The Dissertation, page 41
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Fourthly and finally, it strikes me (Are you listening, fat Faf?) that an Iberian concern for the honor of womanhood, strange as it may appear in Gringoland, is a far sight less morbid than a Frenchman’s obsession with the chastity of books, Sig’s thrill at exercising droit de seigneur over a can of tennis balls (see note 13), or the strange state of mind that leads motel managers in the Good Old USA to equip guest toilet seats with paper hymens.
24. The intrusions of a priest
Since last Sunday (17th March, 1974) I have received daily, unsolicited, predawn visits from a young man of the cloth—or rather from his spirit. At first I took him for a member of Performing Arts made tip for a production of Jesus Christ Superstar (a so-called rock opera to which Liz dragged me when we were in New York at Thanksgivingtide in 1971). Besides shoulder-length hair and auburn beard, he has stigmata on both palms and the wistful, infinite-compassion gaze associated in pop religion with the Prince of Peace, but his white shirt with gold lapel cross (the uniform of foot soldiers of the progressive, socially conscious Church in Latin America) and his fluent prayer Latin have convinced me he is a bona fide divine.
I noticed him grieving at me from beside the closet door at about 4 A.M. last Sunday morning while I was summarizing the record of Rebeca’s trial for witchcraft (see note 25 below). He seemed about to speak when I asked him point-blank whether he had any information concerning León Fuertes, his ancestry, etc. My visitor shook his head, and I told him, courteously but firmly, that I was fully occupied with a lengthy and complicated investigation and that I could not and would not allow myself to be distracted.
Lest the reader condemn this attitude as uncivil or inhospitable, let me note that there are a great, great many spirits, that most of them are hungry for contact with this world, and that there are only a very few of us here able to communicate with them. For reasons of personal health, as well as of good scholarship, I cannot afford a reoccurrence of the situation that obtained in California in December, 1971, when my home, my workroom, and my mind were infested with uninvited spirits, all clamoring for my attention. I am willing (see note 21) to risk madness in the interest of historical science, but not simply for the entertainment of a pack of lazy ghosts. And of course, this dissertation must have my full attention if it is to be up to my standards, and well beyond those of the Department of History, Sunburst University.
My visitor began to cry—not unseemly sobbing, I’ll say that much for him, but a single tear pearling from the outer corner of his left eye to soak into his beard. I told him to come back in a few months, say after Christmas. He nodded sadly, gave me an “Ego te absolvo” with cross, and faded. A well-bred fellow, I said to myself; then I got back to work. But my great weakness is a tendency to overestimate the decency of other people. Father Whoever-he-is has been back every night since then. He kneels in a corner mumbling Latin prayers until I nag him off, and that means up to five or more minutes, for I cannot raise my voice with Liz asleep next door. I have no doubt but that he will appear again this morning, and there is not a thing that I can do to stop him. Sooner or later he will give up on me and go bother someone else, but he has a lot more time on his hands than I do.
As I have said (see note 4), our life permits no shortcuts to achievement. Interviewing spirits has its difficulties, and I mention this one as a caveat to those scholars who may be gifted and interested enough to care to try my methods.
25. The charges against Rebeca Fuertes
I do not disprize conventional techniques. My perfection of spirit interview, my application of it to the goals of scholarship, are invaluable contributions, more than sufficient to win me an early Nobel were the Swedes only bright enough to offer one for history, but there is nothing like a document for certain kinds of research. Rebeca was unable to tell me much about her trial—she had not (as I’ve noted) paid attention—but Don Pedro Caoba informed me fully on the tenor of proceedings, the décor of the courtroom, the mood of the spectators, etc. Nevertheless, I did not for an instant consider treating a matter so vitally important for an understanding of León Fuertes’ life and character without consulting the court record. Accordingly, on 7th-8th March, 1974, I visited Mituco Marítimo.
I do not drive. I know how, of course, but just don’t do it. There is no longer any regular boat service between Ciudad Tinieblas and Mituco, and I lack the romantic temperament which recommends the danger and discomfort of Tinieblan bus rides to hippie wanderers. Hence I asked my wife to drive me. She felt compelled to mention our projected journey to Mr. Heilanstalt. He expressed an irrepressible urge to see something of the Tinieblan interior and proffered his services as chauffeur. I reminded him of his lectures. He reminded me that at our National University professors have no more compunction about cutting class than students do. The three of us departed Ciudad Tinieblas at 7:00 A.M. on the 7th in Sig’s air-conditioned Puma.
