by R. M. Koster
“If he’s tactless, why do you defend him?”
“Can we go on?”
She looks away. “Why not! I’m only a machine!”
“Then tell him Pepe had nothing to do with my getting shot. That it was a personal matter.”
She does; and I go on to tell how Carlitos went to Pepe last fall and asked for Pepe’s endorsement; and how, when it came out in the papers the next morning, Nacho gave Alfonso the story of how Pepe’s cement company was overcharging AID, and Lucho’s TV station ran Donald Duck cartoons during Pepe’s press conference; and how Pepe tried to save the situation by withdrawing his endorsement from Carlitos and announcing he would seek a second term, telling Carlitos and Nacho that if they didn’t support him they would lose the ministries they held—there being seven months left of Pepe’s term, which meant a lot in graft and patronage—and telling Lucho that if he did support him, Lucho’s son-in-law Bertito Alacrán could keep his ministry or be vice president, whichever he liked best; and how Lucho reminded Pepe that it was unconstitutional for a President to succeed himself; and how Pepe reminded Lucho of the amendment to the contrary which Alejo had pushed through before he was thrown out of office for the second time in 1952, and which no one had bothered to repeal; and how Carlitos and Nacho and Lucho, all of whom (as Economist correctly pointed out) had helped throw Alejo out, drove all the way to Otán in Nacho’s bulletproof Lincoln to offer to help put him back in; and how Alejo accepted, getting clear commitments from all three as to how much cash they would put into the campaign and giving only the delphic assurance that once he returned to power everyone in Tinieblas would get what he deserved; and how Pepe threw Carlitos and Nacho and Bertito and all their friends and relatives and supporters out of the government, thirty-seven hundred people purged in three weeks, from senior civil servants down to porters and charwomen, and distributed the vacant jobs where they would get him the most votes; and how Carlitos formed the Partido Soberano Revolucionario and took about a third of the Progresistas into the Alliance with Alejo; and how Pepe made up the difference with Reformistas and Civilistas who couldn’t stomach a deal with Alejo, so that both Alliance and Coalition are composed of people who have hated each other all their lives. I push mushy grunts to Marta, and she translates them to Phil in a flat voice, and he makes notes, neither grinning nor exclaiming “Terrific!” And when I say, “That’s all,” he says, “Thank you, Mr. Sancudo, Marta,” nodding to both of us and looking his age. “I’ll be outside.”
“Agua.” Sounds like a choked dog.
She holds the glass for me. “How do you feel?”
Water gone tepid. I nod for her to put it down. “Tired. It was fun at the start. He’s a good audience. I could see him casting it all for a wide-screen movie. Afterward it wasn’t fun.”
“Kiki …”
“Wait. It was my fauIt. I shouldn’t have said anything. The living ought to live.”
“You’re not …”
“Wait. It’s right for you to go to bed with a man who pleases you.”
“Is it right for Elena too?”
“Yes. You’re both widows. It’s right for me to be jealous too. But not for me to show it.”
“I didn’t mean what I said about enjoying him more. I only said that to hurt you.”
“No one can remember either pleasure or pain. You can remember having felt them, but not how they felt. On balance that’s a benefit.”
“I can remember feeling whole, and I haven’t felt it since the last time you made love to me.”
Thank you, Marta.
“He doesn’t mean anything to me, Kiki. You’re the only one who’s ever meant anything to me. Before I had to share you with Elena and God knows how many other women. Let’s go away, Kiki. Let’s go away from here, and I’ll take care of you, and you won’t have to share me with anyone.”
Shake my head.
“You’ll never change, will you?”
“I’ve changed, Marta. I’ve had to learn. But I don’t want to learn too much. I don’t want to learn how to like being a cripple, for example. Or how to forgive my enemies. Or how to live in the passive voice.”
“You don’t want me to take care of you?”
“Of course I do. I want everything.” Make my smile. “That’s another thing I don’t want to learn: how to stop wanting.”
“Well.” She shrugs. “What do you want now?”
“I want you to smile.”
“How?”
“I do it by pulling back the corner of my mouth. See?”
“I’ll have to practice. What else do you want?”
“I want you to go out with those gringos and help them make their movie.”
“You don’t want me to read to you?”
Shake my head. “You go out. Send me Jaime. I’ll have him push me out to the patio. And then I’ll talk to Elena when she gets up. You can read to me this afternoon. You can read me the Count of Monte Cristo. The last part. When he gets Danglars.”
“And what does he do after he kills Danglars, Kiki?”
“He has a girl, Marta. Don’t you remember? He has a girl, and they just sail away.”
