PRESIDENT LEÓN FUERTES returned from San José to find his honeymoon with the Republic of Tinieblas over. The communiqué regarding his meeting with John Kennedy preceded him, and he was met at Monteseguro Airport by a sizable mob of strife-peddlers who accused him by voice and placard of having betrayed his country.
The specifications were at once a tribute to the paranoid imagination and a proof of that segment of information theory which holds zero can be a cause. From the absence in the communiqué of any reference to the Day-Cornudo Treaty, Canino and claque charged that León and Kennedy had concluded a secret pact which confirmed Day-Cornudo in perpetuity and granted the United States missile bases in Otán and Tuquetá; that León had accepted a check for five million dollars drawn by Joseph P. Kennedy and countersigned by Richard Cardinal Cushing; that León had applied for U.S. citizenship.
After a glance at the placards and an earful of shouts, León refused the microphone that had been set up at the foot of the ramp, asked his wife and the other members of his party to excuse him for a moment, and walked jauntily toward the mob, which a line of sweating guardias was restraining in the shadow of the terminal. The demonstrators pushed toward him angrily, buckling the soldiers’ line, but without slowing his pace León spread his arms, palms forward, in front of him, and the crowd opened as though divided by a wedge. He went in among them.
“What would I do with gringo citizenship?” he asked a signbearer, grinning at him, clapping him on the neck with the kind of rough affection coaches give their athletes. “My mamá would disown me.”
“One gringo base is more than enough,” he told another. “Do you really think I offered them others?”
“I told you when I was running not to expect much,” he said to a group of the loudest shouters, who now stood congealed in silence, wincing as he stabbed a finger at them. “I’m telling you now I didn’t sell the country out. I’m not going to mention that again. If you want to believe in fairy tales, go right ahead, but this country doesn’t need to be sold out. I’m not ashamed of this country, so I can face the facts about it. Tinieblas isn’t a world power. We don’t have much to bargain with against the U.S.A. I know how you feel. I sympathize. I’m doing what I can. But I have to think of all the people’s welfare, not just your obsessions.”
He turned then and walked away, and the demonstration crumbled behind him, but his difficulties were only beginning. A few weeks later he brought the anger of both landowners and peasants on himself by vetoing a land reform bill prepared by his own Ministry of Agriculture but passed by the Chamber in grossly diluted form.
“No one can call me an extremist,” he told the Deputies, taking his veto message to them personally, “but this bill is too moderate for me to sign. Some people, people who don’t own land, like land reform because it allows them to feel saintly at the expense of others. Others like it because our friends to the north have made it the condition of some tasty grants and loans. For my part, I dislike it. I understand that the only way to make a go of agriculture is with decently large tracts. But the campesinos will give us no peace until we give them land, so on top of all my other sins I directed the Ministry of Agriculture to prepare a bill of land reform. But reform cannot be done in dribbles. The bill you passed may satisfy those who practice charity by proxy. It may satisfy the U.S. Ambassador. It may satisfy the landowners, who were afraid of mine. Unfortunately, it will not satisfy the campesinos. It will only whet their appetites. Were I to sign it, I would have to request another one next year, which you would no doubt geld in committee. Dribble would follow dribble. Appetites would grow. We would finish by giving the campesinos more land than they need, or know what to do with, or really want, and even that wouldn’t be enough. This bill is veto’d. I urge you to go back and pass the bill my government prepared on careful study. Since land reform cannot be avoided, it must be done correctly straightaway. Then we shall perhaps have time next year to deal with the problems of reduced yield which this inevitable reform will inevitably generate.”
The large holders, who had lobbied ceaselessly to water the bill down, were furious. The peasants listened sullenly to León’s explanation of his veto, which he made over and again by radio and on a painful swing through the interior, and then found it simpler to believe certain agitators, who charged that León was duping them, that he was in cahoots with the landlords, that he would never permit any land reform. There followed a wave of crop burnings on the cane plantations of La Merced, which León was obliged to put down firmly. Aware that the immediate application of overwhelming force is less cruel and costly than half-hearted measures, he declared martial law in La Merced, named Major Dorindo Azote Military Governor of the province, and gave him three companies of guardias to reinforce the regular garrisons. The disturbances were quashed in short order without loss of life, and when courts-martial gave the ringleaders long terms in the penal colony on Fangosa Island, León first arranged for them to remain in local jails and then, at Christmas, commuted their sentences. The events turned the peasants strongly against him, however, and since the Chamber chose to dawdle futilely with land reform for the remainder of the session, he never won them back—or rather not until he’d gained an honest martyrdom with his body meatballed across Via Venezuela.
