The Dissertation, page 21
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
He knew each living thing was doomed to die, and always by some agency. To be the agency of death, as well as life, was in the destiny of everything on earth. But man, who had the faculty of thought, ought not to kill unthinkingly, without considering what he killed or why, or to take pleasure as death’s agent. Joy in battle was correct, as joy in any part of life, but one ought not to kill unthinkingly or out of selfish pleasure.
Then León realized that his whole life had been a constant self-indulgence.80 As a child he had indulged himself in the power of being family breadwinner, and he had bathed in self-indulgence while he lived with Dr. Grillo. He had indulged himself in the hardships of desert journey, and his merging with the army was an acute form of self-indulgence. No doubt he was fated to live selfishly, indulging and asserting his own self, but he ought to acknowledge his nature and bear it consciously. All his life he had evaded and denied his human obligation to consider, to understand his life and bear it consciously. For eight years he had smothered this obligation, in degradation, in action, in the monastic fraternity of soldiering, and before that also he had lived thoughtlessly, without considering. He had, especially, loved thoughtlessly and thus become the agency of Rosario’s death. It was time he considered that and acknowledged it and bore it consciously. As these thoughts came to him, he saw his sister-love Rosario sitting beside Boulala’s body, smiling at him, and his clarity grew calm.
Then León pardoned whatever agency might cause his death, the man of the opposing army who might kill him in the next instant or the myriad army of bacilli that might invest and kill him years ahead. He pardoned the soldier who had killed his friend Jabara and the artillerymen who had killed his comrade Dax and the men who’d killed his other comrades and the dying man three meters off who’d killed Boulala. And when he’d given pardon, he asked it for himself. He first asked pardon of Rosario, and she gave it to him, smiling. Then he asked pardon of the men he’d killed, a special pardon of the men whose killing had been done in pleasure, then pardon of the men he’d killed in present self-defense. As he did so, the Germans charged again, and León’s vision of Rosario was broken by a man who ran over and through her, firing a pistol, and as he reached the pit where León stood, he roared and aimed his pistol down at León, and, asking pardon, León reached up and slid his bayonet without difficulty into the man’s belly.
The man fell forward and crashed down on León, and his pistol crashed on León’s face, and León fell back senseless. He came to himself lying at the bottom of the pit with the man on top of him, screaming, trying to choke him, but his great clarity was with him still, and he pried the man’s grip gently from is throat and gently pushed him up and raised himself, so that the German across his lap, which was drenched with the German’s blood. Then León calmed him, cradling his head and caressing his check, which was filthy and stubbled, soiled by sweat and tears, and the man’s screams softened into whimpers. Then León looked at the man’s wound.
The bayonet had pulled free when the man fell, leaving a slit in his grey trousers from which blood pumped. Gently León opened the man’s belt and then his trousers and drew them down. A sausage of intestine pocked from the wound, and León cradled the man gently and pushed the roll of gut back into him and, having nothing else, took off his woolen cap and pressed it over the wound—uselessly, for the man was surely dying. While León tended him, the man whimpered and wriggled weakly, but now he let his head lie against León’s chest, breathing heavily, and with that León began to weep.
The Germans did not attack again. There were only a handful of them left around the crest, half of them wounded, but had they attacked, León would not have noticed. He sat at the bottom of a pit about the width and depth of a man’s grave, cradling his enemy, weeping for all the living things on earth that have to die and mostly for the human beings of this world, who have to think about their death and bear it consciously.
At length the German moved his head and opened his eyes and looked at León, and León stopped weeping and looked down at him.
“Mutti?” the German murmured. “Mutti?”
León cradled him, and the man smiled faintly. Then he died.
That midnight the soldiers of both armies crouched on the freezing top of Colle Belvedere heard singing from the summit of Crest 862. A voice sang a song called “La Golandrina,” sang it through once quite slowly, then was silent. None of the men who heard it understood the words, but the song spoke so piercingly to them of grief, the voice so swelled with joy and with lament, that they believed they’d dreamed both song and singer. In the morning, when 3rd Battalion, 4th Tunisian Tirailleurs stormed the crest and reached the little group who held the summit, their commanding officer found an exhausted corporal sleeping in a gun pit with the body of a dead German cradled in his arms.
On 4th February, 1944, the 4th Tunisian Tirailleurs were relieved from Colle Belvedere. In little groups, followed by German shells, they came down off the mountain, tattered, smeared with blood and filth, bearded, pale, eyes sunken. In two hundred forty hours of uninterrupted combat the regiment had taken fifteen hundred casualties, well more than half its strength, nearly three hundred killed, more than four hundred missing. In 3rd Battalion all three company commanders had been killed and every other officer killed or wounded, so when the regiment returned to action early in May, León Fuertes was a sublieutenant.
He was wounded leading his section in the assault on Monte Pico in the last chapter of the Battle of Cassino, receiving the Médaille Militaire for his conduct in this action. By the time he was returned to duty, Juin’s Expeditionary Corps had been withdrawn from Italy and made a part of the newly formed French First Army under de Lattre de Tassigny. León took part in the landings on the Riviera and fought with his regiment through France and into Germany. When the war ended he held the rank of captain and was commanding a company on the headwaters of the Danube.
