The Prince

by R. M. Koster

  And right now in his office in the Civil Guard barracks General Puñete is wondering whether he ought to order that motorcade halted at the checkpoint, whether it might not be safer to double-cross Alejo and not keep the Guardia out of the election than to trust Alejo to keep him on as commandant after he wins, and of course if Guardia support is enough to beat Alejo then the double cross was right, whereas if Alejo wins anyway, gets so many votes that all the ballot boxes the soldiers can dump into the bay and all the imaginative counting an intimidated Electoral Jury can invent still don’t matter, then Puñete ends up as military attaché in some place like New Guinea and the double cross was wrong, while for the short run he has to worry about the possibility of a rising in the city when word gets out that Alejo’s rally has been forbidden and the certainty of being nagged to distraction by the gringos, who might even cut off their fifty-thousand-dollar-a-month subsidy to the Guardia rather than be accused in the newspapers of encouraging a military force to meddle in a democratic election,

  And in his headquarters at Fort Shafter in the Reservation, General Shortarm is getting a report from his G2 on the scheduled demonstration in Bolívar Plaza of the National Patriotic Alliance, six political parties supporting the presidential candidacy of Alejandro Sancudo, and hearing advice from the political officer seconded to his Command from the State Department and deciding whether to declare Tinieblas City off-limits to United States’ military personnel and United States’ civilian employees of the Reservation and their dependents, guests, and household pets,

  And the ministers of Pepe Fuertes’ cabinet, some already in their offices, some still in their homes or girlfriends’ cottages, some in their air-conditioned chauffeur-driven limousines, are wondering if there might still be any people on the government payroll who will vote for Alejo, trying to find spots for supporters of the five-party Independent National Coalition which is backing Pepe,

  And the seven-hundred-odd candidates for the fifty-five seat Chamber of Deputies—because besides the nine non-ideological parties we have Socialists and Christian Democrats too—are already on the phone scrounging money for their campaigns,

  And the two-thousand-odd candidates for the various city councils are doing likewise,

  And in his mother’s house in the brand-new middle-income suburb of Esperanza paid for by the Alliance for Progress and built by a construction firm owned by Pepe Fuertes’ brother-in-law out of cement blocks made by a firm in which Pepe himself is a principal stockholder, Ñato Espino is receiving my telepathic proclamation of his death sentence, manner of execution carefully described, and is shivering and mewling and twisting in his sleep, troubled sleep, unquiet sleep, sleep without repose or refreshment that comes only in the damp hours of pre-dawn darkness to flit on bat wings through his heart,

  And here on this balcony, I, Kiki Sancudo, am watching it all with my eyes closed against the morning sun, watching and understanding and gathering my prancing mind under firm rein.

  14

  I was in school, at the Politénico on Avenida del General Enrique Guderian—changed from Avenida del General Jorge Washington and later, of course, changed back—the day they threw Alejo out of the palace for the second time. It was in January of 1942, the second day of class after the Christmas-New Year’s holidays. The capital was particularly colorful those days because of the Decree on the Dignity of Occupations. Taxi, bus, and truck drivers, trolley motormen and conductors, and government chauffeurs wore purple coveralls and green kepis. Market workers were dressed according to what they sold: grocers in green, butchers in red, fish vendors in marine blue. Laborers wore khaki shirts, trousers, and forage caps; government functionaries, attorneys, businessmen, and doctors wore white suits and black ties; secretaries and shopgirls wore purple skirts and white blouses; teachers, even those in kindergarten, wore academic gowns and mortar boards. It was up to the individual to acquire and maintain his uniform, and penalties for improper dress were strict. The Vanguardia Tinieblina, a paramilitary formation organized by Alejo before his election and active enough in the campaign to chase his principal opponent into the Reservation, kept watch for violations. They wore green shirts and white duck trousers and purple berets, carried carbines slung across their backs and twirled leather quirts. The Guardia Civil had new uniforms of field gray—jodhpurs for the officers and black jackboots for all ranks—while the Young Patriots, which replaced the Boy and Girl Scouts and which was popularly though covertly known as Alejo’s Little Bastards, had miniature outfits of the same stuff—skirts, of course, for the girls. All members of the Partido Tinieblista wore red and black armbands and had to be saluted with the right arm held stiffly forward, fist clenched, thumb up, and cheered with the cry Arriba, Tinieblas!

