by R. M. Koster
“Oh!”
“I didn’t mean it, Kiki. I’m not glad about what happened to you. You know that. I only said it to hurt you. I’m sorry. It’s that… lately I’ve been confused.”
“I know. Forgiven. I thought you were apologizing for your romp with Phil.”
Big blush. “Does it show that clearly?”
“I know that look. I remember it. I didn’t see it this morning, so I suppose last night’s round misfired. I telepathed Phil some advice this afternoon, so I’ll take part credit and a kiss in thanks. On the cheek is all right. And to absolve you for using my house as a pushbutton I’ll take another in penance. Good.”
“You’re feeling better.”
“High on memories. Very strong today. I hadn’t thought of it till you came in, but that creamy look of yours brings back an afternoon four years ago when you assaulted me during my siesta and gave me my very last taste of love.”
“You weren’t very eager.”
“Elena and I had been planting sons all morning. God knows why none of them took. That memory’s got me high, and I’m a little nervous about going to the plaza.”
“Don’t go, Kiki.”
“Of course I’ll go! Why shouldn’t I?”
“It might bring back…”
“That’s the best reason for going.”
“Do you mind if I stay home?”
Shake my head.
“I’m still leaving tomorrow.”
“All right. And I’m still staying.”
“I know. You won’t accept reality.” Bites her lip. “Kiki, I want to say…”
“Don’t say it.”
“… that I never…”
“Don’t.”
“What will you do, Kiki?”
“Things marvelous and bloody. Things you don’t even want to think about, Martita.”
“No. I mean, how will you…”
“Live? I’ll live. And if I come to miss you,” make my smile, “the city’s full of girls. I’ll let one seduce me and take your place. Come on! None of that. I’ve seen girls cry sometimes after a good orgasm, but not from sadness.”
“Kiki…”
“Stop. Red eyes will only make Phil feel protective. He won’t concentrate on his movie. Is Elena ready?”
Nods.
“Then wheel me out. Alejo will be by soon. Politics will be honking horns outside.”
“Filthy politics.”
“That’s it. Get mad. I like you better bitchy than all soft. Come. Come on, Martita. Wheel me back to ‘reality.’”
As if this maimed reality, whose edge I won’t be bound by, were the only one!
She sniffs, opens the door, pushes me out. Sonny, Phil, and Carl by the bar, Elena on the left horn of the crescent couch, sipping tea, flipping, yes, Réalités. And Alfonso sweeping in, all agitated and important, saying we must get ready, the caravan will be here any minute.
Moviemen swing up their gear and lug it out to Alfonso’s convertible. Marta goes to tell Jaime to bring my car around. Elena leaves her tea and magazine, comes to embrace Alfonso and ask me in Italian if I feel all right. And he rolls me to the door and eases me down the step.
Now over all the land the tropic dusk is falling. Shrimp boats run in from the wide gulf; peasants trudge home across sere pastures. In the deep forest monkey chatter stills; parrot wings beat against the darkling sky; the jaguar yawns and stretches. And I set off for the place my mind has circled toward all day, all day and longer, since Alejo set the rally and I said I’d go, since I left the clinic and returned here to Tinieblas. My life was arrowed all too fast for thought. Now I plod back along its flight to the place my mind shies from, to meet death-monster fear again and steal a meaning from between his paws.
45
Alfonso’s car curbed on Bahía, pointed downtown. Alfonso at the wheel, Sonny behind him, Carl kneeling on the rear seat with his camera shouldered, Phil on the sidewalk, slung with light meters. My car behind Alfonso’s with the motor ticking. Jaime at the wheel, Elena behind him, Kiki right-front, safety-strapped at lap and chest. Superplant mounted and ready to move out.
Ready ahead of time, or Alejo’s late. Motorcade slowed by throngs, no doubt. Which gives my mind time to catch up with my body. So both can leave for the plaza together.
“Are you all right, caro?”
“Tucked in tight, Elena. And you?”
“I was happier last time.”
Exactly. So was I. That day I also woke at dawn, but got out of bed all by myself. And bathed and shaved myself, imagine that! And sat down on the toilet with Charles de Gaulle and did my duty. Then I tucked the book away in my night table and put on shorts and old desert boots and a shirt with a crocodile on it, and went out on the balcony for coffee.
