Tyrant Memory

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  “Nobody should judge another’s fear,” I told the old man that day after Clemente’s funeral. Who knows what that young man felt, sentenced to death, the shock and disorientation at the prospect of facing a firing squad, something he could never quite get over, and despite his father’s example of struggle, he was grateful to his conservative grandfather, who had saved his life.

  “One thing is fear, another is shamelessness. He could have simply abstained from politics without turning into the priestly confidant of alcoholic military officers and the shoulder for their sluts to cry on,” he said, without mitigating his scorn and bitterness one iota.

  I didn’t insist, though for me Clemente’s portrait had to be drawn with heavy brushstrokes: from the terror of death he sank into alcoholism, and to emerge from both he needed faith, which he found in AA, where he became a fierce activist. He ended up organizing groups of recovering alcoholics among the top brass of the military, and that’s the world he moved in.

  Clemente’s private life also provoked Old Man Pericles’s wrath: first he married a floozy who left him; then he married a Honduran girl from a good family who represented everything Old Man Pericles hated most, but whom, after Clemente’s murder, he’d begun to visit and had grown quite fond of. And there was, moreover, the family secret, his trampling on a reputation when he was a young man, an episode that was never so much as mentioned.

  That morning, sitting in the rocking chair, wandering through my memories and waiting for Old Man Pericles to arrive, I reminded myself yet again that the history of the Aragón family was not material for a short story but rather a tragedy, one I would never dare write — out of modesty, loyalty, incomprehension, lack of skill, and because life had already passed me by, and if I went back and lived it again, I would perhaps opt for silence, as Old Man Pericles did, but without his bitterness. And then I told myself that we humans are hopeless, there I was gloating over Old Man Pericles’s misfortune, wondering about the best way to write it, as if I didn’t have my own cross to bear, as if the rage that devoured me during Maggi’s tragedy wasn’t still with me, forever and unutterable. And now, while writing down these recollections of the old man, I can assert that we men are incorrigible, inconstant, we almost always end up doing what we have set our minds to avoid, and vice versa.

  The telephone rang again; it startled us. I feared the old man may have had some mishap, but no, it was Ricardito, Carmela told me, the young man who was selling my paintings. I took the handset: he asked me if he could stop by in the afternoon. I told him I already had plans, we should put it off till the following day. He was curious, kind, and meddlesome; he told me he wanted to be my agent, manage my entire oeuvre, as if that’s what I needed. I explained that between the galleries, he, and Carmela, it was enough, I wasn’t that prolific. He loved to get me wound up so I’d talk to him about esotericism, Eastern thought, maybe hoping I would give him a greater percentage of sales if I could make him my disciple. I gave him free reign to ask questions and offer his opinions as much as he wished, and once in a while I’d get fired up and run off at the mouth. Carmela warned me there was something about him she didn’t like, she could smell the bird of prey in him. I told her that when vultures start circling it is because they are attracted to something that’s putrefying, so it is best to keep them distracted and thus defer the moment they start pecking at our flesh.

  But what really bothered Carmela was that sometimes Ricardito arrived in the company of gorgeous young women who called me “maestro,” praised my work to the heavens, and asked me why I didn’t teach, how much they would love to take classes from me. She was made particularly uneasy by a rather bold, skinny, curly-haired blonde; her name was Andrea, and she frequently and fervently exclaimed how much she wanted to be my model.

  It was 1927 when I had my first show — some oil paintings I was quite proud of at the time — and Old Man Pericles had quit law school and plunged headlong into journalism and politics. I visited him at the newspaper office where he worked; he’d written an article in which he spoke quite generously about my show. One year later, when I had the nerve to send some verses I’d been working on for publication, I again visited him at the newspaper; Old Man Pericles leafed through the chapbook and, totally serious, asked me if I really thought I could be a painter and a poet at the same time. I said yes.

  “Is your wound that large?” he asked.

  I didn’t understand.

  “I mean, painting should be enough for you,” he said with that sarcastic frown I would always recognize from then on.