  The city had the aspect of a gigantic costume party, but one which had gone on too long and which the guests weren’t all enjoying. People had begun to slouch, to forego customary courtesies, to look the other way when party members approached. The salute was often given with the middle finger instead of the thumb raised, while the salutation sometimes came out Arriba, tu Madre! It was uncomfortable for waiters and bartenders to wear cutaways in that heat, and the cantina hostesses and barmaids resented having to wear the same uniform as the full-time whores—scarlet dress with white P for PUTA embroidered over the left breast. It got so a party member couldn’t have a friendly drink without getting a Mickey Finn. Many formerly well-dressed business and professional men got doctor’s certificates of goiter trouble and went about without neckties, and Lazarillo Agudo showed up at the offices of La Prensa one morning in his obligatory white suit and black tie but without shirt, socks, or shoes. He was reported by a party member, hauled from his desk by a quartet of Vanguardistas, quirted a bit in the face for resisting, and turned over to the Civil Guard, but as there was nothing specific in the decree about what journalists ought to wear in the way of linen and footwear, he was simply given a beating and released. The Ministry of Justice got the decree tightened up that afternoon.

  Many who didn’t mind the uniforms were annoyed by the Decree on the Protection of Labor, promulgated the day after General Guderian’s tanks crossed into Russia, which abolished all existing trade unions and professional organizations and created a host of new groups with sonorous titles, altruistic aims, stiff dues, and compulsory membership. A more universal source of joy was the Decree on the Preservation of the Tinieblan Race, which was necessary, in the words of Alejo’s radio address, “so that this noble race, born of the union of Mayan princesses and Castilian aristocrats, be preserved in its purity and not corrupted by the degenerate blood of mongrel breeds.” This means that Jews and Chinamen were forbidden to marry non-Jews and non-Chinamen, and, more excitingly, deprived of citizenship, laid open to insult and abuse, subjected to vague but terrifying threats of deportation, and encour­aged to sell out cheap to people judged racially pure by the Ministry of justice. That went for Don Moisés Levi Méndes and his coffee finca. But after dealing briskly with Jews and Chinamen, the decree grew sluggish, since when the Castilian aristocrats had killed most of the Mayan princesses’ husbands, fathers, and brothers and chased the rest into the jungle, they brought in Negro slaves, and everyone in Tinieblas had at least one black grandmother, including Alejo, for the Colombian woman who bore Eladio Sancudo to Pablo Sancudo was surely black, or where did Erasmo get his squashed nose and Alejo himself his somewhat kinky if close-cropped hair? Instead of calling the slaves African chieftains, he set up a commission in the Department of Racial Purity of the Ministry of justice to determine how dark your skin could get and how pendulous your lower lip before you stopped being a member of the Tinieblan Race and became a mongrel. As the darker citizens owned little property, the question was not too pressing. The commission, which was in lengthy communication with scientific authorities in Grossdeutschland, hadn’t come in with its findings.

  Science aside, however, I was sure the Department of Racial Purity would never pass our social studies teacher, Dr. A
bstemio Filos, whose skin was the color and texture of a Civil Guard’s waxed boot, whose brow hurried back in furrows toward his steel-wool hair, whose nose was mashed like a gorilla’s, and whose lower lip drooped like a baboon’s, and so I felt free to bait and harry him, strutting about the room in my lieutenant of Young Patriots’ uniform—Alfonso was a colonel—when he tried to bring the class to order at the beginning of the period, and pumping gales of glee from my classmates by beating my chest while he lectured. That day I had one of my sycophants—and it was delightful how the class sucked up to me, despite the fact that I was weak and unathletic—get him talking about natural selection and man’s descent from the apes (titters, sputterings, and choked guffaws from the vicinity of Sancudo’s desk at the absolute rear of the room), and when he was called out suddenly at about nine-thirty, I sauntered to the blackboard and wrote:

  DARWIN WAS RIGHT.

