The Dissertation, page 28
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
“No, Mamá,” said León wearily. “You don’t understand at all.”
21. Ministry
ALL THE SAME, León returned to public life so quickly that, like Rebeca, most Tinieblans believed his “Great Denial” had been a ploy. Scarcely a month after the coup against Sancudo, the twelve committee leaders came to him and begged him to lead another.
“It’s going to be worse than ever,” said Mizael Indulto. “We helped you eliminate the Fumigator, and now the bichos will eat us alive.”
The election campaign was under way, and there were six candidates for President and six hundred for the Chamber, all bichos, surrogate bichos, or aspirant bichos.
“The price of a vote has gone to seven inchados in Otán Province,” said Ramiel Azarín. “Do you realize how much the winners will have to steal just to recoup their investment?”
“They all claim to be patriots,” Abdiel Agudo continued, “but not one of them cares a whistle about the country.”
“The money you used to keep the Guardia in the barracks has already been stolen back with interest,” said Raziel Lindo. “If things go on this way, we’ll wish we had stayed with the dictator.”
“Licentiate, you made a start,” said Uriel Lámpara. “Now you have to go through to the end of it.”
León told them he didn’t presume himself a messiah, and that he had never intended to do more than remove Sancudo, and that he certainly wasn’t going to be overturning the government every three weeks. Privately he decided that the excitement of the golpe had gone to the men’s heads so that their normal lives seemed boring by comparison; his firmness would snap them out of it and send them back to their stores and businesses. Instead they showed a firmness of their own. When León left home at six the next morning, one of them was waiting in the street. He followed León to the Club Mercantil and brooded mutely through León’s tennis match and then trailed León to his office, where a second was already staked out. When León left for court two hours later, a third went with him, and at midday there was a fourth. They shadowed León about the city, hovering a few yards from him day and night, and when León took his family to Medusa Beach for the weekend, they tracked behind in convoy and then took turns sitting fully dressed on the sand before his villa. Their white suits and mournful faces gave them the aspect of albino buzzards, and at night they flocked in León’s dreams, flapping their sleeves and croaking in chorus: “Tinieblas is a fortunate country, but all the century’s misfortunes are on their way here to take residence.”
For once León had no idea what to do, and he asked his partner, Carlos Gavilán, whether he ought to sue the men and if so, whether Gavilán would represent him.
“I’ll have to disqualify myself on this one, León. You see, I put them up to it.”
“For God’s love, Carlos! I thought you were my friend! The only reason I threw Alejo out was to get a good night’s sleep. Now I’m haunted by moon-struck storekeepers. I can understand their nostalgia for their hour of importance, but I expected more sense from you.”
“Well, León, you’re a mysterious man. Whenever I think I’ve a grip on you, you turn into someone else. For all I know, you’ll turn into the man who can fix this country.”
And León wandered back to his private office, shaking his head.
But the implacable presence of his twelve erstwhile lieutenants had set him thinking about Tinieblas and its discontents. The country wasn’t healthy. His twelve shadows made life unlivable for all the Leóns, but they were no more than birds of omen signaling dangers ahead. So one Sunday, when their vigil had been going on nearly a fortnight, he called down from the terrace of his beach house to Rafael Almohada, who was sitting cross-legged on the fiery sand: “Get your fellow maniacs and my crazy partner. I’ll speak to you after my swim.”
They were waiting for him on the terrace when he came up from the sea twenty minutes later. Soledad Fuertes had made them two pitchers of chicha de mango and was refilling glasses. She excused herself, but León called her back.
“This concerns you as much as anyone, and I’d like to have one other sane person present.”
He toweled off his face and sat down in a canvas deck chair and drew his sandy feet up under him.
“All right,” he said, “the golpe wasn’t a solution. This life doesn’t have solutions. You push trouble down in one place and it pops up somewhere else. You push down the dictator and up pops the corrupt ruling class. Push them down, and up will pop the mob, or another dictator, or the United States Marines. Anarchy and violence, or repression and violence, or intervention and violence. The first step is to forget about solutions. If you want me to politic with you, get that idea out of your minds. It’s a dangerous hallucination.”
