The Prince

by R. M. Koster

  He was the only rat I killed that night. I found the bait, spun almost to the other wall, and went back on stand, but before another rat came, weak, weary light began seeping through the high window, and after it the splatter of some guardia’s urine. Later there was a turnkey with a garbage can on a low-wheeled trolley, and I emptied my slops and dropped the rat in after them. He came back a good while later with the same trolley and a similar, if not the same, garbage can, filled with bacon-globbed lentil mush and covered with a tray full of cornbread. I got three chunks and a ladle full of the mush. Later on he came back with water. That was all.

  I massaged my kidneys and armpits and walked around the cell on my hands and did some serious exercise—my main worry was that I’d get out of shape—and got some sleep, for I meant to hunt all night. The one available diversion which I didn’t take advantage of was thought. Oh, I daydreamed myself a hard-on remembering Angela and bent it down with a hundred sit-ups, but I didn’t sort out my life. Six meters underground and with no one to distract me I might have drawn up a working map of the world and located myself on it. I might have found Alejo’s place on it, and my dead mother’s, and Alfonso’s and seen how they stood to me. I might even then have plotted a course for myself. Other men have passed prison time that way; some do it even when at liberty. But I didn’t have the inclination, and prison didn’t teach it to me. Prison taught me only that I was free. It took Professor Espino to teach me the other.

  One midnight almost three years ago, as I lay in my hospital bed, I realized that I had survived but would not recover, and I began for the first time to examine my life. I was watching a movie on TV, a gangster film. The hero was brave, energetic, talented, one who might—as his mother and sweetheart told him—have made his mark in any legitimate field, yet he set himself against society, and while he had made himself powerful and free, he was clearly destined to die like a dog. The appeal of such movies is, of course, that they enable people to suck a little danger and freedom into their lives without actually risking anything. The violence in them doesn’t breed violence. It calms most people down, giving them their necessary modest ration of excitement so that when they leave the theater or turn off their sets they may continue to lead placid lives. There are some people, though, who have a greater appetite for danger and freedom than can be satisfied by movies, and as I was lying there in that California hospital—which was really more of a sanitarium, out in the hills, with its drug addicts and alcoholics and psychosomatic invalids as well as medical cases like me—all alone (for I couldn’t stand the night nurse wheezing in the chair) late at night, watching this gangster hone his ego on the world around him, I realized I had never had any purpose in my life except to satisfy my appetite for action, for contest involving risk. When I wasn’t where the action was, I felt dull and mean and blotchy. When I could find action, I felt alive. Alejo has an appetite for having people kiss his butt, in other words for power, so he convinced himself he could save Tinieblas and went into politics. I went into politics because it was the biggest action available to me at the time. Before that I’d had other kinds, going from one to another without any plan. It wasn’t a bad way to live; it was the right way for me. I knew it had been right because I hadn’t had to think about it. That night in the hospital I had to think because there was no action left in survival—I’d done it, except for learning how to ride my mind so well it would never buck me into another convulsion—and the action of recovery was rigged against me. Now I’ve found some action again, but in the two years I was without it, from that night in the hospital until Alejo announced his candidacy, I developed the habit of contemplation.

  I didn’t have to develop it in prison because I saw prison as a contest. Kiki against Kiki. Kiki was afraid of vermin, so Kiki went down in the verminous dark and hunted them. That was the way to live. Jump in over your head, don’t sit on the edge contemplating. I even argued this point with Lazarillo when he joined me. He was self-taught and had read a great deal, in English as well as Spanish, but his bible was Quixote. He had great slices of it deepfrozen in his memory and was quite willing to serve them to me, even when I was trying to sleep, garnished with tidbits from the author’s life. He considered Cervantes the greatest man who had ever lived, and went on about him until I got annoyed.

  “Some people live life and other people write about it,” I told him. “Some people make love and others play with themselves.”

  “Cervantes practiced arms as well as letters. He was wounded at Lepanto.”

  “I went to school, Lazarillo. He lived for a while; then he gave up life for literature.”

  “And created a universe!”

  “Because he didn’t know what to do with the real one. It’s like the painter who gets a naked woman up to his studio, and instead of screwing her he paints her picture.”

  “Sometimes he does both.”

  “Why? Isn’t the one enough?”

  “When Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra was in the Royal jail at Seville,” said Lazarillo, getting down off his slab and taking his stand in the center of the cell, holding up his pants with both hands, “a worse place than this, ‘the seat of all discomfort and the home of every melancholy sound,’ he began writing the Quixote. I suppose he ought to have chased rats!”