  THE MISSING LINK EXISTS.

  IT LIVES IN TINIEBLAS AND TEACHES SOCIAL STUDIES.

  This got applause, but less than I’d expected because a number of my fellow scholars had gone to the window to observe some unaccustomed activity across the avenue in the Reservation. A company of troops was being marched down the black-top road from the three-story, olive-green, screened-in, wooden-barracks square toward the main gate of Fort Shafter—puttees buckled at the ankles, Springfields slung from right shoulders, and instead of high-crowned campaign hats, steel helmets with slightly sloped brims. And as they swung down the road—captain at the front looking neither right nor left, sergeant out to the right about twelve men back from the point belching Hut, hut, hut, hut, hut, lieutenant with his pistol slapping his thigh sprinting up from the third platoon—a line of trucks headed out of the motor pool away over to our right and swung toward the gate, preceded by three high-silhouetted light tanks, certainly no match for one of General Guderian’s, but General Guderian was at the moment fully engaged, giving ground, in fact, before Moscow. From the turret of the lead tank protruded the bust of a monster from one of the gringo football films: immense shoulders, flint chin, and leather helmet. It defined itself when the tank hippoed nearer as a gringo major—gold leaf on the brow of the helmet—who patted the receiver of a machine gun mounted on a trolley that ran around the hatch as though calming a Doberman whose leash would presently be slipped. The tanks growled up to the gate, waddling parallel to the avenue just inside the barbed-wire-topped cyclone fence, and then squirmed through, the lead tank crunching with its left tread in reverse, the other two each making slightly wider turns, so that they halted in a row with the front plates of their treads just toeing the avenue and their cannons aimed under our window at the classroom below. The major waved his left hand (palm forward, as though pushing an imaginary butt) at the sentry, who stood in a little stucco shelter just inside the gate. Such jolly fellows those sentries had been only four weeks before, lounging in their shelters (there were two boxes, one on either side of the gate), shouting foul taunts at each other, slinking out to flirt with the little whores who carne wiggling by the base every afternoon around four-thirty, jabbering in pidgin English, reaching down to pat a hip or pinch a titty, grinning to show the gum gaps left by cantina brawls, then looking up to howl a genial Fuck you, Greaseball! as we jeered them from our departing schoolbus, but now they were all business. Check every individual’s ID card. Search the trunks of civilian vehicles. Stay alert and no grab-ass with hoors. So when the major waved, the sentry double-timed out with his rifle at port arms to stand straddling the centerline, and the other sentry did the same on his side, halting traffic along the avenue. Meanwhile the head of the infantry column disappeared behind the line of trucks, which had halted when the first one drew even with the gate, and then the squads came clambering up over the tailgates, unslinging their rifles and filling up the benches on either side, eight men to a bench, shoulder to shoulder with their rifles sticking up between their knees, until the last truck was loaded and the lieutenant pounded back along the line between the trucks and the fence and braced in front of the captain who stood by the cab of the first truck and saluted and reported, his jaw jerking the chin strap of his helmet. The captain snapped about-face and marched quickly and stiffly, as though he were trying to hold a rectal thermometer in place, three steps and then left-flank along the side of the major’s tank, and then halt and right-face. He craned his head back and threw up a salute so that his hand quivered near the brim of his helmet and called, in a voice that rang across the avenue into our window, “Sir, B Company mounted and ready to move out, Sir!” The major nodded at him and lifted his hand off the machine gun and waved an answer to the salute. Then he looked straight at me and balled his hand into a fist and poked it slowly into the air ahead of him three times, and his tank jerked forward onto the avenue and then clanked around to our right bruising the asphalt, and the second tank crunched after it, its engine roaring, and then the third, and the first truck pulled ahead and turned through the gate, the captain swinging up into the cab from the right running board, and turned again, gathering speed to draw up behind the third tank, and all the line of trucks rolled on out the gate, their motors groaning and heat waves dancing above their khaki-painted hoods. And just as the sentries were about to turn back to their stucco shelters, two soldiers on motorcycles with rifles slung across their backs came stuttering down the hill, followed by a Dodge staff car with a white-starred blue pennant fluttering above the right front fender, and this group swept through the gate and took off after the column of trucks toward the old city, from which direction we schoolboys could now hear firing.

