by R. M. Koster
And recover from my scare. Siesta dreams run a bit wilder than those at night, but today’s were excessive. Nice to be with Mito at La Yegua though. And I enjoyed my vision of the sea. Marvelous expansive feeling; peace and fulfillment to balance that horrid fear.
I never dreamed before, or if I did I was never conscious of it. And I dealt with waking fears by diving into them, so I never got pinned down in abject quivering. Action’s the antidote if you can manage it. A Costaguanan captain whom Bronteo Culón ordered shot insisted on commanding his firing squad. Stood on the lip of his grave and bellowed the orders in a parade-ground roar. By the time he got to “Fire,” his pants were soaked dark from thigh to knee, and there was some discussion afterward, while the next man was being brought out as to whether or not he’d been a coward. The consensus was not to condemn his heart for his bladder’s insubordination. He’d stayed on his feet, after all, and kept control of his vocal chords. The dark stain took something from the dignity of his raised chin, but his voice didn’t break and he spaced the orders evenly. No doubt he’d commanded firing squads before. Surely the practice helped. But, on balance, he’d managed to translate fear into orderly action.
In contrast I performed shamefully in my last dream, calling a policeman to protect me from Iguanaman, fearing he might not be bound, dragging the soul of a cripple into a world where, for a moment at least, I was sound. Which is the mirror image of what I try to do waking: face a world where I am paralyzed with the responses of a healthy beast of prey.
That’s what I was at twenty-three, a robust predator, a master-piece of natural selection cased in horn and crafted for the jungles that I prowled. Then I caught love like malaria, or developed it like blood cancer, or declined into it like dementia praecox, and languished for four years, and never fully recovered since the disease crumbled the armor round my heart and left it vulnerable to human feeling. Without which weakness I’d be prowling still. At least I see a connection between my love for Olga and the conversion which possessed me during my campaign. Maybe it’s just the fool’s gold which will trick a novice prospector who pans for meaning in his life—what else have I to do while trapped here like a bug in amber?—but I don’t think I’d have denied Ñato his big chance if I’d never suffered love. So should I curse Olga or thank her?
Olga Luciérnaga Tristealegre was Queen of the Club Mercantil at Carnival in 1954 and rode in on the poop of a Persian pleasure barge under a canopy of purple velvet. She was attended by twenty Saracen knights with scimitars and spiked helmets and twenty slave girls in gossamer silk trousers and gold breast plates, while her father, Don Edmundo Luciérnaga, sat enthroned beside her like Harun al-Rashid. A doctor in the etiology of love might decide whether I was stricken at that moment or whether I infected myself later on with I-love-yours spread in hope of getting her to bed. In any case, within a week I was mortally afflicted, incapable of cogent thought, forgetful of my business, and useless to myself and everyone else, except headwaiters, shopkeepers, and florists. And, worst of all, I was delighted with my state.
In all the world there were never two people so mismatched as Olga and I. She was lovely and delicate, like one of the magnificent butterflies which grace our forests for a few days after the rains and which the indians call Flowers of the Wind. She played Chopin and Schumann, bending in the swollen gloom of evening while slow rhythms rippled her dark hair. She painted in watercolor, grave children wreathed in garlands, and wrote verses in the romantic style of Gustavo Adolfo Bequer. Withal, she feared and hated violence, and not simply violence—which was a thing so foreign to her life as to be mainly an abstraction to her—but any roughness, any harsh word or brusqueness of behavior. And I was a death-seller, a killer by proxy and, lately, by my own hand. Olga heard violence chuckle in my throat, felt violence balled in my shoulders when she danced with me, tasted violence on my lips when I kissed her, saw violence in my eyes when she drew her lips away. My violent gaiety sang out on street corners while passers-by gaped; my violent generosity swept bucketfuls of anemones into her arms; my violent declarations—“I love you, Olga. Do you understand? I love you!”—rasped her ears like threats. And so she fled, and so I pursued.
I abandoned my affairs to remain near her. I sought out an old negro woman renowned for her skill at concocting love spells and potions, and for a month was at pains to bring her locks of Olga’s hair, nail parings, and scraps of her clothing. And when this magic failed, I disguised myself as a man of Olga’s liking, a docile man who followed her about like a tame leopard, mewing softly and bending liquid eyes, a gentle man who brought her one rose instead of three dozen, a steady man, strong yet not violent. I paid her court, I hovered in attendance, and, treating her as though the Carnival had never ended and she were still a queen, I won her to me.
