by Mark Helprin
Santos-Ott dressed in white summer uniforms or, in winter, in a long military coat. His portraits were executed only when he was in this coat, so that even in late November as we sat in class fanning ourselves with our exit cards he looked down upon us coolly, with not a bead of sweat, absolutely motionless in the ten-kilo coat. It had two rows of buttons and a black collar with silver oak leaves. I know, because I stared at it through a thousand boring lessons. It was monumental, and he himself was tall. His peaked hat, with a visor and many more leaves, helped to make him seem like a giant.
I used to see the coat also in the pictures of him in La Prensa Color. It was not quite tan and not quite gray but, rather, the color of a Weimaraner dog. This, and the fact that Santos-Ott himself had absolutely blue eyes, gave rise to a universal comparison that never could be spoken but that never needed to be.
Though Santos-Ott had the typical dictatorial attribute of always receiving flowers from exemplary little girls in the national dress, everyone in the country looked in the little girls’ eyes and could see that, even at four or five years of age, thinking that they might trip or hand over the bouquet incorrectly, they were numb with fear.
My teacher dared not criticize him. My father did not speak ill of him even at home. He seemed to me to be like God. I imagined that his children, if he had them (we never knew), would be more frightened than anyone else. Until the revolution, in all my life I had never heard a single soul but one speak against him—no strong man, intellectual, priest, or peasant, not even foreigners, who soon learned to bite their tongues. Only my sister, Claudia.
I WILL KEEP FOREVER and with great affection a vision of her, at seventeen, on a fall day when the air was so cold and clear that we had to wear sweaters. Our father had gone to Norway and brought back sweaters that he said were from a special batch made for the Norwegian royal family: because he was a cotton broker, he had contact with textile manufacturers and weavers, and we always had the best clothing, although it almost never fit well.
Claudia was tall and had not yet filled out. Because she moved her long limbs as if they were already heavier, she was awkward. Sometimes she would become so frustrated with herself that she would cry, and then my mother would take her in her arms and tell her that it would be just a matter of time until everything came into balance.
Her hair was the color of white gold, her eyes bluer than the eyes of Santos-Ott. The boys in her form shunned her, merely because they imagined that she would not even consider them. But anyone who cared to look closely could have known how lonely she was, for although in repose she was formidable and off-putting, as soon as she moved or spoke her animation and charm turned the burnished colors into soft allure, as if she were overjoyed just by the fact that someone was talking to her. At seven years her junior, I thought of her as a grown woman.
I remember that the pattern of her sweater was entrancing, especially as her long shining hair moved across it in soft sheaves, parting here and there, so that you wanted to brush it aside to see how the animals were placed in the flowers. A band of white and blue crossed the top of the yoke, and the yoke itself was so resolute, deep, and detailed that it seemed like a patch of mountainside. Mine was different. It had a herd of reindeer with a forest of brown antlers floating above them.
In 1932, a group of colonels on the Altiplano attempted a coup. It didn’t make sense to start a coup from the Altiplano, and their efforts brought them a short civil war in which they were quickly driven into their sanctuaries. Even on their own ground they behaved like amateurs, and when the army closed in on the provincial capital, they fled on foot. Santos-Ott, commanding his own troops, had known their character. Anticipating that they would flee, he waited with two massive cavalry columns on a field between some high ridges along the route the plotters had hoped to use for their escape.
This became the Battle of Rosario, in which two thousand disorganized, retreating rebels were met by eight thousand men on horse. The action was much like that of an exercise at the military academy. The cavalry made diagrammatically perfect sweeps and charges on just the right lines, with little worry about being shot off their mounts, as only half their opponents were armed and those who were armed had little ammunition. The newspapers spoke of a pitched battle that had lasted for days, but still the truth got out. There were almost eight thousand survivors, the victors. They told their families. Their families had tongues.
Santos-Ott was quick to realize that those men who had been trapped between stone cliffs and ranks of cavalry and slaughtered at leisure over a period of ten or twelve hours had presented his opponents with two thousand martyrs. After dark, cavalry units had crisscrossed the field, crushing the wounded under their horses’ hooves, until the drop in temperature relieved them of that task. Patrols circled the battleground to prevent families from coming to the aid of the defeated, and to shoot anyone alive enough to move. The victorious army made camp on a plateau not too far away, and a thousand bonfires kept them warm as those wounded rebels who still hung on slowly froze to death. The image that captured the public imagination was of men dying of cold while looking at the glow of the orderly fires around which their enemies were drinking hot tea.
Though Santos-Ott knew that two thousand martyrs are not nearly as effective as one, he moved to protect himself. Abandoning his pride and violating the tenets of dictatorship, he appealed to the public in a carefully mounted political offensive. For us, this rarity consisted of an army lieutenant colonel addressing the assembled student body of our school. One morning, a month after the battle, he appeared at the lectern of the assembly hall and nervously tried to assure us that everything was fine: the government was not merely firm—and correct—but desperately necessary, and good in its heart.
