Tyrant Memory (29 page)

Old Man Pericles blows out the smoke and stares into Nikolai’s blue
eyes; he wonders how old this Russian is: forty? forty-five?

“Were you in your country during the October Revolution?” the old man
asks, off the cuff, before finishing his whiskey.

Nikolai smiles, then nods and winks.

They agree to dine one day that week in a restaurant in that city I
never saw and never will, but it wasn’t difficult for me to imagine the afternoon in
question, while lying in my hammock with the story of Pericles in Brussels playing
in my head like an old movie, which took place in a restaurant of Nikolai’s
choosing, with private rooms suitable for intrigue, in one of which the old man
would sit after giving his coat to the waiter, with that astonishing lighthearted
sensation that accompanies a man who has decided to take on his own destiny.

It is not difficult for me to imagine the freedom Old Man
Pericles felt when he made the decision to resign from his diplomatic post and
become the opponent he would be from then on, the “Soviet agent,” as the authorities
would call him each time they jailed him or sent him into exile; that sensation of
freedom and adventure of knowing that he was returning to his country as somebody
else, his own opposite, without anybody at first suspecting; the lightheartedness
that comes from having finally divested himself of the contradiction of belonging to
and representing a camp he found utterly repugnant. It was in the last few months of
1937, if I remember correctly. Old Man Pericles returned all grown up, saturated
with the events taking place in Europe; he told stories, amazing at the time, about
Nazis and fascists, and he could talk for hours about events in Spain, about the
Republicans and the Franco uprising.

Haydée experienced the old man’s resignation differently, as she
admitted to us when she returned: hers were the concerns of a mother (Clemente and
Pati were teenagers and Alberto was still a boy), the concerns of a woman from a
conservative family who doesn’t fully understand her husband’s decisions, but who is
also enormously happy to be returning to her own land and her own people.

Before serving lunch, Carmela said she would bring a glass of
watermelon drink to the poor Viking, who was waiting outside, sitting in the shadow
cast by a silk cotton tree, he himself a shadow of Old Man Pericles for years
already. Carmela always took pity on him, brought him a cold drink, and told him he
mustn’t worry, he could have lunch in the dining room where the park employees ate,
Old Man Pericles would be at the house until late in the afternoon, as if he were a
friend and not the police spy assigned to tailing our friend. The Viking wasn’t as
old as we were, but I had the feeling he was aging more quickly, as if he were
suffering from a secret malady.

When I first met Haydée, as I’ve said, she was a tall, slender
young woman with red hair; beautiful, brimming with life, and so expressive that
next to her, Old Man Pericles — who at that time wasn’t old but was already scowling
and reserved — seemed mute. For decades, and every time she wanted to irritate him,
Haydée would tell the story of how her heart was pierced by that handsome, dashing
young second lieutenant of the cavalry, who paraded around proudly on his sorrel,
leading his sweaty troops through the central plaza in Santa Ana. The eldest and
favorite daughter of Don Nico Baldoni, a fellow coffee-grower and friend of
Carmela’s father, Haydée had the wisdom to take what life offered her with a good
dose of wonderment. I never heard her once complain about the tribulations she was
forced to undergo at her husband’s side: sometimes she spoke enthusiastically about
one or another of their periods of exile and the juggling acts she had to perform to
survive when her husband spent time in jail. But I am also certain her family never
left her to fend for herself. Don Nico respected Old Man Pericles, and he must have
supported him at least until 1944, when the dictator fell, because at that time we
were all in the opposition; later, after the Second World War and once the old man
had already been branded a communist, things may have changed. But Haydée was loyal
to him for better and for worse. Until she was stricken with breast cancer, sudden
and devastating, which finished her off before we could even get used to the idea of
her being gone.

Carmela had made a casserole of ground beef, vegetables, and
green plantains; she served the beans separately in soup bowls topped with cream and
grated cheese, just as Old Man Pericles liked.

