The Prince

by R. M. Koster

  But once she was gone—and it was a lucky thing for both of us that she’d been milking his venom sacks for two years, for it was dangerous to slight him in any way, while we’d given him a ringing swipe where it hurt most—once she was gone, he had no choice but to stage his dreams in public with the country as supporting cast and audience. The nightmares she’d been sopping up then burst on Tinieblas with greater force than in 1940, for everyone had begun to think of him as just another president. His supporters were fat and torpid from three years gobbling at the public trough. His opponents were complacent: things hadn’t been so bad, and his term would be up in nine months. Before anyone realized, he turned the country upside down.

  His first step was to get the entire Guardia Civil to swear personal loyalty to him. Colonel Tolete—Culata had retired—sent the officers to him one by one. Dr. Maroma gave them the oath—“I swear on my honor as an officer, my faith as a Christian, and my dignity as a man, to uphold the authority and defend the person of Engineer Alejandro Sancudo Montes, President of the independent and sovereign Republic of Tinieblas by the will of the people and the design of the stars”—while Alejo sat behind his desk and Furetto stood in a corner of the office, scrutinizing the swearers for signs of insincerity. Then Dr. Maroma and Furetto went to the barracks, and to every town of the interior, administering a similar oath to the men. The forty officers and four hundred guardias who wavered, grimaced, or twitched, along with Major Dorindo Azote, who refused point-blank to swear, saying that an officer’s oath to uphold the constitution was sufficient, were organized into a battalion and sent to Korea, supposedly because Tinieblas had supported the United Nations resolution to aid that country and restore world peace.

  “We are a small nation,” Alejo said, speaking at the naval docks in the Reservation when the battalion sailed on a gringo troopship, “but a valiant one. The nations of the world respect only blood, and so”—here he looked at Major Dorindo Azote, who stood in his gringo steel helmet in front of the color guard at the head of the troops—“let our blood be shed. I say to Señor Trygve Lie, set our flag alongside those of the nations who sacrifice for liberty, and to Generalísimo MacArthur, place our soldiers in the vanguard where they can die like men.”

  He had no need to swear the Secret Police to allegiance, for he had made Gonzalo Garbanzo the Inspector General, and Gonzalo had reconstituted the organization completely, firing or retiring the former agents and replacing them with men loyal to him. Alejo, in his dotage with Angela, had given no such order, but Gonzalo was a prudent man who preferred friends to enemies and sycophants to friends. There were only two hundred men in the Secreta, but they were all Tinieblista Party members, who owed their salaries and their surplus gringo .45’s and their surplus gringo staff cars (with POLICÍA SECRETA stenciled in yellow on the front doors) and their opportunities for shaking down small businessmen to Gonzalo. But the firemen were made to swear, and the chief, who had been appointed by Lucho Gusano after attending a Boston course in fire prevention and control, was replaced with Fecundo Llamas, who made his name burning ballots during the 1940 elections.

  Yet while Alejo drew in the reins, he dug in the spurs. The Tinieblista Party had organized student, worker, peasant, and intellectual groups during the 1948 campaign and, after the election, had allowed them to wither. Alejo now reactivated these groups, each under a chairman named by him, and gave them money to hold national convention, and had them select delegates to a Tinieblist People’s Congress. The Congress met in the Legislative Palace, empty now that the deputies were out of session, and promptly began to debate national policy in the most vociferous manner imaginable, denouncing the classes not represented for having exploited the people and sold the national birthright to the gringos and even criticizing the Sancudo Administration for not dealing firmly with these abuses. The president of the Congress was Eugenio Lobo, son of the president deposed through gringo pressure in 1917. Alejo “suggested” him to the delegates on the opening day of the Congress, and they elected him unanimously. Lobo was a humpbacked dwarf with a huge head and glasses like the bottoms of Coca-Cola bottles, who had degrees from at least four universities and was a professor of sociology. He made no attempt to restrain the passions of the delegates, who invariably began by affirming their ignoble origin and current squalor, as if these were marks of particular distinction, and ended by fixing blame for all the country’s woes on a few prominent families referred to as Los Bichos—The Bugs. Some held that Los Bichos were congenital betrayers and predators; others, among them Dr. Lobo, believed they had merely surrendered to the irresistible seductions of the gringos. All were allowed ample use of the floor, and it was only when a delegate’s voice or virulence was exhausted that Dr. Lobo would beat on the podium with his curriculum vitae, which he carried with him wherever he went, rolled up in a bamboo rod, to recognize a new speaker. Besides controlling the debate, Lobo named and directed a shadow cabinet, which proposed final solutions for every problem of Tinieblan life, and these schemes, along with the invective of the delegates, were sloshed across the front pages of all the newspapers and spewed by radio into every crevice of the land.

