The Dissertation, page 26
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
“It’s God’s curse on me for whoring myself to Burlando! I should have known his seed was putrid. Four generations broke their bowels to get you, and you turn out a ninny! You haven’t testicles enough to pick up power when they hand it to you on a plate. Oof!”
“Ay, Mamá,” said León, smiling. “How can you expect me to have any? In our family the women have them all.”
“Don’t mock me! I’m cursed, and that’s the end of it. I opened my womb three times and got a Chinaman, a ninny, and a cripple. But no one escapes destiny.” She stabbed León with a pudgy forefinger. “You’ll be President of the Republic whether you want to or not!”
He didn’t want to; it wasn’t in his dream. He had several extremely pleasant lives and was already President of the Associated Avatars of León Fuertes, a loose confederation whose government allowed him ample exercise of parliamentary skills. Rebeca had, besides, struck the truth at least a glancing blow when she implied he was afraid of power. He had no fear of standing out from the herd, exposed to envy and the fangs of predators. He had a taste for that. And those who, later on, accused León of being starved for power also got a piece of the truth. Hunger was León’s essence, after all. He was, however, wary of indulging his appetite for power. His study of history had revealed power to be a habit-forming hallucinogen which blasts the minds of all but the most disciplined of its users, conferring euphoric visions which encourage dependence, and engendering hideous waking nightmares which even massive doses can but momently dispel. His study of himself had meanwhile disclosed his vulnerability to all manner of addictions. He therefore curbed his taste for power as sternly as he’d curbed his taste for killing. For five years he avoided all contact with power, and first touched it only to remove a stash from an addict who’d become a public menace.
From the end of our civil wars (1883-1893) through sixty-odd years of this century, power in Tinieblas was in the main held and dispensed by a peculiar class, a group of families, mostly from the capital and mostly white, whom their detractors called los bichos. The term, which is best translated “the vermin,” was coined by Dr. Amado del Busto during his brief tenure in the presidency in 1905. It conveys the demagogue’s repugnance for those who move by stealth, not honest violence, and gives apt inference of busy mandibles and ceaselessly swaying feelers. The bichos infested most of what was tasty in the land. They were not, however, terribly noxious as ruling groups go. They killed no one, either in their own or in other countries. They were not cruel or brutal or stupid. Now that they have been superseded, it is hard for the dispassionate observer not to view them with mild nostalgia.
Plato observed that greed is the vice of oligarchs; the bichos confirm the observation. They pursued power as a means to money and money as a means to family survival. The original bichos had survived obscurely since the days of the Spanish colony. When the national id had raped itself limp in the train of General Feliciano Luna and the national superego had sermoned itself hoarse in Monseñor Jesús Llorente’s pulpit, the bichos emerged in egoistic vigor. Hildebrando Ladilla crept to prominence from a dank office in the customs shed because he’d taken neither side in the bloody ten-year wrangles between Liberals and Conservative—or rather because he’d outwardly toadied to (and covertly fleeced) both sides so earnestly that each thought him their cohort. He enjoyed being President. It is said he wore the presidential sash to bed, pinned to his nightshirt. But he put duty to family before love of office and rather than lash himself to the helm of a nation foundering in bankruptcy, abandoned ship, taking what was left of the treasury with him. His son Heriberto Ladilla (1871-1937, President of Tinieblas 1920-1923, 1924-1927) plowed the money back into what was now the family business, twice purchasing the presidency during a period when several foreign oil firms were competing for concessions in our country. Heriberto, who spent part of his youth in exile, was the author of a very touching sonnet on the beauties of Tinieblas, but he did not let love of country blind him to his duty to his heirs. He dealt the national oil patrimony to the firm that offered him the largest kickback and hatched his father’s nest egg to a proudly crowing fortune. Unencumbered by ideology, by patriotism, or by love of power for its own sake, the Ladillas responded with agility to the call of family interest. They were a model for their class.
