by R. M. Koster
Nod.
“Or I mean so little. You don’t care if I go or stay, do you?”
“I care, Marta.”
“Not enough. I can’t compete with Ñato. That I love you and am willing to spend my life taking care of you can’t rival the pleasure of seeing a man killed. Is it such fun, Kiki, killing people?”
“I can’t have him sit there, Marta. I can’t have him sit there safe in his house after what he’s done to me. Here I am with my life smashed, and there he is, able to call his friend Acha and have Jaime arrested and maybe beaten and killed. Should I forgive him, Marta? Here I am, and do you know what Ñato’s doing? Ñato’s shaving. He shaves in the afternoon so his face will be smooth for his girlfriends. When he’s finished shaving, his mother will bring him a cup of coffee, a demitasse of strong black coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar. He’ll drink that, and at five he’ll go collect some little typist or salesgirl. On the way to wherever he takes her, he’ll buy an evening paper, because Ñato doesn’t like to make love. What he likes is to have a girl fondle him while he reads the newspaper and smokes a joint. And here I am, Marta. Here I am. Here I am. Here I am.
“Well, I won’t have it. It can’t go on. He has to die. Would you rather I forgave him, Marta? Do you want him to go on enjoying life after what he’s done to us? Isn’t he your enemy too?”
Stares at me for a moment, ready to cry, then fires grief to fury. “Oh, how I hate you, Kiki! Oh, God, how I hate you! All your life has been violence and death, and you’ve fouled me with it. I thought once you were changing, but you changed right back, back to the side of death. How many have you killed, Kiki? How many did you and your guns kill in Costaguana? How many died because of you in the flag riot? I never loved Ñato, but I loved you, Kiki, and all you want is killing. Oh, God, I hate you, Kiki! And I’m glad you’re paralyzed. I’m glad you can’t kill any more. You have to have someone do it for you. It’s what you deserve, Kiki. It’s what you asked for! I’m glad! I’m glad!”
And she runs out with her hands over her face.
36
Counting the volumes that flank my unplucked Dumas. No Monte Cristo today, but in a few minutes Jaime will be here to tell me if he saw Ñato. And at six I’ll go to the rally. And tomorrow Marta will leave me, then Elena in a week or two, and I’ll be trapped in my mind, sewn up in a sack full of rodents, buried alive with roaches nesting in my mouth and scorpions stalking across my eyeballs.
Better count the books. Marta’s too generous. Embraces the error decried by Tolstoy and his neighbor Toynbee, giving the individual too much influence on history. The Costaguanans had no trouble getting arms while I was in Europe with Olga. Would have killed each other with teeth and fingernails in any case, as Ñato pointed out. Though he sought to justify the gun business morally, whereas I merely wish to avoid the cult of personality, blah, blah, blah, but I have to think of something. For example, I never anticipated a riot or even hoped for one. Never dreamed the gringos would be so helpful. I was only looking for a little excitement, and the gringos were so helpful I wound up in the palace, for half an hour anyway.
Defending national sovereignty. The issue was there, but only the students had done more than talk about it. Doctors of education would fly down from Ann Arbor and Chapel Hill with AID contracts and flasks of Kaopectate to click their tongues over the failure of Latin America’s universities; the student uprising hadn’t caught on yet in the States. We were used to it, having had rollicking good riots over things like cracked toilets at the Politécnico, so no one was surprised at the students’ rage when Bonifacio Aguado (who had been León’s vice president) refused to press for renegotiation of the Reservation treaty.
That was a sore point, our national abscess. León had promised to cure it and took the matter up with Kennedy in the most statesmanlike manner conceivable: breakfast chat during the San José presidents’ meeting.
“Did you get anything?” I asked when he and Carlitos came out. “Besides ham and eggs, I mean.”
“We’ll get something.” He walked straight on, holding his hands in front of him like a surgeon leaving the operating theater, and those of us who’d been waiting fell in beside and behind him. Carlitos was telling someone how he had quoted Kennedy’s university speech back to him. “He’s a decent man,” León continued; then he dropped his voice: “That’s the difference between a sailor and an infantryman; he’s never had to stick a bayonet into anyone.”
