The Prince

by R. M. Koster

  “Well, then, yes; I’d like to keep her.”

  “It’s not to feed your ego, is it? I know we’re all supposed to feed your ego, but I hope with Marta it’s not just that.”

  “She has an excellent ego of her own which I, in my small way, have gorged like a Strasbourg goose.”

  “All right. She might do you good, settle you down a little. But remember, Kiki, I turned down a chance to play Les liaisons dangereuses.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means I’m understanding you and the way you need other women, and not trying to find perverse stimulation or act out some sadomasochistic lunacy. And if you get tired of her, don’t drag it out. I won’t have you hurting her.”

  “Feeling maternal? Is it time we had a kid?”

  “No. She’s more like a younger sister, or a memory of myself at that age.”

  “Nine years ago. You make it sound like ninety.”

  “Being married to you makes one age quickly.”

  “It does, eh? Then come here, you big Istrian bitch. It’s time for your hormone injection.”

  And the three of us lived happily until death did us part.

  When I went back to Tinieblas eight months later, Marta asked me to take her with me. Her family disowned her, and Alfonso told me to let her go, let her finish her studies or get married.

  “I’m not holding her. What should I do, throw her out? She likes it here, and I need her in the campaign.”

  “You’re an egotistical bastard, Kiki.”

  “Well, yes. But as long as the girl’s happy, what do you care?”

  And when I was bungled into the plant kingdom, you stayed with me and learned to translate my noises.

  “Is it that you feel sorry for me?” It must have been a year ago I asked her that.

  “Do you feel sorry for yourself?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I don’t. You don’t either. If you did I’d leave you. I stay because you’re a man.”

  12

  “Shall I read or hold?”

  Angry at something. Or just sick of life, as we get now and then. It’s nice to sit in the sun and have her read to me, but not when she’s bitchy. “Hold.”

  She pulls her chair beside mine and spreads Alfonso’s Correo Matinal. My father has had a triumphant tour of the interior: “Tumultuous multitudes recall the great campaigns of 1940 and 1948.” Picture of him speaking from the back of a truck in the Salinas oil field: kind of white suit that went out of style after León Fuertes became President; desiccated face under wide-brimmed hat; false teeth snapping at the wind; and all around a sea of aluminum helmets.

  “‘The maximum leader of the Tinieblista Party will speak this afternoon in Bolívar Plaza,’” Marta reads, “‘accompanied by his son, Don César Enrique Sancudo Maldonado, and his daughter-in-law, Elena Delfi de Sancudo, the famous actress.’”

  “Tears for the freak and cheers for the lovely lady.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “You know why.”

  “You should have stayed in California and continued the treatments.”

  “When I’ve seen Ñato. That’s the treatment for me.”

  “Just see him?”

  “‘If Alejandro Sancudo is President, all is permitted.’ That’s what your uncle wrote day before yesterday.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It’s true where Ñato is concerned. It’s not as though anyone cared about him or would miss him much if something happened. I imagine he’s sweating now. Watching the campaign and worrying, and if he leaves the country, Interpol will get him. His only chance is if Pepe Fuertes wins, Pepe won’t win. Alejo has the people. And the Electoral jury, and in this country it’s not who votes, it’s who counts. And he’s made his deal with the Guardia, and Washington won’t interfere. That’s what you need: the people, the jury, a deal with the Guardia, and the OK from Washington, and he’s got Nacho’s money and Alfonso’s papers and a TV station and four radio stations and the same white suit he had on when they threw him out in ’52. And he’s got Elena Delfi who won an Oscar three years ago, and a vegetable on wheels who can sit out in the sun making people feel so sorry for him they’ll cry their way to the polls, who can whinny and drool and shit in his pants if it’ll get votes, because when we win we’re going to divide this country up, and my share is Ñato Espino!”

  Came out heehaws. Only a few circuits left, and they overloaded. Cool hand on my check. Wipes my chin with a napkin. “Ya, papi. Cálmate, corazón.”

