by R. M. Koster
“That’s right.” And she kisses my mouth, so sweet it aches. Sea spray trickling my cheek, and she kisses it away. “Gia, caro.”
“Sorry. See why I shouldn’t let you? See how it gets me?”
Brushes my eyes with her lips. “It isn’t weakness, Kiki.”
“No. I guess not. But I have to keep control.”
“Give in, Kiki. Give in.” And she holds me to her lovely breasts.
Where it would be nice to stay forever, sniffling quietly. While she licks my scars with kind fingers. And thinks what? God knows. That I’m the child we waited too long to have? Or a warrior to give repose? Who is she now? No matter, as vague fingers creep along my flank to play among my dead flowers. Dead, dead, and I mourn them sobbing.
Which brings a kind of peace, after all, once it passes. Ride with the current for a while at last and let it draw me down to a dark grotto where there are no monsters. Soft and warm here. Close and protective. Salt-moist and safe.
And, holding me, she carries my hand to her like a child. Not lustful, just to have me there. And let me taste the warm yolk of life again. Which can’t be synthesized or faked.
“It’s not so bad, Elena.”
‘No, Kiki.”
“I’ve learned some things.”
“Yes, Kiki.”
“And there are still good things, aren’t there?”
“Yes, Kiki. Yes.”
Soft and warm here. Safe and sea-moist. Melting into sleep.
28
Mito and I walk hand in hand across the bridge, the silver-painted, steel-girdered, one-lane bridge that reaches forty yards over the river at La Yegua. Mito is still only seven, still frail with all his ribs showing and his shoulder blades pushing out like wings, yet I am my full age, thirty-nine, and no longer paralyzed. No time to puzzle this through, for the asphalt is hot under our bare feet, and we begin to trot, Mito holding my two little fingers, toward the far end of the bridge, where a cloud of purple and yellow butterflies floats through the wild acacias. He’s going to swim the river today without a life preserver, and I’ll scull backward in front of him to keep his fear down. We’ll start under the bridge and let the current help us toward the shallows below the house, because it’s something I promised him long ago when he was also seven but I not yet thirty. And broke the promise to make some trip or slay in the capital with some girl, and has choked voice told me on the telephone he wanted to make the swim with me, not Jaime. But all that’s wiped away now, and he’s waited for me.
“And after you swim the river,” I tell him, “we’ll take Mamá and Olguita to the fair in Angostura.”
“Can I ride in front, Papi?”
“Of course. Men in front, women in back.”
And he looks up at me with Olga’s timid smile.
Dry wind rolling off the pastures to flick our suits. A hundred yards upstream to our right, two peons on horseback are fording a dozen dusty cows, and the beasts stand thigh-deep, lapping the cool water. Be in it soon, Mito and I, yet the far end of the bridge recedes before us.
And now we are no longer on the bridge above the river but in the bottom of a jungled trail, and the butterflies are no longer butterflies but brown mosquitoes, and not ahead, all around us, and we are no longer running because the ground sucks at our feet, and no wind blows, and it is all sticky heat and the sweet-foul smell of decay, and we are nowhere near La Yegua but on Fangosa Island.
Two or three days after I was put back in prison, three or four days after Alejo fell from power, a leash of guards, led by Lieutenant Narses Puñete, the assistant warden, and accompanied by the newly liberated Dutch zionist, sniffed through our cell for Doktor Henker and, finally, made us file out into the corridor one by one, even Egon, whom Gunther had to lift down from his slab, while they checked our faces against a photo marked “BEWEISMITTEL #4140, NÜRNBURG,” and, still not finding him, searched all the other cells and even the coffins. Then the arresting officer was summoned from Angostura, and when he maintained that Doktor Henker had not been in the car with Alejo, that there had been Gunther and Egon in front, Alejo and Furetto in back, and with them only a large black poodle with yellow eyes who had bounded across Alejo’s lap and out the car window, Colonel Aiax Tolete issued orders that all alejistas would remain confined until after the elections.
These were being organized under the stewardship of Belisario Oruga, whom León Fuertes, who was sensitive to constitutional niceties, had urged to return to Tinieblas and assume the presidential sash. Whether much urging was actually necessary is doubtful. Oruga was a Tinieblan after all, and your legitimate Tinieblan seeks the Presidential Palace as water does its own level. More, this charter member of Acción Dinámica who had had a brother wounded in the coup of November, 1930, this Captain General of the Vanguardia Tinieblina and founder of the Tinieblista Party, was finally disenchanted with Alejo.
