by R. M. Koster
As for me, three weeks after successfully defending my innocence against assault from the rear, I lost it in a face-to-face engagement. That was two years before Alfonso’s nearly fatal seizure of love, the night of Hiroshima. There were several soldiers working out at the Y that day, men from a kind of commando unit which had fought in Europe and was refitting for the invasion of Japan, lean, pebble-eyed assassins who took desperate joy in the knowedge that they would all be dead before the year was out and whose only commerce with the world was in the hard currency of violence. Their workout was a free-for-all in which they aimed savage kicks at each other’s testicles, rabbit-punched anyone whose back was turned, ganged up two and three against one (these alliances dissolving in gouges and chops as soon as the victim was subdued), stomped the kidneys of those who were down and bit the ankles of those still on their feet, pausing only to wipe blood from bashed noses and spit loose teeth into the corner near the weight rack, until they all lay piled and tangled in the center of the mat, groaning, cursing, and laughing. Then a sergeant from their outfit came in with the news that a hundred fucking thousand fucking Nips had been cre-fucking-mated with one fucking bomb and that the fucking bastards would fucking well throw in the fucking towel, the reaction to this being fifty-one percent relief and forty-nine percent resentment, their reprieve just outweighing the loss of all that horizontal snatch, and the ones who could still walk decided to go celebrate. One of them, with whom I had been practicing jujitsu throws before the free-for-all began, suggested that they take me along to interpret so that the greasers wouldn’t cheat them, and we set off as soon as they had put on their boots, first on foot to the labyrinth of cantinas behind Washington Avenue, then by taxi to the Alameda, where my book bag was used as a football in an impromptu game of rough tackle and passed and punted to shreds and my books hurled through the yellow bug-clustered globes of park lamps and lofted into the trees, all with my complete approval though of course they didn’t ask, while strollers hustled for their houses and a lone Civil Guard looked on in terror, and finally in three buggies out to whoresland. The buggies, which in better times carried family groups and sweethearts and tourists around the square park or perhaps all the way down to Cervantes Plaza on nights when there was a band concert, were commandeered and their drivers tossed down off the boxes and their skinny, carbuncled horses lashed in a kind of Roman chariot race out the Vía Venezuela, past swerved autos and gape-eyed citizens standing at bus stops, with the buggy in front of us hitting a pothole and careening, spilling its people out into the street, one soldier jumping up and lunging to cling to the lip of our buggy, hopping and trying to climb inside while the corporal who was driving flayed his shoulders with the buggywhip, until another man reached past me to shove a palm in his face and flip him back into the street, and the third buggy pulling alongside us, the two drivers whipping at each other and us passengers. That’s how we came to Lo Que el Viento se Llevó.
Eighteen years later I had to remember that night as, lying in bed with Elena, I listened to her tell me how she’d been smoothly seduced by an army companion of her father’s, who took her on an outing from her convent school near Udine, gave her lunch on a terrace in Trieste, brought her to his palazzo in Venice, and excised her girlhood with quick, surgical skill.
“And who seduced you, Kiki?”
“Lo Que el Viento se Llevó.”
“What the wind blew away? Was she some tramp off the streets?”
“No,” I laughed. “A whorehouse. That was the name of it. The Spanish name for the movie. Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh.”
“Gone With the Wind.”
“That’s it.”
