by R. M. Koster
Gonzalo Garbanzo had been in politics for forty-seven years without ever being elected to anything. All that time he’d hacked for Alejo Sancudo. He’d passed out propaganda leaflets when Alejo seized the palace in 1930. He’d stolen votes in the 1940 race. He’d been a river of hope and faith to alejistas during Alejo’s first exile, and an island of sanity during Alejo’s astrología campaign in 1948. He’d gone to jail whenever Alejo was deposed and rallied to him whenever he tried a comeback. There wasn’t any question what was up. The people elected deputies pledged to Gonzalo, and the first thing Gonzalo did when they voted him president—right there in the chamber! as soon as they’d pinned the tricolor sash on his chest!—was to delegate his titles, powers, duties, and authority to Alejo Sancudo.
Who sent word that he’d accept on one condition: he’d have to have his wife as his vice-president. Which the deputies granted as soon as the word arrived: they elected her unanimously, though none of them had ever seen her.
No, some of them may have seen her. One or two of them may have been in the tent that evening in the fall of 1949 when Amichevole’s Universal Circus played the capital. One or two may have seen her (bikinied in rhinestones) handstanding on brother Pablo’s head. But whether any had seen her or not, she was elected.
Alejo returned to Tinieblas with her, and they took office. Four months ago. In due course she went touring around the country. In due course she visited Otán.
Mandragon received the Most Excellent Lady, the Vice President of the Republic, Doña Angela de Sancudo. She was the last visitor Mandragon received.
28
Alejandro Sancudo received the presidential sash on November 28—the 462nd anniversary of the discovery of Tinieblas and the forty-seventh of his own violent debut. His return to power was constitutionally valid. It reflected the people’s will. But as he stood on the podium of the chamber pronouncing his inaugural address, many Tinieblans, both there and watching on television, repented their yearnings to have him back in office. His first lady vice-president sat below him on the dais, veiled and gloved, solemn in dress and expression, and yet so youthful as to seem only a girl, so lovely as to seem more-than-in-name angelic. In contrast Alejo looked aged and demonic—two golden eyes aglow in a disinterred skull; two skeletal hands wrapped in pale-ocher parchment; a hollow voice echoing from a wraith. People suddenly recalled his past, his howlings at the moon and rabid snappings. Crazy times would likely come again now.
These doubts about Alejo were unjust. Crazy times came, but he didn’t provoke them. From the moment the national colors touched him, till the day two months later when they draped his hearse, he governed himself and the country with unexpected balance and restraint.
General Manducos constitution was still in effect. Alejo had full dictatorial powers. He scarcely used, much less abused them. Or, rather, he used them so as to discourage abuse. The assembly’s functions ended with his sashing. He could make the laws himself, or appoint a tame committee to make them. But his first act was to designate the deputies—those who’d voted for his stand-in and those who hadn’t—as the legislative committee, thus giving the people’s representatives the status proper to them in a free republic. Cabinet ministries, which Genghis had parceled out, to his brothers and sisters, went to the most competent people in the country, but first Alejo assured himself that those he picked were independent enough in character and esteem to contradict him if and when they thought he was wrong. In choosing judges, he gave first preference to lawyers who’d been in prison during the dictatorship, provided prison hadn’t turned them bitter. Every judge, he said, ought to know where he’s sending people, and unjust punishment was the best school for defenders of the law, just as it was also the breeding ground for tyrants. And he amazed everyone, including the appointee, by making Carlos Gavilán president of the Supreme Court. Gavilán hadn’t merely opposed General Manduco: he’d played a leading part, back in 1952, in deposing Alejo when he tried to subvert the state and become a dictator.
“Señor Presidente,” Gavilán told him, “I appreciate the appointment. But don’t think that you can buy me with it. I’ll show you no special favor, and I’ll fight you if your ambition gets out of hand.”
