by R. M. Koster
Slapped his face. “Need it!” Backhand. “How many poor pubic hairs have you taken with this dodge?” Stroking medium force, forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand, forehand.
“One,” when I’d stopped. “Only one. Only one stinking time. Forty stinking drachmas,” blubbering down his chin. “Not even fifteen dollars, and it costs two hundred to get home.”
“I’m weeping.”
“Sure. You don’t care. You don’t care what happens to me. You didn’t fight those sailors for my sake. You did it for fun, because you ‘felt like it.’”
“So you try to rob me.”
“I have to live.”
“No you don’t.” I dragged him to his feet. “I can throw you out the skylight.”
“Go ahead.” He hung limp on my hands. “Go ahead and kill me. Is that what you ‘feel like’ now?”
I let him drop back into the chair. “You’re not worth the effort.” I turned to put on my shirt.
“I didn’t ask you to help me. I’m stuck in this filthy, stinking hole, and I can’t get home, and the gringos beat me, but I didn’t bother you. But you pushed in anyway, the great fighter, the big macho. And stuffed with money, all you Sancudos. It’s the big crooks who don’t get caught. I never had your chances. I never had a father to steal for me. I have to steal myself, and you tempted me. And you owe it to me anyway. It’s your fault I’m an orphan.”
“My fault!”
“Well, your father’s. The morning I was born my father went down to the cantina to celebrate, and some coffee peons came in yelling revolution and macheted him to death.”
“While he was crawling out the door, no doubt.”
“It’s a big joke to you, but your father was to blame, and you owe me for it.”
“I owe you another kick in the ass.”
“I don’t count what you did to the sailors. You did that for fun. And what good was the drink you bought me? One stinking drink! You didn’t ask what I was doing in this filthy, stinking place. You didn’t offer to help me get home.” Sniveling up at me, the victim, the innocent. “And when I said I’d get you a girl, you, the big macho, assumed it would be for love.”
“You said it was a present.” Why was I arguing, with this clown?
“Did you expect me to ask for money like a pimp? You won’t even leave a man his dignity. You should have left me with the gringos. I didn’t expect anything good from them, but you’re Tinieblan, you should have some feeling. But you only care about yourself. I get you a girl who does everything, a girl worth a hundred drachmas, but the way you are you’d stay all week and not even leave ten or twenty, so I came for my share. Not even my share! Who knows what your family owes me? How much is a father worth? You, strong man, tell me that: how much for a father who would have taken care of me and given me education? But you didn’t give me anything or even promise, so I came for my share and you nearly broke my back and hit my head against the wall and kicked me like a dog. I’d have been better off with the gringos. But if I had your luck, and you had mine, I wouldn’t treat you the way you treat me.”
“Oh, shut up!” bending to tie my shoe with my joint aching from unrequited love. Four in the morning, and all the whores tucked away, and who knew if I’d get a taxi back to Athens or even find my way out of those alleys?
“I wouldn’t treat a dog like that. I wouldn’t hit you. I wouldn’t leave you to rot in a place like this. I wouldn’t do that to someone from my own country. I didn’t grow up in the palace or go to good schools or have a father to give me everything, but I had a mother to teach me how to treat people. Yes, and the decencies of a Christian! We’re poor, but we’re human! You can’t treat us like dogs forever! You’ll see!” Someday things won’t be so easy! and then you’ll …”
“Shut up!” raising my hand, and he stopped, cringing like a kicked mongrel. “Here’s thirty drachmas. Get out and don’t come back!”
“You think …”
I took him by the lapels and lifted him and shook him till his teeth rattled. “Can’t you hear? I said out! And if you try one trick, I’ll throw you through the skylight!”
I let him go, and he bent to scoop the money. “The girl’s worth fifty,” half mumbling with his head turned away, and I thought: Should I break his arm? Shaking him’s no good, but if I snap his arm at the elbow, maybe he’ll understand. “Out,” I said wearily. “Out.” And he shuffled out the door.
I closed it behind him and set a chair against it. Then I pushed off my shoes and walked to the bed unbuttoning my shirt. The girl hadn’t moved. I kicked off my trousers and lay down, and she nodded and knelt and blew out the candle.
