Tyrant Memory

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  At the far end of the hallway, past a swarm of other guests, the old man catches a glimpse of his colleagues from Guatemala and Nicaragua. He longs to join those clowns in their banter.

  “I have no doubt,” Nikolai continues, “that you are deeply knowledgeable about the reality in your country, as a participant and as a witness, and I feel quite fortunate to have met you at this precise time and place. I would like to request an interview, have the opportunity to ask you a few questions about Central American history. Nothing formal. We could meet for dinner any day that’s convenient for you.”

  From the other end of the hallway, the eagle-eyed oaf from Guatemala gestures to the old man with a barely perceptible nod of his head — a question and an invitation.

  “In particular, you might be able to help me understand the events that took place in your country three years ago at the time of that bloody insurrection,” Nikolai says and makes a grimace, fleeting, slightly malicious, or perhaps it is just a nervous tick, the old man isn’t sure.

  Old Man Pericles blows out the smoke and stares into Nikolai’s blue eyes; he wonders how old this Russian is: forty? forty-five?

  “Were you in your country during the October Revolution?” the old man asks, off the cuff, before finishing his whiskey.

  Nikolai smiles, then nods and winks.

  They agree to dine one day that week in a restaurant in that city I never saw and never will, but it wasn’t difficult for me to imagine the afternoon in question, while lying in my hammock with the story of Pericles in Brussels playing in my head like an old movie, which took place in a restaurant of Nikolai’s choosing, with private rooms suitable for intrigue, in one of which the old man would sit after giving his coat to the waiter, with that astonishing lighthearted sensation that accompanies a man who has decided to take on his own destiny.

  It is not difficult for me to imagine the freedom Old Man Pericles felt when he made the decision to resign from his diplomatic post and become the opponent he would be from then on, the “Soviet agent,” as the authorities would call him each time they jailed him or sent him into exile; that sensation of freedom and adventure of knowing that he was returning to his country as somebody else, his own opposite, without anybody at first suspecting; the lightheartedness that comes from having finally divested himself of the contradiction of belonging to and representing a camp he found utterly repugnant. It was in the last few months of 1937, if I remember correctly. Old Man Pericles returned all grown up, saturated with the events taking place in Europe; he told stories, amazing at the time, about Nazis and fascists, and he could talk for hours about events in Spain, about the Republicans and the Franco uprising.

  Haydée experienced the old man’s resignation differently, as she admitted to us when she returned: hers were the concerns of a mother (Clemente and Pati were teenagers and Alberto was still a boy), the concerns of a woman from a conservative family who doesn’t fully understand her husband’s decisions, but who is also enormously happy to be returning to her own land and her own people.

  Before serving lunch, Carmela said she would bring a glass of watermelon drink to the poor Viking, who was waiting outside, sitting in the shadow cast by a silk cotton tree, he himself a shadow of Old Man Pericles for years already. Carmela always took pity on him, brought him a cold drink, and told him he mustn’t worry, he could have lunch in the dining room where the park employees ate, Old Man Pericles would be at the house until late in the afternoon, as if he were a friend and not the police spy assigned to tailing our friend. The Viking wasn’t as old as we were, but I had the feeling he was aging more quickly, as if he were suffering from a secret malady.

  When I first met Haydée, as I’ve said, she was a tall, slender young woman with red hair; beautiful, brimming with life, and so expressive that next to her, Old Man Pericles — who at that time wasn’t old but was already scowling and reserved — seemed mute. For decades, and every time she wanted to irritate him, Haydée would tell the story of how her heart was pierced by that handsome, dashing young second lieutenant of the cavalry, who paraded around proudly on his sorrel, leading his sweaty troops through the central plaza in Santa Ana. The eldest and favorite daughter of Don Nico Baldoni, a fellow coffee-grower and friend of Carmela’s father, Haydée had the wisdom to take what life offered her with a good dose of wonderment. I never heard her once complain about the tribulations she was forced to undergo at her husband’s side: sometimes she spoke enthusiastically about one or another of their periods of exile and the juggling acts she had to perform to survive when her husband spent time in jail. But I am also certain her family never left her to fend for herself. Don Nico respected Old Man Pericles, and he must have supported him at least until 1944, when the dictator fell, because at that time we were all in the opposition; later, after the Second World War and once the old man had already been branded a communist, things may have changed. But Haydée was loyal to him for better and for worse. Until she was stricken with breast cancer, sudden and devastating, which finished her off before we could even get used to the idea of her being gone.

  Carmela had made a casserole of ground beef, vegetables, and green plantains; she served the beans separately in soup bowls topped with cream and grated cheese, just as Old Man Pericles liked.

  “Have you heard anything from Estela and Alberto?” Carmela asked, as if wanting to liven up the repast, perhaps seeing that the old man was even more withdrawn than usual, whereas I perceived him as he always was: laconic, and averse to small talk.

  “They’re fine,” Old Man Pericles mumbled, “and Albertico is, too; he’s happy at the university.”

  Carmela said they had done well to make lives for themselves there, in San José, Costa Rica, where they’d gone into exile a year earlier, after the failed coup that Alberto’s close friends had participated in, and maybe he had himself, though he denied it; his daughter Pati had also been living in that city for more than three decades.