20
I sit in my chair, my eyes half-closed against the glare off the swimming pool, my hands packed in my lap, my shoulders caped by the shadow of the pink umbrella which sprouts through the aluminum table beside me. Otilio crouches barefoot at the back of the patio, an old pair of tuxedo pants rolled below his knees, an old dress shirt flapping his butt, pruning the grass near the fence. Three swicks, four, with his machete, and he shuffles to the right without straightening up. He keeps the yard as well-groomed as Alfonso’s beard, all neat and orderly like my current life. Easy in this dry season, but I prefer June, when the grass leaps up overnight around fallen mangoes and the plant garden along the kitchen wall is a jungle of fronds.
Jaime squats doglike in the shade of sere mango leaves. I used to wonder how our people can wait that way, hour after hour. I would see them along the sun-or rain-swept highway, waiting, inert as the trees they leaned against, for a bus I’d passed a hundred miles back, or on the straight-backed benches of public waiting rooms, waiting all day for their names to be called while surly clerks lounged behind the glass partitions, flirting with secretaries who filed and polished their nails, and I would wonder what they did with their minds while their lives seeped into eternity. How can they wait like that while I have to have action? They must have a switch that shuts their minds down, or puts them on a standby circuit.
Now, of course, I have to wait, but my mind isn’t circuited for it. My mind keeps chewing at full power, and if left unprogrammed gives off frightful blares and screeches, woof-tweets of rage and terror that flash adrenal signals toward my dead nerves. Which signals go unanswered, clog the circuits, feedback causing more noise, until everything explodes in the gray static of convulsion. And that can kill me. I’ve had two; another one could kill.
At first I took pills and spent my days being read or TVed to. My reward for learning to move my left index finger was a remotecontrol switch to my hospital room TV, and I stayed full of pills and kept Marta nearby. But it’s enough, more than enough, to be dependent for the tending of my body, so I learned to handle my mind. It needs exercise, or it’ll hoof me to death, yet it can’t be let loose to roam unguided. I take it on well-planned expeditions into the future and long jaunts over the past. These are perfectly safe, so long as I don’t let the reins drop.
Before my assassination I was never conscious of my mind as an alien and destructive force. I could always find some action. Even in prison one can exercise—I don’t mean a few sit-ups but real exercise, where you push yourself against pain or hunt rats. The exception is the coffins, each one two feet high, two feet wide, six feet long. After the flag riots they put one of Canino’s communists, a black called Tonio, into one of the coffins, and when they took him out two or three days later, his forehead was all scraped and welted from being beaten against the ceiling. He
wasn’t trying to kill himself, just to calm his anxiety with unconsciousness. I was never in one, though it might have been good training for the way I am now.
Still, as long as you’re not in one of the coffins, there are ways to keep busy. Massaging your armpits and kidneys, for example. That’s what you do on the first day, for everyone gets a beating upon admission. They call or drag you out of the truck and walk or rifle-butt you up the stairs. In the guard room to the right of the door they take your name, prints, and picture, your belt, shoelaces, and keys. Then they shove you down three flights of stone steps, perhaps even prod you a bit, for it’s hard to move quickly without shoelaces, to the Sala de Interrogaciones. Along the way you pass the coffins, or their two-foot-square steel doors. The lower ones are almost flush with the floor, the upper ones almost flush with the ceiling, which isn’t high down there. Six rows of two; some people call them the ovens. The walls of the Sala de Interrogaciones are streaked with mildew; the floor slopes toward the center of the room where there is a sump drain. You stand over the drain with your arms above your head while the guards who brought you beat you in the armpits and on the kidneys with their truncheons. There’s very little sadism in this. Sometimes a little anger, if the guards know and dislike you, but everyone gets a beating to calm him down and make him less of a bother. It helps to make a little noise. You certainly shouldn’t curse the guards, but if you yelp a little they’ll know they’re getting through to you and will quit all the sooner. In 1952 they beat Egon unconscious because he wouldn’t cry out, and on my first visit they might have done the same to me, for I didn’t know enough to satisfy them with a squeal or two. But although Alejo had told the prison commandant to show me no favors, the guards who did the truncheoning didn’t have their hearts in it. If Alejo changed his mind, it would be their turn, so they didn’t beat me beyond the call of duty. In any case, if you aren’t defiant or excessively stoical, they beat you only hard enough to give your urine a rich, resinous tint. Then they escort, prod, or drag you upstairs to a cell.
