The Dissertation, page 25
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Women often emerged from these embraces as from a trance, astounded by their actions, but my father was himself quite commonly surprised by León, lecher. One night a few weeks before his marriage, while he was dining at the home of his partner and closest friend, Carlitos Gavilán, some laugh or gesture by Gavilán’s wife, Marcia, sent León, lecher, surging to his body. My father was amazed, somewhat annoyed, at length amused, but was in any case able to keep the wanton down till he was needed. He turned to Carlitos and talked shop for a cool half-hour until the latter finished his coffee and repaired to his study to work on a brief. He took the twins up to their room and storied them to sleep. Then, and only then, did he commit his body to the care of León, lecher, and in that character, disposing of the powers proper to that special León, charm Marcia into quivering consent and thoroughly pleasure both her and himself.
The pleasures León Fuertes found with women were three: the physical pleasure of tension and release; the psychic pleasure of conferring pleasure; the moral pleasure of tearing free from all moral constraints. He formed León, lecher, unconsciously, but deliberately allowed him to procure these pleasures. Since my father found intellectual pleasure in his work and studies, social pleasure in his public life, and affective pleasure in his wife and family, he did not require of a paramour that she have this or that mentality or come from a particular background or feel compassionate about his life. He reserved sentiment for his wife and approached other women with good-humored hedonism. Judging by results, this was an adroit procedure; his embraces were neither resisted nor resented. Though he had many adventures, each produced in him an enthusiasm that recalls the Greek root of that word: “possessed by a god.” Few were, however, extended to a second episode, and in the whole career of León, lecher, there were but two relationships that might be called affairs.
Irene Manta de Hormiga was something of a female counterpart to León, lecher. Her charms were irresistible and her desire boundless. But sensuality was not just a fragment of her nature: the whole of her was given up to it. From the time she left convent school at eighteen she lived in the act of Love or in repose from it or in its preparations, and when, at forty-three, still at the summit of her beauty, she learned she was developing sclerosis, she seduced a CIA case officer and had him bring her one of those Bondish cyanide pills (which she said was for her husband), and hiding the capsule in her mouth and welcoming her lover with a special tenderness, died in climax.
Irene Hormiga breathed forth a promise of delight that moved the stoniest men to passion. Her skin was smoothed by the satiety of love, her dark hair perfumed with love’s anticipation, And since she was bound over into love so firmly that she literally could not live without it, Irene studied love and mastered all its arts, especially the art of dreaming herself into her lover’s mind and body and thereby pleasing him fully and perfectly. Men who became her lovers took such joy in her that they could scarcely credit their own senses. They were awed while she loved them and pierced with wild regret and longing when she released them and in neither case able to boast of having her. Hence she managed to maintain a spotless reputation though she deceived her husband with at least three hundred men, one each month for twenty-five years.
At first she was disturbed by her behavior. Each month she found herself drawn to a certain man. He might be an ambassador or a laborer, but she would find his attraction irresistible, and she would yield and receive him and enjoy him and consecrate herself to him and lavish on him all the pleasures of the Muslim heaven. Then he would shrink dim and wasted in her eyes and, wondering sadly at his faded power, she would abandon him and make a new selection.93 Later she realized that she was vassaled in the regnance of the moon, who rules by revolution, and that her lovers took allure from her in moonly rhythm. From then on she chose her consorts without guilt or sadness.
One month she chose León Fuertes—or tried to choose him, for he did not choose to serve. This was in the fall of 1950, soon after President Alejandro Sancudo acquired several miles of empty beachfront at a place called Medusa and had the Ministry of Public Works put in an access road and streets and make a golf course and do landscaping. Most well-to-do Tinieblans were buying lots and building villas, and León went there for a weekend with his family to see if he should do the same. His one-time fellow rounder Nacho Hormiga was his host, and on Sunday morning, as León was treading water and calculating real estate values out beyond the breakers, Irene swam out to him and, cavorting between him and the beach, contrived to lose the top of her bikini and show him her glorious breasts. The signal was loud and clear yet went unanswered. My mother was in plain view, sunning herself on a beach towel with her handsome second son of just two months, and my father was entirely León, husband. For the first and last time in her life, Irene found herself rejected.
She was more puzzled than offended; her response was to study León Fuertes. Few women and fewer men attempt to understand their lovers, present or prospective, being in the main preoccupied with their own emotions. It is, of course, almost impossible not to learn something about a person with whom one associates closely for any length of time, and a certain random gathering of data often goes on during the first stages of a love affair, but few people have minds to begin with, few of these discipline their minds, while of this latter few only a minute fraction will flog their minds to swim against a tide of hormones. As a specialist in love, however—one would say as a professional if the term did not have pornic connotations—Irene studied her lovers with great interest and imagination, though, since it was easier that way (and more fun too), she normally did not begin until she was in bed with them. She approached each as a particular and fascinating mystery worthy of her total concentration, and it was this attitude, of course, that accounted for her success. Had she been ugly as Sycorax, she would have still had all the men she wanted.
