MY FATHER,94 León Fuertes, entered public life in January, 1952. That he’d been disinclined to do so until then was looked on as a considerable bizarrity, for your Tinieblan takes to politics as alligators do to fragrant swamps, and will, at the least chance, plunge in and wallow for as long as possible. León had had chances. He had, in fact, been offered high public office, which to your true Tinieblan is paradise itself, where one sits at banquet, anointed with flattery and graft. When León declined the commandancy of the Guardia Civil, President Luis Gusano assumed the war had left him shell-shocked. Rebeca, for her part, was furious.
“It’s God’s curse on me for whoring myself to Burlando! I should have known his seed was putrid. Four generations broke their bowels to get you, and you turn out a ninny! You haven’t testicles enough to pick up power when they hand it to you on a plate. Oof!”
“Ay, Mamá,” said León, smiling. “How can you expect me to have any? In our family the women have them all.”
“Don’t mock me! I’m cursed, and that’s the end of it. I opened my womb three times and got a Chinaman, a ninny, and a cripple. But no one escapes destiny.” She stabbed León with a pudgy forefinger. “You’ll be President of the Republic whether you want to or not!”
He didn’t want to; it wasn’t in his dream. He had several extremely pleasant lives and was already President of the Associated Avatars of León Fuertes, a loose confederation whose government allowed him ample exercise of parliamentary skills. Rebeca had, besides, struck the truth at least a glancing blow when she implied he was afraid of power. He had no fear of standing out from the herd, exposed to envy and the fangs of predators. He had a taste for that. And those who, later on, accused León of being starved for power also got a piece of the truth. Hunger was León’s essence, after all. He was, however, wary of indulging his appetite for power. His study of history had revealed power to be a habit-forming hallucinogen which blasts the minds of all but the most disciplined of its users, conferring euphoric visions which encourage dependence, and engendering hideous waking nightmares which even massive doses can but momently dispel. His study of himself had meanwhile disclosed his vulnerability to all manner of addictions. He therefore curbed his taste for power as sternly as he’d curbed his taste for killing. For five years he avoided all contact with power, and first touched it only to remove a stash from an addict who’d become a public menace.
From the end of our civil wars (1883-1893) through sixty-odd years of this century, power in Tinieblas was in the main held and dispensed by a peculiar class, a group of families, mostly from the capital and mostly white, whom their detractors called los bichos. The term, which is best translated “the vermin,” was coined by Dr. Amado del Busto during his brief tenure in the presidency in 1905. It conveys the demagogue’s repugnance for those who move by stealth, not honest violence, and gives apt inference of busy mandibles and ceaselessly swaying feelers. The bichos infested most of what was tasty in the land. They were not, however, terribly noxious as ruling groups go. They killed no one, either in their own or in other countries. They were not cruel or brutal or stupid. Now that they have been superseded, it is hard for the dispassionate observer not to view them with mild nostalgia.
Plato observed that greed is the vice of oligarchs; the bichos confirm the observation. They pursued power as a means to money and money as a means to family survival. The original bichos had survived obscurely since the days of the Spanish colony. When the national id had raped itself limp in the train of General Feliciano Luna and the national superego had sermoned itself hoarse in Monseñor Jesús Llorente’s pulpit, the bichos emerged in egoistic vigor. Hildebrando Ladilla crept to prominence from a dank office in the customs shed because he’d taken neither side in the bloody ten-year wrangles between Liberals and Conservative—or rather because he’d outwardly toadied to (and covertly fleeced) both sides so earnestly that each thought him their cohort. He enjoyed being President. It is said he wore the presidential sash to bed, pinned to his nightshirt. But he put duty to family before love of office and rather than lash himself to the helm of a nation foundering in bankruptcy, abandoned ship, taking what was left of the treasury with him. His son Heriberto Ladilla (1871-1937, President of Tinieblas 1920-1923, 1924-1927) plowed the money back into what was now the family business, twice purchasing the presidency during a period when several foreign oil firms were competing for concessions in our country. Heriberto, who spent part of his youth in exile, was the author of a very touching sonnet on the beauties of Tinieblas, but he did not let love of country blind him to his duty to his heirs. He dealt the national oil patrimony to the firm that offered him the largest kickback and hatched his father’s nest egg to a proudly crowing fortune. Unencumbered by ideology, by patriotism, or by love of power for its own sake, the Ladillas responded with agility to the call of family interest. They were a model for their class.