There are three levels of cells, two above ground and one below. Common criminals are kept on the upper levels; I was put below with the politicals. This because there was no charge against me and because rumor—started no doubt by the villa guards—already had it that my offense was one of lèse-authorité, to wit: banging the President’s girl friend. It is impossible to imagine how quickly news circulates in that prison or how deftly the false is separated from the true. So, after the flag riots, when I had been in prison for weeks, I learned all the details of the plot which General Látigo was preparing in the greatest secrecy against General Puñete, a plot of which Puñete was entirely ignorant before I warned him and in which he refused to believe until I recited his itinerary for an inspection of the Civil Guard barracks in Córdoba, where Látigo intended to have him arrested and hanged. Rumor floats along the corridors and drips from the cell walls, so that even while the guards were thwacking my kidneys, the whole prison knew that Alejo’s son was inside for disputing the preeminence of the presidential prong. Yet what is common knowledge even to an unfortunate buried two floors underground in one of the coffins never seeps out into the city. Alfonso learned of my escapade two weeks later when I told him. Certainly Lazarillo Aguda, the nosiest of journalists, had no inkling of it until he was locked up, for he couldn’t have picked a less propitious moment to publish his doggerel.
The ladies all enjoy it,
Although it’s rather small;
A girl can’t get in trouble at
The Presidential Ball.
The lower cells have two-by-three-foot windows high up against their ceilings, which are just above the level of the Civil Guard Compound in which the prison sits. These windows allow a kind of twilight to grope down into the cells, and also serve as impromptu latrines for whichever guardias find themselves in a bladder-draining mood when near the prison, so that the lower cells breathe out a sharp ammoniacal reek and, while cooler than the ones above, are generally considered less comfortable. They are five paces long and three paces wide and have sleeping facilities for fifteen men, that is three tiers of steel slabs two feet wide by six feet long hung by chains from the walls, six slabs on each long wall and three on the wall near the window. The top slab on the window wall is usually the last one filled. In 1952 I shared one of these cells with Gunther, Egon, Furetto, and twenty-one other human beings, and we used the slabs in shifts, all but the top one under the window. This we gave to Egon, who had been beaten too badly to mind being pissed on. There were two thousand political prisoners then during the weeks after Alejo fell from power, and they amnestied criminals to make room.
It is a tribute, on the other hand, to Alejo’s second administration that when I made my first sojourn in the prison the lower cells were almost empty. A dozen or so communists rotted placidly, three to a cell, to ease the sleep of the American Ambassador and keep up Alejo’s credit with Washington. A Dutch zionist, who had been snooping after Doktor Henker, sighed through a leisurely deportation process. The four Cormillo brothers—unregenerate anti-alejistas who had persisted, even after friendly warnings, in distributing mimeographed sheets which denounced Alejo as a war criminal, assassin, and morphiamaniac—shared a corner cell, palatial accommodations arranged by Major Dorindo Azote, who allowed them razor blades and a domino set, who got their food parcels to them unopened, and who saw to it that the guardias relieved themselves into other prisoners’ windows. The rest of the cells were empty, except for three set aside for the homos dredged in during the vice squad’s weekly raids.
On certain nights, the guardias who cared to were allowed to come down and use these men, and we other prisoners would hear the smack of boots on stone, the loud, self-conscious laughter, the titters and squeals, the high-pitched giggles of mixed fear and desire, “Not me, darling, I’m having my period,” the shouts and the screams and the sobbing, and I would imagine the faggots fluttering like starlings around their cells, in and out of the flashlight beams, and the guardia ape-grinning as he held a kneeling queer by the ears, and the boy whimpering with his face pressed against a steel slab while love drilled into him like a jackhammer, and I would feel the shadowed violence and smell the pain and lust. My sex would stiffen and my stomach turn. My mind would drag me through the walls into those other cells, where for a moment I would rut with the guards and whimper with the faggots and stand spread-legged in the doorway with Duncan’s shotgun, blasting them all to blood and sperm and shit. Then I would get up to hunt rats, feeling my way to the door while Lazarillo Agudo hawked juicily and snorted, “Animals!”
And even now last night’s feast is bleeding into the slop pails and fresh meat is being basted in the Sala de Interrogaciones. Even now in this sun-shot mid-morning a frieze of women is carved along the compound wall, bent ancients with greasy shawls over their foreheads, vacant-eyed mothers with infants at their breasts, firm-haunched girls who bite their lips at the guards’ wisecracks, each with a paper bag full of tenderness for some beast inside. Right this moment one of them is being let through the gate and up the steps to the prison guardroom. She waits before the desk while the sergeant tears the bag half open and lifts out the paper plate and spreads the waxed paper with his index fingers. Hmmph! Chicken rice. He spies a piece of breast and forks it into his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. Hmmph! Spits gristle into the wastebasket. Pokes his middle finger into the rice and stirs slowly, pushing grains off into the paper. Nods seriously. Bunches the food in both hands and drops it back into the bag. Then he flicks his hand as though shooing flies, and the woman takes the bag and carries it outside to a cart filled with similar bags, squashed and torn, with the names smeared, the tenderness squeezed out. Even now the prison sits there, turning out its quota of suffering and debasement.
