The Prince

by R. M. Koster

  Then a new junta was formed, a new assembly convoked, a new constitution drafted, a new election held, and a new president selected: Dr. Alcibiades Oruga, founder of the Tinieblan Conservative Party. Dr. Oruga became the first popularly elected President of Tinieblas to serve his full constitutional term, and when it was over, he stepped down in favor of a Liberal, Licentiate Bolívar Cebolla. Cebolla was succeeded by another Liberal, Gustavo Adolfo Puig, who was committed to an insane asylum by his Vice President, Saturnino Aguila, and while this was going on, Nicanor Sancudo’s younger son Pablo was arrested for advocating the independence of Cuba and exiled to Colombia, where he was first a journalist and then a timekeeper on the French canal in the Colombian province of Panama.

  When Saturnino Aguila was in his third year as President of Tinieblas, Sarah Bernhardt came to perform at the Municipal Theater in the capital. Aguila took his whole government to the theater and paid his respects to Madame Sarah before the performance. During the entr’acte an officer went to her dressing room saying that the President of the Republic would like to make her acquaintance.

  “I have already had the honor of meeting your President,” said Madame Sarah.

  “You have met the former President,” replied the officer. “It is the new president who wants to meet you.”

  While Aguila was at the play, Dr. Lázaro Torcido and a group of Conservatives had occupied the palace.

  After this, civil war broke out in Tinieblas, with the Conservatives holding the capital and the Liberals controlling much of the interior. Both Aguila and Torcido died, and the presidency was simultaneously claimed by Monseñor Jesús Llorente, a Conservative of course, and General Feliciano Luna, a Liberal, who moved his provisional capital between the towns of La Merced and Angostura, depending on the location of the columns of regular troops Monseñor Llorente sent out after him. Luna wasn’t really a general, but rather a ranch foreman who collected a group of riders behind him. He raided towns, dodged regular columns, and was never actually brought to battle. This war went on for five years until Llorente lured Luna to Ciudad Tinieblas under a flag of truce and had him hanged. Then peace was negotiated through the good offices of the American Ambassador and signed on the veranda of the American Embassy.

  At this time Eladio Sancudo, Pablo’s younger son, who had come to Tinieblas and rode with General Luna, settled in Angostura, capital of Remedios Province, where he married the daughter of a storekeeper.

  Now elections were held and won by Rudolfo Tábano, but during our civil war Tinieblas had contracted a huge debt to Germany, and as Tábano could find no way to pay it, he resigned in favor of his Vice President, Hildebrando Ladilla. Then Ladilla fled to Portugal with what was left of the treasury and was succeeded by his Minister of justice, Ernesto Chinche. Then the German Emperor announced that he was annexing Tinieblas in payment of the debt and sent a cruiser, and the President of the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine and sent two cruisers, and Chinche resigned in favor of his Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Ildefonso Cornudo.

  Ildefonso Cornudo, who was bald as a doorknob and wore a spade beard in compensation, was a doctor of veterinary medicine who had emigrated to Tinieblas from Spain and was not even a citizen of the country. People said he had been named to Chinche’s cabinet in return for professional services to a Black Angus seed bull which Chinche had imported at vast expense and which the tropical climate had rendered impotent. As soon as he became president, he went to Washington on board one of the American cruisers and signed the Day-Cornudo Treaty, under which the United States agreed to pay all debts owed to the German Emperor and Tinieblas agreed to grant the United States a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year lease on a tract of land adjacent to the capital. After this Dr. Cornudo went by train to New York and from there by Cunard steamer to Paris, where he lived in conspicuous splendor until the flu epidemic of 1919.

  When the terms of the treaty were published, some Tinieblans felt they had been betrayed, but when the second American cruiser trained its guns on the capital and prepared to debark marines, the members of the Chamber realized that the treaty was fair and ratified it. Then they proclaimed their Speaker, Ramiro Aguado, President of the Republic.

