The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers

by Anton Piatigorsky

  Rafael sits stiff and straight before the Bunnell sounder, awaiting the evening’s final telegraph. It’s cooling outside, with a mild breeze rolling north across the hills from the Caribbean, but the thick stone building traps the island’s tropical heat. Although he wears a heavy coat and refuses to loosen his necktie, he does not sweat, nor does his posture slacken with fatigue. The nub of his fountain pen presses against his paper at the optimal angle for penmanship. The boy grins and waits. The message will come when it comes. No need to fidget or complain. He is capable of sitting motionless all night if it comes to that.

  In the distance, lounging on the church steps in San Cristóbal’s main square, a man plays three breathy notes on his accordion. He stops, regroups, and plays the same notes again. The cicadas halt their screeching in wonder at the unidentifiable bird.

  Rafael continues to wait. Five minutes, seven, ten—his pen never moves. When the main line relay fires, the local battery is engaged and the Bunnell sounder’s brass armature suddenly knocks off an audible series of dots and dashes. He jots down the code without hesitation. Señor Leger, who’s spent the past half-hour bent over his desk on the other side of the municipal telegraph office, adjusting springs on a dysfunctional relay, now stands and approaches his young apprentice, peering over Rafael’s shoulder to read the Morse code message taking shape on the paper before him.

  With a sharp memory and almost a year’s worth of experience, Rafael has no trouble converting the rapid code into letters and words virtually in tandem with their sending. The telegraph operator at Santo Domingo’s Hacienda Ministry is obviously an experienced sender, uniform with his dots and dashes and spacing between words. A good, clear transmission like this one makes Rafael’s job so much easier; he barely has to think. Only a small part of his brain registers the message’s content: under order of president caceres stop begin construction of high road stop local labour required by min of hacienda velaquez stop. Mostly, Rafael is concerned with the numbers of dots versus dashes in the transmission as a whole. It’s imperative that the former surpasses the latter. More dots per day is a good sign, a fortunate omen, and no oranges will need to be crushed to rectify the situation. More dashes, of course, is a bad portent and could be quite serious; for every three dashes in excess of dots, an unblemished orange will have to be crushed, its seeds removed and pocketed, sprinkled across Constitution Street or any number of locations, but only in the moonlight when no one’s watching. Even then, there’s still no guarantee the curse against him will be voided. Right now the day’s tally gives the dots a slim lead over the dashes, but it’s too precarious a lead to guarantee victory. This final message of the day could tip the balance. Rafael’s heart thuds in his chest. It will come down to the last letters tonight.

  With the message almost finished, Leger leans over the table and shakes his head. “Look at that,” he says, grinning with unrestrained pleasure. “Velázquez has done it.”

  “Mmm,” mumbles Rafael, his pen still moving. His boss, who has been baking all day in his formal shirt, smells as ripe as an overworked donkey, but Rafael will not let himself be distracted by Señor Leger’s pungency or by the conspicuous wet patches stretching from his armpits down his flanks, no matter how disgusting. His mind is focused and racing: dots plus seven, plus six, plus five, plus six, plus five, plus four, plus three …

  “And it’s confirmed by President Cáceres.”

  “Yes,” says Rafael. The body of the message is complete, but still there’s the sender’s initials, which will determine the entire day’s tally, since the dots retain only the slimmest of leads.

  “Virtually guaranteed,” says Leger.

  The sender’s signature taps into the relay, through the sounder. Dash dot dash dot. Pause. Dash dot dot dot. The sounder stills and the gentle clacking of the brass armature is replaced by silence.

  JB, writes Rafael. He flips the paper, glances at the table watch, marks his initials and the time, his posture still perfect, his brow and neck clear of perspiration, but his lip imperceptibly twitching with the excitement of the dramatic finish. He can hardly believe that the entire day’s tally has come down to a final letter B, and that the dash and three dots signifying that letter confirmed a net plus advantage of two dots for the day. He presses his lips together and grins at the good omen.

