by R. M. Koster
To bewitch the fool.
29
Shame-crimped face wraithed in the night-dark glass. Shame-curled toes burrowing the carpet. Mandragon was unworthy.
Whored from my mission, slutted my children’s trust. Drabbed my destiny, mocked my election. Poured my gifts down a cesspool, sowed my powers in a swamp. Bewitched myself, made love to my own snaring, rather not recall it.
Rain’s stopped, or too thin to see. Dark courtyard puddled with ink blots. Mornings first customers across the street. Gaffer in his seventies or eighties, bald as a doorknob, spooning up a bowl of something (oatmeal?), and a couplet of young goons in undershirts and nylon-stocking skullcaps. Twisting their shoulders, slapping palms on the tile, in time (I guess) to the radio perched there between them. Cook slides coffee mugs along the counter; they bend to slurp. Tart lifts her head three inches, eyes them yawning. Drops her head again and dozes on, but soon the city will be stirring.
Sitting up and blinking, rubbing eyes. Padding off to empty the night’s staleness. Arrange the days mask, prepare for this morning’s ritual. I, Mandragon, could go out and witness.
Could, for example, watch Angela rise, stretch pale-gold arms, lift hair with lacquered fingers. Watch her pad off and then return to bed, settle back against plump, lace-trimmed pillows. Watch her stare gravely and unthinkingly into a nowhere of lamp-yellowed brocade drapes—child’s sleep-creased forehead, ancient storm-grey eyes—as she sips chocolate from a pansied teacup. Watch her small, avid, pointed teeth morsel a cone of honey-beaded croissant, just as, so many times, I watched, resting beside her, my male thighs swathed in tumbled sheets. Or I could watch the bandsmen shine their flutes and trumpets, the presidential guards polish their boots, the colonels’ orderlies lay out dress uniforms, scanning for lint. Or visit the assault troops where they’ll stand at ease outside Monteseguro Barracks, waiting in predawn twilight for the trucks, snarling filthy cracks and smacking ape lips, fondling the barrels of their guns. Or join the happy haters on the seawall, and watch my conscientious hangman test his winch.
The city and the prison, stirring soon. Brawlers in their cages, my girls downstairs. Huddled in the vermin-scampered darkness, curled in the night-chill damp of chain-hung metal slabs. All five asleep now, I can feel their measured breathing. Each dreams her special version of the birth. Each nourishes power’s instrument with her flesh. But soon they’ll stir. Boot-bustle in the rain-pooled yard above them will chide them back from truth to wake and mourn. I could go down and comfort them, be comforted. Ask and receive pardon, soothe my shame. I could go down and sweeten this last hour.
Best decline it.
Best decline that and every other diversion. Best be stern. Best drag my shame-crimped face back from the window. Best turn away. Best couch my self, withdraw, close eyes, peer inward. While I have time (enough, I think) to recall the rest. Remember who I am, recapture the last of it. Reclaim Mandragon.
Who recognized Doña Angela de Sancudo as the presiding spirit of Rebozo’s dreams, the presiding figure of my execution, the portioner of love and death. Who toppled into trance and was flung backward to catch part of her circus tumbling act. Who did not at first accept her invitation to visit her in the capital, but who straightway visited her past. Who conjured the demoness, who summoned her into his visions, who bewitched himself.
Himself. Already sexing when I toppled. Dragged off the poise of neuter wholeness by a tongue tip, tugged maleward by a smile. Once out of balance I swung further over. Angela’s pull strengthened. The weight of gender grew. But when I toured her past, I lived in her as well as in her lovers. I wore her skin as well as theirs. I minced in her slim haunches at her first conquest, as well as flushed and panted with Don Serafino Salma, circus proprietor, promoter of attractions, her mothers uncle and her father’s boss.
His study: framed glossies of performers on the walls, nimbus of cigar smoke above the buff-and-white cowhide chair. Nine-year-old Angela minces in. Nimbles to his lap, twines his fat neck, “Give me some money, Tío Fino.”
“Hmph! Money? For what?”
Lays her cheek on his lapel and, very softly, jounces her young nates. “For ice cream. For something.”
“Bandit! Well, then. Well see.”
Twists her head under his palm and jounces softly.
Then, one day, with a pert wiggle, “What’s that, Tío Fino?’
“Nothing!”
“Don’t fib,” jiggling and giggling. “You’ve something down there, Tío Fino, I can feel.”