Though he wore the same kind of tentlike coat as did Santos-Ott, and the same kind of hat, and was roughly the same age, he had the face not of a hardened soldier or a cold political functionary but of a tobacconist who has spent the greater part of his life sitting in a kiosk that afforded him most of the sorrows and none of the glories of a man who is shot from a cannon.
Perhaps the lieutenant colonel would not have been intimidated by guns and sabers, but he was intimidated by a sea of children’s faces. The adolescents and younger children stared at him with a kind of lunatic freshness, and with a skepticism born of freedom and almost total ignorance. Even in our authoritarian school, where the nuns were always rapping us on the knuckles, we moved from place to place in an uncontrollable tide, numerous fat children were always unable to stifle their giggles, and we had half a dozen semiprofessional anarchists. How does one deal with untutored spirits? Teachers have difficulty. An army lieutenant colonel was at sea.
When he stood to address us he had the cautious, amazed air of someone in a monkey house. Though each child was confined to a seat, there was so much writhing and fidgeting that it was like a storm blowing through the jungle.
He introduced himself, and stated that he had come to stress the need for vigilance after the Battle of Rosario. For political reasons, enemies of the state would seize the opportunity to spread falsehoods, but he had come to describe the incident solely according to the facts.
Then he began his falsified account of the battle—falsified, we knew, because it was exactly parallel to the descriptions in La Prensa. The more he went on, the more relaxed he became. In describing the maneuvers and their classical antecedents (Santos-Ott was a great admirer of Napoleon) he won the majority of the boys over to his side, as an engineer might have in explaining a marvelous machine. I myself have always been strongly drawn to objective beauty, and I delighted in the decisiveness and power of which he spoke and which he claimed to represent. And we, after all, the boys of a private academy, were the stuff that made up the officer corps.
When he finished, he was confident enough to ask for questions. Indeed, boys as young as eight were jumping in their seats, wanting to pose questions about flying wedges, crossfires, saber charges, and what hav
e you.
The girls, however, had not been enthralled. In their stubborn and infuriating way, they were undoubtedly thinking about sewing or pastries. I wondered how they were content to dismiss things of great excitement, how they could insist upon looking at the world as if the most important part of it were the little kingdoms of which they were the queens. Nonetheless, my sister, who was in the next-to-last form, seemed surprisingly agitated. From the way she was moving around in her chair, and from her expression, I was sure that she was about to speak, but she did not raise her hand. I suspect that she felt obliged to stand and question him on behalf of those who had died. Everyone thought she was hard and pure, and she often rose to the part with great courage.
Mind you, I was not analytical then, not capable of understanding what moved my sister to be as impetuous, outspoken, and daring as often she was (she would, for example, at great risk to her standing among the teachers, flay alive any nun who dared to come to class unprepared). But I have remembered, and as the years pass, even though I have—I think—long understood her, I am surprised. For me, the power of recollection has always seemed sadly and inversely related to the power of action. My memories grow more intense, as if they had a life of their own. And if I close my eyes I see the pattern of her sweater in the most exact and luminescent detail, the way you see something bright that you have apprehended from the dark. I see her hair shining under the light. I have trouble recalling her voice, at seventeen, but the words are there, exactly.
ALTHOUGH THREE HOURS in the sea then seemed as long and expansive as the years now seem short, the weeks of our vacation passed quickly. The Mar Nueva could have been another planet—a sea planet—where no unpleasant things existed, where you didn’t have to study logarithms or dress in a suit, where your parents were always nearby but you were old enough to go off by yourself, where gravity was annulled for much of the day in astoundingly transparent water that, either blue or green, glowed as brightly as an electric light.
In February, when the cities were unbearably hot and strangely empty and yachts glided across the Mar Nueva as quietly as moths, I determined that I would help my father struggle against the vagaries of his profession by providing food for the table. I decided to become a fisherman, and much to my own surprise, for I have never had much confidence in my own resolve, I did.
I fished single-mindedly from dawn to late afternoon. Though I knew that my parents and even Claudia were as disturbed by my devotion as they were impressed, I aimed to impress them until they had forgotten what had made them uneasy.
On the very first day I caught three bluefin, of which we ate one and gave away two. When I got better, and could cast as far as a grown man, when I knew what kind of bait to use with different tides, and when the fish were running, how they ran, how to drop a hook right in the middle of churning water far offshore, and how to get a fish in fast enough so that I could hook another from the same school, I did so well that my father had to take me into town every night to sell my catch.
At first we stood by our car in great embarrassment, with the fish resting in a box of ice propped up against the running board. It took a long time to sell them off, and my father didn’t like all the driving, so we struck a deal with a man who had a stall in the market. Every day at four o’clock he arrived in a truck that steamed with dry ice, and pushed a wheelbarrow to the pier, where my catch was strung, fresh and alive, riding the promise of the waves but never able to break loose.