  Resting. Like a bug on flypaper. I want to do something again, mean something. People wondering why I’m back in the country. What’s Kiki up to? Is he planning something? Expectant and afraid. He’s only a cripple. Cripple, hell! He’s up to something. It’s the last chance for Alejo too. He’s always been sure only he can save the country, but he really wants the kick of being in. He wants to feel the country under him and make it wiggle and twitch. Stick it in deep for the times they threw him out, for the months in jail and the years in exile.

  “Do you know what it’s like, Marta, to be in prison with your enemies in power? It’s like how I am now. They used to poke their fingers in his food. Major Azote used to come every morning and piss into his cell. ‘Good day, Señor Presidente. I have the honor to urinate on you.’”

  “He shot Azote’s cousin, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. And Ñato Espino shot me.”

  “And someone had León Fuertes blown up with a plastic bomb. Who had Fuertes killed, Kiki?”

  “There are always people who want to kill a strong President.”

  She gives me a look. “You were supposed to be a minister, and you didn’t get anything.”

  “Would it make you happy if I said it was me?”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong with you this morning?”

  “Nothing. I hate this politics.”

  “You used to like it.”

  “I never liked it. I liked you, and you wanted to be President.”

  “Everyone wants to be President. I wanted to be President, and I got shot. León Fuertes was President, and they blew him up. His brother Pepe is President, and he wants to stay President. My father was President twice—three times if you count one day in 1930—and he wants to be President again. They threw him out in 1952, and now the same people are trying to put him back in. Lucho Gusano’s son-in-law wants to be President, but Pepe wouldn’t give him the nomination, so Lucho’s backing my father, and Meco Avispa wants to be President and is backing Pepe because Pepe’s promised him the nomination next time. Nacho Hormiga wants to be President and figures the best way is to be my father’s Vice President because my father always gets thrown out before the end of his term, and Lino Piojo wants to be President and is running as Pepe’s Vice President because, after all, León Fuertes got blown up, and the same thing could happen to Pepe. Do you know that even Alfonso wants to be President? Only last week he told me, ‘Kiki, I think I’d make a good President.’ Can you imagine? Even Alfonso wants to be President. If they hanged Tinieblans for wanting to be President, rope would be worth more than rubies.”

  “I hate it.”

  “Give me La Patria.”

  “It didn’t come.”

  “Then send the girl for it. I heard a kid hawking it on the street a little while ago.”

  “Why do you want to read La Patria?”

  “To see what the other side says, of course. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “Of course! Something must be wrong with me. Not with your wonderful politics.”

  She flings out of her chair. Back in a minute with the tabloid. Holds it under my nose. “Here! Are you happy now?”

  MORE HORNS FOR KIKI across the top. Full page picture of Elena from one of her movies; lying in bed, ecstatic face craned toward the camera and her fingernails in some actor’s naked shoulders. La Donna è Mobile underneath. Inset at the bottom, a small shot of me laughing; caption The Complacent Cuckold. />
  “The story’s inside.”

  Sun warm on my closed eyes.

  “Don’t you want me to read it?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “‘Elena Delfi has built a new set of horns for Kiki Sancudo, who isn’t up to his conjugal duties any more. The latest lover is a well-known French singer, who flew all the way to Hollywood to keep her company on and off her cinema set. The Italian sex goddess married Don Kiki seven years ago in hope of becoming First Lady, but since he is no longer active as a man or a politician, she takes diversion where she finds it. Kiki doesn’t complain. She pays the bills, after all.’”

  Boy crying Patria! up the street. Marta’s suffering, so she has to hurt someone.

  “‘La Delfi, who never tires of Tinieblan politics, arrived from California yesterday to take part in the current campaign. She’s casting a local stand-in for Kiki, and since the lady is nothing if not a democrat, the post is wide open. Good luck, boys.’”

  Pelicans wheel and plummet. Avenue filling up with cars.

  “I’m sorry, Kiki.”

  Sit quiet and watch the cars. Wonderful place for a traffic survey. Great line of work for me, but they only have them in developed countries.

  “Kiki?”