“Nada!”
Then, finally, one day: “Tu tienes algo, Tío, algo duro.”
An anguished croak: “Toque la, pues. Mete la mano dentro.”
Giggling and groping: “Y me des mas plata. Me des un montón.”
I shivered his shiver at the scurry of mouse-foot fingers. I sighed his sigh as they fumbled Jack round and let him spring out of the box. I gasped his gasps and squirmed his squirms, I tremored his tremor. I blushed his blush. But I also know her peso-stuffed fistlet’s triumph, and her other hand’s scorn for the pale pearls of Don Fino’s bliss.
As adolescent Pedro and Pablo I gave myself up to seizures of delight—in hidden corners of Don Serafino’s theater, in the gym where they practiced tumbling, even at home—while Angela’s soft palms and agile fingers did what their own had used to. As Angela I smirked and collected their pin money and played each against the other. As Rebozo I nurtured her and worshiped her and suffered for her. As Angela I toyed with him and tortured him and leeched away his manhood. I ordered up dreams and visions. I flung myself about her past. I lived in her and in her lovers. All the while, though, I tipped further maleward, so more and more I found myself in them.
In the beefed back and hairy arms of the Bremen ship’s oiler who had first plowings—for about forty marks’ worth of pesos, in a twenty-minute room above a dance hall, beside the Buenos Aires waterfront. Hooked from a circus matinee by a grey-eyed twelve-year-old, who propositioned him as forthrightly as any veteran street whore. He took her to a place beside the docks. And I, Mandragon, lived those moments in him. I knew the trembling of his knees as he climbed the stairs with her, his heart’s leap when she put her foot up on the chair and bent to roll her sock down. Cane-backed chair scarred at the seat rim with cigarette burns. Calf-length white sock. Changing with the gesture into a girl he’d ached for long ago in Germany, then into his sister. I know the desperation of his groin as it bludgeoned into her, its wild rejoicing, its crestfallen regret when she squidged it out. I knew his throat’s clutched wonder as she mashed the bank notes to her stained thighs, arching her neck back, nether lip between her teeth. I knew his nape hairs’ bristling awe at her cat squeals in the tango-throbbing dusk.
In the book-crammed skull and chalk-smudged, bony fingers of Américo Paz, her tenth-grade Spanish teacher, whom she bedeviled for six months with lisps and flouncings and then finally pleasured (for cash, not better marks), becoming when he touched her a succession of sweet nymphs and willful queens out of old tales, so that (till she shriveled him) he thought himself a god or conqueror. In the puffed pigeon-chest of Dr. Raúl Mallea, who succumbed on his own examining table with his mind’s arms full of the cadavers he’d dismembered while a student. In the thin lips and pallid brow of Padre Pío Sibauste. Him she set writhing simply by confessing her sins—in a low murmur, with a luxury of detail, and accounts of their effects on the men involved—until he went to the booth all goatish and in mortal terror for his precious soul, until the day she said she’d done a sin she couldn’t tell in words, she’d have to show him. He gave up then. They did that sin together in the vestry, along with others she had managed to describe. And under Padre Pío’s lips (flushed now and fevered) Angela turned into one after another holy saint, spicing his fall with blasphemy and desecration.
In the pink, hairless, and cologne-doused flab of Lorenzo Amichevole as he knelt behind her on the carpet of the hotel suite he took for the purpose—her buttocks nuzzling his loins, her slender tail
bent sideways against his abdomen, her smooth back bowed beneath his chest, her hand enfolding the contract he’d just given her. Threading her deeply, clutching a golden breast in each pink fist. Chewing her neck and striving to hold motionless, as she became the ten-year-old son of a hated business competitor, then the competitor himself. Who squeezed and wriggled till Don Lorenzo couldn’t keep from plunging, and Angela whispered, “Now,” and husked him dry.
