by R. M. Koster
Not on purpose. Later on, when I’d learned to direct the power in me, I dreamed people’s dreams whenever I had a mind to, and read their thoughts, but in those days, with Rebozo, it was involuntary. Found myself dreaming his dreams, his nightmares of humiliation and betrayal. Always dreamed of the same girl, a pale-golden girl with an acrobat’s lithe body and a mocking smile. Way of running her tongue over tiny pointed teeth. Saw it in what’s called real life many years later, in a field in Otán, in plenty of other planes. See it again in a few hours while I’m dancing, if the cablebite doesn’t unfocus my eyes. In his dreams Rebozo loved her and suffered marvelously, and I began to feel protective toward him. Worried almost paternally about how he’d take Bebe’s old age and death, about his painful efforts to arrange a new act. But I gave the feeling no expression, I ignored it best as I could.
My solitude also coexisted with Bruno the strong man’s. He too lived folded in himself. Muttered complaints to himself, muttered chessboard comments. With Gili-Gili gone he had no one to play with, but chess was his only pastime so he played by himself. Set the board up on the edge of his platform same as ever and played games between his right hand and his left. Went from one side of the board to the other, muttering comments. One day I came by just as he finished setting up the pieces, as his right hand pushed the white king pawn forward. I glanced at the board, and the black king pawn hopped two squares out. Bruno grunted and looked up.
“I guess it want to play”
He looked back at the board. Muttered, “It wants to play, so it wants to play, so we’ll give it a beating.” Slapped his king knight out. A black knight jumped out in answer.
“Wants to play, wants to play, but does it know how to play?” He whistled his bishop out to threaten black’s knight, and the black queen pawn slid slowly one square forward.
“It wants to play Steinitz. Steinitz is what it wants to play. Then we’ll eat its horse. We’ll gobble its fat horse and give it check.” Swept the bishop in and snatched the knight. “Check! “Check check check!” The black pawn charged diagonally forward into the bishop, knocking it up off the board and into the oblong piece box.
The game continued, Mandragon the mago standing two paces from the platform, Bruno the strong man banging his pieces and mumbling his patter, the black pieces moving, as it seemed, of their own will. Other performers and their barkers began conversing in unnaturally loud voices, glanced over nervously, tried not to watch. From then on chess was a ritual between Bruno and me.
Evenly matched, though different in style of play. Brawny Bruno played conservatively. Frail Mandragon—or, rather, the power that played through me—attacked boldly, flung pieces forward, made sacrifices, sometimes gave brilliant mates. But when these attacks failed, my pieces were liable to behave childishly. Captured men tried to sneak back onto the board. Pawns retreated to meet Bruno’s counterthrusts. Rooks attempted knight jumps, bishops impersonated rooks. To ambush Bruno’s queen, or the king might leap from mate to a safe corner. At which Bruno would growl disgust. “Take your beating like a man, you little cheat!” And I’d protest innocence. “I didn’t do that, Bruno; I wouldn’t cheat.”
Then I asked him to let me keep the set on my platform while the Rotunda was open. Chess became part of my act. I’d suggest that someone make an opening move, and the black pieces would answer. It drew people over, the sight of them moving without being touched, and for a small sum a spectator could play a blitz game with them. Funny, they always played at the strength of their opponent. Wood-pushers who barely knew the moves could give them trouble, could even win, yet in Caracas once they played a visiting grand master, and won a pawn from him, and made him sweat to get away with a drawn game. Playing more important than winning. Tried to cheat when Bruno had them beaten, but only playfully, to get him riled.
People who saw the show one day came back the next with their own sets, or sets bought for the purpose still sealed in their boxes, sets weighed in laboratories and examined by X ray, huge sets with pieces molded in metal and tiny sets whose pieces had to be unpegged then pegged in for every move. But any chessmen placed before Mandragon would play without being touched, and always at the strength of their opponent.
