FROM SHORTLY after midday on 25th November, 1963, when he chose his destiny, until shortly before midnight on 10th January, 1964, when he was plastic-bombed into the next world, my father León Fuertes lived in a manner altogether different from the other portion of his years. He seemed restored to his old self. He was, in fact, transfigured.
In the first place, the diverse personages he had fashioned and kept rigorously separate melted together. Each had passed easily for a whole man, though each was crafted for but a single aspect of our human situation. Now they combined into a unity. Each was fully present at every moment during my father’s last six weeks and four days in this world. His last transformation integrated all those that went before.
León unveiled this new and final figure in the Plaza Cervantes on the night of his return to office. Professor Schwartztrauber had let slip during an interview that, among other matters of December business, John Kennedy had planned to entertain the President of Tinieblas, and when the phraselet reached our country, it incubated to a headline. This was swilled up in the collective mental maw of the United Young Paranoids at our national university and shot like a green mango through their collective mental bowel, getting an enzyme bath of hate and anger, and suffering a tripe-change into something foul and strange: Secret meeting! Sellout! Treachery! By nine P.M. Plaza Cervantes brimmed with such excreta.
By day Plaza Cervantes (Which lies along the north side of Avenida Bolívar some three hundred meters east of Plaza Inchado and the Presidential Palace) is an unprepossessing little square flanked by the Hotel Colón (occupied for one night in 1878 by Sarah Bernhardt and since then in decline) and the squat Church of San Geronimo (muraled in bird droppings after the style of Jackson Pollack), and containing a few stone benches, a covered bandstand, and an empty pedestal designed (but never destined) to bear a statue of Quixote. By night it is a place of magic. It is the open place in the midst of our city where people go to speak against those in power. Here Amado del Busto harangued the mob that overthrew Modesto Gusano. Here León Fuertes led a crowd in singing before the fall of Alejandro Sancudo. Here agitators, power freaks, and merchants of unrest have conscripted all the highest human aspirations in the service of the basest human lusts, and here authentic patriots have shackled ogre id in the dream of freedom. Even on tranquil nights, even now when—as during the dictatorship of General Epifanio Mojón—one doesn’t hear a peep out of this country, the shadows of the bandstand teem with spirits. The shades of former orators visit here and congregate, along with those of men, Tinieblans and foreigners as well, whose names have been invoked here in the cause of liberty or license. On the night of 25th November, 1963, half the spirits of Resentment and Revenge were in attendance. They issued in a steady stream from the mouth of Manfredo Canino and rose tumbling in the air, lifted on the shouting of the crowd. Then a rippled whisper spread down from the steps of San Geronimo and slapped against Canino’s peroration. The President of the Republic was standing all alone in the doorway of the church.
Canino stilled in midsentence and, with the others who were with him on the bandstand, stared at León in amazement.
“Don’t stop for me, Manny,” León called to him. “But when you’ve finished, I’d like to say a word or two.”
Canino knew the crowd was his. Besides, the sight of León had flushed the remnant of his speech out of his mind. “Go ahead now!” he shouted. “I give you my permission! There he is, comrades! The traitor, Meestair Forts, in person!”
The crowd turned toward León, jeering and whistling. León smiled and nodded, as though acknowledging applause. Then he walked down toward them, but stopped at the rim of the square and got up on one of the stone benches. It was the first time a man holding public office had ever come to peak in Plaza Cervantes, and the last time too, at least as of this writing. Much better fora are available to men in power, and Cervantes is, by tradition, the rostrum of outsiders. In essence, though, that tradition remained unbroken, for when he began speaking León was not merely an outsider but an outcast.
His first words were stifled in catcalls, but he continued without shouting or losing his composure, and after a time those closest to him turned and shushed those farther off, and little by little the crowd stilled. Then he began again, thanking Canino for permitting him to speak and begging the crowd’s pardon in advance, “since what I have to say may rob you of the delicious feelings of self-pity Manny gives you. I know how warm and wonderful it is to feel sorry for oneself. There was a time in my life when I made a career of it.”
This brought shouts of insult and derision, but León smiled and held up his hand and said they needn’t worry. He would only rob them temporarily. “In a short time you can go back to feeling yourselves betrayed, and calling me a traitor, and blaming me for all your discontents. Meantime I’ll tell you of my dealings with John Kennedy. In preface, let me admit that as the thing turned out, I achieved nothing, not even the betrayal of our country, which, by the way, was never in my mind.”