Family loyalty was the mortar of bicho class cohesion. Bichos paired with bichos in marriage, and often in adultery as well, so that their genealogies present not trees but an entangled mangrove, with branches growing back into their roots and stalks engrafted one upon another. Aquilino Piojo, an altogether typical example, had Chinches and Ladillas on his father’s side and on his mother’s Tábanos, Gusanos, and Hormigas. He married Andrea Comején, whose mother was a Mosca and who had Grillo and Avispa grandmothers, and maintained a liaison (solemnized by marriage after his and her divorces) with his cousin Marina née Chinche, who was his cousin Hunfredo’s first wife and who had Abejas, Grillos, and Arañas among her immediate antecedents and, further back, Luciérnagas, Piéridas, and Mariposas. Piojo’s issue thus bore the blood of fourteen bicho breeds doubly and trebly blended, and as they have married back into their class, the twine of genes threatens to become inextricable. Marital unions reflected and provoked commercial ties. Politics took on the aspect of a parlor game, an endless round of Monopoly on a set owned by close cousins, who compete with guile, combine and recombine, make deals, go back on them, cheat now and then, exchange mild insults, but never come to blows; and who, a winner having grinned and losers grumbled, simply start in again with the same players. Outsiders might kibitz or even sit in if there was room, but if one of them lost his temper and began playing for blood, if he became violent or abusive, if he sought to ban a cousin from the game or tried to take it out into the street and play with his own buddies, he was pushed from the board, gently but firmly.
Sometime around the turn of the century, about a decade after the bichos scuttled from the economic molding of the country and crawled up from beneath the social flagstones which ten years of war had overturned, they were struck with a collective amnesia. One morning Modesto Gusano, who was Minister of Finance and would soon be President of the Republic, received a petitioner, a fellow who aspired to some minor post and who prefaced his request by remarking that Gusano had scarcely changed—physically, he meant—since the days when he sold sweet rolls door to door.
The minister blinked in perplexity and murmured, “Sweet rolls?” and the petitioner, thinking he was furthering his case, replied “The best in Tinieblas! No one bakes like your mother (may she rest in peace) these days.”
“My mother?”
The petitioner’s tongue swam in the remembered taste of sweet rolls, and his thumb itched with the remembered feel of the tiny silver two-and-a-halfcentavo pieces that were in circulation back in the days when President Gustavo Puig went crazy and was deposed by his vice-president, General Saturnino Aguila, and that would buy a plump, sugar-glistening sweet roll from the plump, sweat-glistening ten-year-old who came waddling down the middle of the street bawling, “Sweeeet rolls!” with a basket of them (shielded from sun and flies by a limp sheet of newspaper) wobbling on his head. The petitioner’s nose twitched to the remembered fragrance of sweet rolls baked by Señora Gusano, whose husband had failed selling hardware and then failed selling dry goods and would fail again selling vegetables in the public market before civil war mercifully broke out and he made his fortune, starting with a one-wagon commissary roped to a Conservative battalion. But the Minister of Finance could not, try as he might, remember either the sweet rolls or the woman who had baked them or the boy who had sold them or the merchant who had failed. He remembered Don Prudence Gusano, Vice-Minister of War for Supply and Transport in the Government of Monseñor Jesús Llorente, and Doña Candelaria de Gusano, Vice-President of the United Conservative and Catholic Ladies of Tinieblas, and Licentiate Modesto Gusano, Assistant General Manager of the Gusano Patriotic Sales Corporation. He remembered them with great clarity riding together in a pearl-grey landau to the hanging of General Feliciano Luna. But that was in 1893, and he could remember nothing before that.
Gusano broached the problem to his wife that night and learned that she too had lost a good part of her memory. She could remember back as far as Palm Sunday morning in 1895, when her father, Ernesto Chinche, announced that President Rudolfo Tábano had offered him a ministry, but all before that was blank. All the bichos were suddenly afflicted with the same syndrome: none could recall a time when their families were not powerful, or at least important and well off. From then they put on the air of dynasts, assumed the arrogance of Moguls or of Manchus. They took to speaking English among themselves, as Tolstoy’s counts and princesses spoke French. They fraternized only with the diplomatic corps, executives of foreign banks and companies, and senior Reservation officers. They came to feel that nothing native to Tinieblas could possibly be good, and their despite for the very term “domestic” grew so ingrained that when they went to Paris they automatically refused French wine and called for imported vintages.
