by R. M. Koster
Gaspacho’s gift was a gold fob watch with arrow-tipped hands and Roman numerals and “Mens Sibi Conscia Recti” engraved on the back. It was presented to Gaspacho’s father in 1927 by the Tinieblan Academy of History and Letters, and bequeathed to Gaspacho’s care in 1937 by that father’s dying breath, and plucked from Gaspacho’s vest in 1947 on a street in Chuchaganga by an alumnus of that city’s famous pickpockets’ school. The thief fenced it to a pawnbroker who sold it to Gamelial Garza, who kept it ten years then pawned it in a shop in Veracruz, Mexico—not because he was pesoless (though he was) but because he could not bear to measure the hours of his exile. There it stayed ten years till it was bought by a British tourist and carried home with him to Porlock in Somerset and buried with him when he died. Mandragon’s power traced it and exhumed it and teleported it to Gaspacho.
Melgacho received a silver ring set with a tear-shaped turquoise. He’d had it of his wife, Lea, while he was a bachelor, and cherished it through their marriage and into his widowerhood, but it was thieved from him by his eloping daughter, along with many other things he could have sold for more but valued less, Mandragon returned it to him.
For Baldacho, Mandragon produced a lead paperweight topped with a globe and a three-sided obelisk. Dear little Balti had lisped and mewed his parents into buying it for him at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, had marked it with a deeply notched, top-heavy B and kept it on his person, night and day, for the rest of their visit and on the voyage home, until his sister, with unspeakable malice, pried it from his six-year-old fingers and hurled it from the boat deck of the Moira into the Atlantic off San Juan. When Baldacho clutched that silly trinket—cleaned of barnacles and sea slime by Mandragon, but still cold from the depths of the Puerto Rico Trench—all the delight of childhood flooded to him, fate was annulled, the drowned past was revived, and plundered innocence was ransomed.
Mandragon received Felix Gato Montes, snarl-lipped, amber-eyed storekeeper of Angostura in Remedios, who came in a four-wheel-drive Pitman Dromedary with a Spanish made .45-caliber pistol and his brother Silvestre, the town magistrate, and a court order for “the immediate release from unlawful restraint and concubinary bondage” of his daughter Graciela. As if she’d been kidnapped! As if she were any concern of his! Mandragon had released her from restraint, had freed her from bondage. Mandragon was her mother-father now. Mandragon had picked her for the remnant and renamed her Promesa and transformed her, so that she now bore about the same relation to the girl Gato was hunting as a triumphantly empurpled moon moth does to the caterpillar that cocooned it. When he and his brother came roiling across the pasture-churning the turf up, gouging ruts in the young grass—when they stamped to where Mandragon sat by the bowed roots of the great tree, Mandragon told him—softly, smiling—that his daughter Graciela was dead.
(Mandragon’s daughter Promesa was standing three feet back. Both Gato brothers looked directly at her but neither recognized her. How could they? She wasn’t sniveling. She didn’t cringe. She stood, hands clasped below her navel, smiling radiantly, pregnant with light.)
Felix Gato took his pistol from where he’d had it stuck in the waistband of his trousers under his flapping shirt. He cocked it, thumbed the safety forward, poked the muzzle toward Mandragon’s forehead. He pulled the trigger. Mandragon smiled.
Mandragon’s smile held back the hammer. Mandragon’s smile eased the safety back with a soft click. Mandragon’s smile depressed the button on the grip near Gato’s thumb so that the magazine popped from the pistol to the ground. Mandragon’s smile flung the receiver back so that the bullet was ejected from the chamber. Mandragon’s smile lasered the pistol, fusing it into a solid chunk. Then Mandragon told Señor Gato to go home and mind his business, or Mandragon would take all his children, and his wife, and everything he had.
The Gato brothers ran to their truck, and started it and slewed it round, and sped away without looking back.
