep.
Light flooded down from above, highlighting a podium at the center of a long wooden stage, which sat at the front of the room. Emilio Lobaton stood behind the podium, squinting. “That’s too much,” he said, raising a grey-suited forearm to shield his eyes.
“It won’t be this bright with the other stage lights behind it,” a voice from the back of the room declared. “Here, let me show you.”
The rest of the room lights went up slowly until it was slightly less dim than the average pre-show movie theatre. Lobaton, who had distinguished-looking salt and pepper hair and a tall, thin frame, looked around and took in the room. Along with seating for perhaps 300 people, volunteers had set up a handful of tables to take donations and sell party memberships as people found their seats. A small area had been left clear in front of the stage for the press.
“That’s better. Prudencio, why is it always such a chore for us to just get the lights right off the bat?” He looked down at his notes on top of the podium, the paper stark and white in the spotlight. He’d always been terrible at reading from teleprompters, but they held it against you if you looked down at notes on camera, and he was glad the speech wasn’t going out live.
The “voice” emerged from the back of the room. Lobaton waited until the short, pudgy man had walked down the center aisle between the chairs then climbed four wooden steps up to the stage, before walking over to shake hands. “You know, as campaign managers go you make an impressive roadie, Prudencio,” he told the man.
Prudencio Ontiveros sighed inwardly, and smiled outwardly, a broad grin over his double chin.
His boss had never been much good at recognizing his staff’s contributions. He wasn’t going to point out that a roadie most sets up and takes down equipment. What he was doing was stage directing, producing the latest in a string of stirring public moments that had helped Lobaton maintain his long-held position as a community hero in the Spanish coastal city of Valencia. For any politician these days, Ontiveros thought, that was no mean feat.
“You got it boss,” he said. “So, once you’ve made your entrance, stage right, you’ll shake hands with the greeting line. Then, you hit mark number one near the front of the stage, here, and you point towards someone in the middle of the crowd, give them a fist pump or a thumbs up, or a double finger point. Then, you ….”
Lobaton rolled his eyes. How many times had he done this over the last 40 years? “Yes, Yes, I know.” The last thing he needed was instruction on how to work a stage. “You have my things?”
“You got it boss.”
“Prudencio …”
“Yes, boss.”
“What have I asked you, again and again?”
“To stop calling you boss, boss?”
Ontiveros had been ensuring for multiple campaigns that Lobaton always had fresh mineral water available and an area to sit quietly on his own, without being bothered, for 20 minutes or so before each speech. It helped him relax and focus and though it had occasionally been difficult to arrange, no one in the city would have begrudged Lobaton the request – or anything else for that matter – given his age and reputation. This was a man who had taken two bullets trying to save the life of the socialist martyr, Pau Delapaz, and who had led the socialist underground as his successor for a decade.
Those two bullets, as everyone knew, had taken a toll: Lobaton walked with a cane, learning on it with every other stride, a copper-topped ebony number. He had been hobbled slightly ever since that fateful day in 1961, when he and his resistance mentor, Delapaz, were caught in an ambush, both gunned down by Franco’s police and civil guard. With the shooting had ended the broadest remaining resistance in the southwest to Franco and the church organization that really ran Spain.
Ontiveros was happy to put up with the odd accidental slight, and with Lobaton’s immense moments of ego, when he would reflect loudly and proudly upon his own past glories. For if nothing else, they were all true; and that was a hell of a lot more than you could say about most politicians, for whom truth was the least dependable factor in their personal equation. Ontiveros knew all too well; he had worked for a variety of them in the 20 years since graduating from the local university. He had run a city council campaign successfully, a senate campaign unsuccessfully and, on two occasions, Emilio’s re-election.
He recognized politics for the game it became to all of the participants. But Ontiveros also felt politics could be noble, a calling equivalent to true leadership rather than a glorified feeding at the public trough, and so he worked for the socialists, who paid him less and resented him just as much … but had the good sense to listen to his opinion.
Lobaton said, “How much time do we have?” Other people had kept him on schedule for years – and handled most of the other mundane aspects of life, as well.
“Two-and-a-half hours. There’s a dressing room, that blue door just off the stage entrance. Did you take your insulin yet?”
He nodded that he had, waiving an irritated hand in Ontiveros’ direction. He hated when Prudencio acted like his mother. “Si, si, leave it be,” he said.
Lobaton walked back to the podium and stood behind it, looking out over the empty room. In his mind’s eye he could picture it at rally time, full of cheering, clapping supporters, row on row of faces, their heads all tilted back slightly to look up at him and listen, whistling, foot stomping, standing in unison and calling his name.
“One more time, eh Prudencio? One more campaign.”
Ontiveros smiled. “There is always one more time, boss.”
“Prudencio…”