It was the first of many stories that he told that night, and he did not tell it exactly as I have in Chapter 22 above. As León, lawyer, had once pointed out, the truth lacks realism. My father retailed essential truth by packaging it in fiction. He scholared in the stacks of memory, gathering details; then lawyered them into a web that trapped the fancy of his listeners. He refused, for example, to sling Kennedy’s feet up on a coffee table but posed him standing with one elbow on a marble mantelpiece chiseled from the Élysée Palace and masoned carefully into the tale. He gave Kennedy fine rolling cadences and florid metaphors, such as his listeners were accustomed to hear from politicians. He made the voice of León Fuertes quaver just a bit in trepidation, so that his listeners might identify with it and dream themselves face to face with the leader of a great power. He didn’t have his President of Tinieblas bait his President of the United States, rubbing Kennedy’s face in his own speech. Who would believe that? What decent man would care to link himself with such conduct now that John Kennedy had been assassinated? No, León set his story one day earlier in time and made Kennedy’s speech an outgrowth of his meeting with León Fuertes. Not that the León of the story could take much credit for it. The León of León’s story did no more than bring the nature of the Day-Cornudo Treaty to Kennedy’s attention, and Kennedy, out of his own nobility, perceived a wrong and said he’d try to right it. He pledged as much in his speech, but could make no specific reference to Day-Cornudo then, or in the communiqué, because he was not a dictator who ruled by fiat, but had to consult with others and work out ways and means. Thus León wove an illusion of reality and wrapped essential truth inside it, and he gave it to the people through the voice of León, artist.
The artist returned to León Fuertes that night after an exile of twenty-seven years, but now he was part of a new unity, and his instrument had timbres unknown to it in León’s early life: the hypnotic mastery of León the Don Juan; the yielding anima of León, Riviera femme fatale; the protective tenderness of León, husband and father; the violence of León, warrior. All those tones glowed in my father’s voice that night and, under its charm, the crowd forgot the pleasures of resentment and went over to him, while Canino and the others on the bandstand winced and shriveled, until they were no more than dwarfs, glaring at him over the railing. He finished the story with Kennedy’s letter.
“You may be tempted now, as I was tempted, to feel sorry for yourselves, to feel betrayed by the universe. But the universe owes us nothing.99 No one can say that had the meeting in Florida taken place, it would have produced all or even part of what you and I want. It’s best to face the facts like grown-ups. The man is dead, and the whole effort came to nothing.
“It might have worked. It seemed the best approach to go directly to President Kennedy. I erred in not foreseeing that he might die. I should have. Who of us here can say for sure he’ll be alive tomorrow?
“So, then, with that last thought in mind, and since you knew part of it already, I have come here and, with Manny Canino’s kind permission, have told you the full story. Clearly, I made no error in keeping it to myself until tonight. It would have put your hopes up, and, as you see, it came to nothing, as things so often do.”
He stepped down from the bench then and turned away, but the crowd called him and begged him not to leave.
“But this is Manny Canino’s meeting,” he protested, smiling. “You’ll want to hear him and the other bright young men go on denouncing me as a traitor.”
But Canino and his disciples had shrunk to the size of roaches and slipped through the cracks between the floorboards of the bandstand and disappeared.
Then León walked through the crowd to the center of the plaza and got up on the empty pedestal and sat down cross-legged on it and drew the people in toward him with his hands. And when those nearest him had sat down about him on the ground and the others gathered in, he began telling stories. They were stories out of the history of our country, stories of the discovery and conquest, the founding of cities and the cultivation of the land, the days of the Spanish colony and the gestures of independence and the birth of the republic. He told stories also of the days of his forebears Generals Bodega and Mojón and Luna, and stories of the civil wars, and of the time of the bichos. All were stories of wild dreams and ceaseless disappointments, of incredible achievements whose substance at once faded, of splendid porticoes of hope which opened on despair. Each was the story of some effort that had come to nothing, yet the people listening in the square in no way grew despondent, for as my father told these stories, the joy of struggle overweighed the grief of ultimate defeat. It was as though those gathered round him in the shadows were the last remnant of the nation, exiled and shipwrecked on an alien shore, and León Fuertes sat all night among them, passing them the memory of their community and, coded in it, the memory of all human community on this planet, past, present, and future, along the continuum of time. His face, bathed palely in the yellow glow of the bug-swarmed lamps around the bandstand, took on a parchment semblance of immense antiquity. His gestures grew ever less pronounced, till he sat motionless as an idol save for the almost imperceptible movements of his mouth. His voice, though, remained clear and youthful to the last.