In the men he sent her to—for pay, of course; she wouldn’t have gone otherwise—men in authority in places they played. In the bull neck and narow eyes of Colonel Dionisio Huevas Pandilla, the future dictator of Costaguana, when he was chief of the Michagrande military district. In the limp shanks of Heliodoro Marañon, mayor of Ciudad Tinieblas. In the talcumed thighs of Don Cipriano Vargas, governor of Zacapetl or Tehuantezuma or Xibalba, who enjoyed her ministrations seated on his balcony while, in the patio below, a twenty-piece mariachi played “La Golondrina.” In the zombie-streeled brain of Dr. Dubonet, the Haitian despot, since nothing, not even a circus, happened in his tormented country without his say-so. And in the men she chose herself, for she vamped more monied spectators than Magda ever dreamed of, and gave them fair return, very fair return. Crepitating waves of ecstasy, tongue-lolling satiation, mine-shaft glimpses into their hearts’ cores that tinged the drabbest physical sensation with all the heady hues of guilt and horror. She manned them and unmanned them, roused them to perform prodigies and drained them, blissed them to infancy and wrung their souls, eased them and left them filled with longing.
Mandragon lived it all. In Angela, in the racked flesh and boiling minds of Angela’s lovers. For days and nights Mandragon sat immobile, under a great Indian laurel tree. Its trunk, melded from dozens of thick intertwining stems, pillared stoutly behind me. Its branches wombed me from the sun and rain. Its fragrance sweetened my departures. Its cool breath freshened my returns, No muscle moved, yet Angela’s life raged in me. I journeyed to it over and again, immersed my spirit in that caldron of unholy loves. With each plunge, gender burgeoned in me
Not physically. It wasn’t till later that I got the outward badges. Male gender came first as a restless yearning to expand myself, to press out on the world and make it notice me, a yearning I had never felt before. As a performer I gave my spectators delight and wonder, but I never cared how many came or whether they applauded. As power’s instrument, I did its bidding, with no concern for public recognition. Now I wanted all the world to acknowledge Mandragon, and even as this strange craving came upon me, the world narrowed into Angela, Angela crescented till she encompassed all the world. I came to know it first through her old lovers, this longing to enter and reenter Angela’s ambit, to plumb her depths and swell within her, make her notice and acknowledge. It drove me ceaselessly back to her past—and grew more frustrate with each pilgrimage, for I was more and more trapped in their minds and bodies, less and less aware of what she felt. This hunger drove me to repeated gorgings, and panged more savagely with every taste.
Mandragon spiraled downward into maleness, and gendering fell back to carnal love. The love I’d learned for all things on earth and out of it bent in a narrowing focus on one object. Angela filled up Mandragon’s spirit, and emptied it of everything besides. So when I’d summoned up her past and wallowed in it, proved every crevice, seen, heard, tasted, smelled; when I’d enjoyed her in the flesh of all her lovers, and toyed with them in hers, reveled and writhed; when I had wrenched my gifts to that unworthy purpose and worked them to the fullest, I was implacably bewitched, more captive than I’d been in El Olvido, or in Zito’s beast truck, or with La Negra’s collar round my throat.
I didn’t know that then, I know it now. Then I felt free, freer than ever in my life. As power’s instrument I’d worn true freedom, dancing to the rhythm of the universe. I know that now. But then I was bewitched and thus bemused. Of a sudden and like too many other fools, I conceived freedom as the independent exercise of individual will, and thought that’s what I was doing. When I completed my journeys of exploration through Angela’s past and realize I was going to visit her present, I thought I’d had a choice and made a decision—to further my mission on my own initiative by cultivating the first lady of Tinieblas, and through her the temporal powers in the land. That’s the sort of twaddle I told myself. That’s what Mandragon honestly believed. But free choice had no more to do with my leaving Otán than it will with my strangling. My butt will drag my throat against the cable, in an hour or so, when the winch takes up the slack. Free choice began and ended for me when I summoned Angela into my visions and fouled my spirit swining in her life. Once I did that, I was dragged to her relentlessly by the brute gravity of gender and mortal love.
On the way I stopped to preach in Aguascalientes. I went on foot, alone, and with every step the pull of Angela strengthened, the weight of gender grew. At the time, of course, I construed these forces differently—as the bright allure of independent action, as the ballasting poise of new responsibility. I wasn’t yet entirely out of touch though. Now and then I received illuminations, mine-shaft glimpses into my true state. I was in thrall to a false power. I was on the way to forgetting who I was. I didn’t credit these insights much, still they disturbed me, so when I passed the baseball field at Aguascalientes, which lies outside the town against the highway, and saw a thousand or so people watching a game, I thought to stop and prophesy to them, as if to my tribe, in a reminder and affirmation of myself and my mission. That, anyway, was the twaddle I told myself. That’s what Mandragon honestly believed. But everything in Mandragon was warping by then. I was forgetting who I was: power’s instrument. I was losing the sense of my mission: to rear a remnant. What I was after that day in Aguascalientes—and from then on till Angela released me—was to expand myself in the world and make it acknowledge me, to make Angela notice Mandragon.
