The Dissertation, page 24
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
When darkness washed in around them, though, León grew youthful, would swing his legs out of the hammock and rise and go to her and take her hand, bend to her, kiss a bride’s blush onto her lifted check, whisper a low, shy laugh from her turned throat, lead her upstairs. His ardor for her was as strong on their last evening as on their wedding night.
The way he gloried in my mother’s company was the despair of other husbands, who were forever having him held up a model for them by their own wives. When León and Soledad went out together, he did not flee to rumble business with the men or flirt with other women, and if they were pulled apart by tides of conversation, he kept in touch with her by smiles and glances. Even when he was President and she First Lady and they presided at state entertainments or were themselves hosted in foreign capitals, he let no pomp or protocol divide them long but would seek her across the room to stand holding her hand while he conversed. Their couplehood was so charming and so obvious that during their official stay in France in 1962, M. Malraux remarked to my mother that the Elysée orchestra ought to have marked their entrance with a waltz from Les deux pigeons rather than the Tinieblan anthem. One would have thought my father had no other purpose in his life besides his marriage.
León Fuertes never raised his voice to his wife, even in the seclusion of their bedroom. He deferred to her judgment in all points of taste, from the décor of their apartments at the Palace (which was done over out of his private means) to his own dress. Nor did he ever countermand her dispositions where their children were concerned, though he had very firm ideas on child rearing as a dry run for the struggles of this life. My mother, for example, tended to spoil her second son, cute little Camilito, future historian, whom I self-portray from the glass of memory as a wily brat parlaying his huge eyes and scrawny body into more than his fair share of Mama’s love. I feared and loathed the breakers at Medusa Beach, which at flow tide were mountainous, snarl-lipped with greasy foam, and slimed with seaweed, while my father’s dearest joy—shared idiotically by both Clara and Carlos—was to romp in them. We would wade out, all holding hands like figures in the danse macabre, until one of these monsters loomed above us, and then dive through the base of it so that it broke harmlessly past us, and this I valiantly endured, having my father’s hand and, more, the prospect, once we were past the waves, of riding tadpoled to his back on the calm, limpid, sun-flecked swells beyond. My father, though, would often leave us on the sand to swim far out alone and then, returning to the far fringe of the breaker line, call us out to him. Carlos and Clara would go happily, dolphining through the waves, but when a big one rose above me, I, stonied by mixed disgust and terror, would refuse the dive, would get the full weight of the ocean on my fragile ribs, would be bowled up across the shingles, foam in my nostrils, seaweed on my lips, sobbing for air and safety. Then, when I’d floundered to my feet and wiped my tears, my father, who understood my problem (though I didn’t think so then), who suffered my anguish more than I did (though I sense this only in retrospect), but who felt obliged to urge me toward self-mastery (though at the time I put his motive down as tyrant’s Machtlust), would call, “Come on, don’t let it beat you,” and I, of all things most afraid of his displeasure, would stumble shivering back to try again. My mother was wont, however, to cancel whole runs of this tragifarce. She might, if the seas were breaking, put on a stern face and with pained gravity, as though it were a cruel blow to me, proclaim: “Camilo can’t swim today. He has a fever.” I would contrive to look both sick and shattered, a tough role since I could now anticipate delicious hours lounging near her under the striped umbrella or, still better, snuggled beside her in the porch hammock while she read to me. My father, scarcely deceived and visibly annoyed, would merely purse his lips and nod, would not so much as test my forehead with his palm, much less call us both sneaks and overrule her.
My father’s presence brought at once excitement and security, a sea breath of freedom, a wide horizon of delight and possibility, a steadiness of firm and weathered decks. The spirits of my mother and us children thrived or withered with his entrances and exits, and since his pride of place was ever beyond question, he had no call to be a bully in his home, to govern arbitrarily or demand kowtows. At dinner, which we took together most nights as a family, he drew his children into conversation and heard us out with interest and respect. Further, he often let us stay when there was company, a provision that he likened to Plato’s idea of taking future leaders to the battlefield as children to observe in safety and be blooded like young hounds, for to our home came the cleverest people in Tinieblas and distinguished foreigners as well-artists, journalists, politicians—and their debates moved wide- and wittily through every theater of the intellect. Here one might glimpse in León, husband, evidence of other Leóns; he was not always able to restrain the athlete’s-lawyer’s-warrior’s thirst for strife and triumph. He never competed with my mother, though, or pushed her down. My parents ruled in harmony, Sultan and Grand Vizir, so that their only fault was to leave us children ignorant, hence cruelly unprepared, for the sex wars that rage by other hearths.