Family loyalty was the mortar of bicho class cohesion. Bichos paired with bichos in marriage, and often in adultery as well, so that their genealogies present not trees but an entangled mangrove, with branches growing back into their roots and stalks engrafted one upon another. Aquilino Piojo, an altogether typical example, had Chinches and Ladillas on his father’s side and on his mother’s Tábanos, Gusanos, and Hormigas. He married Andrea Comején, whose mother was a Mosca and who had Grillo and Avispa grandmothers, and maintained a liaison (solemnized by marriage after his and her divorces) with his cousin Marina née Chinche, who was his cousin Hunfredo’s first wife and who had Abejas, Grillos, and Arañas among her immediate antecedents and, further back, Luciérnagas, Piéridas, and Mariposas. Piojo’s issue thus bore the blood of fourteen bicho breeds doubly and trebly blended, and as they have married back into their class, the twine of genes threatens to become inextricable. Marital unions reflected and provoked commercial ties. Politics took on the aspect of a parlor game, an endless round of Monopoly on a set owned by close cousins, who compete with guile, combine and recombine, make deals, go back on them, cheat now and then, exchange mild insults, but never come to blows; and who, a winner having grinned and losers grumbled, simply start in again with the same players. Outsiders might kibitz or even sit in if there was room, but if one of them lost his temper and began playing for blood, if he became violent or abusive, if he sought to ban a cousin from the game or tried to take it out into the street and play with his own buddies, he was pushed from the board, gently but firmly.
Sometime around the turn of the century, about a decade after the bichos scuttled from the economic molding of the country and crawled up from beneath the social flagstones which ten years of war had overturned, they were struck with a collective amnesia. One morning Modesto Gusano, who was Minister of Finance and would soon be President of the Republic, received a petitioner, a fellow who aspired to some minor post and who prefaced his request by remarking that Gusano had scarcely changed—physically, he meant—since the days when he sold sweet rolls door to door.
The minister blinked in perplexity and murmured, “Sweet rolls?” and the petitioner, thinking he was furthering his case, replied “The best in Tinieblas! No one bakes like your mother (may she rest in peace) these days.”
“My mother?”
The petitioner’s tongue swam in the remembered taste of sweet rolls, and his thumb itched with the remembered feel of the tiny silver two-and-a-halfcentavo pieces that were in circulation back in the days when President Gustavo Puig went crazy and was deposed by his vice-president, General Saturnino Aguila, and that would buy a plump, sugar-glistening sweet roll from the plump, sweat-glistening ten-year-old who came waddling down the middle of the street bawling, “Sweeeet rolls!” with a basket of them (shielded from sun and flies by a limp sheet of newspaper) wobbling on his head. The petitioner’s nose twitched to the remembered fragrance of sweet rolls baked by Señora Gusano, whose husband had failed selling hardware and then failed selling dry goods and would fail again selling vegetables in the public market before civil war mercifully broke out and he made his fortune, starting with a one-wagon commissary roped to a Conservative battalion. But the Minister of Finance could not, try as he might, remember either the sweet rolls or the woman who had baked them or the boy who had sold them or the merchant who had failed. He remembered Don Prudence Gusano, Vice-Minister of War for Supply and Transport in the Government of Monseñor Jesús Llorente, and Doña Candelaria de Gusano, Vice-President of the United Conservative and Catholic Ladies of Tinieblas, and Licentiate Modesto Gusano, Assistant General Manager of the Gusano Patriotic Sales Corporation. He remembered them with great clarity riding together in a pearl-grey landau to the hanging of General Feliciano Luna. But that was in 1893, and he could remember nothing before that.