It rarely took Irene long to “solve” a man, but she spent almost a year on León. He was a complicated subject and besides that uncooperative. The main enigma, after all, was that Irene had been unable at her first attempt to get him between the sheets of a good lab. She had only the unfamiliar tools of remote field observation and informant interview. She went to court to hear him argue cases. She watched him at parties. She led her lovers into talking of him and found discreet opportunities to chat with Soledad. She became the confidence of several likely matrons of her age and class and showed such envy at their escapades that three of them confessed they’d been to bed with León and gave details on his modus operandi. The picture gradually developed—or rather a gallery of irreconcilably different portraits, all purportedly of the same man—until she glimpsed the secret of his subdivided personality.
He would, clearly, never make a proper full-time consort, not even for a month. On the other hand, his prolificity excited her, and it was foolish, having gone to so much trouble, to deprive herself. Irene put herself in León’s path and avenged his rejection of her, not actually repulsing his advance but making him wait. When he “ran into her” in the lobby of the Excelsior and offered (with an unequivocally lustful grin) to drive her “somewhere,” she grinned right back and said:
“If you mean ‘take me to bed,’ I’d love to, Leoncito. But not now. I’ll drop by your office one of these days.”
“I hope I’ll be in,” he answered, meaning in the mood, but to his great surprise he found himself looking forward to her visit. He was even more surprised when, two weeks later, as he lay sated in her arms, he realized he would want more of her.
León, lecher, was not incapable of a recurring urge for the same woman, but one had never before come with premeditation. The fact was that his circumscribed accomplishments were inadequate to cope with Irene Hormiga, for as an après-amour diversion she had described the mensual rhythm of her love life, then given a witty and perceptive reading of León himself. In so doing she managed to engage my father’s intellect as completely as his genitalia. Thus doubly pleased and stimulated, he was receptive to the proposal she next made him:
“I’m the most exciting woman in this country, Leoncito, and you’re the most interesting man. We ought to get together whenever it’s convenient for us both.”
It was the only contract he ever acceded to without negotiation. They sealed it on the spot and honored it monthly on the slack day between the paling of her old love and the rising of her new, he installing a spacious new office couch and she giving him a watch that told the phases of the moon.
Irene Hormiga provided León, lecher, with one of his two human relationships. His connections with other women (one alone excepted) were rodential quickies, but with Irene he laughed and compared notes, philosophized on love and pleasure, regaled her with tales of his adventures, listened with delight to tales of hers. At the same time the addition of a human dimension stretched León, lecher, beyond the limits of a figure formed for casual lust. In the warmth of Irene’s visits his predatory keenness laxed, and at length he suffered an unmasking which, but for her, might have got the whole crew of segregated Leóns hashed together. One day he simply forgot to lock the door and was surprised in ecstasy by his son and future biographer.
I happened to come in at a critical moment and stood dumb-struck, rooted in my tracks, entranced by the grunts and stunts of the strange multilimbed biceph on Papa’s couch. When it at last grew calm, one head opened a sloe eye, spied me, and whispered to the other. The beast then split apart abruptly, and when the top half turned out to be my father, I realized what I’d witnessed. Ever my mother’s partisan, I was outraged and vengeful. I instantly resolved to inform Nacho Hormiga and see both the culprits chastised. My father, totally nonplused, was occupied with a recalcitrant zipper, but Irene must have guessed my intent, for she sighed and shook her head at me in supplicating languor, rippling her hair, which lay like a dark lake across the ocher leather.
“Ay, Camilito, don’t betray us! You’ll understand soon enough.” Then she gave me a marvelous smile of satisfaction, as though it had been I who’d made her pretty toes curl toward the ceiling, and prophesied, falsely but nonetheless charmingly, “You’ll be a bigger bandit than your father.”
At once her thrall, I withdrew blushing, having tasted the delicious guilt of infidelity at the apt age of eight.
León, lecher’s other extended liaison was with Dolores Gavilán, his partner’s daughter-honey-skinned, green-eyed Loli, who chrysalised to nymphhood in his arms.
I have in part describes how León Fuertes charmed his partner’s children, nurturing their infant personalities, showing them unforced affection, receiving their adoration in return. His was no pro-forma honorary uncledom such as is often feoffed to bachelors by their connubed chums and later on resigned when they too marry and get children of their own. By the time he was three months back in Tinieblas he was as important a personage to Lilo and Loli as their own parents, and as the years passed his stature in their lives only increased. He liked children in general and Gavilán’s in particular. He liked Lilo’s seriousness, which he called a “Corsican temperament” and which cast life as a somber drama on the theme of honor, iron loyalties, and enmities. He liked the impish joy with which Loli cheated at games and teased her smoldering brother. He did not expel them from his affections to make room for his own kids; there was room for all. Carlos, Clara, and I called Lilo and Loli “cousin,”’ but they were in fact more like elder siblings to us. To them León was a kind of superdad with whom their blood father could scarcely compete.