“He played me for a sucker,” Oruga remarked to Uncle Erasmo. “And to think I loaned him Babieca, whom no man but me had ever rode, for his triumphant entry into the city.”
The nineteen opposition parties sprang up fully armed from the earth where Alejo had planted them, and in the space of two weeks León and Carlitos Gavilán organized a new one, the Progresista, and announced their candidacies for deputy and declared their support for the Liberal Party’s nominee, Pacífico Pastor Alemán. Only the Tinieblista Party, most of whose leaders were in jail, remained inactive, while all candidates campaigned on the platform of democracy for Tinieblas and a complete political gelding for Alejandro Sancudo. León and Carlitos proposed he be tried for lèse-constitutionalité; Father Benigno Pan de Dulce, running for councilman on the Conservative ticket, favored prosecution under a seventeenth-century witchcraft statute devised by the Holy Inquisition; all agreed he should be firmly chastised.
Colonel Tolete’s decision to detain all alejistas no doubt contributed to the tranquility of the elections, but it posed certain logistical problems which had clearly never occurred to the architect of La Bondadosa Prison. Besides Alejo’s family, close advisers, and conspicuous sycophants, Tolete had jailed all the important members of the Tinieblista Party, including twenty-seven deputies and three hundred forty-two councilmen, ward leaders, and bosses, all the delegates to the Tinieblist People’s Congress, the members of the Commissions on Social and Political Abuses, persons remarked cheering with particular enthusiasm at the gymnasium trial, most of the students involved in the Miramar demonstration, and the entire complement of the Policia Secreta, so that every cell, except the one where Alejo languished incommunicado, was filled to bursting and prisoners were asking to be put in the coffins to get some elbow room. Thus as election day was still months away it was decided to send the excess prisoners to the penal colony on Fangosa Island. The leading agitators of the Congress, the most refractory of the students, and the toughest of Gonzalo Garbanzo’s secret policemen were culled from their cells for shipment.
In normal times only the most demonic criminals were sent to Fangosa, for the climate of the place was such that few inmates ever remained a burden to the state for long. In fact judge Arquimedes Malsano—known for his witty remarks when passing sentence—was wont to amuse convicted murderers with the smiled whisper, “I’m giving you the shortest sentence in Tinieblan law: life on Fangosa,” and it was a rare fellow indeed who was not free of all earthly durance within a year or two. But when Puñete’s guards came for Gunther and Egon, I asked to be taken too.
“You’re crazy, Kiki!” said Puñete when they brought me to his office. He’d been a class ahead of me at the Politécnico and a fellow officer of Young Patriots. “If the guards hit you on the head the night you were brought in, I’ll have them restricted. You don’t want to go to Fangosa.”
“Yes, I do. I have to get back in shape, and there’s no room in here to work out.”
“Look, Kiki. We know you didn’t get along with your father. We just have to keep you inside for form. In a day or two, when we’ve shipped these pigs o
ut, I’ll speak to the colonel and get you a soft spot.”
“That’s the trouble. Things have been too soft. If you don’t want to send me now, how would you feel if I knocked out a couple of your front teeth?”
So he shrugged and had me handcuffed to one of the students and shoved onto a truck.
We went in convoy, five U.S. Army surplus six-by-six trucks, forty prisoners to a truck, through Tinieblas and Salinas and Tuquetá Provinces to the port of Bastidas, where we were loaded on an LST which the U.S. Navy had given to the Guardia during Lucho Gusano’s Administration, and then southeast along the coast, which we couldn’t see since it was after dark when we boarded. But in the morning there was the low green hedge of jungle stretched away to our right and the sun, glazed by sickly clouds, and the sea, oily and metallic, smoothing the wake a hundred feet astern, so that without the throbbing of the engines we might have thought the ship bolted to the bottom. In mid-afternoon a green blot appeared on the horizon ahead of us. It grew prodigiously, and in twenty minutes we could make out mangrove thickets growing down to the water’s edge and a flotilla of sharks swimming in single file clockwise around the island a few hundred yards offshore. We fell in with them and chugged around toward the south end of the island. The bulbous north end was umbrellaed in gigantic clouds, which, every five minutes or so, let down tons of rain like a celestial interrogator training a high-pressure hose on an already unconscious victim. Then the sun would burn through, raising great wraiths of steam from the expiring jungle. It was like being translated back into a carboniferous age, when the planet was swathed in plant life and not yet so tame as to permit the habitation of men and beasts.