  Señor Leger picks up the completed message and rereads it to make sure he hasn’t been deceived, that the Minister of Hacienda for the Dominican Republic really did just order the construction of a high road from Santo Domingo to Azua, which will pass through San Cristóbal and guarantee numerous well-paid, local jobs for at least a year. “Cáceres is a real leader,” Leger declares, slapping the paper against the palm of his hand. “For once in this damn country, we’ve got an honest president.”

  Rafael nods, but he isn’t listening to his boss. He’s busy rethinking his future in light of the good omen. Maybe he doesn’t have stomach cancer, which has been his vague worry for most of the past month, not that he’s shown any symptoms. This omen could mean good health, although it’s impossible to interpret its significance precisely. It might also denote a joyous event for this evening or tomorrow.

  Leger takes the message across the room and files it into Juan Piña’s box. Half the telegraphs in this small rural office are destined for Señor Piña, the government’s informal contact in San Cristóbal, the man in charge of executing all state requests, including this present command to gather labourers for the road construction.

  “You’ll probably take that new road to the capital in the spring,” Leger tells his apprentice. “By then the whole trip should take no longer than a couple of hours.” He removes his suit jacket from its hanger and slips it over his damp shirt, pulling his cuffs out of the sleeves.

  “Not necessarily,” says Rafael, who remains seated at the telegraph desk. “The journey will still be unpredictable without a bridge.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” agrees Leger. “But a Haina bridge will come in due time. I wouldn’t put it past Cáceres and Velázquez to have one built by the end of next summer. That’s the kind of men they are.” He grabs his hat and an iron key ring from off a hook, and puts the hat on his head.

  Now Rafael stands and straightens his tie, although it’s perfectly straight already and needs no adjusting. He runs his hands over his trousers. His back remains as stiff when he’s standing as it does when he’s sitting. His clothes are as clean and pressed as they were first thing this morning, before the heat set in. “Well,” he says.

  Señor Leger smiles at the boy and wipes his brow with a handkerchief. “Good work, Trujillo. As usual.”

  “Thank you, sir,” says Rafael, nodding and returning his boss’s smile.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Yes. Nine o’clock.”

  “I’m sure,” says Leger, smirking slightly, since the boy hasn’t been late even once in over a year.

  “Good night, sir.”

  Señor Leger opens the door for his apprentice and lets Rafael precede him into the dusty street. Outside, Leger pulls the creaky wooden door closed. He turns the key and shakes it once to ensure it’s truly locked. He faces Rafael and taps his hat in parting. “Good night, then,” he says, slipping the key ring into his pocket.

  They walk in opposite directions. Rafael’s commute is a straight shot down Constitution to the town’s main square, where his family’s big red house sits across from the Church of San Cristóbal. It’s a three-minute journey at most. But instead of heading home, Rafael turns off the main thoroughfare and walks towards Padre Ayala on a short, unnamed side street packed with ramshackle bohíos on either side. Each makeshift home is roughly constructed of stripped palm planks and cabbage-palm thatch roofs, and the shacks’ bright paint jobs of red, blue, green, and yellow do little to mask the essential poverty of their crowded inhabitants. Dark-skinned kids in torn trousers yell at each other in the street or run circles in concentrated pursuit of some fantastic end. Rafael
kicks at the dust and searches for any metallic shine. Nothing here but tiny rocks. Smoke drifts up from an open kitchen behind an adjacent bohío and the air smells like roasted red beans. He turns down Padre Ayala.

  Maybe Uncle Plinio will let me keep this tie, thinks Rafael as he fingers its smooth silk and makes sure it’s still tight around his neck. Or maybe he’s bought a new suit jacket for me. Either addition to his wardrobe would be news good enough to befit the omen. But Rafael knows he can’t really predict it. The omen might have nothing to do with his clothing or his health. It might just signify that María waits for him by her house right now with the lascivious intent of leading him into the cornfield. No, omens cannot be predicted.