  Can’t teach a coward to shoot. Afraid of the gun, so he never learns to hold and squeeze. Think he’d be able to hit the head with four shots at three yards. When the man’s unarmed and his back is turned. Jerked the trigger and pulled them low. Neck, shoulder, scapula, kidney. First one did the damage, and if it’d been four inches higher there’d be no problem.

  “You’re more of a man than any of them!”

  Make my smile. “Don’t worry, Marta. We’re going to get them all.”

  “I don’t care about them. I care about you. Let’s leave, Kiki. Why don’t we leave?”

  “Because then it would just be waiting. This is the only place where I can do something.”

  “You can let people gawk at you. And snicker at you and write filth.”

  “That’s the way it’s done here. Tonight our radio will say that Pepe’s withered leg is the result of syphilis inherited from his mother.”

  “And if they shoot you again? Ñato would shoot you again. Do you want to be dead, Kiki? Is that it?”

  “No. That’s why I came back. So I could feel as though I were still alive.”

  “Stop trying, Kiki. Stop trying to be like before. You’re paralyzed. You can’t smuggle guns or blow people up or overthrow the government or run for President. It’s all fantasy. They’re only using you. Everybody’s using everybody, and I hate it. Give it up!”

  And she goes out crying.

  13

  In the bedroom to my right Marta is dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and choking sobs into anger,

  And in the bedroom to my left Elena is dreaming (Patria, please copy) of that now-extinct hominid Kikianthropos erectus with her-left hand clasped between chiffon-swathed thighs and the base of her thumb nestling Mount Pubis,

  And next door fluffy-bearded Phil the documentary director who, I hope for both their sakes, laid Marta last night, not in my house, of course, but in one of the pushbutton assignation nooks on the airport road, while a poorly maintained air conditioner wheezed at them and (keep copying, Patria) she pretended it was the old Kiki putting it to her—and Carl the cameraman and Sonny the soundman are tenting their bedclothes with piss-rods,

  And opposite them Edilma’s niece Modesta is making up my bed without disturbing the corded buzzer that lies taped to the bottom sheet under my left index finger every night,

  And downstairs Modesta’s daughter Neira has cleared off Marta’s toast crusts and tea cup and is setting places for the movie men,

  And in the kitchen Modesta’s sister-in-law Franca is cleaning shrimp for the noon meal, and Jaime is packing the last eggsoaked knob of bread into his jaw,

  And at the service entrance on Justo Canino Street Edilma is buying Otán oranges from a pushcart man,

  And in the back patio Modesta’s husband Otilio is spraying the grass around the swimming pool, and earth and grass are drinking politely because they get their rations every morning while most of the country is sun-scorched brown and breathless, and a forage column of parasol ants is strutting up out of their rock-hard nest, quick-timing off on the long haul to the plants that flourish by the kitchen wall, while another column marches back, each ant holding a sheet of leaf three times its size so that the second column looks like a line of sloops beating closehauled through the grass,

  And—what else? because there’s no one to read to me or help me smoke a cigarette, and I will not, repeat, will not shout, and I don’t want to get nervous nervous nervous because when you’re trussed up (truss and trousseau from the same root, eh, Ñato), trussed up tight, it is imperative to keep calm calm calm,

  And in the pink and white school bus of the Instituto de la Virgen Santísima, Olguita is drenching her classmates with envy telling them her plans to take tea and cakes with Elena Delfi, and some little bitch is trying to get even by mentioning the lead story in this morning’s Patria, and Olguita is putting her down with a contemptuous phrase,

  And all over the city newsboys are crying Patria! Patria! and citizens are staring at the front page and gobbling up the story inside and smiling to themselves or chuckling or laughing out loud, poking their neighbors, “Have you seen this?” because there’s nothing so funny as an impotent paralytic cuckold, especially if he used to give himself airs, and others are shaking their heads and clucking about the yellow press but reading on all the same,

  And perhaps that story is giving the readers of La Patria a faint impression of being alive, but I doubt it because that sensation doesn’t pounce unless you joy or suffer personally, and the readers of La Patria make do with vicarious experience, sweaty sneering bleary swine, nutless gutless thoughtless zombies; run five-inch needles up their spines and they’d come to life, truss them up and they’d understand; and would they laugh then? would they chuckle? read them stories from La Patria and see if they’d laugh; all those who laugh this morning, and those who cluck and read on shall be turned into plants, trees for dogs to piss on and weeds for dogs to dump on and smear their bungs across!

