The Dissertation, page 36
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
When León Fuertes, at peace with all the world and in the deepest state of body-soul well-being, exited the building in which Loli had her flat and, singing (sotto voce) an air by Schumann, entered has blue Wildebeest coupe, he discovered Lilo sitting rigid in the right-hand bucket. Lilo was holding on his lap a brown paper bag containing a kilogram of plastic explosive with an electric detonator embedded in it, a dry-cell battery, a simple switch, and the necessary wires. León greeted Lilo with surprise and pleasure; Lilo mumbled a reply. León asked if Lilo would like a lift home; Lilo nodded. León then started his car and began proceeding northwest at moderate speed along Via Venezuela.
“Traitors must die,” announced Lilo.
“What?”
“You are a traitor.” Lilo put his right hand into the paper bag.
“What’s the matter, Lilo?” He stopped the car in the middle of the street opposite the Alameda.
“You have betrayed the toiling masses of our country and the workers of the world. You are the agent of the plutocrat oppressors and the warmongers.” Lilo was weeping.
“You know about Loli and me?”
“You are a running dog of the warlords.”
León grinned, as he always did at such jargon, then stopped at once: his son Lilo was suffering. He reached out his right hand and touched Lilo’s neck affectionately. He smiled at Lilo in compassion.
“It is my duty and privilege to destroy you.”
As the bomb went off the analog computing instrument in León’s head printed out the following discrete nonverbal messages with the functional simultaneity of electronic speed: love for his son Lilo; compassion for his suffering and admiration for his courage; satisfaction for the way he, León, had spent his day; the warmth of Soledad’s smile, of Schumann’s music, of his children’s laughter, of Loli’s kiss; the sensation of moving easily with a great current; intense and cleansing pain.
By the time the few unvaporized chunks of his and Lilo’s bodies—the largest of which might have made an Ollie-Burger-fell back100 to the pavement, my father, León Fuertes, had told Lilo Gavilán (whose spirit was as yet mingled with his) that he had pardoned him long ago and that he loved him, and was asking Lilo for his pardon.
NOTES
PART ONE
1. Our current simianisimo
General Genghis Manduco Torcido (b. 1930), Commander-in-Chief of the Tinieblan Civil Guard, self-chosen leader of the so-called Tinieblan Revolution (see note 10 below), and dictator of Tinieblas since 1970.
Our neighbors in the United States, who through their taxes subsidize the Civil Guard and General Manduco, are wont to extol the virtues of barrackroorn despotism, a form of government they have never chosen to embrace themselves but which they think is just the thing for us. Like most of life’s joys, however, it must be experienced to be appreciated. I am happy to devote a footnote to such an occurrence:
One recent evening the American novelist Sig Heilanstalt, whom the U.S. Government has Fulbrighted to our National University, was driving in Ciudad Tinieblas. While lolling in the right-hand lane of Avenida Balboa, he chanced to flash his bearded grin into an official car occupied by two uniformed guardias and a mysterious shadow in mufti. Ten seconds and twenty yards later he was rammed to the curb, boarded by a sergeant, and ordered to Guard Headquarters. There he was hauled from his crumpled Puma and pistol-prodded up the steps into the guardroom, where with sweeping salute and crunch of boot heels the sergeant accused him to the duty officer of having laughed at members of the Tinieblan armed forces. The gravity of the charge was evident. According to Sig, he defended himself eloquently if ungrammatically, in the noble tradition of Nicola Sacco. I rather think he was stuttering with terror, but in any case he admits concluding with an abject apology to all present. This plea was but vaguely successful. He was not taken downstairs and beaten, but his silky conquistador’s fringe was scissored to frightful asymmetry, and he was thrust roughly back into the street with a boot-punctuated warning to show more respect.
2. His hell is a bureaucracy
This is not quite the place to present a general plan of the next world. My investigations have, however, proved the plans of others (e.g., Virgil’s, Dante’s) grossly inaccurate. In the first place, the “good” are not conspicuously rewarded, the “bad” nowhere punished as such. A vast number of activities are offered, and the arriving spirit applies according to his preference. Vacancies are not always available, however; lengthy waits often occur. General Epifanio Mojón applied for Orgies and Abominations; it was, then as now, heavily oversubscribed. He languished for nearly a century, then applied for Politics, and was appointed to a committee that concocts schemes for projection into the minds of earthly tyrants. He is a good deal happier than he expected to be but complains of overwork.
