by R. M. Koster
Olmedo Avispa had practiced law for forty years without ever making an enemy. He was nominated first by the Conservative Party, which had not yet split and which had put Lucho Gusano in the palace. Then the Liberals nominated him, followed by the Liberal Nationalists, and the Socialists and the Authentic Socialists, and the Independent Revolutionaries and the Revolutionary Independents, and the Practical Utopians, and the United Anarchists, and the Personal Opportunists, whose entire program was to get Humberto Ladilla elected to the Chamber of Deputies and who sold lottery chances on the government jobs in his patronage, and the Radical Republicans, and the Peasant Laborites, and other parties whose names are forgotten now even by their founders, all nineteen of them parties which have long since dissolved and whose flag colors and zoological symbols have disappeared or passed to other groups. That year they united to stop Alejandro Sancudo. And besides those nineteen parties, the anti-alejistas had four newspapers and six radio stations, while the power lines to Radio Tinieblista and the plant which printed Uncle Erasmo’s papers, lines maintained by the Compañía Tinieblina de Electricidad y Gas (a subsidiary of the Yankee and Celestial Energy Corporation, whose legal counsel was now the firm of Avispa y Abeja), kept breaking down. Nor was it an accident, a regrettable misunderstanding, that whenever Alejo’s campaign caravan reached a guard post it was detained for an hour or more. The Guardia Civil remembered Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote. But Alejo paid no attention to this opposition and went on talking about the stars.
It was this trust in the stars which preserved his confidence, for all was not well. True, wherever he went the masses acclaimed him, and province after province reported that he would win a majority of the votes, but as the proverb says, “It’s not who votes, it’s who counts,” and the arrangements for counting were not propitious. During the last week in March carpenters began putting up voting booths and tables in every ward of the capital and in the parishes of the towns and the squares of the villages, and every voting table was nine yards long because the arrangements for counting held that at six P.M. on election day the ballot boxes would be opened at the tables and the votes counted openly by representatives of all the parties who supported candidates for President. And while some of the parties supporting Olmedo Avispa were so small that they could hardly find enough representatives for all the voting tables, they were bona fide parties and entitled to be represented at the counting. So every voting table sat twenty people: one representative of the Tinieblista Party and nineteen representatives of the parties supporting Olmedo Avispa. And the Electoral Jury in the capital which checked the table counts and tallied the vote for the whole country was of the same composition, one representative from each party, with an administrative staff headed by Avispa’s law partner Ernesto Abeja. President Luis Gusano, who aspired to the status of elder statesman, described the fairness of this system in a scholarly article written for him by the political officer of the United States Embassy in Tinieblas and published in The New Republic, and the Tinieblan Ambassador to the United Nations offered the plan to the General Assembly as a model for protecting minority rights in developing countries, but few Tinieblans were fooled. Yet when Gonzalo Garbanzo went to Alejo on behalf of all the provincial chiefs and told him that something would have to be done about the counting arrangements, Alejo merely looked to Doktor Henker and asked about the stars.
Doktor Henker untaped Olmedo Avispa’s horoscope from the wall and carried it across the room to those of Alejo and the Republic of Tinieblas. I had to jump out of his way. He compared the three charts while Gonzalo stood clenching and unclenching his fists.
“The stars remain propitious,” Doktor Henker said finally.
“Tu ’tás loco!” shouted Gonzalo. He slapped his forehead with the palm of his right hand. “It’s nineteen to one at every table and nineteen to one on the Jury! Not counting the staff! What do the whore-stars know about that?”
Alejo held a finger up toward Gonzalo. “Pay attention to Doktor Henker.”
“You pay attention to me, ’Lejo,” screamed Gonzalo. It was the first time I ever heard anyone raise his voice to my father or call him by anything but a title, Engineer Sancudo or Mr. President. “This whoreson German has you all whored up with his whorestars! If you don’t get rid of him, he’ll whore us all!”
“Pay attention to Doktor Henker, Gonzalo. He invented Cyclone Five.”
“Is he going to invent a cyclone to blow away the nineteen avispistas on the jury? What the whore has a cyclone to do with Tinieblan politics?”
“My career,” said Doktor Henker in his phlegm-clogged spitstained Spanish, “is the mirror image of Sir Isaac Newton’s. You know who was Sir Isaac Newton? He went to Cambridge to test the judicial astrology and later turned to chemistry, then physics. I am doctor of physics from Leipzig. Later I study chemistry, then astrology, the most exact of all the sciences. Your matronym is Maduro, a Sephardic Jewish name, and if the Führer had listened to me, you would know very well what is Cyclone Five.”
