The Hamlet Warning

by Leonard Sanders

  Harassment was Ramón’s game, Loomis argued. And Ramón was winning. His losses were negligible, and his forces were growing daily while morale among the government troops was dropping.

  El Jefe listened to Loomis, but he found the argument of his generals more convincing. He boiled down his doubts to one question: “If Ramón’s so strong, why doesn’t he come out and fight?”

  Loomis repeated his belief that Ramón was gathering his strength until the right time.

  El Jefe couldn’t accept the theory. He only know of one way to run a revolution. His way.

  “If he is certain of winning, now is the time for him to strike,” he said. “He’d win more troops over by doing it. He already has more than I did when I started. If he’d declare himself, take a stand, they’d fall out of the trees, spring up out of the ground. No. Inaction kills revolutions. Ramón is too inactive.”

  Loomis gave up on the argument. He was confident that developments soon would prove him right.

  *

  María Elena continued to ignore Loomis’s existence, a fact he found unsettling.

  On the morning after the rescue, the palacio was besieged by more than a score of reporters who had flown in overnight to cover the revolution. They wanted to interview María Elena. She refused to see them. At El Jefe’s request, Loomis went to the De la Torre quarters that afternoon to urge María Elena to cooperate. El Jefe wished to prove to the world that María Elena was safe and that she was an honored palacio guest, not a political prisoner thrown into some dungeon.

  Loomis talked to her briefly in a small parlor in the family quarters. She came into the room pale, distraught, obviously still shaken from the battle of a few hours before. Yet she faced Loomis with the same defiance she had shown in Santiago. She did not sit or offer Loomis a chair. “I see no need to discuss the matter,” she said. “I haven’t talked to the press in two years. There’s no reason to do so now.”

  Her delicate, soft features made her seem vulnerable, belying her firm stance and strong words. Loomis had an almost overwhelming impulse to put his arms around her, to give her whatever assurance he could. He was irritated by the inclination. He told himself that he was only intrigued and fascinated by the mystery of her. He knew, perhaps better than anyone, that impulses arising from the emotions are dangerous and that affairs of the heart are the worst kind. Surely, he had learned that lesson by now.

  “El Jefe places no restrictions on you,” he said. “You can tell them anything you want.”

  Her eyes blazed up at him in anger. “What could I tell them? That I’m a political prisoner? Held here against my will? No, thank you. I won’t give Ramón that satisfaction, even if it’s what my uncle deserves.”

  “El Jefe has only your best interest at heart,” he told her.

  “He had no right to bring us here,” she said. “We were perfectly safe in Santiago.”

  Loomis spoke with some heat of his own. “You were safe in Santiago only because your uncle kept you and your whole family under discreet but close surveillance. Three companies of troops were assigned to guard you. That was their sole duty. They were in constant radio contact, literally around the corner. Believe me, lady, there are plenty of reasons for El Jefe to be concerned for your safety. And may I remind you that a lot of good men died last night because of those reasons.”

  Her eyes wavered for the first time. Loomis saw her hands tremble and instantly regretted he had been so blunt.

  “Well, anyway, I will not talk to the reporters,” she said.

  Loomis made one last effort. “It would only take a minute,” he said. “They are just men doing their job.”

  She gave him one final, scornful look. “There are already too many people around here operating on that philosophy,” she said. She turned and walked out of the room.

  Loomis faced the reporters alone. He described the night’s assault, placing heavy importance on the heroic delaying tactics of Rodríguez and his men and on Bedoya and the men in the gunship.

  That evening, he dressed as usual and went down to dinner. El Jefe seldom left the palacio, and his social life centered around quiet evenings with small gatherings invited in for drinks, dinner, and a movie. The guest lists varied — senators and ambassadors, newspaper publishers and plantation owners, his generals and advisers, and, always, their wives. El Jefe had made plain to the palacio staff that Loomis held a standing invitation. Loomis only had to advise the social secretary each day of his intentions. He usually accepted. The food was better than most available elsewhere in the country. And he liked the company, most of the time.

  Loomis also enjoyed the dinners in that they revealed a side of El Jefe he otherwise wouldn’t have known existed. The old warrior apparently was starved for feminine attentions. There were stories that when El Jefe’s wife died young, he had grieved for years and vowed never to remarry. In his quiet, genteel attitude toward the women, El Jefe showed a debonair, suave self that seldom surfaced in other surroundings.

  By the time Loomis entered the lounge, a dozen or more guests had arrived. He nodded greetings to a general and his wife, to an industrialist and his daughter, and moved toward the bar. Drink in hand, he turned to find María Elena de la Torre staring at him. She was standing alone in a corner of the room. Her gaze dropped to his shoes, then slowly and frankly sized him up, conveying as clearly as spoken words her shock and disbelief that he would dare to be in dinner jacket, presuming to mix with civilized people as an equal.

  Then she pointedly turned away.

  Throughout the cocktail hour, Loomis couldn’t keep from stealing glances in her direction. She was wearing an understated black sheath, V-necked, with a white linen jacket. Her long dark hair was loose. An ivory cameo necklace was the only trace of jewelry. Loomis was convinced he had never seen a lovelier woman in his life.

