by R. M. Koster
Edilma brings my coffee; holds the thermos for me to sniff.
“See, Kiki. The way you like it.”
Olga thought strong coffee bad for my health, or my disposition, though that’s not why I divorced her. Edilma has always given me what I want. Every woman has in fact, though some, like Olga, gave and resented.
Pleasant smell. Little Kiki used to hang around the mill enjoying it. One roast for Tinieblas, another for the Reservation. Gringos like their coffee weak for some reason, so they can see through to the bottom of the cup. Take the perfume out and drink it like medicine, but even theirs smells good in the bag. Stacks of blue paper sacks with my mother’s picture on them. CAFE SANCUDO. Something to trust about the family.
Smile for Edilma. Pours me a cup. Two spoons of sugar. Milk from the green carton. Holds the cup for Kiki to sip through a glass straw. Two cups that way while I watch the pelicans. Something that’s as good as before.
10
Edilma believes Alejo put my mother’s picture on the coffee sacks out of remorse for having driven her insane, but as far as I am concerned it was a political move. In this culture the leader ought to be respectful to his wife, as well as ardent to his girlfriends, attentive to his mother, stern with men, firm with horses, arrogant with the masses, and unchummy with gringos. Since Alejo was President when word came that my mother was dead—the Italian Ambassador delivered a personal sniffle of regret from Il Duce—and had recently forced Don Moisés Levi Mendes to sell him his coffee finca for about one-tenth what it was worth and had built his own mill with a generous loan from the Ministry of Agriculture, he put her picture copied from a wedding photo, on the blue sacks.
They continued to sell briskly, in the Reservation as well as in Tinieblas after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the gringos had Alejo deposed and exiled, though that probably had less to do with the coffee’s excellent flavor than with national pride. Few Tinieblans were very contrite when they packed my father on a plane for Paraguay, but once he was gone he became something of a symbol of violated sovereignty, and those Reservation sales of CAFE SANCUDO were no doubt made to Tinieblan employees who were willing to stomach the gringo grind for the sake of nationalistic protest.
People like Alejo more when he’s out of power. He’s been out for eighteen years now, so they love him. Even the pelicans would vote for him if they had the vote. Fuertes would go on television and promise a new program, elaborated by the Presidential Planning Commission and funded by AID, for keeping the cold current inshore all year round, and the pelicans would still favor Alejo. Alejo would go out on the sea wall and hold up his hands with the palms out and say, “Pelicans of Tinieblas,” and they’d all stop fishing and gather in to listen. “Pelicans of Tinieblas,” he’d say, running his words together and then pausing. “I am Engineer Alejandro Sancudo Montes. I have been your President and will be your President again. History is a spiral which winds always to higher convolutions. Our destinies are intertwined. The stars guide my footsteps even in the wilderness. Nothing happens by accident. You will vote for me.” And of course they would, all but the few who tried to understand what he said, and maybe even some of those because he’s got so many parties behind him this time and looks like a winner. And as he’d promised the pelicans nothing, he could perfectly well expect to get the fish vote too.
He can always count on the women, not because he put through the law giving them the vote, but because he is still personally magnetic, irrational, and, as the picture on the coffee sacks proves, respectful to his wife’s memory as he was to her person in life. Only last week I chanced to mention my mother to Doña Rosario Largo de Cristál, once Alejo’s grade school teacher and now, at eighty, president emerita of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Tinieblista Party, and was reminded that no wife was more respected by her husband than Angustias Sancudo. There she was, a gibbering neurotic, yet Alejo always carried a little bottle of the rubbing alcohol she liked to sniff for her anxiety seizures and would leave any social gathering, no matter how heated the discussion, the moment she grew restless among the women and came whimpering to him. More, he didn’t rut with chola girls or go whoring to the capital, but kept a Ticamalan woman discreetly in the village near La Yegua, visiting her only two or three times a week and never staying late into the evening, much less all night. (My mother’s father, Don Augustín Maldonado, died shortly after the golpe of 28 November 1930, leaving the ranch to her, and Alejo was able to manage it from town since one of the first acts of the Anguila Administration was to put a road—“a vital stimulant to good relations with our sister republic,” said Erasmo Sancudo, the new Foreign Minister—right by the ranch from Angostura to the frontier.) And because of poor Angustias’ nerves Alejo abandoned politics for five years, returning to public life only when he was named Ambassador to Italy, an appointment which love of country made impossible to refuse.