I provided the main course almost every night, and with the money I earned supplying fish to a market strained by the needs of the summer people I provided the rest of our food, too. I was sinfully proud of myself. In the long hours I spent casting from the pier I frequently imagined that every girl I liked in school was somehow able to see me, and I often moved as if I were fishing in front of an audience. I was ashamed if I failed to cast beyond the point where I could actually see my lure as it splashed into the waves, and delighted if I could throw it temporarily into oblivion. The critical observers I made up for myself slowly forced me into expertise, and I caught an overwhelming amount of fish. I remember that often when I whipped the lure off one of my long surf-casting rods I looked ahead nobly and said, “Rosa!” Rosa was a little girl who was not very pretty, I loved her like crazy for years, and she grew up to be extraordinarily beautiful.
I was at the pier every day from dawn till four. After the fish man came I brought the money to my father and took the best fish I had caught into the kitchen, drank some fruit juice, and went into the ocean until dinner. The waves in late afternoon have an exhausted quality. I have noticed in many places all around the world that beaches empty at about four. Everyone has had enough, even the ocean. The light is too bright, the wind too steady. But underwater it was the same: the temperature was constant, the light was only slightly different, and the fish did not go back to their villas to shower and eat cherry ices.
SOLDIERS APPEARED in the bungalows. My father had been right about them: they did have rifles. When I looked in their direction, they didn’t look back. Except for an officer who came out of the bushes and asked me what I was doing, who my father was, and how long we had lived there, they did mainly what I did: they scanned the sea. And the officer had refused to tell me who lived in the huge villa sheltered among the trees.
Soon I was as indifferent to the guards as they were to me. In the capital every other doorway was guarded by a detachment of infantry, and soldiers with rifles slung across their chests stood on street corners all day long looking at the women who passed by. I concentrated on fishing.
Claudia hardly ever came to the pier. My father visited often to check the fish, to sit and talk, and to bring me pitchers of ice water. Even my mother, who walked in tiny steps and hated to go through the bushes, came to visit a few times. But Claudia was in a sulk because she longed for the social life of the town—a sun-bleached extension of social life in the capital, which, though much less formal, was just as self-serving. I think she wanted the boys who had just left school, or were perhaps a little older than that (though not by much), to lose their breath as she passed by. She wanted to be noticed, and, of course, she would have been: she would have been a sensation. But in that regard my parents were unambitious. They never went out, they didn’t sit in cafés, they had a small circle of friends—cotton brokers, unknown journalists, businessmen who didn’t do too well, and some people whose strength and troubles prevented them from settling into any one profession. And relatives—my mother’s brother was an inventor who invented a thousand things, not a single one of which was ever patented or produced (who needs a shoehorn that doubles as a drinking straw?).
My parents were grateful that Claudia was still with us, and they patiently endured her outbursts. After all, she was almost eighteen, and would soon be marrying. “She is undergoing a painful transition,” my mother said. I used to stare at Claudia and wonder about this transition. She spent so much of the day reading Russian novels that her ears were red where she had rested her head on her hands. Reading in winter always seems to me to be rather businesslike; in summer, it puts you in a trance and makes your bones ache.
Anyway, one day in the third week of February—the seventeenth, to be precise—I was sitting at the end of the pier. There was a breeze, and the waves were rolling in slowly. They hardly broke, except on the beach itself, where they quietly tucked themselves in. It was before lunch, and the sun was high. I was casting into the wind, trying to close in on a big school of fish that had me praying for them to veer shoreward. These were mackerel, which belonged in the open sea, and the water around them looked like the rapids in a river. They had no business where they were. They should have been out deeper in the blue, and as they passed inshore I was able to cast my lines farther than ever before. My four lures fell short of the fish, but I was enthralled anyway, and I shouted into the wind for them to come closer.
They didn’t. They vanished beneath the swells, leaving me with beautifully taut lin
es drawn by the power of the sea. I turned around. Right next to me, practically on my heels, was an old man dressed in sandals, a bathing suit, an open shirt, and a peasant’s straw hat.
I almost fell into the water. “Sorry,” he said. “You couldn’t hear me because of the wind, and I didn’t want to interrupt you when you were going great guns. I saw that school, too. I thought I’d come over and see if you could pull one in.”
I knew I had a volatile imagination. I was the one who claimed in near hysteria to have seen a prehistoric bird. Still, I was terribly afraid that this old man, who was unusually tall and wore impenetrable sunglasses, was actually Santos-Ott. I wanted to run home and say that he was Santos-Ott, and to be convinced of it, but for him not to be Santos-Ott.
How could it have been Santos-Ott? The soldiers were still in their bungalows and he was alone with me. He wasn’t in a general’s white summer uniform, and he seemed shy.
I think I knew that he was indeed Santos-Ott, but if I had admitted it to myself I would have fainted, so I pretended that he wasn’t. This is just an old man who’s going to go on and on about fishing, I thought, as deep within me alarm bells were going off, flames were licking the back of my lungs, and choruses of the damned were singing, “Caudillo! Caudillo! Caudillo!”
