by R. M. Koster
All that week clouds gathered over Tinieblas. The clouds that billowed just beyond the coasts and borders pushed wispy tentacles out over the land, filmy pseudopods of vapor. They groped out, swelling and branching, thickening and merging, till all the sky was loosely thatched, then bulged and burgeoned, pinching out the gaps, so that by the seventh morning, when Genghis crossed into Otán, the whole country was swathed in cloud. No rain fell, but the air was heavy, and dry winds no longer buffeted, and Tinieblans gazed up, at once expectant and wary of rejoicing prematurely. Mesalina Manduco was likewise uncertain which way to jump. She prepared a communiqué ascribing the clouds to the genius of Tinieblan scientists inspired by the personal direction of Blahisimo himself, but withheld it from publication lest they blow off without dropping any rain. The problem was that the Blab-in-Blah was missing from his compound. The place, his aides said, had been bewitched, and no one could remember when he’d left or why, so Mesalina prepared another release accusing the imperialists of kidnapping him, and of strewing the National airspace with fake clouds to torment the Tinieblan people with empty hopes. But although the government took no stand one way or the other, people broke from their normal activities and stood together in fields and city streets and village plazas, gazing upward.
A large number headed for Otán, responding to rumors that a sorcerer was newly settled in that region who meant to bring rain and cleanse Tinieblas of the Manducos. The road north from San Carlos was choked with pilgrims, many in cars and trucks and many others on foot like Genghis. The person traveling with him, whom no one else seemed to see, pointed out individuals among them. Rogelio Salmón from Salinas, whose father was in exile and whose patrimony had been mostly manduquized and the rest ruined by drought. A peasant woman named Delgado whose husband had been organizing other peasants, until the police came for him one night and put him in the ground under the barracks in Belém. Others. Genghis’s companion told him their stories, without speaking, it seemed, and for the first time in his poor life Genghis was aware of other people and their troubles. The pilgrims never left off cursing him and the rest of the Manducos and praying that Tinieblas might be free of them forever, but none seemed to recognize him, and for the first time in his poor life his thoughts concerned things other than himself, so he moved calmly along in the stream of humanity.
Toward evening, though, the stream stopped flowing and pooled out from the road into the right-of-way and up the scrubby hill banks on each side. Cars and trucks were stalled in both lanes, pedestrians milled about, so that Genghis had to push his way through. His companion, suddenly, had disappeared. All the weariness and pain of his long journey came on him at once. Confusion and despair fell back into him. He stopped and stood with shoulders slumped and shaking, shoving mousy little glances left and right. Daylight was draining quickly from the narrow gap between the clouds and the dry earth, and to the east the hills were shrouded in gloom.
Then there was a commotion up ahead, honking and shouting. The sun, setting off to Genghis’s left, flung its last light under the clouds, drenching the crowded road in a strange dawnlike glow. A path opened in the mob clogging the shoulder. Genghis’s companion was approaching through it, seen now by everybody else.
Mandragon barefoot in an unbleached tunic embroidered with childishly drawn animal—coyotes, alligators, buzzards—set at odd angles to each other. Stalks through the crowd, eyes glaring, showing a spangle of white teeth. People skip out of Mandragon’s way.
Comes to within five yards of Genghis. Catches sight of him, halts, stares, then points. Grins and throws head back in mocking laughter. Genghis inches forward plaintively. Mandragon rocks, hee-hawing, claps in derisive merriment, points again. High-pitched hee-hee-hee, and the crowd recognizes mi general. Curses, insults, raised fists, but before they can mob him, Mandragon jumps forward and begins a nose-thumbing, ear-waggling, tongue-showing hop-dance around him.
Genghis begins to shuffle forward. Mandragon dances round him, pointing and smirking, lip-farting moist wind into his face. The crowd opens for them.
Insults and dry clods rain in on Genghis as, circled by Mandragon, he moves slowly along the shoulder of the road.
Poor Genghis didn’t want to go forward. He wanted to run off and hide. But he was drawn as though cuffed to a moving vehicle, danced on through howls of happy hatred, to where the road was blocked by a circling motorcycle ridden by a fellow with no face, with plastic limbs and metal hooks for hands, wearing a white-winged helmet. Drawn there then to the left up a dirt track, vrooming cycle weaving in front, clods and curses thumping on his shoulders, till the track opened on a pasture thick with young grass and the angry crowd was far behind him. Ahead, between him and the day’s last light, a group of youths and girls stood smiling at him. And Mandragon walked beside him smiling sweetly, a smile immensely tender, loving, gay.