The arrangement turned out to be a good deal more agreeable than I had expected. I was able to sleep while Sig and Liz amused themselves with conversation, which penetrated my slumber soothingly like the chirpings of a bluejay answered by the cooings of a dove. We were almost to Belém when Sig swerved me off the back seat and Liz well over toward his corner of the front to avoid a crew-cut, crucifix-bearing priest and straggle of brown peasants who had preempted our lane of the highway, and by then it was lunchtime anyway. A generous ration of chicken rice and fried plantain and three bottles of icy Cortes Beer—taken in an open-air but trellised restaurant opposite the town hall and its “BELÉM IS WITH YOU GENGHIS” banner—put me in such good humor that I bent my rule on not discussing my work enough to tell the story of Great-great-grandmother Raquel’s recruitment for the bed of General Epifanio Mojón. The event took place more than a century ago but no more than a hundred meters from where we were sitting. Sig responded with the news that he had shelved his Carlo Snyde satire to take notes for a “big book, a ‘nonfiction novel’ about Tinieblas and General Manduco.” He meant, he said, to elbow himself a place at the trough between Mailer and Capote. (Good manners forbade my glossing that since he lacked the patience for scholarship and the imagination for art, he was well suited to a hybrid form that, like the Mule, is sturdy, gross, insensitive to punishment, and sterile.) Did I know, he went on brightly, that the General’s brother was carving himself a considerable. fief out of the peasant squatting of this very (Belém) region? Or that a Costaguanan priest—imagine a Catholic country importing priests!—was making the first peeps of protest against Manduco by organizing the peasants? I explained how we Tinieblans, being the most civilized and skeptical of nations, imported priests from fanatical Costaguana and credulous Spain, while exporting con men throughout the hemisphere and world, and we continued this pleasant and mildly stimulating chitchat for the remainder of our journey, with Liz contributing a titbit now and then but mainly beaming on like the proud mother of two clever, well-behaved young sons.
We slept that night at the Mituco Guest House, Liz and I in the same room and bed for the first time in years, and here the languor of the trip, the justified surcease from trying labor, the aromatic breathings of the island, and the salt freshness of Pacific breezes contributed first to a restful sleep, then to a mutual awakening and some hesitant caresses, and finally, incredibly, to a mute and infinitely tender episode of love in which months of conflict and resentment were (for the moment anyway) swept off like wisps of smoke. Later Sig and Liz saw sights while I, gorged with well-being, pored through the Registry to find and Minox-photograph the record of the trial.
The point, honored examiners, to this charming preamble to the documentation of a piece of text is that conventional research is a thousand—no, a million times easier and more pleasant than my revolutionary method. If I rely mainly on spirit interview, it is not (as Dr. Vertilanz’s slimy charge asserted) because I am too lazy to check documents. No; much the reverse, it is because I spare myself no labor and no risk in my commitment to the advancement of science. If you have got that through your heads, I shall now present the charges against Rebeca:
That the defendant, Rebeca Fuertes, did, on 6th June, 1894, criminally and with evil intent bewitch, charm, and enchant out of all sentient concern for his own best interest Señor Don Patricio Garza Cortada, and, further, that, during the period of 6th June, 1894, to 6th June, 1899, the defendant made use of powers and accomplishments vouchsafed her by the Prince of Darkness to extract from the aforementioned Señor Garza bed, board, material goods, and affection, to the grave detriment of the aforementioned Señor Garza’s spiritual, physical, and financial well-being and in heinous contravention of the laws of God and the Republic of Tinieblas;
That the defendant, Rebeca Fuertes, did, during the period of August, 1914, to February, 1917, visit upon the mind and body of Señor Dr. Azael Burlando spells, enchantments, and bewitchments, thereby compelling the aforementioned Dr. Burlando to furnish her bed, board, material goods, and affection, and further causing him to contrive, sign, and certify instruments ceding to her and her issue material goods of high value, to wit, a large dwelling formerly the property of Señor Don Patricio Garza Cortada and twenty shares of common stock of the Mituco Company of Infinite Progress, and that the defendant performed these actions knowingly and with evil intent to the detriment of the aforementioned Dr. Burlando’s spiritual, physical, and financial well-being, to the prejudice of the financial well-being of the aforementioned Dr. Burlando’s legitimate spouse and heir, in deep and open threat to the peace and public order of the Independent District of Mituco, and in profound contravention of the laws of God and the Republic of Tinieblas;
