The Dissertation, page 35
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
How, then, had he seized upon it? He hadn’t; it had come to him. It had come to him when he stopped wanting “more.” No, it had come to him and he’d stopped wanting “more” when he turned his will to flow with the world’s current.
León stopped, nodding slowly. He’d reached moist sand, and his soles echoed his mind’s relief in having solved the problem. Then he began to think of some of the things and people he loved now for themselves: a country, a tiny backwater country whose existence citizens of other lands approved because it gave them something to look down on; a people, all caprice, no staying power, who made him now their totem, now their sacrifice, who would have themselves a magic beast at all cost, rather than simply a man who tried his best; a ministry, twelve years of toil hung on an eyelash, ready to fall the moment he was gone, and the moment was approaching—, a wife who had never understood him for an instant; children who would never know him as a human being because they would never watch him grow old as they grew to man- and womanhood. León loved each and all without censure, as, without guilt, he loved the country he had done so little for, and the people whom he hadn’t saved from themselves, and the ministry he hadn’t built strongly enough, and the wife he’d never understood (unless just now he had begun to understand her), and the children he was going to abandon, and the friend he had betrayed, and the surrogate son he had made use of, and the surrogate daughter he had seduced. León loved each and all passionately.
Don Anselmo Chinche walrused from the surf and saw the President of the Republic standing some ten meters off, but as the President’s chin was dipped into his chest hair—borne down, no doubt, by some burden of state—gave no greeting. León spotted him, however, out of the corner of his eye and looked up and called, “Olá, Don ‘Selmo! Buen día pa’ la playa, no es cierto?” Don Anselmo grinned like a child and tramped up to pass the time of day, and as he stood there babbling, salt water streaming down his flaccid chest onto his paunch, León felt love for him. When Don Anselmo Chinche went to meet his Maker—and it wouldn’t be long now, León judged —when the Lord asked him what of any worth he’d done in life, all Don Anselmo would have to say for himself was that one night in 1947 he’d played a bridge hand decently. Yet León Fuertes loved him.
It was amazing, León thought as he disengaged himself politely and strolled on across the firm sand near the water’s edge, his gaze aimed just before his toes, his hands clasped at his back. There was no end to it! If he loved old ‘Selmo Chinche, he loved everything. His murderer? Christ! He would probably end up loving him too! And why not? The stupid whoreson turd was a key figure, vital to the whole process, and as important to the particle of it called León Fuertes as Dr. Azael Burlando. The latter’s urge had flung him in the world; the former’s would fling him out. As well an angry moron as an earthquake or a culture of flu bugs. León loved the world itself, which in its perversity had dragged him into it unasked and mocked him with possibilities and soon would push him out.
Twenty minutes later Bolívar Gavilán, the faithful Lilo, was granted an epiphany of León’s love—though it brought him none of León’s gaiety. 6th January, 1964, was, altogether, a trying day for Lilo. He spent the morning in dialectic combat on two fronts with the Ardilla brothers, Augustín and Tomás Aquino, who were home on vacation from studies in Spain and France respectively. Tomás, who later went to Chile as a consultant to Salvador Allende and disappeared after the latter’s fall, was a communist. Augustín (now a monsignor somewhere in the Vatican) was preparing to enter the Society of Jesus. Although the brothers were completely opposed in ideology, they were identical in personality, displaying the most profound fanaticism imaginable. Lilo tried, after the fashion of his idol, León Fuertes, to advance moderate positions against them, but as their minds, like those of all true believers, were sealed tight as a pharaonic tomb, he could make no headway whatsoever and succeeded only in appearing foolish to their younger sister Pía, whom he loved to distraction. The struggle raged through lunch, with Lilo assailed unmercifully from both left and right, smirked at by Pía, and consoled mutely and unwelcomely by Juan de la Cruz Ardilla, the former President of the Republic and a moderate’s moderate, who was every day more convinced that his wife (God rest her soul) had born him bastards. At length Lilo tossed in the sponge and escaped with Pía, leaving the two brothers roaring at each other, and their putative father downing his fourth brandy. But escape did not bring case.
