The Prince

by R. M. Koster

  “They could be marines landed by boat. Or parachutists.”

  “Don’t be such a pubic hair. What’s happening is they’re throwing out Alejo.”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Anybody. Joaquín Araña [he was the candidate the Vanguardia had chased into the Reservation], the Guardia, the people.”

  “I bet the gringos are behind it.”

  “That’s what you say. The people don’t like Alejo any more.”

  “Then what are the gringos doing with those tanks?”

  “They have no right to take them out of the base.”

  “They go where they feel like, the bastards.”

  “Alejo shouldn’t have messed with them.”

  “Alejo has guts.”

  “Alejo’s finished.”

  I did not participate in these speculations, and no one looked at me.

  Dr. Filos came back then and told us to take our seats. I noticed immediately that he had taken off his gown and his mortar board, but I had no desire to call this infraction to his attention or even to report him to the Vanguardia that afternoon. He begged our pardon for his absence but added that in Tinieblas a class in social studies did not necessarily stop when the teacher left the room. Tinieblas was, in fact, of all the world the best place to teach social studies, for students had only to look out the window to learn, for example, that there is no morality among nations and no law except that of the jungle, and if they listened at the same window they would understand, far better than from a lecture on Machiavelli, that a ruler who makes himself hated and does not possess a strong city may be easily assaulted. He turned then, perhaps to put these precepts on the blackboard, and saw what I had printed. There was no laughter from my friends. Dr. Filos looked at the phrases carefully. When I had written them, I had been immune from punishment; now I was seared, but I resolved bravely to answer any comment from Dr. Filos that it was mongrels like him who made our country weak. Or perhaps I would cry “Arriba, Tinieblas!” and die like a patriot, for it seemed to me suddenly that the writing of those phrases had been a courageous and patriotic act. But Dr. Filos said nothing. Finally he smacked his lips like a monkey and began to laugh quietly, nodding his head. Then he erased my phrases neatly and wrote in their place:

  INTRABIT UT VULPIS

  REGNABIT UT LEO

  MORIETUR UT CANIS.

  When he turned, grinning sadly at me over the heads of the class, the nine-fifty bell rang, and he said classes would continue as normal.

  My father did not die like a dog, however; he went out like a legitimate politician, covered with someone else’s blood. The night before, the gringo commander in the Reservation had met Colonel Genaro Culata, Commandant of the Guardia Civil, at the home of Doña Artemisa Gusano de Fink, the widow of a gringo who had come to Tinieblas in 1907 with the Copperhead Mining Company and had married and stayed on after the copper deposits in Otán Province were totally scraped out. As the niece of a Tinieblan president and the widow of a gringo empire builder, Doña Artemisa could provide the sort of discreet liaison needed in such troubled times. Both officers wore civilian dress, but strict protocol was observed: no handshake and an aide-de-camp at parade rest behind each chair. The gringo general was slight, gray where he wasn’t bald, with thin lips and steel-rimmed glasses; no doubt he sat stiffly, as though taking a square meal in the dining hall at West Point. Colonel Genaro Culata was the last of General Feliciano Luna’s fifty illegitimate sons, the only one to bear his mother’s surname, for General Luna, who was generous enough to recognize all his male progeny, was hanged a week after Colonel Culata was conceived. He was tall for a Tinieblan and heavy, swarthy like his father with a drooping mustache which I imagine he chewed during the interview, sitting with his legs spread and feet stretched out, permitting himself an occasional clawing at his crotch. The conversation was in Spanish, which the gringo general, who had spent long years civilizing his little brown Filipino brothers with a Krag rifle, spoke excellently. Colonel Culata’s aide has left a record.

