Tyrant Memory (30 page)

“You should give the ice-cream vendor the Italian ambassador’s mug,” he
said.

Then he stood looking out the window in intent contemplation, as if he
didn’t want to miss a single detail. He asked me for the binoculars. I told him I’d
lent them to Ricardito, and he still hadn’t returned them. He looked at me as one
looks at a man who has been swindled despite the warnings.

“And that girl, Andrea, has she returned?” he asked me in the
conspiratorial tone of an accomplice, because I had told him about the visits of the
young lady who wanted to sit for me, of Carmela’s chagrin, of the fantasies and
fears that even old age fails to temper.

I said no without parting my lips, only waving my index finger back and
forth.

Carmela appeared in the doorway.

Now, while reminiscing, I realize that ours was, more than
anything else, a friendship of old age. We had, of course, met in the twenties, and
the friendship between Carmela and Haydée had been indissoluble since they were
children, but for the following thirty years we’d seen each other only sporadically
while his and Haydée’s lives were swept up in the old man’s political adventures —
their periods in exile and the displacements — and Carmela and I went to live in the
United States, where we remained for ten years, at first thanks to an arts
scholarship and then as the embassy’s cultural attaché. The same baboon who put Old
Man Pericles behind bars on more than once occasion was the one I had to thank for
my appointment, which allowed me to live for several memorable years in Washington
and New York. In 1958, when we returned home to stay, our friendship solidified,
despite the constant turmoil of his political life, and Haydée’s cancer, which
finished her off a few years later.

“I don’t understand why your returned,” Old Man Pericles would say to
me, shaking his head as if I had disappointed him. “You should have stayed in New
York, or moved to Paris, where artists are worshiped.”

Ten years earlier, when I had told him about my scholarship from the
American Embassy to attend a fine art academy in New York, fearful that he would be
devastatingly critical of me because of his anti-Yankeeism, and doubtful myself if
it was worthwhile to go live in a city where we had no family and knew not a soul,
Old Man Pericles spared no arguments to convince me to accept the scholarship.

“Everything has its time, Old Man,” I told him, “and my time up north is
over.”

We returned to the rocking chairs on the terrace; Old Man
Pericles seemed content with his cigar in his mouth.

“They’re the same ones Fidel smokes, according to Signore Ambassador
Strasato,” I noted.

The old man shot me a withering look; I knew my friend had spent one
year on Castro’s island after the triumph of the revolution, something of an
ambassador for our native communists. It was a few months after Haydée’s death. The
change must have helped him deal with his grief. After his surreptitious return, I
invited him over, hoping to satisfy my own curiosity about his Caribbean experience.
“The Cubans get high on noise,” he declared sententiously. A few weeks later he was
arrested and again sent into exile.

Carmela was cleaning up in the kitchen. She asked if we wanted her to
make us another coffee before she took her nap.

Old Man Pericles said he’d rather have another whiskey, unusual as he
always drank only before lunch.

I went to get it for him; fortunately, there was some ice
left.

“Recently I’ve felt like death has always been here, lurking, waiting,”
Old Man Pericles said, touching both hands to his chest, where his lungs were.

A breeze from the park swept over the terrace, spreading its shards of
mist.

“It’s not poetry or cheap metaphysics. Don’t get me wrong, Chelón,” he
said, taking another drag off his cigar; he always referred to “cheap metaphysics”
whenever we talked about the afterlife, the invisible, or other possible worlds. “It
wasn’t some revelation or a sudden urge to discover new worlds, just a sensation, as
if my body were telling me . . . Very strange.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in anything,” I said, without reproach,
just to needle him.

“You know well enough that it has nothing to do with belief,” he
mumbled, the cigar held firmly between his lips. And I knew that he knew that I
knew, I thought playfully, with a small burst of ingenuity, and to avoid remembering
the spot where my death was lurking, waiting.

He gulped down his whiskey.

“Difficult to get used to the idea that one is finished,” he said,
rocking back and forth in his chair.