León, husband, was withal loving, attentive, and respectful to his wife; kindly, strong, and bountiful to his children. Besides, he suffered himself to be adored by her and them, to be the sun around which their world orbited. This was a burden, for as he was now bound to examine his life, he knew that León, husband, his virtues else aside, was stamped with one defect which corrupted him to failure: he had no staying power. Think of a star athlete who frustrates fans and teammates by missing half the season every year. Think of a writer whose lightest phrase is genius, who never sets a word down out of place, but who, seduced from art by love of life, strays from his desk and starves his public on a few slim volumes sparsed across the decades. Think then of León, husband, superspouse and author of his family’s joy, who was forever vanishing, leaving the grin of his perfections in the air behind.
Each of León, husband’s, vanishings was a departure90 from existence. His body was in use to other Leóns, his spirit limbo’d for uncertain time. At dawn he vanished into León, athlete, for his two sets of tennis, and but for a telephonic moment at midmorning he remained vanished until five or six P.M. León, lawyer, or León, politician, had the workday. Any siesta time or otherwise spare minutes went to León, lecher (who makes his entrance in a page or two). When León, husband, had made late-afternoon devotions to his wife and dined with his family, he was liable to vanish once again, and even if he remained throughout the remnant portion of the evening, answered an invitation with his wife or hosted guests at home, he vanished for the midnight hours into León, scholar. None of these other Leóns had a family; none was even married. None cared for Soledad Piérida de Fuertes, and none could pass even at a scrape as an embodiment of love formed for her custody and worship.
Thus Soledad and León failed, each in his way, of being the true incarnation of the other’s vision. León failed Soledad and knew it, was not wholly hers, left her in main a widow, but he was in no wise able to give up his separate lives and form himself into one person about León, husband. Soledad knew she failed León, but she could not love partially, could not forbear to grieve her husband’s vanishings. Neither reproached the other for his failure; each bore his guilt and heaviness in silence. León and Soledad, Soledad and León, reaching, mostly in vain.
19. Lechery
SINCE SIGMUND THE GLAD proclaimed that the essence of the human species throbs between its thighs, it has become the mode among biographers to rummage in their subjects’ sex lives with exceeding thoroughness and, upon pulling forth their plums, to say: “What a good boy am I!” I loathe, detest, abhor, condemn this fashion. Can catalogs of humps and spasms solve the human mystery? Must scholar vie with scribbler in contriving that the reader’s groin be starched or gooied every fifteen pages? But though sex is not everything, while it is surely not the only thing, it is at times part of the bio that one graphs. This work has thus allowed itself a few grudged gropes below the belt and now must make another. No history of León Fuertes would be complete or balanced without considering that he reached for other ladies besides his wife.
León came young to venery and wenched with sufficient industry to clap himself before he was fourteen. He was an ardent if unknowing incesteer and the crown princess of Riviera homodom. For six years he practiced the weirdest of all sexual perversions: total chastity. Then, on his return to Tinieblas in November, 1946, he embarked upon a progress through the hearts and parts of women which continued unarrested till his death.
No respectable León could be this kind of tourist. The athlete was a man’s man, the scholar a eunuch, the lawyer chastely trothed to frigid wealth. The husband was enveloped in monogamy; the leader craved no more from women than their votes. But with us Fuertes the taste for respectability reciprocates an equal, opposite fuck-youism. Hence León, artist–but he, apparently, had lost his voice on Colle Belvedere. So when my father created León, lawyer, León, lecher, sprang boldly dingus’d from his loins.
