The Prince

by R. M. Koster

  Here pandemonium broke forth again, but when the uproar subsided Dr. Lobo did not fine Dr. Listín for contempt but spoke thoughtfully to him in his high-pitched, though grating voice:

  “Your line of argument has merit, Doctor. It comes close to proving itself, for your brilliant reasoning is another example of how your client finds clever Tinieblans to serve his contemptible ends. We cannot, however, sustain you to the extent of dismissing the indictment. You admit penetration but deny lack of consent, but in this regard we must consider the republic a maid unwise in the ways of the world and the leaders you have mentioned, her unscrupulous guardians. It is nonetheless rape when a trusting waif, too innocent to realize the consequences of her actions, is lured by her own guardians into the lecher’s greasy embrace. We rule, therefore, that a prima facie case of rape exists, and you and Dr. Galán will have to convince the Congress of your client’s innocence or guilt. Still, your argument has merit; it may prevail. At the least it compels me to widen the indictment. The guardians too must answer for whatever part they took in the alleged crime. True, most of the men you mentioned are dead, but they must be seen as representatives of the class that spawned them. We, therefore, rule that Los Bichos will stand trial alongside your client as accessories before, during, and after the fact in this crime of rape of the republic. In order, then, to bring this new accused before the people’s justice, we hold this trial recessed until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Now, on the morning of this most momentous day, Alejo, who along with Furetto, had composed the entire scenario of what took place in the gymnasium and had even passed personally on Fulo Montalvo’s outfit and short speech, went to his villa at Medusa Beach for a bit of rest. Before he left he had two interviews. The first, which took place at two A.M., was with Juan de Arco Soplón, president of the Tinieblist Student Phalanx, who was smuggled in and out of the palace disguised as a woman. This caused no suspicion, in fact even calmed some of the more worried members of the government, for Alejo had now been some three months without the company of Angela or any other female. Alejo told Soplón that he had decided to liberate Tinieblas once and for all from the gringos and Los Bichos and ordered the Phalanx to organize a student protest march through the Miramar quarter, where the American Embassy and the homes of many prominent families were located, the following evening. In the morning he sent for Vice President Oruga and put the government and the country in his care. He told Oruga that he was fed up with the Congress and alarmed by the direction it was taking. Colonel Tolete had orders to execute Oruga’s commands. In the event of any disruption of public order or any threat to continued good relations with the United States, Oruga was to act with the utmost vigor and decision. Then he left for the beach, along with Furetto and Doktor Henker and Egon and Gunther, all of whom were now naturalized Tinieblans. The papers carried the news that President Sancudo was at his villa and Belisario Oruga in the palace.

  Even before the trial recessed, students began gathering on the University campus and in the quadrangle of the Instituto Politécnico; and at five they marched, the one group coming down the Vía México past the newly laid foundation of El Opulento, the other passing through the Plaza Bolívar and out Avenida de la Bahía, about three thousand students eleven years old and up, along with laborers, hoodlums, and bums collected on the way. The students carried placards denouncing gringos and Bichos in terms familiar since the opening of the Congress and pocketfuls of coarsely ground black pepper to throw in the nostrils of the Civil Guard’s horses, and those who came from the University picked up a good deal of rubble from the hotel construction site. Neither group had gone more than a block before Colonel Tolete called Oruga for orders on what to do about them.

  The American Ambassador was in the palace when the call came through, making an energetic protest about the afternoon session of the trial and demanding that the Tinieblan Government put a stop to the slanderous proceedings of the Congress and (since the Student Phalanx was riddled with spies for gringo intelligence agencies, the military Metaphysical Police Command and the civilian Committee for Research and Penetration and the Ambassador thus knew all about the march before it got started) warning Vice President Oruga that the United States would tolerate no insult to its flag, no injury to its citizens, and no damage to its property. Oruga had got Alejo by phone when the Ambassador presented himself at the palace and was admonished not to disturb the presidential repose over trivialities. We can imagine Alejo grinning past the mouthpiece at Furetto.

  “Don’t be afraid, Orguita. It’s only the Ambassador. What would you do if they sent troops? Tell him that it would be easier for us to deal with the Congress if President Truman would consent to revising the treaty. Give him all the assurances you want, but if he gets snotty, remind him we’ve sent troops to Korea. And be a man. I might as well have stayed in the capital if you’re going to call me about every little thing.”

  But Oruga lacked Alejo’s talent for abusing diplomats, and now, when Tolete’s call came through, he saw a chance to end an unpleasant interview.

  “Colonel Tolete with a minor problem,” he said, holding his palm over the telephone. “Which nonetheless requires my attention. I shall arrange for you to see the President when he returns.”

  “If it’s about the student demonstration, you may be interested in knowing that it’s headed for my Embassy.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Oruga, whose own house was on the next block.

  And when the Ambassador nodded, Oruga remembered Alejo’s parting orders, saw a chance to impress the gringos, and told Tolete to keep the marchers out of Miramar with all necessary force.