  Then he told me he couldn’t understand how the muse of poetry, so insolent and depraved, could pick a guy like me — sober, a devoted husband, not given to excesses of any kind — that there must have been a mistake somewhere because no lasting art can come from politeness and a good heart.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  The following week he published a short article in which he welcomed a new poet who was already a painter, but he didn’t say a word about the quality of my verses. The clarity of my recollection is proof of the slight I felt to my self-esteem.

  Then came that fateful coup d’état in December 1931: suddenly Old Man Pericles became — probably through the intrigues of his ex-comrades-in-arms and his father, Colonel Aragón — the private secretary to the new president, a general with a warlock complex who would rule over us for twelve years. I stopped seeing him during this period; the exercise of power always isolates men , and Old Man Pericles was no exception. But I heard about his adventures through Carmela, who continued to see Haydée as frequently as ever.

  Barely a month after the coup, the peasant insurrection began, led by the communists. There was total chaos. We felt uneasy in San Salvador, but the situation in the western sector of the country was much more dire. When the indigenous hordes armed themselves with guns and machetes, my in-laws were at their finca in Apaneca; they managed to escape by the skin of their teeth and arrived, terrified, in San Salvador. The government’s response was strong. There was a massacre, and the leaders were executed.

  I’ve never known the passion for power, but I have read about it and thus am not surprised that Old Man Pericles lived those weeks of the insurrection with great intensity, awash in adrenaline and with enough vehemence to crush his enemies. I imagined him whispering in the general’s ear, drawing up plans, displaying his brilliance. He had been educated at a military academy, but he’d also attended law school, where he had shared classrooms and perhaps even adventures with some of the communist leaders, whom he was now fighting, and whom he would soon defeat.

  The insurrection was a disaster; its chief military leader — Negro Martí, a former law-school classmate of Old Man Pericles — was captured almost at the outset. He was court-martialed and sentenced to be executed by firing squad. The night before his execution, the old man went to the prison with a box of cigars, shut himself up with Negro Martí and his two deputies — who were also sentenced to death — and they remained there talking and smoking until the dawn. At five in the morning he accompanied Martí to the wall of the General Cemetery. It was the first of February 1932. That’s when his life changed.

  Old Man Pericles wasn’t one to make confessions and give detailed accounts, and I never met Martí, but I can picture the scene as if I had been right there, several yards away from the site of the execution, sitting on the grave of a stranger, my sketchbook resting on my lap, trying to capture every last detail under the blue-gray light of dawn, when there appears a rather small, thin man with dark skin, a mustache, a receding hairline, the little hair he has left curly and tangled, his hands in manacles, flanked by a priest and the commanding officer of the firing squad, surrounded by guards, his step firm and determined, with a proud bearing, conscious that he had the central role in this scene and was, thus, the one who set the tone and the rhythm. Old Man Pericles is walking to the side, silently; the priest holds forth, invoking God and gesticulating affectedly. With a disdainful look
on his face, the condemned man says no, no he is not going to confess, would the priest please leave. The priest insists, stubbornly, obsequiously. The commanding officer and Old Man Pericles exchange looks. It’s time, the officer says gravely, and he removes the manacles. The old man approaches the condemned man and embraces him tightly, his nerves and muscles clenched; they exchange no word, only a glint in the eyes. The commanding officer takes out a handkerchief to blindfold the prisoner, who says he doesn’t need a blindfold, they should proceed without. The priest relents and, still muttering his mumbo-jumbo, he embraces the condemned man, who responds coldly. The old man starts to walk away, eager to gain some distance; when he gets alongside the firing squad he hears the voice of the condemned man shouting: “Pericles!” The old man turns around. “Come here, give me a hug,” he says. “But I already did,” the old man answers, discomfited. “Come, give me another one, I don’t want the last hug in this life to be from a scheming priest,” the condemned man says. The sky lightens. Pericles retraces his steps. They embrace again; the condemned man uses the opportunity to whisper in his ear: “You are going to be one of us.” The old man walks away, bewildered, his head down, his back to the scene; he pauses briefly to light a cigarette. The condemned man stands and faces the firing squad, his chest out, defiant. The officer shouts: “Ready!” He orders them to prepare their weapons. Then, the condemned man’s voice rings out forcefully: “Aim!” The officer suffers a moment of confusion but right away lifts his whip and energetically nods to the squad to carry out the condemned man’s order. At which point the condemned man shouts: “Fire!” The officer swings the whip through the air and the shots ring out. The condemned man has slumped over. All present hold still and silent amid the curls of smoke. Breathing heavily and clearly agitated, the officer approaches the body, still in its death spasms; he draws his forty-five, brings it to the condemned man’s temple, and shoots. A car’s engine has started nearby.

