by R. M. Koster
The girls cooed about “le pauvre,” but I went cold. I heard a crowd scream and saw a spurt of flame beside my shoulder. I reached to close the trunk lid; in half an hour I could have him back in France, trapped away where he couldn’t kill me.
“What’s wrong?” asked Josette. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
“My own. Ce salaud me tuera un jour.”
But I was making an ass of myself. Me afraid of Ñato? I forced a smile and dropped my hand to help him up.
“Some friend you are! Searing me, keeping me locked in when there wasn’t need. You don’t care about me, Kiki. All you want is to have fun with this pair of whores!”
“I got you out, didn’t I? Shut up or I’ll hand you over.”
I meant it, though I couldn’t understand why. Ñato snarled at me, then grinned, embraced me, called me brother, swore he’d never forget. I shook the future out of my head, and we went inside. The girls and I had another bottle while Ñato ate, squeezing for gaiety, but the day’s wine was drawn. Josette said she was tired, and I didn’t bother her. She fell asleep at once with her cheek on my bicep, but I lay for hours in a demoned half-sleep where phantoms lurked behind me and I couldn’t turn my head. At first light I drove Ñato to the airport at San Sebastián where he could get a plane for Madrid, and from Madrid a plane home. Then I fled into Josette’s body. Voices whispered of horrors, so I pulled her young warmth down over my mind. I should have listened. I should have listened.
Next month I had a premonition I didn’t dismiss. Narses Puñete had promised elections, but all military dictators promise that. Tinieblans in and out of the country made plans to live with him till the end of the decade. Then one morning I read an item about a gringo mission to Central America, and though the gringos love military governments and send out missions every year when it gets chilly in Washington, I heard myself remark to Marta that Johnson was feeling righteous and we’d have elections in the spring.
I wrote to Gonzalo and suggested he begin putting the party in shape. I sent a problem to Armando Loza in Boston: Assume elections in Tinieblas in 1966; which issues were important and how should they be treated? I began liquidating some investments to build a war chest. I asked Elena not to sign any contract that would keep her busy during March and April. Finally, early in November, I went to see Alejo.
He was living in Montreux in a large house about a quarter of a mile above the Château of Chillon. He had Furetto with him, and Gunther and Egon, and an East German woman who reminded me faintly of Angela, though her teeth weren’t pointed and she didn’t look as if she had a tail. As far as I could learn he did nothing but read political philosophy and pay monthly visits to a Lausanne monkey-glander, but when Egon had convoyed me by the Dobermans and into his presence, he advised me to tell him what I wanted without foolishness; he could give me five minutes.
He sat in a leather chair with his book on his knee, his place kept with an index finger. He wore tweed slacks and a cardigan and a cashmere scarf. He was quite pale, and with his glowing eyes and his skin stretched paper-thin over his cheekbones he looked like what a clever director might cast if called upon to use the medieval figure of Death in a modern-dress melodrama. The German woman was curled on a leather couch with a copy of Der Stern. He flicked her out of the room with his free hand and waved me into a chair.
“What do you want?”
“I want to tell you something. I think there will be elections soon at home. I think I will run for president.”
“Why tell me?”
“So you don’t have to hear it from someone else. Or read it in the papers.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
“No.”
“Good. I have given you everything I intend to give you, but since I know you will not take it, I will offer you some advice: avoid politics. No, it’s not what you think. If, as you say, elections will be held soon, I have no intention of running in them. I am destined to be President of Tinieblas once more before I die, but not for some years. Not for some years. I have learned how to wait. You should learn. For you it would be a profitable study. And you should forget politics. No one can escape destiny, but perhaps one can postpone it.”
“I only came to inform you. I don’t know yet if there will be elections or if I’ll have a chance to win. But if they’re held, and if I have a chance, I’ll run.”