  During Aguado’s term the United States began building bases on the leased land, which they called the Reservation, and when Aguado’s successor, Modesto Gusano, was overthrown by Dr. Amado del Busto, American soldiers from the Reservation reinstalled him. The Gusano Administration leased a tract of land in Tuquetá Province to an American banana company, and the government of Ascanio Pícaro, who followed Gusano, granted exploration rights in Otán Province to an American copper company.

  Pícaro was succeeded by Aguado, who resigned in favor of Gusano, who was deposed by Colonel Franco Tirador, who withdrew after three weeks in favor of Aguado. Then the people elected Eudemio Lobo, but he sympathized with the Central Powers and was, therefore, replaced, after the sinking, of the Lusitania, by Armando Cabeza Loza, who died of the same flu that killed Dr. Cornudo in Paris and was succeeded by Victoriano Mosca, who served out the rest of the term.

  There followed a famous election between Dr. del Busto and Heriberto Ladilla, Hildebrando’s son. Most people gave Dr. del Busto the advantage, but every one of the fifteen thousand indians in Tuquetá Province voted for Ladilla. So great was Ladilla’s appeal to the indians of Tuquetá that little babies voted for him, and men long dead, so that when Dr. del Busto spoke demanding a recount, he could declare, “Tinieblas is the first democracy to extend suffrage beyond the grave.” But as Ladilla controlled the Electoral jury, the count stood, and Ladilla took office.

  During Ladilla’s term various foreign companies began negotiating for oil exploration leases in Salinas Province, and Ladilla felt that the country ought to have the benefit of his leadership when it came time to grant a lease. But the constitution forbade a president to succeed himself, so five months before his term was up, Ladilla resigned in favor of his vice president, Felipe Gusano, Modesto’s cousin. Then he ran again against Dr. del Busto, and the indians of Tuquetá remained loyal to him, and he won and signed a bill granting the oil lease to an American company. Then he retired and was succeeded by Luis Napoleón Tábano, who was followed by Abúndio Moral, who was overthrown by Alejandro Sancudo, Eladio’s younger son.

  5

  My grandfather, Eladio Sancudo, never owned anything but the clothes on his back, a .45 caliber Martini-Henry rifle, and a photograph of General Feliciano Luna accepting a counterfeit presidential sash from the splendidly mustached mayor of La Merced. He clerked in the store which belonged to his wife’s father, lived in a house which belonged to his wife’s mother, and died from a ruptured spleen after having been kicked by a roan mare which belonged to his wife’s brother. This dependence on his in-laws in no way curtailed his self-esteem. He had a bold stare for every man and a leer for every unattended woman, and he refused to let himself be patronized, even by those who were buying him drinks. He was sullen when sober and murderous when drunk, though as few men crossed him, his wrath usually fell on his wife and elder son Erasmo, my Uncle Erasmo, who were so perpetually bruised that the people of Angostura decided that wife-and child-beating were hallowed customs of Colombia, where my grandfather was born and reared. After Uncle Erasmo ran away to the capital on his twelfth birthday, his younger brother Alejo, who was only four, came into the patrimony and wore rainbows about his eyes for three years until my great uncle Simón Montes’ mare Cucha, whom my grandfather beat with a stick, made him an orphan.

  Almost as soon as he arrived in Ciudad Tinieblas, Uncle Erasmo was taken in by Don Fernando Araña, who was famous for his generosity to orphan boys, and some say Uncle Erasmo became his catamite, but then there is no Tinieblan public figure who has not at one time or another been accused of being impotent, cuckold, or homosexual, if not all three. Whatever his motive, Don Fernando began by giving Uncle Erasmo a home and his first pair of shoes, and sent him to school, and later to Coimbra to study law, and fini
shed by willing him a small legacy, so that when Alejo was eighteen, Uncle Erasmo was able to bring him to the capital for a year at the Instituto Politénico. This was the pinnacle of Tinieblan education—we had no university then—a French lycée which had withstood transplanting to the tropics. Alejo took his bachiler in science. He wanted to be a surgeon, the only professional licensed to mangle and maim in peacetime, but Erasmo, who was still searching for a rich family to marry into, calculated the cost of a medical education and instead sent his younger brother to agricultural college in Kansas.