The movie played in Tinieblas the week of my father’s first inauguration, and the day after Don Horacio Ladilla saw it, he sent to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the plans to Tara. He had the mansion duplicated on a swampy flat outside the capital and stocked it with women from all over the hemisphere, haughty limeñas who wore evening gowns and carried themselves like queens; witty chilenas with darting tongues; lithe, coffee-skinned cariocas whose samba churnings could wring love’s libation from the most jaded client; blue-black haitianas who strutted the dance floor in a voodoo dream lolling bubbles of saliva over soft, swollen lips; meek, sad-eyed ticas, submissive as tame heifers; statuesque gringas with platinum hair; savage-souled mejicanas with white teeth and flashing eyes; sullen argentinas who lounged like jaguars among the tables; and agile cubanas, tutored in arts unequaled since the sack of Rome. The ground floor contained the bar, which was sixty feet long and at which no women were allowed, and a huge ballroom with tables and a bandstand where a Cuban orchestra played till dawn. This room had no windows, only louvers high up near the ceiling, and its walls were decorated with an immense mural by Orlando Lagarto representing the interior of Noah’s Ark the night before the rains stopped. Here the lion lay down with the lamb, and the elephant buggered the rhino who buggered the hippo who buggered the bull, and the ostrich fellated the prancing giraffe, and the alligator ravished the zebra, and the dromedary humped the tigress, and the peacock futtered the ewe, and the goat swived the gorilla, and the chimpanzee frigged the bear, and one of Noah’s sons banged the orangutan while another was reamed by the wolf and a daughter-in-law was tongued by the antelope, and another blew the jackass, and the rest of his family writhed and grappled with each other and the odd animals in a combined collective incest-bestiality which hallucinated across the whole rear wall and formed the background for Noah himself, white-bearded and toothless, who jacked off above the bandstand, hopping on one foot. Upstairs a corridor tunneled back beneath cobwebbed rafters, its end obscured by the curvature of the earth, and on both sides were bedrooms with mirrored ceilings and revolving colored lights and speaking tubes which breathed in the rumba rhythms of the tireless musicians, and all night long the stairs creaked under couples rising to paradise in flesh and bone, while maracas chuckled the lewd Te Deum of “Mamá Inés” and the dancers swayed under a constellation of flaring orgasms.
Well, that night, after the buggy horses had staggered up to the columned portico, their mouths dripping blood and froth, my fine pack of murderers trooped inside, full of gross shouts and laughter and boasts of Apulian shrines defiled and Rhine maidens violated, but when they pushed their way in to the ballroom and saw the women waiting by the door and clustered at the tables and preening themselves beneath Lagarto’s mural, they grew hushed and reverent, like ghostly janizaries arrived at the Muslim heaven, and bent to me whispering, “Get that one for me, Kiki,” “Ask that there little girl if she’ll sit with me.” So I moved along the tables serving Cupid’s office, while the women rumpled my hair and smeared my checks with lipstick and caressed my stomach with warm hands and pulled my face down into perfumed bosoms and the men gaped and rubbed their eyes as though afraid they might be dreaming it all back in the jails and chain gangs where they’d been recruited. The hulking corporal let himself be led away by a fragile mulata no older than myself, shuffling meekly after her while she tittered to her colleagues, and others followed with their partners, hanging their heads and mewing like tame beasts, until there was only me, an ape-shouldered Kansan with a knife scar under his eye and a pocket full of gold teeth he’d rifle-butted from the mouths of dead men, and a willowy Colombian girl, not from Baranquilla or some other coastal town but from a valley in the Andes where the Andalusian blood had remained unmixed with indian or negro, a doe-eyed girl with black hair down to her waist. My gringo asked me to tell her she reminded him of a Neapolitan girl he’d abandoned with child when the outfit was sent to Anzio, and when I translated, the girl stroked his check and said, “Malo, malo.”
“What’s she saying?”
“She says you’re a bad boy.”
He nodded, and tears rolled down his savaged check.
Then he said he didn’t want the girl, that I should take her, and when I said I had no money, he fished up a wad of one-inchado notes and threw them on the table. I grabbed them and stood
up, displaying my manhood clearly through my thin school trousers, and took the girl by the hand and said, “Vámanos!” in a voice that was meant to be as tough as the soldiers’ but which came out squeaky, and she followed me without laughing, though she had to stop me at the window at the head of the stairs where one paid and retrieve the odd inchados after I threw all the money in. And in her room I tried to pretend I knew what I was doing, but as I knelt before the target, I had to ask how, and when she reached to guide me, I fired the whole clip into her hand. Then she made me lie down beside her and tell her how I’d got my muscles and what I was doing with those gringo soldiers, while she ran her fingers lightly over my chest and flanks, and if she were making fun of me I was going to rip the gold rings out of her ears as one of my jovial comrades had done to a cantina barmaid earlier in the evening, and what story could I concoct for my patron below so he wouldn’t guess how futilely I’d dribbled away his money? But my body rearmed before my mind capitulated, and I lay on a great warm plain which rose beneath me and sucked me down, and when it swallowed me, I was free.