As my father was male, some females sought to entertain him. Some were excited by his grace of body, some by his mental brilliance, some by his wealth, some by his prominence, some by the tenderness he showed his family, some by his ruthlessness in court, some by some combination of these features. None knew he split himself in a plurality of Leóns. Subtly or blatantly, each in her way, they made it known they were at home to León Fuertes. They spread the welcome mat; they asked him to drop in. Sometimes a message of this nature reached my father when he was in the visiting mood; sometimes it actually provoked his transformation into León, lecher. But had León, lecher, called only on those ladies who sent him invitations, he would not merit a full chapter in this history. What commands our interest is the number of doors he knocked on uninvited and the invariable warmth of his reception.91 He knocked when and where he cared to, entirely without regard to the race, creed, ethnic derivation, social standing, economic condition, or marital status of his prospective hostesses. He called generally on women of from eighteen to thirty-five but made enough exceptions at both ends of this scale to prove his freedom from prejudice. He wasted no time in courting, paid no mind to logistical inconvenience, had no sense of decency, and met with no rebuffs, so as his health was strong, his need persistent, and his whim eclectic, his wang was known to a good portion of the females in the land.
León, lecher, exerted a hypnotic fascination over women of all rank and temper. The chief source of this power was his concentration, a trait common to all the Leóns. As León, lawyer, was all business, León, lecher, was all lust. When the gonadine fit was on him, all León’s energy was focus’d in desire and beamed upon his target. But he was by no means pushy or ostensibly intense. He lounged, he drawled, he grinned in a perfect counter felt of relaxation, picturing forth the overstroked indifference that women find bedeviling. Meanwhile his gaze would grasp a woman by the hips, steal beneath her clothing, palp her breasts and loins, so that she found herself first paralyzed, then randy. His voice would nuzzle up between her thighs and buttocks. His presence would flush her skin and melt her tendons. Consider, in illustration, the case of Luz Ahumada, whom he enjoyed impromptu on the morning of 7th February, 1956:
Luz arrived at the Club Mercantil at about seven-thirty for an early swim and was on the point of entering the ladies’ locker room (which gave on the tennis courts) when León, who had played two sets, finished screwing the press’ down on his racket and looked up at her. She was nineteen, tall and slender, with shapely legs, palm-sized buttocks, and smoky-soft grey eyes. She was, besides, scheduled (and destined) to be married four days later to Jacinto Salmón, an associate at Gavilán y Fuertes, and it may have been her prenuptial glow that, heightening her normal loveliness, transformed León from athlete to lecher. At once in steaming rut, he called hello and, masking his bulged groin with his racket, gimped to her. When his smile touched her, she felt the openings of her body fill up with warm wax. During the next two minutes she heard the small-talk that her mouth kept making like radio noises from a distant room, now and then shivering uncontrollably as his laugh tongued languidly across her abdomen. When he guided her inside, she opened her mouth to protest but instead gave it to León, who lapped behind her upper teeth, causing her soul to pour out of her body and soak the bottom of the one-piece bathing suit she wore under her dress. She stood docilely while he peeled her naked, but when he drew her to a shower stall and closed the curtain, as he stripped his sweat-sopped shirt and shorts, she began to twist her hips and squeeze her thighs together. He steadied her haunches and pushed gently, collapsing her to the tiles. He dropped between her raised calves and pillowed his knees with his clothing. When he, entered her, she smiled in pain and bit her lip in pleasure, but it was only later, when he had helped her to her feet and opened the tap, when she saw her blood wash down the shower drain, that she began to realize what had happened.92
León, lecher, was at all times ready to assume command of my father’s body and had besides a knack for exploiting an unpromising situation. Witness, for example, his seduction of Inelda de Comején, attempted on the provocation of a glance and accomplished in the presence of her husband. This was in the living room of the Comején apartment on a rainy evening in the early fifties. León had gone to discuss a case with his colleague and coeval Francisco Comején, had finished by settling it out of court to his own advantage, and had in the process so stung his host’s ego that Comején, who was chess champion of Tinieblas and one of the strongest boards in Central America, insisted that they play a game or two and called his wife in to observe his triumphs. He crushed León twice, spotting him first a knight and then a castle, then proposed to play blindfolded—actually from a chair at the far end of the room facing away from the table.
