Tyrant Memory

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  A breeze from the park swept over the terrace, spreading its shards of mist.

  “It’s not poetry or cheap metaphysics. Don’t get me wrong, Chelón,” he said, taking another drag off his cigar; he always referred to “cheap metaphysics” whenever we talked about the afterlife, the invisible, or other possible worlds. “It wasn’t some revelation or a sudden urge to discover new worlds, just a sensation, as if my body were telling me . . . Very strange.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in anything,” I said, without reproach, just to needle him.

  “You know well enough that it has nothing to do with belief,” he mumbled, the cigar held firmly between his lips. And I knew that he knew that I knew, I thought playfully, with a small burst of ingenuity, and to avoid remembering the spot where my death was lurking, waiting.

  He gulped down his whiskey.

  “Difficult to get used to the idea that one is finished,” he said, rocking back and forth in his chair.

  I assumed that if that cancer had always been lurking in his lungs, it must have flexed its muscles and decided to spread only about a year ago, in February, when Clemente was murdered. I could be wrong: maybe there’d never been any hope for the old man, and his body’s hour had simply come, as mine will, very soon now.

  I never quite understood how Old Man Pericles subsisted during that last period, how he scraped together the little money he needed to survive. After his return from Europe, he began to work for the newspapers that opposed the dictatorship; the general was ruling in all his splendor, but soon the Second World War would come and with it his decline. Then there was a long stretch during which I associate him with the radio; that was when he struck up his friendship with the Pole, a Jew with whom he founded a radio station and who, as the years went by, became the most important radio impresario in the country. While the old man was getting poorer and poorer because of his communist activities and having to live from hand to mouth between jail and exile, the Pole was swimming in money and founding new businesses right and left. They stopped seeing each other, but the friendship persisted, and especially the Pole’s respect for Old Man Pericles. I know of this first hand, because one of the Pole’s daughters bought a couple of my paintings; she said her father always spoke about Old Man Pericles with great admiration, for he had been like a big brother to him and had taught him about integrity, even though he didn’t share his political ideas.

  After Haydée’s death, he told me he was earning a small salary as a clandestine correspondent for a Soviet news agency. I’ve always assumed Haydée must have left him something from what she inherited from Don Nico.

  “These last few days I’ve been waking up afraid. I know I’ve been dreaming something horrible, but I forget it the moment I open my eyes. I don’t want to remember,” Old Man Pericles said, placing the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, as if he’d smoked enough.

  “Maybe it’s death,” I suggested.

  “That’s what I think,” he said.

  “Did you used to remember your dreams?” I asked him.

  “There you go . . .”

  The neighbor’s cat walked across the patio; he gave us a passing glance out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t stop. When Layca was alive, that cat didn’t dare come near here: our boxer bitch never even had to chase him, she’d paralyze him with a single look.

  “Is it true you can do anything you want in your dreams, as if you were awake?” he asked, shifting his position in his chair.

  I told him about that once; at the time, he was intensely curious, but he never fully believed me.

  “It’s just that sometimes I’m awake while I’m dreaming, so I can move around fairly easily, but there’s a big difference between that and being able to do anything I want,” I said.

  “So you can fly or go anywhere you want in a split second? What’s it like?” he insisted.

  “So-so. It’s simple: while you are dreaming, you know you are dreaming. That’s the only extraordinary part of it.”

  “Hard to believe.”

  “As you say, Old Man, it’s not a matter of belief; it’s a gift,” I explained.

  “If that’s true, there must be something after.”

  “I’m telling you there is, but it has nothing to do with all that church nonsense about Heaven and Earth that you hate so much. Anyway, death is a personal matter and each of us experiences it differently,” I said, feeling somewhat ill at ease and fearing I was simply repeating clichés. “Are you afraid?” I asked him.

  He took off his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, as if the glare were burning them.

  “Of pain, that’s all,” he murmured. “And it’s right here, devouring me,” he said, touching his chest.

  “Almost all suffering is futile,” I said.

  “Indeed, Mr. Schopenhauer,” he said with his old grimace. Then he said, “I wonder what would happen if you decided you didn’t want to return . . .”

  “What?” I shot back, confused.

  “If, when you are conscious that you are dreaming you suddenly decide you don’t want to return, you are doing quite well there and badly here, and you want to remain in the dream. What would happen then?”

  “One can’t decide when to return,” I said. “Your body brings you back.”

  I asked him if he was going to smoke the rest of his cigar, Carmela didn’t like the stale smell of burned tobacco. He told me I could toss it. I picked up the ashtray and went to the washroom to dump it.

  “A while ago I read that there’s an exercise for people who want to wake up inside their dreams,” I told him when I got back; I placed the clean ashtray on the coffee table. “You’ve got to get into the habit of taking a little hop every five minutes, no matter what you’re doing, and while you are taking the little hop you ask yourself, ‘Am I awake or am I dreaming?’ It’s a method so that the little hop, together with the question, get etched into your unconscious . . .”

  “A little hop . . .” he noted with a frown and a lifting of his eyebrows.