He paused and looked about from one man to another, as though he expected some to rise and leave. None budged, not even to sip chicha.
“In politics,” he went on, “one can try to palliate the discomfort of a problem, or one can trade the problem in. New problems are exhilarating. They have the charm of virginity. But they are rarely an improvement on the old ones. Often they are worse. The second step is to venerate Lord Falkland: ‘When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.’ I won’t be leading any coups this month.”
He paused again, smiling. In his bunched pose and near nakedness, he looked to Gabriel Masamorra Verde more like an Oriental holy man than a political leader.
“The political problem of Tinieblas is that the ruling class has lost its confidence and hence is losing its authority. The people used to admire the bichos for clever thieves who at least looked after their own interests. The people trusted them to leave a little for the rest of us and to prevent the rise of despots. Now the bichos feel their day is ending and are out to steal everything they can while they still can, and the people begin to hate them. Now they cannot even protect themselves, and the people look down on them. It is more dangerous for a ruling group to be looked down on than to be hated. But if the bichos fall, there is nothing to replace them. Only the mob, or a dictator, or the United States Marines. Since they can’t help themselves, someone must help them. Someone must moderate the bichos’ greed and prop them up. Someone must calm the people down and soothe their resentment.”
“The someone is you, Licentiate,” said Miguel Ángel Camposanto.
“I was coming to that,” said León, with a grin that faded instantly. “It seems I am the someone. But if so, it’s only because I’m not obsessed with politics.96 If I am capable of doing anything, it is because I know that no one can do much. If I am to be at all effective, I must never take myself as seriously as you do now. That’s the third step: don’t delude yourself or anyone else into believing you can do much good; that way you may be able to avoid doing much harm.
“If you can’t accept these principles, stop bothering me. Go get Alejo out of jail and put him back in office. He has solutions; he enjoys the confusion of change; he believes in politics. If you accept my view, I will work with you to try to make things a little better, to try to make this country’s luck hold a little longer. I will make no more brusque or dramatic movements, but if you like we can form a party. If you like I will run for deputy. And as a punishment for causing all this trouble, Carlos will run too. Nothing is lost when two lawyers enter politics, but you other gentlemen have productive work to do, so for the moment two candidates are enough.”
Israfel Bandeja suggested that they call theirs the Progressive party, and León winced. The name was soggy with optimism. Then he decided he had done enough lecturing for one morning. “Why not? If it will stop you gentlemen from hounding me, we shall already have made some progress.”
Until recently, when politics became a Civil Guard cartel, Tinieblas was one of the world’s leading producers of candidates for public office. León Fuertes was the strangest of them all. His campaigns were innocent of horn-blare motorcades and torchlight rallies, of patriotic fanfares and half-dressed prancing girls. He made no irrational appeals. He drew on no demonic fonts of passion. He shrouded up his glamour in the sackcloth of common sense. He stopped wearing decorations, and when, at a public meeting near the end of the 1952 campaign, Ituriel Frasada introduced him as “the bane of tyrants and defender of our freedoms,” León began his speech by chiding Frasada for extravagance of language.
“The golpe of 8th-9th January was an exercise in garbage disposal,” he said. “Those who took part in it deserve no more credit than do the employees of the Department of Sanitation for the performance of their daily chores.”
From the first he was wary of the fervor his public presence generated. “In this business,” he told his wife, “what look like assets are in fact liabilities. It’s not just that I restored the Constitution. People insist on remembering a baseball game I played in years ago. They want a hero, and I’m the most vulnerable man in the country on that score. You watch: no matter how I act or what I say, they’re going to convince themselves that I can solve their problems. They’re going to get it in their heads that I can save them. That by some magic I can turn Tinieblas into a world power. Have the gringos cringing in their boots. Make everyone around here millionaires. Then, when I don’t deliver, they’ll tear me to pieces and go looking for another sucker.”
So while he couldn’t help being an object of enthusiasm, he did nothing to encourage it. .
