by R. M. Koster
Salinas isn’t a rich province, not like Otán, where you scarcely need to plow—“just throw some seeds down,” they say, “and jump back.” Many rice gamblers in Salinas, and they’d had three bad years: drought through July and August; floods and downpours in December making what crops had sprouted impossible to reap. The drought had hurt the cattle people too, and in October foot-and-mouth had broken out. It’s a province of small holders; many of them had gone under and the rest were mortgaged to their eyes. But the struggle for existence winnowed all the whiners from Salinas centuries ago, and the people there know how to feast an evening, bad times or no. And I had no land there. I didn’t feed my family on salary from a rice mill that was folding. My rivered ranch was two hundred miles northwest, and every cow that sickened in Salinas made my fat, healthy ones worth more. I didn’t have to share those people’s troubles.
But while I was mixing through the crowd, being introduced by Rosendo Salmón, who’s Vice President of the Chamber now, I met a wiry chap about my age, and when I shook his hand a wave of anguish swept me.
“You lost your harvest,” I said softly. I didn’t have to ask. I knew he’d lost his crop and his credit and his freedom, that the best he could hope for was to find a place in some more fertile province administering some luckier man’s fields, that he’d never be his own man again. I knew this, though I didn’t know his name, and, more, I winced his hurt and choked his helpless rage as though they were my own.
“That’s right, Don Kiki. She rotted in the field.”
I nodded to him—what could I say?—and shook his hand again, and it seemed to draw off some of his pain, for he smiled and wished me luck, but I stayed with his suffering. And before I could grasp what was happening to me, Rosendo led me up to a bunch of barefoot peasants, all munching avidly on stick-speared strips of beef, and I was pierced by hunger. But not food-hunger, I realized, and I said:
“Land’s what you want.”
They all nodded, and one man said, “That’s clear, Don Kiki. Everyone wants land.”
I nodded back. “I’ll have to find a way to give you some then.”
They liked that, but I kept their hunger.
The worst was when I met a man, a rancher of fifty-odd, who’d had land, land his great-grandfather had wrested from the Spanish Crown, and his grandfather had held, and his father had added to, and he had lost to a bank the month before. I didn’t speak to him. I only shook his hand, and his shame buckled me. I had to brace to hold my shoulders straight under the frowned contempt of those disgruntled forebears.
I wanted to speak soberly that evening. By the time I got up I wanted to speak about land reform, and an agricultural development bank, and irrigation projects. I started out that way because I was in pain and that kind of talk seemed to ease it. But then I saw I was ruining the fiesta, reminding those people of their grief, piling it back on top of them. So instead I picked it up and carried it myself. I told them to enjoy their food and drink, the music and the speeches. I told them not to fret about their trouble; it was my trouble now. The problems of Salinas were my own personal problems from now on, and I would solve them. And when I said I’d give this country to its people, I meant it, Marta. I meant it.
I reconsidered later. On our dark journey to the capital, propped beside Jaime as he hurled the car along the tunnel chiseled by our headlamps, I wondered, Do I mean it? Do I want to do such things? And many times I told myself, the phrase wins votes, that’s all, and that’s enough. But wherever I went I felt the people’s pain and worry. The night after Salinas I faced a crowd dredged from the shack-towns which stretch like a girdle of misery around the sleek paunch of the capital, and I felt those people’s frightful weakness, the helplessness we others know in dreams where monsters gnaw us while our fists flail punily. I lifted it from them, and took it on myself, and told them that I’d make them strong and free. And once the words were out, I knew I’d meant them; those people’s weakness was my own. I went to the new Club Mercantil and spoke with bankers and landlords and felt their fear-guilt as my own—fear for their perfumed comforts, guilt over luxuries spilled out amid rasped want—though I’d never sought comfort, hence couldn’t fear to lose it, and hadn’t known guilt. I drew it from them as they accused me of being power-wild like Alejo, ready to pitch the country into chaos on a whim. I told them that we’d have to work together, all the country working together so that everyone might thrive, and they felt better once they’d passed some of their fear and guilt to me.
