IN THE TWILIGHT of the Seventeenth Century, Don Alonso de Alcapara y Cebolla Picada, Viceroy of Tinieblas, abandoned a long struggle with the paranoia of command and fortified his capital against a rabble of phantom pirates who had for years been pillaging through his imagination. Such projects don’t admit of skimping, and to this day the colonial quarter of Ciudad Tinieblas remains gartered on its seafront by broad and sturdy walls,88 the top of which—rimmed with a salt-stained battlement and brooded from (at the elbow promontory opposite the Cortes) by three squat cannons—provides a promenade for citizens and Kodak-fodder for tourists. Somewhat before sunset, then, one day in January, 1947, when the dry season was upon the country and the heat split up a little by fresh breezes off the Humboldt Current, a young woman stood on Don Alonso’s wall, now reading, now looking out over the bay. The western wind held her about the waist with one hand and with the other pressed the folds of her white linen dress against her thighs and knees. The sun (who in our latitude is potent on his deathbed) had sired triplet flecks of perspiration along her upper lip. She was memorizing verses in a foreign language, gathering them from the page three at a time and then mutely declaiming them to an audience of sailing pelicans. This so absorbed her that though a man approached and stood some time beside her, she was not conscious of his presence till he spoke.
“What’s the book?”
“Shelley.” She did not look up.
“Hmm.”
“English poet of the Romantic epoch.”
“Hmm.”
“Born in Sussex, 1792. Drowned in the Gulf of Spezia, 1822.”
“And meantime married to the mamá of Dr. Frankenstein.”
She closed her book and looked at him. She blinked and smiled. “Oh.” She turned toward him. “If I had known I was going to make your acquaintance, I would have brought someone more heroic. Byron, I suppose.”
“No matter.” He smiled but looked at her steadily. “The important thing is that the children will be encouraged to learn English. My mother actually forbade me to learn English. Foolish, and something of a handicap.”
“What children?”
“Ours. No, please, don’t be offended. Wait, let me tell you a dream I had two years ago. You were in it.”
“You don’t even know who I am!”
“You were in my dream all the same. Wait, let me tell you.”
Thus, anyway, the meeting was recounted to my brother, Carlos, my sister, Clara, and me on various occasions in our childhood. Saving brief reference to the place, the hour, and the pelicans, my mother did not set the scene. She would, however, cite the intensity of my father’s gaze and the rakish tilt of his panama, then gruff her voice up for his portions of the dialogue. He, if he happened to be home, would harumph happily at his allusion to Mary Shelley, then break in to claim that he had said “Your children” and that he’d made no mention whatsoever of any dream until some evenings later. It was a tough jury for him; he got only Carlos’s vote. But even if, on appeal, the reader chooses to grant him his two points, the essential facts of his conduct that afternoon are not in question: he left the office he was already sharing with Carlitos Gavilán; he took the sea wall, not the street, north toward the Club Mercantil; he saw my mother, whom he did not know but whom he recognized at once as the woman in his wartime dream; he approached her and pressed himself upon her. Had he instead searched round the globe as relentlessly as the Flying Dutchman, he could nowhere have found a woman at once so loving and so opposite to him.
León Fuertes snacked at a smorgasbord of worlds, tasting each separately as different men. For Soledad Piérida the world was one, a perfect oval, fissureless and whole, composed of love. It was not that she felt love to be the main thing or what truly counted. Only love existed. Love might display itself in different form, like gold in a charm bracelet. Love might be twisted clumsily into an Adolf or an A-bomb. But as prime matter it was ever one and pure. One morning in 1928, when at age three she sat alone on the balcony of her father’s house in Calle Justo Canino, she heard a spider singing at its loom under the eaves, wooing the fat flies, and for the next few years such music whispered to her solitary games—the trek anthem of parasol ants as they safari’d out across the patio, the work chantey of black ants heave-hoing a moth’s carcass nestward over sala tiles. Later, when she received religious instruction, her epiphanies of love took divine form. She was so visibly imbued with the holy spirit that contentious adults grew calm in her presence, and Monseñor Irribarri, the archbishop of Tinieblas and a worldly priest if there ever was one, went to her in a throng of first communicants and, to his own amazement, knelt and asked her blessing. She had frequent and protracted visions of the blessed virgin, who came to her as a girl of her own age and played with her. After the first of these visitations, which her parents, with worried looks between them, told her to think no more of, Soledad stopped speaking of them, but they remained regular occurrences, however wonderful. They ceased with her puberty and were replaced with the sound of verses in the air around her. Her first thought was to write these down and show them to her father, but he was so shocked and furious at their passionate character that she never more put poems down on paper but merely listened. They brought her no shame. Nor did she feel that godhead had abandoned her; love, which had shown itself to her in one form then another, had now assumed a different avatar.
