Mandragon

by R. M. Koster

  Caught that part too, but not in an involuntary trance. Reviewed her career in detail during the days and nights after I first saw her face to face. Ordered up dreams of her and reveled in them. Saw, heard, touched, and smelled. Tasted. Spectated and participated. Experienced it all both as Angela and the gentlemen she solaced.

  Tribe thought I was meditating. Special reverence toward Mandragon—as if they weren’t reverent before!—but it was no part of my mission, no means of preparing for the end and the beginning. Abuse of power. That charge is just, though not the way the colonels understand it. Not the power of the state, puny semblance of power; no power at all since it’s fenced round by time and space. Abuse of the power of the universe that had chosen to live in me.

  In the fall of ’49 Amichevole brought his circus here and needed a permit to perform. So Angela performed for the mayor. Who praised her to the president of the republic, Alejo Sancudo. Who commanded a performance for himself. And the morning after Angela played the palace, Alejandro Sancudo bought her contract from Amichevole, gave him five hundred dollars, and twenty-four hours to get his circus out of the country.

  Installed her in a villa at Medusa Beach, place built for my mother if that myth of the birth is true. Kept her two years, then sold her for five thousand to Mr. Dred Mandeville, the chairman and sole stockholder of Hirudo Oil. Who kept her almost two decades, then sold her back to Alejo for influence, worth easily five million except the pay off was delayed. Alex ran and got elected, even took office, but the Guardia deposed him eight days later. And General Manduco became dictator. And ran Tinieblas seven years.

  Until Mandragon came and cleansed the country of him. And then Alejo returned and became president for the fifth (and last) time and made Angela his vice-president, and one of the first things she did was make a pilgrimage to Mandragon and tribe’s retreat in Otán Province.

  To pay the guru her respects. To thank the sorcerer. To choose the wizard for her lover, love of her life.

  To bewitch the fool, La Negra would have said.

  She walked up through the pasture from her car, her military aide stepping carefully behind her, carrying her shoes and trying to keep his own from getting too muddy. Barefoot on the wet ground. Print dress and wide, Chinese-style hat. Girlish, except for her grey eyes. Mandragon came down to greet her, followed by a group of youths and girls. As I neared her she smiled, ran her tongue along her tiny pointed teeth, and I toppled in trance.

  I’d seen her and that smile before. Years earlier, in a man named Rebozo’s nightmares.

  Tongue-tied even when I came to. Mumbled a few words with my eyes lowered, then a few more when she invited me to visit her in the capital. Tribe thought I was simply showing deference to a representative of temporal authority, but I was already wandering in the fever-groves of her past.

  Later on I was articulate enough, when I left my tribe and went to her. For a few days, I said, just a few days. I had plenty of words then, told her all sorts of things, including how I’d become connected with Amichevole. And she mentioned the common denominator I knew about already.

  “He bought you and he sold me.”

  She didn’t mention that she’d been the principal broker. In that and all the other transactions. When Angela is sold, she does the selling, though given the subsequent rise in her market value it was inevitable she should resent the low sum Don Lorenzo accepted.

  “For five hundred dollars! Fah!”

  As if he’d been trying to unload her. As if he wouldn’t have held out for more had he held any leverage for haggling.

  “I’m worth more than that, don’t you think, darling?”

  10

  How much he paid for me he never said. A pittance, probably, and yet probably more than I figured to be worth. He didn’t know I’d be the vessel of power. My teeth were a sign, but Don Lorenzo couldn’t read it. And while I was a freak of surpassing rarity, my monsterhood was difficult to market. And not really suitable for the kiddies.

  Don Lorenzo’s public line was that he cared nothing for money, that he was rich beyond the tally of accountants for his association with people of talent, and with examples of the wonder of God’s world. He was lying of course, but not altogether. There was a strain of the collector in him that balked his merchant greed from time to time. Like most impresarios, he was an ordinary man, knew it, but didn’t enjoy it—though to be ordinary is the summit of good fortune, as the disastrous lives of artists, saints, and other freaks attest. So he made himself marvelous by association. He loved possessing one-and-onlies, to the point where now and then he made himself the present of an unprofitable astonishment like me.