I didn’t plan my words or actions. I was aware, quite suddenly, of people. They stumbled through their lives in pain and terror, and now I felt it with them. One afternoon, in one of the strange showers which, that year, broke the dry season, I saw a monster child, a stunted mongol with a gross, bulged head, standing beneath the drainpipe on the Ministry of Commerce, letting a flood of filthy water ram on his tilted crown, and I felt that child’s bewilderment and sorrow so strongly that I nearly went to stand beside him. It was as though I went out of myself into other people’s minds and bodies, or that they entered me. Yes, they passed their pain to me; I sponged their trouble from them.
It went beyond the human. As I moved round the country I felt the longing of parched fields, the twined confusion of dark jungle. I had all Tinieblas inside me, and it filled my brain to bursting.
For seven weeks I tried to seal myself against the suffering of others and the torment of the land, and each week brought me a new anguish. I had the famines, where I ate and ate, yet remained hungry, and the thirsts, and the sorrows, where every sight set my eyes burning and I wept all night tears held back through the day. I had the guilts, where I repented four hundred and fifty years of injustice as though I’d done it all myself, and the resentments, where I sulked a countryful of injuries and slights, and the terrors, where I shuddered everybody else’s fears. Worst was the plague of hopes, where every night I dreamed the dreams of others: slum-dreams of lottery, peasant-dreams of land, invalid-dreams of health, whore-dreams of dignity. I carried with the rush of my campaign like a cork in a torrent, scarcely aware of where I went or what I did. I’d sit the long miles in an idiot daze. We’d reach some town, and I’d blink and go out to draw the people to me, to drain them of their pain and worry and to set them cheering. Then I’d lapse back into my trance. I would hear Gonzalo or Alfonso as from a great distance, and my answers would go back like rays from beyond the sun. Those about me wondered at my strange. placidity, but inside all was maelstrom. Only Elena understood.
“I think you’re going through what I do when I work up a new role,” she told me. “But I’m much more malleable than you are, Kiki. And I make the changes on purpose. I think the part through and decide what voice I’ll use, what gestures I’ll put on. But you’re like a poor caterpillar who’s got to become a butterfly and doesn’t know why or how to go about it. It must be painful.”
Then, at the beginning of March, I found my ease. I was speaking in Tuquetá, in a little town far up against the Ticamalan border, and when I said I was going to give the country to the people, I knew once and for all I meant it. I knew I wouldn’t wonder any more. I had the whole country inside me the way an author wombs his characters and settings—things grander and more various than himself—inside his heart and mind. I was at one with the people. I shared their emotions and could order them so that the strains of class and interest might meld in harmony. The idea of the country for the people—a new idea for me—had come unthought, and I’d doubted it. The suffering of others had come unsought, and I’d struggled with it. Now I accepted the vision and the gift. I claim no credit. A man can be possessed by grace as well as by demons. And it was brief. Ñato the exorcist purged me of it soon enough.
A new country was swelling inside me; no scandal ought attend its birth. I gave Uncle Erasmo’s legacy back to his executor. I told Gonzalo and the others that, whatever frauds Pepe or Felix tried, I wanted none from us. A clever candidate from La Merced had xeroxed up some tho
usand twenty-dollar bills—not much gringo money is seen in the interior—to pass out to voters on election day. I told him, “Burn them,” and when he carped, I kicked him off the ticket. And I sent for Ñato, who’d disappeared somewhere, to tell him to disband his goon squads.