On the south end of the island was a high bluff graced with palms and laved by an Atlantic breeze that cooled the air and swept the midges and mosquitoes toward the invisible coast. Here no rain fell, except perhaps a fragrant shower at dawn, and here the guards lived, and the homosexuals, for anyone who would renounce his manhood was pardoned from the dank swamp to the north and given light work, tending the maize and yucca which, along with fish, made up the diet of the colony. Here also, atop a towering cliff, was the house of the governor, who had been appointed by Ramiro Aguado in 1912 and reappointed ever since and who now, four decades later, was polishing the ninth volume of his great treatise on Sexual Inversion: Key to the Purification of the Criminal Soul. But we didn’t climb the bluff. We waited on the sand where the LST dropped her ramp until our heads were counted and our names taken and our irons removed. Then they marched us along a narrowing path north into the swampland.
As we moved toward the interior of the island, a fetid breath rose about us, magnifying the odor of our sweating bodies and the pervasive ambiance of decay. Soon we were among huge twisted trees, whose branches, twined with vines and brambles, reached out to drop new sets of roots into the quivering earth and whose top leaves filtered the light, admitting hot rain and the softer fall of bloated leeches. No birdsong here, nor any sound save the panting of our lungs and the greasy smack of mud sucking at our footwear. After we had marched about nine miles, we came upon a clearing, all stinking mud and pools of stagnant water, with a double circle of huts squatting around a kitchen tent where a congregation of ulcered skeletons were queuing up to eat. Here we got maize mush in wooden bowls and one or two tiny pieces of fish, and here we slept on mud-soaked straw to the D-minor hum of mosquitoes, and at dawn we went to work on the road.
The road ran in a circle, five miles in radius, around the camp. We had crossed it along our march, without noticing anything, however, for that section of it was badly overgrown. It overgrew, in fact, much faster than it was built, though, as it led nowhere and there were no vehicles to drive on it, this was hardly a disadvantage. A practiced eye might note where secondary growth revealed the route along which long-dead prisoners had hacked and heaved, but as it took a year for the work gangs, laboring only with machetes, to make one revolution, there was never any chance of its being finished. A number of paint-blazed trails led to it from the camp like spokes of an immense wheel, and each morning we were marched out along one of these to sweat all day, hewing away trees and roots, dragging off fallen logs, feeling, if not actually seeing the jungle seep in behind us to obliterate the progress we had made the day before.
No effort was made to keep us in the camp at night. At sundown the guards departed for their barracks and their handmaidens, and anyone who cared to might wander off into the jungle. The man not present for work simply did not eat. There were those—new arrivals—who talked of making rafts and of escape, while old hands nodded with wan smiles. Egon and Gunther thought of this at once, and every night for weeks they slunk away to a part of the shore where they were building a raft of branches lashed together with vines. But when they launched it, it sank like stone, as did the second craft they made, and a third, until one evening they complained of their bad luck, and a wasted parricide, then on the fourth and last year of his life sentence, remarked with a gap-toothed grin, that, though he’d hunted for months, he’d never found a stick of wood from that island which would float. At night the long-term convicts, some no older than myself, though they looked already aged, told us how so-and-so had gone mad and tried to swim for mainland, or how someone else had turned upon a fellow prisoner, or a guard, and killed him with his machete, to be rifle-butted to death on the spot and buried in the mud, and such stories seemed at first fantastical, for the men around me looked so beaten down under the endless rain in that foul heat that they seemed incapable of that much defiance. Yet each man there was holding on to his integrity with an iron grip, for he had but to wink to be lifted from that hell to what appeared at times a kind of paradise.