  Rafael is enjoying his stroll in the cooling air, but he would prefer to be trotting down Padre Ayala on his father’s pinto mare. It took him hours of practice in the tall sugar cane and along the bank of the Nigua River to master the art of riding with a perfectly flat back, given the horse’s jumpy gait and its frequent missteps. Walking down Padre Ayala can be dignified, of course, but it will always lack the gallantry that every girl, no matter how impoverished or dark skinned, adores and desires. When a man travels by foot, he lacks chivalrous comportment, thinks this sixteen-year-old boy, which is the crucial component to success.

  Chivalry made the difference last summer, when Rafael started courting María. He presented himself as the perfect image of a man, stopping his father’s mare with a tug of the reins and a low grunt, dismounting in one fluid motion, and handing the astonished girl an overflowing armful of bougainvillea. The grand clatter of spurs on boots, the strut in his step, and the tilt of his hat—yes, a real caudillo. And now Rafael recalls María’s plump, dark ass, his delicate first touch as he recited some florid verse Uncle Teodulo had him memorize—yes, yes—and then his second, firm squeeze, delivered no later than midnight that night, as María lay sprawled on the dirt in the corn with her skirt hiked up, her panties by her ankles. María. So perfect. A dark indio’s sweet molasses skin. He has taken this detour onto Padre Ayala with the hope of spying her full frame through the front window of her family’s bohío.

  Rafael rubs his fingers through his wavy, oiled hair, slowing his pace as he approaches the girl’s hut. Although the window is small and the daylight is beginning to wane, he can distinguish a human form inside. He concentrates his energy into a penetrating stare, his eyes dark and full of purpose, a lecherous grin poking out from the corners of his otherwise tight mouth. His fingers tingle with anticipation. In the orange light of dusk, he can’t discern any features, but the person inside the little blue bohío could very well be his conquest. He slows and shortens his steps. The figure disappears behind the wall. Was that her, and has she seen him? The front door opens and the threshold fills with a large man’s frame—Fernando, María’s brother. He’s tall and fat, sporting a tapered and waxed moustache much like President Cácares’s, and he’s gnawing on a long root.

  Rafael nods a perfunctory hello and quickens his step. This Fernando’s got murder in his eye. My reputation precedes me, the boy thinks, with considerable pride. Hey, Fernando, he wants to say, put a fence around your sister if you don’t want her flowers picked. Chuckling, the boy taps the thickening fuzz on his upper lip with three extended fingers and peeks over his shoulder to see the large brother, still in the doorway, glaring. Rafael resists laughing and maintains his composure. An impotent sibling is almost as good as a cuckolded boyfriend.

  He continues ambling down Padre Ayala, searching for other young girls whose treats he might sample at a later date, when his eye catches a silvery object sparkling in the dust. He bolts towards it. He’s still a few feet away when he recognizes the distinctive colours of a Pabst Blue Ribbon. He picks up the bottle cap and turns it over, assessing its condition. There’s the usual bend from where it was pried off the bottle, but that’s easy to fix. Otherwise, no scuffs. The paint is intact and the metal is complete. He takes out his handkerchief from an inside coat pocket and stands in the dusty street for a while, polishing the cap into a brilliant shine and surveying his work when he’s done. Yes, it’s a fine specimen. His sixty-third Blue Ribbon—a slip back into odds. That, of course, changes everything.

  He cuts off Padre Ayala and heads towards his home, forgetting the fury of brother Fernando, María’s chunky body and smooth skin, and even the omen of dots and dashes. This bottle cap must be integrated into his collection right away. Appropriate adjustments must be made. A failure to do so properly will cancel out the telegraphic omen, replacing that good portent with a violent and destructive one, which couldn’t be cured by crushed oranges or sprinkled seeds, or any means other than old-fashioned patience, fortitude, and endurance. The prospect of that failure makes him feel sick. A bad omen could mean cancer, tuberculosis, disasters of human or divine origin.

