Tyrant Memory (27 page)

But the doctor had told him they could treat him to prevent the spread
and that he should return in fifteen days for his first session. That’s why, as the
sun was getting hotter and hotter, we waited to find out what was going on.

“What could have happened, why did he leave the hospital so soon?”
Carmela muttered behind me.

I asked her if she had spoken to María Elena. She had been working for
them forever, Haydée even brought her with them once when they went into exile in
Costa Rica.

“She told me she thought he was at the hospital. He left the house early
this morning, carrying a bag with his pajamas and a few toiletries, ready to check
in for his treatment. She was surprised when I told her he had called us and was on
his way here.”

“Maybe there was some delay,” I said.

María Elena also told her that in the last few days Old Man Pericles had
been even more withdrawn than usual, he ate little, and he barely left the house,
spending all his time in his office with the door closed; his cough had gotten
worse.

It now feels as if I’ve always known him, because memory is
deceptive and attaches itself capriciously to things. But it must have been around
1920, shortly before I married Carmela. Old Man Pericles was already married to
Haydée, and Clemente was about three years old. Carmela and Haydée were classmates,
neighbors, friends in the same club.

As for Pericles, all I remember from those days was his military
haircut, his upright bearing, his stern gaze, and his wrinkled brow, as if he were
already old. He was a second lieutenant in the cavalry, a graduate of the military
academy. He was following in the footsteps of his father, who was then a lieutenant
colonel. He would, however, suddenly abandon his military career and enroll in the
university to study law. As he would say, this was his first insubordination: the
eldest son’s break from paternal authority. An insubordination against the military
world of his father, which as the years passed, would become the central theme of
his life. “They’d already passed me the baton when I saw the folly of continuing in
that world,” he once told me. “That’s my story.”

The moment I met Haydée, on the other hand, stands out perfectly clear
in my memory. It was an afternoon at Carmela’s family’s house during our courtship:
a slender redhead with milky-white skin, freckles, and green eyes, Haydée was
sitting on the sofa holding a cup on her lap. Dazzled, I reminded myself she was
Carmela’s best friend, the one I had heard so much about, the wife of Second
Lieutenant Aragón, the mother of the baby my future mother-in-law was holding. A
thought slipped past me: Haydée could have been the girl for me.

Not even half an hour had passed since Pericles had called when
there was a knock on the door. I told myself it was impossible for him to have
gotten here so quickly, unless somebody had driven him. But it was Don Tobías, the
postman. Twice a week he came to deliver mail to these last houses along the highway
beyond which is the enormous park and, further on, the uninhabited highlands. He was
a thin, short man with a narrow, Cantinflas-style mustache, and was perspiring; he
had been delivering the mail in this area for five years. Carmela invited him in, as
always, to have some fresh watermelon drink. The letter was from Maggi, our only
daughter; Carmela opened it eagerly while Don Tobías was enjoying his refreshment,
then she began to read it, some parts out loud. Maggi wrote about some late cold
spells and the miraculous arrival of spring, about her companions at the convent in
Maryland, the pastoral work she so much enjoys, and her recent trip to Baltimore.

Don Tobías asked us if we’d heard the latest news: the authorities had
learned that the big blue house at mile nine had been inhabited by a guerrilla group
for several months. He said he couldn’t believe his ears when he heard it on the
radio news that morning. He had not delivered any mail to that address that whole
time; he delivered the utility, water, or telephone bills to a post office box;
there was nothing unusual about that, many people in the neighborhood preferred to
receive their personal mail in a box in the city, given how remote this area is. I
told him we had also heard the news on the radio, and fortunately the house had
already been vacated by the time the authorities burst in, and there were no victims
to mourn.

“Hard to believe the things that are starting to happen,” Don Tobías
said as he handed the glass back to Carmela; he wiped off his mustache, thanked us,
and said goodbye.