No point in trying to tell Doña Rosario that he never abandoned polities, not even for an instant, that he simply preferred, instead of trudging toward the center of the stage, to make his entrances en grande jetée brillante. He pretended to disband Accion Dinámica in deference to Anguila, but continued to plot as earnestly as ever and was all set to overthrow Juan de Austria Tábano, Angela’s successor, when Uncle Erasmo, then vice president and destined to become President the next year, had Alejo dispatched to the farthest decent embassy Tinieblas then maintained. As for attentions to my mother, he destroyed her pets with his basilisk stare. A bull terrier named Pepe ran off yelping as though kicked and never came back, and the white rabbit had convulsions and died in my mother’s arms when he trained his gaze on it. Once he seized Alfonso by the ankles and hurled him into the river before my mother’s eyes—when he tried it on me, I bit his thumb to the bone—while in the privacy of the house he usually addressed her in the third person as La Inválída. In Rome he often popped home early in the afternoon to stand in the doorway of the bedroom where my mother lay crocheting and glare at her for above five minutes, snarling incomprehensibly and making weird faces. Then he would stride out and return at six, all tenderness, and go in and fondle her and say, “Are you feeling a little better, love?” And she would smile weakly and ask, “Why were you so terrible to me before?” And he would shake his head sadly and sigh and say, “What are you saying, heart? I’ve been all afternoon at the Ministry of Trade, trying to get them to buy Tinieblan coffee. I’ve only just left the place.”
So Edilma believes he stole my mother’s mind like one of those precision-planning movie bandits and then felt sorry when it was too late, and I think he did it haphazardly and never felt responsible. She had to impersonate a whole country, reacting to him and paying him deference, so he alternately pampered and terrorized her, hardly remembering the one policy when the other was in effect so long as he got a response. If you asked him, I think he’d say sincerely that he was a good husband, that his wife was just too weak to absorb the great benefits he’d offered her. That’s what he says about the Tinieblan people, after all, and he treats them the same way.
I don’t recall the incidents myself, not even biting his thumb. I recall a soft woman who wore a lace bed jacket and smelled of lemon-scented soap, who grasped the fingers of her right hand in the palm of her left hand to stop them from shaking, who held her head a little to one side as she wandered distractedly through a flat in Rome, who lay in bed crocheting most of the day and would like as not crumble in sobs when her short-pantsed, scuff-kneed, boy-sweat-smelling younger son flung himself over her to embrace her. One day she was no longer there—I can reconstruct the time as being shortly after my father’s 1937 visit to Berchtesgaden—and Alfonso and I were informed that she was ill and that we must be men. Alfonso cried, I didn’t, though at the moment we both thought she was dead. She lingered, actually, for four years in a sanitarium near Como, a model patient—according to the file I had them exhume for me in 1963—until the morning she broke the bathroom mirror with her forehead and cut her throat with a sha
rd.
11
Marta drops into a chair by the railing and slings one leg over the other. Sunglasses on, newspapers in her lap.
“Sleep well?” Sounds like a bullfrog.
“So, so.”
“Gringo’s no good?” Last night she went out with the director of the documentary crew Elena has brought from Hollywood.
No smile. Shrug. “How are you?”
“Fine. Watching the pelicans. Coffee?”
