Tyrant Memory (28 page)

Barely a month after the coup, the peasant insurrection began, led by
the communists. There was total chaos. We felt uneasy in San Salvador, but the
situation in the western sector of the country was much more dire. When the
indigenous hordes armed themselves with guns and machetes, my in-laws were at their
finca in Apaneca; they managed to escape by the skin of their teeth and arrived,
terrified, in San Salvador. The government’s response was strong. There was a
massacre, and the leaders were executed.

I’ve never known the passion for power, but I have read about it and
thus am not surprised that Old Man Pericles lived those weeks of the insurrection
with great intensity, awash in adrenaline and with enough vehemence to crush his
enemies. I imagined him whispering in the general’s ear, drawing up plans,
displaying his brilliance. He had been educated at a military academy, but he’d also
attended law school, where he had shared classrooms and perhaps even adventures with
some of the communist leaders, whom he was now fighting, and whom he would soon
defeat.

The insurrection was a disaster; its chief military leader — Negro
Martí, a former law-school classmate of Old Man Pericles — was captured almost at
the outset. He was court-martialed and sentenced to be executed by firing squad. The
night before his execution, the old man went to the prison with a box of cigars,
shut himself up with Negro Martí and his two deputies — who were also sentenced to
death — and they remained there talking and smoking until the dawn. At five in the
morning he accompanied Martí to the wall of the General Cemetery. It was the first
of February 1932. That’s when his life changed.

Old Man Pericles wasn’t one to make confessions and give detailed
accounts, and I never met Martí, but I can picture the scene as if I had been right
there, several yards away from the site of the execution, sitting on the grave of a
stranger, my sketchbook resting on my lap, trying to capture every last detail under
the blue-gray light of dawn, when there appears a rather small, thin man with dark
skin, a mustache, a receding hairline, the little hair he has left curly and
tangled, his hands in manacles, flanked by a priest and the commanding officer of
the firing squad, surrounded by guards, his step firm and determined, with a proud
bearing, conscious that he had the central role in this scene and was, thus, the one
who set the tone and the rhythm. Old Man Pericles is walking to the side, silently;
the priest holds forth, invoking God and gesticulating affectedly. With a disdainful
look on his face, the condemned man says no, no he is not going to confess, would
the priest please leave. The priest insists, stubbornly, obsequiously. The
commanding officer and Old Man Pericles exchange looks. It’s time, the officer says
gravely, and he removes the manacles. The old man approaches the condemned man and
embraces him tightly, his nerves and muscles clenched; they exchange no word, only a
glint in the eyes. The commanding officer takes out a handkerchief to blindfold the
prisoner, who says he doesn’t need a blindfold, they should proceed without. The
priest relents and, still muttering his mumbo-jumbo, he embraces the condemned man,
who responds coldly. The old man starts to walk away, eager to gain some distance;
when he gets alongside the firing squad he hears the voice of the condemned man
shouting: “Pericles!” The old man turns around. “Come here, give me a hug,” he says.
“But I already did,” the old man answers, discomfited. “Come, give me another one, I
don’t want the last hug in this life to be from a scheming priest,” the condemned
man says. The sky lightens. Pericles retraces his steps. They embrace again; the
condemned man uses the opportunity to whisper in his ear: “You are going to be one
of us.” The old man walks away, bewildered, his head down, his back to the scene; he
pauses briefly to light a cigarette. The condemned man stands and faces the firing
squad, his chest out, defiant. The officer shouts: “Ready!” He orders them to
prepare their weapons. Then, the condemned man’s voice rings out forcefully: “Aim!”
The officer suffers a moment of confusion but right away lifts his whip and
energetically nods to the squad to carry out the condemned man’s order. At which
point the condemned man shouts: “Fire!” The officer swings the whip through the air
and the shots ring out. The condemned man has slumped over. All present hold still
and silent amid the curls of smoke. Breathing heavily and clearly agitated, the
officer approaches the body, still in its death spasms; he draws his forty-five,
brings it to the condemned man’s temple, and shoots. A car’s engine has started
nearby.