17
Alejo returned on the same plane which took Alfonso back to Harvard. As an expert in my own right on pre-dawn returns from exile, I assume he shuffled impatiently by the aircraft door, looking out through its bathysphere window at terminal lights captured in puddles on the tarmac, that when the door finally opened he felt the air of the savannas like an animal tongue on his face, like a sodden cape dropped across his shoulders, that he stepped out immediately, not smiling at the admirers who were not packed around the foot of the ramp, not blinking at the flashbulbs which did not explode below him, not waving at the multitude which was not cheering from the observation deck of the terminal, hurrying down to be reassured by Uncle Erasmo that his presence in his own country would not be disputed, that it had been cleared with President Gusano and Colonel Culata and the Ambassador of the United States. He was followed down the ramp by four citizens of the Republic of Paraguay: broad-shouldered Egon and narrow-hipped Gunther, former members of the marine detachment of the Graf Spee; Baldesare Furetto, former Italian Vice Consul at Punta del Este; and a round little man called Doktor Henker, former passenger on U-477 during its final voyage, from Kiel to the River Plate, in the late spring of 1945. The Paraguayans conversed in German while waiting for the customs inspector to finish the game of dominos he was playing with two corporals of the Guardia Civil.
Alejo had two gold front teeth and wore dark glasses. If the last were intended as a disguise, they were inadequate.
“What happened to your teeth, Mr. President?” asked the customs inspector.
“I bit a gringo.”
“Bite him again, Mr. President,” the man said softly, thinking Alejo spoke figuratively. “This time we’ll help you.”
“Do you see?” said Doktor Henker. “The stars are propitious.”
Outside the customs shed Alfonso was waiting to embrace him.
“You are Alfonso, aren’t you?” Alejo asked, pointing a finger at him.
“Yes, Papá.”
“You did not tell me you had a son,” said Doktor Henker.
“I had forgotten.”
“It must go into the chart. Young man, what was the day and hour of your birth?”
They drove straight to La Yegua in Uncle Erasmo’s state-owned Cadillac with Corte Suprema on the plate. Armed ranch hands kept the gate. Alejo and the Paraguayans stayed indoors. For five years alejistas and anti-alejistas had variously boasted or warned that Alejo had slipped ashore from a Japanese submarine, that he was poised to cross the Ticamalan frontier with a thousand volunteers, that he had air-freighted himself to the capital in a coffin or come in by ship disguised as a nun. Now he was really back and nothing happened. The government did not fall; the gringos did not intervene. “He’s given up,” sighed the alejistas. “He’s beaten,” chuckled the rest. But one by one the leaders of the Tinieblista Party were summoned to Remedios. They were asked the date and hour of their birth and given audience with the leader.
“I have come home,” he told Dr. Fausto Maroma. “Next year I shall be able to say, ‘I have returned.’”
“Don’t worry about the gringos,” he said to Fidel Labrador, the secretary of the Union of Tinieblan Reservation Employees. “The gringos are learning who their true enemies are.”
And when Gonzalo Garbanzo Maduro asked him point-blank if he were going to run for president, he replied: “For the present I cultivate my coffee and my cattle. But I am destined to be President of the Republic twice more before I die.”
These remarks were repeated, and old Tinieblists got their armbands out of mothballs. Meanwhile data was being collected on the precise moments of the discovery of Tinieblas, its declaration of independence, and the founding of its principal towns. Parish records were consulted for the birth dates of political figures and officers of the Civil Guard. Doktor Henker began casting horoscopes. The only modern political campaign conducted according to the science of astrology had begun.
Alejo announced his candidacy on November 28th, my seventeenth birthday and the seventeenth anniversary of his first taste of power. It was raining throughout the republic, but a patch of fair weather followed his car like a spotlight from La Yegua to the capital. The trip took sixteen hours, so crowded was the way with people. People stood in the mud beside the road and perched on the steel rafters of bridges and hung from the trees, waiting all day under the pelting rain, and in the towns people packed the post offices waiting for the phone to ring and the postmaster to shout, “He’s just passed Palo Seco; he’s coming now!” so they could run down to pack the highway crossroads, women holding newspapers over their heads and men with kids on their shoulders, and the clouds would part and the rain would break and the car would come in view and they would shout, “Arriba Tinieblas! Arriba Alejo!” and he would pass without looking either left or right, and as he disappeared down the road the clouds would fold in over the sun and the rain would hammer down on the still shouting people. At the guard post on the outskirts of the capital he got down from the car and mounted a white stallion owned by Don Belisario Oruga and rode through the poor quarters preceded by two men carrying torches, and when he entered Plaza Bolívar there were forty thousand people waiting for him.
