by R. M. Koster
Olga urged me to visit one of Dr. Demenzella’s colleagues, citing her own success with analysis. I answered that it worked for her because she had faith in it; for me it would be no better than voodoo or acupuncture, merely a waste of time. Besides, I had never sought help before, and no one was going to probe into my psyche.
No, no, the thing was to get Olga away from Il Signor Dottore; then those symptoms would go back where they belonged.
She refused to leave. She berated me for even suggesting that she break her analysis before it was completed, and the bite of the noose forced me to incredible frenzies. I was no longer relieved by beating myself with my fists and took to using glass ashtrays and a small bronze bust of Mussolini which the count had left tucked in the top of a closet. I considered flight but dismissed this as cowardice. Worse, I still loved Olga. I loved Mito. I was prepared to love Olguita, then about the size and shape of a goldfish. I had to save us all. I had to lead us out of Italy into Tinieblas.
And so, on the evening of my twenty-seventh birthday, I took off the noose. We had to leave: the thought of leaving made Olga suffer; her suffering tightened the noose; its pain made me incapable of action; so at last I took it off. I bought a pair of wire cutters and a surgeon’s knife. I locked myself in the bathroom and disinfected tools and jewels with alcohol. Biting my tongue, I slit the skin which had grown over the noose, gouged the pliers under it, and sliced the steel. Then I gripped one end with the pliers and tore it from me. Blind with pain I emptied the alcohol bottle into my wound, bound myself with gauze, pulled on my shorts, and staggered into the bedroom to announce that we were leaving. All Olga’s sobs and reproaches failed to move me. In fact it was rather pleasant to listen to them, for from habit I expected the noose to tighten, and now the noose was gone. My sole concession, made freely, for I did what I did in self-defense not sadism, was that we would not fly. Two days later we drove to Genoa and went aboard the Dante Alighieri bound through the Panama for Valparaíso.
33
There is no record of how long it took Samson’s hair to grow out, but within four months after I cut the noose I had recouped four years of marriage. On the day I returned to Tinieblas, Ñato Espino showed me a photo of myself taken just before my wedding, and I looked up from the fellow in the picture and saw his alcoholic uncle in the mirror on Ñato’s dresser. This uncle pressed his fist to his twitching right check and resolved to take the cure of action. I wasn’t strong enough to plunge straight in. I had to go gingerly, dipping my big toe, wading to my ankles, so I accepted Ñato’s offer of a marijuana venture in Panama.
My nerves were bad. My hand shook when I handed my passport to the immigration agent at the airport. I felt as though I had contrabandista branded on my forehead. I was so jumpy that the police had me three days after I arrived. But the marvel of civilized countries is that people can be bribed, and while I was waiting for Alfonso’s bank draft to reach a certain officer of the Panamanian police—waiting in the Circle Modelo in Panama City, where, as a common criminal, I had luxuries (a cell above ground, an hour a day of sun on the prison yard clean-up detail) unknown to Tinieblan political prisoners—I had a chance to think. I realized I was no better than Ñato had been when I ran into him in Piraeus: a cheap peddler, incompetent to boot. That wasn’t right for me, so when I was released I left the capital, where I’d been buying up grass to sell to a Greek freighter captain, and went up past Penonomé and rented twenty acres of llano from a small rancher and planted it in the highest grade red pot. I bought a horse and spent my days outdoors. I found a chola girl and let her and appetite wean me from my addiction to Olga. There wasn’t any real risk, nothing like Costaguana, but Penonomé served for a convalescence. When I rode through my marijuana field with the sun hot on my face, I felt as though I’d come back from the dead. And when, after my crop was harvested and baled I drove it down to the Canal Zone and onto a pier crawling with gringo customs agents, and put it on the Greek captain’s manifest as cattle feed, and watched it swing, bale after bale, up onto the ship, I knew I was ready for better things again.