  The result was a turmoil such as Tinieblas had not witnessed in ten years, though now the conflict was drawn on class, not racial, lines. So great was the excitement over the Congress that now, six months before an election, no one was interested in the crane’s dance of prospective candidates or the manipulations of the party chiefs. The opposition bosses accused Alejo of having organized the Congress for just this reason, condemned him, as politicians will, for risking the country’s stability for political profit, and warned him that the Congress was a monster which might destroy its own creator. Even his own party was disturbed. Vice President Belisario Oruga, one of the few bichos in the Tinieblista Party, was the first to warn Alejo about the Congress.

  “I’m sure you had a good reason for calling it,” he said, “but it’s getting out of hand. They’re attacking property.”

  And Alejo, who was a man of property himself, nodded gravely and assured Don Belisario that he was following the situation carefully.

  Francisco Caballero, the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, was more perceptive, but made the mistake of being too familiar:

  “One parliament is enough for any reasonable country, Señor Presidente. If you want to stir up trouble, we can do it.”

  “What makes you think Tinieblas is a reasonable country?” Alejo replied. “I intend to call the deputies into special session; all in good time. Until then, go home.”

  The ministers whom the Congress attacked and the men angling for the Tinieblista Party nomination for 1952 were similarly worried and resentful, but Alejo either turned their objections aside or ignored them. None knew that the substance of every Congress speech, even of the attacks on the government, was composed in the palace by Alejo and Furetto and then transmitted secretly to Dr. Lobo for distribution to the scheduled speakers of the day. None dreamed that he was preparing a coup d’état against his own regime.

  All through the fall the Congress squawked and shouted, sowing dissension and harvesting discontent. As the delegates’ vocal cords grew weak, Dr. Lobo instituted a new practice, forming the Commission on Social Abuses, which held public hearings, inviting members of the lower classes to testify on the iniquities of Los Bichos. Everyone knew that Reynaldo Manta had an empire of firetrap tenements, stocked with rats and roaches and never repaired; that Fernando Anguila used child labor in his shoe factory; that Orlando Alacrán exercised droit de seigneur over every peasant girl on his copra plantations, but now their names were mentioned in public without genuflection and their way of life considered as social abuse. These hearings were followed by those of the Commission on Political Abuses, during which the graft of ministers and deputies was exposed. Such scandals were nothing new, but it was amazing to hear them aired while the men involved were still in power. The accusing finger of Dr. Lobo, who was getting his information straight from the
palace, reached higher and higher into the Sancudo Administration, until people wondered breathlessly whether Alejo himself was going to be exposed, but while the Commission was considering a contract in which Belisario Oruga sold beef to the Guardia Civil for five inchados the pound, its hearings were suddenly suspended to allow the Congress to take up a more exciting matter.

  Some two months before the Congress was called, there was a momentous trial in the Reservation. A Tinieblan gardener was accused of raping a gringo wife. What had happened was that the gardener had been troweling away at the wife for months when one morning the husband came home for lunch a little early. When he came up the stairs calling for his sandwiches, she began howling “Rape!” The gardener didn’t wait to put on his clothes, which he’d disposed of neatly, socks in his shoes, pants creased over the back of a chair, shirt on a hanger in the bathroom, but dived through the window buck naked. The husband grabbed a shotgun and lamed him as he went across the lawn. He was then charged with trespassing, breaking and entering, burglary, assault, assault with intent to rape, rape, and resisting arrest, tried in a military court, convicted on all counts but the last, and sentenced to one term of six months, one term of a year, three terms of twenty years, and one term of life, the terms to run consecutively. The case caused a furor in Tinieblas, especially when the gardener’s counsel, a young second lieutenant, declined to question the woman on the ground that it would only subject her to unnecessary emotional stress. Now a Tinieblan girl came forward claiming to have been raped by this very Lieutenant. The Foreign Ministry requested his extradition from the Reservation and was told he had been transferred to Korea and could not be recalled. At this Dr. Lobo declared that the Congress would try him in absentia.