The where he’d disappeared to was Miami. He’d sneaked up with his cousin Pio’s passport. Which showed a certain rodent courage, not just because the French and Interpol both wanted him, but because his Miami friends could hardly write off his cocaine bungle as a tax loss. He was alive, in fact, only because they hadn’t thought him worth the price of an assassin. But now he offered them the new Havana, almost as close with jet planes flying and ten times as corrupt. Wasn’t the president-to-be a former smuggler? Wasn’t old Ñato his best pal? The pranks they’d played together, the capers that they’d pulled! With syndicate funds and know-how they’d turn Tinieblas into a border-to-border vice farm.
He had great plans. Casinos? Of course. Run by the mob and rigged by smart mechanics. But that was peanuts. Why not poppy plantations and a junk refinery? What about the world’s first machine-rolled joint? ESPINOS: a choice blend of Panama red and Acapulco gold. A bank or two to launder grimy money. So many things were possible when you owned a country. Poor Ñato. He never dreamed I’d start believing my own speeches.
He got the news at Alfonso’s house at Medusa Beach. I went with only Elena and Marta to get three days of rest before my final drive—the rally in Bolívar, the last swing round the country, the TV speech before the vote on April first—and left word for Ñato where I’d be. Alfonso had developed both his part and the tract Alejo still retained, but it was mid-week, and the cottages were empty. We rose early, my ladies and I, and walked beside the sea and talked about the future. I remember Marta commenting that this was the last tranquility I’d have for four years.
“I’ll have plenty once I’m dead,” I answered. But that’s not true.
I was trying to find a way to speak to Elena about her career —I didn’t think the First Lady should make movies—when she declared she was canceling her contracts.
“I think it’s time I had some babies,” she said.
And Marta would go back to school in Paris. How neatly we had everything arranged.
The house where Angela had lived stood empty behind its high walls topped with glass shards, and the last morning I went over there and entered as I had fifteen years before, between the gate top and the wire. Wild flowers had sprung up on the spot I’d burrowed in and sunlight drenched the terrace that I’d run across. Instead of tangos, the dry slap of a loose shutter, the rapping of wan ghosts. I studied the leaves at the bottom of the empty swimming pool for some clue to the relation between the pirate who’d stealthed in to board his father’s mistress and the candidate who was going to give Tinieblas to its people. We had strong urges, I decided, and made the risky play. On balance it seemed more rational to be lured by a fair-skinned whore than by one’s own rhetoric. Some people’s dreams grow wilder as they age. I climbed out and swam round the point back to Alfonso’s, and when I got there, Ñato was waiting.
He bubbled with delight. We were going to be rich. Not Tinieblas rich, gringo rich.
I said sure. I sat down in one of the canvas deck chairs Alfonso has beside his pool and yelled for Marta to bring us some iced tea and said sure, but first I had to tell him something.
“No, hombres I have to tell you.”
He sat down in the shade of a table umbrella and opened the neck of his silk sport shirt and whispered to me the oracles from Miami. When Marta came with the tea, he stopped as if unplugged, then whispered on again when she’d left. I watched his kid-with-ice-cream grin for a while, then gazed the prismed sunlight in the beads of sea-water on my chest. I waited till he’d finished, then said, “No.”
“What do you mean no, Kiki?”
“I mean no.”
“Sure, Kiki, but what? You don’t like the junk part? I know you never liked that, but it’s big money, Kiki. You see, it grows in Turkey, and they refine it in France, and the gringo government is leaning on those countries, and that makes everything difficult and puts the price up and could maybe even cut off the supply. But I told them in Miami how you don’t take shit from the gringos. Ah, ho, Kiki! You should have seen their face when I told them what you said to Johnson on the phone. And if they move in here, they can control the whole thing from the poppies to the horse, and we get a big cut. And, Kiki, if they don’t do it here, they’ll just do it somewhere else, and someone else will get the money. All right, Kiki. You don’t like it. You don’t like it. I can see you don’t like it. All right, I’ll tell them no junk. You’re the President, Kiki. I know that. I know when you don’t like something. I know enough not to try to push you. All right. I’ll tell them. We’ll still get rich. The gambling is big money. They’ll set it all up and bring down tours of rich gringos, and…”
“No, Ñato.”