Meanwhile, the landowners found a more craven outlet for their spite: inspired by two gentlemen whom this history will not dignify by naming and who discovered a forgotten clause in the Club Mercantil charter denying membership to men of illegitimate birth, they called for León’s expulsion in a series of private letters to the club president. He, though properly apologetic, felt compelled to bring the matter to León’s attention. My father resigned at once, saying that he was glad to be a naturally born and not a self-made bastard, but the incident rankled him cruelly, having pierced the tenderest zone of his character, his urge for respectability.
“I’m surprised a thing like this can hurt,” he told Soledad, “considering all I’ve been through in my life and all the ways I’ve found to stuff my ego. But I dreamed Clarita might be club Carnival Queen someday.”
“She doesn’t mind.”
“I know. She’s not as childish as I am. The worst part is I have to hold it in. It’s been suggested—as if I hadn’t thought of it myself—that I make the thing political and win some favor with the lower classes. Half this country was born out of wedlock. But I can’t do it. I can’t even knock anyone’s teeth out till my term is up. People would think I’ve declared a revolution.”
León’s political opponents, whom his great popularity had cowed to an unnatural and agonizing silence, took heart from these events and filled the press and every public forum with their yelpings. At the same time, a number of his followers deserted him. During the troubles in La Merced the Chamber had overwhelmingly endorsed León’s vigorous action. Once order was restored, in the very instant of the danger’s passing a motion of censure was introduced, charging that President Fuertes and his government had overreacted. A number of Progressive Party Deputies—though not enough to make up a majority—supported it, invariably asking time to explain their votes and then driveling out grave empty phrases about the painfulness of the decision and the telling weight of moral imperatives over personal friendship and party royalty.
“It’s part cowardice and part ambition,” Rosendo Salmón told León. A Tinieblista member from Salinas, he had nonetheless voted against censure. “But the main thing is they’ve never forgiven you for helping them get where they are. I don’t owe you anything, and besides, every once in a while I give myself the luxury of voting like a man.”
Student protest continued. Canino’s faction won control of the Students’ Syndicate, and scarcely a week passed without a campus demonstration or a rally in Plaza Cervantes. Canino dealt entirely in abusive falsehood but was inventive at it and had the peasant troubles to embroider on as well as Day-Cornudo. His rantings drew large audiences from the lower-class barrios, and by fall the atmosphere of the capital was nearly as polluted with resentment and frustration as in the last days of 1951. Now, however, the target of invective was not a class but an individual: “Superbicho, the campesino killer”; “Meestair Forts, the first gringo President of Tinieblas.” The scenario that León had outlined during his first campaign was developing as he foresaw: Without any encouragement from him, the country had installed him as its hero. Tinieblas nonetheless remained Tinieblas; no magical transformation had ensued. León must now be punished for failing to incarnate the fantasies he had tried consistently to dispel.
The woes of León, politician, were aggravated by the rebellion of the other Leóns. They had ceded portions of their time and energy to León, politician, so that he might, acting as their agent, maintain a favorable environment for their stimulations and fulfillments. Upon becoming President, however, and with the growing instability of the Tinieblan system during the summer and fall of 1963, León, politician, absorbed an ever-increasing share of the common patrimony, so that the other Leóns, finding themselves ever less free to act, judged him a tyrant and declared their independence.