Lastly, he told them the story of his ministry, why he had sought office in the first place and what he conceived to be the function of a leader and how he had tried and was still trying to preserve our tiny patrimony of good fortune. The story was, he said, as yet unfinished, yet there was little question of its ending. His effort too would no doubt come to nothing. It too would crumble, and leave nothing behind.
Here he was interrupted by shouts of “No!” He listened, motionless, then smiled and raised his hands.
“All right,” he said, as to small children. “It may endure, and be something to build on.”
With that, he got down stiffly and began to walk away, but the people nearest to him caught his sleeves and held him.
“No!” He shook his arms free. “Enough! You’d best start learning to get on without me!”
The people drew back, frightened, and stood staring at him.
Then he said he was sorry but he had no more stories for them.
“I’m sorry, but I have nothing left.”
He took a step toward Avenida Bolívar, but then turned suddenly and held up both his hands. “Wait. I have a song left.
“Crazy country!” He laughed. “What can be said of a country where the President sits all night in a public park, telling stories? —Crazy President and crazy people! Even crazier if he should sing!
“There was a time, though, when I did not sing badly, and I feel like singing, crazy or not.”
And so León lifted his face to the sky, which was paling now beyond the low church belfry, and holding his hands clenched by his sides sang the joyous, grieving song “La Golandrina.” He sang it through in the piano tones that gifted tenors can lift to the last recesses of an opera house or stadium. Then he sang the last lines once again, in his full voice:
También yo estoy
En la región perdido—
Ay cielo santo!—
Y sin poder volar.
He turned then and walked through the people to Avenida Bolívar, and down it toward the Palace, and no one in the plaza moved or spoke till he was far away.
It were a pleasant task to say now that León was then miraculously restored to favor, but such was not the case. That took more than his performance in Plaza Cervantes. That took a bomb. Protest continued. Even those touched by his presence on that night entertained resentment for him during the next weeks. Canino still drew crowds. His immediate disciples were as closely bound to him as ever, and to these he added a new convert, of whom more in a few pages. But León’s visit to Plaza Cervantes had not been in the nature of a campaign stop, and he made no special effort to curry favor with the country.
With the melding of his transformations in one human unity, my father found his life altered in another aspect: the hunger that had been the only common trait to all his personalities faded entirely. Although he knew his days were numbered—no doubt because he knew, because he had, in accepting his fate and returning to his ministry, chosen that they be brief—he did not seek phrase is Yeats’s) to “ram them with the sun.” He went about business and pleasure with as much energy and enthusiasm as ever, yet felt no tug of urgency. He was apt even to linger fondly on some trifle and find the universe in it.
There was for instance, the afternoon—18th or 19th December, as far as I can ascertain—when, as he and members of the Cabinet were lunching with the Costaguanan Foreign Minister (in town for discussions on the Central American Common Market), his daughter, Clara (then just ten years old), entered the dining room carrying her little inlaid wood jewel chest and seeking executive relief: she was invited to her cousin Alma’s birthday; she wished to wear the medallion her uncle Pandolfo had brought her from Lourdes, but its gold chain was tangled up with every knickknack in the box. Nodding an excuse to his guests, President Fuertes pushed back his plate and dumped the jumble of baubles, beads, and bracelets onto the tablecloth before him. Then, smiling gravely to Clarita, he spread it gently with his fingers and, with the air of a surgeon, took up his clean dessert fork and began probing delicately.
“Here,” he remarked without looking up, “is a concrete metaphor of good politics in action: unraveling a mess provoked by neglect and carelessness. Or”—he raised a strand of chain on a fork tine, then took it between his left thumb and forefinger and worked it through a twist of beads—“of science and creative art: bringing meaning, that is, order, out of an apparent chaos of occurrences.”
“Why not follow Alexander?” suggested the Costaguanan, proffering his steak knife. “Surely a new chain can be found to hang the medal on.”
My father looked up briefly and shook his head. “The military approach. Solve the problem by destroying it. Simplification via violence.” He extracted an earring from the scrum and laid it beside his butter plate. “Brute force substituted for imagination. Crude and costly. justifiable only in the last resort.” Jiggling gently, he freed the chain from a bracelet charm. “The aim the optimum”—he flicked the bracelet aside and began plucking at a rope of indian beads—“is to achieve order while preserving each diverse element. For example”—here he permitted himself to glance up for a moment—“we prefer the slow work of setting up a customs union to having one of our countries invade and conquer all the others.”
