The Dissertation, page 27
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
The end came in 1970. That is, the events of 1970 made it clear the bichos had no power anymore. Few lamented, but an era of freedom ended with them, for the bichos believed in freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and freedom of thought, as well as freedom to give and receive bribes and freedom to charge what the market will bear and freedom to go out and rig the market. Graft, of course, continues, but now it goes to people who believe in slavery and terror.
The end might have come sooner. In 1951 Alejandro Sancudo, who had returned to the presidency in 1948 despite the last united effort the bichos ever mounted and who had then governed for three years with uncharacteristic lucidity and restraint, reverted to the madness that power and his craving for it had made chronic to him. He established a People’s Congress and used it to promote class hatred. With his left hand he encouraged violent demonstrations, then crushed them with his right. He contrived chaos and screamed for order. His aim was to fumigate Tinieblas of its ruling class and seize total power, and he would surely have succeeded but for León Fuertes.
León was at his mother’s house on the December day his public future sought him out. For three months Alejandro Sancudo had been furrowing the land with discord and fecundating it with evil humors of resentment, had sown unrest and cultivated violence. A miasma of bile and choler hung about the country and seeped into the recesses of every private life, and León Fuertes became poisoned. León, lawyer, found his workdays fouled with reveries in which he wrangled issues with himself. León, scholar, could not concentrate because his fancy teemed with images of fury. León, husband, snarled and shouted at his family; León, athlete, took to smashing balls in his opponents’ faces and hurling his racket petulantly about the court; León, lecher, degraded is companions with enforced perversions. Vile passions curded all León’s sweet lives, and at night his sleep was venomed by a dreamed dispute with President Sancudo.
In this dream, which was replayed each night in ever clearer detail, León would march into the Presidential Palace and collar President Sancudo and sit him down and speak him some plain sense. He would point out that he had seen New York during the Great Depression and Europe during Adolf Hitler’s war and that experience had taught him something: though it was small and poor and backward, an object of patronizing ridicule (if not contempt) to those few who had heard of it beyond its borders, the Republic of Tinieblas enjoyed great good fortune.95 Tinieblas had slept placidly through half of the worst century since Adam, disturbed by neither war nor revolution, innocent of massacre and torture. One could count on one’s fingers the countries that had not known sword or famine in the last fifty years, yet Tinieblas was among them. Its President ought not tempt fate. Sancudo would merely sneer and answer that he wasn’t tempting fate, he was fate’s instrument. The people of Tinieblas were free and sovereign and entitled to equality among the nations, to a fair share in the marvels of the century, its refinements of strife and agony, its advancements in terror and despair.
León would wake enraged, then give himself a lecture in his shaving mirror: the bunglings of politicians were not his business; the country’s mess was none of his affair; if he stayed out of it, it would not touch him. But of course, it had touched him already.
On the day in mention León felt particularly agitated. He had the unbanishable sensation of a rendezvous to keep somewhere, and yet his calendar was empty and his secretary assured him he had no appointments. He could not sit at his desk for the feeling that he was expected somewhere. At length he left his office and drove aimlessly about the city—or rather drove according to an unknown aim, letting his hands turn the steering wheel at their own impulse, as years before, lost in the desert, he had let his camel lead him to water. He stopped beside the Alameda.
General Feliciano Luna’s statue was decked in crepe, and someone had hung a sign about his neck that read: “I DIED FOR THE FATHERLAND, SOLD TO THE GRINCOS BY THE BICHOS,” but politics had not yet reached the south end of the park, where boys were playing baseball. León got out and wandered toward the backstop. The fielding team was short a player, and as he noticed this a thought hopped crazily across two decades into his mind: today he might get a game. With that, a great calm and confidence came over him, a relaxed alertness and anticipation, the exact complex of sentiments he’d had twenty years earlier when he first took his turn at bat on this same field. For the first time in three months he felt healthy. He turned in midstride, as though shouted at, and walked jauntily toward his mother’s house, a young man of affairs in a white linen suit and whiter panama, on his way to an important meeting
Rebeca was in her rocker on the porch, fondling her grey cat, but she said nothing to León when he came up the steps. He merely nodded to her and took a chair beside her. They had had nothing to say to each other for three years, since the day he bought her the red-roofed bungalow.