3. General Mojón’s procurer
Theopompos Anaxagoras Canelopulos (1819-1867), an Alexandrine Greek was for some years engaged in the Afro-Arabian slave trade. He emigrated to the Western Hemisphere in I 851, after running afoul of the British consul at Zanzibar. Learning that General Mojón was seeking an experienced procurer, he accepted the post before learning that it was contingent upon his being gelded. I met him first in May, 1971, when he paid me an unsolicited visit featuring a color-slide lecture on his investiture (performed in the basement of the Tinieblan Presidential Palace by General Mojón’s Mexican aidede-camp). I did not enjoy the interview, but one must not let terror retard the advancement of knowledge. When I began doing research for this dissertation, I consulted Canelopulos in hope of fleshing out the meager record on Raquel Fuertes. I found him an enthusiastic though somewhat hysterical informant.
4. Procedure
This is the place for me to say a few words about my research procedure, which consists mainly in communication with the so-called “dead.”
True science refuses to dismiss those phenomena it cannot yet explain, but with the rise of scientism this perfectly natural form of communication has been cruelly discredited, so that serious thinkers have, for the most part, neglected it, abandoning the field to charlatans. (In this regard, I am reminded of an incident in the home of Doña Reina de Abeja, an amateuse of the occult, who some years ago brought a medium from Duluth, Minnesota, for the delectation of her cronies. The séance was held in Don Lorenzo Abeja’s thick-curtained cardroom. Lights were doused and candles lit. Dr. Rickenhouse withdrew to the bathroom, whence the spirits then emerged. Doña Rosario Lergo de Cristal requested an interview with her brother Inocencio, who in this life scarcely spoke Spanish, much less any foreign tongue, yet when his supposed spirit clomped from the John, he spoke nothing but English, and that with a ringing Midwest twang. Doña Rosario was entirely taken in, sobbed hysterically, and attempted to embrace her “brother,” who faded canward in great haste, but given the frequency of this sort of crude bamboozlement, it is understandable that minds less festered by the will to believe doubt Dr. Rickenhouse and ilk, and the very possibility of conversing with the departed.)
Now, the truth is that the “dead”—and in these notes I put the word in quote marks to cleanse it of taints of finality—can talk to us and we to them, though as with everything else, some people are better at it than others. I have a gift for such communication. When I was but five, my uncle Nicolas Fuertes, who was shot by U.S. Marines in Nicaragua in 1932, used to visit me while I was supposed to be napping and entertain me with tales of Augusto Sandino and his guerrilleros. My love of history was born then, in an airless alcove swaddled from the sunlight by drapes the color of dried blood and strewn with odd pieces from my brother, Carlos’s, Erector Set, but my uncle’s visits ceased abruptly after I recounted to my parents the description he had given me of a particularly bloody raid on Jinotega and my mother, with some butterflywing glances at my father, decreed that from then on I would siesta with my baby sister, Clara, and her nurse. There followed a period during which my parents chuckled about “Camilo’s vivid imagination” and insipidly compared my conversations with my uncle Nicolas to the invisible playmates Carlos had invented at age four. Under this pressure even I began to think I’d been imagining things. Thus parents, in their eagerness to ground a child in one reality, can blind and deafen him to others.
My gift reasserted itself in adolescence. Uncle Nicolas resumed his visits. Other spirits came. Later, after her “death,” my mother would drop by, sometimes in sleep but often when I sat among my books. I would feel her presence and look up to her soft, sad smile. No one need ever be lost to us.
“I’m glad you’re studying, Camilo,” she’d say to me. “Your father puts great store in learning and is proud of you.”
“And you, Mamá? Are you happy now?”
“I’m happy when I can be with him. He gives recitals for us now and then, and they allow me a few minutes with him in his dressing room. And I’m happy when I visit you and Carlos and Clarita, though they look right through me and never hear my voice.”