Gusano broached the problem to his wife that night and learned that she too had lost a good part of her memory. She could remember back as far as Palm Sunday morning in 1895, when her father, Ernesto Chinche, announced that President Rudolfo Tábano had offered him a ministry, but all before that was blank. All the bichos were suddenly afflicted with the same syndrome: none could recall a time when their families were not powerful, or at least important and well off. From then they put on the air of dynasts, assumed the arrogance of Moguls or of Manchus. They took to speaking English among themselves, as Tolstoy’s counts and princesses spoke French. They fraternized only with the diplomatic corps, executives of foreign banks and companies, and senior Reservation officers. They came to feel that nothing native to Tinieblas could possibly be good, and their despite for the very term “domestic” grew so ingrained that when they went to Paris they automatically refused French wine and called for imported vintages.
Still, snobbery did not paralyze them totally. From time to time a bicho family would marry a daughter to a promising young outsider—to strengthen the breed, as it were, or to assimilate a potential enemy. León Fuertes became eligible for bichohood by this dispensation when he married into the Piérida family, who were bichos in morphology if not behavior, as peacocks are birds along with rooks and shitepokes. León never really exercised his option, however; nor was he really recruited. Don Adelberto Piérida favored the match between his daughter Soledad and León Fuertes, but he did not make León the kind of business proposition Erasmo Sancudo had offered.
Erasmo Sancudo was himself the great example of miraculous bichification. He was an orphan from Remedios with some unfashionable indian and negroid genes who came to the capital barefoot at age twelve and peddled newspapers, until Don Fernando Araña observed how cleverly he shortchanged customers and took him in and gave him an education. He was the ugliest man in Tinieblas, with all the poorest features of his several racial strains, but he was also the shrewdest man in America, and Don Fermín Anguila gave him his daughter Beatriz in marriage and made him a partner in his law firm—the sort of deal León rejected—confirming him a bicho. Sancudo became the power in the firm, and publisher of the same newspapers he’d peddled, and a director of companies, and a maker of Presidents, and President of the Republic (1936-1940), and President of the Chamber, and President of the Supreme Court. He was at all times a true and perfect bicho, defending his class, its interests, and its principles even against the machinations of his mad brother Alejandro.
The bichos believed in strong currency and weak government, the weaker the better so long as property and contracts were respected. They disbelieved in despotism and democracy, and particularly distrusted popular leaders, who, as history shows, often invoke the second and institute the first. Accordingly, they clamped the inchado to the gringo greenback and scrutinized ambitious men for telltale signs of charisma or social conscience. They considered national dignity (along with great men, noble causes, glorious sacrifices, and utopian programs) a luxury which a poor country like Tinieblas could simply not afford. Their foreign policy was to grovel, mainly to the United States. But if the United States made use of the bichos to exploit Tinieblan resources, the bichos made even more effective use of the United States. In 1905 the populace deposed President Modesto Gusano and installed its favorite, Dr. Amado del Busto, in the Palace. He instantly issued a sheaf of egalitarian decrees and appointed an army of unbribable officials to enforce them, but he and his abominations were soon swept away. El Diario de la Bahia—the Chinche family owned it—published an interview with the new president, a strident interview in which Dr. del Busto reached new peaks of patriotic eloquence, pledging in one paragraph to triple taxes for the Galactic Fruit Company and in the next to expropriate its holdings down to the last banana plant, no recompense allowed. It was a total fabrication, every word thought up, weighed out, and then set down by Maximo Chinche himself, but the mob so loved those pledges that del Busto could not disavow them, and inside a week he was deposed by Marine effectives from the Reservation. This theme was replayed with appropriate variations in 1917 and 1942 for the dancing pleasure of such bichophobes as Eudemio Lobo and Alejandro Sancudo. (In Lobo’s case the bichos floated so many rumors about his German sympathies that he eventually developed some and sent a cable of congratulations to the commander of the U-boat that sank the Lusitania. The gringos threw him out of office the next day.) At critical moments during half a century the bichos disposed of the military and diplomatic resources of the United States as fully as the U.S. president. Nor were bones made about it. In 1919, when President Victoriano Mosca vetoed an appropriation for the Guardia Civil, he told the Chamber that Tinieblas didn’t need armed forces. “In any emergency we can use the gringo army. It beat the Kaiser, and that’s good enough for me.”