  Hence, the sort of shabby cops-and-students brawl which gave us latins a reputation for irresponsibility until the same amusements grew modish in Paris and New York. A guardia broke his shoulder when pitched from a sneezing gelding; a dozen adolescents were saber-flatted into the accident room at San Bruno Hospital; a dozen more were jailed; and cars were overturned, lawns trampled, windows smashed, and an American flag ritually cremated. Mild, as such things go nowadays; primitive; a Model T of a protest clash, underpowered, innocent of such ornaments as molotov bombs and vomit gases, most modest in property damage and looting, too frail and fleeting to produce a single death or permanent maiming, but a beginning, something to build on, and altogether sufficient for Alejo’s needs.

  He stormed back that night, the sirens of his motorcycle escort wailing all the way to the capital, and called the Chamber into special session. He demanded and received emergency power—state of siege, suspension of guarantees—to deal with the unrest fomented by the Congress. Then he went to the Congress and congratulated the delegates. He apologized for the torpor of his administration. “Three years a somnambulist, I called this Congress in an inspired dream. ‘Thank you for waking me, for rousing me to the agonies and aspirations of the people.” He praised the students for leading the country in justified protest and condemned Oruga for depriving the people of their constitutional right to demonstrate. He criticized only the burning of the flag: “An unseemly and empty gesture, no matter how strongly motivated. True vindication will come only when we have put our own house in order. First we must purge the fatherland of the poisons which corrupt it from within; then we shall win justice from the foreigner. Perhaps I am not worthy to lead you to these goals; for I have been your president for three years and done nothing. But now I have bathed myself in the will of the people and emerged revitalized. I promise you I shall sleep no more.”

  With this he returned to the Chamber and asked the Deputies for a law permitting him to succeed himself. “The people,” he said, “would be robbed of their franchise if they were not allowed to choose from among all Tinieblans the man they wished to lead them.” And when the Chamber did not respond immediately but began to debate the question, led by the opposition deputies and those tinieblistas who had themselves hoped for the nomination, he had the doors sealed and the building surrounded by troops. “They can
debate all they want,” he told Francisco Caballero by phone, “but they will neither leave the building nor eat one grain of rice until they bring me the law I want.” And since he had the guards smuggle food to the deputies who were supporting him, their number grew with each approaching mealtime. He had his law in three days and immediately announced his candidacy for reelection. Then he dissolved the Chamber, and sent Belisario Oruga to Japan as Ambassador, and fired all his ministers and appointed Dr. Lobo’s shadow cabinet in their place, and told the Congress they had served the fatherland and could now go home, and settled down to govern in the way he enjoyed most, by decree.

  The first decree established the People’s Tribunal for Economic, Social, and Political justice, with Dr. Eugenio Lobo as Chief justice. This court was to try Tinieblans for the kind of offenses discovered by the Congress’s Commissions on Social and Political Abuses and for the newly named crime of Sale of the National Birthright. A section of this decree read, somewhat biblically, that “the People’s Justice shall visit the crimes of the father upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,” so that one of the first indictments prepared was against Nacho Hormiga, whose maternal great-grandfather, Hildebrando Ladilla, had run off with the national treasury and whose maternal grandfather, Heriberto Ladilla, had granted concessions to Hirudo Oil, while the indictment against Lucho Gusano cited not only his own collusion with the gringos, but that of his father Modesto. It was now clear that Alejo meant to finish with what some people called Los Bichos and others the Oligarchy and others the Club Mercantil Group—that is, the long-established, wealthy, prominent families, most of them descendant from creoles come out from Spain during the colonial period, who had run things in Tinieblas since the days of Simón Mocoso. But the gringos couldn’t call him a communist, for he had sent troops to Korea, and the Guardia had no call to move against him, first because its dissident elements were the troops sent and second because he promised Tolete to use the fines collected from the Bichos to double the Guardia’s pay, and though there were many middle and even lower-class Tinieblans suspicious of Alejo’s motives and ashamed of his tactics and afraid of his success, the masses were enchanted, not so much by the prospect of their own rise as by the spectacle of the Bichos’ fall. People began to refer to Alejo as the Fumigator, while his intended victims started acting like roaches when the DDT powder hits, rushing about frenetically trying to get themselves and their money out of the country. But Alejo’s second decree froze the bank accounts and canceled the passports of everyone whose indict­ment was being considered and ordered the People’s Tribunal to begin trying offenders by January fifteenth.

  Now if Alejo had managed to try, convict, and punish even one of the Bichos, then probably we would have had a real revolution, which would have run its course, as in Cuba, or been halted by gringo intervention, as in Guatemala, and since the machinery of the Tribunal was already in motion, all he had to do was to let events take their course. But that was just the thing he was incapable of doing. He was enjoying himself too much whipping events along, and besides, he had been so successful that he was convinced he could do anything he cared to. He didn’t care to run for reelection. The opposition parties were so disorganized they hadn’t even named candidates, but it was a bore to go campaigning when he could be issuing decrees. And he didn’t care to have a Chamber of Deputies, which might prove recalcitrant and have to be sealed up in the Legislative Palace again, or a Supreme Court, whose president, his own brother Erasmo, who had married a Bicho, was pestering him about the constitutionality of his decrees. So on the day after the feast of the Epiphany he issued his third decree, which abolished the Constitution, and with it the Chamber and the Court and all political parties, even his own, and proclaimed himself, Alejandro Sancudo Montes, Perpetual Guardian of the Tinieblan State and People for the duration of his natural life.