The pelicans were fishing that day too. I watched them while Edilma brought my tray. I spooned my sugar and poured my milk all by myself. I drained the cup, and poured a second from the thermos, and sipped it slowly. “KIKI SPEAKS!” shouted Correo Matinal, “PEPE TO SELVA TRÓPICA,” whimpered La Patria.
I saw the shrimp fleet off. Beneath blue skies I smoked a blue Galoise. Warmed by the infant sun, half-swollen by a languorous fantasy, I rose and stretched and went to Elena.
She had the drapes pulled, the machine on high, the covers piled about her. I dropped my clothes and slithered in. My fingers crept under her nightgown into her dream. She half-turned toward me, making sweet moan. I rolled her back and hitched her gown up and spread her petals and climbed between them (with her already shuddering, half in sleep) and slipped into her as into a warm sea. Plunged, and caught her at the bottom—oh!
Then soaked a bit while she waked. And curled in her warm fragrance while she bathed. And imagined her soaping her breasts. And was ready again when she returned.
“Good. I want to be awake when my first child’s conceived.”
“Too late.”
“If you’re so sure, I might as well get dressed.”
“No, no. Let’s stay on the safe side.”
Later we dozed. And later still we hedged our bets again. Then we dressed and went downstairs, she to feed the triplets an egg apiece, I to practice politics.
There should be time, before Alejo’s juggernaut toots up, to daub a triptych of my morning. The central panel shows Don Kiki with his shirt peeled off, baking healthily in the poolside sun. Gonzalo and Armando hug the umbrella’s shade beside him: Gonzalo, his face gold-red and pitted like a pomegranate, his lips drawn back, a fist balled on the table top, a forefinger stabbed toward Armando’s face (he was saying, I believe—and the squabble churned throughout my whole campaign—that ideology is mental masturbation if you don’t get the votes); Armando with his arms folded, his chin and nose and eyebrows raised (he had just finished saying that votes are worthless without a program). Both look to Kiki, who smiles like Solomon and lifts his hands in reconciliation. In the left background a round man with a shiny face (a hardpressed candidate for deputy who craved a seat nearby me on the rally stand that night) peers through the glass door of the sala at Kiki and his counselors. Behind him a tall, sallow gringo with bad teeth and a wrinkled seersucker (the noted journalist Kerry Pimpton, who got an interview that morning and a box seat at a murder the same night) flirts desultorily with Marta, while a squat old man with an Alejo-style white suit and a face carved from a chunk of mahogany which had lain out on a beach till it was sun-cracked and sea-streaked (Doroteo Aranque, Felix Grillo’s ward boss in San Felipe, who was prepared to deal three hundred votes, all relatives and debtors, for a niche on my bandwagon) paces nearby. The head, like an eight ball fuzzed with cotton, of the Reverend Dr. Gladstone Archer, is visible over Pimpton’s shoulder, and the top of the panel is crowded with the figures of associates, retainers, petitioners, and advisers. To the right of the Kiki-Gonzalo-Armando group the dining-room window frames a picture within the picture touched in the Vermeer mode: Donna Elena at breakfast, holding a triangle of toast halfway to her mouth as she gazes softly i
nto a dream of heirs, and, through the doorway to the kitchen, bent-backed Edilma husking crayfish for the first course of our lunch.
The left-hand panel shows the pool at noon. Kiki stands waistdeep at the shallow end, the top of his shorts visible beneath an inch of transparent water, holding nine-year-old Olguita, her heels cupped in his upstretched palms, her eyes clamped shut, her hands bladed over her head. Water streams his sun-brassed chest and crinkles in the corners of his smile and beads the sunlight in his hair and slicks his shoulders as he lifts his daughter for her dive. At his side twelve-year-old Mito waits his turn, while in the background, Olga in a smart Miami pantsuit (she has just remarked, a trifle bitchily, that Elena and I ought to have children of our own) and Elena in a print dress (she smiles in secretive contentment) watch the performance from a pair of aluminum chairs set back in the shade of the trellis. The sunlight-shimmered sala door reflects Kiki’s V-ed torso and Olguita’s rump, but a careful look through it will be rewarded by a glimpse of a delicious houri in a micro-skirt (Alfonso’s stewardess of stewardesses—she made Time’s “PEOPLE” section six months later when she married Spitzer the hedge-fund wizard), who stands in the cool of the sala tinkling a heraldic gin-and-tonic.