I didn’t think about things like that then. What happened to others was their problem. I saw prison as a personal test and as proof I’d done something notable. When they put the handcuffs on me, especiall
y when they began beating me, I knew I’d reached Alejo. The harder they hit me, the more he was hurt, and I was proud of myself, even later when Lazarillo explained that the smart prisoner made a little noise for the guards and told me that, as I’d been able to walk out of the Sala de Interrogaciones, I’d been pampered with only a run-of-the-mill beating. It was as if the prison had been built and the police organized all for my benefit, though I didn’t realize until later what a service Alejo was doing me without intending to. Every stress that doesn’t crush you makes you stronger, and those two weeks in jail were a final exam in the course I’d been taking with Duncan and Angela.
I didn’t know it would be two weeks, of course. No magistrate came to interrogate me; no judge told me what my penance would be. I didn’t know if they’d connected me with the stolen Higgins boat, but I assumed they hadn’t, for the blackjacked guard would have entitled me to a full-dress beating. I had no news of the world outside the prison until they put Lazarillo in with me, and what he told me was disappointing, for none of it concerned me. Nor could I keep my spirits up with the prisoner’s common fantasy of frantic family effort to get me out. It was my family who had put me in. At the same time, however, I knew Alejo wouldn’t have me killed or maimed or locked up forever. Family ties are sacred in our culture, and it would be bad politics for him to do me calculated permanent harm. There was always the danger that the guards would try beating me without putting handcuffs on me first and that I’d lose my temper and kill one of them, but that was part of the test prison offered me. So I had no more fear than was easily controllable and hence invigorating, the kind of fear you feel at the top of a ski run or when first soloing a plane. It was a different story five years ago when Dimitri Látigo was in power and I had to worry about being shot while attempting to escape.
Snap me that first morning squidging my laceless tennis shoes down the prison corridor with my manacled hands shading my crotch and a guard’s billy club nudging my shoulder, the freest man in Central America, responsible only to myself. Inside the cell they loosed my wrists, and the turnkey came in with a wooden bowl full of water and a wooden spoon and a big chunk of cold, greasy cornbread—I’d missed the daily meal—and when he bolted the thick wooden door, I stuck the spoon in my pocket and drank half the water and put the bowl and the bread on the top left-hand slab nearest the door and climbed up on the middle slab and laid one hand under my head and clasped the other in my aching armpit and hunched onto my right side to ease my aching kidneys and fell asleep. I woke a few hours later with a bad ache in my right kidney and got down to spray Valdepeñas into my slop pail and ate half the bread and drank the rest of the water and then went back to sleep, on my left side this time. Some hours later I rubbed my shoulder against a tickle on my check and sent a roach tripping down my lower lip and over my elbow and came awake so skewered in terror that my heart stopped beating. It was tomb-dark and clammy, like the bottom of a crypt three days after your burial, and one moment it seemed the opposite wall was just beyond my chin and the next that there were no walls at all, only a limitless darkness. I settled this by poking my hand out over the edge of my slab and rolling my face against the cold stone behind me. Then I breathed through my mouth until pain and hunger brought the world back to me. I raised up on my elbow and reached to the slab above me for my chunk of cornbread and put my fingers onto fuzzed nervous life. I drew my hand back so fast I wrenched my shoulder and lay twitching again while my mind flashbulbed rats the size of dachshunds trotting across the slab above me. Dozens of them, and a thousand million roaches swarming the walls, and huge furry spiders stalking across the ceiling and swaying down toward me on nylon ropes, and snakes and slugs writhing beneath me, but that was better than the way I am now, yes, a hundred times better, because I could swing down to the floor despite the snakes and step to the center of my cell, even though at the center of my cell the floor dropped away a thousand feet to a bottomless cesspool, and do knee-bends until my thighs screamed, and then flop forward into push-ups, flushing the toads and scorpions from my brain, and then get up, rubbing my armpits and kneading my kidneys, to take possession of my cell, three short steps right to the door, then palming along the wall to the first slabs, circumnavigating and claiming. Then I found the cubic inch of cornbread my rat had abandoned and set it down near the corner by the door and waited, squatting motionless in the total womb-coffin dark, while my mind felt around the contours of the cell like radar. Then after about five thousand heartbeats I got an instinctogram straight from the mid-Pleistocene: fat rat sniffing through gnaw-hole at base of door. I could feel him coming for the bread, poking his nose, brushing his side hairs against the wall. I held my hand absolutely still and relaxed, waited while a roach scudded over my ankle between my pants cuff and my sneaker, and when rat-flank touched my fingers and rat-nose probed my wrist, I swept him up, as a bear scoops fish from a river, and flicked him against the opposite wall of the cell. Oh, I thought, as I heard him thud the wall and then one of the slabs, all that talk about you in psychology class, but you’re not so fucking smart.