Mandragon

by R. M. Koster

  He had aides standing by, all night all day, to brief him on the drought’s developments, but the drought didn’t develop, merely rasped on, and the aides had to scavenge ceaselessly for material. Not that they ever got to report much of it. Genghis would call them by radio from his helicopter, or grab them on route from helicopter to whores, or summon them to his insomnia in the high hours of early morning, but scarcely had they got an item out when he’d switch off or turn away or shoo them out, because the drought and any reference to it recalled his loneliness and fear, excited his despair and his self-pity, sent his thoughts fluttering. But they had to be prepared, and their material had to be current and, if possible, hopeful, so they scavenged up all sorts of scraps. In this way Genghis learned of a message from a maniac in Manizales and a letter from a lunatic in Luzon, along with other crankinform communications to brother Nebucodonosor, from crackpots in Krakow and nuts in Nutley, N.J., from madmen the world around who’d heard of the drought in Tinieblas and claimed they could end it. By boring holes in the sky with their laser-beam eyeballs or ringing up their twin brother Beelzebub. At which news Genghis would like as not zing off a telex to the appropriate consul and order the goofball in question conveyed to Tinieblas—by jet, front cabin, all expenses paid—because although he’d given up, he wasn’t resigned. Some were in padded cells. Some were too zonked on Thorazine to travel. Some had forgotten all about Tinieblas, and some had new and pressing projects at hand—keeping the sun from going out or curing cancer—but a few showed. A burly blond young megalo, ordained minister in the Church of Jesus Christ, Surfboarder, accompanied by two keepers from the Fasholt Clinic in Los Angeles. An ancient Israeli schiz with a long white beard and blueprints for an ark—to be made of gopher wood, whatever that was, so many by so many cubits, and stocked with two of every species in Tinieblas, and then it would rain for forty days and nights. One or two others, but scarcely had they put shoe leather on the airport tarmac when Genghis would ship them out again. Because although he wasn’t resigned, he’d given up. No one could end the drought, not while he suffered. No rain until he spritzed, so what was the use?

  In this way too, in April of the seventh year of his dictatorship, he learned of odd happenings in the interior. Only tangentially related to the drought, but if his aides had to be prepared day in night out with fresh material, hopeful if possible, they couldn’t be blamed for scavenging scraps. As, for example, that a band of outlanders had materialized in Otán. No one knew who they were or how they got there. All the foreigners in Tinieblas had been accounted for; no record of new ones at any port of entry. But up at Tres Olmos the border chief had gone wacky. Sublieutenant named Tranca, very steady man; up through the ranks, commended for touchy assignments, but he’d been found braced at attention saluting like mad, though there was no one around except for a couple of guardias, and they were out cold. It had taken six men to get Tranca into a straitjacket, and three days for the guardias to come to. And the chain had been broken, mi general, every link sliced through, around the same time this outlander band had materialized. In eastern Otán, mi general, where Otán meets Remedios, camped in what used to be a pasture. Sixty or seventy, gringos and Latins, boys and girls. All of them young, some hardly more than children, and what they did, mi general, was conduct orgies. At least one, mi general, to initiate some Tinieblans who’d joined up with them, young people from Angostura and other towns. They’d orgied all night right out in the open, stroking and poking, chowing and plowing, gnawing and pawing—all in a sprawl so you couldn’t tell who was what. They had some kind of witch or sorcerer with them, who led them in some kind of mumbo jumbo, some kind of hocus-pocus besides the orgy. And yes! mi general, it might be a development, because that place had been the driest place in Tinieblas, dry as an oven, sir, and blowing away, but since those foreigners had appeared with their warlock or voodoo woman, since they’d started their abracadabra and open-air orgies, a spring had begun to flow. Out of the ground or out of a rock, no one knew for certain, but water, mi general, no doubt about that. And not just a trickle either, a regular gush!