“You can buy me the Taj Mahal if you feel like it,” Rebeca had told him, taking the deed, “or Nebuchadnezzar’s gardens, but I won’t be clean of the Burlando stain till you stop acting like a ninny and do what you were born for.”
From then on he sent her money through his brother Pepe but rarely visited.
They sat in silence for about five minutes. Then a boy came by selling the Informe Trópico, and León beckoned him onto the porch and bought a paper from him.
President Alejandro Sancudo sneered up from a decree he had been signing. The headlines howled about a People’s Court of Economic, Political, and Social Justice. León opened to page three and learned that the new tribunal would try bichos for so-called class crimes, including those allegedly committed by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Then the sentences looped round his chest, binding his upper arms, constricting his breathing. The paper took on the weight of a cuneiform tablet. He bent it closed and let it press against his thighs, but when his glance fell on page one, he found it altered. León Fuertes was striding down the steps of the Presidential Palace, followed by Colonel Aiax Tolete of the Civil Guard and Carlos Gavilán. “SANCUDO FLEES PALACE—FUERTES REFUSES SASH.” León had just time to glimpse part of the date—January, 1952—before his eyes closed in a catalepsy so brief Rebeca did not notice it. When he regained consciousness, the paper was as it had been when he took it from the newsboy.
It was the first of three prophecies León received about his public life, and he accepted it unquestioningly.
“From the look on your face,” Rebeca said, “the news can’t he all bad.”
“I’m going to throw Alejo out of office.”
“It’s about time! When Alexander the Great was your age, he’d been dead over a year. What post will you give your brother Pepe?”
“None. I’m going to throw Alejo out and then go home.”
“Oof!” Rebeca began rocking. “There’s not a man born in this country who hasn’t thought of throwing out the President. But never just to go back where he was before. But go ahead. You have my blessing. At least you sound like a man, for a change.”
A new León had, in fact, been born: León, politician; León, leader.
Most humans suffer spells of terror and self-loathing. Some of the worst afflicted become politicians. When one lives in profound and constant terror, when one feels leprous in his very soul, he may seek out a tranquilizing fix of power and a cleansing douche of public deference. But since compulsive use of power brings on nightmare, since deference defiles recipient and giver, these medicines exacerbate the symptoms. The best specific against fear is danger; the cure for self-hatred is humility. My father, León Fuertes, had conquered these infirmities by correct treatment; he did not enter public life to ease his private ills. León, politician, or León, leader, was rather his spontaneous response to the distemper of the country, an antibody reaction to toxins spreading in Tinieblans. Though he appeared on short notice, he was not a makeshift figure; my father had been composing him unconsciously for twenty years, and all his qualities were present in his maiden effort, the coup against Alejandro Sancudo.
León, leader, was unique among my father’s transformations in that he cared about the commonweal he lived in. This concern, projected with great energy, gave him a presence of authority. The morning following his visit to Rebeca, León informed his partner, Carlos Gavilán, that he was going to unseat Sancudo and then suggested that Gavilán, who got most of his clients from the middle class, might know some non-bichos who could head committees of public safety. Gavilán straightaway found himself involved in forming skeleton organizations and making discreet contact with picked men. It was some days before he thought to ask León why he was so certain of success, why he thought people would follow him.
“You tell me why,” said León by way of answer. “You’re a steady fellow with a family to look out for. You surely wouldn’t jeopardize them merely out of friendship. Alejo hasn’t harmed you personally. I’ve promised you nothing. I haven’t even asked you anything, just told you what I’m going to do and shown how you can help. Yet you’re following me. You’ve been committing what (if we got caught) would be called treason, You’ve made, yourself an ‘enemy of the Tinieblan masses.’ You’ve jumped up to your ass in a subversive conspiracy, all on my say-so. Why?”
