Mandragon
Page 32
The major shouts: “PREPARENSE!”
The soldiers in the second rank take half a step to the right so that each stands behind a gap in the first rank.
Mandragon is singing. In an unknown language somehow full of meaning. Mandragon’s dance and song say this: “Beloved, the end will begin here in Tinieblas, at the periphery of the soon-to-fragment world. All of you will perish, I have heard you howling. Earth will be cleansed.”
“APUNTEN!”
The soldiers raise their rifles to their shoulders, slapping the stocks with their palms as they bring them up. They aim at Mandragon.
“Embrace it lovingly, beloved. The end is always also a beginning.”
“A FUEGO AUTOMÁTICO…”
The soldiers thumb the small levers beside the receivers and push them forward.
“Earth will be renewed.”
“FUEGO!”
Barrel flashes, thunder roll of fire. Spent cartridges fly up from shuddering weapons. Mandragon’s arms embrace the ascending hail.
Reverberate thunder from the palace and Alcaldía. The park is silent. The screams and keening, cries and moans. Mandragon’s body, chewed apart by gunfire, hangs by a thread of flesh from the woundless head. Blood bursts forth, soaks the tatters of shirt and trousers. The thread of flesh gives way, the body falls. Mandragon’s head remains, swings back and forth, gripped beneath the chin by the noosed cable. The head continues singing, it smiles as before.
No one moves. The soldiers with their rifles raised and pointed. The major, braced at attention, chin lifted, fists clenched. The two privates, flinched forward with their hands over their ears, flanking the bullet-chewed, bloodsopping body. The girls, kneeling in pentagram about it, their weeping faces raised toward the singing head. The spectators on the seawall and in the grandstand. The cameraman on the roof of the panel truck. Angela, halfrisen from her chair, her hands braced on the parapet of the balcony. Colonel Guadaña beside her, Colonels Acha and Empulgueras standing behind. While the sun lifts from behind the palace, stripping the palace shadow from the park.
The old tree flowers into leaf, branch by branch to the branch Mandragon’s head swings from. Then the earth begins to heave and shudder.
The palace shakes so that the tricolor above it flaps and billows in the breezeless air. The facade collapses inward, pitching the balcony and its occupants backward under a cascade of rubble. The Alcaldía topples toward the grandstand. The seawall cracks and crumbles to loose stone. People are howling.
The earth beneath Tinieblas heaves and shudders. Great fissures open, new hills are thrust up, graves and monuments tumble in ruin. The sea draws back from the shore, the bay drains empty. Vast expanse of mud, flotsamed with gasping fish, with careeened shrimp boats.
The top of Dewey Hill begins to rise. A section forty yards high, a quarter-mile in diameter, separates from the base and lifts away, then smithers to dust in a thunderous explosion. The sides of the hill split outward, streaming lava. Flaming cinders spew across the sky.
The sea returns. A wall of ocean walking in across the mud flats. Rolls up over the land to meet the lava. Great seething hiss. Billowing clouds of steam.
The ocean recedes, flows back, carrying smashed bodies and smashed objects with it. The earth is still. The bay is calm. The ruins of Tinieblas lie under a cloud of ashes. Here and there people trudge about bewildered.
Mandragon’s head is floating on the water. Floats out to sea. Mandragon’s head sings in an unknown language. Mandragon’s face is smiling, a smile immensely tender, loving, gay.
January, 1975–September, 1978
R.M. KOSTER, originally from Brooklyn, New York, has lived in Panama since the early 1960s. His academic appointments have included ones at the Universidad Nacional de Panama, Instituto Mexicano-Norteamericano, and Florida State University-Panama Canal Branch. A writer of fiction and essays, he has been published in the New Republic, Harper’s, Quest, and Connoisseur, among others. He is a very active member of the Democratic Party and is on the Democratic National Committee.