The Dissertation, page 34
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Canino stilled in midsentence and, with the others who were with him on the bandstand, stared at León in amazement.
“Don’t stop for me, Manny,” León called to him. “But when you’ve finished, I’d like to say a word or two.”
Canino knew the crowd was his. Besides, the sight of León had flushed the remnant of his speech out of his mind. “Go ahead now!” he shouted. “I give you my permission! There he is, comrades! The traitor, Meestair Forts, in person!”
The crowd turned toward León, jeering and whistling. León smiled and nodded, as though acknowledging applause. Then he walked down toward them, but stopped at the rim of the square and got up on one of the stone benches. It was the first time a man holding public office had ever come to peak in Plaza Cervantes, and the last time too, at least as of this writing. Much better fora are available to men in power, and Cervantes is, by tradition, the rostrum of outsiders. In essence, though, that tradition remained unbroken, for when he began speaking León was not merely an outsider but an outcast.
His first words were stifled in catcalls, but he continued without shouting or losing his composure, and after a time those closest to him turned and shushed those farther off, and little by little the crowd stilled. Then he began again, thanking Canino for permitting him to speak and begging the crowd’s pardon in advance, “since what I have to say may rob you of the delicious feelings of self-pity Manny gives you. I know how warm and wonderful it is to feel sorry for oneself. There was a time in my life when I made a career of it.”
This brought shouts of insult and derision, but León smiled and held up his hand and said they needn’t worry. He would only rob them temporarily. “In a short time you can go back to feeling yourselves betrayed, and calling me a traitor, and blaming me for all your discontents. Meantime I’ll tell you of my dealings with John Kennedy. In preface, let me admit that as the thing turned out, I achieved nothing, not even the betrayal of our country, which, by the way, was never in my mind.”
It was the first of many stories that he told that night, and he did not tell it exactly as I have in Chapter 22 above. As León, lawyer, had once pointed out, the truth lacks realism. My father retailed essential truth by packaging it in fiction. He scholared in the stacks of memory, gathering details; then lawyered them into a web that trapped the fancy of his listeners. He refused, for example, to sling Kennedy’s feet up on a coffee table but posed him standing with one elbow on a marble mantelpiece chiseled from the Élysée Palace and masoned carefully into the tale. He gave Kennedy fine rolling cadences and florid metaphors, such as his listeners were accustomed to hear from politicians. He made the voice of León Fuertes quaver just a bit in trepidation, so that his listeners might identify with it and dream themselves face to face with the leader of a great power. He didn’t have his President of Tinieblas bait his President of the United States, rubbing Kennedy’s face in his own speech. Who would believe that? What decent man would care to link himself with such conduct now that John Kennedy had been assassinated? No, León set his story one day earlier in time and made Kennedy’s speech an outgrowth of his meeting with León Fuertes. Not that the León of the story could take much credit for it. The León of León’s story did no more than bring the nature of the Day-Cornudo Treaty to Kennedy’s attention, and Kennedy, out of his own nobility, perceived a wrong and said he’d try to right it. He pledged as much in his speech, but could make no specific reference to Day-Cornudo then, or in the communiqué, because he was not a dictator who ruled by fiat, but had to consult with others and work out ways and means. Thus León wove an illusion of reality and wrapped essential truth inside it, and he gave it to the people through the voice of León, artist.
The artist returned to León Fuertes that night after an exile of twenty-seven years, but now he was part of a new unity, and his instrument had timbres unknown to it in León’s early life: the hypnotic mastery of León the Don Juan; the yielding anima of León, Riviera femme fatale; the protective tenderness of León, husband and father; the violence of León, warrior. All those tones glowed in my father’s voice that night and, under its charm, the crowd forgot the pleasures of resentment and went over to him, while Canino and the others on the bandstand winced and shriveled, until they were no more than dwarfs, glaring at him over the railing. He finished the story with Kennedy’s letter.
“You may be tempted now, as I was tempted, to feel sorry for yourselves, to feel betrayed by the universe. But the universe owes us nothing.99 No one can say that had the meeting in Florida taken place, it would have produced all or even part of what you and I want. It’s best to face the facts like grown-ups. The man is dead, and the whole effort came to nothing.
“It might have worked. It seemed the best approach to go directly to President Kennedy. I erred in not foreseeing that he might die. I should have. Who of us here can say for sure he’ll be alive tomorrow?
“So, then, with that last thought in mind, and since you knew part of it already, I have come here and, with Manny Canino’s kind permission, have told you the full story. Clearly, I made no error in keeping it to myself until tonight. It would have put your hopes up, and, as you see, it came to nothing, as things so often do.”
He stepped down from the bench then and turned away, but the crowd called him and begged him not to leave.
“But this is Manny Canino’s meeting,” he protested, smiling. “You’ll want to hear him and the other bright young men go on denouncing me as a traitor.”