At seventeen, Pía Ardilla was the most accomplished little tease in all Tinieblas and might, had she adopted the custom of fighter pilots, have painted rows of broken hearts and swollen gonads on her apple-smooth cheeks, her supple, delicately-downed midriff, and her firm, pale-golden thighs. At nineteen, Lilo Gavilán was the oldest virgin in the country, male or female, with the possible exception of a few members of religious orders. This was due to no physical disfigurement or disability. Lilo was as handsome as his twin sister Loli was beautiful, and as well furnished with testosterone as any other fellow of his age. He nurtured an obsessive respect for what used to be called “nice girls,” however—having somehow got it in his head that his idol, León Fuertes, took the same neochivalric attitude—and was incapable of making lewd advances to them, or even of accepting those that they might make to him. That would seem to leave a considerable portion of the female population fair game, but there were further complications. First, in accord with our culture, Lilo divided womankind into two camps: “nice girls” and whores. Second, he thought it unmanly to consort with the latter, for he had somehow got it in his head that León Fuertes held this view. Actually, both Lilo’s misconceptions of León’s attitude toward women were understandable enough: Lilo had never met León, lecher. For these misconceptions, Lilo was virginal. And for these misconceptions—being otherwise in health and, hence, attracted sexually to Pía Ardilla-Lilo was compelled to love her and, loving her, to think of matrimony. At the same time Lilo knew that León Fuertes would never think of matrimony if he were, like Lilo, still a student and unable to provide for a wife and family. Thus as Lilo and Pía walked hand in hand along the asphalt road behind the Ardilla beach house (she flirting gaily, he in a Keatsian dejection), as they turned onto the pitted gravel road that led to the deserted villa of the exiled ex-President A. Sancudo (she pausing to brush his forelock back with counterfeit tenderness, he smiling shyly in a dream of husbandhood), as they penetrated deeper into the tunnel of foliage which, after years of neglect, now enclosed the road (she slipping a pale-golden arm about his waist, he reciprocating with an arm somewhat lobstered by an uncustomary weekend in the sun), Lilo had, with the unwitting and yet crucial help of his hero, León Fuertes, worked himself into a textbook example of what theorists of schizophrenogenia have called a “double bind.”
Pía, for her part, suffered no conflicts. She was swooping toward another kill. When she and Lilo had proceeded about fifty meters—this was, I judge, about the time when León Fuertes waded into the surf, dove through a breaking wave, emerged in the trough of a soft swell, and began pulling in a powerful crawl out around the jungled point separating the settled portion of Medusa Beach from the Sancudo villa—Pía stopped, turned, ran her fingers up under Lilo’s T-shirt along the hollow of his back, and, smiling up at him, putting her glistening jube-jube tongue-point out through pouting lips, provoked him to what he honestly thought would be a chaste kiss. But Pía kissed with a lascivious expertise that the harlots of old Babylon may have aspired to yet probably never achieved. And Pía crushed her breasts against his breast, and touched her shorts against his tented trousers. For nearly a minute—long enough for León Fuertes to swim fifty meters—Lilo’s principles were swamped in a flood of hormones. For the best part of that time he remained absolutely still, paralyzed by passion. For a few seconds more only his arms and hands moved, clutching at Pía’s shoulders. Then, after what seemed an age, his hips and loins began to make a commonplace mammalian movement. But at the first suggestion of a thrust—no! at the mere intimation of a hump—Pía (whose timing was superb) leaped backward out of his arms and seared his naked face with blowtorch eyes.
“Disgusting animal!”
It’s a near question which punished Lilo more severely, Pía’s shriveling look and epithet or his own reviving principles. He had but one manner of reprieve from either: he proposed marriage.
In sympathy for Lilo, I shall not go into detail on what followed. It is enough to state baldly that Pía refused him, that she did not show him the courtesy of making her refusal angry (much less kind), that she laughed at him with the sort of total contempt for his impertinent presumption which (if one may be allowed a spot of anthropomorphism) females show to males among the mantids, and that she then stalked off, leaving him wandering in the gloomy wood, his groin engorged and his spirit utterly deflated.