“Carajo, León! Someone has to throw that lunatic out before he wrecks the country!”
León smiled and nodded. “Exactly.”
And Gavilán found himself hard put to reconcile the man before him with the main-chance virtuoso and protector of number one who’d been his partner for five years. The man before him cared about his country. He knew what was best for it. He could do the job.
Men gifted with a presence of authority quite commonly abuse it, but León, leader, was hedged with firm restraints. His emergence represented an admission by the other Leóns that none of them could flourish without a sound environment of freedom. They were León, politician’s prime constituency; his first responsibility was to keep Tinieblas healthy for them. They granted him part of their time and energy, they gave him their support, but they were by no means willing to cede him a despot’s hegemony over the communal body, to commit suicide so that he might play polities all day and all night long. They suffered him existence only insofar as he was needed to secure their liberties. The other Leóns checked and balanced León, politician; thus though my father had a taste for power, he never got stoned or hooked. Thus though he was destined to lead, he accepted that destiny piecemeal, as it was forced on him by circumstance.
Since his ambitions were well fenced, León, leader, could permit himself a degree of honesty which few politicians feel they can afford. This quality was evident even to such skeptics as Don Luis Gusano, General Manager of the Pelf Fiduciary Trust’s Tinieblas branch and former President of the Republic.
“I think you’re the best man to raise a fund, Don Lucho. Three hundred thousand ought to do. Cash, no pledges.”
“Are you suggesting we retain you to defend us in Alejo’s People’s Court?”
“No. I’m going to throw Alejo out of office. To do it I’m going to take the Guardia away from him. The best way is to buy it.”
Gusano rubbed his palms together. “Make my son-in-law Bertito Minister of Finance.”
León shook his head. “I’m not making anybody anything, Don Lucho. Not myself or anybody else. I’m going to make Alejo an ex-president. That’s all. I’ll need the money by the first of the year.”
Luis Gusano, like his father, Felipe, and his grandfather Modesto, had enriched his family and become President of Tinieblas by the simple expedient of never trusting anyone, but he raised three hundred thousand inchados and gave them to León Fuertes, no questions asked.
León, leader’s first act was the overthrow of an elected president. Later, as Deputy and then as President of the Republic, he was identified with the profound social changes that took place in Tinieblas in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was, however, in essence a conservative.
“The original meaning of the word ‘revolution’ is ‘turning back,’” he told Arsenio Poroto, Chief Engineer of the Compañía Tinieblina de Electricidad y Gas (a subsidiary of Yankee and Celestial Energy). He had approached Poroto to arrange for the palace telephones to be cut off once the coup was under way, and while Poroto didn’t care much for Sancudo (who’d put Poroto’s brother-in-law in jail for writing uncomplimentary verses), he wanted no part of any revolution.
“I’d like to turn things back to where they were four months ago,” León went on. “Then, if things have to change, maybe they can change calmly. That’s the only revolution you’ll get from me. Alejo is the kind of revolutionary you’re leery of. He wants to turn everything upside down so the country will be as confused as he is.”
Although my father had no nature and steadfastly avoided forming one, the politician-leader was perhaps the most “natural” of all the Leóns. During the first week in January, 1952, while Sancudo was indicting bichos in his People’s Court and canceling their passports and freezing their bank accounts, while Carlos Gavilán was urging him to move before they were arrested, León displayed an easiness that amazed my mother. She’d seen him lose weight during a big lawsuit, had watched him pace their bedroom trying to convince himself he’d not forgotten some detail. She’d heard him grind his teeth in his sleep the night before he went to Costaguana to defend Apolonio Varón. Now he was going to overthrow the government, send people to the streets, and risk his life and theirs, yet he was perfectly relaxed.