  At dinner he was seated next to a senator’s wife, the daughter of a prominent Dominican family. Educated in Europe, she was extremely well read. Loomis had discussed books with her many times, so they naturally fell into a lively comparison of the relative value of Russian and American authors. Loomis was expounding his theory that Russian writers, from Dostoevsky to Solzhenitsyn, had profited artistically from their harsher experiences — intellectual rebellion, revolution and warfare, arrest, penal servitude, and their eventual return, older and infinitely wiser, to a troubled society. In mid-sentence he looked up and caught María Elena watching him intently. She quickly looked away. Yet Loomis sensed that she continued to listen to the conversation.

  The disturbing eye duel persisted through dinner. Loomis would feel her gaze on him. But when he turned casually in her direction, she would be looking elsewhere. By the end of the evening, concluded with the screening of a French comedy, Loomis was hardly aware of anything other than María Elena. After the guests left, and as the De la Torres walked toward their quarters, María Elena paused in the doorway and gave him one last, lingering glance. Loomis could read no meaning on her face.

  He found the whole evening disconcerting.

  The next night, annoyed with himself over his foolish eagerness, he went down early for cocktails. After taking a drink from the bar, he turned and walked straight across the room to María Elena, who regarded his approach without a sign of expression.

  “I’m sorry, but I live here, too,” he said. “You’ll just have to put up with seeing me around.”

  He was rewarded with the barest hint of a smile. “You seem absolutely naked without your guns,” she said. “And I’ve been wondering where you learned to read. I thought you more the simian type.”

  “I’m full of surprises,” Loomis said. “You really haven’t seen any of them yet.”

  Her eyebrows lifted in mock surprise. “A film critic, a gunman, and an authority on world literature. What next?”

  “I play a mean game of tennis. You care to try me?”

  “How do you know I play tennis at all?”

  “I told you I was full of surprises.”


  “My security file,” she guessed, accurately. She seemed disturbed by the thought. “What else is in there?”

  “You’re full of surprises, too,” he said.

  She laughed, then. A rich, throaty laugh that struck Loomis as pure music.

  “You should laugh more,” he said. “It does things to your eyes.”

  “Political prisoners don’t laugh much,” she said.

  He gestured with his drink to their surroundings, the huge crystal chandeliers, heavily framed oil paintings, the wide brocade draperies, marbled floors, and elegantly gowned and jeweled women. “You’ll have to admit that this beats those Nazi ovens.”

  She made a face. “As long as I’m penned up, I’d just as soon be on bread and water. Two days in this place, and I’m already half crazy.”

  “Crazy enough to play tennis with me?”

  She laughed again. “All right,” she said. “When?”

  “Morning is best. The palacio courts are in shade. Eight o’clock?”

  “Eight o’clock,” she said.

  El Jefe led the way into the dining room. María Elena was seated to Loomis’s left. She remained strangely quiet through the early portion of the dinner. Across the table, De la Torre, his wife, and Raul also seemed subdued. From the strained atmosphere, Loomis assumed that a confrontation had occurred between El Jefe and the family over their enforced residence.

  El Jefe seemed to be making an effort toward amends. He was especially attentive to Juana and María Elena, recommending certain dishes, making sure their every need was met.

  The conversation centered around El Jefe at the head of the table, ranging from the latest American and Italian films to the sad way tourists were ruining the best places in Spain and the south of France. News of the destruction of an airliner by terrorists in the Middle East was discussed, leading El Jefe to turn the topic of conversation to Dominican politics — usually a taboo subject at palacio dinners.

  “I don’t know the solution to this terrorism,” he said. “There’s only small consolation in the fact that we are not the only country in the world having such difficulties. I must confess that I don’t understand what is in the terrorist’s mind. I simply don’t know how to deal with him.”

  He paused, and directed his attention to María Elena. “It has occurred to me that I haven’t asked the opinion of the one person present who is an authority on the subject. As some of you may know, María Elena wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Rastafarian terrorists — lived with them, went along on missions with them.”

  A murmur of surprise swept the table. Loomis wondered how María Elena’s affiliation with the Rastafarians had been kept so secret. Although there was considerable information in his files — including a terrific picture of her in jungle fatigues and crossed bandoliers — her career in terrorism hadn’t been discovered by the press.

  El Jefe seemed to enjoy the reaction. “Perhaps you could tell me, María Elena. What is in the terrorist’s mind?”

  María Elena considered her answer carefully. “I think the most difficult thing to understand is that the terrorist is a person driven to the most extreme desperation by what he considers oppression, political, spiritual, poverty, or whatever. His setting becomes a world unto itself — a world that feeds on itself to the point that all logic is lost. The illogical becomes logical. He and his group become convinced — convince themselves — that if enough innocent people are endangered, killed, the government will accede to their demands and that the general population will applaud the result. The terrorist may be crazy, to our way of thinking, but he has his own logic.”

  El Jefe nodded slowly, thinking. He seemed genuinely impressed with María Elena’s answer.

  “If you were in my place,” he said, “how would you deal with him?”