Sure enough, that fall León got a letter from him proposing negotiation of a new treaty. That was two weeks before Kennedy’s assassination and six weeks before León’s.
Johnson, though a navy man himself, probably wasn’t as decent as Kennedy, and Bonifacio Aguado certainly wasn’t as forceful as León. Some twit in the House of Representatives accused the Democrats of wanting to “give away the Reservation,” and Johnson told Aguado he couldn’t think about the treaty till after November. Give away the Reservation! As though it were theirs! They bleat the same way about “losing Asia,” and when did they own Asia? They rented the Reservation on a sixty-five-year-old swindle and were all constipated over renegotiating the lease, and Bonifacio Aguado, who was terrified of gringos and everyone else, said he understood, he understood. So the students demonstrated and tried to haul down the flag at the U.S. Embassy, and the Guardia beat them back, and they rioted along Bolivar Avenue.
The regular politicians nodded gravely and clucked about how the students were the conscience of the country but street violence wasn’t the proper instrument for vindicating the national honor, and meanwhile they were fouling their drawers in fear of revolution and thanking God for all those gringo troops next door. But not Kiki. He resigned his embassy in protest. He came home and declared that as the Reservation was Tinieblan soil, he would carry the flag through it to Roosevelt Beach (where Palmiro Inchado’s head had been washed up) on the anniversary of discovery.
Some people called me a patriot; others accused me of exploiting the nation’s plight for personal power. Both were wrong, though I didn’t say so. The treaty irked me, but I was no insect that would confuse my personal integrity with that of the hive. As for power, I hadn’t the taste for it yet. I knew it was a great delicacy which many men craved, but it didn’t make my mouth water. I wanted excitement. I hadn’t had any since I’d quit the gun trade, and there were the students, raising hell and fighting the Guardia and scaring their parents and annoying the gringos. Why shouldn’t I have a piece of the treaty action? Wasn’t it the best action around?
The day after I made my declaration, a gringo colonel, who was public information officer for the United States Hemispheric Interdiction Team, called a press conference and said I couldn’t bring a Tinieblan flag into the Reservation because the commanding general wasn’t authorized to display any national emblem but the Stars and Stripes. So that afternoon I told the press that the general didn’t have to worry; I, not he, would do all the displaying. More, so the general wouldn’t get in trouble I would swear out an affidavit that it was entirely my idea and that I would execute it without aid or comfort from the general. Another man might have been solemn, but I thought some gringo telling me I couldn’t wave my own flag in my own country was much too serious a matter to be solemn about. That called for either blood or banter. Certain prominent Tinieblans, men who sat around the Club Mercantil harrumphing at each other, said I was making a mockery of the flag, but the common folk, the students especially, liked my approach, and right away I began hearing from all sorts of individuals and groups who wanted to march with me. I was also visited by a young man named Manfredo Canino Rabioso who wanted to overthrow the government. He represented a faction of a faction of the University Students’ Syndicate and claimed his group would have Bonifacio out of the palace in jig time if I would give them weapons. Canino was a resolute fellow, the leading distributor of mayhem during the romp down Bolivar. His illustrious family had fallen on hard times; he was estranged from his father, a hack whom Aguado had named to a municipal ju
dgeship; but he managed well enough, supporting himself on the earnings of a cantina barmaid and on small sums paid him by some shop owners in return for advance warning of student demonstrations. I didn’t want to blunt his initiative, so I refused to give him guns but offered to sell him some Schmeisers at cost whenever he could show me the cash. Meanwhile the general huddled with the U.S. Ambassador to Tinieblas and made and received calls on his hot line to the Pentagon and finally instructed his information officer to tell the press that Mr. Sancudo was free to enter the Reservation (restricted areas excepted) any time he wished, but that if he wanted to bring a flag or a group with him, he would have to have a parade permit. If Mr. Sancudo applied for such a permit, his application would be given all due consideration. It wasn’t long before the Associated Press called asking if I was going to apply, and I said I was sure the people in the Reservation were busy defending us all from communism and I wasn’t going to bother them with idle paperwork. All I was going to do was stroll out to the beach with a flag and maybe a few friends. No one in the Reservation had to go out of his way for me. I certainly wouldn’t lift a finger one way or the other if the general felt like carrying a U.S. flag from, say, Sunset Boulevard to Malibu. Then Reservation gringos began writing letters to the editors of the English-language papers, calling me a communist and saying that the Tinieblan flag had no business in the Reservation, at least not till the treaty ran out in another nine-hundred-odd years. Alfonso set aside a column in the Morning Mail for such letters and then expanded it to a full page, and the circulation of the paper tripled, and an enterprising Jamaican set up in the Café Bahía, translating the letters aloud to a teeth-gnashing audience and drafting irate replies in English at one centavo the word. These letters, and their replies and counterreplies, inflamed tempers on both sides of Washington Avenue and contributed to the severity of the flag plague.