After suffering himself to be denied for several weeks following my father’s resignation from the Club Mercantil, León, athlete, picked the day after a blustery speech by the Commander of the American Legion in the Reservation—“We’ve got the right to stay here nine hundred thirty-four more years, and we’ll stay another thousand after that if we feel like it!”—to seize command of the communal body and sneak to the tennis courts at Fort Shafter. There he remained for seven hours, enjoying himself hugely and fraternizing in the greatest good humor with the gringos whom he found there and with the many others who, as news of his presence spread, came to look on. Inevitably, word of his whereabouts reached the news desks of the Tinieblan papers, and by midafternoon four carloads of journalists had arrived to witness him partner the commandant’s daughter (a properly photogenic blonde of twenty-two) at mixed doubles and, by way of keying up her game, drench her with gallantries in fluent English. The motion to censure was at that time being debated in the Chamber, and the headlines, pictures, leaders, editorials, and feature stories that began appearing the next morning and that continued till the last dram of scandal was wrung from the incident “disclosure” that León was divorcing Soledad to marry Miss O’Moore—contributed materially to the closeness of the vote. And as if this were not sufficient proof of his existence and autonomy, León, athlete, continued to play tennis at Fort Shafter now and then—to the great aid and comfort of Manfredo Canino and associated fanatics—and to make León, politician’s life otherwise more difficult by flitting over to the grass court behind the British Embassy Residence whenever he took the notion, even if there was a crisis on or a cabinet meeting scheduled.
León, lecher, whom interest of state and the all-seeing eye of the news media had denied his normal complement of romps, took to leaping palace maids and secretaries at the most inappropriate times and places. Important visitors huffed in anterooms while the presidential office served as a humpodrome, and the discretion of presidential aides was sorely strained by glimpses of El Jefe tearing one off in the pantry or on the service stairs. Beyond asserting his independence, León, lecher, seemed bent on destroying León, politician, altogether. The Tinieblan Constitution stipulates that the President of the Republic may not leave national territory without the formal consent of the Chamber of Deputies, and yet only the last-minute intervention of Carlos Gavilán (who used his authority as Minister of Justice to order all flights leaving Monteseguro Airport temporarily grounded) prevented León, lecher, wearing a false beard and bearing an even falser passport in the name of Panurgo Burlando, from decamping to New Orleans in the company of an atypically well-nourished and perfectly adorable young gringa fashion model who had been appearing in an international display of couture sportive at the Hotel Excelsior. Like all the members of my father’s repertory company of personalities, León, lecher, passed these months in a wild drive for primacy—no, for exclusivity. He resented all bounds, even his own commitment to careless futtering, and on top of his pitiless assaults on targets of opportunity persuaded Loli Gavilán not to return to her studies in Lausanne when summer ended, so that he might continue unimpeded a liaison that engaged his heart as fully as his gonads.
Nor were León, scholar, and León, husband, any less rebellious. The former, who was the meekest of all my father’s figures, recalled the long hours he had spent poring over English grammars, decided he had been vilely manipulated for the purposes of polities, and reacted with amazing boldness. Previously content with an abbreviated and nocturnal existence’ he now appeared during the day and seized control of my father’s mind and body at his pleasure. Ministers and other conferees grew accustomed to seeing León’s face go blank even as they posed him important questions, to hearing him mutter phrases of no currency at all in the argument at hand, to witnessing him snatch up a pencil and fill his notepad with the incomprehensible hieroglyphics of topology or physics. He was wont, during cabinet meetings, to pull from his jacket pocket a folio anthology of the poems of Blake and engross himself therein, sometimes quoting from it in the original, sometimes translating passages whose opacity to the men of affairs present was in no way pierced by being put in Spanish, and invariably remarking, slapping the book on the glossed table before tucking it away, that Blake was the only justification for his having learned English, one verse of his being worth fifty interviews with Kennedy. Don Felix Grillo del Campo gave the most acute appreciation of the problem. Invited along with other leaders of the banking community to inform the President on certain economic questions and then treated to a performance by León, scholar, Grillo went from the meeting to the private apartments of the Palace and urged Soledad Fuertes to make her husband take a rest.
“I don’t want to alarm you, Sóle, and I have the greatest confidence in León, but just now I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming of my crazy uncle Escolástico.”