  Rafael hurries along a side road darkened by the shade of an enormous mahogany. When he reaches Constitution, he’s only a few feet from his house.

  His father, Don Pepé, and his uncle Plinio are sitting and drinking beer in rocking chairs on the front porch, Plinio holding today’s copy of Listín Diario, which he’s had imported from Santo Domingo, as he does at least twice a week. There are only a handful of people in all of San Cristóbal who read the newspaper on such a regular basis. Don Pepé stands as Rafael opens the gate and hurries towards the front door.

  “Hey, Rafael,” Pepé calls, the anger in his tone undermined by a grin he can’t quite suppress. “Come here, son.”

  Rafael fights the urge to barge past his father and uncle, to hide himself in his bedroom where he can get to work on his collection. He steps onto the porch and stands before his father, his eyes lowered respectfully, his hands pressed to his sides, and his back straight.

  Don Pepé grabs Rafael’s tie and yanks it out of hiding from beneath his waistcoat. The boy winces at the affront. Ties do not look proper hanging outside waistcoats.

  “Is this the one?” Pepé asks Plinio.

  “Yes,” says Plinio as he rocks slowly in his chair, his fat hand resting on the curve of his protruding belly.

  “Rafael?”

  “Papa.”

  “Do I have to tell you this?”

  “No.”

  Plinio slurps from his bottle of St. Pauli Niña and suppresses his own smile. He burps and hiccups, blowing gas from the corner of his crooked lips. This is ridiculous, thinks Rafael. They’re not even angry at me.

  “Take it off, Rafael.”

  Rafael’s shoulders sag as he removes the elegant striped tie from around his neck. “I’m sorry, Uncle Plinio,” he whispers, as his heavy cheeks dip into a frown. He hands the silken treasure to its rightful owner.

  “You have to ask me, boy,” says Plinio. “I spent half my morning looking for it.” Plinio folds the tie into quarters and tucks it into his pocket.

  “I know, uncle. It was a mistake in my judgment. I am sincerely sorry.”

  “As if you didn’t have enough of your own,” Pepé says, grinning openly. He fills his mouth with a swig of beer. “The boy’s got more ties than I do, and he’s only fifteen.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I know that,” says Pepé. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “I know you know.”

  “I know lots of things. I even remember the day I made you. A lot of hard work that was, for sure. I don’t have to tell you how it’s done. I remember the details as if it were yesterday. You’re sixteen, of course—not fifteen at all.” Pepé furrows his brow and twists his lip in a mock expression of consideration. “But I forget which one you are. Not Pedro or Virgilio. Are you the little dark one, Héctor?”

  Rafael shakes his head sombrely at his father’s joke. “Héctor’s the baby in the crib.”

  “Oh yes. The one who cries all the time. I know him. So you must be the other, Pétan.”

  “No, Papa,” says Rafael, shuffling his weight from foot to foot, thinking: Is this fucking man just going to stand here and tease m
e all night? Why can’t we end this conversation so I can get back to my room? It’s infuriating, because there’s a time limit, after all, for the integration of bottle caps into his collection. Not a second to be wasted.

  “Not Pétan?” says Pepé as he squints at his son, his drunk eyes glassy and playful. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m Rafael.”

  “Oh, yes! Rafael. The necktie thief. The powdered boy. The one who always smells like flowers.”

  Uncle Plinio laughs and rocks his chair as he takes another sip of beer.

  “May I go now, Papa? I have important tasks.”

  “Important tasks!” Pepé cries, laughing. “Well, forgive me, son.” He turns to his brother-in-law and adds: “My telegraph son’s got important tasks to do here in San Cristóbal.”

  “Oh, he does, then?” says Plinio as he rubs his belly. He then answers his own question with a nonchalant shrug. “At least that makes one of us with important tasks.”

  “May I go?” asks Rafael.

  “You may go,” Pepé says with a casual wave of his hand. He throws himself back into his chair, which rocks to and fro with the collapse of his weight.