And who knocked on the door next day, while I lay with my head under the covers and the girl spooned against my back? Who brushed the door respectfully with his knuckles and then rapped louder and finally called, “Come and open, don’t sleep all day”? Who danced in to stand under the skylight in the Mediterranean winter sun with a fat box in one hand and a flat box in the other? Who grinned like a kid caught playing with himself in the shower and said, “Happy birthday, Kiki”? Yes, yes, Ñato Espino.
His cheeks were puffed and he had a huge hickey on his forehead, but he’d spruced himself up with a clean shirt and a shoeshine. “Sleep well? Ah, ho, I’ll say you did! Not much meat on her,” slapping the girl’s rump and she slouched by on her way around the screen that hid the sink and the bidet pan, “but she knows her trade. I didn’t lie, did I? What she doesn’t do hasn’t been invented. Here, take your present. And you,” calling to the girl, “when you’ve rinsed that thing out, come arrange the cake.”
Yes, yes, he’d brought a cake, less than a handspan in diameter, but a cake nonetheless, and in his pocket two tiny candles. I blew them out sitting up in bed, while he sang “Cumpleaños Feliz,” then I lit them again and sang for him. Then we cut the cake in thirds and breakfasted off it. How could I be angry?
My present was an incredibly cheap necktie which Ñato insisted on windsor-knotting round my bare throat. In the midst of this operation he looked at me, eyes brimmed with liquid vulnerability, and asked, “You forgive me, don’t you, Kiki?” How could I bear a grudge?
Five minutes later, as I was spraying at the sink, it struck me that I’d never had a friend, or ever been a friend in all my life. “You don’t like this place, eh, Ñato?” I called over the screen.
“No, Kiki. This place stinks.”
“Why’d you come then?”
“Well, Kiki, I was steward on a Panamanian flag boat, and I had an argument with the purser, and he fired me.”
“Caught you stealing.”
“Oh, no, Kiki, nothing like that. He was queer, you see, and when I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, he got me fired.”
“Of course.”
“Then I couldn’t get another ship and had to sell my seaman’s papers.”
“And now you want to go home.”
“Yes, Kiki. That’s why, you know, last night, I … There’s a freighter sailing tomorrow for La Guaira and Veracruz with a cargo stop at Bastidas. The passage costs two hundred dollars.”
“Well, it’s time to get you your present.”
And when I was dressed, we went down to Lloyd-Triestino and bought two passages.
Four days out I was seized with a steaming, Near East clap. There was no doctor on board, and by the time we reached Venezuela the bug had galloped up into my prostate gland, where it lurked for months, gobbling wonder drugs like bonbons and spewing out pain and foul drippings.
“That’s the trouble with young whores,” Ñato commiserated. “They don’t know how to take care of themselves.”
“And you!” I howled, shaking myself after my tenth fiery piss of the morning. “What are you so philosophical about? You must be riddled with it!”
“Not me, Kiki. I’m the careful type. I know those young whores. I let her fool with me a few times—she wasn’t bad at it—but I never put my prick in her.”
“Take the card
back. I’ve had this dream before, years ago.”
But the butler is gone, the tennis court is gone, and I lie paralyzed in a hospital bed while Dr. Fasholt shakes his head and sighs and mutters, “Incurable.”
30
I drive along a city street late at night. Two iguana-like lizards are coupling beneath a streetlamp, a large male trying to penetrate a smaller female, who cries like a human child. I stop my car and say to a policeman, a New York policeman, “That’s rape, isn’t it?” He agrees, and we attack the male iguana. I try to club him with a stick, but he escapes. Then I see him covering the female. I worry him with my stick, and he turns his head toward me fiercely without interrupting his thrusts. I continue to prod him until suddenly he breaks off and comes for me. Now he has human form but is still an iguana, naked, hairless, very smooth. He points to my chest and explains my human circulatory system to another iguana whom I cannot see. My chest is made of transparent plastic, and all my veins and arteries, my pumping heart, are visible. I call, “Officer,” and the policeman rushes up and strikes the iguana with his revolver butt, felling him.
“La rabia,” says the Policeman, using, for some reason, the Spanish word for rage or rabies. “It was la rabia.”