My mother was not alarmed by Grillo’s comment for the simple reason that she had been alarmed before he made it. But overwork did not seem to be the problem. Soledad could not recall a period when my father had been more willing to give time to his family. He would loll in bed of mornings chatting playfully, would drop in on her at odd times in the day, would neglect his work to linger in her company in a, manner altogether unprecedented in their sixteen years of wedlock. More, on the impulse of the moment he would whisk her arid the children to the beach, scoffing alike at their school obligations and his official duties. In short, León, husband, too was asserting himself freely.
Yet however much Soledad enjoyed my father’s company and appreciated spontaneous attentions, León, husband’s behavior was too uneven not to be disturbing, His goings were as unpredictable as his comings. He was liable now to disappear during a family dinner, to give way to León, scholar, for example, in the midst of a conversation—though neither Soledad nor the children understood the process whereby Papá’s gaze would glide off into nowhere and his penless hand start scribbling on the tablecloth. Or he might suddenly be replaced by León, lecher—who, heretofore, had always kept his distance whenever Soledad was anywhere around—as when, during a poolside party at the home of Aquilino Piojo, my father (with the unconcern of a cocktail tippler dipping in the peanut dish) slipped his fingers and at least half his palm under the dorsal fold of Pastora Avispa’s bikini bottom. Soledad’s world was love, and love and jealousy are mutually exclusive,98 but she had to be alarmed at this: her husband was acting weirdly, and she bad no notion why.
Had Soledad understood León and possessed a rudimentary grasp of cybernetics, she would have realized (1) that the complex open system known as León Fuertes achieved stability (homeostasis) by means of a built-in, selfcorrective feedback mechanism which regulated the flow of energy to several component systems (León, husband—León, scholar; etc.); (2) that the stability of the overall system depended on continual small alterations in the allotments to components; (3) that while the introduction (in response to external pressure) of a new component (León, politician) had been accomplished without excessive disturbance to the system’s balance, the application of new external pressures, beginning in June, 1962, and intensifying during summer and fall, 1963, resulted in a massive increase in the energy allotment to this particular component (4) that the system’s self-corrective feedback mechanism responded to this change in one variable by effecting similarly dramatic changes in the other variables, so that the normal pattern of continual small changes in the flow of energy to the component systems was warped into a blunder of abrupt, wild fluctuations, ragged zigzags, zingy swings; and therefore (5) that under external pressure the system’s internal stabilizing mechanism had pushed the system into instability. In other, more familiar words, my father’s psychical ecology was gravely out of whack.
That fall, as the interior festered in resentment and the capital suppurated radical dissent, León Fuertes appeared to withdraw from events, so that many Tinieblans felt he’d lost his nerve. It was, rather, that the other Leóns restricted León, politician’s freedom of action and attention. Not that they found much profit in it: they restricted each other’s freedom also. None could thrive unless all did. And as if that were not enough, León’s ancestors combined against him—or rather took action far more noxious than intrigue or attack. Concerned for his welfare and with the best intentions, they began hustling him in very wrong directions.
It is something the custom of my country for important men to repair in times of crisis to the Palace, there to give counsel to the President of the Republic and to themselves reaffirmation of their own importance. All through the latter half of 1963, President León Fuertes received visitations, both in dreams and during waking moments, from Generals Isidro Bodega, Feliciano Luna, and Epifanio Mojón. They all had done the state some service. They all possessed executive experience. They all could cite not only patriotism but ties of blood in motive for their urge to counsel the incumbent. And so, in the Tinieblan fashion, they went to León Fuertes uninvited and served him generous slices of their minds.
When León told Soledad it had been suggested that he milk political advantage from his bastardy, he did not tell her the suggestor was his grandfather General Feliciano Luna, who had cantered into León’s dreams on a black mare the very night León resigned from the Club Mercantil and who, rising in his stirrups and brandishing his Martini-Henry rifle, had volleyed blasphemies against solemnized procreation that shook the sky above him. Nothing could come of it, he bellowed, but “fags and cowards and thinshanked whining girls with cunts as dry as chalk! There’s never been a man with balls born yet, or a good hot-bottomed woman either, who wasn’t got by simple honest fucking, with the priests and magistrates left out of it! That’s how I made my children, fifty sons and Christ knows how many daughters! You just be proud you were made the same way!”