“I’ll give you pawn and move, Leoncito, and the beating of your life in the bargain!”
At that, Inelda de Comején, dumpling-plump matron of twenty-seven, glanced at León Fuertes. One might have wrung that glance like a dishrag and not squeezed out one drop of prurient invitation. It contained no more than an excuse for Comején’s arrogance, a plea that León humor him and go through with the game, and a hint that she was rooting for the underdog. It was made, however, with a certain tenderness and complicity—a chaste tenderness, a mild complicity, yet sufficient to relieve León, lawyer, from duty and, call up León, lecher.
“You’re on!”’
Comején swung the board so that the whites faced León. He plucked the black king pawn and set it on the table. Then he rose, stalked off, turned a rattan armchair toward the closed door, and slouched into it. “Your move!”
“If you turn your head, the game’s forfeit. Agreed?”
“Agreed, agreed. Just move!”
León touched his queen pawn forward and called the move to Comején, at the same time leering shyly at Inelda and fondling the pawn’s glistening nub with his thumb and forefinger. She crossed her legs and squirmed. Developing, he put light pressure on Comején’s king bishop pawn and Inelda’s downy forearm, then attacked boldly, extending his knight toward Comején’s flank and his tongue in dumb-show lappings toward Inelda’s center.
“What! What are you …?”
“Inelda! Please keep quiet! I’m concentrating!”
After some more advances León captured a pawn from Comején and Inelda’s fluttering left bubby.
“Ohhhh!”
“Did you move?”
“J’adoube,” said León, twisting gently.
He followed with a succession of forward probes, then, in a daring suite, opened his center file, exposed his Bishop, and pointed it at the dame!—winning the piece but putting himself in a difficult position:
Inelda stood on tiptoe, her skirt up, her girdle down, her trunk draped forward over the back of her chair, while León addressed her shuddering stern, squelched her mooings with a firm left palm, watched the board, moved chessmen with his right hand, and called his moves. In this manner he held off Comején’s counterattack until he had mated Inelda soundly.
A real trouper, León, lecher, appeared ad lib on any stage at all with every type of co-star. He made his debut on the Bastidas-Ciudad Tinieblas bus the night of his return from Europe with a mulata girl whose hips synched with the humps and swayings of the road as she knelt spraddled to him in the humid stifle, her bum jouncing in his hands like caramel custard. He did daytime walk-ons in the offices of private firms and government departments with the likes of Lisa Pestaña, lynx-eyed receptionist at Hirudo Oil, who billboarded her availability the instant he walked in, who approved his lingering to flirt with her once he had done his business, but who, expecting to be taken out, was instead taken on her desk as soon as the other staff had left for lunch; with Professor Pilar de Yglesias (M.A., Chicago, 1950), Vice-Minister of Social Welfare in the Government of Juan Ardilla (1960-1962), who gave León, politician, a cool welcome—he’d been thumping the administration pretty hard—and León, lecher, a torrid one, the change of heart and Leóns transpiring in a ten-minute pavane which began near her swivel chair and finale’d on the floor below a panting air conditioner; with Nuris Ciervo and Lelis Liebre and Dalys Cordero, file clerks at the Registro Nacional, who on one or more occasions found themselves splayed to León Fuertes up against the dusty storeroom shelves; with other castings in other locales. He played matinees on his office couch with secretaries or sometimes with clients, and kept after-dark engagements in motel rooms and in private homes and in his car. He even did a gig once in the Reservation, standing in for León, scholar, who went one evening to the Post Library at Fort Shafter to consult the Atlas of American Wars (Col. Vincent R. Esposito, ed.) in connection with a study he was making of Batallón Tinieblas in Korea. The scholar was completing a fourcolor tracing of the positions along Heartbreak Ridge when Ensign Amy Wrigley, USN, brushed by his table, leaving a mixed whiff of musk and soapsuds, which shooed him from the communal Fuertes frame and cued in León, lecher. He did his act with Amy in a corner of the stacks, then (since the place closed in the interval) followed with an encore in a nest of piled chair cushions. Some days León, lecher, gave two or three performances with different ladies, and when he was President he played the Palace.