On April Fool’s day, 1952, a flunked philosophy student named Vacio disguised himself as a priest and got close enough to the inaugural parade of Apolonio Varón, President of the Republic of Costaguana, to blow Varón, three aides, several bystanders, and himself to meatballs with a nitro bomb. Because Vacio was rumored to he a leftist, conservatives went into the streets to protest. They were joined by liberals, who took Vacio’s cassock for bona fide. There followed six days of bloodletting in the streets of Chuchaganga, culminating in the dictatorship of General Dionisio Huevas Pandilla. Thus began the decade of Costaguanan civil strife known as la rabia.
The Costaguanans, unlike their infinitely more civilized Tinieblan neighbors, are a violent lot, much given to killing, maiming, raping, and plundering each other, but during la rabia they outdid themselves, abandoning peaceful drudge entirely for racy games of murder and thus placing grave demands on the manufacturers and suppliers of weapons. Fortunately the Korean War was crunching toward stalemate and industrialists in New England, Brussels, and Prague were alert to the emergence of fresh markets. General Huevas never wanted for the instruments of repression, and a number of hardy and imaginative entrepreneurs came forward to furnish the instruments of rebellion (or revenge, or recreation) to those cash-bearing Costaguanans who did not care for the general or who, free of political obsessions, saw in the turmoil of the times a chance to even old scores or enjoy new amusements. (Among these last was the so-called corbata, or “necktie,” practiced largely, but not exclusively, on the passengers of busses held up on rural highways, which involved slicing the throat with razor or well-honed knife and pulling the tongue through so that it blobbed like a garish and truncated cravat, and which became so fashionable that at least a dozen backland warlords called themselves “El Corbatero.”) So la rabia proceeded with reasonable technological efficiency and petered out not from any lack of arms but rather from an increasing shortage of Costaguanans to bear them.
Besides feelings of satisfaction in helping Costaguanans exercise their national bent, the gun business also generated profit. Most of this went to the big companies who supplied General Huevas, directly through cash sales or indirectly through the United States foreign aid program, but a substantial dribble remained for the independent merchant who was willing to risk capital, freedom, and skin to distribute death evenly about the country. Profit and risk attracted me, but risk more than profit, the hope of rekindling the glow I’d felt on board the Higgins boat with Duncan, and I took my friend Ñato Espino as a minor partner, though all he could put up was companionship and guffaw-spawning attempts to justify our enterprise morally.
“Well, Kiki,” he said when I told him what I’d heard about the demand for weapons across the border from Selva Trópica. “Those animals are going to kill each other no matter what we do. If we don’t sell them guns, someone else will. And the common man has to defend himself. It isn’t right that General Huevas should have all the guns.”
“Jerk!” laughing. “We’ll get shot if we’re caught and make money if we aren’t, and right and wrong has nothing to do with it.”
“That’s fine for you, Kiki. You don’t believe in those things. But my mother taught me …”
“To be a hypocrite!”
“Make fun if you like, Kiki, but I’m more decent than you think.”
This is my room at the Pensión Pizarro, some weeks after we returned to Tinieblas. We landed at Bastidas on the last day of 1952, which was also the last day of Alejo’s impeachment. The Chamber voted articles against him the day they convened, between the inauguration of Pastor Alemán and a resolution to recall the Korea battalion, and as my previous return had come on the day of his arrest, this latest one fell on the day of his conviction.