I assumed that if that cancer had always been lurking in his lungs, it
must have flexed its muscles and decided to spread only about a year ago, in
February, when Clemente was murdered. I could be wrong: maybe there’d never been any
hope for the old man, and his body’s hour had simply come, as mine will, very soon
now.

I never quite understood how Old Man Pericles subsisted during
that last period, how he scraped together the little money he needed to survive.
After his return from Europe, he began to work for the newspapers that opposed the
dictatorship; the general was ruling in all his splendor, but soon the Second World
War would come and with it his decline. Then there was a long stretch during which I
associate him with the radio; that was when he struck up his friendship with the
Pole, a Jew with whom he founded a radio station and who, as the years went by,
became the most important radio impresario in the country. While the old man was
getting poorer and poorer because of his communist activities and having to live
from hand to mouth between jail and exile, the Pole was swimming in money and
founding new businesses right and left. They stopped seeing each other, but the
friendship persisted, and especially the Pole’s respect for Old Man Pericles. I know
of this first hand, because one of the Pole’s daughters bought a couple of my
paintings; she said her father always spoke about Old Man Pericles with great
admiration, for he had been like a big brother to him and had taught him about
integrity, even though he didn’t share his political ideas.

After Haydée’s death, he told me he was earning a small salary as a
clandestine correspondent for a Soviet news agency. I’ve always assumed Haydée must
have left him something from what she inherited from Don Nico.

“These last few days I’ve been waking up afraid. I know I’ve
been dreaming something horrible, but I forget it the moment I open my eyes. I don’t
want to remember,” Old Man Pericles said, placing the half-smoked cigar in the
ashtray, as if he’d smoked enough.

“Maybe it’s death,” I suggested.

“That’s what I think,” he said.

“Did you used to remember your dreams?” I asked him.

“There you go . . .”

The neighbor’s cat walked across the patio; he gave us a passing glance
out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t stop. When Layca was alive, that cat didn’t
dare come near here: our boxer bitch never even had to chase him, she’d paralyze him
with a single look.

“Is it true you can do anything you want in your dreams, as if you were
awake?” he asked, shifting his position in his chair.

I told him about that once; at the time, he was intensely curious, but
he never fully believed me.

“It’s just that sometimes I’m awake while I’m dreaming, so I can move
around fairly easily, but there’s a big difference between that and being able to do
anything I want,” I said.

“So you can fly or go anywhere you want in a split second? What’s it
like?” he insisted.

“So-so. It’s simple: while you are dreaming, you know you are dreaming.
That’s the only extraordinary part of it.”

“Hard to believe.”

“As you say, Old Man, it’s not a matter of belief; it’s a gift,” I
explained.

“If that’s true, there must be something after.”

“I’m telling you there is, but it has nothing to do with all that church
nonsense about Heaven and Earth that you hate so much. Anyway, death is a personal
matter and each of us experiences it differently,” I said, feeling somewhat ill at
ease and fearing I was simply repeating clichés. “Are you afraid?” I asked him.

He took off his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, as if the glare were
burning them.

“Of pain, that’s all,” he murmured. “And it’s right here, devouring me,”
he said, touching his chest.

“Almost all suffering is futile,” I said.

“Indeed, Mr. Schopenhauer,” he said with his old grimace. Then he said,
“I wonder what would happen if you decided you didn’t want to return . . .”

“What?” I shot back, confused.

“If, when you are conscious that you are dreaming you suddenly decide
you don’t want to return, you are doing quite well there and badly here, and you
want to remain in the dream. What would happen then?”

“One can’t decide when to return,” I said. “Your body brings you
back.”

I asked him if he was going to smoke the rest of his cigar, Carmela
didn’t like the stale smell of burned tobacco. He told me I could toss it. I picked
up the ashtray and went to the washroom to dump it.

“A while ago I read that there’s an exercise for people who want to wake
up inside their dreams,” I told him when I got back; I placed the clean ashtray on
the coffee table. “You’ve got to get into the habit of taking a little hop every
five minutes, no matter what you’re doing, and while you are taking the little hop
you ask yourself, ‘Am I awake or am I dreaming?’ It’s a method so that the little
hop, together with the question, get etched into your unconscious . . .”