Quite soon after I announced my intention to carry the Tinieblan flag out to Roosevelt Beach, U.S. flags began appearing, on houses in the Reservation. Civilians (dock workers, maintenance men, paper pushers) began it; the military took it up. As the controversy grew—and I never contributed to it or organized anything; all I did was announce my plans and, when anyone asked if he could go with me, say, “Sure, why not? Come along”—Tinieblans began putting out flags of their own. This was not a traditional practice. Stores soon ran out of Tinieblan tricolors. But a rush order was put in to manufacturers in Osaka, and by midsummer almost every house in the capital had a flag or two draped on it. This led Marta’s uncle Lazarillo to comment in Diario de la Bahía that “una peste de banderas,” a flag plague, was epidemic in the land.
Then symbols blossomed into symptoms. The first case of flag plague was recorded in the Reservation when a journeyman plumber, who had recently had an anti-flag-march letter published, showed up at an out-patient clinic with exactly fifty tiny blue stars on the back of his writing hand. The same week a man was treated at Marine barracks sick call for red and white stripes on his forearm. Then, on July 4th, fully a hundred bathers at Roosevelt Beach were amazed to discover red-white-and-blue shields on each others’ chests and bikini midriffs. Meanwhile doctors at San Bruno Hospital began noting similar irritations in Tinieblans. Habitués of the Café Bahía letter sessions went purple-green-and-yellow in the face. The national colors bloomed on the biceps of student leaders and the buttocks of journalists. These stigmata were not only indelible but had an eerie way of glowing in the dark, and they burned painfully whenever the afflicted heard his national anthem played at a sporting event or on the radio. As more and more Tinieblans became obsessed with their right to fly their flag in the Reservation and gringos with their obligation to keep it out, the plague spread and waxed virulent. The entire membership of the Tinieblan College of Attorneys (which had petitioned the World Court to adjudicate the flag dispute) developed purple-green-and-yellow spirals around their penises. Flag-conscious housewives woke from their sleep with purple-green-and-yellow portraits of General Feliciano Luna and other national heroes glowing on their thighs and abdomens. The commander of American Legion Post One in the Reservation, who was already starred and striped from crown to toe, sprouted the hooked beak and jagged talons of the heraldic bald eagle, while a colonel on the Interdiction Team Staff (who had been doing some clandestine canvassing for Goldwater) found his forehead transformed into a miniature Allied Chemical Building across which phrases like MY COUNTRY RIGHT OR WRONG AND AMERICA: LOVE HER OR LEAVE HER ran in red-white-and-blue letters. No deaths were reported nor any cases in children under six, and sufferers usually recovered after four or five weeks of isolation. Reinfection was common, however, the second affliction being generally more severe than the first, and only a few were immune. The plague spared only those who did not get worked up over flags and anthems, those who were too busy to worry about them or who, like myself, refused to take them seriously—in short, those very few who, either by reason or intuition, could detect a difference between symbol and substance.
So it went all summer and fall. The flag plague raged; the flag march was the biggest thing in Tinieblas. The only distraction came early in November when a group of university students stole two trucks and fled to the cordillera, stopping to shoot up the town of Mercedilla with Schmeiser machine pistols and issue a manifesto calling for the overthrow of Bonifacio Aguado (“Lackey of the Wall Street Imperialists and Running Dog of the Pentagon Warmongers”), but as opponents of the flag march chose to connect me with this insurrection, it only brought me more attention, and every eye in the country was focused on me on the anniversary of discovery.