  Two hundred miles away in Otán, Mandragon could feel mi general’s scalp prickle. Here was something to clutch at, and not just a straw. And here was something to yank his hand away from. It was the combination, of course, that had him tizzied, spasms and spring together, since he’d finally connected his personal curse with the country’s, and sensed they’d be lifted together or not at all. Most hopeful report his aides had ever delivered, though they didn’t know it. They didn’t know that Genghis was dry as the country. They thought he waddled from too much spritzing, not none at all. But also the scariest, because if this wasn’t a real development, there’d never been one. Bad enough to be spasmless in a wasteland, groin gorged with cement and heart empty except for loose dreads; worse to take the risk of hoping and wind up disappointed. And for all that the combination of revels and gushing spring suggested relief, it also recalled his fear and loneliness, excited his self-pity and despair, so that his thoughts couldn’t rest there, could only touch and then go mothing away. So he told his aides to investigate, then told them forget it. So he gave his pilot a course for Otán, then called a new heading. So he hung tremored in uncertainty three days, and Mandragon, two hundred miles off, could feel him quivering, clutching, and drawing back in the same motion.

  At length he decided to clutch, summoned the secret policemen who’d kidnapped La Negra and colleagues and sent them to kidnap the sorcerer-witch from Otán. They set out at dusk—four ice-hearted thugs in an unmarked Piranha V-8—to make the snatch around midnight and be back by dawn, but at 1:23 A.M. poor Genghis, who’d whiskied himself to sleep down in his trull bunker, was jerked from the relative peace of a nightmare by an eerie whoosh: the car was in the room with him! Left fenders nudging his divan, right fenders flush with the wall. High beams blazing, engine rumbling, whip antenna bent by the mirrored ceiling. And occupants green with terror, sick at both ends, but after a time all four began to speak—in unison, expressionless monotones full of a strange authority:

  “Poor Genghis, Mandragon will save you. Go to Mandragon, poor Genghis, and be healed.”

  There was no way to shut them up, no way save gagging them and putting them in straitjackets, and the car had to be cut up with acetylene torches and hauled out piece by piece. By then poor Genghis’s thoughts were mothing less crazily. He decided to draw his hand back once and for all, summoned Lieutenant Colonel Lisandro Empulgueras, chief of operations of the Tinieblan Civil Guard, and ordered him to get rid of brujo and band, put them out of the country or into prison or in the ocean or ground. Empulgueras assigned this mission to Major Bartolomeo Chuzo and the 3rd Special Assault Group (“Wild Alligators”), and they set out at dawn—three hundred snakefaced assassins in camouflage suits and berets—to strike around midday and be back by dusk, but Mandragon sent them home early. At 1:23 P.M. Genghis and staff, who had convened in the work bunker conference room, were startled by a weird whoosh that blew the door open. Major Chuzo came sailing in and landed on the table and spun there like a pinwheel on his butt. At length he stopped twirling and began to speak, in the neutral lone of a robot or computer:

  “Poor Genghis, Mandragon will save you. Go to Mandragon, and you and the land shall be healed.”

  At the same moment the Wild Alligators appeared outside, fell chuteless from the sky onto the compound parade field, faces green and jump suits poo-pooed but unharmed, except that they couldn’t stop chanting the same message.

  Which Genghis might have heeded then and there and saved himself anguish. Sick to distraction and all the country with him, unable to clutch or draw back, and power’s voice was offering relief, so obey it. Submit, beg help, be healed and saved. But obeying isn’t so easy when you’ve been a despot for years, decreeing whatever comes into your head, and anyone who doesn’t like it gets put someplace nasty. Submitting’s a problem when you’re Blahblah of the Blah-blah-blah-blah, with multitudes cheering and
aides mi-general-ing and children singing that you’re the savior. With your eyes frogging out from billboards all over the place and the newspapers calling you a great leader. And how do you beg for help when you’re used to pretending you’re an imaginary Genghis, nothing less than every inch a man? Demanding help, compelling it, that’s not so bad. That doesn’t wreck the act entirely. That way you’re still in charge, you’re still the master—though that way, of course, help never helps. Help helps when you plead for it, admit your need, but the greater the need the scarier to admit it. Admit, for example, that you were a miserable wretch to begin with, frying in fear, and that all your pretending has only made you more miserable. That the country was in poor shape when you stole it and your monkeying has just about finished it off. Admit that everything you are is sham and everything you do is minus. Poor Genghis wasn’t quite ready for that. On his way but not quite ready, and off in Otán Mandragon felt his anguish, knew his confusion, smelled his pain, and watched his thoughts go mothing, round and round. Whirled and fluttered ceaselessly, beat futile wings, when all they had to do was stop striving. Then, mothlike, they’d fall upward into light. Mandragon ached with compassion for poor Genghis, but it wasn’t Mandragon’s part to make things easy, it wasn’t Mandragon’s part to go to him. A certain respect was due—not to Mandragon: to the power Mandragon served.