“A little hop . . .” he noted with a frown and a lifting of his
eyebrows.

“That’s right. And if you come back down to earth the way you normally
do, that means you’re awake, and if you don’t, if instead you keep floating, it
means you’re dreaming, because there is no law of gravity in dreams.

“Have you tried it?”

I told him I hadn’t. And I laughed.

“I can just see me on my way home, taking little jumps every five
minutes. Worse than Vroom . . .”

Vroom was the madman of La Rábida, the district where Old Man Pericles
lived. He ran around the streets barefoot pretending to be a car, he’d stop at the
traffic lights, imitate the sound of a car engine, honk, hold up traffic and even
sometimes overtake an absentminded driver, while other drivers either waved or
insulted him.

I suggested we take a walk in the park through the dense forest, so the
stifling heat wouldn’t do us in.

Old Man Pericles had an aversion to the occult. I could
understand why: the general who fancied himself a warlock read books about the
occult sciences and professed ludicrous notions to justify his brutal acts, as when
he would say that it is worse to kill an ant than a man because the man will be
reincarnated whereas the ant will not. On several occasions I tried to explain to
the old man that the occult had nothing whatsoever to do with the sick mind of a
criminal, any ignoramus can convert knowledge into grotesque superstition, that the
depth of the mystery is inaccessible to a man corrupted by power. But Old Man
Pericles had been marked by that experience, and his mistrust of any metaphysics was
equal only to his sarcasm whenever — in private — he mentioned Marxist dogma.

I clearly remember Haydée’s wake, during those early morning hours when
the visitors had all left and the only ones left were a few family members and the
closest friends, Old Man Pericles asked me what I thought about the idea of the
eternal return. I told him I preferred to call it recurrence, and said I didn’t
forswear the possibility that things could happen again in precisely that way — that
time was circular and the moment of our death coincided with that of our birth, and
we would have to live the same life over and over again. Old Man Pericles remained
pensive for a while then said that such a possibility seemed macabre to him, that if
such a recurrence was an invention of a “superior intelligence” — as I liked to call
the will from the invisible — it was not, in fact, a superior intelligence but
rather a perverse, sadistic one. And he gave the example of a man who’d suffered the
worst possible torture and death, who would be born over and over again only to die
in the same brutal fashion.

“It hasn’t got heads or tails, not heads or tails,” the old man
repeated, aggrieved, because at that moment his atheism was weakening, and he could
find nothing to replace it.

I didn’t tell him that I was wont to pray to my invisible ones, asking
them to leave me forever in the void.

The Viking was sitting in the shade of a pink poui tree,
leaning against the trunk, dozing off. He was the sleuth assigned to keep watch over
the old man; apparently he was supposed to never lose sight of him and to keep a
record of all his movements. He was a bitter old cop, but he had a certain way with
people; in his youth he had been a professional wrestler — hence his nickname, “The
Viking,” for at the time his hair, now gray, was blond. At first, Old Man Pericles
treated him with disdain: he ignored him and at the slightest opportunity gave him
the slip; then he took pity on him, and if he found him hanging around the house
when he went out in the morning, he’d tell him not to waste his time, they were both
too old for this game of cat and mouse, then he’d tell him his plans for the day so
he wouldn’t have to follow him and could still present his report to his bosses. The
Viking did his part, too: the last time they were expediting the order to expel him
from the country, he let the old man know, which gave him several hours to get ready
before they arrested him and drove him to the airport. And whenever they exchanged
even a few words, The Viking always, and with great respect, called him “Don
Pericles.”

I would have liked to paint The Viking as a fallen angel, the old
worn-out bloodhound assigned a quarry who is even older and more infirm than he. But
I never found the path that revealed him to me: an old man sitting in the shade of a
tree doesn’t say anything; putting him in a policeman’s uniform would have been
forced and unnatural. Maybe I should have painted him precisely like that: a
bloodhound with weary wings.