“Don’t live in the past, young man,” Alejo croaked back. (Gavilán was only sixty-three then.) “I have no more ambition. Except to die in peace, and that can wait. If it were a question of ambition, I wouldn’t be here. But when you and León Fuertes removed me from office, the stars decreed I would be president once more, and that week in 1970 wasn’t sufficient. I had ambition once, that time is over. Now I have a destiny to complete.”
Destiny or sentence. Whether or not he was president by starry decree, he seemed condemned to unlive his life in the last months of. All his life he’d been a man of mystery, who never did what he said or said what he did. He’d been the most arbitrary leader in the hemisphere, launching abrupt maneuvers, making wild pronouncements—often, it’s true, to the people’s great delight, but never with any by-your-leave or warning. He’d been haughty, distant, stern, answerable to no one. He’d communed with his private lunacies, then imposed his will. But now he acted with profound deliberation—openly, consulting everyone. Now he made every aspect of national policy the subject of consideration—by ministers, by deputies, by functionaries, by people outside the government entirely, those who might be affected and those who simply seemed experienced enough to have a sound opinion. Now he was almost humble. He could still be curt in private conversation. The stars hadn’t chosen him for nothing, after all. But in public matters now he merely proposed, and did so in an unassuming manner: “I seek the cabinets counsel on this question.” “I crave the assembly’s wisdom on this bill.” Where once his customary mode of operation had been a series of dramatic leaps from the wings, of swoopings from the rafters on invisible wires, of poppings-up from trapdoors in puffs of smoke, now he moved like a figure in a ritual procession, calmly and reverently.
And unpopularly, though no one in the country would admit why, not even to himself. No crazy times came, and (suddenly!) none were likely to—not with all those wise appointments, those measured steps. Secret resentment festered in people’s hearts. Alejo was no longer entertaining.
Some said the change in him was due to Angela. Elder Tinieblans recalled the midyears of his second term, when he’d kept her in a villa at Medusa Beach. Guarded by four eunuchs, or maybe they were only homosexuals, but all to himself: his was the only villa there in those days. How calm he’d been! Benign, in fact, like now. Things were so tranquil in Tinieblas it was as though he were in exile, not in power, and people joked that the gringos had kidnapped him and substituted an imposter. At first he’d been as crazy as ever. Proposed a horoscope law that couples couldn’t get married unless their stars matched. Brought a witch doctor from Haiti to make voodoo against Harry Truman. Then he found Angela and went abruptly sane. Later on she left him, or he threw her out, and right away he turned wilder than before. Stirred up a war between the classes. Abolished the constitution, or at least tried to, so that he had to be deposed. Well, now he’d found Angela again, and married her, and made her the first lady and vice-president. All those years she’d spent, praying in a convent, waiting for him to do the decent thing. Well, look! Now he was sane. It had to be due to Angela’s influence.
The truth was somewhat different. Alejo’s mind had been a den of dragons. He’d been tormented by mad dreams and visions, driven by ungovernable lusts. By temperament he’d been a saint or an artist, but he believed in nothing but his personal stars, and his only talent was for politics. Only political power gave him the means to act his nightmares into life and so find ease. But power’s possibilities were infinite and intoxicating. At the first taste his head swam, and he went reeling, howling off. Till Angela calmed him. That part was true. She had the gift of transformation. Still has it! Mandragon knows! She could flesh his fantasies, as later she did Dred’s. She made him forget himself, as later she did Mandragon. For two year
s she milked Alejo’s venom—a handy knack! She lulled the owls and panthers in his brain so that he didn’t have to dose himself with power. Then she betrayed him with his son for money, and Alejo sold her to Dred Mandeville, and right away got power-drunk again.
Years later, Dred sold her back—for a consideration, not for money. Living with her seven years in exile (or growing old, or both) cured Alejo for good. His lusts burned out, his dreams cracked into shards. The monsters in his mind shriveled and died. When at last he returned to power, its possibilities no longer dizzied him. He wasn’t even conscious of them. He noticed only power’s obligations. He made Angela vice-president because he’d promised to, but she had no dominant influence on him anymore.
Which was why Dred Mandeville kept sailing, kept tunneling on through the deep-ocean gloom.
