by R. M. Koster
Copyright
This edition first published in the United States in 2013 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]
Copyright © 2013 by R. M. Koster
Copyright © 1979 by Sueños, S. A.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now know or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-0649-1
Contents
Cover
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Note
Presidents of Tinieblas
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
About the Author
For Otilita and Herbert
PREFACE
This is one of three independent but interlocking novels—technically the first volume of a trilogy but, to my mind, more like the left panel of a triptych, since each of the three is complete in itself, since they need not be considered in the order of their publication, and since The Prince and Mandragon are of a size, while The Dissertation, which they flank in time, is one and two-thirds times larger.
The Prince is my seventh novel. The first six were stillborn. It was taken for publication while still half finished. It was kindly received: I could scarcely have written more favorable reviews myself. The hardcover edition sold out without being remaindered, and a National Book Awards jury nominated it for a prize. It was not my first love but my first conquest.
Warner did a paperback edition. So did Morrow and Norton. Grijalbo and Éditions Denoël brought the book out in Spanish and French respectively. Overlook will publish The Dissertation and Mandragon beginning next year.
The trilogy depicts imaginary people and events in the imaginary Republic of Tinieblas. There are some glances back and forth toward past and future, but the temporal focus is mainly the seventh decade of the utterly unreal 20th century. The same themes play in variation through all three books. Major characters from one book appear as minor characters in the other two. One character, Alejandro Sancudo, has intermediate status in all three. There are sorties in all directions into actual localities, but the main setting is Tinieblas. A good case may be made for its being the main character.
How does a fellow from Brooklyn come to invent a Central American country? I went to Panama as a soldier in 1957, having been drafted a year before. By enlisting for a third year I got into counter-intelligence and thereby out of uniform. Because of my languages I was offered postings in France and Panama. I had no overcoat, so the choice was easy; if I went to France I’d have to buy one. Before my enlistment was up I married a girl from Panama. This union is now in its fifty-fourth year and likely to last. On being discharged I taught at the University of Panama, then joined the faculty of the Florida State University Panama Branch. Meanwhile I was writing unpublishable novels. Two shootings caused the hero of this book to gestate inside me.
In 1964 deputies to the Panamanian National Assembly, the country’s legislature, chose suplentes who took the seats, cast the votes, collected the salaries, and enjoyed the privileges of their principles when the same were absent. No suplente-ship was so valuable as that offered by Roberto “Tito” Arias. Tito, son and nephew of two presidents and husband of the great dancer Margot Fonteyn, was essentially an adventurer and playboy and would likely spend more time on Aristotle Onasis’s yacht than in his seat in the assembly. Prospective suplentes were expected to help out with campaign expenses, so Tito, chronically short of funds, promised the plum to two gentlemen and collected accordingly. Once elected, however, he had to choose, and the man not chosen expressed his disappointment by firing four bullets into the back of Tito’s neck as he waited in his car at a stoplight. This was in late June, 1964.
Word of the shooting flew about the city. I was stringing for the Copley News Service and was at Santo Tomás Hospital when Tito was brought in. Good doctors saved his life, but he was paralysed from the neck down and in his face partially. Two or three years later my wife and I were invited to an event at the British ambassador’s residence. Tito and Margot attended. His man Buenaventura carried him up the stairs and deposited him in his wheelchair. I was able to observe him for a few minutes.
The second shooting came in 1968. The Panama Canal Zone was still in existence then under United States jurisdiction, and the local Democratic organization had representation in party councils. In 1967 I became a national committeeman, the youngest of 110. Members were ex-oficio delegates to the 1968 national convention, and that March I became Robert Kennedy’s first delegate in his campaign for the Democratic nomination, the only member of the national committee to declare for the him between his announcement on March 16th and President Johnson’s withdrawal from the race on the 31st.
The Canal Zone had five convention votes. I set about electing a Kennedy delegation by the ancient strategem of bringing in an unsuspected horde of new voters. By June 5, the day of our meeting, we had a majority. At four that morning, however, I got a call from Los Angeles. Dun Gifford, my liaison with the Kennedy campaign, told me the senator had been shot.
“How is he?” I asked.
“He’s either dead or a vegetable,” said Gifford.
The manuscript of my sixth novel was returned to me a day or two later. Not by a publisher. My agent was ashamed to send it out under his name. Over the course of the next months, during which I was preoccupied with events—the riotous Democratic convention was followed closely by an armed coup in Panama that imposed a nasty dictatorship—I decided to quit writing and invest my ambitions in politics. I would go to law school, pick a state, be in Congress by 40 and the Senate by 50. I did the necessary applications and gave notice to FSU that I would leave in June 1969.