Beyond the crest there was a single huge old tree, and at its base, between the bowing roots I’d struck with my gourd rattles the night my tribe and I arrived there, a spring gushed. Welled from the earth and pooled, flowed down in rills, and there I had my newest converts bathe him. Tinieblan girls, Promesa and No Toques, who hated him more than he deserved. More chancre than spirochete, but they hated him intensely, and it was good discipline to have them peel the rags and lave His Loathsomeness with their soft hands. Machoed him too, since while they went about it dutifully and gently, contempt twisted their faces and, along with their forced touches, turned him all randy. Bathed and then dressed him, so that his tunic poked jauntily forward, like a jib on a whisker pole, and led him down to where my tribe was gathered and the beasts were tethered and Mandragon tranced.
Torches spiked in the moist earth, tribe seated in a wide half-circle, beasts tethered by their hooves to stakes sunk in the loam. Mare from Otán and Jenny from Salinas; Remedios heifer, La Merced nanny, Tuquetá ewe; she-tapir from Selva Trópica, and from Tinieblas a plump sow. Seven she-ungulates from the seven provinces of the republic, standing tamely, bending placidly, cropping the grass. Beyond them sat loinclothed Mandragon, arms and legs crossed, spine against a man-high crackling bonfire. The girls led Genghis—abluted, tunicked, wanged—through the celebrants and stood him just inside the circle. Then I went out of my body and took into it his dryness and the country’s.
Nightandmist, breasts bare, face masked in ashes, rises from the midpoint of the crescent holding an earthen bowl of water in both hands. She walks out between the goat and ewe toward Mandragon, runs the last few steps and reaches the bowl out at her arm’s length so as not to be scorched. Mandragon takes the bowl, drinks but does not swallow, sets it down.
Mandragon rises and walks counterclockwise round the fire, left shin lapped by flame. Pauses at the four compass points to turn outward and spit, Sits down again, spine to the flames.
Mandragon’s eyes roll upward. Mandragon’s arms droop. Mandragon’s head falls forward.
Piercing noises, like tire screech of steel, tear from the air above the crescent, from beyond the fire, from the earth. Yawning wails from different points beyond the onlookers, hystercial coughs and heaves, plaintive lapwing cry and falcon’s crowing, interrupted by a woodcocks whistle. The beasts strain at their tethers and buck crazily. The seated figures clasp one another’s shoulders. Mandragon twists and writhes.
Sudden silence, save for the fire’s pop and a faint hum like a mosquito’s. Two pale phosphorescent blobs push from Mandragon’s abdomen. Stumped tentacles of glow push up and out. Wrist-thick pseudopods of bluish light rise wavering from under Mandragon’s navel and arc above the beasts toward Genghis, pause near his closed eyes then palp his brow.
Spurts of garish light pulse back along the arcs into Mandragon. Mandragon shrieks, falls backward in convulsion. Tear-shaped green and purple globs pulse back along the arcs and comet-plunge into Mandragon’s body, which bows from crown to heels, vibrating rigidly.
The earth trembles. Thunder rumbles, and a shower of small stones falls on the open semicircl
e. The glowing tentacles break from Genghis’s brow and shrink quickly back.
Mandragon lies inert.
Mandragon rises slowly. Smiles wanly and steps backward into the fire. Bares teeth, throws shoulders back, lifts arms outspread. Mandragon stands chest-high in flame, head back and arms outspread, smiling in triumph; then floats upward with the sparks and disappears.
Thunder rumbles and a shower of small stones falls on the circle.
Mandragon in the embroidered tunic. Emerges from the gloom beyond the crescent and steps primly through the sealed tribe, minces coquettishly to Genghis. Mandragon begins to undulate before him, squirms and sighs, laps lips in a slow rhythm. Sways toward Genghis, mews, moves hands caressingly over his throat and chest, along his flanks, about the tentish bulging in his tunic, sweeping delicately, all but touching. Genghis twists and shivers.