  “When he was in prison in Algiers, he made three attempts to escape.”

  “Four attempts!”

  “Four then. Well, he should have tried to escape from the jail in Seville. And no doubt he would have tried, but he was already so old and tired and worn out that he hadn’t the energy to have adventures but only enough to imagine some. As for rat-hunting, it’s just as difficult as inventing fantasies. I don’t think my father will keep me here too long, but if I’m not released inside a month, I’ll see about escaping myself. Meanwhile, I stay in shape.”

  “Rat-hunting and the Quixote!” He snorted and bulled his neck. Pugnacious little fellow with no lack of halls, or he wouldn’t have been in jail, and he’d been quite friendly, saying straight off that if Alejo Sancudo had put me in prison, I couldn’t be all bad. I thought he was going to come over and hit me. “I suppose that you agree with your father’s great friend Adolfo Hitler that books ought to be burned!”

  “Keep calm, Lazarcito. Why get so worked up? You’ll give yourself a stroke. I’ve nothing against books, or Cervantes either. It’s just that life is short, so the people with balls live it. Don Quixote was a greater man than Cervantes. He took his lance and got out on the highway. And I’m going to stop this jabber and take my workout.”

  And you, Lazarillo, you snorted, “Animal!” and went back to your slab, without ever trying to teach me that when Cervantes took up his pen he engaged himself in a contest involving risk, a contest with the powers of disorder at the risk of his sanity. You didn’t think of that, and besides I wouldn’t have accepted it. No one ever learns anything until he has to, and I was three months shy of my twenty-first birthday and in as good shape as when I took the gold one at Helsinki. My wrestling weight was one fifty-seven, of which not an ounce was fat, and I could lift twice that over my head and walk on my hands better than most men walk on their feet. I was five feet nine inches tall, which is tall enough in this country, and if I wasn’t pretty like Alfonso, I wasn’t ugly either, despite my cauliflowered ear. No one mocked or slighted me, and while no one loved me either I didn’t care. I could digest that prison lentil slop and sleep sweetly on a cold steel slab. What need had I of the contemplative life?

  That’s how I left prison, tough inside and with a bright glaze all over me. I was already planning my escape when they released me. I’d badgered Lazarillo into climbing onto the top slab under the window and taking me on his shoulders so I could test the piss-stained bars. They were firm, so I began to figure ways to get past the guard room and over the compound wall once I’d jumped the turnkey and the guard who accompanied him. Instead, an officer came for us one evening and took us upstairs to the common criminals’ showers and let
us bathe and shave and gave us clothes picked up at our homes. Then they handcuffed us and took us out to the airport in a patrol wagon.

  Alfonso was there, along with Lazarillo’s wife, with my suitcase and my birthright: a ticket to Miami.

  “What did you do, Kiki? He says you’re not his son, that Mama deceived him and got you with a Jew.”

  “I’m his son all right. That’s what bothers him most. And never mind what I did. You’re better off not knowing.”

  “I’d say it had something to do with Angela,” he said, smiling at me in admiration. “He sold her day before yesterday.”

  “What!”

  “He sold her. The president of Hirudo Oil was through here, and Papá had him out to the villa and sold Angela to him for five thousand dollars. They left for Texas yesterday on the gringo’s plane. Oh, he told me to tell you this ticket is the last thing he’s giving you.”

  “Whatever I want from him I’ll take. But you’ve got to loan me a thousand. Don’t whine. I know you’ve got it. It’s for my tuition, Fonso. I’ll pay you back by Christmas. You’ll never regret it.”

  “I regret it already. I only have fifty on me.”

  “Then hand it over and send me the rest in New Haven. Stuff it in my shirt. They’re calling the plane.”

  They took the handcuffs off us at the emigration counter while tourists glanced nervously at the desperadoes who were sharing their flight. The propellers were already turning, brushing spray from pools of rainwater on the tarmac, but the pilot couldn’t be in too big a hurry for me. When we took off, I didn’t crane my neck for a last look at my native city. I sat self-contained as a bullet, soaring off into my manhood.

  21

  Elena’s hand on the side of my neck. “Buon, giorno, caro.”

  She comes round the table and sits down in the aluminum chair, hunches it in out of the sun. “Were you sleeping?”

  “No. Inventing the past. Sleep well?”

  She nods, smiling. “Many dreams of you.”