I repeat: Old Man Pericles wasn’t one for details — he never told
anybody what he talked to Martí about during the more than five hours they spent in
that prison cell awaiting the execution, smoking cigars, anticipating the moment he
would lead Martí to the wall. And I could imagine that scene, innocent and heroic,
thanks to the many times I’d read and heard about similar ones, but I could never
paint it as I wished because I was somehow permanently incapacitated, and I could
never do anything more than draw half a dozen sketches, nothing presentable,
especially not to the old man, who would have turned to look at me without a stitch
of compassion, raised his eyebrows, and asked me since when I thought of myself as
Señor Goya of the Candelaria district.

Carmela called out from the kitchen to tell me that Old Man
Pericles would arrive any minute now, and I should get out the ice cubes in case he
wanted a whiskey. I told her not to be so pushy, I would take care of it. I stood
up; pain shot through my spine. I walked over to the cupboard — very carefully,
afraid of exacerbating the pain — to make sure there was enough whiskey left in the
bottle; then I placed an ashtray on the dining room table and another on the coffee
table out on the terrace. I told Carmela there was no point in taking out the ice
until we heard the bus arrive, otherwise it would melt. Carmela asked me to help her
set the table. At that moment we heard the clatter of the bus on the street
below.

I opened the door. I took the cutlery out of the drawer of the china
cabinet and was about to set it out when the old man appeared.

“Just look at you, making yourself useful as always,” he said,
putting his bag down on the sofa. He was dressed as he almost always was: a white
short-sleeved guayabera, dark gray slacks, black loafers, and tortoiseshell glasses;
his face was impeccably shaved.

He held out his hand to me, gave a kiss to Carmela, who had just
appeared at the kitchen door, then asked to be excused, he had to use the
washroom.

Old Man Pericles always claimed that his rebelliousness
came from way back, that he had inherited his bitterness from his mother. He came to
this conclusion with the passing of time, and the older he got, the more his
certainty grew. His grandfather was a famous general, commander of a troop of
indigenous soldiers and a liberal leader, who was executed by the conservatives
around 1890 after leading a revolt. Old Man Pericles’s mother, Doña Licha, then a
young lady of fifteen and the general’s eldest daughter, was taken to the main plaza
to watch her father face the firing squad; the rebel general’s head was then placed
on top of a stake at the entrance to the town to dissuade the natives from offering
any further resistance. “That’s the only way I can explain the rage I feel against
those bastards,” Old Man Pericles told me one night he allowed himself to confess.
What he didn’t say was how disappointed he was that neither of his sons had
inherited his rebellious spirit, his resentment of the powerful, which he considered
to be one of his own dearest virtues.

“I didn’t go in,” Old Man Pericles said, sitting in the rocking
chair, a glass of whiskey on his lap.

“Why not? What happened?” Carmela asked from the kitchen, raising her
voice.

“The older that woman gets, the keener is her hearing,” I noted, because
Old Man Pericles was with me out on the terrace, and he was speaking so only I would
hear him.

Soon Carmela was there, standing behind us, drying her hands on her
apron, worry etched all over her face.

“They postponed your treatment? Till when?” she asked.

“I said, I didn’t go in,” Old Man Pericles repeated, looking at me out
of the corner of his eye, appealing to my good offices, because Haydée had died
twelve years before, and he had probably lost the habit of explaining himself, of
being questioned by a woman. “I was in the waiting room and I decided not to go in,
so I didn’t. I came here instead,” he said and took a long sip of whiskey; then he
turned to look at Carmela, for just a few seconds, but enough for her to
understand.

“Then what? . . .” she asked, dismayed.

“Then nothing,” I intervened. “Can’t you see that he’s here now?” I said
somewhat emphatically.

Carmela returned to the kitchen. I knew she was on the verge of tears
because she had understood that Old Man Pericles had decided to let himself die, and
she, Haydée’s best friend, had promised her, at her bedside when she was dying so
suddenly of breast cancer, that she would take care of the old man as if he were her
brother.