“Don’t cheer yet!” he told a crowd in the La Cuenca barrio in 1962, when he was running for President. They looked on him as a native son and howled support whenever he paused for breath. “Wait till I’ve retired,” he told them. “Or better yet, wait till I’m dead. Wait till you’re sure that I accomplished something and didn’t leave the country worse off than it was before.”
He was infuriated by the promises of certain other politicians, whose trick was to excite and exploit the people’s aspirations. They pictured Tinieblas as a land of immense riches, of which the people were being cheated by their rivals and the United States.
“Fly now, pay later,” he told Gavilán in disgust. “And it’s people like you and me who’ll get the bill.”
His own speeches were painfully low-key. Tinieblas was not a rich country: a little oil; barely enough fertile land to feed its population; a lot of people who couldn’t read or write, much less understand modern technology and use it. Perhaps the country might allocate its meager resources a little more efficiently. If elected, he would work in that direction. People were ingenious when it came to stealing money. But perhaps ways could be found to curb some of the more flagrant abuses of the public trust. Blaming one’s problems on a remote and potent force brought only an illusion of relief. Perhaps the United States could be persuaded to change its policies, could be shown how such a change was in its interest. But no one should expect much. The people of the United States were no more intelligent when it came to their own interests than were the people of Tinieblas. Particularly, no one should expect too much of him.
“If elected,” he told every group he spoke to, “I will belong to nobody.” That invariably drew a cheer, and he would frown and calm his with raised hands. “Wait. Wait a moment. I won’t belong to you either. I won’t pawn my brain to you for votes. I’ll listen to you, but I’m going to do what I think best, whether you like it or not. If you don’t like that, vote for someone else. There are plenty of ventriloquist’s dummies in the race already.”
“Spoken like a perfect ninny!” Rebeca told him after one such pronouncement. “Of course you’ll do what you feel like once you get elected, but why rub their faces in it now? I don’t understand you. You used to be a first-rate liar. Don’t you want to win?”
“I can’t help winning, Mamá. The only thing I’ve never succeeded at is failure. But these campaigns always leave an awful hangover, and I don’t want to make people any more depressed than necessary.”
León, politician, could not, for example, help displaying a trait borrowed from León, lawyer, and then significantly reworked. He too banked all kinds of data on all kinds of people and could withdraw it effortlessly at opportune moments. He could, while shaking hands in the working-class barrio of Laguna Seca, recognize a stonemason who, years before, had been a witness in a tort case León had heard part of while waiting for one of his own suits to be called. He could, moreover, remember enough details of the man’s testimony to ask whether his child had recovered from his injuries and if the driver who had knocked him down had paid a compensation. The difference was that León, politician, actually cared about the fellow’s troubles, so that when he heard that the case had been thrown out of court and that the child was crippled, León arranged for him to get physiotherapy at San Bruno Hospital and got him a free pass on the bus line back and forth. While rival candidates strove to project an image of concern, León possessed the substance. Concern for people was standard equipment on León, politician, and he could not help benefiting by it.
An even more advantageous property was León’s aura of legitimacy. His intelligence, his energy, his experience, his concern were all good reasons for his being in a place of leadership, but while he stood on these and did all he could to minimize irrational attractions, his successive candidacies were touched with what in another century would have been called divine right. The spirits of General Isidro Bodega and General Epifanio Mojón and General Feliciano Luna went campaigning with him and stood beside him when he addressed the Chamber and sat at his right hand when he was in the Palace. It made no difference that they had often abused power. They had all been President of the Republic, and they were León’s direct forebears. León never invoked them, yet their presence near him, perceived subliminally by Tinieblans of all classes, gave him an air of rightfulness such as in other times surrounded persons of royal blood. It was insight, not arrogance, that made him say he couldn’t help winning.
The magical authority the Tinieblan people discovered in León Fuertes was felt even by other politicians. How else, if not by magic, was he able to instill a sense of public spirit into men who in their lifetimes had never cared for anything but personal or family interest? It was not merely that León was often able to persuade his colleagues that what he advocated was good for the country. When León spoke to them, men who were depositing their hopes in numbered Swiss accounts began to have the nagging feeling that what was best for Tinieblas was best for them as well.