  And something else, please, because the spit is slobbering down my neck under my lovely Philippine shirt and I can’t wipe it off and my shoulders ache and a vein beside my nose is throbbing and I can’t press my finger against it,

  And in a room at Lawrenceville, where La Patria is not distributed, Mito is hunching under the blankets the way he used to hunch up against Olga’s warm flank on nights when the thunder cracked and he came droop-shouldered and chatter-toothed into our room, and I always let him come in and crawl up against his mother, though sometimes I was angry and let him feel it in my voice, and I’m sorry for that, Mito, because being afraid has nothing to do with heing a coward, or perhaps he is up and on his way across the muddy snow to a class in political science, a class where the teacher lectures about forms of government in sanitary, abstract terms,

  And over to my left, two floors under the gold roof of the Presidential Palace, Pepe Fuertes is rocking in the high-backed, red-leather swivel chair he had carried over from his dental clinic four years ago, resting bis wasted leg in its aluminum brace and twenty-pound shoe in a half-open desk drawer, listening to Meco tell him about my father’s swing through Salinas and trying to figure a way to steal the province this year since he doesn’t have the strength to win it or the money to buy it,

  And in my Aunt Matilde’s house in Córdoba my father is chewing a stick of cane sugar with the false teeth Pepe made for him ten years ago when my father was urging loyal alejistas to vote for Pepe’s brother León,

  And outside in the street the motorcade is forming behind Nacho’s bulletproof Lincoln (turned over to my father for the campaign as part of the price of Nacho’s vice-presidential nomination), eight cars or so full of Tinieblista Party people first, then Nacho in one of his
unbulletproof Cadillacs, and behind him cars full of members of his Partido Reformista Patriótico, then, five or six cars back, the Partido Campesino Libre, and behind them the Movimiento Civilista Conservador and the Partido Soberano Revolucionario and the Frente Defensora Nacionalista,

  And at precisely eight o’clock Alejo, who is the only punctual man in Tinieblas, will spit his sugar cane on to Aunt Matilde’s tile floor and smear his smile with the back of his hand and stride outside with his Westphalian bodyguard Egon behind him, and all the horns will toot,

  And he will walk straight on without looking down the line of cars and duck into the Lincoln, whose door a boy briefed two hours before by Alejo’s Florentine secretary Furetto will swing open at the last minute to let none of the air conditioning out, while Egon does a Seesoldat doubletime around the car with his stock-fitted Mauser pistol at the high port,

  And the second Alejo’s shriveled seventy-year-old butt touches down on the Lincoln’s ostrich-leather seat, his Rhinelander chauffeur Gunther will tramp on the accelerator, and the car will lurch off, rear wheels churning dust and graves, with Egon still half out the right-hand front door and Furetto clutching the hand strap in the back,

  And the other cars will light out behind, out of town and left onto the Pan American highway, sixty miles an hour, twenty feet between bumpers, with horns blaring and party flags fluttering from radio antennas: red with black border and white hydra for the tinieblistas, yellow with green alligator for the reformistas, green with black bull for the campesino libristas, white with red jaguar for the civilistas, sky blue with orange fighting cock for the soberanistas, orange with purple Ozian winged monkey for the frentistas,

  And the column will stop at each town large enough to provide a platform for the maximum leader and in Aguascalientes for a barbeque rally on the baseball field, and more vehicles will hitch on the end at each stop, so that by three o’clock when they hit the Guardia control-point west of Ciudad Tinieblas there will be eighty to a hundred cars strung out behind the Lincoln, plus trucks full of campesinos (to each one of whom Nacho’s factotum has slipped a five-inchado note for his big time in the capital) and at least three busloads of Juventud Tinieblista,