Alejo’s enemies had, of course, to do something about him; he was more than just another political opponent whom one could hope to defeat or buy off. Some foreign observers, however, considered it superfluous to impeach a President who had already been deposed, jailed, and succeeded, and suggested that it would be more rational—if Alejo had to be judged and muzzled—to try him in a normal court. But genius always operates irrationally, or rather according to a higher reason of its own, and it was genius, in the person of Humberto Ladilla, that conceived the impeachment. The Tinieblan Constitution provides that the Chamber may, on the vote of two-thirds of its full membership, establish itself as a tribunal for the impeachment of public officials, and that the impeached, if convicted, must pay the costs of the proceedings; and as Shakespeare wrung fantastic music out of the blind blunderings of history, so Ladilla turned these trite articles into a fount of cash. If the Chamber became a court, he argued, then deputies would be transformed into judges—no ordinary judges either, judges at least the equal of justices of the Supreme Court, and the salary of a Supreme Court justice was seventeen hundred inchados a month. More, judges needed clerks and secretaries, and courts must have bailiffs and stenographers and clerks and secretaries of its own, and these were responsible posts which called for decent salaries and which, by the way, might well be filled by people close to the deputies, as it was perfectly possible for a deputy to have a nephew learned in the law or a protégée who knew shorthand. And a court had to proceed deliberately, especially in so serious a matter as the impeachment of a president, so all appointments, and their salaries, could be expected to continue for many months—at no cost to the republic either, since who could doubt that Alejo was guilty and would be convicted? Thus the Chamber voted unanimously to impeach and proceeded with great industry, sparing no expense, to hire staff and make investigations and draft charges and prepare briefs.
Meanwhile Alejo prowled his cage, alone with his thoughts and the matinal excretions of Major Azote. The prison emptied after Pastor Alemán’s inauguration to fill again, its upper floors at least, with common criminals. Alfonso emerged badly shaken—all day and in his dreams he heard his telephone ringing, ringing; the plaintive mewings of the stewardesses who’d rung in vain while he was inside—and went back to Harvard for a law degree. Furetto went to Argentina where he had relatives; Gonzalo Garbanzo, to live with a daughter in Miami. So Alejo had not even the comfort of feeling his durance shared, and his only contact with the world came in brief visits with his defense counsel, Uncle Erasmo, who had been elbowed off the Supreme Court and whose newspapers had been padlocked pending conclusion of the impeachment. True, one morning as he unzipped before Alejo’s window, Major Dorindo Azote was sure he heard the deposed chief magistrate conversing warmly with someone who spoke Spanish in gluey teutonic snorts, but when the major repantsed and bent to investigate, all he could see in the cell, besides Alejo, was a plump gray rat, who looked up at him contemptuously for a moment before waddling out through a gnawhole in the door. Th
e only logical explanation was that Alejo had gone round the bend at last and was not merely talking to himself—a common affliction among prisoners in solitary confinement—but orchestrating other voices out of his memory and pain.
The trial of Alejandro Sancudo opened on December 10th with the Chamber newly redecorated for the occasion and the deputies gowned in black silk robes made to measure by a London tailor. Preparations had lasted more than six months, and Ladilla predicted that it would take at least another six to hear the case, given each deputy’s right to cross-examine witnesses. What with the sale of gallery seats and of commercial time during radio coverage, there was good prospect of making the impeachment the leading industry of Tinieblas. Half a day was consumed in calling the roll of the tribunal, the clerk pausing after each name while the radio touted soap flakes and Cortez Beer to an attentive nation, and Alejo, wedged between two guards, licked flecks of foam from bared canines. Another four days went in reading the charges, during which more sponsors were rounded up and Ladilla made downpayment on a villa at Antibes. But on the afternoon of the fifth day, when Alejo was asked to plead, Uncle Erasmo said simply, “Nolo contendere.” All Ladilla could do was order two weeks’ recess to consider sentence (and finish out the month). On the last day of the year Alejo was found guilty, sentenced to one year in prison (suspended, since he had already spent eleven months and twenty days in La Bondadosa) and ordered to pay costs, which amounted to just under three-quarters of a million inchados.
The figure caused a certain preening of buzzard feathers in Tinieblan financial circles: the coffee finca, La Yegua, and Medusa Beach might be available at bargain prices. But Alejo paid with a draft on his Panamanian bank and left at once for Europe. During a plane change at San Juan he found himself face to face with León Fuertes in a waiting room for in-transit passengers, and León, who was not fainthearted and who alone among the deputies had given his judge’s salary to San Bruno Hospital (arguing that it was one thing to bleed Alejo, another to gorge oneself), offered his hand. Alejo stared for a moment—the year in prison had begun the transformation of his face into a death’s-head—then took the hand. “Yes, young man,” glaring with bronze eyes. “You are audacious. And interested in power, not in money. But for you I would still be President. But I bear you no enmity. I will be President again. Not even the Chamber of Deputies can alter destiny. And you too deserve a better fatherland. You too have an interesting fate.”