In December 1968 I began fiddling with a pair of books. Writing wasn’t my thing any more, so a little fiddling couldn’t do much damage. Your typical Panamanian has two households. When his wife, for whatever reason, isn’t properly attentive, he goes to his girlfriend, and vice versa. I had two typewriters and two books.
One book was a comic novel in the manner of Waugh about a congressional delegation that junkets to a trop
ical republic to inspect U.S. bases. The other was … I didn’t know, except that it was first person, that and that the narrator was parapliegic, a vegetable, due to an attempted murder. I spent weeks writing the first two pages over and over, about how he could move one finger a few centimeters. When I couldn’t any more, I went to my other typewriter and book. There was nothing wrong with the pages. They ended up being paragraphs two and three of Chapter 3 of The Prince. I wrote them over and over to see if the narrator would tell me more about himself. At length he did. His name, for instance, was Kiki Sancudo. Tito Arias, whom I’d had a chance to observe, plus Bobby Kennedy, in whose dream I’d entangled myself, yielded Kiki as in a chemical reaction. The comic novel, which had been romping along in perfect health, died unattended. The Prince survived and thrived. And I realized that, for good or ill, I was a writer.
As I discovered more and more about Kiki, I discovered Tinieblas, which had a geography and a history, as well as social, economic, and political peculiarities, and was somewhat a bouillabaisse of Central America and the Caribbean. Some months before I finished Kiki’s story, I realized that I could not depict his country in one book. When I was about a third of the way into The Dissertation, I realized I was doing a triptych. The writing of Mandragon completed the work.
But not the imaginary world I’d made, what Tolkein called a “sub-creation.” Another book has called me back to Tinieblas, and I’m discovering more.
Is The Prince dated? I think not. Revenge is still a popular passion. The man of action forcibly thrust into the contemplative life (c.f. Machievelli) can compete thematically with the intellectual who is forced to act (Hamlet). Besides, as I realized late in its composition, The Prince is plugged in (as it were) to the myth of Prometheus, where the hero is bound for an altruistic impulse. As for the American tropics, they remain lands drenched in sunlight yet places of darkness. All change in the last 40 years has been superficial, so that the marvelous Nicaraguan expression applies: “La misma mierda con distintas moscas”—“The same shit with different flies.”
A word on the cover. It was done by Guillermo Trujillo, the best (to my mind) of Panama’s many fine painters. In the early 1960s he and I had workshops on the second floor of a decaying tenement off Plaza Catedral in the old quarter of Panama City, he dabbing with exemplary vigor at a dozen canvases simultaneously, painting a little on one, then moving along, I pecking languidly at yet another unpublishable novel, both of us arting away next door to each other like Marcello and Rodolfo in La Bohème, except that we were tormented by heat, not cold, and never (alas!) interrupted by pretty women. I made him promise that if I ever had a book published, he would do the cover. At the time it seemed unlikely he would ever be called upon, but he fulfilled that promise not once but three times.
Gracias, Guillermo! If the wise purchaser of this elegant edition finds my words as good as your picture, I shall be quite satisfied.
—R. M. K.
Panama, August 2012
Y la tierra estaba desordenada y vacía
y las tinieblas estaban sobre la faz del abismo.
Genesis 1:2
NOTE
The purpose of literature, and every other art, is to translate us from the so-called “real” world into others more carefully organized. Hence the people in this book are imaginary.
Similarly, the only way to reach the Republic of Tinieblas is via this book.
I have given my chief character a nickname, a diminutive of Enrique. It would normally be spelled “Quiqui,” but I have transliterated it “Kiki” so that the reader may hear it correctly in his mind’s ear.
—R. M. K.