  I repeat: Old Man Pericles wasn’t one for details — he never told anybody what he talked to Martí about during the more than five hours they spent in that prison cell awaiting the execution, smoking cigars, anticipating the moment he would lead Martí to the wall. And I could imagine that scene, innocent and heroic, thanks to the many times I’d read and heard about similar ones, but I could never paint it as I wished because I was somehow permanently incapacitated, and I could never do anything more than draw half a dozen sketches, nothing presentable, especially not to the old man, who would have turned to look at me without a stitch of compassion, raised his eyebrows, and asked me since when I thought of myself as Señor Goya of the Candelaria district.

  Carmela called out from the kitchen to tell me that Old Man Pericles would arrive any minute now, and I should get out the ice cubes in case he wanted a whiskey. I told her not to be so pushy, I would take care of it. I stood up; pain shot through my spine. I walked over to the cupboard — very carefully, afraid of exacerbating the pain — to make sure there was enough whiskey left in the bottle; then I placed an ashtray on the dining room table and another on the coffee table out on the terrace. I told Carmela there was no point in taking out the ice until we heard the bus arrive, otherwise it would melt. Carmela asked me to help her set the table. At that moment we heard the clatter of the bus on the street below.

  I opened the door. I took the cutlery out of the drawer of the china cabinet and was about to set it out when the old man appeared.

  “Just look at you, making yourself useful as always,” he said, putting his bag down on the sofa. He was dressed as he almost always was: a white short-sleeved guayabera, dark gray slacks, black loafers, and tortoiseshell glasses; his face was impeccably shaved.

  He held out his hand to me, gave a kiss to Carmela, who had just appeared at the kitchen door, then asked to be excused, he had to use the washroom.

  Old Man Pericles always claimed that his rebelliousness came from way back, that he had inherited his bitterness from his mother. He came to this conclusion with the passing of time, and the older he got, the more his certainty grew. His grandfather was a famous general, commander of a troop of indigenous soldiers and a liberal leader, who was executed by the conservatives around 1890 after leading a revolt. Old Man Pericles’s mother, Doña Licha, then a young lady of fifteen and the general’s eldest daughter, was taken to the main plaza to watch her father face the firing squad; the rebel general’s head was then placed on top of a stake at the entrance to the town to dissuade the natives from offering any further resistance. “That’s the only way I can explain the rage I feel against those bastards,” Old Man Pericles told me one night he allowed himself to confess. What he didn’t say was how disappointed he was that neither of his sons had inherited his rebellious spirit, his resentment of the powerful, which he considered to be one of his own dearest virtues.

  “I didn’t go in,” Old Man Pericles said, sitting in the rocking chair, a glass of whiskey on his lap.

  “Why not? What happened?” Carmela asked from the kitchen, raising her voice.

  “The older that woman gets, the keener is her hearing,” I noted, because Old Man Pericles was with me out on the terrace, and he was speaking so only I would hear him.

  Soon Carmela was there, standing behind us, drying her hands on her apron, worry etched all over her face.

  “They postponed your treatment? Till when?” she asked.