  María Elena didn’t hesitate. She spoke with an intensity that went beyond the best of her screen roles. “I would disarm him by removing his oppression. I would restore constitutional guarantees. I would hold free elections. I would improve his wages so that each year he could see that he is better off than the year before.”

  “A very heavy order,” El Jefe said.

  “You promised those things when you took office,” María Elena pointed out. “And you haven’t delivered them. That fact is what sends your terrorist into the streets.”

  A tenseness had settled over the table. The food was forgotten. The moment hung on El Jefe’s reaction.

  He slowly shook his head. “María Elena, you are so young. There are so many things that are not in your books. In my youth, there was not the slightest feeling of national unity in this country. Now, at least, we have that. We have made progress. But which constitution would you restore? There have been thirty-nine — an unholy mess from the standpoint of attempting to establish traditional law. And how can you conduct elections when fifty percent of the population is illiterate? When there are more than seventy political parties and splinter factions?”

  He paused. “No, I haven’t called free elections. There would be chaos. You are looking at the only stability this country has at the moment, and I must recognize that fact. I must take strong measures. I have no choice.”

  There was a gentleness, almost a pleading quality, in El Jefe’s tone. But María Elena was not swayed by his argument.

  “Don’t you see?” she demanded. “Those repressions were the very thing you opposed when you made your revolution. The issues remain. If you continue to use Trujillo’s methods, then to the terrorist in the streets, your government is identical with Trujillo’s.”

  “María Elena!” De la Torre said.

  El Jefe waved a hand. “It’s all right, Manuel. María Elena has a valid point, and the courage to make it.” He turned back to María Elena. “Vida, I hated Trujillo with my every breath. I can never forgive him his excesses. My friends died, many of torture, in La Cuaranta. I apologize to my dinner guests for bringing up this topic. But I must admit, María Elena, I understand Trujillo better every day.”

  “He knew how to govern,” María Elena said, repeating the popular street joke.

  El Jefe refused to be baited. “Yes, Trujillo knew how to govern. He was very, very good at what he wanted to do. But he was not benevolent. And that is my problem. How can one be benevolent? How would you hold elections with ignorant, illiterate voters who haven’t the slightest inkling of the issues?”

  “You could set up literacy programs.”

  “And how are you going to educate a man who earns less than a peso a day in the cane fields — and who needs that peso to live?”

  “You could set up adult schools, and rotate the workers.”

  “If one-fourth of the workers are in school, the Gross National Product, already one of the lowest in this hemisphere, would drop by twenty-five percent.”

  “Night classes, then.”

  “How is a man going to study after spending fourteen hours in the cane fields or in a factory?”

  “He could be inspired into doing it.”

  “Now you have come to the core of the matter,” El Jefe said. “How can you give a man hope, when there is no hope for him in this life?”

  “That’s just my point,” María Elena said. “You’ve underestimated people. Haven’t you realized that this man who spent fourteen hours in the cane field, or in the factory, is your sniper, your terrorist with his explosive? That’s why your men can’t find Ramón’s army. It’s all around you. Your men pass his soldiers on the street every day, think of them as workers, and never recognize them as the enemy. That’s why Ramón is winning. He offers them hope.”

  “You think Ramón is winning?”

  “Please read my dissertation, Uncle. Today’s guerrillas are far more dangerous than the full-time fighters of your day. They strike and melt back into their environment. Perhaps not even their own families suspect. They subsist on your economy. The longer Ramón can survive, forcing you to repressive measures, the greater his strength.”

&
nbsp; El Jefe glanced at Loomis, who shrugged elaborately. María Elena turned to look at Loomis, puzzled.

  “You sound exactly like my friend Loomis,” El Jefe explained. “He has been upsetting my generals by telling them they are losing. That is his argument.”

  María Elena looked at Loomis. “Well, he’s smarter than I thought,” she said.

  After dinner, the other guests followed El Jefe into the theater for the screening of a new Italian film. María Elena seemed upset, so Loomis proposed a drink on the terrace. She accepted.

  They sat in the moonlight and talked until long after the film was over, the guests had left, and the other palacio residents had gone up to bed. Under María Elena’s persistent questioning, Loomis revealed a bare outline of his life. She seemed intrigued. “Talk about an odyssey!” she said. “What are you hunting for?”

  “If I knew, maybe I would find it,” he said.

  “Maybe you ought to sit still for a while and see if you can figure it out,” she said. “And I thought I’d racked up some mileage! You make all my knocking around sound like nothing.”

  “What are you searching for?” Loomis asked.

  “You ought to know,” she said. “You have my files.”

  “They only have facts,” he explained. “They don’t tell why.”

  “Then your files are worthless,” she said. “The ‘why’ is the important part.”

  When they at last went to their rooms, María Elena hesitated at the door. “I’ve enjoyed it, Loomis,” she said. “I haven’t talked like that in a long time.”

  “I thought I did all the talking,” he said. “I still know almost nothing about you.”

  “Maybe there’s not much to know.”

  “That would surprise me,” he said.

  She laughed and looked up at him. “Well, let’s not rush it, Loomis. Things are complicated enough as it is.” She squeezed his hand and went in, leaving him with a vague sense of a promise unfulfilled.