  For three years, and no doubt even while Alfonso and I were in Italy, the students of the Instituto Politécnico had played war every noon, stalking each other in the cloister and clashing hand-to-hand in the quadrangle. When I first enrolled in May, 1939, the Spanish Loyalists, defeated on the peninsula, were still the favored group at the Instituto. That fall most boys wanted to be Frenchmen. After my father’s election, it became more fashionable to be German, and by September, 1940, no one would be French except the son of the French Ambassador, and he had joined us Germans in our skirmishes against a diminishing band of Englishmen. The following summer a few of the former Spanish Loyalists became Russians, but they switched back to being Englishmen and two even became Germans after they were ambushed and badly mauled on their way home from school by a group of Young Patriots from the upper forms. But when, the week before the Christmas holidays, one boy suggested introducing new teams of combatants, there were plenty willing to be gringos and not one aspiring Japanese, not because we liked gringos—we knew all about imperialism from being chased out of the Reservation when we climbed the fence to pick mangos there—but because they were too palpable there across the avenue not to be feared and respected. As an eleven-year-old I couldn’t help feeling scared when that gringo major looked at me; as a Tinieblan I was angry when those gringo sentries held up their rifles to halt our traffic and those tanks and soldiers violated our city, but as a noontime Wehrmacht officer, I had to admire the smooth, confident way the operation clicked off, and as Alejandro Sancudo’s son I was aware that hard times lay ahead. When the American Ambassador called on my father the morning of December 8th to request that the Tinieblan Government take steps to black out the capital, my father kept him waiting for three hours and then announced that he was ordering floodlights set up in the park opposite the palace and special illumination for every important public monument. On New Year‘s Eve he gave a huge reception in honor of the Japanese Ambassador, and on January 5th, the day schools opened, he published the Decree on the Defense of Tinieblan Sovereignty, which prohibited the sale of foodstuffs to the Reservation and forbade Tinieblans to work there under pain of loss of citizenship. The decree was not unpopular. The people who earned their livings in the Reservation and the merchants who sold milk and vegetables there didn’t like it, but most Tinieblans resented the Reservation, many disliked gringos, and some thought it had been wonderfully clever
of the Japanese to give them such a kick in the nuts. But no one thought my father had much of a future. A good sample of the prevailing opinion was given to me on the bus that morning by Aquilino Piojo, a classmate and friend of Alfonso’s, a major in the Young Patriots, and the midday leader of von Piojo’s Death’s-head Storm Troopers.

  “Your papa’s crazy, Sancudo.” Along Avenida Bolívar shopkeepers were boarding up their stores. “He’s organized the country and put the kikes in their place, but if he thinks he can shit on the gringos he’s crazy. It isn’t done.”

  “The Japs are doing it.”

  “The Japs are crazy too. And they’ve got an army and a navy. Did you see the guns on that gringo battleship?”

  The week before an American cruiser had put in briefly at the Reservation, up from Panama on the way, I suppose, to San Diego, and hundreds of Tinieblans had gone down to the sea wall opposite the naval docks to see her. Lino went on about the guns and the squadron of P-40’s stationed at Potter’s Field and all the other things that gringos had, and when I put in a halfhearted word for the Japanese, he said:

  “You’ll see. Those gringos are a serious thing. Boom! Boom! Boom!”

  Now, of course, what we heard was pop! pop! pop!

  “It’s the Civil Guard fighting the gringos,” said one junior pundit.

  “Don’t be a bobo,” said another. “The gringos just left.”

  “It could be other gringos. The Civil Guard is winning and they had to send reinforcements.”

  “Jerk! Even if another bunch had left by the back gate they’d have had to pass by here to get downtown.”