I hadn’t known the power in me would play chess. Never knew what it would do. I went to the Rotunda in the Godwill-provide spirit of religious beggars, trusting the power in me would come through with something. And it did, it always did, it loved me then. I learned not to be surprised but remained in awe, was as delighted at a new stunt as any spectator. Never practiced, never rehearsed. Tried not to think of the shows when I was offstage. Oh, I had impulses, sudden ideals like putting the chess set on my platform. Came to me sometimes before the show and sometimes during, and I followed them blindly, without question or reflection. They always worked, but I never felt I was doing anything. A power was performing through me, I was its instrument.
Started with bulbs. A bulb would light when I held it in my hand, or in my mouth or in the crook of my elbow. Glowed or flickered, sometimes flared and popped, sometimes threw out all the colors of the rainbow. People always demanded to see the bulbs, know what the “trick” was, and I found if I said politely, “Pretend it will light for you,” the bulb would like as not go on in a spectator’s hand. Rarely failed to with children, and in my special shows behind the curtain I’d sometimes have as many kids as were there squealing with joy, waving glowing bulbs in their small hands.
In Cartago once, early in my magoship, a bunch of Chilean naval cadets heckled me, yelled drunkenly I was a fake, and on impulse I tossed a bulb to one of the loudest. Began flashing in his hand the instant he caught it, and then his friends were laughing convulsively, flicking their fingers as if to shake them off their hands. The bulb, they said at last, was sending out insults in Morse, calling the fellow who held it smutty names, commenting on the love life of his sisters. Wanted to climb up and punch me, but they held him back, said he’d brought the ragging on himself, and when he shoved the bulb to one of the others it flashed insults at him too. They took it with them when they left, and one of them returned the next evening and told me it had continued blinking salty jibes into the night, but its light grew dimmer as they sobered up and refused to shine at all the next morning.
Even before that, impulses came to me during my shows. On my first night, here in Ciudad Tinieblas, I noticed a smirk-face young gringo standing back from my platform scribbling in a brown notebook. Spy from the army command in the Reservation, read that on him at once, sent over to investigate the circus and find out if it harbored any threat to the USA. From Moscow or Peking or outer space, and on impulse I waved him over and asked him to put his notebook and pencil on the platform. Soon as he did, the notebook flipped itself open to a clean page, the pencil got up and began writing. Very flattering account of my act, all in English, which the spy translated for us when he’d found his voice. After that I brought a pad to the Rotunda, and now and then it would come on me that such and such a spectator had, in pocket or purse, a pen or pencil with something to say, or a picture to draw. Then the miracle would be repeated.
Later on I bought a typewriter, an ancient Underwood, cobwebbed and rusted, that had sat ten years in a Veracruz pawnshop. Walking in the town, and on impulse I crossed the street and went into the shop, stood looking around till my glance struck that machine and I knew it was what I’d come in for. Its history too. Belonged to a novelist, Gamelial Garza. Brought it to Mexico with him when he was exiled from Costaguana, and then pawned it for next to nothing, Not because he was pesoless, though he was, but because it had failed to write a decent sentence in three months, not one imaginative phrase, not one apt word, so Garza figured it was empty. Pawned it and went out and borrowed money for a new one, but there was plenty of insight left in the old machine. It was weary of telling lies and inventing worlds, weary of being stared at angrily during interminable hunts for metaphors, of being pounded mercilessly when molten images threatened to congeal. It w
as weary to exhaustion of having cigarette smoke blown at it in long sighing expirations, but all it needed was a little rest. Got plenty too before Mandragon found it, before Mandragon put it back to work. I set it on the edge of the stage, inside, behind the curtain, and it held forth during my special shows. When someone from the audience laid hands along its sides, it typed out data—name, age, occupation. Then it gave advice.