“What do you mean, Kiki?”
“I mean no. No drugs, no gambling, no weird banks, no grass, no pre-teen whorehouses, no syndicate in Tinieblas. The country’s not for sale. I’m not for sale.”
“They don’t want to buy you, Kiki. They’ll make you a partner. There’s a guy coming down tomorrow to make all the deals. He’s got a hundred thousand for your campaign, Kiki.”
“You better call and tell him not to come, Ñato.”
“But it’s all set, Kiki.”
I started laughing. “Did you tell them I’d sent you?”
“Well, Kiki. I know you. And it’ll be good for the country, all that money coming in. And you were out on the stump. And, Kiki, I didn’t know when I left here whether I’d swing the deal or end up on the bottom of Biscayne Bay, so I thought if it worked out I’d make it a surprise. And you can’t say no to this, Kiki. It’s too big. Do you know who’s coming down?” He breathed the name of an august crime magnate. “He says he wants to meet you, Kiki. And he’s a big fan of Elena’s.”
I laughed again. “No.”
“Ah, ho, Kiki! Be serious! Let me tell you again. Let me give you the figures. It’s millions and millions and millions, and we get a cut of everything. You get a cut. You get a big cut. And you don’t have to do anything. All you have to do is look the other way and take the money.”
“No.”
“You don’t understand, Kiki. It’s my big chance.”
“No, Ñato. You don’t understand. Listen. I’m not going to sell this country to the Mafia.”
“It’s not the Mafia, Kiki. The Mafia’s only a branch of the outfit I’m talking about. Like Buick is a branch of General Motors.”
“Still no, Ñato.”
“Kiki…”
“No!”
He pulled the front of his shirt from where it was sweat-stuck to his chest. “You’re hard, Kiki. You don’t care, do you? You don’t care about anyone but yourself. Everything’s fine for you now. You’re going to be President, so you don’t care what happens to me. You don’t have any feeling. Everyone else, when they’re President, they take care of their friends, but not you. Everything for you and nothing for anyone else. That’s the way you are.”
“I’ll take care of you Ñato.” I looked over in the direction of the house where Angela had been and remembered Lalo Marañon. “I’ll make you consul in Macao. You’ll have diplomatic immunity, and you can make a nice little bundle.”
“Consul in Macao! That’s peanuts! This is my big chance, Kiki!”
“I said no, Ñato.”!
“Kiki! I can’t tell”—he breathed the name—“to stay in Miami. It’s all set, Kiki! You can’t say no!”
“I’ve already said it.”
“Then, Kiki, you’ll be sorry!” He jumped up. “You’ll be sorry for treating me like this. You think you can have everything for yourself and leave me with nothing, but you’ll be sorry!” And he ran off to his car.
At lunch I told it all to Elena and Marta. I told it as a joke. Sell Tinieblas to the gringo crime
conglomerate! What an ideal I might have thought of it myself some years before if it hadn’t involved mere leisured riches. And it was amusing to be threatened by Ñato Espino.
But later on that day something occurred that might have shaken me had I been less certain in my coming victory and the rightness of what I meant to do. Near the end of our drive home, as we were rolled down Washington between unpainted slum buildings and the Reservation fence, I saw my mongol urchin grubbing in a waste can and stopped the car. He didn’t understand me when I called him over, but when I showed him a tin of cookies, he came over to gobble avidly, heehawing about like I do now.
“What an ugly child!” whispered Elena.
The monster looked up at her, smiled and said clearly: “Not as ugly as what will happen tomorrow.”
44
“Kiki?”
“Yes, Marta.” She stands in the doorway, the fringes of her hair damp from her shower, her face smeared with pleasure and contrition like a child who’s been at the icing bowl.
“Can I come in, Kiki?”
Nod.
Shuts the door. “I’m sorry, Kiki.”
“For what?”
“For what I said before.”