  Hearings and debate were suspended, the Legislative Palace vacated, and the Congress convened in the Olympic Gymnasium. Chairs were set up on the basketball court for the delegates, who formed the jury, Dr. Lobo, who presided, and the accused, who wasn’t there. More than fifteen hundred spectators were admitted each day free of charge, though many sold their places for as much as five inchados to people who didn’t care to stand in the huge lines that began forming at dawn. They cheered wildly for the delegates, for the complaining witness, and the prosecutor, Licentiate Crecencio Galán, who was himself a member of the Congress, and Dr. Lobo, who sat on a dais between the flags of Tinieblas and the Tinieblista Party and had a Chinese gong to beat on for order, and they whistled, booed, and cursed the defense counsel, Dr. Inocencio Listín, who was a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a chess crony of Furetto’s, the cleverest criminal lawyer in the republic in the opinion of Uncle Erasmo himself. Dr. Listín fought every step of the way, so much so that it was widely, though falsely, believed that the United States Government was paying him ten thousand dollars to defend the lieutenant, badgering witnesses mercilessly, interrupting the prosecutor constantly with objections, leering salaciously at the complaining witness and asking her to admit that gringos were superior lovers, that she’d enjoyed it, that if anyone was raped—which he very much doubted—it was the Lieutenant, so that a cordon of Civil Guards had to protect him whenever he entered or left the building. Then, when the prosecution had presented its case—which took ten days, what with medical experts and huge color diagrams of male and female sexual organs and life-sized mannequins which were manipulated to show exactly how the rape had been committed—Dr. Listín moved that the indictment be thrown out on the grounds that the alleged rape had taken place in the Reservation. Here Dr. Lobo rose on his little soda-straw legs to his full three-and-a-half feet and beat furiously on his gong and fined Dr. Listín a thousand inchados for contempt of Congress and country, since the Reservation was part of Tinieblas, now, in the past, and for all eternity, and declared that, as President of a Congress that represented the Tinieblan people, he was expanding the case, that, concurrently with the absent lieutenant, the Congress would try the United States of America for rape of the Republic of Tinieblas.

  That afternoon a new personage was present at the trial. This was a drunken drifter called Fulo (Blondie) Montalvo, the bastard son of a gringo soldier and a Tinieblan woman, a tall, gaunt fellow whose hair had actually been red, not blond, and was now mostly white, who was dressed up like Tío Sam in a red, white, and blue cutaway and cardboard top hat. He was marched in from the gymnasium dressing rooms by two guardias to the hoots and jeers of the spectators—which he answered with his right hand held high above his head, middle finger extended—and took his seat between Dr. Listín and the empty chair reserved for the lieutenant. Dr. Lobo then read the indictment, which specified ten counts of rape, Dr. Lobo admitting that the United States had raped Tinieblas on many more occasions, but since God Almighty had been satisfied with ten points, the people of Tinieblas would not exceed that number:

  “FIRST, that the United States”—here, and at this point in the reading of the other counts, Dr. Lobo pointed his bamboo rod accusingly at Fulo Montalvo, who would stick out his tongue, or thumb his nose, or slap the crotch of his right elbow with his left hand, or simply blow air flatulently through his lips, while the spectators hissed and booed and Dr. Lobo gonged for silence—““that the United States violated the Republic of Tinieblas, conspiring with Monseñor Jesús Llorente in the murder of General Feliciano Luna and tricking the people into an unjust peace;

  “SECOND, that the United States violated the Republic of Tinieblas, bribing President Ildefonso Cornudo into signing an unjust treaty;

  “THIRD, that the United States violated the Republic of Tinieblas, forcing, by threat of naval and marine attack upon a defenseless city and People, the Tinieblan Assembly into ratifying that unjust treaty;

  “FOURTH, that the United States violated the Republic of Tinieblas, sending armed marines into the Tinieblan capital to reinstale Modesto Gusano after he had been overthrown by the Tinieblan people;

  “FIFTH, that the United States, in the person of the Galactic Fruit Company, violated the Republic of Tinieblas, corrupting President Modesto Gusano into granting piratical concessions;