Discoursing thus, he patiently undid the snares and tangles, and only when he had dropped the medal and its chain into Clarita’s hand and accepted her kiss in payment did he turn back to state affairs.
Much less than pressing him, time slowed as it had done two decades earlier on Colle Belvedere. He felt the same awareness and vitality, but not the violence that had later left foul lees. He drew his breath in passionate detachment: his life had never seemed so sweet and precious, and yet he accepted its coming loss without anxiety. He was involved in the world, concerned for the welfare of his family and country, and yet he could face calmly the fact that they would have to get on without him. His one regret was that he ha not been able to achieve this mode of living earlier. His temptation was not to seek a postponement of his fate (e.g., by ringing himself with guards or by restricting his movements) but to teach his children something of his present attitude. He refused to puzzle or worry them with grave, solemn testaments—he felt neither grave nor solemn anyway—but he yielded to the extent of having his sons memorize two passages from Homer (Iliad, XVIII: 115-21; Odyssey, V: 221-24).
He was amazed at his state of mind. He had flashes of anger—some son of a whore was going to murder him!—and then recalled that long ago he had pardoned the agency of his death. He had moments of sadness, and then took stock as he had done on the night before he first went into battle. He had no ties now to any company of warriors, nor was he faced by an opposing company for which he might feel enmity, but he held the chief office in his commonwealth and struggled against forces of disorder. He was no longer free of obligations to people who depended on him and for whom he cared, but his responsibilities were the measure of his full use of life. More valuable men had died before and would die after him. He had no call to raise a fuss. And apart from these flashes and these moments—which, in any case, were few and brief—he felt inexplicably light-hearted. This might have made him feel indecorous had anyone else known what was in store for him. Condemned men were supposed to mope about with a long face or, if they had to smile, smile bitterly, and show proper respect for the Grim Reaper.
It was not until 6th January, 1964, that León understood the cause and nature of this gaiety. Tinieblas celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany, and since it fell on Monday that year, making a long weekend, León spent it at Medusa Beach with his family, as did his friend and beach house neighbor Carlos Gavilán. At about 3:00 P.M., then, on that most holy day, León Fuertes woke smiling from a dreamless siesta and spoke the word “Love.”
Puzzled at this spontaneous utterance, he got up and pulled on a pair of shorts and stepped out on the empty terrace. As he felt the tropic sun embrace his shoulders, as his eyes “heard” the contrapuntal harmony of heat waves bowing saltato across glaring sand, and ocean blowing long, cool horn notes, he spoke the word “Love” again.
He was about to sit down and think about this when the puzzle fell in place of itself: he was filled with love. His life was suffused in love even as the beach and ocean were suffused in sunlight. It had been that way six weeks now.
He had known only one similar period: four weeks, twenty-seven years before. Since then he had felt love only for brief moments so rare he could recall them easily, as, for example, on Colle Belvedere when an unknown enemy died in his arms. He had taken joy in life. He had gone out passionately to a few people and to many actions. But he had scarcely felt selfless love. The activity or person had never been an end to him. Learning, art, sport, war, law, lechery had all been means to fill his hunger. Politics, the presidency of his country, had been a means to other means. And he had cherished his wife and family as means to his dream of order. His hunger for “more” had driven him to treat the world as a means, and that mode of life had sharpened his hunger.
León laughed, more in amusement than self-mockery, and strolled down the steps and out across the burning sand, concentrating on a measured pace against the pain in his soles. What an amazing way to live! Not that it was the worst. It had brought him a great deal of what was valuable, that is of joy and grief, proof that he was alive. It had not involved much selfless loving—four weeks and certain moments—but he’d got by well enough on that. If he’d cared to live differently, he would have. You couldn’t accuse a man who’d walked across the Sahara Desert of lacking will to live the way he wished. His way of life had been one of the best! And yet his present way was much superior.
How, then, had he seized upon it? He hadn’t; it had come to him. It had come to him when he stopped wanting “more.” No, it had come to him and he’d stopped wanting “more” when he turned his will to flow with the world’s current.