Mandragon received the ill and the afflicted, people who couldn’t get ordinary care and people who’d been told their cases were hopeless. Healing wasn’t part of Mandragon’s mission. It drained Mandragon’s energy and time. But power must be used, gifts can’t be buried, so Mandragon healed, and the word spread, and more came, and the word spread farther. Then, on a day in August, Mandragon received a delegation from the Tinieblan College of Physicians, who came to observe the phenomenon or expose the quack, depending on the open-mindedness or prejudice they brought with them.
Forty-four strong, with attendant interns and technicians and a mobile diagnostic laboratory, a great hulking trailer full of heart machines, X-ray equipment, and the like. No way to get it up into the pasture, so Mandragon went down and saw patients near the road—after the medicos had checked them, naturally, which took no end of time and bother, but finally Mandragon got to work. Trailer and doctors’ cars parked on the shoulder of the highway, bent queue of sufferers straggled up the path, Mandragon in the operating theater. Circled, that is, by craned-necked whispering practitioners, most of them in sport shirt for the outing, but a few wore the more formal guayabera. Dr. Alfonso Gusano de Sedas, their president, wore a white suit and a heraldic stethoscope, and a haughty sneer, while Mandragon shuffled barefoot in the drying mud, brown calves untrousered below a rude tunic, brown hands unrubber-gloved, woolly pate uncapped, snapper-flashing mouth un-gauze-masked.
Peeling cataracts off an old peasants eyeballs, closing a child’s pellagra sores by touch, taking the fever from a sick Indian. His two sons had carried him in on a litter from the mangrove marshes back of Huaunta and wouldn’t let the interns sample his blood, so no one found out exactly what he had. Impressed by his fever, though. Passed around a thermometer they’d stuck in his armpit—hemming, raising their eyebrows, nodding gravely. I laid my left palm on his head and drew the fever out. Drew it into me, then spat it on the ground, and he got up and thanked me and walked away.
Spent about thirty seconds on each patient. Hurried a little because I’d started late, but I put on a decent show. Kid about five with a withered hand, and I laughed and said I could fix it without looking, that’s how easy it was. Turned and closed my eyes and reached my left hand back to her. Told her to stretch her bad hand out and grab my finger. She did, and I felt the power flow out into her, and when I turned the hand was whole, just like the other. I didn’t let her leave though. Next on line was a young woman with the shingles—a terrible case, her back all scaled and crusted. I guess half the doctors there had examined her and she was getting used to it, for she pulled her blouse off without the least show of embarrassment and stood placidly, her forearms crossed over her breasts, and I told the little girl I’d cured to cure her, to touch her back with the hand I’d healed. The power was still in it, and when she began I lifted her so she could reach the woman’s shoulders, and power flowed out of me into her through the kid. Doctors all around, muttering, peering; shielding their eyes against the glare that fell about us out of a yolk-yellow sky, and where the little girl’s hand touched, the skin went smooth. I set her down by her father and said, “Mil gracias, señorita doctora,” and turned to my next patient.
One after another, half a minute on each. All routine stuff till I faced a man who was dying. Taxi driver from the capital, no more than forty, and he seemed healthy enough, but a voice in my left ear told me where to look, and after that I saw what was wrong quite clearly. Laid my check against his chest just to make sure, then told him to take off his shirt.
Rising murmur from my audience. They knew his trouble, and not from their mobile lab either. He’d been turned away from San Bruno Hospital that week, been told to settle his affairs and come back when the pain hit. Then, when they came to visit me, the doctors brought him.
“Nothing to do with this one,” mumbled Dr. Gusano, and I put my hands together at the base of the man’s neck and drew them sharply downward. The flesh of his chest opened and petaled back.
Gasp from the ringed onlookers. Dr. Gusano, face pale
as his suit, jumps forward to seize Mandragon. Mandragon waves him back and glances quickly round the circle. The doctors rooted, motionless, tranced.
The patients face. brow smooth, eyes all but closed, lips parted in a serene half-smile. His chest: flesh petaled open from the throat to below the breastbone. Carmine tissue lifts and settles slowly, but no blood flows. Mandragon repeats the downward hand-sweep, and the breastbone splits.