  “SIXTH, that the United States, in the person of the Copperhead Mining Company, violated the Republic of Tinieblas, corrupting President Ascanio Pícaro into granting piratical concessions;

  “SEVENTH, that the United States violated the Republic of Tinieblas, forcing, by threat of military and economic reprisals, the deposition of the Constitutional President of the Republic, Don Eudemio Lobo;

  “EIGHTH, that the United States, in the person of the Hirudo Oil Company, violated the Republic of Tinieblas, corrupting President Heriberto Ladilla into granting piratical concessions;

  “NINTH, that the United States violated the Republic of Tinieblas by armed invasion, deposing the Constitutional President of the Republic, Engineer Alejandro Sancudo;

  “TENTH, that the United States, in the persons of the Yankee and Celestial Energy Corporation and the First Secretary of the United States Embassy, violated the Republic of Tinieblas by interfering in the elections of 1948 and aiding Tinieblans in the commission of electoral fraud.

  “These, then, are ten specific counts,” said Dr. Lobo. “A thousand others might be brought, but we are content to try the accused for just these ten. How do you plead?”

  Fulo Montalvo got to his feet, stuck his thumbs in his ears and waggled his fingers, and shouted, “No speeky fuckin’ Spanish!”

  At this a roar of protest broke from the spectators as if to lift the roof off the gymnasium and explode its walls, and Fulo pranced around the basketball court like a bullfighter touring the ring, stopping at each corner to sweep his cardboard hat off his head and bow deeply, each time drawing more abuse from the crowd, so that it was ten minutes before Dr. Lobo and the guardias could restore order. Then, Dr. Lobo fined Fulo ten thousand inchados for contempt and asked again how he would plead.

  “Your Honor,” said Dr. Listín, “my client pleads ‘Not Guilty.’ And if you, your Honor, and this distinguished Congress, will hear the grounds
for this plea, I think you will withdraw the indictment and save us all a good deal of time and breath.”

  “Proceed.”

  “Well, Mr. President and members of the Tinieblist People’s Congress, as any lawyer knows—and there are many lawyers here, including, I believe, yourself, Mr. President, for unless I am mistaken, among your many illustrious degrees is one from the School of Law of Columbia University—as any lawyer knows, the crime of rape is composed of two elements, penetration and lack of consent, both of which elements must be present,” Dr. Listín emphasized the word “must” by pointing his finger at the basketball net over Dr. Lobo’s head, “must be present if it is to be said that a rape has occurred. If either one of these two elements is absent, there is no corpus delicti, no crime, no rape. Is that not so, Mr. President?”

  “That is so, Doctor. Proceed.”

  “Well, Mr. President and members of the Congress, my client readily admits penetration. One might say”—here Dr. Listín began snickering—“one might say that my client has penetrated—if I may be permitted a small vulgarity—up to the short hairs into the fair and fragrant body of our land.”

  Here Dr. Listín was interrupted by such screeches, catcalls, and hoots that Dr. Lobo had to order the squad of guardias ranged at parade rest behind his dais to fire a volley through the gymnasium roof before order could be restored. Then he reminded Dr. Listín that he had already been fined a thousand inchados and his client ten thousand for contempt and advised him that the Congress permitted no vulgarities and warned him that he, Dr. Lobo, would not hesitate to fine anyone a million inchados if such a fine were necessary to preserve the dignity of the proceeding. Then he bade him to proceed.

  “Well, Mr. President and members of the Congress, my client admits penetration. But that is only one of the elements of rape. The other element is lack of consent, lack of consent. And this element has not been present. No, Mr. President. No, no, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished members of the Congress. No. No. No. There was no rape because Tinieblas consented. Monseñor Llorente consented to the conspiracy; President Cornudo consented to the bribe; Ramiro Aguado and the Assembly consented to the treaty; Modesto Gusano consented to be reinstalled by the marines; he and Ascanio Pícaro and Hildebrando Ladilla consented to the seductions of the foreign companies; the leaders of the Liberal Party consented to the deposition of Eudemio Lobo; the Civil Guard consented to the invasion of 1942; Luis Gusano and the leaders of the nineteen parties consented to the interference into the 1948 elections. On every occasion you have cited, Mr. President, the Republic of Tinieblas, in the person of its leaders, consented to the penetrations of my client. Not only consented, but shook its ass and humped right along!”