“I’m waiting for Alejo,” he told her. “I’m in no rush. One of these days he’s going to make the blunder that antagonizes everybody. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. It’s not for me to hustle the events. That’s his style, not mine.”
At eleven A.M. on 8th January, 1952, President Alejandro Sancudo sat down before the microphones of a national radio hookup. First he abolished the Constitution, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, after pausing for breath, he outlawed all political parties, his own included, and canceled the national elections scheduled for 1st April. Then he poured himself a goblet of Evian mineral water from a crystal carafe and, sipping it, proclaimed himself Sole and Perpetual Guardian of the Tinieblan State and People for the period of his natural existence on this planet.
The address, which lasted about three minutes, caused a certain consternation in the country, particularly the points about parties and elections, for politics is the Tinieblan national pastime. It did not catch León Fuertes unprepared. Before Sancudo’s voice was off the air, León had got his partner started making phone calls and was on his way to Civil Guard Headquarters with a Gladstone bag full of cash. By noon the Guard was in its barracks getting paid, the streets were full of demonstrators, and the palace was cut off from all the world.
“Let’s go in and get him!” cried a citizen when León spoke to the crowd in Plaza Cervantes.
“Oh, no. Let’s sing instead. Alejo will fall like a rotten papaya in a few hours. Meanwhile we might as well enjoy ourselves.”
Surely the fall of Alejandro Sancudo was in my fathers mind two years and some months later when an American journalist who was visiting our house—an august personage of immense influence whose clipped speech and perpetually twisted lips gave the impression that he suffered from chronic constipation—decried the “carnival atmosphere” of the Army-McCarthy hearings in the U.S. Senate, for León replied that the most salutary function of politics was to provide public entertainment for the community. “Why must tragedy and melodrama be the only respectable forms? Comedy is more popular and no less beneficial, especially the kind of piece where the hero-villain turns out to have been a clown all along.”
For two days and nights the populace of Ciudad Tinieblas gave itself up to unrestrained gaiety, while Alejandro Sancudo dangled impotently in the Palace. Offices closed; shops were boarded up. The committees of public safety kept gentle, good-humored order, and the rest of the citizens sang, and danced in the streets, and chanted anti-Alejo slogans. At seven A.M. on the 10th, a report came from Córdoba in Salinas Province that a car carrying Sancudo and four close collaborators had been seen driving north along the Pan-American Highway, and León Fuertes went to the palace, accompanied by Carlos Gavilán and Colonel Aiax Tolete and the twelve chairmen of the committees of public safety. They found the building deserted save for a few servants, and were about to leave, when a large number of people who had been reveling in the nearby streets and had heard rumors of Sancudo’s flight streamed into the Plaza Inchado and began shouting for León. When he did not appear on the balcony from which our presidents, elected or otherwise, traditionally greet their supporters, a group of men and women went in after him, bearing a makeshift presidential sash-three strips of purple, green, and yellow nylon safety-pinned together.
Colonel Tolete took the sash from them and made to hang it over León’s neck, Gavilán stepped up to help him, and the twelve committee chairmen smiled their approval, but León held up his hands. Now that Sancudo was gone and the country out of danger, León, husband, remembered that he hadn’t seen his children for two days. León, lawyer, thought of his neglected practice; León, athlete, of his missed workouts. There were, besides, many books that León, scholar, wished to read, and the world was full of willing girls for León, lecher.
“Call Oruga,” León said to Carlos Gavilán. (Belisario Oruga was the constitutional Vice-President, whom Sancudo had exiled to an ambassadorship in Asia.)
“Aiax, you’re in charge until he gets here.
“Take your orders from Colonel Tolete,” he told the twelve committee chairmen. “I’m going home.”
Rebeca visited him that afternoon to congratulate him and to tell him her stain was cleansed. “I understand now, “ she said. “You have a deal with Beli Oruga. He’ll be President from now till the elections. You’ll run and he’ll help count the votes. Just like Heri Ladilla’s deal with Feli Gusano in 1924.”