On election day a record number of Tinieblans went to the voting tables to put their ballots in the boxes and have their identity cards punched and their left wrists smeared with purple indelible ink, and there was no doubt but that most of them voted for Alejandro Sancudo, but when the polls closed and the Civil Guards made everyone move a decent distance back from the tables and the ballot boxes were opened, many irregularities were discovered. Ballots were found smudged, or slightly torn, or sometimes folded in quarters instead of in half. The party representatives had to decide whether or not to accept such ballots, and where it concerned Sancudo ballots—as in almost every case it did—the decision at every table in every ward and parish and village square was always the same: nineteen to one for rejection. Then the accepted ballots were counted and the count certified by the party representatives, and here again the result was the same throughout the republic: the Tinieblist representatives refused to certify the counts, except for the representative in the village of Baldosa in Selva Trópica province, who signed after the Civil Guard on duty at the table had pointed a rifle at his car and chambered a round and released the safety. Then the accepted ballots and the certified counts were locked back into the ballot boxes, and the rejected ballots were locked in other boxes, and all were sent to the Electoral jury in the capital. There the table counts were checked against the accepted ballots, but when these were examined, more irregularities were discovered and more Sancudo ballots had to be disqualified. Meanwhile the days passed and the populace waited eagerly for the results, alejistas claiming victory and denouncing the table counts as fraudulent, anti-alejistas claiming Alejo had been beaten and boasting gleefully about how many Sancudo ballots this or that table had managed to disqualify.
It took the Electoral jury ten days to rule on all the irregularities and complete the count. All this time they were locked in the Alcaldía with the telephones disconnected and a company of Civil Guards outside. No one was allowed in or out except the waiter from the Hotel Colón. Still there were rumors. Certain cynics alleged that the count was not being conducted fairly. The populace grew unquiet, and President Gusano took the precautions of declaring a state of siege, suspending constitutional guarantees and imposing a seven P.M. to five A.M. curfew. Then it was announced that Olmedo Avispa had defeated Alejandro Sancudo by some four thousand votes.
It was the greatest fraud in the history of Tinieblas, greater than the fraud of 1916 when sixty-six sealed ballot boxes disappeared as by enchantment en route from Salinas to the capital, greater even than the great frauds of 1920 and 1924 when men rose from the dead to vote for Heriberto Ladilla and fifteen thousand indians voted for him as one. The leaders of the Tinieblista Party begged Alejo to call for an uprising or at least a general strike. So many citizens had been robbed of their votes that the Gusano Government would fall, they said, like a ripe papaya. Not even the Civil Guard could be counted on to support Avispa’s inauguration. The men had been without leave for weeks and the
officers were beginning to forget Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Azote and remember the splendid field gray uniforms Alejo had issued them during his administration. But Alejo conferred with Doktor Henker and then anounced that the stars remained propitious and that he would go to La Yegua and await the call of destiny.
Olmedo Avispa received the presidential sash at eleven o’clock in the morning on the first of June and choked to death that same evening on a piece of filet mignon from his inaugural banquet. His vice president, Fernando Comején, was sworn in on the spot and struck dead by a coronary thrombosis before morning. The succession ought then to have passed to the Minister of Justice, but neither Avispa nor Comején had had time to name a cabinet. Nineteen men from nineteen parties claimed to have been promised the post by Avispa; another nineteen protested that they had been favored by Comején. Don Lorenzo Abeja, Ernesto’s brother and an amateur of spiritism, offered to resolve the matter in consultation with Avispa’s ghost, but was shouted down by the Chamber of Deputies, where the Tinieblista Party had gained a majority. This majority called for new elections and a caretaker government under Speaker Caballero. The Supreme Court, where Uncle Erasmo was in the minority, asked Colonel Culata to head a junta, but Culata refused.
“The politicians are as bad as the gringos,” he told his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Aiax Tolete. “They foul their pants, then ask us to clean it up.”
Meanwhile the banks were closed, the government offices shut down, the shops boarded up, and the people ready to go into the streets, Civil Guard or no Civil Guard, the moment Alejo whispered.
Alejo said nothing. He didn’t have to. Men who had spent fortunes to keep him out of the palace had begun to believe in fate.
“There’s no way,” said Ernesto Abeja to whoever would listen. “It’s either God’s will or a joke of the devil’s, but that madman will be president whatever we do.”
In the end it was decided that he should reconvene the Electoral jury and recount the votes. Twelve hours later the jury proclaimed that Alejandro Sancudo had won the election after all.
Alejo did not come to the capital to be inaugurated. He waited for the sash to be brought to him. So it was that the entire Chamber of Deputies and the Supreme Court and the Commandants of the Guardia Civil and the diplomatic corps and the foreign journalists drove to La Yegua in a motorcade that stretched seven miles, and assembled in the rain in the pasture across the highway from the house, and waited under their umbrellas until Alejo felt like coming out. He stepped from the porch into the saddle of a bay gelding and rode the fifty yards to where the President of the Supreme Court was waiting to swear him in. He took the oath on horseback and reached down for the sash and knotted it across his chest. Then he delivered the shortest inaugural address in Tinieblan history:
“I was chosen by the stars and am responsible to destiny. You can all go home now. I’ll call you when I need you.”