The field at Aguascalientes. Bright sun and heat waves shimmering the turf, light breeze ruffling the pennants on the backstop. Brown-faced people in open stands along the foul lines—short-sleeved shirts and floppy straw sombreros—the mestizo crowd of a Latin countryside. Yelping encouragement at the Salinas hitters, catcalling the Remedios pitcher, enjoying the game. Smack and thwop of horsehide on wood and leather. Cheers and groans.
Off on the shoulder of the highway, beyond the chain-link fence in right-center field, a solitary walker stops and turns. Stares in toward the diamond, then looks upward. Lifts his arms.
The sky darkens. The breeze stiffens, swells to a rising wind. Rumble of thunder.
A sudden hush falls on the stands. The players stop their game. The fielders trot, then run, toward their dugout.
A bolt of lightning cleaves the chain-link fence.
I dimmed the sun, I shrouded the day over. I called a wind out of the east and roiled it in with thunder. By the strong power living in me I convulsed the heavens—and could do so now! for power rises in me as I remember. I sent the players scampering but held the spectators transfixed, plucked down a thunderbolt and strode into the field with lightning crackling about my brows. I drew a tempest with me so that all would know the coming of Mandragon.
Mandragon halts on the infield, storm clouds above him, lightning crackling about his brows. His face is scowling, his aspect is fierce, his voice is harsh. His periods are scored by peals of thunder.
“This age is doomed, it will explode and crumble!
“I am Mandragon! I have seen it flame to cinder. I, Mandragon, have watched it seethe and die.”
The clouds above Mandragon vomit flame.
“Billions will perish. I have heard them howling. Earth will be cleansed!”
The air above Mandragon is rent with screams.
“The end will begin here in Tinieblas, at the periphery of the soon-to-fragment world. I, Mandragon, both announce and bring it. My coming will be marked by days of turmoil. Take heed, the time is short!”
A dusty whirlwind stalks across the field and wraps itself about Mandragon. Fa
t ruddy raindrops spatter in the dirt, Mandragon stands erect, funneled in wind. The spectators are moaning terror.
A woman’s yellow scarf blows from the stands and wraps itself about Mandragon’s wrist. He takes it, tosses it in air, holds his hand aloft, fingers spread wide. The silk floats upward, spreading as it rises, until it hangs pavilioned forty feet in air and covers all the infield and both grandstands. The tempest breaks.
Sheets of rain fall on the outspread silk. Streams of water pour down from its edges. Thunderclaps peal.
Mandragon lowers his hand slowly. The thunder fades. The rain lessens. The wind drops. Mandragon’s voice is sweet, his face is smiling, a smile immensely tender, loving, gay.
“The universe is not a machine to operate. It is not a gadget to tinker with, or a problem to solve. The universe is a song to be in tune with, a ceaseless rhythm. Each end is always also a beginning.
“The new age will begin here in Tinieblas, at the center of the soon-to-be-born world. I, Mandragon, both announce and bring. Some of those who follow me shall see. Of those who acknowledge Mandragon, some shall be saved.
“The beginning will be born here in Tinieblas. A new age will march from here on a cleansed earth. I, Mandragon, will lead. Those who follow me shall be its kings.”
The soft rain stops. The covering shrinks to its former size and falls at Mandragon’s feet, a soggy square of yellow silk. A great radiance glows about Mandragon, so that the spectators shield their eyes and drop their heads. When they can look again, the field is empty.
Then I went down to Ciudad Tinieblas and delivered myself up to Angela.
30
Once more from “I went,” but quietly, without excessive melodrama:
I went to Angela in Ciudad Tinieblas, and put my gifts and powers at her service.
That was on the night of my arrival, three days after my ball-field prophecies. The sky was clear and starry, crescent-mooned. A salt breeze off the bay cut the heat a little. People strolled along the wide seawall. In Parque Mocoso old men were playing damas, bending around a board set up on a folding chair under a streetlamp. Lit by floodlights on the porte-cochere, its second-story windows glowing warmly, the palace was a friendly, stately presence—as though it had at last had its fill of turbulence and was reminding itself and passers-by that the aim of government is concord and decorum.