  The gringo general told Colonel Genaro Culata without bluster that the United States of America could no longer tolerate the attitude of the Tinieblan Government. Responsibility and authority for the conduct of United States affairs with the Republic of Tinieblas has been turned over to him. Alejandro Sancudo would be deposed the following morning. If Colonel Culata cared to accomplish this with his own forces, the United States of America would furnish all necessary assistance and promptly recognize Culata himself. If not, the United States had sufficient force in the country to take all measures necessary to defend its national interest. Colonel Culata said that “measures necessary” sounded like a fancy way to threaten armed intervention, and added that it wasn’t worth the pain to dip a turd in perfume. The general said that he would determine what steps might be necessary according to the circumstances which prevailed, but pointed out that the United States had intervened, reluctantly perhaps but none the less effectively, at Vera Cruz in 1915 and more recently in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic—all this in peacetime—and now the United States was at war. Colonel Culata said he would have to consider the matter and consult with his officers; the general said that he must have an answer at once, and if Colonel Culata could not speak for the Tinieblan Civil Guard, would he please put the general in contact with an officer who could. Colonel Genaro Culata then said that Alejandro Sancudo didn’t matter a donkey’s prick to him, but that it was more in keeping with the honor of his profession to die at the head of his troops in defense of his country. The general said that he could certainly respect such a decision but that if the colonel had the good of his country at heart, he might consider the possibility of civilian casualties and the advisability of putting Tinieblas as soon as possible on the winning side of what was going to be a long and bitterly fought World War. Colonel Genaro Culata stood up and said that since the general had him between the sword and the wall, he would throw Alejo out of office, but that the general could go to shit with his offer of recognition since he, Colonel Genaro Culata, had lived all his life, and until this moment with honor, without being recognized by his own father. Some civilian would turn up to form a government acceptable to the United States. The general said he would hold a force in readiness should the Civil Guard need help.

  “You may do what you like,” said Colonel Genaro Culata, “because you are the stronger. But if you come before I call, come shooting.”

  Then he went back to the barracks and told his officers: “We’re going to throw out Alejo to please the gringos. I was born a son of a bitch and I’ll die a son of a bitch, but that’s what we’re going to do.”

  The next morning Culata ordered the Guardia confined to the barracks and sent his second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote, to the palace with the two platoons he could trust. Azote left them under command of Captain Dionísio Espada, who was married to Azote’s sister and was rumored to be faithful to her though he was easily the most handsome officer in Tinieblas, with orders to surround the building as discreetly as possible and went himself to the main gate. In other times the Guardia Civil had furnished men for the presidential escort, but Alejo, who had already been thrown out once by the Guardia, replaced them with members of the Vanguardia Tinieblina. These stopped Azote at the gate—no one was allowed inside without a written order—and told him to go back to the barracks. When the Leader (they liked this title better than President) wanted to see him, he would be sent for. Azote told them that the palace was surrounded, the Leader in the process of being deposed, and that he wished to avoid bloodshed and give Engineer Sancudo the courtesy of a personal notification. One of the Vanguardistas ran into the palace; the others leveled their carbines at Azote’s chest. At length the first returned, relieved Azote of his pearl-handled, gold-chased Browning pistol, and began prodding him inside. On the steps Azote took the precaution of tying his handkerchief to the riding crop he always carried stuck in one boot.

  President Alejandr
o Sancudo received Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote in his office, in the presence of Dr. Fausto Maroma, the Minister of justice, and the President of the Assembly, Don Francisco Caballero de la Rosa. He waved the guard outside but did not rise.

  “Well, little Colonel. What have you got to say to me before I have you shot?”

  “I have the honor to inform you that by authority of Colonel Culata and for the good of the state, you have been relieved of your duties as President of the Republic. The palace is surrounded. For your own safety and that of your collaborators here have the kindness to accompany me to the barracks.”