Eyes fluttering in mock modesty, Mandragon lifts the tunic, gasps down in mock surprise and wonder. Gives Genghis the hem to hold, swirls hands around the gorged pork, all but touching it. Genghis grins, drooling a little, and rolls his hips. Rhythmic moaning rises from the crescent.
Undulating, swirling liquid fingers, Mandragon steps backward and draws Genghis toward the beasts. Genghis shuffles forward, holding the hem under his chin, grinning moronically. Out to the mares broad stern, onto the mound of earth piled just behind it. Mandragon steps aside, raises the tail, wrist lifted, fingers bunched, arm’s length in air. Sweeps left hand slowly through, wrist swaying, fingers fluting softly about Genghis’s gilled truncheon. Flicks them up as Genghis sconces home.
Whinny from the mare and snort from Genghis. Horse haunch in each fist he bucks and rears. Hands aloft, Mandragon prances round them, but jouncing backward answering his thrusts—then sweeps hands downward and apart, and Genghis stumbles backward. Blinking confusion, panting frustration, throbbing disappointment.
Cruel, obscene smirks: Mandragon minces to him, resumes touchless caresses, draws him toward the ewe.
Beyond, rouged by the torchlight, the celebrants are rocking rhythmically, groping and fondling, moaning as though in pain.
I drew him on from one beast to another, coupled, uncoupled, coupled him again. Mate and ewe and goat, donkey and heifer; heifer and squealing tapir, tapir and sow. I animaled him, joined him to brute nature; I mated him to the fauna of the land. And when he knelt in the roiled grass glued to the sows rump, clutching bristled flanks, deeply enswined, I raised my face and lifted my spread hands, I cackled and the sky and his loins opened. The seed pumped out of him like molten glass, and quickening rain drenched the dry earth.
The downpour doused the fire and the torches, broke like a wave, though Genghis and my people scarcely felt it. It slackened after a time but didn’t stop. Soft rain was falling all across Tinieblas, even as it falls now outside this prison.
26
The rains continued seven months: small rain before dawn and showers at midmorning; afternoon torrents, evening cloudbursts, midnight cascades, so that when they quit the third week in December (exactly as they’d been scheduled to of old), all Tinieblas was green again and flowering. And for seven days Genghis Manduco took a fresh shot at being human.
He would have stayed animaled if I’d let him, took wonderfully to it. Rutted all night, baa’d and bleated along with his consorts. Pawed the mud during engagements and wallowed in it blissfully between, so that when I touched him in the rainbowed dawn, his heart creaked with nostalgia. Laid hands along his temples, raised him up; restored his speech and he stood sniveling in the warm drizzle, reluctantly rehumaned. With his first words he begged to join Mandragon.
Whose tribe were as little children; Genghis would settle for that. If he couldn’t be a beast he’d be a baby. But Mandragon didn’t want him.
I meant to make my people fully human, to nurse them through. To freedom and power and the responsibility called love. Infant them first and restructure them in balance, so head and heart and loins would music in trio. Hive them in a group soul, tune them to the universe. Ballast them with love, give them dominion. I meant to take what time there was and craft a remnant, to weather the end and welcome the beginning. That was Mandragon’s mission, why I’d been picked. I didn’t sift out specially gifted prospects. Anything on two legs has the potential. I took the ones I took as my whim struck. Even Genghis might have made it with my help. But I was sick of coddling him, didn’t want him around. I’d watched him, lived inside him, worn his consciousness like a hyena skin. I’d sent him signs and portents, illuminations; stung him with insights, descummed his soul, taken on his pain. I’d cured his drought by dipping him in beasthood. I’d given him a good wallow, then raised him up. Saved him, in short—for the country’s sake, not his, but what did that matter? He’d had more than his share of Mandragon’s grace.
Mandragon sent General Manduco back to his compound, by teleport express just like his goons. Dumped him, slimed and wailing, near his ruined limo—no custom restructuring afforded, no interim of infancy allowed. Gave him a fresh shot to make or muff, and turned to more important matters.
But will give him a few more minutes now, to be rid of him before they come to get me.
Flip over on my back and draw my legs up, give one camera some teeth and the other a profile, and empty him from my mind, squirt the last of him out. Won’t do to be soiled with thoughts of him at sunup.