  “We got a letter from Maggi today,” Carmela said, as if she was determined to intrude on every silence; later I understood she wasn’t doing this out of compassion for Old Man Pericles but rather for herself, for both of us, for it was frightening to think that we were eating with death sitting in the chair next to us.

  “Without the treatment, the pain is going to knock you out,” I told him, taking the bull by the horns.

  “The pain will knock me out with or without the treatment,” Old Man Pericles said as he took another bite.

  At the previous appointment, the doctor had told him that if he didn’t undergo the treatment he’d have only a few months left, it would become increasingly hard to breathe, and he would suffer unbearable pain.

  I felt as if Haydée had entered the dining room, a strange, fleeting presence; Carmela turned to look at me. Old Man Pericles finished eating the meat casserole, then pulled the bowl of bean toward him with relish, breaking into a smile and saying:

  “Horrifying, don’t you think?”

  The rumble of the bus broke the heavy midday silence.

  “You should make another appointment. If you don’t get the treatment, you’ll regret it,” Carmela said, clearly upset. Then right away, before getting up, she asked, “Are you going to want more juice?”

  Old Man Pericles asked her also for more tortillas, toasted rather than fresh, the way he liked them.

  “Did you ever find out who was living at that house at mile nine?” I asked.

  The old man wiped the plate of beans with a piece of tortilla. He nodded, without looking up.

  “Nothing good is in store for us . . . ,” I commented.

  “Things here are always worse than we imagine,” he said before bringing the dripping piece of tortilla to his mouth; he left the bowl clean, pure, without a trace of beans and cream. “Fortunately, I won’t be around to see it,” he added with no self-pity, as if he really did foresee what was coming.

  Now I understand how grateful Old Man Pericles was that Albertico had left the
country: some of his companions at the university, his age, were already appearing in the newspapers as supposed members of the burgeoning guerrilla cells that were confronting the military government. Surely the old man was staring at the specter of the insurrection of 1932, at the butchery armed struggle can lead to.

  Albertico was the grandchild with whom the old man most identified; this was evident when he told us that the young man had started studying sociology at the University of Costa Rica, and that he took on politics with a dedication and lucidity that neither his father nor his Uncle Clemente had ever had; he called Clemente’s children “futile flesh,” and Pati’s “meek Costa Rican lambs.”

  Carmela insisted that the best thing for Old Man Pericles to do after the treatment was to go to San Jose, where his two children were living, so he could spend his last few months with has family. I was certain he would never take that comfortable and predictable route; nothing would have horrified him more than to watch his privacy suddenly intruded upon by his children and grandchildren and their concerns: he didn’t have the temperament of a patient, much less of a dying man.

  Of his two remaining children, Pati was most like Old Man Pericles: she was a tall, graceful, haughty brunette; she had a fiery temperament and no time for trivialities. Married to a powerful Costa Rican communist, she had a couple of children and had made her home in that city, where Haydée had spent long stretches, especially toward the end, when the cancer was ravaging her. Old Man Pericles always called his daughter’s house “the Costa Rican rearguard,” because that’s where he went into exile each time the baboon currently in charge gave the order. I met Pati when she was little: she always was a livewire; then I heard about her marriage and didn’t see her again until her mother’s funeral.

  “What are you painting, Chelón?” he asked me while Carmela was making coffee in the kitchen.

  “I’m still on the fallen angels,” I answered.

  “You’ve spent more than two years on them,” he said. “Have you found your gold mine?”

  “The buyers like them, and they still aren’t boring me,” I explained, which was absolutely honest; every week I painted one oil and one watercolor of an angel with a different occupation, and they came to me on their own, without much effort. “As far as it being a gold mine, not . . .”

  “He’s now painting one where a poor ice-cream vendor, with his wings and dripping with sweat under the burning sun, is pushing his little cart,” Carmela said from the kitchen. “He modeled it after the ice-cream vendor’s cart that parks here at the entrance to the park on Sundays.”

  “Not only the cart,” I said, “the hat as well.”

  “It’s a source of solace,” Old Man Pericles said as he lit his cigarette.

  “What do you mean?” Carmela asked, walking toward us with the coffee pot.

  But I understood right away.

  “People like to buy solace, the rich most of all,” he answered.

  “There you go with your notions,” I said. “The poor are the ones who need solace.”

  “But they don’t have the means to buy it . . .”

  “The Italian ambassador already reserved the ice-cream angel,” Carmela said, pleased, while she poured out the coffee.

  He was one of those boors who begin to fancy themselves renaissance men after being posted to a backward country like ours. When I described to him what I was painting, he said he loved ice cream and asked me to put it aside for him, and he even had the nerve to offer me some suggestions. He’d been at the house the previous Saturday, insisting we come to a reception at the embassy; he appeared incapable of comprehending that his world was so alien to me that his offer to send his chauffeur would do nothing to induce us to attend his party — we had already had our share of protocol for our lifetimes.

  “He brought me some first-rate cigars,” I said, remembering the Italian’s good side. “Would you like one?”