She shakes her head. Jaw set angry-worried, like the day she came to see me at the embassy in Paris. Her scholarship check hadn’t come through, and she suspected I’d filched it. Her family were very anti-alejista—still are, except for her, and she’s really a kikista and can’t stand my father. At that time you loathed me too, didn’t you, Marta? though your uncle Lazarillo, my cellmate in 1950, always spoke well of me, giving a romanticized version of our imprisonment in his column at least once a year to remind everyone how he’d suffered for democracy. Actually my father admired Lazarillo’s wit and was secretly flattered by “Hagiografia Tinieblina,” an extended quibble on the illusory sainthood in our family name.
Lazarillo didn’t get jailed until he revived the old rumor that Alejo has only one testicle with a satirical romance called “The Presidential Ball” in the English section of Diario de la Bahía. I was being held, without a formal charge: my real offense was getting caught humping Angela. We weren’t treated badly, and after ten days or so my father shipped us out of the country.
But Lazarillo’s tales of our comradeship in adversity cut no ice with you, Marta.
“How did you get your scholarship?” I asked, just to make chitchat, while my secretary was checking the mail.
And you said, “More honestly than you got your embassy.”
Which made me notice you—slim girl with wide brown eyes that flashed marvelously and lovely long legs in crazy-colored tights.
“Perhaps you can get one to study etiquette.”
She regretted her rudeness but wouldn’t apologize and sat glaring at me, her little white fist clenched over the wooden button of her duffle coat. She always gets angry when she’s wrong.
When my secretary came back without the check, I dictated a cable to the Ministry of Education. Then I offered to loan her five hundred francs.
“I don’t want anything from the Sancudos!”
It was then a question of throwing her out or taking her to bed.
“The loan’s from petty cash, but I’ll give you a dinner on what we Sancudos have stolen from the poor.”
“And your wife?”
“Will be furious. She’ll scratch my face and throw figurines and call me filthy things in Italian.”
“All right,” she said, smiling at last. “I was pompous.”
I took her to an unromantic place where provincial businessmen read their dinners from newspapers clipped to brown sticks, and she ate like a horse and recounted my iniquities. The gossips had taught her my story better than I’d lived it, and I learned that I’d been heartless to Olga and was now living off Elena, that I’d had ten kilos of heroin plucked from my bags at Miami airport and was making deals with neo-Nazis in Bonn. Also opinions of her own: that I was egotistical, staging a coup against the Aguado Government just to get power, and unprincipled, taking an embassy from the military junta just to get out of jail. She built a little pirate isle of Spanish in that Sargasso of bourgeois French grunts and won me there, singing of my sins and escapades. I’d got used to being known in Paris as Elena Delfi’s husband, but my vanity was always sensitive until Dr. Espino removed it. I left half my steak, nourishing on your interest in me, Marta, and when the bill came I took you down the street to a hotel.
My arm around your shoulder as we crossed the avenue. Headlights shearing yellow over rain-glazed cobblestones and February wind tangling your hair. I felt like singing then. Each new girl was like the first time, and I couldn’t believe my luck.
It was warm in the bar, but she wouldn’t take her coat off. She lit my cigarette with book matches from the table and laid the match in the ashtray—a white ceramic triangle with RICORD printed in red and black—to see if it would burn to the end. I asked the waiter for brandy and registration forms, and she filled out mine from my passport. No coy protests, no romantic gush, as though that were what she always did after dinner.
“I thought you were older than thirty-four.”
“Disappointed?”
“No. Thirty-four’s a good age.”
I sent the forms in with the waiter and could have drunk another brandy, but she’d only half sipped hers when he returned with the key. The elevator rose sedately like an upright glass coffin as I fumbled for her icy hand.
I didn’t think you’d be a virgin, Marta. You were almost nineteen and had been five months in Paris. And you were so calm downstairs.
“I’m glad to be rid of it. I haven’t thought of anything else for months. I could hardly study.”
“No boyfriend?”
“There’s a French boy. But he asks me and then lets me say no.”
“So you seduced me.”
“Until this evening I hated you. Then you didn’t seem so nasty, though I’m sure everything they say about you is true. And you didn’t ask, you just brought me here. I thought at least you’d do a good job. And you wouldn’t have to talk about love.”