He nodded. He smiled. “I knew you would not listen. But don’t you find it strange, this desire to ‘inform’ me? Inform your wife. She is a beautiful woman; I have seen her in magazines. Inform her. Inform your brother. Inform your friends. But why inform me?”
I didn’t know why. It was strange. I didn’t care how Alejo learned of my ambition, and yet I’d gone to see him. I felt a chill like I’d felt when I looked down at Ñato huddled in the trunk of my car. I heard excited voices as though above me. They faded, then grew louder, and there was fire in my neck. I raised my hand to my forehead and wiped these signs away.
“Why give me advice?”
“As I said, I know you won’t listen.” He flapped his book on his knee. “If you have nothing else to tell me…”
The next time I saw him was four years later, six weeks ago, at Alfonso’s house, when I offered to campaign for him if he’d give me Ñato. He agreed at once. Then he looked at my wasted flesh piled in a wheelchair, and said in exactly the same tone, with exactly the same half-smile: “I knew you wouldn’t listen.”
On November 28th, 1965, my thirty-fifth birthday and the four hundred fifty-first anniversary of the discovery of Tinieblas, General Narses Puñete announced that elections would be held the following spring. That night I woke from sleep with my nostrils full of ether and the murmured tones of doctors worrying my cars. But I paid no more heed to this sign than I had to any of the others. The next morning I took the plane for home.
41
Trails to guide my mind down while Jaime dries and dresses me. Quick gallop into next month, and a trot through five years ago. To keep the beast from turning on me. I trained my body, taught it entrancing tricks and to be my uncomplaining servant. Got much good use and pleasure from it till Ñato killed it. Now I tame my mind to keep it from trampling me, to make it lift me from this wheelchair.
Some men have taught their minds to bear them up among the galaxies or down into the atom’s core, or to find countries unicorned with marvels, lands rich in order and excitement, where splintery nature’s beveled down with dreams. I have Tinieblas and my storm-drenched past, the circle that’s marked out for Ñato’s execution, and a sharp-hoofed mind to take me if I keep it bridled, to lift and carry me as Jaime does now.
Downstairs in his brown arms, but not into the sala, where Carl and Sonny are checking their equipment. He sets me in my folding chair, and I grunt him to the library. Cool and quiet. Wait here for Elena and Marta, for Alejo and his motorcade, and ride my mind along another path.
42
I spoke to people. I spoke to them one by one in my air-conditioned study and beside the pool and on the porch at La Yegua and at Alfonso’s house at Medusa Beach and by overseas phone to Armando in Boston. And of the men I spoke to I asked thirteen to supper.
That was two weeks after I returned “on leave,” while the last rains of December torrented against the louvers of the dining room and flailed across the terrace. I can’t paint that scene in Leonardo’s mode—we sat around the table, not all bunched at one side—but I could film it as well as Phil. I’d sit myself just where I sat at lunch-not in this baby stroller, but in the master chair with sturdy arms and lion faces carved where I rest my hands—and hang the camera over my right shoulder. Mid-shot across the supper plates to Uncle Erasmo, who sits at the far end sipping Vichy instead of Brandy Lepanto, sucking a toothpick instead of an Uppmann cigar. Zoom into his mind, to the lavishly appointed, cypress wood coffin which lies in his study at the foot of his books, which he sleeps in each night, fully clothed, to spare Cousin Raquel the annoyance of dressing his can
cered cadaver. And perhaps reach forward to the morning after I announced my candidacy when he told the maid he would not get up and died as discreetly as he had lived.
Zoom back through Uncle Erasmo’s old lizard’s eyes to a beardless Alfonso, on his right, who licks a bit of éclair cream from the top of his lip, harrumphs portentously, and then says nothing. Swing left again to Aquilino Piojo, silver-haired at thirty-nine, sufficiently sleek in pearl-gray sharkskin to remind all present of his membership in General Puñete’s governing junta. Then on to the Verdun landscape of Gonzalo’s face, where pill-box warts, bristling with black hairs, sit among the smallpox craters in a trenched wilderness of wrinkles, and over to Armando Loza, or, rather, just his hands, which have pushed back his dessert plate and dab with felt-tipped pen in a tiny notebook.