  “By the authority of President Rosenfeld and for the good of the United States. Ha! Do you think it was for this that I have given this country order? The law on social security? The franchise for women? Is it for this that I am purifying the Tinieblan Race and defending our national sovereignty, so that a packet of cowards who lick the gringo’s backsides should put me down?” He stood up and placed both palms on the polished top of his desk, leaning toward Azote. “I am the Gauleiter of Middle America, named by Adolfo Hitler himself I will brook no indignities! All those who defy my authority will be shot! I will give you one chance, little Colonel. Pledge your royalty to me and put yourself at the head of the Guardia Civil. If the gringos dare put one toenail outside their base, I will crush them! They are mongrels. Their day is over. They will not fight. And should they dare to interfere, should they dare, Chancellor Hitler will send the finest soldiers in the world to help us bury them! He has promised it. He has given me his personal word. All of Middle America will be united under one order. One nation from Peru to Mexico. The dream of Bolívar!”

  Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote blinked his eyes. “Mr. President,” he said, “you’re crazy. Consider yourself under arrest.”

  President Alejandro Sancudo reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out the pistol he had pointed at President Abúndio Moral and shot Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote through the chest. Then he ran around the desk and emptied the pistol into Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote’s face. He threw the gun into a corner of the room, picked Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote up on his shoulder and carried him out onto the balcony from which General Epifanio Mojón had watched the sharks feed and threw him over the railing onto the sea wall. Then he rushed back into the room to find his pistol and reload it.

  When Captain Dionísio Espada heard the shots, he ran out from the side street to the sea wall promenade in time to see Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote come sailing down from the balcony like a sack of feed. He then ran another hundred meters down the promenade to a café that overlooked the bay and called Colonel Culata at the barracks. Culata decided that if men were going to be killed, it would be better if they were gringos. He told Captain Espada to hold his positions and let no one in or out of the palace; then he called the gringo commander in the Reservation. But when Espada returned to the palace and saw Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote lying in his own blood, he could not contain himself, and he drew his pistol and rushed around to the little park with the statue of Simón Mocoso and gathered the squad he had posted there and charged the gate, firing on the Vanguadistas, and they fired back, joined by three others on the roof of the porte-cochere, and the Civil Guards around the building began firing into it, and Vanguardistas fired back at them from the windows, and while Dr. Maroma and Señor Caballero ran up to the maids’ quarters to see if they could dress themselves as women, Alejo himself went back onto the balcony and fired down with his pistol. That was the firing we schoolboys heard over at the Politécnico.

  Now I have slides. The first one, snapped by my Uncle Erasmo from the window of his office in the Correo Matinal building on Bolívar Plaza, shows the gringo column rolling out of Avenida del General Enrique Guderian—and the story goes that an official in the Ciudad Tinieblas town hall was already instituting a search for the old street signs with Avenida del General Jorge Washington on them—and around the square into Avenida Bolívar, with a few private cars run up on the pavements on either side and the major’s tank about to smatter a pushcart full of casaba melons abandoned on the corner by a fleeing, green-suited vendor. In the next we see the tail of the column, with the two soldiers on motorcycles and the staff car in the wrong lane trying to get past, disappearing down Bolívar toward the Plaza Cervantes, while in Plaza Bolívar a platoon is dismounting from four trucks, those already down fixing bayonets and a lieutenant seeing to the placement of a light machine gun on the steps of the Hotel Excelsior. Now a series taken by Edilma (who had gone out with two of the palace maids to do some marketing) as she crouched in the portico of the general post office on Plaza Inchado at the far end of Avenida Bolívar: first a view of the square, littered with field gray Guardias lying under benches, kneeling beside bushes, craning around the kiosk on the side of which a Correo Matinal poster with the words PRESIDENT SANCUDO AFFIRMS NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY can be clearly seen, and standing behind the pedestal of the statue of Palmiro Inchado de los Huevos, all pointing rifles at the side of the palace, from whose unzipped windows carbine barrels poke. Then the same scene, but at the extreme right a tank with the major up, holding his Doberman by its steel ears and aiming its perforated muzzle at the windows, while turret and cannon swing toward the palace. Next a shot of the tank, four or so yards further into the plaza, with the staff car swung half in front of it and a brigadier general in a khaki cap with polished visor, khaki jacket with polished brass buttons, white shirt and tan tie, polished Sam Browne belt, tan riding breeches, and polished brown riding boots, standing beside the car pointing a little stick with a polished fifty-caliber cartridge case fitted over the thicker end at the major, who holds his right fist straight up in the air above him and looks down contritely at the brigadier. Next, please; ah! The brigadier and a captain dressed the same as he only with a pistol in a polished leather holster, flap closed and lanyard rising from the butt and looped through his epaulette, strolling across the square, the captain with his shoulders a bit hunched, the brigadier quite erect, left hand clasping his right wrist behind his back, right hand holding his stick, which dangles by his left leg like a tail, and beyond them a Civil Guard sergeant in field gray, sitting with his back to the pedestal of the statue of Palmiro Inchado (between whose legs another Guardia is aiming his rifle), holding both palms toward the gringo officers, his mouth wide open shouting and his face smeared with fear, and just to the left of the two gringos a Civil Guard rising off his knees with his head jerked back and his Argentine Mauser held up the length of his two arms and pointing back over his shoulder. And finally the captain talking to the Civil Guard sergeant, who is on his feet now but crouched behind the pedestal, pointing with his left hand around it toward the little park whose trees can just be seen in the background between the corner of the palace and the façade of the Alcaldía, while the brigadier stands, still erect and quite exposed to the right of the pedestal, looking in the direction the sergeant indicates.