“I don’t need to go through any more ordeals. The doctor warned me the
treatment would be painful and, with luck, it could only hold the cancer at bay but
never reverse it,” Old Man Pericles said as he lit a cigarette.

Noon had come with its steamy breath, its glaring light: not a touch of
a breeze; the leaves on the trees, unmoving.

“But you don’t stop smoking,” Carmela said, carrying a plate of toast
with beans and avocado; she said it angrily, as if the harm he was causing was to
her.

“What for, said the parrot, the hawk’s already caught me . . . ,” the
old man mumbled, repeating an old folk saying.

“I remember when you used to smoke a pipe,” Carmela said, now in a
different tone, as she offered us the plate of hors d’oeuvres. “That did you less
harm, smelled better, and you looked more elegant.”

Old Man Pericles was extremely circumspect, a stranger to speechifying;
his style was the caustic or sarcastic phrase, the query, or the doubt. Two years
after that insurrection, he left for Brussels with Haydée and the three children, as
an ambassador; he would return after becoming an opponent of the general, who jailed
him more than a few times during his twelve-year dictatorship. I never knew how he
became a communist, where he had been recruited, nor by whom. Once I asked him; he
answered that so many many years had passed, and his memory was in such poor shape,
that it wasn’t even worth trying to recall; this was his elegant way to avoid
digging through the garbage of the past. But one afternoon, with the snippets I’d
heard over the years and my shameless imagination, while lying idly in the hammock
on the terrace, I elaborated a story that begins at a cocktail party at a Latin
American embassy in Brussels around 1935, perhaps the following year, after the
Civil War in Spain had broken out, a cocktail party where Old Man Pericles is
wandering around alone carrying a glass of whiskey, looking for his Central American
colleagues, when he is suddenly approached by a man he has never seen before.

“Are you Ambassador Aragón?” the man asks in perfect Castilian Spanish.
He is blond, with pale skin and blue eyes.

“At your service,” the old man says.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” the man says, with a touch of an accent
the old man can’t quite place. “My name is Nikolai Ogniev. I am a journalist, a
correspondent for the Soviet newspaper,
Pravda
.”

The man holds out his hand.

“My pleasure,” the old man says, politely but already on his guard. “How
can I help you, Mr. Ogniev?”

“I understand you were once a journalist, before you devoted yourself to
politics and diplomacy.”

The old man takes a sip of his whiskey, then places the glass on a shelf
and pulls a silver cigarette case out of his pocket.

“Would you like one?” the old man asks; the other man says no.

The old man lights a cigarette just as a fat jolly man with a stentorian
voice approaches them. He is the host.

“If I may, I would like to borrow the ambassador for a moment,” the fat
man says to Nikolai, as he takes the old man by the arm and leads him away. He
quickly whispers something to him than goes to join another group.

“Forgive me. You were telling me that you are a journalist,” the old man
says when he returns, picking his glass of whiskey off the shelf.

A waiter offers them a tray of sandwiches.

“Precisely. And my specialty is Spanish-speaking countries . . .”

“You are quite far away from your specialty,” the old man
comments.

“Please allow me to explain,” Nikolai says. “I am stationed here in this
city, at a bit of a remove from the whirlwind in Europe precisely so I can use my
spare time to write a book about the current situation in Hispanic America.”

At the far end of the hallway, past a swarm of other guests, the old man
catches a glimpse of his colleagues from Guatemala and Nicaragua. He longs to join
those clowns in their banter.

“I have no doubt,” Nikolai continues, “that you are deeply knowledgeable
about the reality in your country, as a participant and as a witness, and I feel
quite fortunate to have met you at this precise time and place. I would like to
request an interview, have the opportunity to ask you a few questions about Central
American history. Nothing formal. We could meet for dinner any day that’s convenient
for you.”

From the other end of the hallway, the eagle-eyed oaf from Guatemala
gestures to the old man with a barely perceptible nod of his head — a question and
an invitation.

“In particular, you might be able to help me understand the events that
took place in your country three years ago at the time of that bloody insurrection,”
Nikolai says and makes a grimace, fleeting, slightly malicious, or perhaps it is
just a nervous tick, the old man isn’t sure.