During his months of combat after Belvedere he showed consistent valor under fire and received several decorations, French and Allied, but he never killed again or used a weapon. It was not that he now thought war or killing wrong. While his regiment was resting and refitting after Belvedere, he took pains to inform himself on recent history and came to the obvious conclusion that Hitler and those who followed him in arms had best be extirpated, as quickly as possible, as violently as necessary. He directed men bravely and efficiently in combat, and the units that he led killed many Germans. León did not kill personally because he feared he might enjoy it. To be an agency of death was oftentimes an honorable and sacred occupation, but one ought not take selfish pleasure in it, and as he had found killing could bring exquisite pleasure, León, in self-defense, adopted the custom of British officers and went into battle with his revolver holstered, carrying a little cedar swagger stick, which was capped at one end with a highly polished .30-06 cartridge case and which he jokingly called “La Joyeuse,” after Charlemagne’s sword.
Thus equipped, León no longer enjoyed the company of his great-grandfather General Epifanio Mojón. My aunt Rosario was with him constantly, however, beside him in every battle, so that he felt her presence though he could not see her, and in his dreams each night. In these dreams they conversed chastely and hence guiltlessly, as neither lovers nor siblings but as friends. Thus, in Rosario’s company and burdened with a consciousness which he strove always to bear firmly and yet lightly, my father, León Fuertes, came out of the wilderness regions of his life.
PART FOUR
HIS MATURITY, HIS MINISTRY, HIS MARTYRDOM (1946-1964)
17. Money
MY FATHER, León Fuertes, returned to Tinieblas ten years to the day after his departure. He arrived on the Minerve from Cherbourg with a law degree and a new personality. My grandmother Rebeca was on the pier to meet him. They had not communicated in any way, but on the day he landed, at the moment when León glimpsed a shore bird from the foredeck of the ship, Rebeca poured the coffee she had just made for my uncle Pepe back into the pot.
“Go save me a seat on the bus to Bastidas. Your brother León’s coming back from the dead.”81
She did not recognize the balding fellow in the cheap tweed suit until she felt his hands on her shoulders. Her lips chewed earnestly, but no sound emerged.
“It’s all right, Mamá,” León said, embracing her. “I know you forgive me. I forgive you your curse.”
Tinieblas too forgave him. Following his departure he had become the object of intense and general resentment. Those whom his singing had transfigured, whom his athletic feats had stuffed with tribal pride, felt abandoned, and there grew up a copious apocrypha of slander to explain his sudden slinking off. In one version he’d sold out to Tío Sam and Coca-Cola, had snatched a gaudy wad of greenbacks to change his nationality. Don Vitelio Mosca gave it spurious confirmation when, upon returning from the 1941 World Series, he claimed to have seen León with his hair dyed and a gringo nickname playing shortstop for Los Esquivadores de Brooklyn. Another text held that León had murdered Rosario in a jealous fit, that he had refuged in Stockholm of in Lisbon or in Bern and earned a dishonorable fortune forging Caruso records. Men of the left snorted that he was a spy for Mussolini, while rightists figured him a paid assassin of the Comintern. He was accused of every crime except the one he’d actually committed and written boldly in, the catalog of traitors that Tinieblans cherish in their hearts as an excuse for our republic’s insignificance.
When he returned, though, he received a hero’s welcome. This was not particularly surprising, for he engineered it. Through the new León’s calculating intervention—he published a series of pseudonymous articles about his war deeds in the French press and had former commanders write letters to de Gaulle—the French Ambassador in Ciudad Tinieblas got a lengthy résumé of his war record, an early warning of his coming home, and an advice that French influence and commerce would be benefited by some official clucking over León’s service under the tricolor. So scarcely had León got his bags unpacked when His Excellency convoked a glittering reception at which the citations of León’s several decorations were read aloud in opulent translation and León was received into the Légion d’honneur. Great Britain and the United States refused to be upstaged and came through with entertainments, scrolls, and medals. The local press spared no expense of adjectives, retold his feats of arms, invented new ones for him, and contrived to have him fighting on several fronts at once. Then, two weeks after his return, on the four hundred thirty-first anniversary of the discovery of Tinieblas, President Luis Manuel Gusano presented him with a second Grand Cross of the Order of Palmiro Inchado, saluting him publicly on the palace balcony before a huge and roaring82 throng.
In private Gusano urged León to accept a commission as lieutenant colonel in the Guardia Civil, pledging to promote him and name him Commandant as soon as Colonel Genaro Culata could be decently retired. León declined. He declined as well the plaintive invitations of three opposition parties and a number of independent main-chancers that he be a vice-presidential candidate in the next elections. He bad small interest in public office and none in letting others trade on his war-hero glamour. He meant to trade on it himself. He had come home to make a fortune, dishonorable if need be, as a counselor-at-law.