  But your collector-impresario loathes while he loves. Talent reminds him that he hasn’t any, strangeness that he’s common. Denigrating artists and degrading freaks was Don Lorenzo’s main out-of-the-ring employment. Fun, and good business too.

  “Don’t give yourself airs,” he told Mohotty, Maestro del Fuego, when the Ceylonese—a holy man! a worker of great wonders!—asked for the chance to do some fire-walking in honor of his god, Kataragama. “Nobody comes to see you. They come to see the midgets and the geek. My geek’s worth ten of you nigger pain freaks, with all your filthy heathen gods thrown in. If you think you’re too good for the sideshow, get out of my circus. You take up more space than you’re worth as is.”

  Mohotty got his fire-walk, but only after he’d groveled. After he’d begged and pleaded. After he’d agreed to perform gratis, and pay the costs of the pit and fuel. After he’d said he’d bathe in white-hot embers, and lash himself with torches, and drag a sledge across the coals from steel meat hooks stuck through his shoulder flesh. In the same way, Don Lorenzo admired my deformity enough to buy it and publish it, but he didn’t hesitate to put me in my place.

  The zipper bag, for instance. I came to be wombed inside it, swinging back and forth. Began kicking and squealing, not that I could do much of either with my knees jammed under my chin, not that it did me any good.

  “I’ve bought myself a baby tapir,” I heard Don Lorenzo say, no doubt to his driver. “Best put it in the trunk. See? It bites.”

  That’s how I went to the circus: crammed in a canvas bag, dumped in a taxi trunk.

  Once there, I had my place as well. The bag and I were swung up and carried, swung up again and dropped.

  “That’s it, Zito. Open the zipper now so it can crawl out. Careful! Bites like a snake! That’s it, now drop the door.”

  Heavy clank. I kicked my way out of the bag. Collar and chain were gone, and I felt strange without them, like newborns do, I guess, without caul and cord. But I had plenty other cause for feeling strange. They’d put me in the truck where Zito, Dominador de Bestias Salvajes, kept his animals.

  Steel box barred widthwise into cages, twilit by seeping glimmers from slats at the top. Six doors on each side, two to a cage; heavy steel plates that could be raised from the outside. To put the animals in and take them out. To aim a hose through when the box was empty. As it was then, except for the stench and naked Rarito. Who squatted in a corner, clutching one handle of the overturned zipper bag. Hairless marmoset, shivering in terror, bobbing its brown face up and down, blinking its eyes compulsively.

  The last show in Ciudad Tinieblas for that year was about to start, so the other beasts were working. Later on I was joined by a toothless lion, two gelded tigers, and a bear. The bear knew how to ride a tricycle. The cats knew how to sit on stools. I didn’t know how to do anything, yet I received equal treatment, except that the others were fed. I fasted all the way to Chuchaganga, over the border in the Republic of Costaguana.

  This is a pleasant enough ride for human beings. Even Bebe, Rebozo the clown’s trained Pomeranian, seemed to enjoy it when she and I made it together in the front seat of Rebozo’s Knauser van. In later years, I mean, when we were both performers. Southeast of Ciudad Tinieblas the highway slices across rolling llanos, where humpbacked cebu cattle mope and graze. Now and then a river and a bridg
e: box of rusting girders one lane wide. Now and then a town: gas station, store, cantina, cluster of dwellings. And always, off to the southeast, the jungled hills.

  At the border, a bigger town; a wider river; a longer bridge. Beyond it the hills nudge in. They slouch up from the left and squat to slip beneath the highway, which now becomes a tunnel through the forest. Roof of leaf thatch oozing yolky gouts of sun. Walls of tree trunks writhed in arm-thick creepers. Lianas drooping snakily above. Flare of parrot feathers against a monkeyed umbra of twined branches.

  Then the hills get up and lift the road out of the forest. They climb on one another and become the cordillera. Along whose crests one winds to Chuchaganga.

  Humans (and favored pets) can freshen in the breezes from the wing vents, can poke their faces out the window if they wish. Feeling the miles whoosh by, watching the countryside change, they get the impression that they’re going somewhere. Beasts in the animal truck, however, lie wrapped in their own stink, roasted on the steel floor, lapped by streams of piss that flow from cage to cage between the bars. They feel the truck’s motion all right. When I made that trip, the bear was carsick at both ends all the way. But they know they’re going nowhere. Very soon, even before the truck began moving, I entered the consciousness of my companions.