The bichos governed by the client system of ancient Rome—not that they copied it; it came to them by nature. Each bicho patriarch sat on a scaffolding of agents, fixers, arm-twisters, rumor-pushers, vote-buyers, post-sellers, go-betweens, goon-masters, and hacks, which held him high above the muck in the pure air of power. From each depended a candelabrum of deputies, judges, councilmen, province jefes, barrio bosses, functionaries (grand and petty), and guardias (commissioned and non-), which spread his glow of influence over the land and beamed it down into the lowest hovel. These practical fixtures were sprayed with a cosmetic film of ideology, which, while transparent, gave them a modern sheen. The bichos owned and operated parties, some taken over from their past proprietors and some constructed new, whose names evoked the soarings of political philosophy. These names, however, had rather less symbolical significance than do the shapes of the tin figurettes that circle a Monopoly board. No one gaped in wonder when the Universal Socialists merged with the Patriotic Nationalists. That merely meant that the Avispa and Abeja families were in alliance, and since Arnulfo Avispa and Rufino Abeja were cousins three times over and the best of friends, since they agreed to the last particle on how Tinieblas should be governed, since Don Rufi was neither a patriot nor a nationalist while Don Fufi would have cut cane in Remedios before espousing socialism, there was little to wonder at.
The bichos were bankers and brokers, importers and exporters, speculators and peculators. A bicho patriarch was like as not a minister, when he was not taking his turn in the Presidential Palace. His son sat in the Chamber, when he was not farming a consulate abroad. The bichos wore white linen suits and everyone who could afford to wore them also. They sent their sons to prostitutes at puberty and later on to foreign universities, enjoining them in both instances to learn how the world worked but not to become burdened with any useless sentiment or knowledge. Their daughters went to convent schools for preservation, not for education. They married young and, with but few exceptions, led lives of physical torpor, mental blankness, and emotional turmoil, spawning swarms of clever, greedy bichitos.
The bichos thrived in undiminished vigor for about three generations, munching up the goodies of the country but keeping their greed nicely calibrated to what they could get away with as a class and, meanwhile, running the Tinieblan show with Hurokabilly verve and Barnumstorming confidence. Then missing memories began to straggle home. Memories that had disappeared like Speer’s Jewish neighbors began showing up in the best residential quarters of Ciudad Tinieblas, and bicho men and women who had never known anything but luxury began to recall an epoch when their families were poor and powerless. Alberto Avispa found his brain stuffed with memories that had originally belonged to his grandfather, including some depressingly clear memories of that grandfather’s father, one Pablo Avispa, who got up at dawn day to buy crustacea at a wharf near what is now the Yacht Club and then trudged till dusk, dragging a stinking cart about the city. Irma Araña had wincing smellovision memories of her grandmother’s hide-factor uncle, who stank of pig dung and the tannery. No one mentioned these memories, but almost every bicho had a number of them slouching in the foyers of his mind, and their ragged, interloping presence moved the bichos to wonder if they were destined to be powerful forever. Silently, separately, the bichos began to question their capacity to stay in power, even their right to rule. There followed from this questioning a doubt, and from this doubt a fear, and from this fear an attitude which answered their questioning and confirmed their doubt and fear. The bichos began to take the attitude that their world was coming to an end.
From then on they gave their greed free rein, they gouged and grafted wildly, they grabbed for everything within their reach. Humberto Ladilla sold lottery chances on the government jobs in his patronage. Dagoberto Comején put his entire family on the payroll of the Ministry of Justice, including all his cousins to the fourth remove and children down to the age of seven. He had his dog, a Doberman called Ilse, commissioned with the rank of captain in the Guardia Civil, and when she was killed in the line of duty—hit by a neighbor’s auto while patrolling the approaches to Comején’s driveway—the state paid her pups a pension. Filiberto Alacrán took a huge bribe and opened Tinieblas to a U.S. gambling syndicate, and when school gyms and cafeterias filled up with slot machines, he justified them on the ground that they helped children learn game theory and the laws of probability. In their rapacity the bichos fought with one another over trifles. They betrayed their class to outsiders for short-term profit. They fostered enmity among themselves. They grew incapable of banding firm against a common enemy. Most seriously, they ceased to look and act like rulers, hence they forfeited their legitimacy.