On the right we are coming out from lunch: Olguita with a dab of chocolate at the corner of her mouth, Mito preening his gold-buttoned blazer, Alfonso the Suave with Elena on one arm and Mouche (who looks over her shoulder to send me my last sweet message), Kiki and Olga (I have just complimented her on our children’s table manners, and she replies, “I feel the same way about having married you as Edgardo does about having fought in Korea: I was crazy to do it, but I’m glad I did, now that I’ve managed to survive.”), and Marta, as fetching as the sprite on Sparkling Water labels, in a light-purple shift, who raps the doorway molding with a knuckle when Armando Loza says we’ll all be lunching in the palace in ten weeks.
But all this sunny, viand-rich well-being fogs me from Ñato whom, I confess, I didn’t give a thought to all that morning. Hindsight reveals I’d best have spent an hour picking in Ñato’s mind—roached and spidered like the top slab of a basement cell in La Bondadosa, strewn with elliptical black rat turds and staled by drying urine. I might have flushed the scorpion that stung me later on. Instead I took my joy at work and love, so now I mustn’t snip him from this replay.
He drove, then, from Medusa Beach to the capital at grand prix speed, cursing me without interruption and escaping a spectacular death two or three times through the skill of certain anonymous motorists, whom I will not take trouble to imagine since they chose to preserve themselves rather than spare me my paralysis. Immediately on arriving at his mother’s house, he went to the bathroom, lifted the top of the toilet tank, untaped a packet of cocaine, and inhaled it. Then he left for the Compañía Interplanetaria de Telecommunicaciones to place a call to Miami but arrived instead at the Alameda. A pig-tailed nine-year-old fell from her swing and scuffed her knees; Ñato soothed her with ice cream. He and the child were lifted to his car and whisked magically to an obscure dirt road beyond the airport. A blue inchado note—on which Simón Mocoso was smoking a marijuana joint stuck on a toothpick—flapped from Ñato’s fingers to the girl’s, but when his thing cobraed from his trousers to brush the steering wheel, she grew frightened, so he grabbed her dusty hand and made her do it, though she sniveled distractingly and squeaked when he gooed her thumb. Then he was sitting on his toilet, his pants gauded with dried starch and a hillock of cocaine trembling on the back of his hand. He sniffed it up, and Kiki Sancudo came in wearing a wet bathing suit to apologize for joking so cruelly the day before. Ñato forgave him, since they were going to be partners again and millionaires, and went to the Palmita to celebrate. While he was on his third rum, or his fourth, he got an overseas call from Miami, which he took on a pair of leather dice cups, speaking through one and listening through the other. Meyer Lansky congratulated him personally. Ñato passed the earpiece to his friend Fidel Acha, but as Acha didn’t know much English, he couldn’t comprehend the importance of the call. Then they were in the men’s room of the Hueco Negro with Acha zipping beside the sink and Ñato parked on the toilet with a young fag squatting between his knees. But nothing happened and Acha started cackling, so Ñato pushed the kid away and said he’d bit him, and Acha got angry and coshed the kid with his revolver and kicked him in the face, and Ñato got up and pissed on him a little, trying to hose the blood from his lower lip. Then he stood outside his car, which was rammed, radiator split and steaming, into the rear of a sedan, scuffling his feet in shattered headlight glass, while Acha flashed his Guardia badge at the other driver and counseled him to forget all about the minor scratch on his bumper, the imaginary ache in his neck, and to watch his driving, and to think who he might be talking to before he started shooting off his mouth. And next morning, just as I was letting Mito push me in the pool with my shorts on, Ñato woke up with a bad headache and sat naked on a corner of his bed, gouging pale chunklets of dead skin from between the small toes of his left foot and carrying them to his nostrils for appreciative sniffs, trying to recall where he’d been and what he’d done, remembering only that Kiki had betrayed him, had denied him a fair share of the electoral booty—out of plain spite, since Kiki stood to gain as much as he—after all he’d done for Kiki, and that the capo from Miami was already airborne, expecting to close a deal that wasn’t there.
So he inhaled a packet full of hope and set off to buy his dream from pawn. He wandered in the driveway looking for his car; then he recalled the crunch of twisting metal. But a neighbor had left the keys in hers, so he took it to Tinieblista Party Headquarters.