  “I said, I didn’t go in,” Old Man Pericles repeated, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, appealing to my good offices, because Haydée had died twelve years before, and he had probably lost the habit of explaining himself, of being questioned by a woman. “I was in the waiting room and I decided not to go in, so I didn’t. I came here instead,” he said and took a long sip of whiskey; then he turned to look at Carmela, for just a few seconds, but enough for her to understand.

  “Then what? . . .” she asked, dismayed.

  “Then nothing,” I intervened. “Can’t you see that he’s here now?” I said somewhat emphatically.

  Carmela returned to the kitchen. I knew she was on the verge of tears because she had understood that Old Man Pericles had decided to let himself die, and she, Haydée’s best friend, had promised her, at her bedside when she was dying so suddenly of breast cancer, that she would take care of the old man as if he were her brother.

  “I don’t need to go through any more ordeals. The doctor warned me the treatment would be painful and, with luck, it could only hold the cancer at bay but never reverse it,” Old Man Pericles said as he lit a cigarette.

  Noon had come with its steamy breath, its glaring light: not a touch of a breeze; the leaves on the trees, unmoving.

  “But you don’t stop smoking,” Carmela said, carrying a plate of toast with beans and avocado; she said it angrily, as if the harm he was causing was to her.

  “What for, said the parrot, the hawk’s already caught me . . . ,” the old man mumbled, repeating an old folk saying.

  “I remember when you used to smoke a pipe,” Carmela said, now in a different tone, as she offered us the plate of hors d’oeuvres. “That did you less harm, smelled better, and you looked more elegant.”

  Old Man Pericles was extremely circumspect, a stranger to speechifying; his style was the caustic or sarcastic phrase, the query, or the doubt. Two years after that insurrection, he left for Brussels with Haydée and the three children, as an ambassador; he would return after becoming an opponent of the general, who jailed him more than a few times during his twelve-year dictatorship. I never knew how he became a communist, where he had been recruited, nor by whom. Once I asked him; he answered that so many many years had passed, and his memory was in such poor shape, that it wasn’t even worth trying to recall; this was his elegant way to avoid digging through the garbage of the past. But one afternoon, with the snippets I’d heard over the years and my shameless imagination, while lying idly in the hammock on the terrace, I elaborated a story that begins at a cocktail party at a Latin American embassy in Brussels
around 1935, perhaps the following year, after the Civil War in Spain had broken out, a cocktail party where Old Man Pericles is wandering around alone carrying a glass of whiskey, looking for his Central American colleagues, when he is suddenly approached by a man he has never seen before.

  “Are you Ambassador Aragón?” the man asks in perfect Castilian Spanish. He is blond, with pale skin and blue eyes.

  “At your service,” the old man says.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” the man says, with a touch of an accent the old man can’t quite place. “My name is Nikolai Ogniev. I am a journalist, a correspondent for the Soviet newspaper, Pravda.”

  The man holds out his hand.

  “My pleasure,” the old man says, politely but already on his guard. “How can I help you, Mr. Ogniev?”

  “I understand you were once a journalist, before you devoted yourself to politics and diplomacy.”

  The old man takes a sip of his whiskey, then places the glass on a shelf and pulls a silver cigarette case out of his pocket.

  “Would you like one?” the old man asks; the other man says no.

  The old man lights a cigarette just as a fat jolly man with a stentorian voice approaches them. He is the host.

  “If I may, I would like to borrow the ambassador for a moment,” the fat man says to Nikolai, as he takes the old man by the arm and leads him away. He quickly whispers something to him than goes to join another group.

  “Forgive me. You were telling me that you are a journalist,” the old man says when he returns, picking his glass of whiskey off the shelf.

  A waiter offers them a tray of sandwiches.

  “Precisely. And my specialty is Spanish-speaking countries . . .”

  “You are quite far away from your specialty,” the old man comments.

  “Please allow me to explain,” Nikolai says. “I am stationed here in this city, at a bit of a remove from the whirlwind in Europe precisely so I can use my spare time to write a book about the current situation in Hispanic America.”