The end came in 1970. That is, the events of 1970 made it clear the bichos had no power anymore. Few lamented, but an era of freedom ended with them, for the bichos believed in freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and freedom of thought, as well as freedom to give and receive bribes and freedom to charge what the market will bear and freedom to go out and rig the market. Graft, of course, continues, but now it goes to people who believe in slavery and terror.
The end might have come sooner. In 1951 Alejandro Sancudo, who had returned to the presidency in 1948 despite the last united effort the bichos ever mounted and who had then governed for three years with uncharacteristic lucidity and restraint, reverted to the madness that power and his craving for it had made chronic to him. He established a People’s Congress and used it to promote class hatred. With his left hand he encouraged violent demonstrations, then crushed them with his right. He contrived chaos and screamed for order. His aim was to fumigate Tinieblas of its ruling class and seize total power, and he would surely have succeeded but for León Fuertes.
León was at his mother’s house on the December day his public future sought him out. For three months Alejandro Sancudo had been furrowing the land with discord and fecundating it with evil humors of resentment, had sown unrest and cultivated violence. A miasma of bile and choler hung about the country and seeped into the recesses of every private life, and León Fuertes became poisoned. León, lawyer, found his workdays fouled with reveries in which he wrangled issues with himself. León, scholar, could not concentrate because his fancy teemed with images of fury. León, husband, snarled and shouted at his family; León, athlete, took to smashing balls in his opponents’ faces and hurling his racket petulantly about the court; León, lecher, degraded is companions with enforced perversions. Vile passions curded all León’s sweet lives, and at night his sleep was venomed by a dreamed dispute with President Sancudo.
In this dream, which was replayed each night in ever clearer detail, León would march into the Presidential Palace and collar President Sancudo and sit him down and speak him some plain sense. He would point out that he had seen New York during the Great Depression and Europe during Adolf Hitler’s war and that experience had taught him something: though it was small and poor and backward, an object of patronizing ridicule (if not contempt) to those few who had heard of it beyond its borders, the Republic of Tinieblas enjoyed great good fortune.95 Tinieblas had slept placidly through half of the worst century since Adam, disturbed by neither war nor revolution, innocent of massacre and torture. One could count on one’s fingers the countries that had not known sword or famine in the last fifty years, yet Tinieblas was among them. Its President ought not tempt fate. Sancudo would merely sneer and answer that he wasn’t tempting fate, he was fate’s instrument. The people of Tinieblas were free and sovereign and entitled to equality among the nations, to a fair share in the marvels of the century, its refinements of strife and agony, its advancements in terror and despair.
León would wake enraged, then give himself a lecture in his shaving mirror: the bunglings of politicians were not his business; the country’s mess was none of his affair; if he stayed out of it, it would not touch him. But of course, it had touched him already.
On the day in mention León felt particularly agitated. He had the unbanishable sensation of a rendezvous to keep somewhere, and yet his calendar was empty and his secretary assured him he had no appointments. He could not sit at his desk for the feeling that he was expected somewhere. At length he left his office and drove aimlessly about the city—or rather drove according to an unknown aim, letting his hands turn the steering wheel at their own impulse, as years before, lost in the desert, he had let his camel lead him to water. He stopped beside the Alameda.