This may at first glance seem a strange design.83 It is true that León’s father, Dr. Azael Burlando, dealt his station in the next world for wealth in this one, but this very greed made him anomalous in León’s ancestry. It is, besides, well known that lawyers have been the chief woe, bane, pest, and canker of our hemisphere from the day the first one put foot oil Hispaniola down to the recent scandals in the U.S.A., that (in the words of Dr. Eudemio Lobo) “if the New World sent the Old World syphilis, it was a meek and insufficient provocation for the plague of law-titled hypocrites and swindlers which the Old World sent the New, and which has cultured here unchecked and grown endemic.” Since León was blessed (or cursed) with the potential to excel at any number of pursuits, one may well blink in wonder that he chose to enter a profession so hated and mistrusted by those whom it has not deluded or corrupted. But one night in Ulm, in the fell, freezing March of ‘45, with the great seats of culture smashed about him and humans necromanced by war to wolves or rats, León had dreamed that he slept dreamlessly in a wide, airy house beside our southern sea, that a calm, fragile woman slept beside him swathed in luxury and ease, that she had borne him sons who played with grace at gentlemanly games and a daughter who woke all breathed in jasmine and with heart aflutter84 when well-bred youths came In the midnight to lift a serenata to her window. And dreaming there, deep in his dream yet conscious of the ruin and savagery around him, León thought his dream good. On waking, he put it by as one will, being called to a low, messy labor, put off a subtle garment, but when the war was over, he drew his dream out and he tried it on and liked the feel of it. My father was not a man to let a dream stay dream: the dreams he liked he fleshed. Nor was he a man of original, conceptions. Among the essentials of his dream were Tinieblas, money, and respectability, and law is the traditional, hoof-beaten track to money and position in this country. Law appealed to him, moreover, as a predatory game with stringent rules. He had researched himself and found a potent drive to self-assertion. The courts with their rites and ceremonies; the judges, counsel, bailiffs, clerks, and clients with their appointed parts and places; the legal system with its ordered staves and movements, proffered a fit stage, accompaniment, and orchestration for the performance of that drive.
When Germany fell, León left the army. He went to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne. There he lied blithely that he’d studied law at Caen before the war—this to assure that he might sit for his exams without needless delay. No one presumed to doubt the word of a gallant officer;85 had anyone done so, he would have had a hard time proving his doubts, for Caen had been a battleground after the Normandy invasion, and the town was rubbled and many records lost. León went up into an attic on l’Île Saint-Louis and dumped the law texts in his brain by shovelfuls. A year later he flung them back to his examiners and got his strip of parchment. Then he organized himself a hero’s welcome and went home.
He was not prepared to hang out his own shingle. His degree was excellent. He’d picked up copies of the Tinieblan Codes at our embassy in Paris and memorized them on shipboard. He’d been an expert liar since his childhood, and his study of jurisprudence had honed his native skill to a fine point. His celebrity assured him clients. But he hadn’t an inkling of how justice was managed in Tinieblas: how much to bribe this or that judge for a continuance; whose palm to grease to get a case onto the docket or a corporation registered without interminable delay; what doctor to consult when one’s client had need of an invisible infirmity; which ministers to approach through their wives and which through their mistresses; who among one’s colleagues at the bar possessed the means to rig a trial beyond all hope of counter-rigging, hence when to settle out of court even if one’s case was airtight; which magistrates were drunks and which were senile; which liked to have the issue heard forthwith and which demanded a good show of rhetoric, some histrionics, and a tear or two; what pleas might be accepted, what judgments handed down, what fees paid promptly. So León chose to enter partnership.
He did not lack for opportunities. Dr. Erasmo Sancudo Montes, former President of the Republic (1936-1940), future Justice of the Supreme Court, newspaper magnate, and chief power in the august and lucred firm of Anguila, Anguila y Sancudo, made León an ornate Byzantine approach in which he pledged nothing of substance but blew out a perfumed mist of possibilities, among them marriage to his daughter. Avispa y Abeja dangled a junior partnership. Comején-Oruga-Tábano offered to put his name alongside theirs. He might, in fact, have entered any law firm in the country, yet he threw in with a young fellow of apparently dim prospects, about whom there were whispered imputations of honesty.
Carlitos Gavilán (referred to by the diminutive to distinguish him from his father, also christened Carlos, also a lawyer) was León Fuertes’ most intimate collaborator from December, 1946, till León’s death in January, 1964: in law practice, in the golpe of 1952 which deposed President Alejandro Sancudo and preserved the Constitution, in the founding of the Partido Progresista, in the Chamber of Deputies, and in the government. He spoke for León at his wedding, stood namesake and godfather to León’s first-born, managed León’s campaign for the presidency, served in his cabinet, pronounced his eulogy, and executed his testament. He was León’s partner and lieutenant, his beneficiary and his victim, his friend, his confidant, and, like Dr. Escolástico Grillo before him, his complaisant and self-sacrificing worshiper. Their association had, in a sense, long antedated León’s lawyerhood, for Carlitos had played catcher on the national selection baseball team of 1934 and had, in this capacity, displayed a trait of character that León valued highly. Years later, when I was twelve or so and we were living in the palace, my father happened to come in my room and look over my shoulder as I was snapping a school exercise into my notebook.