Carmela read the letter again, then she handed it to me. I went back out
to the terrace to sit down in the rocking chair. The temperature was rising; the dry
season was in its final gasps, the earth was parched and the vegetation withered,
and we still had at least a week to go before the first rains. At the end of the
letter, under her signature, Maggi drew the same drawing she has been drawing ever
since she was a little girl: the sun with a bird in the middle. She was about to
turn fifty. I put the letter aside; I offered my gratitude to the invisible ones
that my daughter was still alive. Clemente had been murdered a year before, and Old
Man Pericles had taken it badly, very badly, even though he tried to convince
himself of the contrary. Clemente, the eldest son, had died unreconciled with his
father.

One night, as he was leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the
Centroamérica district of San Salvador, he was shot in the back. At first we thought
it was a political assassination because the country was in the turmoil of the
elections. Old Man Pericles was still in exile in Costa Rica; the authorities gave
him permission to return. They never caught the culprit, and I assume the case has
been shelved. According to hearsay, it was most likely a powerful military officer’s
act of revenge for a cuckolding. From the time he was a young man, Clemente had had
a knack for getting into trouble over women.

A few days after the funeral, Old Man Pericles came over and confessed
to being plagued by contradictory feelings: on one hand, his grief at Clemente’s
death; and on the other, his blind rage, at him, the world, life. That’s when I told
him that by some strange law that seems to follow a swinging, pendulum-like
movement, children always position themselves at the opposite extreme of where their
parents want them to be, and the more foolishly we try to determine their futures,
the further they go from where we wish them to be. I’m the perfect example: I’m an
agnostic, awash in esoteric ideas, always having disdained the emptiness of Catholic
rituals and rejected the corruption of the Church, and I’ve had to accept that my
only daughter became a nun, out of her own free will and vocation.

“The best proof, Old Man, that life makes decisions to spite us,” I told
him.

But Old Man Pericles was a hard nut to crack.

“The difference, Chelón, is that you believe there’s something beyond
this, an afterlife, that’s why you can forgive. I don’t,” he said.

“You don’t believe in the afterlife or you can’t forgive?”

“Neither . . . ,” he said, as if to settle the matter.

“You still can’t forgive Clemente for not being like you?” I insisted.
“Perhaps he simply broke from your concept of the world in the same way you broke
from the colonel’s.”

Old Man Pericles wrinkled his brow.

I was tempted to tell him that sometimes what we most hate and never
forgive in those around us is some hidden part of ourselves we neither recognize nor
accept, but the old man just would have looked at me scornfully and asked where I
had left my cassock.

Old Man Pericles used to call Clemente “that blundering
fool,” a way of mitigating his disappointment in his firstborn, for whom he’d had
such high expectations. Clemente participated in the attempted coup against the
dictator in April 1944. At the time, he was condemned to death by firing squad but
miraculously managed to escape. So great must have been his terror that, from then
on, he foreswore politics and for the rest of his life supported military
governments.

“Nobody should judge another’s fear,” I told the old man that day after
Clemente’s funeral. Who knows what that young man felt, sentenced to death, the
shock and disorientation at the prospect of facing a firing squad, something he
could never quite get over, and despite his father’s example of struggle, he was
grateful to his conservative grandfather, who had saved his life.

“One thing is fear, another is shamelessness. He could have simply
abstained from politics without turning into the priestly confidant of alcoholic
military officers and the shoulder for their sluts to cry on,” he said, without
mitigating his scorn and bitterness one iota.

I didn’t insist, though for me Clemente’s portrait had to be drawn with
heavy brushstrokes: from the terror of death he sank into alcoholism, and to emerge
from both he needed faith, which he found in AA, where he became a fierce activist.
He ended up organizing groups of recovering alcoholics among the top brass of the
military, and that’s the world he moved in.

Clemente’s private life also provoked Old Man Pericles’s wrath: first he
married a floozy who left him; then he married a Honduran girl from a good family
who represented everything Old Man Pericles hated most, but whom, after Clemente’s
murder, he’d begun to visit and had grown quite fond of. And there was, moreover,
the family secret, his trampling on a reputation when he was a young man, an episode
that was never so much as mentioned.