General Feliciano Luna’s statue was decked in crepe, and someone had hung a sign about his neck that read: “I DIED FOR THE FATHERLAND, SOLD TO THE GRINCOS BY THE BICHOS,” but politics had not yet reached the south end of the park, where boys were playing baseball. León got out and wandered toward the backstop. The fielding team was short a player, and as he noticed this a thought hopped crazily across two decades into his mind: today he might get a game. With that, a great calm and confidence came over him, a relaxed alertness and anticipation, the exact complex of sentiments he’d had twenty years earlier when he first took his turn at bat on this same field. For the first time in three months he felt healthy. He turned in midstride, as though shouted at, and walked jauntily toward his mother’s house, a young man of affairs in a white linen suit and whiter panama, on his way to an important meeting
Rebeca was in her rocker on the porch, fondling her grey cat, but she said nothing to León when he came up the steps. He merely nodded to her and took a chair beside her. They had had nothing to say to each other for three years, since the day he bought her the red-roofed bungalow.
“You can buy me the Taj Mahal if you feel like it,” Rebeca had told him, taking the deed, “or Nebuchadnezzar’s gardens, but I won’t be clean of the Burlando stain till you stop acting like a ninny and do what you were born for.”
From then on he sent her money through his brother Pepe but rarely visited.
They sat in silence for about five minutes. Then a boy came by selling the Informe Trópico, and León beckoned him onto the porch and bought a paper from him.
President Alejandro Sancudo sneered up from a decree he had been signing. The headlines howled about a People’s Court of Economic, Political, and Social Justice. León opened to page three and learned that the new tribunal would try bichos for so-called class crimes, including those allegedly committed by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Then the sentences looped round his chest, binding his upper arms, constricting his breathing. The paper took on the weight of a cuneiform tablet. He bent it closed and let it press against his thighs, but when his glance fell on page one, he found it altered. León Fuertes was striding down the steps of the Presidential Palace, followed by Colonel Aiax Tolete of the Civil Guard and Carlos Gavilán. “SANCUDO FLEES PALACE—FUERTES REFUSES SASH.” León had just time to glimpse part of the date—January, 1952—before his eyes closed in a catalepsy so brief Rebeca did not notice it. When he regained consciousness, the paper was as it had been when he took it from the newsboy.
It was the first of three prophecies León received about his public life, and he accepted it unquestioningly.
“From the look on your face,” Rebeca said, “the news can’t he all bad.”
“I’m going to throw Alejo out of office.”
“It’s about time! When Alexander the Great was your age, he’d been dead over a year. What post will you give your brother Pepe?”
“None. I’m going to throw Alejo out and then go home.”
“Oof!” Rebeca began rocking. “There’s not a man born in this country who hasn’t thought of throwing out the President. But never just to go back where he was before. But go ahead. You have my blessing. At least you sound like a man, for a change.”
A new León had, in fact, been born: León, politician; León, leader.
Most humans suffer spells of terror and self-loathing. Some of the worst afflicted become politicians. When one lives in profound and constant terror, when one feels leprous in his very soul, he may seek out a tranquilizing fix of power and a cleansing douche of public deference. But since compulsive use of power brings on nightmare, since deference defiles recipient and giver, these medicines exacerbate the symptoms. The best specific against fear is danger; the cure for self-hatred is humility. My father, León Fuertes, had conquered these infirmities by correct treatment; he did not enter public life to ease his private ills. León, politician, or León, leader, was rather his spontaneous response to the distemper of the country, an antibody reaction to toxins spreading in Tinieblans. Though he appeared on short notice, he was not a makeshift figure; my father had been composing him unconsciously for twenty years, and all his qualities were present in his maiden effort, the coup against Alejandro Sancudo.
León, leader, was unique among my father’s transformations in that he cared about the commonweal he lived in. This concern, projected with great energy, gave him a presence of authority. The morning following his visit to Rebeca, León informed his partner, Carlos Gavilán, that he was going to unseat Sancudo and then suggested that Gavilán, who got most of his clients from the middle class, might know some non-bichos who could head committees of public safety. Gavilán straightaway found himself involved in forming skeleton organizations and making discreet contact with picked men. It was some days before he thought to ask León why he was so certain of success, why he thought people would follow him.