  I believe her. Didn’t I imagine those dreams? And with women I have always believed what’s most convenient. If one said she loved me, well, of course she did. That I was best, of course. If another said she loved X, or that Y was exciting, or Z the man of her life, it was so much bluff to salve her pride or bruise my confidence. I wasn’t fooled by that. True, in Manhattan once I woke and reached for the girl who was with me, and she shuddered and wiggled gratefully into my arms and nuzzled her sleeping face against my throat and sighed, “Oh, Peter!” and that put me off. There was no doubting the sincerity of that sigh. The little bitch was dreaming of Peter, thought she was with Peter, some pencil-shanked, calf-faced Playboy reader named Peter, and why should I go to her party with Peter’s invitation? But then I thought, well, these girls are young, and they get confused, but she’ll know the difference before I’m through. And in the morning when I asked her—she was sitting on the toilet top with a towel wrapped around her and another turbaned over her hair, watching me shave, because when they’re starting out they love “intimate” things like that—when I asked her, “Who’s Peter?” since I was still just a bit annoyed, and added, “Have to watch that sleep-talking when you’re married,” and when she blushed and said, “He’s this boy I’m engaged to, but it’s going to be hard to appreciate him now,” I believed her. On the other hand, when Olga told me she’d been unfaith­ful, I couldn’t believe her, though she was a very pretty woman, only twenty-six, with a million good reasons for betraying me. I had as hard a time believing her as Europe had believing Copernicus.

  So I believe Elena. And even the futile fool, who suspects his wife of assignations with shoe clerks and grinds her ecstasy to sobs with a “Who are you thinking of?” while he makes love to her, might believe Elena, whose purpose on earth, after all, is to make people believe in marvelous things, for she delivers that lovely line, “Many dreams of you,” with a smile so full of sadness and gaiety and love of life as to make it universal law. Then it becomes a case of the relative superiority of possible universes. In the small, dark, messy universe described by La Patria, a coffin-shaped universe bungled together out of soft lumps of dog shit scraped from people’s shoes, I am an impotent, cuckold cripple, while in the luminous and orderly universe described by Elena’s smile, I am a man whom lovely women dream of.

  “I thought your dreams belonged to Schicksal?”

  “No, caro. Only my soul belongs to Schicksal, who sends you his love, by the way. In one dream you were a gladiator.”

  “And you were Aphrodisia, Queen of the Sybarites.”

  “No, no,” she laughs. “It was a dream, not a Schicksal picture. I was Elena Ravici, very young, your daughter’s age, riding on the trolley in Trieste with my friend Magda and you got on. I guess it was a little like the movie. You had on that fox skin, with the nose sticking out over your forehead. And a cache-sexe the color of dried blood, and sandals, and you held your sword in front of you. Oh, you were beautiful, so strong, and they were all afraid of you. Magda whispered, ‘Te va uccidere!’ but I said, ‘No, Magda, ha venuto prendere la mia virginitá.’”

  “And did I take it?”

  “No. The dream finished there. It faded on you holding your sword, and I felt very calm and happy. Later on I dreamed more, and we made love.”

  “This morning?”

  “Yes. Did you dream it too?”

  Shake my head. “I imagined you dreaming it. Was I still a gladiator?”

  “No. But it was wonderful like that first time.”

  Neira emerges from behind me and sets down a tray with coffee, butter, and rolls.

  “Ci ricordi?”

  Nod. I can remember it all before she takes one sip. I was working out in a gym off Alcalá when Schicksal came in with Dennis Housman and Shelly Barb and his interpreter and his secretary and his guide. León Fuertes had made me Ambassador to Spain, and the only thing I liked about it was that there was someone to wrestle with, a gringo who’d just missed Melbourne in 1956 and who’d stayed in shape since by weight-lifting. We were working out, or beginning to, inching around the mat trying to take each other down, and the gringo, whose name was Custer like the general or Koestler like the writer, who lived in Madrid doing no one knew what, locked up with me, his temple against mine, and whispered, “Some movie people just came in, let’s show them some greco-roman throws.” We started hurling each other around, grunting like hippos and slapping the mat when we fell, bouncing up with fearful snarls and grimaces, and Schicksal started screaming, “Tell them to stop! Tell them to stop before they hurt themselves!” His interpreter rushed onto the mat pleading, “Esperen, señores, el señor productor quiere hablar con ustedes,” and Custer pushed me back and seized the interpreter and lifted him over his head, roaring horribly as though he was going to dash him to the mat. Then he seemed to come to his senses and smiled and set the interpreter down slowly and said, “Forgive me, little brother. I have no qualm with thee.” Then he roared again and charged me, and I threw him back into a corner of the mat, where he fell with a tremendous slap and lay as though dead.