“Business is business, León,” Juanchi Tábano told him when León urged scrapping the vast program of highways to nowhere that Tábano meant to introduce as Minister of Public Works and batten off as principal contractor. “My seat in the Cabinet cost me eighty thousand.”
“Do you have to double it during your first month in office? You’re not a businessman, Juanchi, you’re a walking PR campaign for the disciples of Karl Marx.97 Do you think you’ll be happy in Miami? If you survive, that is. You’ll haunt the airport yearning to come home and eat your liver in nostalgia and sit around with other exiles snarling at the communists. But if the communists had any sense of gratitude, they’d be building you a monument. You’d better start doing something for this country, Juanchi. That’s not your best move it’s your only move.”
Meanwhile he strove to disabuse others of the fantasy that Tinieblas might be transformed into Utopia by the necromancy of revolution. This delusion was particularly widespread among the students, who suffered the squalor of the lower-class barrios like a personal leprosy and felt the presence of the Reservation like a malignant tumor. Its main locus during the late fifties was in the Instituto Politécnico, and León monitored it through Lilo Gavilán.
North American educators will have no difficulty these days believing that prestige in Tinieblas’s largest secondary school depended on social consciousness, not athletic prowess, and that the best and brightest of our country’s students dreamed not of money and fast cars, or even of fornication, but rather of saving their country. The most attractive dream (because it was the simplest) was that if the existing social, political, and economic order was swept away by the most violent possible means, Tinieblas would be at once mystically enveloped in complete and eternal bliss. Lilo was not that deranged himself, but he had friends who were. He was, besides, stuffed to the ears with the highest ideals imaginable, and had these not been fused with his hero-worship for León Fuertes, he might have been as militant as anyone. It was as much for Lilo’s sake as for the country’s that León took to meeting with the young lunatics and listening to them rave about taking nirvana by storm.
“Yes, I take them seriously,” he told President Enrique Abeja when the latter chided him for paying attention to the students and hinted an accusations that León was building a constituency among them. “That’s the only way to ease their pain. No, I am not merely doing good works and storing up indulgences, but I’m not making a Fuertes Jugend either. Unfortunately, Señor Presidente, this country hasn’t progressed to the point where you can get the Guardia to fire on their own children. We’re not that advanced as yet. They went to the streets when Alejo called them and twice since then, and if it’s all been mild so far, that’s only our good fortune. So I take them seriously; I try to calm them down. I give them therapy, and sometimes little pieces of my mind.”
He would go up to the former classroom that had been set aside as an office for the Tinieblan Students’ Syndicate, a narrow room high up under the eaves whose glassless, rusty-screened window looked out across the Avenida Jorge Washington onto Fort Shafter and whose air stank acridly of extremist slogans and young men’s sweat. There he sat down with fanatics like Manfredo Canino and Tonio Burrón and their slightly less rabid sycophants and let them talk till they wearied. It was surely therapeutic for some of them, being heard out by the President of the Chamber, who was also a war hero and a successful government-toppler, and afterward he told them little stories. One of his favorites was the story of Albania, a country, he would say, that played its last trump in world affairs in 280 B.C. It was called Epirus then and had a king named Pyrrhus, who unsuccessfully invaded Italy. After that it abandoned conquest and took up experimenting with different forms of government. The country now known as Albania had been ruled by Roman proconsuls, Byzantine emperors, and Turkish sultans. It had been a Moslem principality with a German Protestant prince. It had been a certifiable anarchy with no less than six governments all claiming legitimacy, a regentless regency under a council of elders, a democratic republic, and then a constitutional monarchy. It had tried fascism Italian-style, and then Russian-style communism. It was now a “socialist state” on the Peking model. No one could fault the Albanians’ readiness to change their system. If changing the system was the answer, Albania ought to be a happy land. Yet throughout all these changes, many of them revolutionary, most of them as violent as ever one might wish, Albania had remained the most wretched country in Europe.