“The stars are propitious,” he said. “Destiny calls me to lead. Neither I nor the republic have any choice.”
The stars were also propitious for Belisario Oruga as vice president. His and Alejo’s candidacies were ratified by the Tinieblista Party in convention three days later. Alejo took over Oruga’s mansion on Avenida Pizarro for his campaign headquarters, installing Doktor Henker and Furetto and Dr. Fausto Maroma and Gonzalo Garbanzo with him on the upper floor and removing all the pictures from the salons below to make room for horoscopes. These were done in great detail and included every important man in Tinieblas, particularly all the Tinieblista candidates for deputy, for which bank balance and voter appeal were the usual qualifications. Now the stars had also to be propitious. I saw the charts with my own eyes, for I would mingle with the numerous visitors every afternoon after my workout. Doktor Henker paced nervously from chart to chart in his black gown with gold symbols embroidered on it, talking to himself in German and shouting orders in bad Spanish to hangers-on, while Furetto sat sneering into the telephone, taking reports from the wards and provinces and making notes in a Renaissance script. The Italian was no scientist and preferred the precepts of Machiavelli to advice from the stars, but clever as he was he could not overrule Doktor Henker at the strategy conferences. These were held every night at nine when they were not on the road, and, invisible as I was, I often remained for them.
“La Merced is unfavorable with Mars in Saturn,” Doktor Henker might say.
“Ma Signore Presidente!” Furetto holds his hands in front of him as though weighing invisible tennis balls. “The committee is expecting you.”
“La Merced is unfavorable.”
“It will be an insu
lt, Signore Presidente; it will show contempt. It is very clear in the Discourses that ‘Contempt and insults engender hatred against those who indulge in them.’”
“Didn’t you hear Doktor Henker?”
“Signore Presidente!” The tennis balls become heavier. “Why not a small speech. We have to pass through anyway.”
“We will not pass through.”
“Madre di Dio! We will have to go how far?” He looks to Garbanzo.
“Two hundred miles.”
“We will have to go two hundred miles to get from Otán to Salinas without passing through La Merced.” He lets the balls fall.
“Pay attention to Doktor Henker. He has killed more people than the bubonic plague.”
Once Alejo saw me, standing under the huge horoscope of the Republic of Tinieblas.
“You are Kiki, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Papá.”
“You look like a man.”
“Another son?” said Doktor Henker. And I believe he was going to ask me for the date and hour of my birth, but then both his and Alejo’s gaze slid through me.
Now at that time Alejo was at the height of his strength and energy and, on Doktor Henker’s advice, no longer drank or smoked or ate meat, so that he could campaign eighteen hours a day and make love to a different woman in every town where he slept and in every village where he took siesta. Wherever he was women came to him or, if they were too old to aspire to being selected, sent their daughters, and though Furetto never ceased quoting that “Women have been the cause of great dissensions and much ruin to states,” Alejo took one after lunch and one after dinner the way a dyspeptic takes peppermints or bicarbonate of soda. From this sprang the rumor that he had lost a testicle and hence was sterile, for none of these women ever brought a child to be recognized, even after he was in the palace again, while by rights that campaign alone ought to have furnished me a hundred half-brothers and -sisters. This was used against him by his opponents, along with the accusations that he had had Furetto murder my mother and that Doktor Henker was Adolf Hitler with his mustache shaved and that if elected Alejo was going to castrate every negro in the country and feed their women to the sharks, but Alejo took no notice of these calumnies nor paid any attention to his opponents but spoke only of what the stars intended for Tinieblas, a school for this town, an agricultural bank for that province, new contracts for the oil and banana workers, and so forth. These were not promises he would try to fulfill if elected; they were part of the country’s destiny, of which his election was the principal fact. Wherever he went, he inspired instant and intense love or hatred, so that by Christmas Tinieblas was completely divided into alejistas and anti-alejistas without one neutral man, woman, or child from Caribbean to Pacific, from the Ticamalan to the Costaguanan frontier. Men who had loathed each other all their lives, whose ancestors back to the days of the Spanish colony had been blood enemies, who had exchanged the most bitter insults and unpardonable outrages, suddenly found themselves working together for Alejo or fighting side by side against him, while husband and wife, father and son, brother and brother cursed each other and slunk snarling into opposing camps. So it was that nineteen political parties banded together behind the candidacy of Olmedo Avispa, Tito’s and Meco’s father.