“Have you heard anything from Estela and Alberto?” Carmela asked, as if
wanting to liven up the repast, perhaps seeing that the old man was even more
withdrawn than usual, whereas I perceived him as he always was: laconic, and averse
to small talk.

“They’re fine,” Old Man Pericles mumbled, “and Albertico is, too; he’s
happy at the university.”

Carmela said they had done well to make lives for themselves there, in
San José, Costa Rica, where they’d gone into exile a year earlier, after the failed
coup that Alberto’s close friends had participated in, and maybe he had himself,
though he denied it; his daughter Pati had also been living in that city for more
than three decades.

“We got a letter from Maggi today,” Carmela said, as if she was
determined to intrude on every silence; later I understood she wasn’t doing this out
of compassion for Old Man Pericles but rather for herself, for both of us, for it
was frightening to think that we were eating with death sitting in the chair next to
us.

“Without the treatment, the pain is going to knock you out,” I told him,
taking the bull by the horns.

“The pain will knock me out with or without the treatment,” Old Man
Pericles said as he took another bite.

At the previous appointment, the doctor had told him that if he didn’t
undergo the treatment he’d have only a few months left, it would become increasingly
hard to breathe, and he would suffer unbearable pain.

I felt as if Haydée had entered the dining room, a strange, fleeting
presence; Carmela turned to look at me. Old Man Pericles finished eating the meat
casserole, then pulled the bowl of bean toward him with relish, breaking into a
smile and saying:

“Horrifying, don’t you think?”

The rumble of the bus broke the heavy midday silence.

“You should make another appointment. If you don’t get the treatment,
you’ll regret it,” Carmela said, clearly upset. Then right away, before getting up,
she asked, “Are you going to want more juice?”

Old Man Pericles asked her also for more tortillas, toasted rather than
fresh, the way he liked them.

“Did you ever find out who was living at that house at mile nine?” I
asked.

The old man wiped the plate of beans with a piece of tortilla. He
nodded, without looking up.

“Nothing good is in store for us . . . ,” I commented.

“Things here are always worse than we imagine,” he said before bringing
the dripping piece of tortilla to his mouth; he left the bowl clean, pure, without a
trace of beans and cream. “Fortunately, I won’t be around to see it,” he added with
no self-pity, as if he really did foresee what was coming.

Now I understand how grateful Old Man Pericles was that Albertico had
left the country: some of his companions at the university, his age, were already
appearing in the newspapers as supposed members of the burgeoning guerrilla cells
that were confronting the military government. Surely the old man was staring at the
specter of the insurrection of 1932, at the butchery armed struggle can lead to.

Albertico was the grandchild with whom the old man most identified; this
was evident when he told us that the young man had started studying sociology at the
University of Costa Rica, and that he took on politics with a dedication and
lucidity that neither his father nor his Uncle Clemente had ever had; he called
Clemente’s children “futile flesh,” and Pati’s “meek Costa Rican lambs.”

Carmela insisted that the best thing for Old Man Pericles to do
after the treatment was to go to San Jose, where his two children were living, so he
could spend his last few months with has family. I was certain he would never take
that comfortable and predictable route; nothing would have horrified him more than
to watch his privacy suddenly intruded upon by his children and grandchildren and
their concerns: he didn’t have the temperament of a patient, much less of a dying
man.

Of his two remaining children, Pati was most like Old Man Pericles: she
was a tall, graceful, haughty brunette; she had a fiery temperament and no time for
trivialities. Married to a powerful Costa Rican communist, she had a couple of
children and had made her home in that city, where Haydée had spent long stretches,
especially toward the end, when the cancer was ravaging her. Old Man Pericles always
called his daughter’s house “the Costa Rican rearguard,” because that’s where he
went into exile each time the baboon currently in charge gave the order. I met Pati
when she was little: she always was a livewire; then I heard about her marriage and
didn’t see her again until her mother’s funeral.

“What are you painting, Chelón?” he asked me while Carmela was making
coffee in the kitchen.