It advised Ignacio Bustamante, twenty-two-year-old dry-cleaner’s deliveryman of Guatemala City, to be more careful tossing humps to the young housewives on his route, especially with Purisima de Alas, whose husband had suspicions and a pistol. It advised Alma de Cañizales, widow, of Puerto Armuelles, Panama, to stop worrying about where next month’s rent was coming from: if she played the last four digits of her cousin Primitivo’s identity card number in Sunday’s lottery she’d win first prize. It advised Isaias Levi a merchant of Venusburgo, Ticamala, to curse God and die, because Mizrachi his partner was cheating him and Sara his wife put pork in the meatballs and Moisi his son was gay and Malca his daughter was four months pregnant by the black handyman and he himself had cancer. Then it advised him to disregard the previous advice, it was all a joke, only a joke, didn’t he feel better? It advised Pablo Tocino, twelve, of Bucaramanga, Columbia, that playing with himself wouldn’t drive him crazy but trying not to might, and it advised Juan Nulo, fourteen, who was from Garza’s own village, Damonco in Costaguana, but who had run away to the capital and entered the famous pickpockets’ school there, that the gentleman whose wallet he’d swiped earlier was just outside the curtain with a cop, and exactly what it advised Bonita Novilla, sixteen, of Maracay, Venezuela, doesn’t matter, but it made her giggle and gasp and then turn red, made her tear the paper out and crumple it, made her whisper shyly to her boyfriend, so that both blushed and left the show at an urgent stroll, each with an arm about the other’s waist. It might even have advised Mandragon, maybe saved me years of hardship, but I didn’t want advice and never consulted it.
During some shows I’d go into trance and utter prophecies, or work marvels that startled even me. My trances were so theatrical they appeared faked, an impression strengthened by my costume. Don Lorenzo gave me a mandarin robe and a pillbox hat, both of the cheapest stuff available, a painted paper fan and vinyl slippers. Bogus in its own right, and its effect when joined with my un-Oriental features, my chocolate skin and Zuluy lower lip more or less announced me as a charlatan. So when my head flopped over to one side, when my eyeballs rolled up and I flung my arms out, when I lurched around the stage chewing my tongue, hecklers howled fake. Just as well. People who’d have lost bladder control had they been forced to know I was possessed by power could drain their tension off in hoots and giggles.
After maybe a minute I’d grow calm. Head still canted, eyeballs still rolled back, I’d start to speak. Not in my own voice though, in an expressionless, authoritative monotone. Sometimes this computer voice describes lost objects and told where they were, an earring that had strayed into the kitchen and taken refuge in a teacup, a tax receipt that had sneaked between the pages of a book. Then someone in the audience would gasp, and maybe say, “Now I remember!” In Tegucigalpa once the voice announced the make, color, and plate number of a pickup parked outside, and said the keys to it had slipped from the driver’s pocket and were now lying on the ground, under the green sedan with the cracked windshield next to it—at which a man in the fourth row jumped up and slapped his pockets and dashed out. Back in a few minutes waving a key ring, shouting, “Fantastico!” telling the now untranced Mandragon, “Gracias!”
Sometimes the voice gave details of unsolved or unsuspected crimes. The strangled streetwalker was done in by a well-dressed gentleman in his late thirties, who wore an amethyst ring and drove a white station wagon. The attorney who supposedly had died of ptomaine was in fact rat-poisoned by a woman with silver nail polish. Such information caused me trouble with the police. Best they could do with it was try to make me the culprit. And sometimes the voice predicted accidents or natural disasters, which, when they happened, people blamed on me.
Anguished agitation, pitiable weakness in my limbs, sense of being prey to a cruel ravishment. Then filled with mysterious light, luminous fire, that enabled me to look upon some scene. Or in other trances I saw nothing, but instead grew conscious of the worries of some spectator. And, with me still in trance, the worries would be dramatically relieved. In Curacao once a spectator was worried about his camera, an expensive number with all sorts of attachments, which he’d forgotten in a taxi, or on the counter of a ticket office, or in a shop. There was an explosion without concussion, like the crack of a rifle, and the camera appeared in air above me, then floated out over the audience and hooped its strap and dropped to its owner’s neck, And in Santurce once I stumbled blindly down into the audience, to a girl whose face was blotched with acne, and brushed my fingertips across her checks, and the pustules healed. That was the sort of stuff some people had fits over. People who couldn’t stand more than one reality, one stable ordinary state of things, had a terrible time with stuff like that.
Bothered me too, though not in the same way. The trances were unpleasant to begin with. The helplessness, sense of being seized by an alien force. Bad enough when all they brought were glimpses of misplaced objects. What about murders, crashes, scenes of horror! What about other people’s worry and woe! Relieving it left me drained, energy pouring out like milk from an overturned pitcher, especially when I was healing. And with this draining the fear that everything would go, that life would piss out of me for good into some stranger. Exhausted and terrified, but nothing to do, no way to hold back when the fit was on me.