  Almost at once, surely before his English had roped its way much above the kindly-direct-me-to-the-water-closet plateau attained at the Instituto, he found night work as a keeper in a madhouse. His biographer can decide—it’s not my worry—if this choice of work reflected an already budded interest in government, or if the job itself led Alejo—the old fox campaigned in Salinas yesterday and will stop in half the towns in Tinieblas Province on the way in to his speech this afternoon—to believe he was fit (he would say destined) to rule. Clearly four years of tending the demented, deluded, and deranged is too valuable a preparation for politics to be coincidental. And all he read was political philosophy. I myself have fingered that college library’s kidnapped poli sci collection, mold-scabbed volumes with the school crest—razorback statant in a maize field—that he left in the house when he sold La Yegua to me, and plotted his annotations, arrows sailing out from the reality of abstract theory to pierce the concrete Tinieblan dream, so that on only a pressed disaster ration of my high-energy paralytic’s imagination I can see him swotting Mosca in the Soils Lab and opening Locke in the Schiz Ward. Somehow he still managed to get an agronomy degree and keep the lunatics in line. Or usually keep them in line, since one swollen-mooned midnight in his senior year he sat too rapt in Hobbes to react when a maniac, who believed himself to be a Siberian timber wolf, broke howling from his straps and bit him deeply on the throat. It is the scar of this wound, I think, not his contempt for the common man, which keeps him necktied long after other politicians have adopted the sport shirt or our Cubanstyle guayavera, for it has a way of glowing royal purple and dripping blood as though it were only an hour old. The first time I noticed it—at Medusa Beach, August, 1950—I thought Angela had done it to him, and I asked her why she hadn’t bit me. Was my father’s sting that much more toxic, or intoxic?

  “I don’t bite, darling,” she replied. “Sometimes I scratch when I want more action. Cats don’t bite, they scratch. Only bitches bite.”

  Then she told me the story, which my father had told her after she, assuming as I had that it had been some woman, asked him if it excited him to be bit while he made love.

  When he returned to Tinieblas, he rejected offers to manage various farms, plantations, and ranches whose owners could afford to live in the capital, if not Paris or Madrid. The Tuquetá Banana Company, a subsidiary of Galactic Fruit, would surely have hired him; Uncle Erasmo, who had married Beatrix Anguila Ahumada, could have found him a post in the Ministry of Agriculture. Instead he went back to Angostura and nailed two partitions up at right angles in a corner of his grandfather’s store and stenciled a sign:

  ENGINEER ALEJANDRO SANCUDO MONTES

  Agronomist and Surveyor

  Each morning he put on his white suit and straw fedora and walked across the street from his grandmother’s house and hung his jacket and hat on a nail and sat down on his chair, which had a stretched cowhide seat and back, and read political philosophy all day long, except for those occasions when a rancher or planter would come in with a problem; then he would put down his book and put on his hat and jacket, and perhaps take up his transit and compass or the narrow spade he used for spearing soil samples, and go out to practice his profession. In 1926 he married Angustias Maldonado, whose father had one hundred and sixty head of cattle on a well-watered ranch called La Yegua half a day’s trot northwest of Angostura between the border of Tuquetá Province and the Ticamalan frontier, and altered his daily routine in that instead of walking across the street from a house belonging to his mother’s family, he now walked down the street from a house belonging to his wife’s.