On one Saturday each month work ceased at noon, and we were marched back to camp and made to tidy up as best we could, and then, an hour or two before dusk, marched south out of the swamp. Halfway up the bluff there was a terrace with a large pavilion where we were allowed to sit and were given a kind of liquor made from coconut milk. And in the fresh glow of early evening the homosexuals came down to entertain us, dressed like women and perfumed and painted. A thin, mocha-skinned negro in an evening gown sang love songs to us, accompanying himself on a guitar, and in between his songs a phonograph played the old boleros, and soft, feline inverts led men out to dance or nestled on their laps to lick their bearded checks. “Why go back to the swamp,” they asked us softly, “when you can stay here with us? Why choose death over love?” And each month there were men who wandered out into the darkness with these synthetic women, and these men were never with us on our long night march back to camp, but the next month would be found, barely recognizable, among the queers. And all were so gentle and submissive that it was hard to believe that they had once been men, violent men who had murdered and robbed and maimed.
Yet there were many who remained in the swamp, who, in effect, chose death, for most men weakened quickly and took fever, and those unable to work received no food. It was impossible to predict who would resist. On my first visit to the pavilion I was shown a famous bandit, author of many cold-blooded murders, who had been converted after only two weeks on Fangosa, while the senior member of our road gang, who had served nine years when I arrived, was a printer’s helper who had killed his young wife, more or less accidentally in a fit of rage, and was really not a criminal at all. Our group was exceptional in that we were political prisoners who could expect to be released in a few months, yet nearly a quarter of our number converted. We would be sitting at the pavilion, listening to the music, and some fellow would whisper, “I’m going to get a little piece of that bugger over there, just to see if my tool still works,” and he would slink off with his partner, not to be seen for another month, when we would find him mincing about the pavilion in a kimono or sarong. Those who used the homosexuals invariable joined them. Some said that they knew pleasures it was impossible to abandon once one had tasted them; and others, when the prospective convert was drained, guards would rape the self-respe
ct out of him; and others, that the true seduction was a day or two off from road work in the swamp, which vacation would be extended subtly until the fellow was ready to do anything rather than return. And, of course, everyone knew there was no need to suffer and die in that swamp, that all one had to do was change sex to gain a long life of comparative luxury, so that a fair portion of the converts were not seduced at all but came stumbling out of their huts into the morning rain to beg the guards to take them up the hill.
Yet many stayed, sullen or blaspheming, bitten by insects, made crazy by the heat, while their flesh turned yellow-green with rot and their bodies shook with fever and the road inched endlessly into the jungle, drawing its tail up after it like a snake; and I, of course, stayed with them. But of all those on the island only I, besides the governor, was there of my own will; he in service to the science of criminology and his own private madness, I in search of a physical challenge to return me to myself, and while others dropped fainting in the mud or simply wasted like lumps of lard melting in a skillet, I thrived. No insects bit me. No leeches battened between my toes. They smelled bad blood before they tasted it and went to feed on riper victims. The fat of a too easy life dropped off me in great gouts; my arms grew hard again swinging a machete and hauling logs. And while others twitched in agued nightmare on their damp straw, I slept soundly and woke fresh to each dawn.
The great complaint, that our work was pointless, that the jungle lapped up our road faster than we built it, that there was no use for the road anyway, that it led nowhere, did not affect me. I might have been happier in some northern gym with a set of barbells and a school of clever wrestling sparrers, but the road was good enough, it served. I might have learned then that no road leads anywhere, that nothing is ever accomplished, that disorder always grows faster than we can beat it back, that no project is valuable except for the exercise we get working at it. Fangosa might have taught me that before Ñato did. Some men learned and despaired; others learned and kept on working. But I still wasn’t ready to learn. I cast my mind ahead to the Olympics, not to the triple pillar where ribboned victors drink the crowd’s applause, but to the feel of some proud champion weakening in my grasp. I sucked strength from the swamp and grew lean and dangerous. And harvested pride from sterile marshes. And nursed a stern contempt for the guards, for the inverts on the hill, for prisoners who shirked or whimpered or anguished for dead friends or distant families, for those who fell behind on march or fainted in the mangroves, even for those who died stoically (since death announced weakness), and, specially, for everyone who sheltered on the terra firma of an easy life, avoiding hardship, fleeing pain and risk, crouching their shriveled souls into a place of safety. And when I left Fangosa, I took that contempt with me. I took it out of the swamp, marching with Gunther and Egon at the very tail of the column, for it turned our stomachs to see the feeble push and shove that others made to get a place in front; and onto the LST (returning loaded for the first time, though not full, for men had died and the converts had chosen to stay in their earthly paradise); and to the capital, and to Panama, where I emptied my safe deposit box, and on to Helsinki, and kept it fifteen years, till the people of Tinieblas leached it from me.