That day, which was also my thirty-fourth birthday, dawned rainy. It kept raining, and my phone kept ringing. I told reporters that, yes, I would march, rain or shine, and Alfonso that, no, the gringos wouldn’t kill me except by accident, and Elena (calling from Los Angeles) that, all right, I’d wear my Olympic medal, and meanwhile, despite the rain, a small crowd was gathering outside my house and a large one on Washington Avenue. At exactly four o’clock, which was the hour I’d announced for my stroll, the rain stopped. I went downstairs. Jaime had the flag I’d bought—a small one, about the size of a bath towel—rolled up on its gold-painted stick. He took it out and put it in the back seat of the car. Then I went out after him.
There were a few shouts and a scatter of applause, nothing like what I’d heard in Helsinki, but it moved me strangely. These people—perhaps there were fifty, half of them students, for I hadn’t wished anyone to come to my house and had used the phrase “See you on Washington Avenue” to anyone who asked about the march—these people wanted me to lead them. They were all plague victims, some of them very far gone, and saw me as a symbol, not a human being; yet their fealty was exhilarating. Sharp, like a whiff of ether. It made my head ring slightly and brought a glow like I’d felt when I said “Now” to Angela or when I squeezed a round through Memo’s lips. I all but whinnied with excitement when a girl put her foot on the bumper of my car and drew her skirt up to show me my portrait etched on her inner thigh in purple-green-and-yellow above that of Simón Mocoso. To keep this lovely feeling I put the girl up front between Jaime and me and let other kids climb in the back and on the trunk and fenders, and off we went at ten miles an hour, men jogging alongside joking with me through the window, horn tooting, kids shouting happily at pedestrians and motorists, as to a fair or wedding. I was criticized for it later. Iron-boweled mastodons in Tinieblas as well as the States decried the “carnival atmosphere,” but the only thing that redeems patriotism is gaiety. Only gaiety keeps it from congealing into a glacier of fecal filth sixty-storeys tall such as engulfed the Kennedy funerals (all that solemn patriotism, when what was called for was an Irish wake and a fine, prancing revolution).
Well, we went gaily that afternoon, piping the city into our trail. I heard later that the passengers of several busses voted democratically to follow me, and the drivers stopped to debark dissenters and then abandoned their routes and tailed me to Washington Aven
ue and parked their busses and got down with their passengers to join the crowd. Oh, yes, there was a crowd. Some said five thousand, some said ten thousand. I don’t know, but there were people massed in the avenue for blocks on either side of Alfonso’s building, plague victims all with the Tinieblan colors burning on their arms and faces, and opposite them inside the Reservation fence a goodly crew of star-spangled gringos and, of course, the troops in combat gear, helmets, and fixed bayonets. Those troops gave me a faint scare. Not for myself—the glow took care of that—but I had a fleeting worry that something might happen to these people who were smiling at me, pushing back to make room for my car, pressing in around it, slapping the roof gaily, reaching in to squeeze my shoulder, shouting, “Here he is! Here’s Kiki!” But when I got out among them I was so high and glowing (as with a woman or when winning a fight) I didn’t care what happened. I might have understood then the craving some men have for power, especially men who’re not adept at love or combat, or men too old to gobble such bonbons any more, but I still wasn’t ready to examine life. I was much too occupied with living it.
I got down, and the crowd foamed about me to sweep me up, but I shook my head, smiling, and waved my hand, no, for I’d done nothing yet to deserve being carried on men’s shoulders, and after a minute they sucked back and left a little gap around me. Then I saw it wasn’t just common people and students who’d come but men of my own class: Lino was there, and Meco, and others, even Alfonso, dressed to kill and carrying a furled umbrella and with a gorgeous tricolor stain spiraling up from beneath his button-down and twining across one cheek. I was their leader too. So I took my flag from Jaime and unrolled it and raised it in the air in one hand as high as I could, and there was a great shout from all those pressed and milling people. Then I laid the flag on my shoulder as a soldier does his rifle and smiled around at my troops and waved my left hand for them to make a little way and started walking toward the Reservation.