Which meant Costaguana, where la rabia was now at its height. I’d hit on a way of handling big shipments which I couldn’t have conceived four years before when I wasn’t a serious fellow with a family to support, and when I returned to Tinieblas with my marijuana profits, I explained it to Colonel Aiax Tolete, Commandant of the Civil Guard. The Guard was the duly constituted armed force of an independent sovereign state. It could buy all the weapons it wanted right from the factories without a squeak from the United States Munitions Control Board or its counterparts in other manufacturing countries. It could import those weapons by the shipload without a glance from Tinieblan customs. And its commandant could see to it that the airport guards looked the other way when those weapons were loaded onto transport planes and flown off to the south. If Tolete would provide cover in Tinieblas, I would take all the risks in Costaguana. As he was a reasonable man, he could not turn down the offer, and we inaugurated our partnership three weeks later with a shipment of six thousand carbines.
During the next three years the Tinieblan Civil Guard bought more small arms and ammunition than the Bundeswehr, and I ran an airlift into Costaguana that kept me on the wing five nights a week. I took Jaime back with me and found a pilot named Garza who owned a 1932 vintage Boeing which looked like a sanforized B-17. When he destroyed his plane and himself trying to get back to Selva Trópica on one engine, mashed his lower body in the wreck and took all night to scream his way to death, I walked home on a broken ankle and Jaime’s arm and bought a DC-3 which I learned to fly myself. Within a year I’d also bought this house and La Yegua. The only thing that was missing was the armor sheath under my skin, but it never grew back, perhaps because I was not totally immersed in violence. I kept a fingerhold on love through Olga and Mito and Olguita.
For Olga the world was ash-gray with loneliness while I was away and napalm-orange with migraine when I was at home. She recovered all her old symptoms and found frightening new ones—an urge to take a knife to Mito and the unquenchable conviction that she would smother Olguita in her crib. On nights when I was away she had Edilma lock her in her room. Often I would wake late in the afternoon to find her crouched by the side of my bed like an orphaned kitten, yearning to be petted, but this same thirst for affection made her dependent on me and bred in her the addict’s hatred for the pusher who at once supplies and withholds the needed drug. If we were together for an hour we would fight, long sterile duels in which Olga’s weapons were shrieks and insults, mine cold sarcasm and disdain. Then we’d make up in bed, not peace but armistice, for the physical bond lasted till the very end, and though she resented me and I had other women, we never lost our taste for each other. She hated herself for enjoying me, and as I slept, sated and defenseless, beside her, she would wipe off love’s glow like a stain and bathe in dreams of violence. She watched herself glide toward me to blind me or slice off my penis and then, as my blood spouted in the bed, throw down her knife in horror not that she’d maimed me but that now I would leave her. And for this knowledge that she needed me despite all longing to be free, she loathed herself the more.
I gave her very little of myself. When I wasn’t flying to Costaguana, I was answering some other woman’s message or romping with Ñato. It is hard to believe now how close we were. He didn’t travel anymore but worked for the newly established Tinieblan subsidiary of the gringo crime conglomerate, running a narcotics clearing-house and angling to be made manager of the syndicate-run El Opulento casino, and he would collect me at the air strip at dawn or honk for me at the house on evenings I wasn’t flying and lead me on a round of pleasures in which he seemed to care more for my amusement than his own. He arranged touching little surprises for me: a pair of matched thoroughbred New Orleans call girls whom he sent prancing into my bedroom one afternoon when he knew Olga and the kids were at La Yegua; a thirtieth birthday party for me at La Amapola (the plushest nightclub in Tiniebl
as, which he took over entirely for the occasion), complete with a pistol-shaped piñata full of silver half-inchado coins and a huge cake in the form of a relief map of Costaguana with our river wanderings traced in pink icing. He assisted me in the pranks I felt compelled to play. We kidnapped Alfonso one midnight, hiding our faces behind horror masks, brandishing unloaded pistols, speaking only English. We muscled him into a borrowed car and told him we were going to kill him, Kiki Sancudo, for double-crossing the syndicate. Alfonso kept whining that he wasn’t Kiki, he was his brother but had nothing to do with him, and when at last we took our masks off, he was too relieved to be angry. We burglarized the apartment where Nacho Hormiga kept his Ticamalan girlfriend and stole the movies he’d bragged of taking of the two of them with a remote-control camera. Then we bribed the projectionist at the Teatro Capitolio to splice clips of the spicier positions into the newsreel. Ñato and I were inseparable in everything but cocaine, which he sniffed moderately but which I would never fool with. He wasn’t my best friend, he was my only friend, all the while I flew to Costaguana.