Toward the end of Soledad’s adolescence the verses she alone heard faded, but by then she had discovered the verses and tales others had heard and had been suffered to write down and publish, and she immersed herself in this love and decided to absorb it so she might pass it on to others. Love was made audible in words to certain people, and their part was to hear it clearly and transcribe it accurately. Others participated at a next remove, preserving and distributing. Daughters of the Tinieblan ruling class were not supposed to use their minds, much less to study, much, much less to enter a profession, and Soledad’s father, my grandfather Don Adelberto Piérida, was more than normally preoccupied with the dignity of his name and the exalted level of his place in the society and the canons of machismo, but by a campaign of implacable sweetness Soledad persuaded him to send her abroad to prepare herself as a teacher. He chose a convent college in Virginia with the most stringent restrictions imaginable and, to enforce them, a complement of nuns that any tyrant would have grinned to have among his gaolers. None of this bothered Soledad, for the place had a good library. She studied for four years without interruption, while her father worried without interruption for her virtue, which could have been no safer had she been cased in a block of ice. (He would have done better to worry about his younger daughter, Alegra, who also believed in love but on a less spiritual plane than did my mother. Alegra married in great haste at seventeen and was delivered six months later of a son whose paternity remains a mystery. Alberto Avispa, who was unaware of the existence—not to say the abundance—of other suspects, copped a plea when indicted, but Alegra fingered him without the slightest certainty he was the guilty man.) Soledad had been back in Tinieblas half a year, teaching fifth and sixth form English at the Instituto de la Virgin Santísima, when love sought her newly in the person of my father.
It came to Soledad one day that León Fuertes was the embodiment of love precisely fashioned for her custody and worship, but this was by no means an immediate revelation. She had never perceived love in the form of human male, and for a good while her feelings toward León were ambivalent. She knew of him before they met, had in fact been present with her parents at all the embassies where he was feted, yet while his courage appealed to her romantic nature, the things he’d done to prove it (as retold in his citations) repelled her. At their meeting she was at once charmed by his spontaneity and frightened by his head-on assault. After he began courting her, she went one day to see him at trial and, deep in the gallery, unnoticed by him, happened to catch one of his best early performances. It climaxed with him backed Flynn- or Fairbankslike against the reporters’ table, engaging judge and opposing counsel in a flashing cut and thrust of argument until both yielded, yet while Soledad was impressed by his intelligence, his violent wielding of it put her off. Following each of his visits to her home, her father took pains to predict León would soon be rich and important—the clearest earnest Don Adelberto could give of favoring a match—but though Soledad wanted to please her father, she had never cared for riches or importance. León’s attentions to her were both captivating and unsettling. She enjoyed his company, which as a manifestation of a León he was building expressly for their life together was tender, ardent, and attentive, yet could not reconcile it with his ferocity in court. She let him tell her his dream and found the house admirably sited, the children lovely, the wife fortunate, but she refused to find herself in it. She refused because, as she and her world were one and whole, she could not countenance things partial and disjointed. She saw no unity to León, and her instinct told her that his love for her was transitory. In this her instinct was both wrong and right: the love was constant but it was felt by an inconstant León, a part-time León who alternated in one body with some several others. Thus all his qualities, each one of which might facilely have won another girl, failed to win Soledad. Still he persisted, and with a light heart, for every hour of her socicty further convinced him he had seen her in his dream of peace and order.