Alejo was scarcely settled at his desk in the palace when Angela raised the matter of Dred’s safe haven. She’d tried to raise it in the limousine that carried them down Bolívar Avenue from the chamber, but he finger-waggled her to silence.
“I want to try to enjoy this,” he said after a moment.
It was raining, yet crowds lined the sidewalks, peering for a glimpse of him and Angela. She smiled and waved at them from time to time through the drop-spattered glass, but Alejo sat motionless as a stone, staring straight ahead over the driver’s shoulder.
“This drive,” he went on after a bit. “It’s the best part of a presidential term.”
And then: “l used to enjoy these little drives.”
She tried again when they arrived, when Alejo halted in the palace patio before the mosaic pool with its bronze faun fountain and its pudgy goldfish. He hand-flapped her to silence and gazed down at the fish.
“When Epifanio Mojón was president,” he said finally, a hundred-some-odd years ago, he kept piranhas in this pool and fed them live puppy dogs.”
And then: “We’ll have the diplomats along in a few minutes. Please see that everything’s in order.”
And then, though she’d gone: “I used to like this spot.”
She tried a third time in the ballroom. They stood, flanked by their military aides, waiting for the first guests to be shown in, and Angela tried to raise the matter of Dred’s haven, but Alejo shook his head the moment she spoke.
He opened his bloodless lips and then said nothing, only gazed across the polished floor into a full-length, Rococo framed mirror on the wall opposite them. Forty-seven years had passed since he’d first looked into that mirror. He’d admired his reflection in it—his slim waist and carefully trimmed moustache, his seal-black hair and delicate widow’s peak—and then wandered out of President Abúndio Moral’s Discovery Day reception to find an empty room and unlock the windows, so that he and his men could sneak in when all was quiet, and kill the guards and seize the palace and power. Now the mirror gave back a group portrait: “Lady and Officers with Resurrected Corpse.” The corpse wore the same purple-green-and-yellow sash Abúndio Moral had been draped with, and a suit cut in the current fashion, but it seemed just raised from a long sojourn in its crypt.
When the reception was over, though, and the last dignitaries had departed, when Angela and Alejo had climbed the double staircase (down which, seven years before, he’d hustled in fury when he learned the majors had seized the capital) and walked past the Salón Amarillo (in which, twenty-five years before, he’d sat down in front of radio microphones and proclaimed himself absolute ruler of Tinieblas for life) and entered the state office (into which, thirty-five years before, Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote had come, under a flag of truce, to advise him that the Civil Guard was deposing him); as soon as Alejo was settled behind the mahogany desk (from the top drawer of which he’d taken the pistol he shot Azote dead with), she raised the matter:
“Would you like to send the cable, or shall I?”
Alejo swiveled round so that his back was to her. He gazed past the French doors (through which he’d lugged Azote’s bleeding cadaver) and past the balcony (off which he’d dumped it) toward the running lights of ships out in the roadstead.
“What cable?”
“The cable to Mount Vervex, darling. That we’re in power, that Scorpion can come in.”
He swiveled back and stared up at her with his strangely youthful, golden eyes. He smiled.
“That little cable,” he said at last. “We’ll leave it a while.”
Nor would he elaborate—not then, not later that night, not the next morning, not at the light lunch they took together between the auditions he held for posts in the cabinet; not at tea before the foreign bankers came in; not over the herb infusion he sipped, long after midnight, in his bedroom; not on any of the occasions during the next few weeks when she raised the matter again—to say how long the “while” would last or why he imposed it. A stare, a smile, a hollow croak:
“Aquel cablecito. Lo dejaremos un rato.”
In the dead calm of the siesta hour, for example, in his private study—a small room tucked between the office and the Salón Amarillo—when he sneaked in for a surprise attack on some overdue paper work and found Angela waiting in ambush:
“He must know by now, you realize.”
“Know what?” (Alejo didn’t have to ask who “he” was.)
“That we’re in power, darling, it’s not a secret. Mount Vervex relays him the news reports.”