That morning, sitting in the rocking chair, wandering through
my memories and waiting for Old Man Pericles to arrive, I reminded myself yet again
that the history of the Aragón family was not material for a short story but rather
a tragedy, one I would never dare write — out of modesty, loyalty, incomprehension,
lack of skill, and because life had already passed me by, and if I went back and
lived it again, I would perhaps opt for silence, as Old Man Pericles did, but
without his bitterness. And then I told myself that we humans are hopeless, there I
was gloating over Old Man Pericles’s misfortune, wondering about the best way to
write it, as if I didn’t have my own cross to bear, as if the rage that devoured me
during Maggi’s tragedy wasn’t still with me, forever and unutterable. And now, while
writing down these recollections of the old man, I can assert that we men are
incorrigible, inconstant, we almost always end up doing what we have set our minds
to avoid, and vice versa.

The telephone rang again; it startled us. I feared the old man
may have had some mishap, but no, it was Ricardito, Carmela told me, the young man
who was selling my paintings. I took the handset: he asked me if he could stop by in
the afternoon. I told him I already had plans, we should put it off till the
following day. He was curious, kind, and meddlesome; he told me he wanted to be my
agent, manage my entire oeuvre, as if that’s what I needed. I explained that between
the galleries, he, and Carmela, it was enough, I wasn’t that prolific. He loved to
get me wound up so I’d talk to him about esotericism, Eastern thought, maybe hoping
I would give him a greater percentage of sales if I could make him my disciple. I
gave him free reign to ask questions and offer his opinions as much as he wished,
and once in a while I’d get fired up and run off at the mouth. Carmela warned me
there was something about him she didn’t like, she could smell the bird of prey in
him. I told her that when vultures start circling it is because they are attracted
to something that’s putrefying, so it is best to keep them distracted and thus defer
the moment they start pecking at our flesh.

But what really bothered Carmela was that sometimes Ricardito arrived in
the company of gorgeous young women who called me “maestro,” praised my work to the
heavens, and asked me why I didn’t teach, how much they would love to take classes
from me. She was made particularly uneasy by a rather bold, skinny, curly-haired
blonde; her name was Andrea, and she frequently and fervently exclaimed how much she
wanted to be my model.

It was 1927 when I had my first show — some oil paintings I was
quite proud of at the time — and Old Man Pericles had quit law school and plunged
headlong into journalism and politics. I visited him at the newspaper office where
he worked; he’d written an article in which he spoke quite generously about my show.
One year later, when I had the nerve to send some verses I’d been working on for
publication, I again visited him at the newspaper; Old Man Pericles leafed through
the chapbook and, totally serious, asked me if I really thought I could be a painter
and a poet at the same time. I said yes.

“Is your wound that large?” he asked.

I didn’t understand.

“I mean, painting should be enough for you,” he said with that sarcastic
frown I would always recognize from then on.

Then he told me he couldn’t understand how the muse of poetry, so
insolent and depraved, could pick a guy like me — sober, a devoted husband, not
given to excesses of any kind — that there must have been a mistake somewhere
because no lasting art can come from politeness and a good heart.

I didn’t know what to say.

The following week he published a short article in which he welcomed a
new poet who was already a painter, but he didn’t say a word about the quality of my
verses. The clarity of my recollection is proof of the slight I felt to my
self-esteem.

Then came that fateful coup d’état in December 1931: suddenly Old
Man Pericles became — probably through the intrigues of his ex-comrades-in-arms and
his father, Colonel Aragón — the private secretary to the new president, a general
with a warlock complex who would rule over us for twelve years. I stopped seeing him
during this period; the exercise of power always isolates men , and Old Man Pericles
was no exception. But I heard about his adventures through Carmela, who continued to
see Haydée as frequently as ever.