Then one day it came to her. She had gone walking to the place where they first met and stood again beside the battlement above the bay, not reading now, thinking of León, and, of a sudden, she perceived him—as she had heard the spider’s song and seen the Blessed Virgin—as an embodiment of love sent to and for her. He had, I guess, by then completed work on León, husband, and Soledad may have mistaken this new figure for a conversion in a whole man. She may perhaps have sensed his essential hunger, the only constant (save his body) to the several Leóns. Whatever the case—and one cannot give “reasons” for irrational epiphanies—from that moment she loved him with her entire being, not till death parted them but beyond death, which is an eye-blink of no consequence anyway. Five weeks later they were married.
Soledad and León were, then, each for the other, the incarnation of a vision—a charming circumstance for maid and man to be caught up in, except the visions were distinctly unalike. For León, Soledad was the consort of one of his many, separate lives; for Soledad, León was the projection of love’s unity. Each was ill formed to wear the other’s dream. My aunt Rosario, who was León’s double with the sex reversed, who shared his soul and whose soul León shared, would (incest taboos aside) have been has perfect co-star in the six-reel epic of a marriage, adapting herself gracefully to as many Leóns as he cared to bring onto the screen. My mother, Soledad, would have played perfectly beside him in a lyric interlude, for while neither she nor León ever understood the other for so much as ten seconds in the sense of feeling what the other felt, both were forever reaching poignantly out toward each other across the gulf between them. Destiny, at times no more perceptive than a Hollywood caricature of a Hollywood producer, cast each lady in the other one’s best role.
Reaching … My mother89 formed her life around my father. Without regret or hesitation, she exchanged the teacher’s calling for the helpmeet’s, turned her intelligence and strength of heart to building León’s dream, dissolved her will in his, and strove to mold herself into his image of her. By nature shy and sensitive, she nonetheless inured herself to prominence, to having her surname bandied in the vulgar mouth and her husband clamored for and at, to being (once he went into politics) an object of attention and of gossip, to living (as First Lady) in the fishbowl of public scrutiny under the wink and stare of cameras, and rather than bear all these intrusions with a grudged ill humor, she so pretended to take pleasure in my father’s fame that he was spared all guilt in foisting it upon her, while many thought it was her hunger, not his, that goaded him along. At God knows what psychic cost, she masked her native sincerity behind a dulcet smile and helped León charm clients and politicians he himself despised but had to humor. She accepted, even helped choose, the luxuries he poured upon her, the profusion of French silk and Irish linen dresses, the Costaguanan emeralds, the Worcester china and the Baccarat crystal, the extra servants, the ornately swollen cars—all the accouterments of pillowed ease and costly glitter. She trained herself first to enjoy these, then to depend upon them, so that those who met her after she had been for some years married to my father assumed her an heiress pampered from infancy, to whom the most lavish opulence was bare necessity. She gave León the children he desired and reared them in concert with his dream. We were the mirror of young gentlefolk, Carlos, Clara, and I; accorded every mode of cultivation and admonished constantly to take the full advantage. In this the reason and the plea were ever one: “to please your father.” Studying one’s schoolwork, attending one’s private tutors, practicing one’s piano scales, perfecting one’s tennis game—all such would “please your father.” Carelessness, negligence, or sloth would “make your father sad.” Our young ears hummed with a changeless litany about how hard that father worked, how kind he was, how much he loved us. In our bicameral universe of the house on Bahia Avenue and the villa at Medusa Beach there was one god, León Fuertes, and my mother was his prophet. She bent her heart and soul to bring his dream alive and to approximate the woman in it, and she succeeded save in one particular: she wasn’t happy.
My mother did a fine job concealing her failure to supply this key feature of my father’s dream. Few outsiders suspected that she suffered, much less that her suffering proceeded from her marriage. Women, my father’s casual loves included, envied her. Men found their own wives restless by comparison. Still, she grieved, and it was not because she felt despoiled of her identity or shrunk to an appendage or otherwise impaled upon a feminist cliché. She wished for nothing but to lose herself in love, to be a mirror of some form of love that showed itself to her. No; if my mother wept in her vast bed, if she lay sighing all a rainy afternoon on her silk-covered Recamier, if she allowed her gaze to flutter weakly round the breakfast room and die by her bone teacup, it was because the man to whom she gave herself entirely returned her but a fraction of himself, was always leaving her a widow.