  At nights things were less orderly. At night Alejo put on a black double-breasted shirt and black trousers and black leather Mexican charro boots which he wore inside his trousers and drifted off into the shadows which flowed even to the center of the town, lapping against the oil lamps of the two cantinas, to return well after midnight, often with his face scratched as though by brambles and the corners of his mouth flecked with dried foam. During the months after his return to Tinieblas, ranchers began noting losses in their herds, a calf found wreathed in vultures the forenoon after a night of full moon, a cow ripped from throat to udders, gutted and with half a haunch torn away, sometimes three or four beasts mauled and slaughtered in different pastures on the same night, a bite of rump gone from this one and a shoulder missing from that. Once a vaquero on the ranch of Don Belisario Oruga—he raised beef, but his bulls had been used for corridas in the capital when the fighting bulls that were usually brought by boat from Mexico proved unfit—found a novillo half dead from ragged wounds about the neck but with three inches of blood on his left horn, and that same afternoon when Don Belisario, who was considering planting a pasture in pangola grass, went to consult Alejandro Sancudo M., Agronomist and Surveyor, he found the office empty and Alejo at home in bed, complaining of a terrible boil on his groin. Then a campesino was attacked by what he said was a wolf, though clearly it was some kind of cat—it chewed a cube steak out of him before he cut its left paw with his machete—for there are no wolves in Tinieblas, whereas we have plenty of jaguar (mostly in Otán Province, which borders on Remedios, and, of course, in Selva Trópica), as well as wildcat (gato montes), puma, and tigrillo. An expedition was mounted to track down and destroy the marauder, but Alejo, who was easily the best shot in Angostura, if not the entire province, had to decline a place in it, for he had cut his left hand seriously while sawing wood, and the men turned up nothing very big though they shot a lot of game and had a good, comradely week. The depredations slacked off then, and then took up again a few months later, and then stopped completely as mysteriously as they had begun at just about the time when Alejo Sancudo formed a secret society whose purpose was to seize power and reform the state.

  He called the movement Acción Dinámica—a phrase which might have made him an American fortune as a detergent tout—though its members became known as the remedistas, derived from Remedios where they came from, and the explosive dose of salts they prescribed for the body politic. They were recruited from among the restless sons of provincial physiocrats, but for some time failed to outnumber the society’s symbols—a Tinieblan fasces (machete poking from sheaves of rice), a swastika (or swavastica, the mirror image of Adolf’s) etched in gold, a fiery cross, the sign of Cancer (under which Alejo was born), and a pet’s corner of birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles, some zoologically possible, some imaginatively combined. Then the sorrows of the New York Stock Exchange depressed the banana market and put the Tinieblan economy in mourning. Young men watched their patrimonies wither and sought dynamic action. They wore sheets to meetings, held torchlight rites on horseback, formed cabals against the merchants of the capital. Grafters and libertines who grovel to the gringos! Kick them out, and the foreigners with them! Republic of virtue based on land! Their leader, a grave, pencil-thin young man with olive face and careful mustache, was already convinced of his mystic mission to save the nation, whereas I always did a thing for the joy of it, without deluding myself that it was part of an august destiny written somewhere in a golden book.

  So for five years Alejo bayed the moon, sublimating bestial urges in the beastlier group therapy of revolutionary conspiracy, confecting a doctrine by collage—gob of Gobineau glued to gloss on Guizot—and a program by astrology—he had begun to study Nostradamus now, along with theosophy, numerology, and occultism. (When I think of all the verbal underpinning Ale
jo needs to support his will to power, I hold it to my eternal credit that when I reached for the brass ring, I never bothered myself, my opponents, or the public with ideology.) Alejo is not unique (See Lew Garew, The Latin American Lycanthrocrats), but—give him his due, he’s going to win in April and have Ñato delivered—there have been very few in his class this century. Nutrillo, Macho Delmonte in Cuba, Dubonet the Haitian witch doctor, and perhaps the Argentine Peñon. And Alejo already had all his super powers there in Remedios: the gleaming bronze eyes that sear men and spear women, the aura of sacred untouchability (even the richest planters called him only by his title), the utter fearlessness (born, perhaps, from the knowledge that Tinieblans do not load silver bullets), the hoarse, compelling voice, the pitiless frown in adversity, and, for brighter moments, the demonic grin. How terrible to nurse talent in obscurity! He needed cheering crowds and fawning ministers, and all he had for audience were some provincial townspeople and for followers a scruffy pack whose adulation was barely sufficient to keep him in human form. White by day he read, tongue lolling from the corner of his mouth, in the dusty heat of his office; black by night he schemed, hurling mute howls at each full moon that found him still unknown. There he sat in that absurd nightcap, wondering if the country was ever going to put on its red hood and set out for grandma’s.