General Luna went on to advise León to get all the “bastards, drab-dropped foundlings, and other sons of whores” on his side and wipe out the Club Mercantil and all its members. These were, after all, the descendants of the very men who had connived with Monseñor Jesús Llorente and the gringos to have General Luna hanged. This was perfectly in line with the program General Luna had been proposing and continued to propose in León’s dreams and in what León thought hallucinations. Revolution and guerrilla war were, General Luna argued, the best policy for León and Tinieblas, and he went into considerable detail on how vulnerable the Reservation was to surprise attack, on how León might, in a lightning blow, rub out the entire garrison, or at least a large portion of it, along with oodles of civilians, and, more important, seize all the arms and ammunition he would need. As for U.S. retaliation, León should take his people down to Selva Trópica and let the gringos come looking for him in the jungle.
“They won’t enjoy it much, you can believe me. Your trouble is that when you hear the word ‘war’ you think of armies squaring off in open battle. Guerrilla war is different, boy, and a lot more fun besides. You can hold out for decades, doing as you please. They’ll never land a solid punch on you, and between you and the jungle they’ll lose thousands and get sick of the whole business.”
“But what of the people?” León would ask. “Our towns would all be occupied by foreign troops. You’ve seen how soldiers act when they occupy a country during war.”
“To shit with the people! The ones who want to fight will be with you in the jungle, killing their enemies like free men. The ones who don’t want to fight deserve what happens to them!”
León had no argument for this. He simply had to steel himself against his grandfather’s seductive simplifications, to bear General Luna’s harangues and sneers in silence, to remember the gentle people in Tinieblas—there were many of them, after all—and cling to his own values.
General Bodega’s advice was the opposite of General Luna’s, no less seductive, but in the end no more acceptable. Bodega had a way of flitting in (light as a butterfly despite his ample paunch) through the window of the presidential office while León was at paper work or in conference with one or two close aides, of taking a position of repose in midair near the bronze bust of him that filled a niche above the sofa, of waiting placidly till León could attend him. He counseled peace, above all peace with the gringos.
“‘Hyena of the Pentagon. Lackey of the Wall Street plutocrats,’” he would say, parroting Canino’s jargon. “Why not? Those aren’t insults, they’re encomiums. Do you know why the hyena laughs, my boy? Because the lion does the work and takes the risks. And who is a better model of rational behavior than Figaro? Lackey to them, by all means! They are strong and rich; we are poor and weak. They can afford to be stupid, so we must try to be clever. Hyena them and be happy, until a stronger lion comes along.”
General Bodega chided León for expelling the Miami syndicate and bothering Kennedy about Day-Cornudo. What Tinieblas needed was more foreign intervention, more foreign economic and military presence, enough foreigner involvement to ensure that should unrest worsen, the foreigners would handle it with their own troops and funds.
“Foreigners ran this country while I was President,” Bodega remarked with pride, “and I lived in this Palace for eighteen years without an hour of distress in the whole time. With a little cleverness and luck you can turn Tinieblas into the fifty-first state of the North American Union. De facto, of course, not de jure! You don’t want to have to pay them taxes! If you won’t think of your own peace of mind, think of the people. Aren’t they better off laughing? Then imitate the action of the hyena.”
And León would have to summon memories of his hyena season on the Bowery and remind himself of the foul taste of offal.
This world was giving León Fuertes enough trouble. He needed no fresh shipments from the next. Entertaining Generals Luna and Bodega, listening to their criticisms and resisting their bad advice, put a measurable drain upon his strength and his good temper. Yet while he would have cheerfully dispensed with their visits, he greatly preferred them to those of General Mojón. That gentleman was not merely an ex-President of the Republic and a concerned forebear; he was a professional advance man for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with half a century’s experience disseminating terror and despair. When Epifanio Mojón staged a nightmare, he didn’t fart about. He meant to make his great-grandson León Fuertes into a proper despot in the high standard and tradition of our time, and he went flat out at turning León on to power.