Best purge is to Genghis myself again, squirm into his consciousness. In those days I had the power to live in others, the gift to fling myself into alien minds, and I can be him again—enough to recollect and unload the last of him. Power flowing back, enough for that, and my cable dance won’t seem so degrading. Even Mandragon’s fate, is a step up from his.
Well then, Genghised—which is to have your mind a porridge of anxiety in which blurred blobs of thought float half-submerged. Wearing his consciousness, which is to see the world as menace or carrion meat. This is living, careful! That’s dead and rotten, may be safely chowed. Except that Mandragon had descummed his soul a little, so he could see more now, fragments of the world’s loveliness and majesty glimpsed vaguely as through a filth-stained, partially wiped pane, along with hints of other people’s joy and trouble. Strong man, dictator, supreme chief: a disease, that is, pretending to be a doctor. Except that Mandragon had stung a few insights into him, had given his snout a few mashings in the mess he’d made. Goat-fragrant and blubbering, weary from his ordeal; nostalgic for the mud and yet revolted at having headlined an animal act; rejected by Mandragon, birthed rudely back into the world with a fresh shot at (and therefore the job of) being human.
But spasm-competent again, spritziferous. That thought bobbed up and briefly blurred all insights; it blobbed about, temporarily salving the stings. With humankind as well as quadrupeds, as he took instant trouble to assure himself, not pausing for so much as a wash. Scrambled up and scampered to his twatery, mi-general-ing guards snapping to before him, and speared the first strumpet he found as splendidly and mindlessly as he had Mandragon’s porker.
“Phew!” the lady said when he uncorked, partly at the fumes that wreathed about him, mainly at the earnest of success that puddled after him onto the cushion, but when she presented her compliments and claimed her bonus, his grin of self-assurance froze and crumbled, his features twisted in pain. The stings Mandragon had lodged in him wouldn’t stay ointmented. The remake of Mesalina’s movie replayed in his memory, recursing him with recollected dryness, remarooning him in a desert of shame.
“Ya, mi amor, ya,” the lady soothed. “It shouldn’t hurt that much to pay my bonus. It’s worth it, don’t you think? After you waited so long and tried so hard? Ya! Ya!”
But Genghis’s broad brow was already smooth. Mi general was grinning again.
“Mother cunt!” he chuckled, getting to his feet. “The poor pubic hair tried everything, that’s no lie. Busted his asshole, didn’t he? even offered a bonus! And nothing worked! Ah, he! Be sad, you know, if it weren’t so fucking funny. But why
bother me about it? It hasn’t a donkey’s prick to do with me.”
And when she protested—Nothing to do with him? that was a good one!—when she called him at tightwad and a welsher and a cheat, he told her to pack and be out of the place in an hour, to stop laughing at him (though she wasn’t laughing at all), to stop that shitty laughing or he’d …
Mi general stamped out, hands clamped to his ears.
Mandragon had given him a fresh shot but no restructuring, had saved him but didn’t feel like nursing him through. Mandragon stuck him with the job of being human, but gave him no instruction in the forms. Which amounted to destroying him, nothing less. People credit Mandragon with that, Mandragon accepts. His only model was an imaginary Genghis, the fearless, wise, compassionate, manly leader describes in sister Mesalina’s press releases. His only method was to pretend to be this figment. But Mandragon had flashed him some peeks at the Genghis he was—a cowardly, bungling, selfish, pitiful clown. The incongruity stung him very fiercely. He hadn’t the courage to face it, much less the discipline to cherish the stings and learn. So he disconnected from what he’d been and done and treated his past as if it concerned someone else, a different person entirely, who hadn’t a thing on earth to do with him. But Mandragon had damaged his machinery for pretense, had smashed a lot of those circuits in the process of goading him toward salvation. Whenever he unplugged, he heard a horrid laughter all around him.
Stamped out, hands over his ears, but the laughter rasped through them. Swept along the hall, squinting bewilderment. Why were the walls guffawing? What call did the doorknob to his private quarters have to cackle in that disrespectful manner? And the faucets in his bath: how dare they snigger? It occurred to him he must have done something foolish, but even so, to simper at him like that! Insubordination! Treasonous! He was Genghis Manduco, Blahisimo of the Blah!