But Canino and his disciples had shrunk to the size of roaches and slipped through the cracks between the floorboards of the bandstand and disappeared.
Then León walked through the crowd to the center of the plaza and got up on the empty pedestal and sat down cross-legged on it and drew the people in toward him with his hands. And when those nearest him had sat down about him on the ground and the others gathered in, he began telling stories. They were stories out of the history of our country, stories of the discovery and conquest, the founding of cities and the cultivation of the land, the days of the Spanish colony and the gestures of independence and the birth of the republic. He told stories also of the days of his forebears Generals Bodega and Mojón and Luna, and stories of the civil wars, and of the time of the bichos. All were stories of wild dreams and ceaseless disappointments, of incredible achievements whose substance at once faded, of splendid porticoes of hope which opened on despair. Each was the story of some effort that had come to nothing, yet the people listening in the square in no way grew despondent, for as my father told these stories, the joy of struggle overweighed the grief of ultimate defeat. It was as though those gathered round him in the shadows were the last remnant of the nation, exiled and shipwrecked on an alien shore, and León Fuertes sat all night among them, passing them the memory of their community and, coded in it, the memory of all human community on this planet, past, present, and future, along the continuum of time. His face, bathed palely in the yellow glow of the bug-swarmed lamps around the bandstand, took on a parchment semblance of immense antiquity. His gestures grew ever less pronounced, till he sat motionless as an idol save for the almost imperceptible movements of his mouth. His voice, though, remained clear and youthful to the last.
Lastly, he told them the story of his ministry, why he had sought office in the first place and what he conceived to be the function of a leader and how he had tried and was still trying to preserve our tiny patrimony of good fortune. The story was, he said, as yet unfinished, yet there was little question of its ending. His effort too would no doubt come to nothing. It too would crumble, and leave nothing behind.
Here he was interrupted by shouts of “No!” He listened, motionless, then smiled and raised his hands.
“All right,” he said, as to small children. “It may endure, and be something to build on.”
With that, he got down stiffly and began to walk away, but the people nearest to him caught his sleeves and held him.
“No!” He shook his arms free. “Enough! You’d best start learning to get on without me!”
The people drew back, frightened, and stood staring at him.
Then he said he was sorry but he had no more stories for them.
“I’m sorry, but I have nothing left.”
He took a step toward Avenida Bolívar, but then turned suddenly and held up both his hands. “Wait. I have a song left.
“Crazy country!” He laughed. “What can be said of a country where the President sits all night in a public park, telling stories? —Crazy President and crazy people! Even crazier if he should sing!
“There was a time, though, when I did not sing badly, and I feel like singing, crazy or not.”
And so León lifted his face to the sky, which was paling now beyond the low church belfry, and holding his hands clenched by his sides sang the joyous, grieving song “La Golandrina.” He sang it through in the piano tones that gifted tenors can lift to the last recesses of an opera house or stadium. Then he sang the last lines once again, in his full voice:
También yo estoy
En la región perdido—
Ay cielo santo!—
Y sin poder volar.
He turned then and walked through the people to Avenida Bolívar, and down it toward the Palace, and no one in the plaza moved or spoke till he was far away.
It were a pleasant task to say now that León was then miraculously restored to favor, but such was not the case. That took more than his performance in Plaza Cervantes. That took a bomb. Protest continued. Even those touched by his presence on that night entertained resentment for him during the next weeks. Canino still drew crowds. His immediate disciples were as closely bound to him as ever, and to these he added a new convert, of whom more in a few pages. But León’s visit to Plaza Cervantes had not been in the nature of a campaign stop, and he made no special effort to curry favor with the country.
With the melding of his transformations in one human unity, my father found his life altered in another aspect: the hunger that had been the only common trait to all his personalities faded entirely. Although he knew his days were numbered—no doubt because he knew, because he had, in accepting his fate and returning to his ministry, chosen that they be brief—he did not seek phrase is Yeats’s) to “ram them with the sun.” He went about business and pleasure with as much energy and enthusiasm as ever, yet felt no tug of urgency. He was apt even to linger fondly on some trifle and find the universe in it.
There was for instance, the afternoon—18th or 19th December, as far as I can ascertain—when, as he and members of the Cabinet were lunching with the Costaguanan Foreign Minister (in town for discussions on the Central American Common Market), his daughter, Clara (then just ten years old), entered the dining room carrying her little inlaid wood jewel chest and seeking executive relief: she was invited to her cousin Alma’s birthday; she wished to wear the medallion her uncle Pandolfo had brought her from Lourdes, but its gold chain was tangled up with every knickknack in the box. Nodding an excuse to his guests, President Fuertes pushed back his plate and dumped the jumble of baubles, beads, and bracelets onto the tablecloth before him. Then, smiling gravely to Clarita, he spread it gently with his fingers and, with the air of a surgeon, took up his clean dessert fork and began probing delicately.