Mandragon: head bowed, eyes closed, temples clasped in a dark-brown right hand. Left hand pokes gingerly into the mans chest, inches info the left cavity. Mandragon stands motionless, left hand in the man’s chest up to the wrist, left arm relaxed, right hand clasped to forehead.
Mandragon’s head rocks slowly forward and back. Mandragon’s left forearm tenses. The tendons stand out like strings on a bass viol. Slowly Mandragon’s left hand reappears holding a lemon-shaped grey lump.
Mandragon turns, smiles weakly, holds the tumor out toward Dr. Gusano, drops it on the ground. Sweeps hands quickly apart. Repeats the movement toward the other half of the circle. Untranced, the doctors gasp and jabber.
Mandragon turns back to the patient. Sweeps hands together, and the split in the mans breastbone fuses. Repeats the movement, and the wound in the mans chest closes. A strip of pale scar tissue forms along it. The man blinks, shakes his head dazedly, turns away.
Tumor the size of a lemon in his heart. Malignant of course, and it was worse than being back in Don Lorenzo’s circus. They wanted to know how: how I knew it was there, how I removed it. And the ones who didn’t ask how refused to believe.
“Hypnotism!” squealed Dr. Alfonso Gusano.
I picked the tumor up and stuck it in his face. The whole business had drained me, and I wasn’t myself, but then a voice spoke into my left ear, and I stopped glaring. I dropped the tumor in a metal dish one of the interns was holding and wiped my hands on my tunic. Then I spoke softly to Dr. Gusano.
“What about the nodules in your lungs? Would you like me to cure them? I won’t have to open you, but you have to believe.”
He stared at me. “How?”
“Sometimes I see, and sometimes a voice tells me, but I really don’t know how. How doesn’t matter. Your lungs are riddled with them, aren’t they? Would you like me to cure them?”
“You can’t!”
“I can’t if you think I can’t, I can if you do. Is denying me worth dying for?” I laid my left hand on his chest, over the top button of his suit, and closed my eyes. “Believe.”
He stiffened, then relaxed. I felt the power flow out and him receive. Then I turned to my next patient.
Dr. Gusano didn’t go straight down to the trailer. He was too afraid, and I didn’t blame him. He’d spent all his life believing in one reality, one his stethoscope and his machines could interpret, so he was afraid to admit now that there are others. Still, he’d known for several weeks that both his precious lungs were full of cancer, and though he bore it well, he was afraid of dying. Either way, the business was scary, so he waited another two and a half patients before he went down and had himself X-rayed.
After a while he came out of the trailer with the picture, blinking glazed eyes. He ran up waving it and pulled me from my patient and embraced me. Then he turned and began babbling to his colleagues.
“Spontaneous remission!” snorted one of them.
Mandragon received Mefisto Maroma, TV personality, who’d become (for a Tinieblan) rich and famous by scraping what he called news events off the bottom of his shoe and then smearing them in the viewers’ faces each Sunday. He brought a film crew and a makeup man and a monster—a mongoloid boy about sixteen, mute and stunted, drool-lipped, bug-eyed, crazed, with a head like a partially deflated soccer ball, dented over the right eye, bulged over the left. Mandragon was supposed to cure the boy on camera—“Just even out his dome and make him talk”—but Mandragon refused. Why change him? He used no words, but neither had Mandragon for many years. He was a freak, but then so was Mandragon. All his sorrow and confusion came from being jeered at and abused, from having to grub his life from garbage cans. Simple kindness was the cure for that. Mandragon took him into the tribe and named him Perfecto, but told Señor Maroma to leave at once.
That Sunday Maroma told his viewers that Mandragon was a fraud who feared exposure and tried to infringe the public’s right to know. He said he had exclusive films shot in the fake guru’s hideaway before the people’s eyes and ears were expelled from. And, sure enough, there was Mandragon, frowning gravely, telling Maroma to clear out. And there was the mongoloid monster being led away by some of Mandragon’s tribe. And there was Mandragon again, stalking off while Maroma s voice complained of disrespect for the press. But when the film cut back to him for his sign-off, for his trademark close-up smirk and his “This is Mefisto Maroma in Otán Province,” there was Maroma (bug-eyed, drool-lipped, goof-grinned), shorts and trousers bunched around his ankles, playing energetically with himself.