He wandered then, and nearing the sea (whose breaking roar muffled his footfalls and his passage through the undergrowth), blundered upon a scene such as might have been put to canvas had Douanier Rousseau accepted a commission from the Baron de Charlus to paint a Déjeuner sur l’herbe. There was a clearing, no larger than a bed, all wreathed in luridly green fronds and walled about so densely by wild palms entwined with creepers that Lilo was almost in it when he saw it. Within, spotlit in sunlight, her flanks porcelain white against the deep tan of her limbs and the lush greenery about her, Lilo’s twin sister, Loli, knelt above the reclining body and unreclining joint of León Fuertes. Gently she bent to lunch. Just as gently León took her head between his hands and, after a long moment, raised her, kissed her lovingly, turned her, and, still gently, mounted her—and with that Lilo Gavilán experienced what Dr. I. P. Pavlov called the “ultra-paradoxical phase” and Saint Paul called “conversion.” In the space of seconds, without benefit of conscious thought, all his beliefs concerning León Fuertes were revised, all his attitudes reversed. Working at electronic speed, the analog computing instrument in Lilo’s head rewired its own circuits, accepted the new data, processed them, and composed a print-out: León Fuertes was a traitor to his country and the human species; he had to be destroyed.
León and Loli then began to make some commonplace mammalian movements. Let them proceed in privacy; Lilo was no longer watching. Lilo was thrashing toward the gravel road. When he reached it, he ran along it till it met the asphalt. Then he ran the seven miles to the Pan American Highway, dropping to a dog trot when his wind flagged, but never stopping. When he reached the highway, he ran south along it until he was overtaken by a car with four of his school chums in it. He accepted the lift but not their conversation. By nightfall he was beating on the door of a room (above the Cantina Ronda) belonging to a barmaid whom Manfredo Canino lived with and off.
When the door opened, Lilo pushed his way past the girl and told Canino in an even voice he wished to join the movement. Canino said he thought Lilo a spy. Lilo said he wasn’t. Canino asked how he meant to prove it. Lilo asked if murdering León Fuertes would be sufficient proof.
Canino looked at Lilo carefully and nodded. He knew a true believer when he saw one. “You’ll never get away with it.”
“Getting away doesn’t really interest me.”
León Fuertes was, of course, Canino’s greatest enemy: ideologically because he was the chief obstacle to revolution in Tinieblas; personally because he had shown Canino kindness and respect. Canino wished Lilo the best of luck. Lilo said he preferred material support. He didn’t think a gun or knife safe weapons. Men had survived them. He needed a bomb. (Lilo did not say that it was insufficient simply to kill traitors like León, that they had to be obliterated, along with those stupid enough to have been betrayed by them.) Canino allowed himself to be persuaded. (He did not mention that bombs were ideologically sound as well as materially effective, that a bomb, being a true socialist among weapons, might not discriminate between victim and assassin, the last of whom would be an embarrassment to the movement if taken live.)
It took three days for Canino to meet his connection in the Reservation and get some plastic explosive and a detonator. It took part of another day for Tonio Burrón, who’d trained in Cuba, to make the bomb. Burrón wanted to save part of the plastic for future need, but Lilo insisted that he use every gram, and Canino supported him.
“Coño! There’s enough here to blow up the whole country.”
Lilo eyed the stuff and shook his head. “I doubt it. But if so, that’s all right too.”
When León Fuertes left Loli Gavilán’s apartment shortly before midnight on Friday, 10th January, 1964, Lilo Gavilán was waiting for him.