“You tell me why,” said León by way of answer. “You’re a steady fellow with a family to look out for. You surely wouldn’t jeopardize them merely out of friendship. Alejo hasn’t harmed you personally. I’ve promised you nothing. I haven’t even asked you anything, just told you what I’m going to do and shown how you can help. Yet you’re following me. You’ve been committing what (if we got caught) would be called treason, You’ve made, yourself an ‘enemy of the Tinieblan masses.’ You’ve jumped up to your ass in a subversive conspiracy, all on my say-so. Why?”
“Carajo, León! Someone has to throw that lunatic out before he wrecks the country!”
León smiled and nodded. “Exactly.”
And Gavilán found himself hard put to reconcile the man before him with the main-chance virtuoso and protector of number one who’d been his partner for five years. The man before him cared about his country. He knew what was best for it. He could do the job.
Men gifted with a presence of authority quite commonly abuse it, but León, leader, was hedged with firm restraints. His emergence represented an admission by the other Leóns that none of them could flourish without a sound environment of freedom. They were León, politician’s prime constituency; his first responsibility was to keep Tinieblas healthy for them. They granted him part of their time and energy, they gave him their support, but they were by no means willing to cede him a despot’s hegemony over the communal body, to commit suicide so that he might play polities all day and all night long. They suffered him existence only insofar as he was needed to secure their liberties. The other Leóns checked and balanced León, politician; thus though my father had a taste for power, he never got stoned or hooked. Thus though he was destined to lead, he accepted that destiny piecemeal, as it was forced on him by circumstance.
Since his ambitions were well fenced, León, leader, could permit himself a degree of honesty which few politicians feel they can afford. This quality was evident even to such skeptics as Don Luis Gusano, General Manager of the Pelf Fiduciary Trust’s Tinieblas branch and former President of the Republic.
“I think you’re the best man to raise a fund, Don Lucho. Three hundred thousand ought to do. Cash, no pledges.”
“Are you suggesting we retain you to defend us in Alejo’s People’s Court?”
“No. I’m going to throw Alejo out of office. To do it I’m going to take the Guardia away from him. The best way is to buy it.”
Gusano rubbed his palms together. “Make my son-in-law Bertito Minister of Finance.”
León shook his head. “I’m not making anybody anything, Don Lucho. Not myself or anybody else. I’m going to make Alejo an ex-president. That’s all. I’ll need the money by the first of the year.”
Luis Gusano, like his father, Felipe, and his grandfather Modesto, had enriched his family and become President of Tinieblas by the simple expedient of never trusting anyone, but he raised three hundred thousand inchados and gave them to León Fuertes, no questions asked.
León, leader’s first act was the overthrow of an elected president. Later, as Deputy and then as President of the Republic, he was identified with the profound social changes that took place in Tinieblas in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was, however, in essence a conservative.
“The original meaning of the word ‘revolution’ is ‘turning back,’” he told Arsenio Poroto, Chief Engineer of the Compañía Tinieblina de Electricidad y Gas (a subsidiary of Yankee and Celestial Energy). He had approached Poroto to arrange for the palace telephones to be cut off once the coup was under way, and while Poroto didn’t care much for Sancudo (who’d put Poroto’s brother-in-law in jail for writing uncomplimentary verses), he wanted no part of any revolution.
“I’d like to turn things back to where they were four months ago,” León went on. “Then, if things have to change, maybe they can change calmly. That’s the only revolution you’ll get from me. Alejo is the kind of revolutionary you’re leery of. He wants to turn everything upside down so the country will be as confused as he is.”
Although my father had no nature and steadfastly avoided forming one, the politician-leader was perhaps the most “natural” of all the Leóns. During the first week in January, 1952, while Sancudo was indicting bichos in his People’s Court and canceling their passports and freezing their bank accounts, while Carlos Gavilán was urging him to move before they were arrested, León displayed an easiness that amazed my mother. She’d seen him lose weight during a big lawsuit, had watched him pace their bedroom trying to convince himself he’d not forgotten some detail. She’d heard him grind his teeth in his sleep the night before he went to Costaguana to defend Apolonio Varón. Now he was going to overthrow the government, send people to the streets, and risk his life and theirs, yet he was perfectly relaxed.