León stopped, nodding slowly. He’d reached moist sand, and his soles echoed his mind’s relief in having solved the problem. Then he began to think of some of the things and people he loved now for themselves: a country, a tiny backwater country whose existence citizens of other lands approved because it gave them something to look down on; a people, all caprice, no staying power, who made him now their totem, now their sacrifice, who would have themselves a magic beast at all cost, rather than simply a man who tried his best; a ministry, twelve years of toil hung on an eyelash, ready to fall the moment he was gone, and the moment was approaching—, a wife who had never understood him for an instant; children who would never know him as a human being because they would never watch him grow old as they grew to man- and womanhood. León loved each and all without censure, as, without guilt, he loved the country he had done so little for, and the people whom he hadn’t saved from themselves, and the ministry he hadn’t built strongly enough, and the wife he’d never understood (unless just now he had begun to understand her), and the children he was going to abandon, and the friend he had betrayed, and the surrogate son he had made use of, and the surrogate daughter he had seduced. León loved each and all passionately.
Don Anselmo Chinche walrused from the surf and saw the President of the Republic standing some ten meters off, but as the President’s chin was dipped into his chest hair—borne down, no doubt, by some burden of state—gave no greeting. León spotted him, however, out of the corner of his eye and looked up and called, “Olá, Don ‘Selmo! Buen día pa’ la playa, no es cierto?” Don Anselmo grinned like a child and tramped up to pass the time of day, and as he stood there babbling, salt water streaming down his flaccid chest onto his paunch, León felt love for him. When Don Anselmo Chinche went to meet his Maker—and it wouldn’t be long now, León judged —when the Lord asked him what of any worth he’d done in life, all Don Anselmo would have to say for himself was that one night in 1947 he’d played a bridge hand decently. Yet León Fuertes loved him.
It was amazing, León thought as he disengaged himself politely and strolled on across the firm sand near the water’s edge, his gaze aimed just before his toes, his hands clasped at his back. There was no end to it! If he loved old ‘Selmo Chinche, he loved everything. His murderer? Christ! He would probably end up loving him too! And why not? The stupid whoreson turd was a key figure, vital to the whole process, and as important to the particle of it called León Fuertes as Dr. Azael Burlando. The latter’s urge had flung him in the world; the former’s would fling him out. As well an angry moron as an earthquake or a culture of flu bugs. León loved the world itself, which in its perversity had dragged him into it unasked and mocked him with possibilities and soon would push him out.
Twenty minutes later Bolívar Gavilán, the faithful Lilo, was granted an epiphany of León’s love—though it brought him none of León’s gaiety. 6th January, 1964, was, altogether, a trying day for Lilo. He spent the morning in dialectic combat on two fronts with the Ardilla brothers, Augustín and Tomás Aquino, who were home on vacation from studies in Spain and France respectively. Tomás, who later went to Chile as a consultant to Salvador Allende and disappeared after the latter’s fall, was a communist. Augustín (now a monsignor somewhere in the Vatican) was preparing to enter the Society of Jesus. Although the brothers were completely opposed in ideology, they were identical in personality, displaying the most profound fanaticism imaginable. Lilo tried, after the fashion of his idol, León Fuertes, to advance moderate positions against them, but as their minds, like those of all true believers, were sealed tight as a pharaonic tomb, he could make no headway whatsoever and succeeded only in appearing foolish to their younger sister Pía, whom he loved to distraction. The struggle raged through lunch, with Lilo assailed unmercifully from both left and right, smirked at by Pía, and consoled mutely and unwelcomely by Juan de la Cruz Ardilla, the former President of the Republic and a moderate’s moderate, who was every day more convinced that his wife (God rest her soul) had born him bastards. At length Lilo tossed in the sponge and escaped with Pía, leaving the two brothers roaring at each other, and their putative father downing his fourth brandy. But escape did not bring case.