18
About fifteen months after Alejo took office, when I had already left for my sophomore year at college, an Argentine circus came to Tinieblas. I assume it was the usual display: the tattooed fire-eater, the clown with the trained pomeranian, the chubby woman in a spangled corset who stands upright on the crupper of a pacing percheron, the pimpish fellow in jodhpurs who cracks a whip and waves a pistol while a toothless lion squats on a stool and a mangy bear chugs around on a tricycle. There was also a tumbling act, two brothers and a sister who used a seesaw to catapult themselves up on each other’s shoulders. When the impresario went to see Lalo Marañon, who was mayor of Ciudad Tinieblas, about a permit to pitch his tent on the vacant plot where El Opulento is now, he took the sister along. The next morning Lalo went early to the palace to tell President Sancudo that there was an Argentine acrobat in town who was the best whore in the Western Hemisphere, if not the entire world.
“She’s more than a whore,” he told Alejo. “She’s a succubus.” And he repeated this judgment for years, verbs changed to the past tense, long after the girl had left the country.
That’s how Alejo found Angela. He summoned her to the palace that evening and bought her contract from the impresario the next day, giving the man five hundred inchados and twenty-four hours to get his circus over the border into Costaguana. Then he made Lalo Marañon consul in Macao, partly as a finder’s fee—Lalo made his fortune there, selling Tinieblan passports and certifying phony bills of lading—and partly so there would be no one else in the country who had had her. Then he recruited four butch queers to guard her and packed her off to his villa at Medusa Beach.
Alejo had bought the beach and all the land around it from the state and had had the Ministry of Public Works run a road in from the highway, but he held the land and kept the road closed to the public, so that while today there are over a hundred houses and cottages set side-by-side along the strand and a casino and a surf club and riding stables and the beginnings of a golf course, in those days there was only Alejo’s villa in a walled compound surrounded on three sides by scrub and wild coconut palms and on the fourth by the sea. Angela lived there with a maid and an old woman and the four sturdy sodomites. Alejo visited her every weekend and took her to the capital once a month for shopping and a dinner at the Hotel Excelsior. She dressed demurely for these excursions and might have passed for Alejo’s niece or daughter, but at the villa she went naked. That’s how I first saw her, dancing naked on the sand.
I went with Lino Piojo, in his speedboat, “to have a look around,” and as the wind was offshore she didn’t hear the motor when we came round the point and kept on dancing, a kind of adagio, to the slow rhythm of the surf. Then she saw us and stopped, and spread her legs, bumped her sex toward us, and clasped her hands over it, and then opened her arms in invitation, and I was crossbowed back into a fresher age when mermaids sang and nymphs came out of the sea to sport with mortals and sea demons took female form to drain men of their souls. I dived toward the shore, leaving Lino to idle the boat beyond the breakers, but when I reached shallow water and stood up to see her laughing at me, covering her breasts and sex in mock modesty, a man came through the villa gate carrying a submachine gun, and when I kept wading in, he fired a burst over my head. I stopped then, and Angela dropped her arms and said, “Why don’t you shoot him?” to the guard, and then turned and walked in through the gate. I saw what looked like a tail hanging in the cleft of her buttocks, but I noted it without surprise and looked after her as in a dream, until the guard fired again, this time into the sand in front of me. Then I waded back into the surf and swam out to the boat.
“Didn’t you tell him you were Alejo’s son?” asked Lino.
“I don’t think it would have mattered. She wanted him to shoot.”
“Lorelei of the tropics,” he laughed. Then: “God, Kiki, look at yourself!”
My chest and stomach and, when I looked inside my bathing suit, my groin were scored with leprous blotches.
Angela had yellow hair and pale gray eyes and pale golden skin and full breasts which stood out from her body and tiny white teeth, no bigger than milk teeth but pointed like those of an animal. She had firm arms and calves and lovely, firm palm-sized buttocks and a flexible tail the diameter of her middle finger and about twice as long. She was kept by my father and danced naked on the sand and laughed at me. After that day she danced on a movie screen stretched across the inside of my forehead and laughed through banks of speakers bolted inside my ears, and as time passed, she danced more wildly and laughed more tauntingly, and the blotches on my body grew redder and more disgusting. She danced and laughed while I wrestled the Harvard captain and when I punched my English instructor and got put on probation and during every fight I had the next summer in the alleys behind Washington Avenue. That summer I paced my dream of Angela like a rabid wolf. I slept into the afternoon each day, waking chalk-mouthed with hangover to the sound of her laughter. In my workouts I used more and more weight and spent hours smashing the heavy bag, for no one would box or wrestle with me, not after I snapped
a soldier’s wrist and then had to be pried off him. And with darkness, I would streel off to the cantinas, looking for trouble.