What shame Maroma had from that prank! What fun he’ll have covering Mandragon’s dance!
Mandragon received weekend sightseers, tourist/pilgrims of the sort who went to Punta Huracán to see the Virgin of the Waves—a piece of driftwood vaguely like an effigy of the Madonna that fishermen had found and built a shrine to and said protected them at sea—or visited the village of Mandinga (where everyone was descended from African slaves) for what were called the “Congo Devil Dances.” Doctora Matilde de Ardilla was the first of them. Her breasts had swelled earth-motherly above the lecterns of many international conferences; her sturdy neck had been togaed with many degrees. She’d fasted with Coptic mystics in Ethiopia, and meditated with lamas in Tibet. She believed in everything.
Doña Matilde believed in Jesus and Gautama and the Sufis, in Zen and Yoga and the Kabbala, in all sorts of things Mandragon had never heard of till she mentioned them. She believed in astral bodies and in transmigrating souls, in divination by tarot cards and yarrow sticks. She believed in shamans and sorcerers and witches, witches that formed covens and worshiped Satan and witches like La Negra, whom she’d consulted and bought potions from in the evil days when her husband took up with an usherette. She didn’t merely keep an open mind. She believed—which was why, though she was past seventy, her eyes still sparkled and her heart was young. Doña Matilde spent an hour with Mandragon and the rest of the day with members of the tribe. She would have stayed longer, but that was neither possible nor necessary. No one stayed overnight except tribe members, and Doña Matilde was already in harmony with the universe.
She was the first, but many more came after her. From the capital mostly, one or two cars at first, later whole convoys. Mandragon sent members of the tribe to meet them, stationed people at the road to welcome them, to sit with them and answer questions. Attending tourist/pilgrims became part of the tribe’s training. The mere presence of Mandragon’s followers was unsettling. They were so contented so serene; so drenched with love, so certain of the future; so puffed with the arrogance of humility that visitors would wring their hands in envy, grind their teeth in wrath. Few were as balanced and at peace as Doña Matilde. Often they grew maudlin or abusive, sometimes even violent. Putting up with them was good practice for my tribe.
Some I received in person. I smiled at them and drained their unwholesome emotions, spoke softly to them of the things to come. I might have preached. I might have filled my Otán pasture with frenzied multitudes at once terrified of the end and exultant at the prospect of the beginning. But that was not my mission. My mission was to rear a remnant. I was not to re-create the mania I’d wrought in New York. I did so only later, when I forgot myself. The sightseers, the weekend tourist/pilgrims, came in curiosity or boredom and went away amused or scoffing, perhaps with an anecdote or two to tell at home.
Mandragon received these different sort of visitors, and meanwhile months passed and elections approached. There’d been no politics for seven years. No new figures had come forward. Most of the old ones were dead or
in decay. There was talk of putting up this fellow or that, of organizing this or that new party, but the only thing people thought of seriously was bringing back Alejandro Sancudo. He’d never been an ordinary politician. For Tinieblans he had long since ceased to be an ordinary, flesh-and-bone human being. He had become a myth, a ghost who haunted the country’s dreams, a perpetually returning incubus. The people would have him back simply from habit, or from a sense of fate, and he’d been out of power now so long those few who tried to judge rationally forgot he’d gone crazy whenever he was in and spoke instead of his experience. It was as if, after a rape and seven years’ concubinary bondage, the country longed to give itself to an old love. No one even felt snubbed when Alejo refused to campaign. Tinieblans only yearned for him more ardently.
He issued a manifesto from his exile in Switzerland saying that he’d been elected in 1970, and that nothing since then in Tinieblas had been legal or real. As far as he was concerned, he was still president. He would return only in that capacity. He wouldn’t compete for what was already his.
But General Manduco’s constitution was still in effect. And there was a clause in it permitting a president to delegate titles, powers, duties, and authority to any citizen he chose. So when Gonzalo Garbanzo announced that he would run, people knew what was up and smiled contentedly.