On the evening of our wedding, at the very instant I took Olga for the first time, a great clap of thunder split the sky above the city. We scarcely heard it then, but later on we both remembered.
32
Many years later, at the Paris première of Weber’s Faust, I had to remember the remote evening when I promised Olga I would make her happy. It was late on our wedding night, and the world was still quite simple, being composed of two chests and three mouths and located in the center of an equally simple universe, our lately virgin double bed.
“I’m afraid, Kiki.”
“Of what?” holding her gently.
“Of being married. Of you. Of everything.”
“Don’t be afraid,” as if that softly kissed command compelled obedience. “I love you,” as if that were an infallible incantation.
“I’ll make you happy.”
I had to remember that moment when I watched Mephistopheles make his pitch to Faust. I wasn’t pleased with the movie. I considered movies—and all art, for that matter—grossly inferior substitutes for life and went freely only to the ones Elena played in, while this movie was the child of a posturing, lizard-smiled Teuton who not only had been one of Elena’s early loves (a minor annoyance) but who spoke condescendingly to me in the lobby. I knew the Faust story only by hearsay and, having small German, was condemned to bifocal glimpses at the French subtitles, but despite all these impediments the bargain scene caught my interest. Mephistopheles romped in wearing the kind of gown you can still see on student street-singers in Madrid. He looked ages younger and worlds healthier than fusty Faust (played priggishly by Weber), directed his spirit scene with great panache, and got so charmed by his own spectaculars, so conned by his own enthusiasm, that he made a poor deal. He promised to make Faust happy. He would get Faust’s soul when, and only when, Faust acknowledged the promise fulfilled. After that I watched sympathetically as poor Mephisto, stupid Mephisto, overconfident Mephisto wracked his brain and sapped his powers trying to make Faust happy. He tried everything, even raised the dead, yet Faust remained depressed. Only through trickery did he at last get Faust to confess a moment’s happiness—one could hardly say he’d kept his promise or triumphed or made a smart bargain—and at the end of the movie Faust saved his soul anyway. All Mephisto’s energy and art served for nothing. By the end he was too exhausted even to feel bitter.
It might have been the story of my marriage to Olga, the early years anyway. When I promised to make her happy, it didn’t seem a particularly difficult task. I loved her; I married her; I gave her my name. I planned to be faithful to her and, since other women no longer attracted me, saw no reason why I couldn’t keep planning. I had plenty of money and no project in my life beyond her. Of course I’d make her happy. How could she fail to be happy when I, Kiki Sancudo, loved her to distraction? And to make sure, I went back to my negress witch and bought a small steel noose which fitted around my testicles and was arranged to tighten, reminding me of my promise, when Olga was unhappy. Olga didn’t demand this, though other women bought such nooses and slipped them on their husbands while they slept. I volunteered it, and Olga didn’t even have to pull: the noose tightened magically whene
ver she whimpered or otherwise expressed unhappiness.
Olga didn’t want to be separated from me, even for a few days, so I retired completely from the gun trade. I didn’t think twice about it, for it is wondrous the way a man can alter his life-style when his testicles are in a steel noose. Even before the noose tightened, I realized I didn’t want to be separated from Olga either and that I was weary of those trips to Costaguana. Ñato hadn’t the stomach for solo trade in arms and switched to drugs, mainly cocaine from Peru; Jaime returned to his tribe and founded a harem. We made a farewell safari through the rattier dockside cantinas from which I returned quite late to Queen Olga’s reproaches: I knew she couldn’t sleep when I was absent; I’d promised to make her happy, and instead I’d hurt her. My little steel noose tightened perceptibly, but, being drunk, I fought against it. I read her, in a voice that may have waked a few light-sleeping neighbors, from the masculine bill of rights, a broad statute which has been repealed in many parts of North America and Europe but which retains the force of Holy Writ south of the Rio Grande. She grew sad, the noose tightened, and I, feeling its bite, shouted louder. When Olga began to cry, the noose jerked tight. Blind with pain, I begged forgiveness. A certain space of agony endured before she stopped sniffling and embraced me, but at that instant the noose went slack. I swept her into my arms and told her not to worry, I’d take care of her. And so I did. And so I did.