Not a syllable. Nor a mention of how terrified I was that you might turn and flee down the stairs and that my fingers shook when I unlocked the door. I turned you by your firm haunch and cupped you where you flowed warm yolk; took you again and can still taste those first bites, though it’s five years since that night and four since I was murdered.
At first I hadn’t thought of having her again, or maybe just once or twice more for the novelty. But she was like one of those sweet fruits from home, a barely ripened mango or wild pineapple, which are impossible to get in wintertime Paris, even at Hediard’s in the Madeleine for fantastic prices, and whose remembered savor can haunt an exile’s dreams, so I decided not to give her up, at least not until spring. I would go by her room on the way to the embassy, striding up the Rue Racine in my chesterfield coat and ambassadorial homburg, a bunch of roses—the only gift she’d take from me—swathed in tissue paper in my gloved hand and my breath wreathing out before me in the windless morning, to spring three flights into Bohemia for a breakfast taste of youth and the tropics.
Elena sniffed it on me at once, that special jauntiness a new girl confers. Olga always tried to block it out, but Elena could hear it in my telephone voice all the way from Rome or Los Angeles and would ask, half serious, half in joke, if she ought to come and defend her territory. She treated me with particular kindness at such periods, enjoying my good spirits, for she believed a man ought to have adventures as a woman ought to be faithful. But when the thing of Marta had gone on above three weeks, which was a record, Elena said she wanted to meet my little friend.
This disturbed Marta; in Tinieblas wives and girlfriends converse mainly with fingernails. But I pointed out that Elena wasn’t a fishwife and that the meeting was as difficult for her, since whenever she went out people gawked at her, despite veils and dark glasses. I didn’t have to press, for she was no coward and as curious about Elena as Elena was about her. As for me, I waited to see what would happen. While I was married to Olga, I tried to organize and was always twisted up in unentanglable intrigues. By the end I had learned that women always make the final dispositions where love is concerned, and I relaxed and let them arrange themselves where they felt most comfortable. I left Marta and Elena to make their rendezvous and went to play squash with the British. When I returned home, I found them together in the living room.
“Marta and I are going to St. Moritz tomorrow, Kiki,” Elena disclosed. “She ought to know how to ski.”
“Am I invited?”
“Perhaps you could come on the weekend. We need a little rest from you.”
And Marta poured me a cup of tea.
“I was afraid she might be a little whore,” Elena said later. “I didn’t want you to stay too long with one of those.”
“And she’s not.”
“Not at all. I like her.”
And Marta, the next morning: “I expected her to be a snob.”
“And she isn’t.”
“No. And not jealous either. She congratulated me on choosing you and said it was better to share a man than own a boy. She says one can’t own a man and shouldn’t try.”
“I wish I’d been there.”
“You’re conceited enough as is.”
Four nights later, when Elena and I were in bed in the hotel at St. Moritz … Wait. I want to remember how it feels to have your legs tired but toned by skiing and your mind eased yet stimulated by the proximity of a lovely woman. We’d had dinner and a drink or two, and I’d danced with each of them and kissed Marta’s smiling cheek at her door. I’d left the window open half an inch in the sitting room. The bedroom had rococo molding where the walls met the ceiling and a marble mantelpiece with a porcelain clock, roman numerals for the hours and a shepherd and shepherdess pushing absentmindedly on either side. I was reading about the battle of Ramillies in Churchill’s Marlborough, probing foot reconnaissances into the frigid no-man’s-land at the bottom of the bed, and had just dropped some Gauloise ash on the white coverlet, yellowed by the merged circles of the reading lamps, when Elena put down the script she’d been studying and asked:
“Do you want to keep this girl?”
“Well, she pleases me. But if it’s a question of choosing …”
“Oh, Kiki. You’re so pretentious. If I thought there were any question of a choice, I’d leave you at once as unworthy of me.”