“Here,” he remarked without looking up, “is a concrete metaphor of good politics in action: unraveling a mess provoked by neglect and carelessness. Or”—he raised a strand of chain on a fork tine, then took it between his left thumb and forefinger and worked it through a twist of beads—“of science and creative art: bringing meaning, that is, order, out of an apparent chaos of occurrences.”
“Why not follow Alexander?” suggested the Costaguanan, proffering his steak knife. “Surely a new chain can be found to hang the medal on.”
My father looked up briefly and shook his head. “The military approach. Solve the problem by destroying it. Simplification via violence.” He extracted an earring from the scrum and laid it beside his butter plate. “Brute force substituted for imagination. Crude and costly. justifiable only in the last resort.” Jiggling gently, he freed the chain from a bracelet charm. “The aim the optimum”—he flicked the bracelet aside and began plucking at a rope of indian beads—“is to achieve order while preserving each diverse element. For example”—here he permitted himself to glance up for a moment—“we prefer the slow work of setting up a customs union to having one of our countries invade and conquer all the others.”
Discoursing thus, he patiently undid the snares and tangles, and only when he had dropped the medal and its chain into Clarita’s hand and accepted her kiss in payment did he turn back to state affairs.
Much less than pressing him, time slowed as it had done two decades earlier on Colle Belvedere. He felt the same awareness and vitality, but not the violence that had later left foul lees. He drew his breath in passionate detachment: his life had never seemed so sweet and precious, and yet he accepted its coming loss without anxiety. He was involved in the world, concerned for the welfare of his family and country, and yet he could face calmly the fact that they would have to get on without him. His one regret was that he ha not been able to achieve this mode of living earlier. His temptation was not to seek a postponement of his fate (e.g., by ringing himself with guards or by restricting his movements) but to teach his children something of his present attitude. He refused to puzzle or worry them with grave, solemn testaments—he felt neither grave nor solemn anyway—but he yielded to the extent of having his sons memorize two passages from Homer (Iliad, XVIII: 115-21; Odyssey, V: 221-24).
He was amazed at his state of mind. He had flashes of anger—some son of a whore was going to murder him!—and then recalled that long ago he had pardoned the agency of his death. He had moments of sadness, and then took stock as he had done on the night before he first went into battle. He had no ties now to any company of warriors, nor was he faced by an opposing company for which he might feel enmity, but he held the chief office in his commonwealth and struggled against forces of disorder. He was no longer free of obligations to people who depended on him and for whom he cared, but his responsibilities were the measure of his full use of life. More valuable men had died before and would die after him. He had no call to raise a fuss. And apart from these flashes and these moments—which, in any case, were few and brief—he felt inexplicably light-hearted. This might have made him feel indecorous had anyone else known what was in store for him. Condemned men were supposed to mope about with a long face or, if they had to smile, smile bitterly, and show proper respect for the Grim Reaper.
It was not until 6th January, 1964, that León understood the cause and nature of this gaiety. Tinieblas celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany, and since it fell on Monday that year, making a long weekend, León spent it at Medusa Beach with his family, as did his friend and beach house neighbor Carlos Gavilán. At about 3:00 P.M., then, on that most holy day, León Fuertes woke smiling from a dreamless siesta and spoke the word “Love.”
Puzzled at this spontaneous utterance, he got up and pulled on a pair of shorts and stepped out on the empty terrace. As he felt the tropic sun embrace his shoulders, as his eyes “heard” the contrapuntal harmony of heat waves bowing saltato across glaring sand, and ocean blowing long, cool horn notes, he spoke the word “Love” again.
He was about to sit down and think about this when the puzzle fell in place of itself: he was filled with love. His life was suffused in love even as the beach and ocean were suffused in sunlight. It had been that way six weeks now.
He had known only one similar period: four weeks, twenty-seven years before. Since then he had felt love only for brief moments so rare he could recall them easily, as, for example, on Colle Belvedere when an unknown enemy died in his arms. He had taken joy in life. He had gone out passionately to a few people and to many actions. But he had scarcely felt selfless love. The activity or person had never been an end to him. Learning, art, sport, war, law, lechery had all been means to fill his hunger. Politics, the presidency of his country, had been a means to other means. And he had cherished his wife and family as means to his dream of order. His hunger for “more” had driven him to treat the world as a means, and that mode of life had sharpened his hunger.
León laughed, more in amusement than self-mockery, and strolled down the steps and out across the burning sand, concentrating on a measured pace against the pain in his soles. What an amazing way to live! Not that it was the worst. It had brought him a great deal of what was valuable, that is of joy and grief, proof that he was alive. It had not involved much selfless loving—four weeks and certain moments—but he’d got by well enough on that. If he’d cared to live differently, he would have. You couldn’t accuse a man who’d walked across the Sahara Desert of lacking will to live the way he wished. His way of life had been one of the best! And yet his present way was much superior.