Still, snobbery did not paralyze them totally. From time to time a bicho family would marry a daughter to a promising young outsider—to strengthen the breed, as it were, or to assimilate a potential enemy. León Fuertes became eligible for bichohood by this dispensation when he married into the Piérida family, who were bichos in morphology if not behavior, as peacocks are birds along with rooks and shitepokes. León never really exercised his option, however; nor was he really recruited. Don Adelberto Piérida favored the match between his daughter Soledad and León Fuertes, but he did not make León the kind of business proposition Erasmo Sancudo had offered.
Erasmo Sancudo was himself the great example of miraculous bichification. He was an orphan from Remedios with some unfashionable indian and negroid genes who came to the capital barefoot at age twelve and peddled newspapers, until Don Fernando Araña observed how cleverly he shortchanged customers and took him in and gave him an education. He was the ugliest man in Tinieblas, with all the poorest features of his several racial strains, but he was also the shrewdest man in America, and Don Fermín Anguila gave him his daughter Beatriz in marriage and made him a partner in his law firm—the sort of deal León rejected—confirming him a bicho. Sancudo became the power in the firm, and publisher of the same newspapers he’d peddled, and a director of companies, and a maker of Presidents, and President of the Republic (1936-1940), and President of the Chamber, and President of the Supreme Court. He was at all times a true and perfect bicho, defending his class, its interests, and its principles even against the machinations of his mad brother Alejandro.
The bichos believed in strong currency and weak government, the weaker the better so long as property and contracts were respected. They disbelieved in despotism and democracy, and particularly distrusted popular leaders, who, as history shows, often invoke the second and institute the first. Accordingly, they clamped the inchado to the gringo greenback and scrutinized ambitious men for telltale signs of charisma or social conscience. They considered national dignity (along with great men, noble causes, glorious sacrifices, and utopian programs) a luxury which a poor country like Tinieblas could simply not afford. Their foreign policy was to grovel, mainly to the United States. But if the United States made use of the bichos to exploit Tinieblan resources, the bichos made even more effective use of the United States. In 1905 the populace deposed President Modesto Gusano and installed its favorite, Dr. Amado del Busto, in the Palace. He instantly issued a sheaf of egalitarian decrees and appointed an army of unbribable officials to enforce them, but he and his abominations were soon swept away. El Diario de la Bahia—the Chinche family owned it—published an interview with the new president, a strident interview in which Dr. del Busto reached new peaks of patriotic eloquence, pledging in one paragraph to triple taxes for the Galactic Fruit Company and in the next to expropriate its holdings down to the last banana plant, no recompense allowed. It was a total fabrication, every word thought up, weighed out, and then set down by Maximo Chinche himself, but the mob so loved those pledges that del Busto could not disavow them, and inside a week he was deposed by Marine effectives from the Reservation. This theme was replayed with appropriate variations in 1917 and 1942 for the dancing pleasure of such bichophobes as Eudemio Lobo and Alejandro Sancudo. (In Lobo’s case the bichos floated so many rumors about his German sympathies that he eventually developed some and sent a cable of congratulations to the commander of the U-boat that sank the Lusitania. The gringos threw him out of office the next day.) At critical moments during half a century the bichos disposed of the military and diplomatic resources of the United States as fully as the U.S. president. Nor were bones made about it. In 1919, when President Victoriano Mosca vetoed an appropriation for the Guardia Civil, he told the Chamber that Tinieblas didn’t need armed forces. “In any emergency we can use the gringo army. It beat the Kaiser, and that’s good enough for me.”