Now I slide my camera left again to a coffee saucer in which Parliament ash is being tapped by a manicured finger attached to a lotioned hand (which has never lifted anything heavier than a balance sheet) coifed by a soft linen cuff clasped by white-gold links half hidden by an Italian silk sleeve; ascend this to a narrow shoulder, a smooth cheek, puppy-brown eyes, a pallid brow—face which, like a palimpsest, imperfectly conceals the child who got so many presents he was never happy: Hunfredo Ladilla. And on to a black bear in a brown suit, the Reverend Dr. Gladstone Archer, who aims hooded eyes diagonally across at the irreverent Dr. Garibaldi Saenz (on Uncle Erasmo’s left), who listens with his eyes closed and his left thumb hooked in the lip of his nostril.
And on Saenz’s left Juanchi Tábano, like an albino hippo, with his chalky jowls and small pink eyes and pudgy arms clasped over a gut-swelled, sauce-specked white guayavera. Then Olga’s brother Edgardo, who is whispering something to Pedro Oruga, who is looking at Pablo Chinche, who is directing remarks to a spot just below and to the right of the camera, an unseen me. And next to him, on my right hand, his mustache straightened by an expectant grin, Ñato Espino, faithful Ñato.
They talked and I listened. Gonzalo Garbanzo promised the nomination and the Tinieblist machine, if I could promise sufficient money. Juanchi said, “Politics is a business, you invest so much to get so much back,” and promised a hundred thousand, if I would promise him Finance or Public Works. Uncle Erasmo promised the papers and the radio station, if I could promise him there’d be no flak from the gringos, and Armando Loza, whom I’d asked to stop in Washington on his way down, said he’d talked with Watson and had lunch with Mann and that the gringos promised not to bother me when Armando promised I was anticommunist. Dr. Gladstone Archer promised the loyal Tinieblans of West Indian descent, if I would promise to make their leader UN Ambassador.
“Which leader?” asked Gonzalo a bit maliciously, and Dr. Archer replied, “The leader who can deliver their vote.”
Dr. Saenz promised the banana pickers of Tuquetá and the oil drillers of Salinas, whose unions he counseled at law, if I would promise to support him for deputy.
“What do you mean by support?” asked Gonzalo.
“A party nomination, of course, and money.”
“How much?” pressed Gonzalo, and Uncle Erasmo wagged a finger at him and said, “That’s a detail; we can work that out.”
Hunfredo promised his TV station and as much cash as Juanchi, if I would keep the promise I’d made him in private, and Lino promised General Puñete would stay neutral, if I would promise to reappoint him commandant of the Guard. Edgardo Luciérnaga promised to organize professional men, and Pedro to give me the ranchers of Otán, and Pablo to help me in Selva Trópica, and Ñato, faithful Ñato, promised me the poor quarters of the capital and two hundred strong fellows to do what others might be squeamish to do. Lino asked Ñato if he could also promise to stay out of trouble, but just then Marta came in saying my call had gone through to Elena in Rome.
“Is there something wrong? It’s five in the morning.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’ve decided to run.”
“Oh, caro! Securo?”
“Yes. I want to announce in two weeks, on Christmas day. Can you be here?”
“Sì, caro. Certo. Ma, tuto va bene?”
“Sure. I just wanted to tell you first.”
“Grazie, caro. È maraviglioso! But now I won’t be able to sleep.”
“I wish I were there to help you.”
“Ti voglio bene, Kiki!”
“Anche io a ti. Ciaou, Elena.”
“Ciaou, caro. E buona fortuna!”
“What’d you tell her, Kiki?” Ñato jumped up as I reentered the room. “Are you going to run?”
I stood beside my chair and tried to put a worried face to the faces turned toward me. “Have I got the party, Gonzalo?”