Generous entertainer, El Mago Mandragon. Gave more platform diversions than strictly needed to sell tickets. Prolonged my special shows past their set time feeding my public extra rations of amusement. Got me harsh looks from other performers and scoldings from Don Lorenzo, but it wasn’t enough. Entertainment wasn’t enough for the power that picked me. I didn’t want to watch people being strangled, or case their worry, or cure their ills, but as time passed the power that lived in me used me more and more this way. Flung me into trances. Drove me toward other people and their woe. Dragged me staggering from the show area once and out through the Rotunda, out into the parking lot just to heal a drunk who’d laid his head open in a fall. Clutched me in trance once while the Rotunda was closed, in the middle of a game with Bruno. Stuffed me with anguish from a woman in the main tent, knocked me cold with it. She’d let her children wander off and couldn’t find them, and scarcely had I come to, sprawled in the sawdust, feeble as a crone, when a roustabout ran in shouting the world had gone crazy, that two kids had flown forty feet through the air, over the heads of people in the main tent, and landed lightly at their mother’s side. More and more of it as time went on, outside the Rotunda and in it. People heard about my cures and came for that. Depressing to wake and find a line of cripples cringing near the van, or have my audiences mildewed at the fringe with deformed and dying. Useless too, since I didn’t direct the power that lived in me, though now and then, just enough to keep sick people coming, the presence of suffering would pitch me to healing trance. And more and more visions of disorder, bloodshed and catastrophe, misery and ruin. More and more the power in me rubbed my face in other people’s trouble.
Grew petulant too, took snide revenges on the skeptics. Afternoon in Kingston, five or six years after it chose me, when it set half a dozen kids, each with a glowing lamp bulb in his hand, floating around the show area like fireflies. Kids ecstatic, but a British tourist, from Porlock in Somerset, there with his wife and another couple, couldn’t stand it. “Unreal mockery!” he snorted. “Tricks and illusions!” The bulbs had batteries inside, the kids weren’t flying. I was a fraud preying on superstitious wogs, and soft-minded morons who couldn’t face practical reality. All but ruined my show with his raving and ranting. Well, it was the dry time of the year for Jamaica, but when he and his party
left the Rotunda it began raining. Poured in torrents, but only on them, only in a circle three yards wide around the gentleman who liked practical reality. For the whole time he was on the island rain poured on him whenever he went out, and he got no sun and played no tennis, and his holiday was ruined. And there was the Mexican lady was refused to believe her eyes when Mandragon, with a touch of tranced fingers, magicked a disfiguring goiter from a girl’s throat. Screamed that the girl was an accomplice that the goiter was put on with putty. Said I ought to be locked up, since fakery gave foolish people, people with real ailments, vain hopes of a miracle cure. But then she broke off with a yelp of pain, jumped up and rubbed her bottom, squeaked that she’d been attacked, though no one had touched her. Wailed until a doctor came and examined her, but he found no damage, except for a large purple bruise, in the shape of a spread-fingered hand, on her right buttock.
With all of this I began to wonder what it was after, what the power that had picked me to live in wanted. Even considered asking Mohotty to teach me, thought about trying to understand. But the trances weren’t crippling, and only came on me once or twice a week. And the visions were bearable, no worse than nightmares really. And only a few skeptics were punished, and none of them really hurt. Better stay passive, better not try to understand. Let it use me as it pleased and not be to blame for it. So the years passed, and I came back here again, for the seventh time as Mandragon the Mage.
18
Dred Mandeville was aimed for Tinieblas too, sharking the middle depths of the Brazil Basin.
No one knew, of course, no one but Angela, Alejo, and Mandragon. They wouldn’t tell, and I didn’t understand. Not till years later, when I’d met her face to face and dreamtoured her life. I visioned Dred’s whaleswim on our way south from Ticamala, but I didn’t know who he was or what it meant. Tranced it from the front seat of Rebozo’s van, but it meant nothing to me, while those who’d have understood hadn’t an inkling.