From July into November León could never lay his head down, not even for the briefest of siestas, without fear of having hideous dreams of weakness, the most pleasant of which involved his being torn apart by mobs, and which crescendoed gradually in horror through piecemeal mutilation and impalement to a scene where León, unbound but paralyzed by cowardice, watched his children chopped to messes, stewed, and served to him. Each episode concluded with a warning from General Mojón that this was what the future held for León if he didn’t change his ways. In counterpoint accompaniment there went a program of demonstration lectures on the uses of cruelty. One morning, for example, the morning after a particularly vociferous and disrespectful protest rally, General Mojón sat down beside León as he was breakfasting on the Palace terrace and invited him to glance out to his left. There, beyond the sea wall, León saw a pair of crosses, each hung with a sharkstripped skeleton.
“That’s how I handled dissent,” General Mojón said softly. “When I was President, you didn’t hear a peep out of this country. And aside from their effect on public order and respect for authority—a telling effect, you can he sure—my policies were personally satisfying. Look.”
General Mojón waved his hand across the bayscape, and instead of two crosses there were ten or twenty, each hearing a naked youth or girl, Manfredo Canino and other students whom León had listened to so patiently and tried to reach but who had turned against him. General Mojón lifted his palm, and the tide rose, and the sharks came slicing in around the crosses.
“Or perhaps something more contemporary,” General Mojón suggested, and the sun-shot, glistening vista of the bay faded, and León saw instead a room much like an operating theater, lit cleanly from a bank of blue-green fluorescent lamps. In place of a table, though, there was a kind of dental chair in which, strapped down and wired with electrodes, a young man squirmed and grunted as a technician played the knobs of an enameled console.
“Now, isn’t that an improvement on your current situation? Isn’t that more enjoyable than being slandered and insulted? Better still, you surely can recall the awful helplessness you felt during your dream last night. You’re still hung over with it, aren’t you? Well, have that fellow there turn the juice up. Just give a mental order, he’ll obey. There!” The “patient” shrieked. His body arced, then jerked convulsively against the straps. “Now tell me you don’t feel stronger right away. Just watch that kid jump! Tell me it doesn’t bring relief. You never got results like that by chatting with them, did you? There’s one brat who’s picking up your message. You’re getting through to him, no doubt of that.”
León endured these abominable hallucinations in mixed disgust and fascination. General Mojón’s advice on how to run a country had a palpable attraction. It would work.
“A firm hand, and you’ll have no trouble. There’s nothing so dependable as suffering. No human motive can compete with fear. Just give some of them a dose of calculated agony, and the rest will foul their pants at the mere mention of your name.”
León’s sole defense was to remind himself of some things General Epifanio Mojón had never learned, despite the fact that by the time his soldiers deposed him and hung him up on one of his own crosses in the bay, he was so rotten that the sharks refused to feed on him and buzzards turned away from him in nausea: No one can dominate and yet stay separate. Everyone is affected by what he affects. Brutality brutalizes. Terrorizing makes one terrified. The trouble with General Mojón’s methods was that they worked too well, so that even if León cared for no one but himself, he would be foolish to apply them. He would be his own first victim. He would have no other life but León, despot, and that figure would be as enslaved, dehumanized, and racked with suffering as any prisoner in his torture chamber.
In these months my father, León Fuertes, bore torment from all quarters. His opponents clamored against him and his followers deserted him. His personalities rose up in anarchy, and his ancestors tempted him with false counsel. By day he was pelted with an endless hail of problems and shaken by strange visions which, since he did not believe in spirits or another world, caused him to doubt his sanity. At night he writhed and sweated in frightful and debilitating dreams. By November, when the rains broke hourly upon city and countryside and men walked bent and stifled under a press of clouds, every satisfaction had been peeled from his poor life. No one of his figures could maintain himself for more than a few minutes at a time. They came and went in dizzying succession, incapable of sustained action. León, athlete’s movements were spastic; León, lecher’s loins were flaccid; León, scholar’s mind was a jumble of disoriented thoughts. For the first time in his life León Fuertes was, in effect, no one at all, and beyond him, as though reacting to his troubles in macrocosmic sympathy, the country too was losing its identity as class and faction surged back and forth across the landscape of events, all striving futilely for dominance.