  Alejo’s perpetual guardianship lasted thirty-eight hours, from eleven A.M. on January eighth, when he proclaimed it, till one A.M. on the tenth, when he sneaked out of the palace. His fall was preceded by one of the rarer political phenomena, a middle-class strike and protest demonstration and was engineered by two young lawyers, León Fuertes and Carlos Gavilán. Fuertes had an ideological antipathy to Alejo. He had been studying in Paris when the Germans invaded and had served first in the French Army and then in the Maquis and finally with the Free French under Juin. “I fought the Nazis in France and Italy,” he liked to say, “why shouldn’t I fight them here?” I think he also felt that if Alejo took all the power in the country, there would never be any for him, but if you dig too deeply into motives, especially in politics, everyone turns out to be a son of a bitch. Fuertes was friendly with Aiax Tolete, who, since he had never fought anywhere, was fascinated with war and never tired of reconstructing the Battle of Monte Cassino, where León had been both wounded and decorated, so while Carlitos organized the demonstration, León neutralized the Guard.

  He went to the barracks, a short, stocky man full of energy in repose like a stick of dynamite, very spruce in the white suit everyone wore those days, with the roseate of the Legion d’Honneur in his buttonhole, jaunty as on a social call with an inquiry after the crippled kid of the sergeant at the gate and a joke for Captain Dimitri Látigo, Tolete’s aide-de-camp. Oh, León was a charming man, and he had natural authority, so that even before he became powerful, one felt favored by a word from him or a twinkle from his brown eyes, but once he was in Tolete’s office, he put charm away, for he was a killer at heart like every man who seriously seeks power.

  “It’s time,” he said, “that Engineer Sancudo returned to private life.”

  “I took an oath to support him,” said Tolete.

  “You took an oath to the constitution first.”

  At that moment—it was shortly after noon—Tolete’s phone rang. It was Alejo, ordering the arrest of León Fuertes and Carlos Gavilán and the posting of troops in key points in the city. Tolete repeated the message to León when he put down the phone.

  “You can arrest me,” said León. “It won’t break up our friendship. In a few days you’ll be downstairs too.”

  “Only if I listen to you.”

  “No,” said León. “Only if you don’t.”

  One evening after a session of the San José Conference, John Kennedy remarked that both he and Khrushchev had the same problem in persuading their generals to give up nuclear tests, and León said that any man in authority could give a soldier orders but only a genius could make one think. Probably he was remembering his conversation with Tolete.

  “You could throw Alejo out, couldn’t you?” he asked Tolete.

  “Of course. If I didn’t mind breaking my oath and killing a few people.”

  “Well, if you know it, don’t you think he does? And don’t you think it bothers him? You must have realized by now that he can’t bear for anyone else to have any power. Especially not the power to throw him out. He has abolished the constitution and the Chamber and the Court. Don’t you think he will next abolish the Guard?”

  “How the devil can he do that, León? We have all the guns.”

  “He can issue a fourth decree, renaming the Guard the People’s Militia and giving command to the sergeants. Of course, it wouldn’t work because the Tinieblan Civil Guard is different from every other military force in the world, because in the Tinieblan Civil Guard the sergeants love their officers. You have two choices, Aiax. Either admit I’m right today and help me get rid of him, or admit I’m right next week when they put you downstairs.”

  “And if I admit you’re right …”

  “You don’t have to do anything. Just order all your men into the barracks and pay them.”

  Now the Guard, like all government employees, is paid on the first and fifteenth of every month, so the eighth was no payday. But January eighth, 1952, was different because Lucho Gusano and Nacho Hormiga had raised a fund among Los Bichos (who, by the way, were reimbursed with interest from the public treasury before
the year was out) to pay the Guard an extra time. So instead of following Alejo’s orders, Tolete called his men, even the traffic cops at school crossings, back to the barracks and confined them there, and León went back to his office.

  Now for thirty-six hours no guardia was seen on the streets of the capital, but there was no looting or disorder, for Carlitos had organized committees of vigilance. Moreover, all the shops were boarded up and their owners in the streets with placards that read Abajo Alejo. The entire middle class was in the streets, kids and women too, parading peacefully and cheerfully, with only the doctors and nurses putting in their turns at the hospitals, and while the government offices remained open the afternoon of the eighth, they too were closed the next day. Nor were there any disorders, for it was as though everyone in the country had spontaneously decided that he had had enough of Alejo. The third decree had something offensive to everyone. The politicians, even the tinieblistas, were naturally against it, while many of the people who mistrusted politicians had a vague affection for the constitution. And the masses hated to give up elections, which meant barbecues and block parties and free drink and cash handouts at the polls, besides the ritual excitement and competition that sport provides in northern countries. That’s the rational explanation, but perhaps Alejo was right that Tinieblas isn’t a reasonable country, and the people who had been with him now abandoned him, like one of Homer’s gods abandoning a hero, for no particular reason except that his time was up.