  That was no problem for wordless Abortito. The problem was escaping from it. The consciousness of captive beasts is worse than hunger, worse even than the smell of baking bear mess. Caged beasts know that the world moves in a circle—from truck cage to show cage to truck cage, for example—and that there can’t be any purpose to such movement. Exactly when I began using words is hard to say, but it was while I was caged in with Zito’s animals. I needed something to put between myself and their truth.

  “Hungry?”

  Don Lorenzo pokes his head under the raised doorplate into the cage next to Monstruito’s. Squints at the little monkey through the bars.

  “I asked if you’re hungry. Would you like something to eat?”

  “Hunuuh!” Nods furiously.

  Don Lorenzo puts a roll stuffed with yellow cheese on the floor of the truck. “Then ask me for it.”

  “Give! Give!”

  “Excellent!” He pushes the roll to where Monstrua can reach it through the bars. “I knew you could speak. All a question of motive, isn’t it?”

  La Monstrua grabs and gobbles.

  “Would you like to come out now?” The roll has disappeared.

  “Yes!”

  “Have you decided to stop being beastly?”

  “Yes!”

  “Will you behave?”

  “Yes!”

  “Do as you’re told? No foolishness? No biting?”

  “Yes!”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Don Lorenzo nods slowly. “Best sleep on it.”

  He draws his head back. The steel plate clanks down.

  The next morning he lifted it again, hooked it up, and stuck in his pink cheeks and twinkly eyes.

  “Still feel like coming out? Still feel like behaving?”

  “Yes! Please yes!”

  “I believe you. But first I must make certain that you comprehend your situation. Allow me to summarize it for you:

  “You are alone. Small and weak. Utterly helpless. Unless someone cares for you, you will perish. But you are also deformed, a freak of nature. Most people do not welcome freaks. Most people are unwilling to care for them. Most would as soon they all died.

  “Do you understand this? Do you grasp what I’ve said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course you do. That’s why you’re so afraid.”

  He nodded very slowly, then he smiled. “Well, if you like, I shall help you. I shall let you belong to my circus. Have you seen a circus? Do you know what a circus is?”

  “No.”

  “No matter. For the present, all you need to know is that a circus is a sort of family, a tribe. It moves from place to place and sticks together. If you should become part of my circus, your deformity would cease at once to be a liability and become an asset. You will not be alone. Grown-ups will protect you. You will survive.

  “Only one thing will be required of you: you must do exactly as I say!”

  Don Lorenzo paused. Found his smile again. Clasped pink hands together on the truck floor. “There you are: the simplest of all choices: life or death. Perhaps you dream of returning to the black woman. Put it from your mind. No doubt you are angry with me. Control your anger. You have one chance. Best take it.”

  11

  Amichevole’s Universal Circus spiraled counterclockwise round the Caribbean. Southeast along the isthmus of Central America; east-northeast to Venezuela; north then west northwest through the Antilles. I spiraled with it.

  My hair was clipped short on the right, and on the left conked with hot irons and set in waves. My costume was on the right a short-sleeved shirt, on the left a pink blouse ruffled at the neck; a trouser leg and half a skirt; a boot and a satin slipper.

  There was a poster of me in this getup. The artist aged me to puberty, gave me a budding left breast and a show girl leg, a lotus flower for my left hand and a coiled snake for my right forearm. Above and below, in ornate script, “EL MILAGRO DOBLE-SEXO.”

  Placarded with the others beside the entrance to the side show tent, the Rotunda of Astounding Miracles. Open from noon till three, when the main show started; later from six till eight. Adults so many pesos or pizarros or whatever, the local equivalent of a dollar. Kids under twelve half price. Infants in arms no charge. Come one, come all.