The bichos governed by the client system of ancient Rome—not that they copied it; it came to them by nature. Each bicho patriarch sat on a scaffolding of agents, fixers, arm-twisters, rumor-pushers, vote-buyers, post-sellers, go-betweens, goon-masters, and hacks, which held him high above the muck in the pure air of power. From each depended a candelabrum of deputies, judges, councilmen, province jefes, barrio bosses, functionaries (grand and petty), and guardias (commissioned and non-), which spread his glow of influence over the land and beamed it down into the lowest hovel. These practical fixtures were sprayed with a cosmetic film of ideology, which, while transparent, gave them a modern sheen. The bichos owned and operated parties, some taken over from their past proprietors and some constructed new, whose names evoked the soarings of political philosophy. These names, however, had rather less symbolical significance than do the shapes of the tin figurettes that circle a Monopoly board. No one gaped in wonder when the Universal Socialists merged with the Patriotic Nationalists. That merely meant that the Avispa and Abeja families were in alliance, and since Arnulfo Avispa and Rufino Abeja were cousins three times over and the best of friends, since they agreed to the last particle on how Tinieblas should be governed, since Don Rufi was neither a patriot nor a nationalist while Don Fufi would have cut cane in Remedios before espousing socialism, there was little to wonder at.
The bichos were bankers and brokers, importers and exporters, speculators and peculators. A bicho patriarch was like as not a minister, when he was not taking his turn in the Presidential Palace. His son sat in the Chamber, when he was not farming a consulate abroad. The bichos wore white linen suits and everyone who could afford to wore them also. They sent their sons to prostitutes at puberty and later on to foreign universities, enjoining them in both instances to learn how the world worked but not to become burdened with any useless sentiment or knowledge. Their daughters went to convent schools for preservation, not for education. They married young and, with but few exceptions, led lives of physical torpor, mental blankness, and emotional turmoil, spawning swarms of clever, greedy bichitos.
The bichos thrived in undiminished vigor for about three generations, munching up the goodies of the country but keeping their greed nicely calibrated to what they could get away with as a class and, meanwhile, running the Tinieblan show with Hurokabilly verve and Barnumstorming confidence. Then missing memories began to straggle home. Memories that had disappeared like Speer’s Jewish neighbors began showing up in the best residential quarters of Ciudad Tinieblas, and bicho men and women who had never known anything but luxury began to recall an epoch when their families were poor and powerless. Alberto Avispa found his brain stuffed with memories that had originally belonged to his grandfather, including some depressingly clear memories of that grandfather’s father, one Pablo Avispa, who got up at dawn day to buy crustacea at a wharf near what is now the Yacht Club and then trudged till dusk, dragging a stinking cart about the city. Irma Araña had wincing smellovision memories of her grandmother’s hide-factor uncle, who stank of pig dung and the tannery. No one mentioned these memories, but almost every bicho had a number of them slouching in the foyers of his mind, and their ragged, interloping presence moved the bichos to wonder if they were destined to be powerful forever. Silently, separately, the bichos began to question their capacity to stay in power, even their right to rule. There followed from this questioning a doubt, and from this doubt a fear, and from this fear an attitude which answered their questioning and confirmed their doubt and fear. The bichos began to take the attitude that their world was coming to an end.
From then on they gave their greed free rein, they gouged and grafted wildly, they grabbed for everything within their reach. Humberto Ladilla sold lottery chances on the government jobs in his patronage. Dagoberto Comején put his entire family on the payroll of the Ministry of Justice, including all his cousins to the fourth remove and children down to the age of seven. He had his dog, a Doberman called Ilse, commissioned with the rank of captain in the Guardia Civil, and when she was killed in the line of duty—hit by a neighbor’s auto while patrolling the approaches to Comején’s driveway—the state paid her pups a pension. Filiberto Alacrán took a huge bribe and opened Tinieblas to a U.S. gambling syndicate, and when school gyms and cafeterias filled up with slot machines, he justified them on the ground that they helped children learn game theory and the laws of probability. In their rapacity the bichos fought with one another over trifles. They betrayed their class to outsiders for short-term profit. They fostered enmity among themselves. They grew incapable of banding firm against a common enemy. Most seriously, they ceased to look and act like rulers, hence they forfeited their legitimacy.