By this time, besides his family, only Carlos Gavilán and Gavilán’s children retained much faith in León. Carlitos urged him to go out and win the people back, but León never left the Palace now except to slink out after dark. Lilo was perhaps his most effective ally. In his idealism Lilo had refused to go abroad to study. He wanted no advantage over anybody else and enrolled at the National University. There he organized a democratic students’ group, and in 1963 his was the clearest voice rebutting Canino’s slanders and supporting León Fuertes. As for Loli, who had taken a job teaching at a private girls’ school and moved into a flat on the Via Venezuela, she gathered a few boyfriends as camouflage and gave León some warrior’s repose. She was nineteen, lovely, and in love with him, yet—since in these days he was as limp as any capon—more like a daughter to him than a mistress, comforting him in the manner of Cordelia with gaga Lear while he lay meekly in her arms and told her stories from his past, recounting them without the slightest arrogance, as though they were episodes from some heroic fantasy which had no truth except in metaphor.
A good gauge of how little León was himself is his reaction to John Kennedy’s letter. He flung away his skepticism of “solutions” and invested the letter with the aura of a celestial sign. Although he had been saying for years that half the trouble in our continent came from regarding the United States as a deus ex machina, León viewed the letter as his salvation, and to make his faith manifest and thus magically insure results, he burned all mental bridges from Palm Beach. He stopped tending to the troubles of the country, When aides brought him problems—most of which had nothing to do with the Reservation or Tinieblan relations with the United States—he grinned moronically and said it didn’t matter, in a few weeks the whole country would be in love with him again. Or he might frown and say it didn’t matter, in a few weeks everything would be decided, one way or another.
“If Kennedy betrays me,” he told Gavilán one day, seizing his friend’s elbow and glaring into his eyes, “I’ll resign! I’ll take the path of Quadros,” he went on fiercely, as though his threat might tremble all the world, “and resign! But Kennedy won’t betray me. He’s a decent man, after all. That’s the difference between a sailor and an infantryman.” León was now beaming shrewdly and had released his grip to pat Gavilán on the neck. “Kennedy’s never stuck a bayonet in anybody.”
And he shrugged off Gavilán’s remark that someone had certainly stuck something into Adlai Stevenson after the Bay of Pigs debacle.
Finally, despite the unrest that racked Tinieblas, León decided to precede his visit to Palm Beach by ten days’ vacation and booked passage on a flight to Nassau all for the evening of 22nd November.
Vice-President Bonifacio Aguado and Dr. Erasmo Sancudo, President of the Supreme Court of Justice, were with León in his state office at the Palace at 12:40 P.M. that day. In accord with the Constitution, Aguado would have to take the oath of office and assume temporary possession of the presidency, and the three men were about to move to the Salón Amarillo for the ceremony when León was informed of an urgent phone call from the United States Ambassador. He went to take it in his adjacent private study. When he reappeared, some seconds passed before Aguado and Sancudo recognized him: his shoulders drooped; his hands shook spasmodically; his features wriggled in an anarchy of tics.
“They’ve shot Kennedy,” he said finally. “Head wound, or wounds; they’re giving him last rites. Get yourself sworn in,” he told Aguado. “You try making sense out of this shitheap world.”
Now, neither Aguado nor Dr. Sancudo realized it, but León meant his statement as a resignation. When he shambled from his office, his left hand cupped over his forehead, he fully believed that he would never see the room again. He left the Palace by a side door and took his car, aiming for the airport and the first plane out, wherever it was headed, but when he’d followed Via Venezuela as far as the Alameda, the steering wheel pulled left under his hands like a dowsing rod. Thirty seconds later Dr. José Fuertes, the Minister of Health, clumped clubfooted out onto the porch of his mother’s bungalow, where he had been lunching, and saw his half brother León’s car careened opposite, two wheels on the curb, and León himself crawling toward him across the sidewalk. As he helped León up the steps, my uncle Pepe had to remember the sweat-rank evenings of his childhood in La Cuenca, when León would come in shepherding Florencio Merluza.