  Pitch it in my mind, why not? why not? Raise the wide canvas firmament on its ash center tree and circumferential props. Strew the earth floor with sawdust. Horseshoe it with platforms on which we miracles display ourselves. Below us, signs with our circus titles; beside us, barkers. Behind us, curtains, and behind the curtains, partitioned areas for special shows. Rim the horseshoe now with spectators, with gawks and gabbles, ganders and gapes. Bunch them before the platforms. Have them stare and sneer, laugh nervously or cackle to lewd cracks, buy tickets or drift off to other platforms. Pitch it and open it, fill it with rubes.

  Opposite the entrance, at the horseshoe toe, were the midgets. Ruperto and Filomena, Gran Duque y Duquesa de Microlandia. Filomena wore a white gown and a paste tiara, Ruperto a scarlet hussar’s uniform festooned in braid and starred with bogus orders, a gold-hilted saber fifteen inches long, and patent-leather boots. Ensconced upon tall thrones they reigned in freakdom.

  His real name was Harry Cox, his wife’s was Gwendolyn. They were from Cardiff. He had a fine lyric tenor, but there aren’t any opera parts for midgets.

  Behind the curtain, the platform was a miniature proscenium, arched with gilt rococo and set with a midget-scale grand piano. Their special show was a mock concert, she at the piano, he with his tiny fiddle. They began with the anthem of whatever country we were in, playing it straight, of course, and then did novelty numbers. Audience mostly kids, but Harry always sang them an aria, sang it for himself whether they liked it or not, and they usually didn’t. Let them wriggle in heat and boredom on their foldable chairs while he shut his eyes and pretended he was in Covent Garden—full-grown, to be sure, towering beside Sutherland or Callas. Puccini or Verdi or Pagliacci or something else. Voice swelling up to bulge the canvas sky, drowning, its tinkly accompaniment, too big to have come from his baby chest. Halfhearted patter of applause and maybe some catcalls, and she would plink out “The March of the Wooden Soldiers,” and he would start fiddling. Stiff-legged strut back and forth across the stage front, snapping eyes left, eyes right at the audience with each about-face, bouncing his little bow across the strings. At the first ending he would tuck his instrument against his chest and do a somersault, come up fiddling, smiling his aged-baby smile. Strut on through waves of laughter and applause. Bounce his bow.

  “Bleeding tone-deaf bumpkins!” from the side of his smile. “Filthy philistine s
wine!”

  Elaborate bows and curtseys to the public. To each other. To the public again. Then they would withdraw in ducal dignity back through the curtain into the open part of the Rotunda, and their barker would lift them back onto their thrones.

  To their left stood Titana, La Giganta Tatuada—eight feet tall, tattooed from throat to ankle. Years before, when she was fifteen and barely six foot ten, a Valparaiso tattooist had seduced her. Not for her charms, though she was a handsome freakess, but for the scope she offered to his art. He was weary of arrowed hearts and anchors, of scrolling “Mother” in all the languages of sailors, and when he saw Titana he knew he’d never find an ampler canvas.

  Perhaps he loved her a little too, for he began with nude studies of her. Titana rose from her own navel like Botticelli’s Venus, slept twined with her own twin under one breast, reclined across her abdomen in the pose of Goya’s Maja. But then he turned elsewhere for subject matter. A series of self-portraits descended her right flank: the artist as aviator with leather helmet and raised goggles; the artist as French tar with pompom’d bonnet; the artist as chess opponents, right and left profiles of himself examining a rook end-game; the artist as artist poised with his needle over a female haunch half-decorated with a tiny tattooist poised with his needle. And on her right buttock, the artist’s face in life-size, smiling contentment, puffing a meerschaum pipe. On her left buttock was a still life. Across her shoulders, a panoramic seascape. And sweeping from her left flank across her back, “The Battle of Ayacucho,” with Bolívar’s guns on the high ground of her right dorsum and a confusion of mêlée along her spine. He wreathed her arms in curious arabesques, intertwining foliage, tendrils and quaint scrollwork, birds and fishes, reptiles and strange insects, bits of fantastic edifices and the calligraphy of unknown languages, but saved her legs for two religious visions. In “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” a stream of winged horrors cascaded along thigh and calf toward Titana’s ankle. In “The Ascent of the Redeemed Prophets” a procession of Hebrew patriarchs mounted toward her cloud-wreathed crotch, led by the Christ triumphant!