That the defendant, Rebeca Fuertes, did, on or about 12th February, 1917, knowingly, willingly, and criminally consort, copulate, and have sexual congress with His Satanic Majesty, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, and/or one or other of his deputies, ministers, affiliated demons, etc., for the hideous purpose and with the resultant effect of conceiving issue, thereby to defraud the aforementioned Dr. Azael Burlando, the Mituco Company of Infinite Progress, and the citizens and government of the Independent District of Mituco, and in flagrant contravention of the laws of God and the Republic of Tinieblas;
That the defendant, Rebeca Fuertes, did, on the evening of 12th November, 1917, knowingly, willingly, and with criminal intent make use of powers and enchantments vouchsafed her by infernal forces to murder, assassinate, and deprive of earthly existence the aforementioned Dr. Azael Burlando, to the disruption of the peace and public order of the Independent District of Mituco and in revolting contravention of the laws of God and the Republic of Tinieblas;
And that the defendant, Rebeca Fuertes, did, during the period of 13th-14th November, 1917, knowingly, willingly, and criminally perform service as the agent of His Satanic Majesty, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, causing storms, hurricanoes, and tempests to blast and buffet the Island of Mituco, aiding diabolic officers in the collection of the immortal soul of the aforementioned Dr. Azael Burlando and the abstracting of his body, to the grave prejudice of the life, health, and property of the citizens of the Independent District of Mituco and in fearsome contravention of the laws of God and the Republic of Tinieblas.
26. Her other children and her maid
Following Rebeca’s flight with Leon, the imaginative mituqueños decided that she was not just a witch but a German spy as well, and that she had escaped from the island on board the German surface raider Wolf. This famous predator had a large wardrobe of sheep’s clothing—phony funnels, movable masts, collapsible cargo crates—and hinged steel lips to hide her six-inch fangs. She had denned from time to time in Tinieblan waters, and the rumor went that Rebeca had somehow managed to get a message to Kapitän Nerger (then nipping nitrate carriers off the approaches to the Panama Canal), and that he had brought his vessel to Mituco and taken Rebeca northwest into Mexico. Acting on this misinformation, the Chinese maid decamped Mituco de Tierra Firme in the wrong direction, taking León’s brother and twin sister with her.
They got as far as Puerto Guineo in the Republic of Ticamala, where they remained until 1924, when the Chinese woman was killed accidentally. The little girl was taken in by strangers. Young Nicolas set out to find his mother, but every step took him farther away. By age fifteen he had wandered into the backlands of Nicaragua and joined Augusto Sandino’s guetrilleros.
My uncle Nicolas participated with Fuertes vigor in raids on Jinotega, Chinandega, Matagalpa, Guanacastillo, and San Francisco de Carnicero. The conjunction in him of Manchu and Mojón genes made him a polished executioner, a Harvey Cushing of the machete with all the cortes (this useful and hard-working word means “court” as well as “cuts”) in his repertoire: the chaleco or vest cut, wbich lopped arms at the shoulders; the cumbo or gourd, where the top of the skull was sliced off to expose the brain, so that the victim died in horrible convulsions; the “bloomers”—legs chopped at middle thigh; the corbata or necktie-throat slashed and tongue pulled through; the cigarro, where the victim got his penis for a stogy. In these rigorous and heady sports he forgot his loveless infancy and the mother who abandoned him, the onus of mixed blood, the homeless scavenging in hostile lands, the loneliness and terror. Unless he lied to me, he was the happiest of all the Fuertes—for a few years at least, until the morning when he blundered whistling on a gringo ambush and three swift tongues of flame translated him into a notch on the pistol butt of Lieutenant (later General) Victor Steel, USMC.