“I assumed you’d advised him by now yourself.”
“I have. He must be getting just a bit impatient.”
“I assumed he’d told you as much himself by this time.”
“He has. Then what about the signal, to bring Scorpion in?”
Stare. Smile. Croak: “Aquel cablecito. lo dejaremos un rato.”
Or late at night, in the tiny former maid’s room, high up at the back of the building, where he slept alone (since no outsider was going to catch him sleeping in the presidential bedroom as he had poor Abúndio Moral); he in a nightcap and flannel pajamas despite the humid heat, Angela in a negligee (since he refused to let her promenade around the palace naked as she’d done at Medusa Beach and in Dred’s cavern):
“His offer stands, the same as in 1970. I don’t doubt it.”
“He’s prepared to invest millions, a hundred million. Aside from what will go to us.”
“That was the arrangement.”
“I want that money, darling.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Send the signal then. Or let me send it.”
“Lo dejaremos un rato.”
Or at any hour, day or night, in any part of the palace where she found him alone:
‘You promised him citizenship and residence.”
“That was the arrangement.”
‘In return for things of value, some of which he has already delivered.”
“Correct.”
“It’s wrong to break a promise, darling.”
A glowing stare.
“It’s foolish to break a promise to him.”
A smile.
“Keep your promise, darling.”
“Un rato.”
Meanwhile he moved, deliberately and solemnly, like a figure in a ritual procession, to form his government and deal with the shambles bequeathed by Genghis. And meanwhile Dred Mandeville kept sailing.
Scorpion slid through the darkness, shrouded by ghostly whisps of phosphorescence. Always at dead slow or half-speed now, in the bowels of remote and unfrequented seas. At depth the hull groaned like voices in a nightmare, creaked and cracked like the joints of a person in seizure. The fans wheezed, the red bulbs blinked and flickered. Mold clung in dark tufts at the corners of bulkheads. It spotted the walls of the companionways. It blotched the flesh of members of the crew.
They were going grey now—from age, not human sorrow, for the sockets at their napes still functioned. The pleasure centers of their brains required higher intensities of stimulation though, for longer periods, so that they scarcely slept and went about their duties weak and listless. They
had barely energy to work the boat, to keep equipment operating, to make the constant necessary repairs. Their bodies were paunchy soft, their eyes were bloodshot. Their flesh was chalky-white and blotched with mold. Their teeth were stained, their checks were stubbled. Their uniforms hung in faded tatters. They rose from their couches sighing and shuffled through their watches bent and trembling. Then they threw themselves down and plugged glory back into their brains.
Forward, Dred lay among his consoles in a kind of living mummification. His mind still burned with a cold incandescence. His appetite still craved. His will still ranged the globe, portioning out peace and misery, plenty and dearth. But his tall body, once firm and athletic, was all wasted—lank skin and toneless sinew, wizened arms he could clasp between a bony forefinger and thumb, shriveled legs that wouldn’t bear his weight, slight though it was. For a time he’d had stewards help him to and from the toilet, but even brain-gadgeted zombies with sockets behind their ears were too human for him. Their touch revolted him, so now he crawled. His ulcerated flesh couldn’t bear fabric. He no longer had the strength to groom himself. He lay naked on the rotting vinyl, his white beard scraggled down across his chest, gazing at the flickering monitors.
Sometimes he dozed and dreamed of a fresh breeze brushing his face, a breeze thick with the fragrance of wild jasmine. Sometimes he dreamed of grass beneath his feet. Sometimes he merely dreamed of being carried aft to the control room and of peering through the periscope at the night sky scattered with stars.
Alejo kept putting off Dred’s havening. He had no intention of allowing it. He noticed only power’s obligations and had decided that granting Dred citizenship and residence would be bad for Tinieblas. So Dred kept sailing, kept rounding and rerounding the promontory of receding hope. Then, early in the new year, Angela went touring round the country, and visited Mandragon in Otán.
To meet the famous guru/healer/prophet.
To pay her respects to the rain-bringer/tyrant-ridder.