“You’ve got the party if you’ve got the money.”
“And I have the money, don’t I, Juanchi?”
“You’ve got my share.”
“And Hunfredo’s. And I’ll match your share and his. I have TV.”
“And the papers, and the station,” said Alfonso.
“And the gringos won’t bother me.”
“Nor will the Guardia,” said Lino Piojo. “If you don’t bother them.”
“And I’ve an M.I.T. sociologist to invent me a program, right, Armando?”
“Right, Kiki. I’ll even make you believe in it.”
“And a ruthless brother to run my campaign. You are ruthless, aren’t you, Alfonso?”
“Merciless, Kiki. Like a lion.”
“And Uncle Erasmo, I’ve got him too, the foxiest uncle in Latin America. He was making presidents while the rest of us were sucking teat.”
“Alfonso hasn’t quit yet,” observed Edgardo.
“Well, he’s going to quit till election day. And I’ve got the West Indians, don’t I, Doctor Archer?”
“Your father never had them, Ambassador Sancudo, but you’re going to.”
“Good, Doctor. I need them. And the oil workers and the banana workers, right, Doctor Saenz? And a strong running mate, an aristocrat to balance the ticket. I’m making it public, Hunfredo. Gentlemen, your next vice president, Don Hunfredo Ladilla!”
Applause from all, and I shouted over it, “So I can’t lose, can I?”
Cries of “No!”
“So I’m going to run! There’s your answer, Ñato.”
And Ñato let out a Mexican yelp and ran around to Lino and grabbed his shoulder and said, “Hear that, Mr. Member of the Junta? He’s going to run, and he’s going to win, and when my brother Kiki”—here Alfonso winced and looked away—”is President of the Republic, I won’t be able to get into trouble!”
43
My campaign was born on the twenty-fifth of December and died on the Ides of March. It shook the country for eighty days, then dissolved like a dream in a puff of gunsmoke. I was picked to run last and was so far in front on the day Ñato shot me that I nearly won while still in coma and put three-fifths of my deputies into the Chamber. Had Ñato missed I would have been the youngest elected president in Tinieblan history with a mandate to lead a united country, but he got a round home, so instead I’m a plant. Win a few, lose a few, as the gringos say.
No star shone in the east when I announced my candidacy. I wanted a rally in Oruga Park, a sprig of violence to evoke the flag march, but my managers told me to change my image. “Running for election isn’t the same as leading a mob,” Gonzalo told me. “You’ve got to prove you’re not a wild man.” So I took the ballroom at El Opulento and trundled out a certifiably tame Kiki who mewed a speech by Armando Loza while reporters coughed and the cameras watched Elena. This specimen had rubber privates and a styrofoam heart. His adrenal glands had been replaced with vials of Valium. Pepe Fuertes and Felix Grillo watched his performance and slept soundly, dreaming of triumphs.
The next morning Uncle Erasmo decided not to get up from his coffin. In accord with his last wishes he did not receive the state funeral the Republic of Tinieblas grants former presidents: the archiepiscopal Mass, the florid oratory, the honor guard with unsheathed sabers, the rococo c
oach drawn by six black horses, the hallowed plot in the National Cemetery, the marble pillar, the memorial bust. He was buried beside his mother in the graveyard at Angostura with simple rites and a rude granite headstone:
ERASMO SANCUDO MONTES
1893-1965
“Let not thy left hand know
what thy right hand doeth.”
He left the bulk of his large estate to his daughter Raquel. Alfonso got a controlling bloc of newspaper shares; I, an uncultivated tract in Otán Province. A final codicil, composed in extremis, left me twenty thousand inchados in cash with the provision, whispered to me by Uncle Erasmo’s law partner and executor, Inocencio Ahumada, that the money be used to buy votes or bribe members of the Electoral Jury. He had an unbroken string of victorious candidates, and it is just as well he didn’t live to see the end of my campaign.