“I’m still on the fallen angels,” I answered.

“You’ve spent more than two years on them,” he said. “Have you found
your gold mine?”

“The buyers like them, and they still aren’t boring me,” I explained,
which was absolutely honest; every week I painted one oil and one watercolor of an
angel with a different occupation, and they came to me on their own, without much
effort. “As far as it being a gold mine, not . . .”

“He’s now painting one where a poor ice-cream vendor, with his wings and
dripping with sweat under the burning sun, is pushing his little cart,” Carmela said
from the kitchen. “He modeled it after the ice-cream vendor’s cart that parks here
at the entrance to the park on Sundays.”

“Not only the cart,” I said, “the hat as well.”

“It’s a source of solace,” Old Man Pericles said as he lit his
cigarette.

“What do you mean?” Carmela asked, walking toward us with the coffee
pot.

But I understood right away.

“People like to buy solace, the rich most of all,” he answered.

“There you go with your notions,” I said. “The poor are the ones who
need solace.”

“But they don’t have the means to buy it . . .”

“The Italian ambassador already reserved the ice-cream angel,” Carmela
said, pleased, while she poured out the coffee.

He was one of those boors who begin to fancy themselves
renaissance men after being posted to a backward country like ours. When I described
to him what I was painting, he said he loved ice cream and asked me to put it aside
for him, and he even had the nerve to offer me some suggestions. He’d been at the
house the previous Saturday, insisting we come to a reception at the embassy; he
appeared incapable of comprehending that his world was so alien to me that his offer
to send his chauffeur would do nothing to induce us to attend his party — we had
already had our share of protocol for our lifetimes.

“He brought me some first-rate cigars,” I said, remembering the
Italian’s good side. “Would you like one?”

“Of course. I hope such high quality doesn’t irritate my taste buds . .
.” Old Man Pericles said, ironically, for he smoked the cheapest cigarettes
around.

“What they’ll irritate are your lungs,” Carmela cut in, glaring at me
reproachfully for what she considered to be my imprudence, as if she still didn’t
want to accept that there was no return, our friend had already crossed the line,
his refusal to submit to the treatment was not a mere whim, not a reaction to fear,
but rather the result of a final, resounding decision — and Old Man Pericles had
always been a decisive man.

I went to the studio to get the box of cigars off the bookshelf.

We rarely spoke about politics, only when there was
pandemonium in the streets due to strikes, elections, or a coup d’état. Old Man
Pericles always had the latest bits of gossip, but he doled them out slowly as if
they were old jokes everybody had already heard. Already before Haydée’s death his
tone had become sardonic, even when he talked about his own comrades’ adventures, as
if he no longer believed what he preached and belonged to that gang because one has
to have something to cling to in this life. He despised the military even though he,
his father, and his grandfather had been in the military; more than anything,
though, he despised the rich: the fourteen packs of hyenas, he called the so-called
fourteen families who own this parcel of land. It was his loathing of the arrogance
of the powerful that made him remain a communist to the very end rather than any
illusion about the supposed goodness of that other world. “There’s deep shit
everywhere, Chelón. This is mine. What is to be done?” he said one day after
returning from a long trip to Moscow and Peking, when those two cities were still on
friendly terms.

At some point in the afternoon he’d always enter my studio: he
would cast an eye over the canvas I was painting, rummage through my books with the
hope that I had bought something that might interest him, then look pensively out
the picture window. He never offered an opinion about my paintings, always claiming
to be incapable of evaluating the visual arts; he was contemptuous of non-figurative
art and was grateful I had never wasted my paint on such things. Whenever I showed
him any of my poems, published or not, he’d make a measured comment, but would
always end by saying: “You’re right to prefer painting.” That was another of his
characteristics: he seemed to go through life forgiving the world. I reminded him of
it that afternoon when I noticed him looking attentively at the ice-cream vendor as
a fallen angel:

“What is His Lordship’s judgment?” I asked in a sarcastic tone, much
like his own, as I handed him a cigar.