Olga didn’t want to stay in Tinieblas, so we went to Europe. Again, even before the noose grew tight I decided that I ought to finish my education, take a degree, and establish myself in a respectable profession. My Yale record would be available to American universities, and so I had better go to Europe, which just happened to be Olga’s preference.
Olga didn’t like planes, so we went by boat, Galactic Fruit steamer to New York, French Line to Le Havre. I realized suddenly that I too craved the leisured luxury of ocean travel, that my caged beast’s anguish on the voyage from Piraeus had sprung from having only Ñato for company, that Olga was right: I ought to learn to relax. I realized this before the noose even twitched. I must confess to a certain glee when a marvelous tempest engulfed us off Newfoundland. It tossed the giant liner like a nut and emptied deck and dining room of all but the hardiest. Up on the spray-swept sundeck, plunged in the shrieking wind, I forgot the soft trappings of the salons and could recall the stress of life. Olga was cruelly sick, of course, but it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could do about it, and so my noose stayed slack.
On the second day, as I was working my way like an alpinist along the felt-covered ropes strung about the first-class lobby, a tremendous wave caught the ship broadside and hurled it almost on its beam. I was flung off my hold against a corner of the purser’s desk. Nothing grave, but the blow hurt more than Memo’s bullets, and later, when I was changing in our stateroom, I noticed a great blue bruise spread all across my left shoulder. It was then that I realized that the inner sheath secreted during my trade in Costaguana had melted and that I was, if anything, softer than before. That’s Olga’s fault, I thought resentfully, but I didn’t add my complaints to her sufferings. I had a promise to honor.
I wanted to honor it. I performed heroic labors even without my noose’s proddings, as when Olga had Mito by Caesarean and I took a double room at Geneva Hospital and stayed with her night and day for a week. But often, either from negligence or perversity, I would muff a detail. Sometimes I lingered after class; sometimes I taunted her about her fears. Then she would suffer and my noose would pinch. An apology and some affection would soothe her suffering and slacken my noose. As time passed, however, she developed a resistance to this treatment, needed larger doses, took longer to respond. And I didn’t always apply it immediately. Often I raged against my noose, though I knew very well this only made it tighter. Sometimes it drew narrow as a needle’s eye before I yielded to the pain; sometimes I forgot the pain entirely in my fury. At such moments I could cause a lot of damage. I recall an oak bedroom door which I reduced to toothpicks when Olga sought shelter behind it during one of my fits. Once or twice, to my eternal shame, I hit her—not hard, not with my full strength, but that’s small defense. Usually I merely terrified her by destroying the unwary objects that strayed into my path or by injuring myself. I found that pummeling my temples distracted me from the noose’s torture and brought a transitory peace, and during the first years of my marriage I took more punishment than in all my wrestling career. Later, of course, my head would echo the noose’s torments, and I would feel remorse, but a man can’t be held responsible for the wild things he may do when there’s a steel noose around his testicles. And what right had I to complain about it? I’d put it there myself.
I wore the noose three years nine months and twenty days, not because I was unable to remove it (though removing it was difficult, for the flesh grew around it, covering it completely), but because wearing it transformed marriage into a contest involving risk. I hadn’t lost my appetite for action, I’d merely pushed it down. It popped up again right away and started munching on my marriage. My task was to make Olga happy; Olga herself was the opponent who made the game difficult and, hence, worth playing; the noose provided the vital element of risk: when I failed, I suffered. Olga didn’t urge me to take the noose off, for it gave her a measure of control, but there were many times when she was willing to quit entirely. She wanted to be protected, and whatever peace I might weave about her in the morning I was likely to unravel into fear at night. Even while she was carrying Mito she said she wanted to leave me. That was after the First Battle of Geneva, which left our apartment ravaged as by Goths. What did she mean, leave me? I shook my bruised head and eyed the wounded furniture. Why would she want to leave? What amazes me now is that I persuaded her to stay. Olga said later that I did so out of stubbornness, and I imagine that was part of it. And vanity: Kiki Sancudo wasn’t the sort whose wife walked out on him. And devotion to the game, which was my only source of action. And fascination with Olga as a woman and as a challenge. My love for her was compounded of these elements, and if I wasn’t clever enough to make her happy, I was at least strong enough to make her stay. Even if it killed us. No matter how much we both suffered.