My father, León Fuertes, passed that day as follows: He rose from dreamless sleep at 6:30 A.M., showered, shaved, dressed, and took his coffee on the Palace terrace, undisturbed by any spirit, certainly not that of General Mojón. He then went to his private study and worked for two hours on an epic history of the Republic of Tinieblas which he had begun on New Year’s Day, It pleased him that he would not live to finish the work, that he would perhaps not even finish the first chapter (the last turned out to be the case), for in such circumstances he could work purely, for the sole sake of research and composition, without fear of his motives’ being fouled by thoughts of fame or profit. At 9:00 he put aside his pages (with the discoverer of Tinieblas still a lad in Cádiz), stepped to his state office, and took up the toil of government, which that day included a meeting with the Minister of Agriculture concerning a new Land Reform Bill scheduled for introduction when the Chamber reconvened the following week; a meeting with Carlitos Gavilán in which they drafted a letter to Lyndon Johnson about the Day-Cornudo Treaty; a meeting with a delegation of banana workers and their union’s legal counsel, Dr. Garibaldi Saenz; and, from 11:15 A.M. till well past noon, the first Cabinet meeting of 1964 and the last of León Fuertes’ Administration. He lunched and then siesta’d with his wife. I would give no details of the latter if I had them, but I can say that I left school early that afternoon to endure orthodontia, that I stopped “home” to leave my books, and that on entering my mother’s room to get a kiss for courage, I found her snuggled up in very rumpled bedclothes, humming to herself. León then met for over two hours with the Progressive Party Members of the Chamber, explaining his legislative program to them in laborious detail, attempting to persuade them of its urgency, pleading humbly for their support, pledging to reward their loyalty, and promising to make life as difficult as he was able for any renegades. He spent the next ninety minutes in the library with M. Armand Bonsoir, the Cultural Attaché of the French Embassy and a most competent accompanist, preparing for a recital of Schumann lieder that he planned to give later that month on the anniversary of the day he met Soledad Piérida. He then had a light dinner en famille and took his children to a baseball game between the Cerveza Cortes Teutones and the Café Sancudo Zorros of the Tinieblan Winter League.
By the seventh inning he had become so disgusted with the meekness of the Teutones hitters, and so vocal in his disgust, that the author of this history (who at thirteen was, sadly, something of a wise guy) asked him rhetorically if he thought he could do better. He replied that, by God, he could—the gringo pitching for the Zorros was fast but had no curve and rarely threw his change-up; a hitter (one who wasn’t seared, that was) could dig in on him and wait for the right pitch. The author remained unconvinced by this analysis (though it was accurate: according to the Saint Louis Sporting News, the pitcher in question, Clyde Hyde, did not develop a curve ball [and thus realize his potential excellence] until 1965). He said as much, but his attention was distracted by a fine shoe-string catch behind second base, and when he looked about, León had left the box. León was next seen conferring with the league president, Guillermo Gorgojo Lindo, in a box behind the Teutones’ dugout. The Teutones’ manager participated briefly in this meeting. Then León disappeared again. Ten minutes later, during the bottom of the eighth and after the Teutones had managed, at the cost of one out and with some aid and comfort from the Zorro infield, to put men on first and second, a player whose number was not on the scorecard and whose deeply-tilted cap brim concealed his face came up to pinch-hit. He spiked his feet up to his shoe tops in the batter’s box, took a ball high and very tight, took a strike low on the outside corner, and then (as I may have mentioned an agony of chapters back) slapped a single wide of first into right field, bringing the tying run around and sending what proved to be the winning run to third. Only when a man was sent in to run for him was it announced over the PA system that he was León Fuertes. (The resulting roar moved pitcher Hyde to ask his Tinieblan shortstop who the geezer was that got the hit; on learning that the geezer was President of the Republic, Hyde wiped his forehead and said, “Sheet! Way he dug in, if my duster’d gone where I aimed it, he’d be the ex-President by now!”) Following the game, León drove his children back to the Palace, then went to Loli Cavilán’s apartment.
The world has known no more (though it’s been buffalo’d much less) about the assassination of León Fuertes than about the assassination of his coeval John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the latter case the wrong man was framed, then murdered. In the former case the right man was taken for an innocent by-product victim and then mourned. No counterfeit assassin was ever officially passed to the Tinieblan people, but a wealth of candidates were privately advanced and a wealth of motives argued. The only point on which everyone agreed was that a time bomb was placed in León’s car. Here, as elsewhere, everyone was wrong. The reader of this history now knows who and why. It remains only to tell how.