  “That’s right. And if you come back down to earth the way you normally do, that means you’re awake, and if you don’t, if instead you keep floating, it means you’re dreaming, because there is no law of gravity in dreams.

  “Have you tried it?”

  I told him I hadn’t. And I laughed.

  “I can just see me on my way home, taking little jumps every five minutes. Worse than Vroom . . .”

  Vroom was the madman of La Rábida, the district where Old Man Pericles lived. He ran around the streets barefoot pretending to be a car, he’d stop at the traffic lights, imitate the sound of a car engine, honk, hold up traffic and even sometimes overtake an absentminded driver, while other drivers either waved or insulted him.

  I suggested we take a walk in the park through the dense forest, so the stifling heat wouldn’t do us in.

  Old Man Pericles had an aversion to the occult. I could understand why: the general who fancied himself a warlock read books about the occult sciences and professed ludicrous notions to justify his brutal acts, as when he would say that it is worse to kill an ant than a man because the man will be reincarnated whereas the ant will not. On several occasions I tried to explain to the old man that the occult had nothing whatsoever to do with the sick mind of a criminal, any ignoramus can convert knowledge into grotesque superstition, that the depth of the mystery is inaccessible to a man corrupted by power. But Old Man Pericles had been marked by that experience, and his mistrust of any metaphysics was equal only to his sarcasm whenever — in private — he mentioned Marxist dogma.

  I clearly remember Haydée’s wake, during those early morning hours when the visitors had all left and the only ones left were a few family members and the closest friends, Old Man Pericles asked me what I thought about the idea of the eternal return. I told him I preferred to call it recurrence, and said I didn’t forswear the possibility that things could happen again in precisely that way — that time was circular and the moment of
our death coincided with that of our birth, and we would have to live the same life over and over again. Old Man Pericles remained pensive for a while then said that such a possibility seemed macabre to him, that if such a recurrence was an invention of a “superior intelligence” — as I liked to call the will from the invisible — it was not, in fact, a superior intelligence but rather a perverse, sadistic one. And he gave the example of a man who’d suffered the worst possible torture and death, who would be born over and over again only to die in the same brutal fashion.

  “It hasn’t got heads or tails, not heads or tails,” the old man repeated, aggrieved, because at that moment his atheism was weakening, and he could find nothing to replace it.

  I didn’t tell him that I was wont to pray to my invisible ones, asking them to leave me forever in the void.

  The Viking was sitting in the shade of a pink poui tree, leaning against the trunk, dozing off. He was the sleuth assigned to keep watch over the old man; apparently he was supposed to never lose sight of him and to keep a record of all his movements. He was a bitter old cop, but he had a certain way with people; in his youth he had been a professional wrestler — hence his nickname, “The Viking,” for at the time his hair, now gray, was blond. At first, Old Man Pericles treated him with disdain: he ignored him and at the slightest opportunity gave him the slip; then he took pity on him, and if he found him hanging around the house when he went out in the morning, he’d tell him not to waste his time, they were both too old for this game of cat and mouse, then he’d tell him his plans for the day so he wouldn’t have to follow him and could still present his report to his bosses. The Viking did his part, too: the last time they were expediting the order to expel him from the country, he let the old man know, which gave him several hours to get ready before they arrested him and drove him to the airport. And whenever they exchanged even a few words, The Viking always, and with great respect, called him “Don Pericles.”

  I would have liked to paint The Viking as a fallen angel, the old worn-out bloodhound assigned a quarry who is even older and more infirm than he. But I never found the path that revealed him to me: an old man sitting in the shade of a tree doesn’t say anything; putting him in a policeman’s uniform would have been forced and unnatural. Maybe I should have painted him precisely like that: a bloodhound with weary wings.

  Old Man Pericles and I had both married women who were one tier above us, socially and economically speaking. Needless to say, things were different at the beginning of the century: the prejudices and alienation arose later with the advent of the middle class and the nouveau riche. Back then, there were the wealthy few on the one hand and the people — the masses — on the other. None of us had any pretentions or ambitions; ours was simply the preordained encounter of persons of the same class and social standing. That’s why Old Man Pericles made so much fun of his son Alberto, and was so disparaging of his longing to cut a figure in society, a desire that ruled his life ever since he was young; he always wanted to be a dandy, parade around the clubs, dress in the latest fashion, drive fancy cars to impress the girls. “That one was born in the wrong place: a pearl among swine,” the old man would say. And that’s what he’d call him, “The Pearl,” when he wanted to scoff at his adventures. I always thought Alberto exhibited behavior typical of the youngest son, the spoiled one, the one who believes the world is made for him; but Old Man Pericles explained to me that he spent too much time with his maternal grandmother when he was little, hence his mother-in-law was to blame for his son’s frivolousness. “Even when he dabbles in politics he acts like a playboy on a safari,” the old man said, laughing, derisive; at moments Old Man Pericles even accepted Alberto’s frivolity, but he never forgave what he once in a broadside called Clemente’s “betrayal.” At the time I sensed that he was not referring to Clemente’s friendships with the same military commanders who ordered the old man’s arrests and expulsions but rather a specific, crushing, painful, and unmentionable act they would both carry with them to their graves, as I would in the case of Maggi.