The end of these flights coincided with León Fuertes’ campaign for the presidency. General Huevas died and his successors, a civilian junta, promised a return to democracy. The demand for weapons dropped, which was just as well, for León opposed the arms trade. He didn’t mind dealing with a former trader, however, and when I offered to support him, he took me on his team and gave me to understand I’d have a place in his cabinet. The Sancudo name was worth votes, after all, and people remembered my Olympic victory, and, besides, I had money to contribute. So, toward the end of 1961 I stopped flying to Costaguana. As a consequence—or so I thought—things went better between me and Olga. She smiled more often, reproached me less, laughed more gaily at our parties, embraced me more warmly, felt her headaches less, and generally gave me cause to hope the years of strife were ending.
I had my girls of course. Olga suspected and tried desperately both to prove I had them and to believe I did not. Now she was less suspicious, and when she did touch on the theme of infidelity, she was no longer bitter but rather chided playfully about a Latin American institution which I can recommended to the city planners of the temperate zones: I mean the particularly convenient kind of house of assignation of which Tinieblas has about a dozen—the names range from intimate, “Mi Alcobita [My Little Nook],” to patriotic, “La Tinieblina”—spaced along the airport road. One drives with one’s companion through a plain cementblock façade and finds a long one-story structure broken by carports, some covered by steel curtains, others (or, hopefully, at least one) empty. One pulls one’s car inside, reaches out through the car window for the button that drops the curtain, and presses. One dismounts and feeds three inchados through the waist-high slot in the front wall. One waits for the unseen attendant to press another button, and, lo, a door swings open on an air-conditioned bedroom with adjoining bath, with a room-service telephone and a coin-fed music box—discretion, privacy, all modern comfort, lease renewable every hour-and-a-half if one has the time, the strength, the inclination, and another three inchados.
These places, called “pushbuttons,” generated their own mythology. Olga glossed wittily on the rumor that Lino and Marina Piojo spent Carnival Monday at a different pushbutton each year in memory of the days when she was married to Hunfredo Ladilla and he to Andrea Comején and they would take El Opulento box lunches to a pushbutton every noon, struggling through traffic with Marina collapsed across the front seat, her kerchiefed head hidden in Lino’s lap. Or Olga would warn, half seriously, that I would end up like Curro Avispa who, the story went, patronized the pushbuttons so constantly that, in accord with Pavlov’s findings, he got an erection each time he rang a doorbell. I would say that was very funny, but I didn’t go to pushbuttons, and Olga would smile ruefully and say, “Of course, of course.”
In truth I only went to one, a place called El Segundo Círculo, which was the plushest of the lot, and the very fact I went there proved me a reasonably faithful husband, for I might have kept a woman outright as most Tinieblans do, or maintained a garçonnière as Alfonso did. I was scarcely adulterous at all for a Tinieblan. I scrupulously avoided the young women Olga had for tea or played canasta with, and I did no active chasing. I merely answered the messages ladies sent, picked up the gauntlets thrown. And not all of these, for I was a busy man. Still, I went to the Second Circle often enough for the outside attendant, the one who raised the steel curtain when you were through, to know my car, a Farinata sport coupe, the only one of its kind in the country.