  So whenever an aide reported, he was likely to hall in mid-sentence and stare stonily and then, ventriloquized, say, “Go to Mandragon.” And whenever a whore tried to solace him, the same message was likely to emerge from whichever of her mouths happened to be unstoppered. When mi general dropped from the sky into famine-blasted villages, peasants snarled the message to him from gap-toothed gums, and when he turned away and waddled back toward his chopper, pariah dogs yapped the message at his heels.

  At midmonth he went down to the capital to receive Dr. Esclepio Varón, President of Costaguana, who had come on the petition of some Tinieblan exiles refuged in that country, and as they sat in the state office at the palace—Genghis hunkered behind his desk, fingers mashing his brow to keep this thoughts from fluttering; Dr. Varón staring past him out the French windows at the brazen sky—the distinguished humanitarian broke off his discourse on the rights of man to say, “Poor Genghis, poor miserable worthless Genghis, go to Mandragon and heal yourself and Tinieblas.” At first light the next morning a red and yellow parrot flapped into the bedroom where Genghis had whiskied himself to the relative peace of nightmare and sailed along the rococo molding near the ceiling repeating, like a looped tape, “Go to Mandragon, poor Genghis, be healed and saved.” And when the bird finally flapped out, Genghis was drawn after it onto the balcony that overlooked the Plaza Inchado, drawn out irresistible though his bulletproof vest lay slung across a footstool, whereupon the twice-life-sized statue of Palmiro Inchado, Discoverer of Tinieblas, looked back over its shoulder at him and said, “Go to Mandragon, jackass, beg to be saved!”

  His brothers Kublai, Mangu, and Timur came to the compound to urge him to seek extra drought relief—for the satchels were going lank now, meager as starving beeves—but not a word of this advice got uttered. Politic men, they told Genghis to come walking with them along the shore, where transistorized snoops were unlikely to be secreted, where the wind and breakers would roll their whispers away, but when Kublai opened his mouth he recounted his life of thievery. His voice droned flat and metallic, as though a transistorized stoolie were secreted back of his tonsils. His eyes bulged as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying, though it was all true. His hands waggled uselessly under his chin, unable to reach and seal his lips. And when Mangu and Timur tried to interrupt, self-accusations flowed from their throats too—greed and swindling, bribery and fraud—till all three fell writhing to the sand, black sand clustered with silica specks that glistened in the furnace glow of the sun. They burrowed their jowls in the sand at Genghis’s feet, and as he gaped, a strange fish was washed up from the sea beside them, big as a hog, pusgrey, and bloated. A breaker flung it up onto the sand, and it opened its toothless mouth as though for air and said, “Go to Mandragon, moron! Let Mandragon heal you and Tinieblas of these plagues.”