Lilo worshiped him openly. He imitated León’s walk and diction, defended León’s name against such base envidious slurs as might be foisted by the wise-ass sons of other politicians, and deferred to León’s children as a king’s valet to young princes of the blood. He took proprietary pride in León’s achievements and when asked what he meant to be when he grew up, replied variously, “A soldier, like my uncle León,” or, “A lawyer, like my uncle León,” or, “A leader, like my uncle León.”
Loli was less obvious about it. She never said she meant to marry someone like her uncle León. In the first place, whenever anyone mentioned marriage—her mother, mine, some other lady—Loli would grab her throat and make a retching noise. She was a beach hoyden, a water rat who scrambled in the sun, sand in her hair, serapes on her knees and elbows. Then, at some precise instant in 1959, perhaps at noontide on the summer solstice (which fell a month or so before her fifteenth birthday), her carriage altered to a feline amble and her throat forgot how to giggle and she withdrew from the swarm of children to a cocoon of love dreams. Her mind teemed with shrouded fantasies of unknown men, but when she closed her eyes, one image appeared instantly and clearly.
It happened then that on the night before her birthday Loli was standing by the water’s edge about a kilometer south of her parents’ villa. Some boys and girls of her own age had built a bonfire on the beach and sat about it singing, but when they began splitting up in pairs, Loli got up and wandered off to where the fire was only a faint glow behind a ridge of sand; she had no use for boys. It happened also that León Fuertes had got from the bed where he lay reading and put on swimming trunks and jogged down to the water. Only the day before President Enrique Abeja and two Lincolnfuls of politicians had come from the capital to urge him (unsuccessfully) to seek the presidency, and that night, moved by the nervousness that afflicted him at ever-quickening intervals during the years when he felt his destiny closing in on him and yet sought to postpone it, he swam far out into the dark Pacific. Great sharks swim also in those waters, and León was of two minds whether he hoped or feared to meet one, but it was not his destiny to be eaten by sharks, and he turned and swam back in to shore. The tide had carried him about a kilometer south. And so it happened that at midnight, as Loli opened her eyes from a dream of León, León came out of the sea toward her, his head and shoulders wreathed in phosphorescent glimmerings of moonlight. She looked at him longingly, and the look morphed him to León, lecher.
Nevertheless, he hesitated for a moment with the waves slapping against the hollows of his knees. Not from apprehension over Loli. She would be had by one man or another sooner or later; soon, by the look of her, and what better man than he? Making love to her might, however, involve him in being more than one León at a time, might merge some worlds that better were kept separate. He could be many men and live in many worlds, but only if he kept them all apart. Then he laughed and stepped forward toward her. Loli was too adorable to miss. Besides, he’d taught her how to swim, and how to hit a top-spin backhand, and how to shoot the pistol he’d brought from the war. What was more logical than that he teach her how to love?
He tossed her jeans and sweater high up on the beach and took her on the strand with soft waves foaming up about their loins.
With Loli, León’s affections were engaged, and so the liaison continued. They did not make love often, but it became a kind of rite for her to call for him at dawn when our two families were at the beach, and they would swim awhile and then rest on the sand, she sitting with her thighs tucked up against her chest and her sweat shirt pulled over her knees and calves, he reclining near her, chatting together (as it might appear) father to daughter. She was happy to possess a fragment of her dream and never intruded on his other lives. I doubt that Loli would have taken her next breath had she thought León might be vexed by it. He found a special joy in helping her grow into her new womanhood. But here, as with Irene, León, lecher, stumbled out of character. What was he doing dispensing tender wisdom to a girl? Why should he care about her life? Where did he get these cumbersome affections? It was as though he’d sloughed his most valuable traits and, in their place, grabbed some from León, husband-father. The figure was no longer firm and rounded, or uniformly costumed for its role
20. Politics
MY FATHER,94 León Fuertes, entered public life in January, 1952. That he’d been disinclined to do so until then was looked on as a considerable bizarrity, for your Tinieblan takes to politics as alligators do to fragrant swamps, and will, at the least chance, plunge in and wallow for as long as possible. León had had chances. He had, in fact, been offered high public office, which to your true Tinieblan is paradise itself, where one sits at banquet, anointed with flattery and graft. When León declined the commandancy of the Guardia Civil, President Luis Gusano assumed the war had left him shell-shocked. Rebeca, for her part, was furious.