PRESIDENTS OF TINIEBLAS
(Independent Republic Declared 1821)
1821–1828
SIMÓN MOCOSO (elected by constituent assembly)
1828–1830
JULIO CANINO (deposed)
1830–1848
ISIDRO BODEGA (military dictator, died in office)
1848
ADRIANO MOSCA (resigned after one month in office)
1848
MANUEL GRILLO (resigned after two months in office)
1848
FRANCISCO PIOJO (resigned after three weeks in office)
1848–1853
JUSTO CANINO (deposed and fed to sharks)
1853–1860
EPIFANIO MOJÓN (military dictator, deposed and crucified)
1860–1866
ALCIBIADES ORUGA (first popularly elected president to serve full constitutional term)
1866–1872
BOLÍVAR CEBOLLA
1872–1875
GUSTAVO ADOLFO PUIG (deposed)
1875–1878
SATURNINO AGUI.LA (deposed)
1878–1883
LÁZARO TORCIDO (died in office)
1883–1893
JESUS LLORENTE & FELICIANO LUNA (presidency jointly claimed, Luna hanged, Llorente resigned)
1893–1896
RUDOLFO TÁBANO (resigned)
1896–1897
HILDEBRANDO LADILLA (fled to Portugal with National Treasury)
1897–1898
ERNESTO CHINCHE (resigned)
1898
ILDEFONSO CORNUDO (voluntary exile)
1898–1904
RAMIRO AGUADO (elected by Chamber of Deputies)
1904–1905
MODESTO GUSANO (deposed by populace)
1905
AMADO DEL BUSTO (deposed by U.S. Marines)
1905–1908
MODESTO GUSANO (reinstated by U.S. Marines)
1908–1912
ASCANIO PÍCARO
1912–1914
RAMIRO AGUADO (resigned)
1914
MODESTO GUSANO (deposed by populace)
1914
FRANCO TIRADOR (resigned after three weeks in office)
1914–1916
RAMIRO AGUADO (finished term originally elected to)
1916–1917
EUDEMIO LOBO (resigned with the encouragement of the United States Ambassador to Tinieblas)
1917–1919
ARMANDO CABEZA LOZA (died in office)
1919–1920
VICTORIANO MOSCA
1920–1923
HERIBERTO LADILLA (resigned)
1923–1924
FELIPE GUSANO
1924–1927
HERIBERTO LADILLA (resigned)
1927–1928
LUIS NAPOLEON TÁBANO
1928–1930
ABÚNDIO MORAL (deposed)
1930
ALEJANDRO SANCUDO (held office for thirty-six hours, resigned when his ammunition ran out)
1930–1932
EFRAÍN ANGUILA AHUMADA (Moral’s Vice President)
1932–1936
JUAN DE A. TÁBANO
1936–1940
ERASMO SANCUDO
1940–1942
ALEJANDRO SANCUDO (deposed by U.S. Army)
1942–1914
EFRAIN ANGUILA AHUMADA (appointed with advice and consent of the U.S. Ambassador to Tinieblas)
1944–1948
LUIS GUSANO
1948
OLMEDO AVISPA (died in office after twelve hours)
1948
FERNANDO COMEJÉN (died in office after six hours)
1948–1952
ALEJANDRO SANCUDO (election ratified retroactively, deposed after three years, seven months in office)
1952
BELISARIO ORUGA (served out remainder of Sancudo’s term)
1952–1956
PACÍFICO PASTOR ALEMÁN
1956–1960
ENRIQUE ABEJA
1960–1962
JUAN DE LA CRUZ ARDILLA (special two-year term)
1962–1964
LEÓN FUERTES (assassinated by plastic bomb)
1964-1965
BONIFACIO AGUADO (assumed office as Fuertes’ Vice President, deposed)
1965
AIAX TOLETE (president military junta, resigned)
/> 1965–1966
NARSES PUÑETE (president military junta, resigned upon new elections)
1966
JOSÉ FUERTES
1
Jaime will get him. No, Alejo will have him delivered. An officer and two guardias will bring him to the ranch, smartly wrapped, in one of those vans with the Alliance for Progress handshake stenciled on the doors. The guardias will set him down on the porch, and Jaime will sign the receipt. Then he’ll carry him over the threshold.
Will he struggle? No, not after that long ride, and he’ll be very scared. But not completely terrified. It will be too much like mashing a roach unless he remains rational. He will not foul himself, for example. I’ll stipulate that the officer have him attend to his necessities in some secluded spot on my property.
Jaime will carry him to Edilma’s room and lay him on the bed. Gently, and a pillow under his butt. Jaime will take the iron off one ankle and clamp it to the leg of the bed under the spring. Rope or electrical cord for the other. His hands will be manacled under him behind his back, and Jaime can run the cord through his armpits and truss him to the head of the bed. He will curse and struggle, but Jaime will neither speak nor treat him harshly. I’ll be out of sight of course. I’ll have Jaime wheel me to the bedside once Ñato is locked in.
When he sees me, Ñato will plead, beg me to forgive him, even say he didn’t mean it. I’ll simply let him look at me, or perhaps just say, “I’ve missed you, Ñato,” to let him hear how I speak now. That and the sight of me ought to obliterate any hope of mercy, and yet Ñato’s been in so many tight spots and always wriggled out, he won’t despair completely. I can count on that to keep him from going insane with terror. He will whine and blubber. Curse and threaten. Collect himself and try to make a brave front, then break down and beg.