  By then he was almost ready, and that night his sister Mesalina arrived with a film the ministry of information had prepared for the seventh anniversary of the dictatorship, a three-hour documentary of the great strides forward Tinieblas had made under mi general’s inspired guidance, but when Genghis previewed it down in his bunker it came out funny. When the narrator spoke of progress and prosperity, there were scenes of peasant children eating dirt and ragged beggars squatting in city gutters. The narrator spoke of honest, efficient government, and the film showed mi general’s brothers stuffing cash into satchels and highways to nowhere overgrown with ferns. “A National Government concerned for the human dignity of every citizen,” and there were scenes of folks being chucked from helicopters, swung up by their wrists and ankles—”Uno, dos, tres, ya!”—and garbaged out the door, wriggling and howling, tumbling down and down. “A Maximum Leader in the forefront of the world’s progressive magistrates,” and there was poor Genghis, humping and pumping futilely, sobbing in self-pity and despair. After each scene, the film cut to a choir of schoolchildren, but instead of singing “Genghis Will Save Us,” they sang: “Parasite Genghis, go to Mandragon, be saved!” Before the film was half over, mi general jumped up and waddled out to his chopper and ordered his pilot to fly him to Otán.

  Ready to seek help at last—and that was progress—but not really ready to receive it, not prepared. Still fungused with self-importance, mildewed with cravings for deference, so cruded with impiety he wasn’t conscious of the disrespect implied in flitting to his salvation attended by flunkies in a clattering great metal bug. Off in Otán, Mandragon smelled these excrescences—all mold and fetor!—on Genghis’s soul and thought to clean it up a little. When he spoke the order through the intercom—buckled snugly between a brace of bodyguards with triplet aides opposite eyeing him reverently—the turbojet above him wailed like a kicked hound and quit, the rotors slowed and stilled, the pilot’s voice came back, “Don’t be pretentious, public hair, go on foot!”

  Mi general had the man arrested (though he claimed he hadn’t known what he was saying) and summoned his driver, but when he gave the order to move out—escort assembled ahead on revving Harleys, and an armored car behind—the crankcase of his limo split in fragments, the oil poured cut, the motor shrieked and seized up in a solid chunk. Then his driver turned and repeated, word for word, his pilots message. It was the same with every car and driver in the compound, and when he called headquarters and ordered them to se him transport, he got the very same reply. By then he was whimpering. By then all he wanted was to go down to the bottom of his bunker and curl on his divan and snivel himself to sleep. Off in Otán, Mandragon accepted his surrender and sent him the desperation to go on.

  At first light, then, General Genghis Manduco, Blahisimo of the Tinieblan Revolution and Commander-in-Chief of the Tinieblan Blah-blah-blah, set out for Otán. On foot, because all other means of locomotion were denied him. Alone, because everyone he ordered to accompany him said, “Go by yourself, asshole, you’re the one who’s cursed.” Not disguised as a woman, because none of his whores’ clothes would fit him—in a frayed sombrero and a tattered shirt and a ragged pair of trousers, all of which he begged plaintively from the compound’s mestizo grounds keeper after a final attempt at command produced a sneer, a raised middle finger, and a burble of moist wind blown in his face. Waddled out through the chain-link gate in the cool time before sunup. Trudged off along the blacktop road that ran due east between sere fields toward the highway. Dipped his whimpering, mug and teary bulgers as the sun popped up from behind the cordillera. Plodded on, hauling his grotesquely lengthened shadow.

  Genghis Manduco was seven days between his bunkers and Mandragon’s sanctuary—east to the highway, then northeast into Salinas Province, then northwest across La Merced into Otá
n; along the dusty shoulders of heat-blistered roads, beside scorched plains and roasted hillocks, past wracked and leafless trees. But before he had been walking seven minutes, he was aware of someone traveling with him, someone short and slight yet muscular and agile, with piercing black eyes and skin the color and apparent texture of a highly polished black-walnut panel, whose body, like a jungle cat’s, suggested ferocity and was physically imposing beyond its size. This someone loped along ahead, looked back with taunting smirks, stuck out a long red tongue and bounded off into the distance; then appeared beside him smiling. Sometimes the smile would fester instantly into a mocking grimace. Sometimes it would guide Genghis’s attention to things around him—a snake crossing the highway in graceful, rippling, sidelong eddies, or a willowy vortex of swirled dust dancing on the plain—and seed him with affection for the world (the first he’d ever felt in his poor life), leaving him slaked and rested. At night this companion shone with a pale, lime-colored aura which beaconed Genghis on or spread back to bathe and refresh him.