The Second Battle of Geneva (there were numerous intermediate skirmishes) took place the following spring with little Mito as terrified civilian spectator. Again Olga wanted to leave; again I persuaded her to stay. I proposed a fresh start, a change of scene, and we left Geneva (without my taking any exams) for Padua. En route we fought the Battle of the Milan-Verona Road, in which I won another Pyrrhic victory, quelling Olga’s reproaches by pushing our Citroën past ninety and nearly destroying us all. But why recall these horrors? Our life was knitted out of pain and fear and anger. And love. The stout yarn of mottled love bound us and our dark emotions together.
It is good exercise for me to conjure the ghosts of peaceful evenings in the richly hung, high-ceilinged flat which an impoverished count carved from his palazzo. Sleet scourges the windowpane. Olga and Mito are asleep, he cocooned in soft blankets, she bunched beside me, her face cleansed of fear and sadness, and I have put aside my law text to nibble in Guicciardini. I close my eyes and roll a savory nougat of treachery and violence around in my mind. Tomorrow Olga and I will go back to grinding our unmatched hearts against each other, but for the moment all is serene while I nurse myself on the adventures of historical personages. The zoo panther recalls his jungle in the butchered meat thrown into his cage; dissolves the bars in dreams of future kills; is briefly absolved from paranoid pacing and the urge to maul his keeper.
Or let me recall the mornings of Olga’s visits to Dr. Demenzella, for just two years after our first meeting she found an escape route along the knife-edge of hysteria into psychoanalysis. Five mornings a week she would lug a haversack full of dreams, anxieties, fantasies, phobias (and a few choice walking nightmares composed, directed, produced, and starred-in by Kiki Sancudo) up four flights of stairs (she was scared of elevators now) and u
npack for the great Ferenczi’s brilliant pupil. Meanwhile I minded Mito. That, and paying Il Dottore’s immense fees, kept my noose just slack enough to bear. When it was too cold or rainy for the park, we went to the Scrovegni Chapel, where I sat him on my shoulders and taught him the Jesus story from Giotto’s frescos. Madman with child stalks beneath the genius-spangled walls, his mind arrowing across the piazza to where his wife is cataloguing his bestialities to a total stranger, but Mito gives me therapy. Little Mito (a year old at the time of Olga’s breakdown, almost three when we left Padua) clutches my hair in fat fists and asks why did they kill Him, papi, and papi, who wasn’t wise enough yet to finger His two errors—a) He confused two things best kept separate: seizing power and adhering to principle; b) He was careless in his choice of associates—gains relief from his frenzy by parroting some priest-talk about His wanting to sacrifice Himself to rid the rest of us of sin. So now I close my eyes and feel Mito’s heels thump against my chest, hear him speak sweetly and trustfully to the savage who so often terrorized him and mami. And I can see one panel, a scene no more remarked than any other then but clearly drawn on my closed eyelids now: the torches flared above the milling mob, the peering faces and the upraised spears, the doomed prince and the squat, lump-buttocked clown who clasps his shoulder, meets his tired gaze, and lifts plump lying lips for a gross kiss.
After about six months of visits to Dr. Demenzella, Olga began to respond. One by one she shed her phobias. Her anxiety seizures came less frequently. She grew less fearful and could spend whole afternoons alone. At the same pace I grew ill. One spring morning as I walked Mito through the park I found myself reluctant to approach a flower patch strafed by some azure butterflies. A week later, on an outing to Venice, a tourist tossed some pigeon feed at my feet, and when wings flapped about me, I screamed in terror and fled into St. Mark’s cowering there until Olga, who came in with Mito in her arms, assured me that the birds were gone. A letter from Alfonso announced that Gunther was feared to have contracted leprosy, and by nightfall I was convinced I’d been infected by touching the letter, a delusion which persisted even after another letter came saying that, happily, all the tests on Gunther had proved negative. I could not bear open windows or closed rooms. I had the persistent sensation of having fouled myself and took to scrubbing my hands with alcohol. I had greater and greater difficulty sleeping, culminating in Holy Week of 1957 when I stayed awake from Palm to Easter Sunday and had hideous hallucinations of fat brown bears in coveralls bearing effigies of St. Joseph through the halls of our flat. Olga was not merely recovering from her symptoms; she was passing them to me. Still she grew no happier but rather blamed me for all her past sufferings, even for the fears she’d had before I met her. Along with all my new torments, I still had the pinchings of the noose.