At seventeen, Pía Ardilla was the most accomplished little tease in all Tinieblas and might, had she adopted the custom of fighter pilots, have painted rows of broken hearts and swollen gonads on her apple-smooth cheeks, her supple, delicately-downed midriff, and her firm, pale-golden thighs. At nineteen, Lilo Gavilán was the oldest virgin in the country, male or female, with the possible exception of a few members of religious orders. This was due to no physical disfigurement or disability. Lilo was as handsome as his twin sister Loli was beautiful, and as well furnished with testosterone as any other fellow of his age. He nurtured an obsessive respect for what used to be called “nice girls,” however—having somehow got it in his head that his idol, León Fuertes, took the same neochivalric attitude—and was incapable of making lewd advances to them, or even of accepting those that they might make to him. That would seem to leave a considerable portion of the female population fair game, but there were further complications. First, in accord with our culture, Lilo divided womankind into two camps: “nice girls” and whores. Second, he thought it unmanly to consort with the latter, for he had somehow got it in his head that León Fuertes held this view. Actually, both Lilo’s misconceptions of León’s attitude toward women were understandable enough: Lilo had never met León, lecher. For these misconceptions, Lilo was virginal. And for these misconceptions—being otherwise in health and, hence, attracted sexually to Pía Ardilla-Lilo was compelled to love her and, loving her, to think of matrimony. At the same time Lilo knew that León Fuertes would never think of matrimony if he were, like Lilo, still a student and unable to provide for a wife and family. Thus as Lilo and Pía walked hand in hand along the asphalt road behind the Ardilla beach house (she flirting gaily, he in a Keatsian dejection), as they turned onto the pitted gravel road that led to the deserted villa of the exiled ex-President A. Sancudo (she pausing to brush his forelock back with counterfeit tenderness, he smiling shyly in a dream of husbandhood), as they penetrated deeper into the tunnel of foliage which, after years of neglect, now enclosed the road (she slipping a pale-golden arm about his waist, he reciprocating with an arm somewhat lobstered by an uncustomary weekend in the sun), Lilo had, with the unwitting and yet crucial help of his hero, León Fuertes, worked himself into a textbook example of what theorists of schizophrenogenia have called a “double bind.”
Pía, for her part, suffered no conflicts. She was swooping toward another kill. When she and Lilo had proceeded about fifty meters—this was, I judge, about the time when León Fuertes waded into the surf, dove through a breaking wave, emerged in the trough of a soft swell, and began pulling in a powerful crawl out around the jungled point separating the settled portion of Medusa Beach from the Sancudo villa—Pía stopped, turned, ran her fingers up under Lilo’s T-shirt along the hollow of his back, and, smiling up at him, putting her glistening jube-jube tongue-point out through pouting lips, provoked him to what he honestly thought would be a chaste kiss. But Pía kissed with a lascivious expertise that the harlots of old Babylon may have aspired to yet probably never achieved. And Pía crushed her breasts against his breast, and touched her shorts against his tented trousers. For nearly a minute—long enough for León Fuertes to swim fifty meters—Lilo’s principles were swamped in a flood of hormones. For the best part of that time he remained absolutely still, paralyzed by passion. For a few seconds more only his arms and hands moved, clutching at Pía’s shoulders. Then, after what seemed an age, his hips and loins began to make a commonplace mammalian movement. But at the first suggestion of a thrust—no! at the mere intimation of a hump—Pía (whose timing was superb) leaped backward out of his arms and seared his naked face with blowtorch eyes.
“Disgusting animal!”
It’s a near question which punished Lilo more severely, Pía’s shriveling look and epithet or his own reviving principles. He had but one manner of reprieve from either: he proposed marriage.
In sympathy for Lilo, I shall not go into detail on what followed. It is enough to state baldly that Pía refused him, that she did not show him the courtesy of making her refusal angry (much less kind), that she laughed at him with the sort of total contempt for his impertinent presumption which (if one may be allowed a spot of anthropomorphism) females show to males among the mantids, and that she then stalked off, leaving him wandering in the gloomy wood, his groin engorged and his spirit utterly deflated.
He wandered then, and nearing the sea (whose breaking roar muffled his footfalls and his passage through the undergrowth), blundered upon a scene such as might have been put to canvas had Douanier Rousseau accepted a commission from the Baron de Charlus to paint a Déjeuner sur l’herbe. There was a clearing, no larger than a bed, all wreathed in luridly green fronds and walled about so densely by wild palms entwined with creepers that Lilo was almost in it when he saw it. Within, spotlit in sunlight, her flanks porcelain white against the deep tan of her limbs and the lush greenery about her, Lilo’s twin sister, Loli, knelt above the reclining body and unreclining joint of León Fuertes. Gently she bent to lunch. Just as gently León took her head between his hands and, after a long moment, raised her, kissed her lovingly, turned her, and, still gently, mounted her—and with that Lilo Gavilán experienced what Dr. I. P. Pavlov called the “ultra-paradoxical phase” and Saint Paul called “conversion.” In the space of seconds, without benefit of conscious thought, all his beliefs concerning León Fuertes were revised, all his attitudes reversed. Working at electronic speed, the analog computing instrument in Lilo’s head rewired its own circuits, accepted the new data, processed them, and composed a print-out: León Fuertes was a traitor to his country and the human species; he had to be destroyed.