  “What would you do, Chelón?” he asked me.

  We were walking down the road toward the path that led into the grove of Guanacaste trees, where those tall broad-leaved evergreens shade out the sun and the air is cool, damp, and comforting. I was wearing my cap and carrying my cane.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  Although the rains had not yet begun, and the mountain was dry, the color of straw, inside the forest the greens of the vines and the bushes emerged seductively.

  “Well, you should know, because your turn will come,” he said with touch of a grimace.

  “Maybe it’s better when it arrives all at once, no warning,” I noted.

  I had an intuition, a fleeting idea, but I shooed it away, like one shoos away a fly.

  “What I would do, Old Man, is settle any outstanding accounts; let go of any resentments, hatreds, lay my burdens down, for where we’re going it’s all just excess baggage anyway,” I said.

  “And if we’re not going anywhere . . .”

  “Still, the lighter, the better.”

  “I have a fever,” the old man said, suddenly stopping.

  “You want to return?”

  “No, let’s do our usual route.”

  He seemed exhausted, and he had always been the one to set the steady, almost martial, pace, never showing the least consideration for my fear of falling.

  “If you don’t do the treatment, you’ll soon not have enough air to go out of the house,” I said.

  “I feel badly for María Elena,” he said.

  Since Haydée’s death, María Elena spent half the week at the house with Old Man Pericles and the other half with her family in her village.

  “We’re going to avoid all that,” he said.

  That was when I understood the raven’s reasoning.

  We walked across the small hanging bridge over the spring; he stood for a while holding onto the lateral ropes, his gaze lost in the thin tongue of water.

  “This morning, after talking to you, I called The Pole,” he said. “He’ll take care of the wake and the burial.”

  With my cane, I pushed aside an orange peel that was littering the path.

  “He’s very fond of you,” I said.

  “It’s no skin off his back: he’ll write off the cost of the funeral home and the cemetery as publicity for his radio stations,” he said, smiling.

  “Don’t be such an ingrate,” I rebuked him.

  But Old Man Pericles was like that: he never missed an opportunity to get in a jab.

  We emerged from the forest into an open field; from there we could reach the highway circling the park that would take us home.

  “Pati and Albertico will come to take care of everything,” he said. “Truth is, the only objects of any value in the house are Haydée’s.”

  We walked along the sidewalk that ran parallel to the highway.

  I would have liked to tell him to take it easy, not to let himself get carried away by his obsessions, even in the worst-case scenario he still had a few months, but he was laying all his cards on the table.

  “Can’t let the pain have its way with me,” he mumbled as he took a deep breath, just to make sure I understood.

  I’ve often asked myself what we had in common, what united us, apart from the friendship between our wives. He didn’t admire my paintings, or my poems (“metaphysical poetry,” he’d say, despite my enthusiasm), or my way of understanding the world (“too much Eastern marijuana, Chelón,” he’d insist in his mocking tone). I couldn’t care less about his passion for politics, his militancy alongside people he himself disdained, his loyalty to the interests of communists in faraway land. But we never argued, not in the sense of ideas clashing head-on. It seems we met over an ineffable, inviolable terrain, someplace far beyond any generational empathy. Or as if deep down I was doing what he would have liked to do and he was living an adventure I would have liked to live. It’s not worth d
elving into too much. Some friendships are destiny.

  Carmela was waiting for us with two glasses of fresh fruit drink. Then she made coffee and cut a lemon tart she had baked earlier in the day. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how much Pericles had declined in the last two weeks: he was ashen and was having difficulty breathing, as if he would never recover from what had been our traditional evening stroll for the past decade.

  “If my lungs were in better shape, I would have liked to go to the Devil’s Doorway,” Old Man Pericles said as he drank this last coffee and smoked a cigarette.

  The Devil’s Doorway was a huge cliff about three-quarters of a mile into the park, where the mountain abruptly ended. The view there was spectacular: one could see the sea and a good chunk of the coast; at night it was crowded with cars full of furtive lovers.

  “It wouldn’t have been good for you in this heat,” Carmela said.

  Before I had so many ailments, I used to walk to the Devil’s Doorway more often; I went many times with the old man. Watching the sunset from those heights is a revelation.

  But the name was derived from its more sinister side: Milena, a feather-brained ballerina and a friend of ours from childhood, knocked off balance by the ravages of old age, was the last to throw herself off the cliff into the void, six months before. The list was long.

  The old man lit another cigarette.

  “It’s time for me to go,” he said.

  Carmela gave him a piece of pie for María Elena; he put it in his bag.

  We walked him to the bus.

  “Don’t be stubborn, old man. Get the treatment,” Carmela said to him, with the voice of a scolding mother as he kissed her on the cheek. I know how she must have struggled over whether to say those words, but now she was on the verge of tears.

  We hugged each other, as if it were just another parting, wordless.

  The Viking had scampered onto the bus through the back door.

  Old Man Pericles sat two rows behind the driver; he barely waved.