“It’s not their fault, Mamá.”
“I know. But it’s so lonely waiting. I’ve applied for Love, you know, and vacancies come up so rarely. It’s lonely waiting, but Love’s really the only thing I want.”
Other “dead” would visit me as well, men and women out of the times I studied. Like every other form of communication, one has to be prepared to receive it. One has to listen. One can’t allow oneself to be distracted by noise. Most people’s receiving apparatus is so clotted with the noise of here and now no other message can get through. And, obviously, one has to know the language of one’s visitor.
While I was an undergraduate, after I had resolved to devote my life to history, I began honing my gift into a research tool. The general advantages are self-evident: the vast majority of witnesses to a historical event do not put their experiences in writing, and even if one finds documents to work with, one cannot cross-question them. Such a tool seemed, besides, particularly valuable, for I planned to specialize in the history of my country. There are no proper archives in Tinieblas. Few Tinieblans write memoirs; none publish their letters. Tinieblas has no tradition of independent journalism. All newspapers are now run by the state, while before the advent of our current tyranny, each was the creature of some interested faction and its reports no more reliable than the yelping of wild dogs. More, since General Manduco took over, Tinieblans have become reluctant to talk about anything more controversial than the weather. The conventional techniques of scholarly investigation simply will not work here.
At first, like many of my contemporaries who have gifts or believe they have them, I experimented with drugs. The most effective turned out to be a plant called flor de sueño, which, as far as I know, grows only on the Island of Mituco in Tinieblas and which may be taken in infusion, but drugs ultimately proved disappointing. Spirits came, but I was unable to choose them, or to control them once they showed up. As in the case of Canelopulos’s first visit, they would, as it were, take the bit in their teeth and tell and show me things I didn’t care to know. I learned the hard way that life admits no shortcuts to any worthwhile goal. I gave drugs up and, in time, perfected the following technique:
I abstain for at least one week from sexual activity. I fast for at least twelve hours. At dusk I isolate myself, assume an attitude of poised repose (the lotus position, for example), and come to complete immobility. As my heartbeat and respiration slow, I concentrate on the spirit I wish to interview. If he does not respond I am almost always able to reach someone close to him. Unsought spirits remain aloof while I am actively seeking others, but this procedure does not dissuade them from visiting me on their own at other times. Much the reverse: my contact with the next world grows ever closer.
At seven P.M. on 7th March, 1973, then, I returned to our apartment on Barracuda Street in Sunburst, Florida, and shut myself in the spare bedroom, which, since my wife and I were not as yet sleeping in separate rooms, I used as a study. I turned out the light, lit a candle, placed it on the floor, sat down before it, twined my legs, and began concentrating on the gross Greek whose emasculation had so terrified me two years earlier. After what seemed a very short period—it is impossible to judge the passage of time when summoning spirits—Canelopulos’s fat jowls and fleshy dugs appeared before me. I admonished him not to bother me anymore about his eunuchizing but to answer my questions, and in the course of that night he gave me the facts concerning Raquel Fuertes related in text above.
5. She went after him
The zeal with which our young women pursue political figures is proverbial in Tinieblas. It is no more irrational, however, and perhaps a wee bit more decorous, than your gringa’s propensity to throw herself at rock musicians, pop novelists, and other purveyors of pseudo-artistic blare.
With regard to the indecorous irrationality of North American females, I submit the following incident, which took place during the research for this chapter:
I conversed with Rosenda Fuertes at Sunburst during the night of 11th—12th March, 1973, an interview in which she gave details of her connection with General Luna and also furnished in formation valuable in the composition of Chapter 2 of this essay. But General Luna declined to answer my astralograms. I TWX’d him strongly and repeatedly from dusk till nearly dawn on 14th-15th March, but raised only the perforated ghost of Nicademo Lágrimas, who, since he had applied successfully for Resentment and Revenge, retained his bullet holes. Then, at 5:17 A.M., when I was on the point of reaching General Luna, my wife, Elizabeth, appeared in his stead, slippered and dressing-gowned, holding our Westclox Baby Ben.