Thus it happened that my father, León Fuertes, was at Rebeca’s house when the third prophecy was given to him. For twenty-four hours León lay belly down with his nose hung over the edge of Rebeca’s couch, staring at the floor. Then he turned over and for a second twenty-four hours lay belly up, staring at the ceiling. Then he sat up and stared at the far wall for a third twenty-four hours. During this time he was watched over by Soledad (who wanted him moved to San Bruno Hospital, or at least seen by a physician) and Rebeca (who held he would make it on his own and was best off where he was, since bad publicity now might finish him), and visited intermittently by Pepe (who cast the deciding vote with Rebeca, not because he shared her faith in León’s recuperative powers but because he knew his country’s history and remembered how Dr. Ildefonso Cornudo had become President of the Republic and was intriguing frantically in hope of setting off the same chain reaction of resignations in my father’s cabinet as had occurred in Hildebrando Ladilla’s). My father was unable to influence the debate because the dispersed brain circuits that made sense of his perceptions—a factory-installed analog computer superior in capacity (though similar in design) to earlier and cheaper models standard on mammals, birds, and many other creatures, even earthworms, apparently, since they can learn by trial and error—had been overloaded till the breakers popped. León was tombed in a hallucination far too slovenly to blame on next-world meddling: a dark swirl of mud and a great noise of static. Just after midday, however, on Monday, 25th November, 1963, he began decoding signals: the roughly triangular pattern (“Night on Mount Pubis” would have been a good Rorschach response) produced by sunlight refracted past Rebeca’s porchside rosebush onto the wall opposite him; the deep breathing of Soledad, who had dozed off in an armchair; the steady rush of Rebeca’s bath water. He had just managed to orient himself when the large, glossy-black Japanese radio, which Pepe had been carrying about with him since he first got word of Kennedy’s assassination and which he had neglected take up from the coffee table after his morning visit, switched itself on. It was a marvelous instrument, all studded with keen knobs and levers such as one associates with the control panels of experimental aircraft and equipped with five bands (three of them shortwave), a pop-up antenna, and a spring timing device that could send or cut off juice to the transistors after whatever interval (up to three hours) the proud owner wished. This last device switched the set on, and a station out of New York began replaying coverage of Kennedy’s progress through Dallas three days earlier. A moment passed before León realized where the voice in English came from and what it was describing. Then he listened, rapt and expectant, recalling a dictum of Dr. Grillo’s that in authentic tragedy suspense is heightened, not diminished, if the audience has prior knowledge of the denouement. But as the announcer brought Kennedy’s motorcade into Dealey Plaza, the broadcast modulated into Spanish.
León recognized the voice of his friend and early collaborator Zofiel Viento (who sponsored his record store with a post-midnight program of classical music on Radio Bahia), making explicatory comments on the work just played: “Siegfried’s Rhine journey” from Götterddämmerung. Before León had time to wonder at this strange confusion of hours, bands, and frequencies, Viento stopped in midsentence. There was a pause, a gasped “Dios mio!” and another pause. Then, in the sterile monotone that sometimes comes to men in shock, Viento announced:
“Senoras y senores, I have just received the following announcement from Civil Guard Headquarters: the President of the Republic has been assassinated. Fellow Tinieblans, León Fuertes is dead.”
Viento’s voice broke then, and he sobbed an apology and promised information later and, with a propriety he could scarcely have bettered had he known the events beforehand and spent all day preparing for them in his music library, put on the next-programmed work: Wagner’s great funeral march for his murdered hero. León’s limbs cooled and stiffened. He tried to rise but could not move a millimeter. Then, as the music swelled in the grave leitmotif of destiny accepted, his tension melted and he fell into a gentle sleep which lasted but a few instants but which pared all trouble from his heart.
Soledad’s kiss woke him. She had been roused by the radio, which was describing preparations for John Kennedy’s funeral, and seeing León with his eyes closed, breathing peacefully, she knew he had recovered. León embraced her, then held her back from him. How long had he been there? What was happening in the country?
“It’s Monday, and there’s nothing new. The students are demonstrating at the campus. Tonight you’ll be denounced publicly again in Cervantes.”
“Something to do with …?” León gestured toward the radio.
“With you and him. They know about Palm Beach.”
Then, without the slightest hesitation, León Fuertes accepted his destiny and, pausing only to call in to his mother that he was all right, rose and returned to the Palace and resumed the presidency of Tinieblas.