León and Loli then began to make some commonplace mammalian movements. Let them proceed in privacy; Lilo was no longer watching. Lilo was thrashing toward the gravel road. When he reached it, he ran along it till it met the asphalt. Then he ran the seven miles to the Pan American Highway, dropping to a dog trot when his wind flagged, but never stopping. When he reached the highway, he ran south along it until he was overtaken by a car with four of his school chums in it. He accepted the lift but not their conversation. By nightfall he was beating on the door of a room (above the Cantina Ronda) belonging to a barmaid whom Manfredo Canino lived with and off.
When the door opened, Lilo pushed his way past the girl and told Canino in an even voice he wished to join the movement. Canino said he thought Lilo a spy. Lilo said he wasn’t. Canino asked how he meant to prove it. Lilo asked if murdering León Fuertes would be sufficient proof.
Canino looked at Lilo carefully and nodded. He knew a true believer when he saw one. “You’ll never get away with it.”
“Getting away doesn’t really interest me.”
León Fuertes was, of course, Canino’s greatest enemy: ideologically because he was the chief obstacle to revolution in Tinieblas; personally because he had shown Canino kindness and respect. Canino wished Lilo the best of luck. Lilo said he preferred material support. He didn’t think a gun or knife safe weapons. Men had survived them. He needed a bomb. (Lilo did not say that it was insufficient simply to kill traitors like León, that they had to be obliterated, along with those stupid enough to have been betrayed by them.) Canino allowed himself to be persuaded. (He did not mention that bombs were ideologically sound as well as materially effective, that a bomb, being a true socialist among weapons, might not discriminate between victim and assassin, the last of whom would be an embarrassment to the movement if taken live.)
It took three days for Canino to meet his connection in the Reservation and get some plastic explosive and a detonator. It took part of another day for Tonio Burrón, who’d trained in Cuba, to make the bomb. Burrón wanted to save part of the plastic for future need, but Lilo insisted that he use every gram, and Canino supported him.
“Coño! There’s enough here to blow up the whole country.”
Lilo eyed the stuff and shook his head. “I doubt it. But if so, that’s all right too.”
When León Fuertes left Loli Gavilán’s apartment shortly before midnight on Friday, 10th January, 1964, Lilo Gavilán was waiting for him.
My father, León Fuertes, passed that day as follows: He rose from dreamless sleep at 6:30 A.M., showered, shaved, dressed, and took his coffee on the Palace terrace, undisturbed by any spirit, certainly not that of General Mojón. He then went to his private study and worked for two hours on an epic history of the Republic of Tinieblas which he had begun on New Year’s Day, It pleased him that he would not live to finish the work, that he would perhaps not even finish the first chapter (the last turned out to be the case), for in such circumstances he could work purely, for the sole sake of research and composition, without fear of his motives’ being fouled by thoughts of fame or profit. At 9:00 he put aside his pages (with the discoverer of Tinieblas still a lad in Cádiz), stepped to his state office, and took up the toil of government, which that day included a meeting with the Minister of Agriculture concerning a new Land Reform Bill scheduled for introduction when the Chamber reconvened the following week; a meeting with Carlitos Gavilán in which they drafted a letter to Lyndon Johnson about the Day-Cornudo Treaty; a meeting with a delegation of banana workers and their union’s legal counsel, Dr. Garibaldi Saenz; and, from 11:15 A.M. till well past noon, the first Cabinet meeting of 1964 and the last of León Fuertes’ Administration. He lunched and then siesta’d with his wife. I would give no details of the latter if I had them, but I can say that I left school early that afternoon to endure orthodontia, that I stopped “home” to leave my books, and that on entering my mother’s room to get a kiss for courage, I found her snuggled up in very rumpled bedclothes, humming to herself. León then met for over two hours with the Progressive Party Members of the Chamber, explaining his legislative program to them in laborious detail, attempting to persuade them of its urgency, pleading humbly for their support, pledging to reward their loyalty, and promising to make life as difficult as he was able for any renegades. He spent the next ninety minutes in the library with M. Armand Bonsoir, the Cultural Attaché of the French Embassy and a most competent accompanist, preparing for a recital of Schumann lieder that he planned to give later that month on the anniversary of the day he met Soledad Piérida. He then had a light dinner en famille and took his children to a baseball game between the Cerveza Cortes Teutones and the Café Sancudo Zorros of the Tinieblan Winter League.