One dry-season evening when I had stopped going to Costaguana and was helping out on León’s campaign, the wife of the French Second Secretary (an École Normale graduate three or four years younger than I with whom I played tennis now and then) smiled so prettily at me across Irene Hormiga’s living room that I had no choice but to make a rendezvous with her for the following afternoon. We had a charming bout of leapfrog, phoned for drinks—they pass them through a cut in the wall, the waiter lifting a slat on his side and setting in the drinks, you lifting the slat on yours and leaving the cash—chatted about her husband (whose failings I ascribed to youth and gently excused, for if you’re younger than a lady’s husband, she may be pleased by jealousy, but if you’re older, avuncular concern works best), took a double shower, got randy soaping each other and played a rematch, had to pay another three inchados (the waiter’s knock caught us in harness, but he retired discreetly at my grunted “Later”), showered again (she first this time, then I), and dressed leisurely, so that it was already dark when the attendant pulled the curtain up behind my car. He called, and when I went to him, he said, “Excuse me, sir, but your companion forgot this the other day,” and slipped a ring into my hand. I dropped it in my pocket, took my friend to where she’d left her car, and hurried home for dinner.
Six hours later as I lay propped against my triangular green pillow reading Fouché’s Mémoires—the French were on my mind that day, after all—with the air conditioner whirring cozily and Olga asleep in the other bed (we’d gone back to sharing a bedroom, the one Elena uses now; that’s how kind and loving our marriage had become), I remembered the ring. If Olga checked the pockets of my suit before sending it to the cleaners, I’d have to think up a story, so I got up stealthily and tiptoed to the closet and recovered the ring to hide it in my study. Olga woke up and asked what was wrong; I grunted and nipped into the bathroom. Door locked, light on, seat down; whose ring is this anyway? I opened my fist to find a Florentine silver band chased with sprawled cupids, quite similar to the ring I’d bought Olga six years before in Italy, so similar in fact it might have been that very ring. Thieving wops mass-produce a ring, then sell it as antique for thirty thousand lire! I couldn’t remember any of my little friends wearing one like it, but, of course, it might have spilled from a dress pocket. I shifted my bare butt on the toilet seat and peered inside at a minutely carved inscription: “O/Q Siempre Insieme.”
Now that was odd. I’d had the jeweler scrape that same inscription in the ring I’d bought Olga. Surely life was marvelous, full of weird replays and bizarre coincidence. Our initials, Olga’s and mine, were not unique; “Siempre Insieme” had to be a common ring inscription. But for the same inscription to occur on two identical rings, for those rings to rendezvous four thousand miles from the land of their origin, surely that was marvelous. I imagined a young gringo named Quentin, a Marine lieutenant, say, attached to the Sixth Fleet, bustling into a jeweler’s shop for a trinket to please his Neapolitan sweetheart Octavia. He glances about and settles for a ring like I’d bought Olga, and when the jeweler asks if he wants it engraved, says, “Yeah, our initials, ‘O/Q,’ and ‘Always Together.’” He marries the girl and is transferred to Tinieblas, where Octavia betrays him (with the Second Secretary of the French Embassy—let coincidence be infectious). She drops her ring in the Second Circle, and since it’s a busy night, the maid doesn’t sweep the room but simply throws on new sheets for th
e next visitor (me). The ring is found after I leave and given to the attendant, who assumes it belongs to my companion and gives it to me the next time, I stop by. Interlinked net of incandescent coincidence which proved life as inventive as Scheherazade.
All the same, and though I much prefer miracles to logic, I stood up and clasped the ring in my fist and went out into the bedroom.
“Find me a sleeping pill,” to dozing Olga.
“On the night table,” mumbled.
“I don’t know which is which.”
She fumbles with ringless fingers among the flasks and bottles. “Here.”
Off to her former bedroom, where she still kept her clothes, her shoes, her dressing table, and, yes, in the bottom drawer, her jewelry box. I found her wedding ring—God knew why it wasn’t on her finger—the cameo that had belonged to her grandmother, her class ring from the Instituto de la Virgen Santísima, the emerald I’d given her the year before and which she refused to wear because the money that bought it was somehow soiled, but not the cupid-gamboled silver band. Which wasn’t that strange, really, since it was being bent into an oval in my left fist.