Had I any idea what time it was?
I had not, and was incapable of speech in any case, with every kilowatt of my brainpower beamed into the next world.
Didn’t I hear her?
I did, unfortunately, but was striving not to let that distract me.
If I didn’t answer, she would scream.
I didn’t, and her scream woke everyone in the building.
Did I hear her now? Did I know she was here now? Should she scream again?
I was trying to mouth an answer when she decided she should.
Well? Well? Well? Was I satisfied? Would I come to bed now? Would I show her some attention now?
“Of course, darling.” I smiled sarcastically through the shattered fragments of my trance. “How very foolish of me to waste my time in scholarly research when I might be tending a madwoman.”
“Research!” She threw the clock at me. I ducked it adroitly, rather a feat of agility from the lotus position. It hit the wall behind me and rebounded past my knee, wailing with alarm and establishing the time of the event for future investigators.
“You are insane, Camilo!” The throw had popped her right breast out of her nightgown so that she resembled Liberty leading the people. “You’re out of your mind. Talking to spirits! Why don’t you screw them? That’s what I think you do! I think you stay up all night playing with yourself and pretend you’re screwing spirits. Your research! Your dissertation! Your goddamn dissertation and your goddamn father! The great man! The martyred hero! I bet he was a queer just like you!”
I am ashamed to admit that at this point I lost my self-control. In extenuation I can plead that I had been engaged all night in a difficult and frustrating investigation and that the concentration demanded by communion with spirits stretches the nerves to great tension. I cannot recall exactly what I said or did during the next few moments, but when I was brought to myself by an intense pummeling at our front door (occasioned, I soon learned, by a police man’s night stick), I was clutching Liz’s throat and howling: “I AM A SCHOLAR, YOU IGNORANT GRINGA BITCH! MY WORK IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND MONKEYS! YOU WILL LEARN TO RESPECT IT OR DIE!”
6. A balding gentleman in black velvet
One Wednesday evening in October, 1970, while I was still an undergraduate and at a time when the seeds of this essay had scarcely begun incubating in my brain, I decided to seek ease of flesh in the company of my cousin (mother’s sister’s daughter) Adana Avispa, who was attending Thornchasm College in Leaping Manor, New York. I bribed a lift from a classmate and casual acquaintance, Noel Whitbread II (or perhaps III), by arranging for Adana to get him a date, and en route developed the following simple plan of operation: I would install our foursome in the cocktail lounge of the Playtime Spa Hotel off the thruway; when we were two-thirds through our first round of drinks, I would disengage from the table, feint toward the men’s room, countermarch swiftly to the reception desk, secure a base upstairs, and be back before the conversation faltered; once I had advised Adana that there was a bed waiting, one that, for a quarter, could be induced to vibrate along with us, hormones would do the rest.
But the best schemed lays gang aft a-gley. In the very dorm waiting room where we collected them—a barren veldt of frayed carpet vultured with an oil portrait of the foundress, the girls made their own dispositions. Whitbread, an overmuscled lacrosse player with a US prime sirloin brain, possessed charms soothing to the female breast. (He was, in fact, the model for the jeune premier of a film script and novel seagulled by his faculty adviser from themes dumped off the stern of Cosmopolitan. The author drained his whole thimbleful of imagination finding his hero a new name, sport, and university, but his soul congrued in triteness with the public’s, to the immense enrichment of his producer, his publisher, and himself. Money is when you never have to say you’re sorry.) Adana, who, unlike me, had never seen Whitbread in the shower, drew a false analogy from his thick and ruddy neck and resolved to have him. Meantime, the tall, tawny blonde booked for him was (more perceptively) drawn to me. They worked it all out in a quick whisper, and when we reached his Exterminator R/T, even Whitbread realized the switch was on. Adana lynxed into the right-hand bucket and began fondling the glans of the gearshift; her friend dragged me into the back. That scrapped my predictable pounce with Adana, but I was not annoyed. Your true Tinieblan would rather buy lottery than bonds—not, as one might imagine, because the return can be so much grander, but just for the suspense of the draw.