Kiki had gone insane, he told Gonzalo. A spender from Miami wanted to contribute a hundred thousand to the campaign, and Kiki wouldn’t take it!
Gonzalo commiserated. It was true Kiki had been acting strangely lately. He’d ordered a clean campaign, for instance, something so foreign to Tinieblan traditions—to politics in any country, for that matter—that it made one doubt his reason. More, there were rumors that he meant to keep his campaign promises, which would prove what Gonzalo had suspected all along, that Kiki was a dilettante, an amateur, gifted to be sure, but not serious. Still, he was winning the election, and everyone knew it, even his opponents. This wasn’t the moment to cross him. Young Mani Liso from La Merced had had a marvelous idea; you know, xeroxing gringo twenties, and Kiki had given him the boot. Right off the ticket, and since there wasn’t time to file another Tinieblista for the race, he’d pledged support to a Christian Democrat. He was capable of anything, even firing him, Gonzalo. It was true, nobody turned down a hundred thousand in the last two weeks of a campaign, but Gonzalo had learned not to judge Sancudos by ordinary standards. He’d seen Alejo win on astrology! No, Gonzalo wouldn’t say anything to Kiki. He had enough trouble trying to rig a ward or two without Kiki’s finding out. No, the most he’d do—since the wheel was flying in today—was loan Ñato a party car and a driver. Maybe if Ñato took the man to beg in person, Kiki would take his money.
While Gonzalo talked, six-inch cockroaches in Dior gowns mamboed across his desk in time to the vein beating in Ñato’s forehead. Ñato howled hysterically at the final quip, snatched up the order for the car, and left. In the hall he met a Boston bull terrier who suggested that Pepe Fuertes might accept the deal Kiki had rejected; the syndicate could keep its hundred thousand and dynamite Kiki instead. He located his driver and ordered him posthaste to Pepe’s house, but when he got there, he learned that Pepe was campaigning in Selva Trópica. Lansky’s lieutenant would land in forty minutes. Home to change and sniff another packet, and before leaving, a desperation call to Kiki.
Ñato’s first ring synched with Marta’s second rap.
“I’ll get it,” said Alfonso, relinquishing two lovely arms and heading for the library.
“We’ve a layover till tomorrow night,” Mouche remarked to Elena, a bit louder than necessary, “and I’m going to play the lottery. The Excelsior has
put me in room 1007 for the third straight time.”
“I wish you luck,” said Elena, turning to smile at Kiki, on whom life continued to lavish goodies.
“It’s your ‘brother’ Ñato,” said Alfonso, who emerged from the library tapping two fingers to his nascent right horn.
“Hang it up.”
“He says it’s life or death.”
I went in and picked up the receiver. “Have you decided to join the Consular Service?”
“Beep, beep.”
“What?”
“This bus will run you over if you don’t give a fair share.”
“Are you on snow?”
“Varruuum!”
“Sleep it off, Ñato.”
“You owe me, so don’t cheat me. I know what’s right. Correct in the rectum, you son of a bitch!”
I hung up and went to see my guests out. Alfonso came over to me. “What’d your ‘brother’ want?”
“Trouble. He’ll get it.”
“Ha!” Marta came over. “You’ll probably put him in your cabinet.”
Shook my head. “If I put him anywhere, it’ll be outside the country.” I smiled to Elena, who was standing near the door with Olga.
“Look, Kiki.” Alfonso pursed his lips. “Lino called me this morning…”
“And?”
“And said some Guard officers are saying you and Ñato have a deal with some gringo gangsters. The deal León Fuertes turned down.”
“They’re saying that?”
He looked away.
“And it’ll be all over the country by tomorrow?” I went on.
“And it’ll cost me votes?”
“Votes!” from Marta.
“You’ll still win, Kiki,” Alfonso said softly.
I grinned and put my arm around his shoulder. “I have no deal, Fonso. And you!” I grinned at Marta. “You ought to be working for Pepe, the things you believe about me.”
“Charm goes only so far, Kiki.”
“I’m not running on charm, Marta. Charm’s not my platform. But see, Fonso? Some people have no faith. Those need demonstra-tions. I wish this had come up at lunch, Marta. I’d have turned the water into wine for you.” And I went to give Olguita a hoisting hug and to tousle Mito’s hair and kiss Olga’s check and shake Armando’s hand and nod with simple (and hence slightly pregnant) courtesy at throaty, long-legged Mouche.