Reaching … Of all my father’s figures, none was so nobly planned or finely crafted as León Fuertes, husband. He was the only León permitted in my mother’s company and was, in all respects save one, ideal. To say that León, husband, loved his wife would be superfluous: he doted on her. A hundred thousand small attentions proved her ever in his thoughts. Each morning he called from court or office to inquire how she’d slept. Each afternoon he brought her flowers, or a book he’d seen and thought she might enjoy, or still some other loving trifle. He got Le Figaro and Corriere della Sera at his office, and when he’d come home, calling “Sóle!” and embraced her and pulled off his tie and coat and collapsed smiling in the Otán-weave hemp hammock that was slung for him across a corner of the sala, when he’d kicked off his shoes and drunk his limonada in two or three parched gulps, he would fish out a scissored piece by Mauriac or a review of the new Malaparte and translate it to my mother along with comments, questions, and expectant glances for approval. He brought her the news, and bits of gossip which he recounted with a luxury of detail, hanging on her responses. Never did León, artist, strive so eagerly to please an audience or León, scholar, give such weight to an authority’s opinion. My father’s manner in these afternoon three-quarter hours was less that of a husband or a lover than of a special kind of friend: the antique gentleman, lonely, near destitute, and yet most courtly, whose only welcome moments of existence come in his visits to a matron half his age. Perhaps he loved her mother long ago or stood beside her father in some fight. No doubt he held her at the font when she was christened and at her marriage stood deep in the church biting his lip to hold back tears of joy, and now he comes each day at the same hour to bring her gilded butterflies of wit, enameled singing birds of conversation, and so to warm his spirit in her smile.
When darkness washed in around them, though, León grew youthful, would swing his legs out of the hammock and rise and go to her and take her hand, bend to her, kiss a bride’s blush onto her lifted check, whisper a low, shy laugh from her turned throat, lead her upstairs. His ardor for her was as strong on their last evening as on their wedding night.
The way he gloried in my mother’s company was the despair of other husbands, who were forever having him held up a model for them by their own wives. When León and Soledad went out together, he did not flee to rumble business with the men or flirt with other women, and if they were pulled apart by tides of conversation, he kept in touch with her by smiles and glances. Even when he was President and she First Lady and they presided at state entertainments or were themselves hosted in foreign capitals, he let no pomp or protocol divide them long but would seek her across the room to stand holding her hand while he conversed. Their couplehood was so charming and so obvious that during their official stay in France in 1962, M. Malraux remarked to my mother that the Elysée orchestra ought to have marked their entrance with a waltz from Les deux pigeons rather than the Tinieblan anthem. One would have thought my father had no other purpose in his life besides his marriage.
León Fuertes never raised his voice to his wife, even in the seclusion of their bedroom. He deferred to her judgment in all points of taste, from the décor of their apartments at the Palace (which was done over out of his private means) to his own dress. Nor did he ever countermand her dispositions where their children were concerned, though he had very firm ideas on child rearing as a dry run for the struggles of this life. My mother, for example, tended to spoil her second son, cute little Camilito, future historian, whom I self-portray from the glass of memory as a wily brat parlaying his huge eyes and scrawny body into more than his fair share of Mama’s love. I feared and loathed the breakers at Medusa Beach, which at flow tide were mountainous, snarl-lipped with greasy foam, and slimed with seaweed, while my father’s dearest joy—shared idiotically by both Clara and Carlos—was to romp in them. We would wade out, all holding hands like figures in the danse macabre, until one of these monsters loomed above us, and then dive through the base of it so that it broke harmlessly past us, and this I valiantly endured, having my father’s hand and, more, the prospect, once we were past the waves, of riding tadpoled to his back on the calm, limpid, sun-flecked swells beyond. My father, though, would often leave us on the sand to swim far out alone and then, returning to the far fringe of the breaker line, call us out to him. Carlos and Clara would go happily, dolphining through the waves, but when a big one rose above me, I, stonied by mixed disgust and terror, would refuse the dive, would get the full weight of the ocean on my fragile ribs, would be bowled up across the shingles, foam in my nostrils, seaweed on my lips, sobbing for air and safety. Then, when I’d floundered to my feet and wiped my tears, my father, who understood my problem (though I didn’t think so then), who suffered my anguish more than I did (though I sense this only in retrospect), but who felt obliged to urge me toward self-mastery (though at the time I put his motive down as tyrant’s Machtlust), would call, “Come on, don’t let it beat you,” and I, of all things most afraid of his displeasure, would stumble shivering back to try again. My mother was wont, however, to cancel whole runs of this tragifarce. She might, if the seas were breaking, put on a stern face and with pained gravity, as though it were a cruel blow to me, proclaim: “Camilo can’t swim today. He has a fever.” I would contrive to look both sick and shattered, a tough role since I could now anticipate delicious hours lounging near her under the striped umbrella or, still better, snuggled beside her in the porch hammock while she read to me. My father, scarcely deceived and visibly annoyed, would merely purse his lips and nod, would not so much as test my forehead with his palm, much less call us both sneaks and overrule her.