“I’m waiting for Alejo,” he told her. “I’m in no rush. One of these days he’s going to make the blunder that antagonizes everybody. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. It’s not for me to hustle the events. That’s his style, not mine.”
At eleven A.M. on 8th January, 1952, President Alejandro Sancudo sat down before the microphones of a national radio hookup. First he abolished the Constitution, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, after pausing for breath, he outlawed all political parties, his own included, and canceled the national elections scheduled for 1st April. Then he poured himself a goblet of Evian mineral water from a crystal carafe and, sipping it, proclaimed himself Sole and Perpetual Guardian of the Tinieblan State and People for the period of his natural existence on this planet.
The address, which lasted about three minutes, caused a certain consternation in the country, particularly the points about parties and elections, for politics is the Tinieblan national pastime. It did not catch León Fuertes unprepared. Before Sancudo’s voice was off the air, León had got his partner started making phone calls and was on his way to Civil Guard Headquarters with a Gladstone bag full of cash. By noon the Guard was in its barracks getting paid, the streets were full of demonstrators, and the palace was cut off from all the world.
“Let’s go in and get him!” cried a citizen when León spoke to the crowd in Plaza Cervantes.
“Oh, no. Let’s sing instead. Alejo will fall like a rotten papaya in a few hours. Meanwhile we might as well enjoy ourselves.”
Surely the fall of Alejandro Sancudo was in my fathers mind two years and some months later when an American journalist who was visiting our house—an august personage of immense influence whose clipped speech and perpetually twisted lips gave the impression that he suffered from chronic constipation—decried the “carnival atmosphere” of the Army-McCarthy hearings in the U.S. Senate, for León replied that the most salutary function of politics was to provide public entertainment for the community. “Why must tragedy and melodrama be the only respectable forms? Comedy is more popular and no less beneficial, especially the kind of piece where the hero-villain turns out to have been a clown all along.”
For two days and nights the populace of Ciudad Tinieblas gave itself up to unrestrained gaiety, while Alejandro Sancudo dangled impotently in the Palace. Offices closed; shops were boarded up. The committees of public safety kept gentle, good-humored order, and the rest of the citizens sang, and danced in the streets, and chanted anti-Alejo slogans. At seven A.M. on the 10th, a report came from Córdoba in Salinas Province that a car carrying Sancudo and four close collaborators had been seen driving north along the Pan-American Highway, and León Fuertes went to the palace, accompanied by Carlos Gavilán and Colonel Aiax Tolete and the twelve chairmen of the committees of public safety. They found the building deserted save for a few servants, and were about to leave, when a large number of people who had been reveling in the nearby streets and had heard rumors of Sancudo’s flight streamed into the Plaza Inchado and began shouting for León. When he did not appear on the balcony from which our presidents, elected or otherwise, traditionally greet their supporters, a group of men and women went in after him, bearing a makeshift presidential sash-three strips of purple, green, and yellow nylon safety-pinned together.
Colonel Tolete took the sash from them and made to hang it over León’s neck, Gavilán stepped up to help him, and the twelve committee chairmen smiled their approval, but León held up his hands. Now that Sancudo was gone and the country out of danger, León, husband, remembered that he hadn’t seen his children for two days. León, lawyer, thought of his neglected practice; León, athlete, of his missed workouts. There were, besides, many books that León, scholar, wished to read, and the world was full of willing girls for León, lecher.
“Call Oruga,” León said to Carlos Gavilán. (Belisario Oruga was the constitutional Vice-President, whom Sancudo had exiled to an ambassadorship in Asia.)
“Aiax, you’re in charge until he gets here.
“Take your orders from Colonel Tolete,” he told the twelve committee chairmen. “I’m going home.”
Rebeca visited him that afternoon to congratulate him and to tell him her stain was cleansed. “I understand now, “ she said. “You have a deal with Beli Oruga. He’ll be President from now till the elections. You’ll run and he’ll help count the votes. Just like Heri Ladilla’s deal with Feli Gusano in 1924.”
“No, Mamá,” said León wearily. “You don’t understand at all.”