  So when the brigadier learned that the officer in charge was over in the little park—for that was where the Civil Guard sergeant had last seen Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote—he and his aide walked back to the major’s tank, both hunched a bit forward now as carbine bullets scuffed the dirt about them, but not running or even trotting, because the captain had to walk if the brigadier walked and the brigadier walked, not to set an example for his men or the Tinieblans but because he had been at Saint Mihiel with the Second Division and hadn’t the slightest intention of being killed or even knicked in a banana republic. He told the major to button up his hatch and take his tank forward to the left side of the plaza near the Ministry of Education and send the second tank forward to the right of the plaza near the Alcaldía and to have his gunner load a round of high explosive but not to do any firing except on radio order from the brigadier. Then he told his driver to take the staff car, which had developed three moth-holes in its left front fender, back up Avenida Bolívar and take the cyclists, who were straddling the
ir bikes in the lee of the major’s tank, with him. Then he walked back to the first truck and told the captain who walked like he was having his temperature taken to give him the first two trucks and a smart sergeant and to be ready to send his men into the plaza if and when the tanks started shooting but not to shoot any Civil Guards and in the meantime to keep everyone sitting tight out of the line of fire. Then he put his aide in the cab of the first truck and climbed up on the third tank and told the sergeant who sat with his head and shoulders out of the hatch to have his driver swing right down the side street. The tank moved ahead, getting a bullet ping under the driver’s slit window, and humped up on the curb, getting a bullet ping on the turret in front of the brigadier’s chest, and turned down the narrow street, one tread on the sidewalk, with the first two trucks full of soldiers following, and then swung left and trundled round into the little park. Almost as soon as the tank came in view from the palace and before the cannon had a good field of fire, a white flag appeared on the roof of the porte-cochere (white flags were also waving in the windows facing the Plaza Inchado), for as a Vanguardista whom Alejo found waving a handkerchief told him, the Civil Guard was one thing, but they were not going to fight gringos in tanks.

  The brigadier sent a soldier running back for the staff car and told the smart sergeant to get his men down and into fire positions and, not making the mistake of Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote, stayed by the tank, whose cannon and machine gun were trained on the palace, and had his aide call out in Spanish for President Sancudo to come out. So Alejo came out, his white suit drenched in Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote’s blood, his right cheek twitching a bit, holding his pistol by the barrel (which was still so hot he had to wrap a handkerchief around it), not looking down at the bodies crumpled by the gate, giving no sign that he heard the curses of Captain Dionísio Espada, who was dying of a stomach wound, and stalked up to the brigadier.