  “Of course. I hope such high quality doesn’t irritate my taste buds . . .” Old Man Pericles said, ironically, for he smoked the cheapest cigarettes around.

  “What they’ll irritate are your lungs,” Carmela cut in, glaring at me reproachfully for what she considered to be my imprudence, as if she still didn’t want to accept that there was no return, our friend had already crossed the line, his refusal to submit to the treatment was not a mere whim, not a reaction to fear, but rather the result of a final, resounding decision — and Old Man Pericles had always been a decisive man.

  I went to the studio to get the box of cigars off the bookshelf.

  We rarely spoke about politics, only when there was pandemonium in the streets due to strikes, elections, or a coup d’état. Old Man Pericles always had the latest bits of gossip, but he doled them out slowly as if they were old jokes everybody had already heard. Already before Haydée’s death his tone had become sardonic, even when he talked about his own comrades’ adventures, as if he no longer believed what he preached and belonged to that gang because one has to have something to cling to in this life. He despised the military even though he, his father, and his grandfather had been in the military; more than anything, though, he despised the rich: the fourteen packs of hyenas, he called the so-called fourteen families who own this parcel of land. It was his loathing of the arrogance of the powerful that made him remain a communist to the very end rather than any illusion about the supposed goodness of that other world. “There’s deep shit everywhere, Chelón. This is mine. What is to be done?” he said one day after returning from a long trip to Moscow and Peking, when those two cities were still on friendly terms.

  At some point in the afternoon he’d always enter my studio: he would cast an eye over the canvas I was painting, rummage through my books with the hope that I had bought something that might interest him, then look pensively out the picture window. He never offered an opinion about my paintings, always claiming to be incapable of evaluating the visual arts; he was contemptuous of non-figurative art and was grateful I had never wasted my paint on such things. Whenever I showed him any of my poems, published or not, he’d make a measured comment, but would always end by saying: “You’re right to prefer painting.” That was another of his characteristics: he seemed to go through life forgiving the world. I reminded him of it that afternoon when I noticed him looking attentively at the ice-cream vendor as a fallen angel:

  “What is His Lordship’s judgment?” I asked in a sarcastic tone, much like his own, as I handed him a cigar.

  “You should give the ice-cream vendor the Italian ambassador’s mug,” he said.

  Then he stood looking out the window in intent contemplation, as if he didn’t want to miss a single detail. He asked me for the binoculars. I told him I’d lent them to Ricardito, and he still hadn’t returned them. He looked at me as one looks at a man who has been swindled despite the warnings.

  “And that girl, Andrea, has she returned?” he asked me in the conspiratorial tone of an accomplice, because I had told him about the visits of the young lady who wanted to sit for me, of Carmela’s chagrin, of the fantasies and fears that even old age fails to temper.

  I said no without parting my lips, only waving my index finger back and forth.

  Carmela appeared in the doorway.

  Now, while reminiscing, I realize that ours was, more than anything else, a friendship of old age. We had, of course, met in the twenties, and the friendship between Carmela and Haydée had been indissoluble since they were children, but for the following thirty years we’d seen each other only sporadically while his and Haydée’s lives were swept up in the old man’s political adventures — their periods in exile and the displacements — and Carmela and I went to live in the United States, where we remained for ten years, at first thanks to an arts scholarship and then as the embassy’s cultural attaché. The same baboon who put Old Man Pericles behind bars on more than once occasion was the one I had to thank for my appointment, which allowed me to live for several memorable years in Washington and New York.
In 1958, when we returned home to stay, our friendship solidified, despite the constant turmoil of his political life, and Haydée’s cancer, which finished her off a few years later.

  “I don’t understand why your returned,” Old Man Pericles would say to me, shaking his head as if I had disappointed him. “You should have stayed in New York, or moved to Paris, where artists are worshiped.”

  Ten years earlier, when I had told him about my scholarship from the American Embassy to attend a fine art academy in New York, fearful that he would be devastatingly critical of me because of his anti-Yankeeism, and doubtful myself if it was worthwhile to go live in a city where we had no family and knew not a soul, Old Man Pericles spared no arguments to convince me to accept the scholarship.

  “Everything has its time, Old Man,” I told him, “and my time up north is over.”

  We returned to the rocking chairs on the terrace; Old Man Pericles seemed content with his cigar in his mouth.

  “They’re the same ones Fidel smokes, according to Signore Ambassador Strasato,” I noted.

  The old man shot me a withering look; I knew my friend had spent one year on Castro’s island after the triumph of the revolution, something of an ambassador for our native communists. It was a few months after Haydée’s death. The change must have helped him deal with his grief. After his surreptitious return, I invited him over, hoping to satisfy my own curiosity about his Caribbean experience. “The Cubans get high on noise,” he declared sententiously. A few weeks later he was arrested and again sent into exile.

  Carmela was cleaning up in the kitchen. She asked if we wanted her to make us another coffee before she took her nap.

  Old Man Pericles said he’d rather have another whiskey, unusual as he always drank only before lunch.

  I went to get it for him; fortunately, there was some ice left.

  “Recently I’ve felt like death has always been here, lurking, waiting,” Old Man Pericles said, touching both hands to his chest, where his lungs were.