27. A particularly blatant extortion caper
The so-called Tinieblan Dispute of 1898, which culminated in the Day-Cornudo Treaty and the founding of the Reservation, is treated cursorily in the standard U.S. texts. Ezra Banner Swart (American Diplomacy [New Haven, 1939]), for example, devotes two paragraphs to showing a gringo Saint George, acting in utter piety and altruism, rescuing a Tinieblan maiden from a Teutonic dragon. More recently, Stephen Lamont (The Foreign Policy of the American Nation [New York, 1955]) allows that in the Tinieblan Dispute and other, similar incidents between 1895 and 1904, the Monroe Doctrine, originally enunciated to deter European intervention, became perverted into an instrument of United States intervention, but he is, nonetheless, persuaded that the benefits to Tinieblas greatly outweighed the injuries. A less sanguine view is held by the few Tinieblans who have written on the matter (e.g., Eugenio Lobo, Infamias del imperialismo yanqui [Ciudad Tinieblas, 1951]), but their pretensions are more polemical than scholarly. The bare facts are available to anyone who cares to consult the newspapers of the day, and I give them in my text. As far as the long-term implications of the incident for Tinieblas and the U.S. are concerned, the subject awaits the attentions of a disciplined monographer.
The building of the Reservation is heroically retold in “Bastion in the Tropics,” a pamphlet put out in 1959 by the Public Information Office, United States Hemispheric Interdiction Team, Fort Shafter. The same document gives copious information concerning the base’s facilities, most of which I have seen with my own eyes. Since 1947 Tinieblans have been allowed to visit the Reservation Club as accompanied guests and to ease their bowels and bladders in receptacles formerly reserved for U.S. citizens, but the double wage scale remains in effect.
Rebeca Fuertes refuses, for reasons that the text makes clear, to comment on her sojourn in the Reservation. I have not yet been able to contact León Fuertes; in any case, he would surely not remember much. I have relied, therefore, on the testimony of Ned C. Cod, whom I interviewed at Sunburst during the first week of November, 1973.
Sergeant Cod served out his thirty years’ enlistment in the U.S. Army, retired in 1928, and “died” four years later during the Bonus March on Washington). He then applied for War and was accepted. War is organized in the other world much like professional sport in this one. (Astral Sport, on the other hand, has a distinctly amateur flavor.) There are an Eastern and a Western League, each of which fields six armies. (Plans are now being considered to expand the leagues to eight armies each.) Armies fight scheduled campaigns on home and away battlefields, and league leaders meet regularly for the Championship. Participants are traded back and forth; soldiers are advanced and demoted; commanders are appointed and relieved. No spectators are permitted, however, and the battlefields are kept rigorously free of noncombatants. Since war, like love, is a basic human pursuit, War is an original Astral Activity, but all combat is conducted with pre-gunpowder weapons, the Director of Astral Activities agreeing with Colonel T. E. Lawrence that the humanity went out of war after the Battle of Crécy.
On being accepted for War, Cod went to the Azure Invincibles of the Western League (John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Commanding) and was assigned to his old arm, the cavalry. He has fought with distinction in two Championships and at present serves in a troop commanded by George S. Patton, an officer who, on recruitment, demanded general rank but whom the army commander has judged incompetent to direct large formations. Cod remembered Rebeca and León perfectly and spoke of them with great affection.
28. This bit of parody
Issues from the union of two of Mr. S. Heilanstalt’s current interests: a survey course in English poetry that he is offering at the National University, and a study of Tinieblan history that he has undertaken in connection with his new book. The verses were born in my living room at eleven or so on the evening of Wednesday, 20th March, 1974, after a gestation of about three minutes. Sig and my wife, Elizabeth (whom he has taken as an assistant for his courses), came in after his class at about 10:30. Liz had forgot her key; I bad to open for them—Sig instantly began pumping me about the DayCornudo Treaty. He had, it came out later, been discussing Coleridge that same evening, and when I began describing the making of the Reservation, he smacked his forehead with his palm, plucked a ballpoint from his pocket, and started scribbling beside the headline (“PRIEST BOLTS WITH CO-OP CASH”) on a copy of the tabloid Informe Trópico that had been lying near him on the couch and that I have before me.