By the seventh inning he had become so disgusted with the meekness of the Teutones hitters, and so vocal in his disgust, that the author of this history (who at thirteen was, sadly, something of a wise guy) asked him rhetorically if he thought he could do better. He replied that, by God, he could—the gringo pitching for the Zorros was fast but had no curve and rarely threw his change-up; a hitter (one who wasn’t seared, that was) could dig in on him and wait for the right pitch. The author remained unconvinced by this analysis (though it was accurate: according to the Saint Louis Sporting News, the pitcher in question, Clyde Hyde, did not develop a curve ball [and thus realize his potential excellence] until 1965). He said as much, but his attention was distracted by a fine shoe-string catch behind second base, and when he looked about, León had left the box. León was next seen conferring with the league president, Guillermo Gorgojo Lindo, in a box behind the Teutones’ dugout. The Teutones’ manager participated briefly in this meeting. Then León disappeared again. Ten minutes later, during the bottom of the eighth and after the Teutones had managed, at the cost of one out and with some aid and comfort from the Zorro infield, to put men on first and second, a player whose number was not on the scorecard and whose deeply-tilted cap brim concealed his face came up to pinch-hit. He spiked his feet up to his shoe tops in the batter’s box, took a ball high and very tight, took a strike low on the outside corner, and then (as I may have mentioned an agony of chapters back) slapped a single wide of first into right field, bringing the tying run around and sending what proved to be the winning run to third. Only when a man was sent in to run for him was it announced over the PA system that he was León Fuertes. (The resulting roar moved pitcher Hyde to ask his Tinieblan shortstop who the geezer was that got the hit; on learning that the geezer was President of the Republic, Hyde wiped his forehead and said, “Sheet! Way he dug in, if my duster’d gone where I aimed it, he’d be the ex-President by now!”) Following the game, León drove his children back to the Palace, then went to Loli Cavilán’s apartment.
The world has known no more (though it’s been buffalo’d much less) about the assassination of León Fuertes than about the assassination of his coeval John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the latter case the wrong man was framed, then murdered. In the former case the right man was taken for an innocent by-product victim and then mourned. No counterfeit assassin was ever officially passed to the Tinieblan people, but a wealth of candidates were privately advanced and a wealth of motives argued. The only point on which everyone agreed was that a time bomb was placed in León’s car. Here, as elsewhere, everyone was wrong. The reader of this history now knows who and why. It remains only to tell how.
When León Fuertes, at peace with all the world and in the deepest state of body-soul well-being, exited the building in which Loli had her flat and, singing (sotto voce) an air by Schumann, entered has blue Wildebeest coupe, he discovered Lilo sitting rigid in the right-hand bucket. Lilo was holding on his lap a brown paper bag containing a kilogram of plastic explosive with an electric detonator embedded in it, a dry-cell battery, a simple switch, and the necessary wires. León greeted Lilo with surprise and pleasure; Lilo mumbled a reply. León asked if Lilo would like a lift home; Lilo nodded. León then started his car and began proceeding northwest at moderate speed along Via Venezuela.
“Traitors must die,” announced Lilo.
“What?”
“You are a traitor.” Lilo put his right hand into the paper bag.
“What’s the matter, Lilo?” He stopped the car in the middle of the street opposite the Alameda.
“You have betrayed the toiling masses of our country and the workers of the world. You are the agent of the plutocrat oppressors and the warmongers.” Lilo was weeping.
“You know about Loli and me?”
“You are a running dog of the warlords.”
León grinned, as he always did at such jargon, then stopped at once: his son Lilo was suffering. He reached out his right hand and touched Lilo’s neck affectionately. He smiled at Lilo in compassion.
“It is my duty and privilege to destroy you.”
As the bomb went off the analog computing instrument in León’s head printed out the following discrete nonverbal messages with the functional simultaneity of electronic speed: love for his son Lilo; compassion for his suffering and admiration for his courage; satisfaction for the way he, León, had spent his day; the warmth of Soledad’s smile, of Schumann’s music, of his children’s laughter, of Loli’s kiss; the sensation of moving easily with a great current; intense and cleansing pain.
By the time the few unvaporized chunks of his and Lilo’s bodies—the largest of which might have made an Ollie-Burger-fell back100 to the pavement, my father, León Fuertes, had told Lilo Gavilán (whose spirit was as yet mingled with his) that he had pardoned him long ago and that he loved him, and was asking Lilo for his pardon.