My father’s presence brought at once excitement and security, a sea breath of freedom, a wide horizon of delight and possibility, a steadiness of firm and weathered decks. The spirits of my mother and us children thrived or withered with his entrances and exits, and since his pride of place was ever beyond question, he had no call to be a bully in his home, to govern arbitrarily or demand kowtows. At dinner, which we took together most nights as a family, he drew his children into conversation and heard us out with interest and respect. Further, he often let us stay when there was company, a provision that he likened to Plato’s idea of taking future leaders to the battlefield as children to observe in safety and be blooded like young hounds, for to our home came the cleverest people in Tinieblas and distinguished foreigners as well-artists, journalists, politicians—and their debates moved wide- and wittily through every theater of the intellect. Here one might glimpse in León, husband, evidence of other Leóns; he was not always able to restrain the athlete’s-lawyer’s-warrior’s thirst for strife and triumph. He never competed with my mother, though, or pushed her down. My parents ruled in harmony, Sultan and Grand Vizir, so that their only fault was to leave us children ignorant, hence cruelly unprepared, for the sex wars that rage by other hearths.
León, husband, was withal loving, attentive, and respectful to his wife; kindly, strong, and bountiful to his children. Besides, he suffered himself to be adored by her and them, to be the sun around which their world orbited. This was a burden, for as he was now bound to examine his life, he knew that León, husband, his virtues else aside, was stamped with one defect which corrupted him to failure: he had no staying power. Think of a star athlete who frustrates fans and teammates by missing half the season every year. Think of a writer whose lightest phrase is genius, who never sets a word down out of place, but who, seduced from art by love of life, strays from his desk and starves his public on a few slim volumes sparsed across the decades. Think then of León, husband, superspouse and author of his family’s joy, who was forever vanishing, leaving the grin of his perfections in the air behind.
Each of León, husband’s, vanishings was a departure90 from existence. His body was in use to other Leóns, his spirit limbo’d for uncertain time. At dawn he vanished into León, athlete, for his two sets of tennis, and but for a telephonic moment at midmorning he remained vanished until five or six P.M. León, lawyer, or León, politician, had the workday. Any siesta time or otherwise spare minutes went to León, lecher (who makes his entrance in a page or two). When León, husband, had made late-afternoon devotions to his wife and dined with his family, he was liable to vanish once again, and even if he remained throughout the remnant portion of the evening, answered an invitation with his wife or hosted guests at home, he vanished for the midnight hours into León, scholar. None of these other Leóns had a family; none was even married. None cared for Soledad Piérida de Fuertes, and none could pass even at a scrape as an embodiment of love formed for her custody and worship.
Thus Soledad and León failed, each in his way, of being the true incarnation of the other’s vision. León failed Soledad and knew it, was not wholly hers, left her in main a widow, but he was in no wise able to give up his separate lives and form himself into one person about León, husband. Soledad knew she failed León, but she could not love partially, could not forbear to grieve her husband’s vanishings. Neither reproached the other for his failure; each bore his guilt and heaviness in silence. León and Soledad, Soledad and León, reaching, mostly in vain.