We watch the pink palace on the hill, a subdued coral now that it is wet. We wonder if the dictator’s wife ever slaps her servants. We doubt it, and we resent her for it.
The rains let up at last and we allow our children to play in the mudpuddles. The dry air in our chests feels like a long sob. Some of our servants’ sisters work in the palace, and it is from them that we hear that the dictator’s wife is now thickening around the middle.
When we meet one another on a clear, cool day, we laugh behind our hands. So that’s what the dictator and his wife do when it rains, we giggle. Though the image of the dark plump woman and the grunting vast man together is surreal, it does make a certain sort of sense.
We have asked our sisters and friends to send us articles about the dictator’s wife and her art. Famous people consume us because we are bored. In the articles she is described the way we see her, but in kinder tones, words like pale for our sallow, unearthly for our strange. She describes her art as products of visions, ghastly revelations that would not let her sleep until she set them down as exactly as possible on her canvases.
When, at one of our bridge parties, out of boredom or tipsiness, we blurt out a question about her painting, she flushes. She looks down at her jostling knees, and in her quiet voice, she says, But I no longer paint, you know. I haven’t needed to since I married the dictator.
We are so flabbergasted that hers is a talent that can turn on and off like a fountain, according to need, that it is only later, when we are alone and drifting off to sleep, that we realize how odd it is that she, too, calls her husband the dictator.
OUR HUSBANDS AT NIGHT tell us a story. The dictator took a few of his generals, some of the higher ranking of the Company and Embassy, over to his hunting camp where the sugarcane meets the jungle. A party of thirty, plus servants, they were there to hunt boar.
They awoke before dawn, when the jungle was filled with hooting monkeys and great cats slinking in the shadows. When the thrashers at midmorning rustled up an enormous boar, grunting with horrific power and fury, the men circled their horses and waited for the dictator’s command.
In lieu of bringing the gun to his eye and simply killing the beast, though, he slid down and put his gun on the ground. He approached the boar, which fell silent, watchful, as he neared. When the dictator was a mere foot away, the boar bowed his head, the prelude to spearing it up and gutting the dictator with his tusks. But before he could, the dictator planted his knife in the base of the boar’s neck and the great beast collapsed in a geyser of blood.
When our husbands tell us this story, we wonder what it is like to be married to a man who could kill such a beast with his hands. We look at our husbands’ balding temples, their concave chests, their pale shoulders, and try not to laugh.
That isn’t the end of the story, our husbands protest. They prop themselves on their arms, leaning over us in their eagerness. As he drove the knife in and the boar collapsed, there was a smile on the dictator’s face. It was a sweet, shy look, our husbands say: it was the kind of smile better worn by a man in love.
WE HEAR REPORTS: there is unrest again at the country’s edges. If possible, the dictator grows even more stern. Our husbands tell us not to listen to the radio, that we should not worry one whit, and because we know not to ask what they do at the Company or the Embassy, we take them at their word. There are few cars in this small country, and those that pick our husbands up in the morning, whether from the Company or the Embassy, appear to be the same.
When the wife of the dictator is six months expecting, the dictator rides off with a few battalions to quell the militants. Over the city falls a new gentleness, a new quiet, and in the trees land flocks of strange green birds that end their rills with metallic clicks. When the birds startle at a sound, it looks as if the trees are tossing handfuls of their own leaves into the skies. We can hear the bands in the square at the bottom of the hill; we find ourselves dancing to them as we ready ourselves for bed. We Shimmy, we Charleston, we Bunny Hug; we imagine ourselves at great gay parties where these things come to us with ease.
The night the wife of the dictator goes into labor, heat lightning branches blue across the sky and our hair yearns staticky toward our brushes. We can’t sleep. We sit on our verandas, smoking our clandestine cigarettes and across the compound see other embers floating, fireflies of disquiet.
The electricity breaks around two with a thunderclap and torrential rain. We are chasing frogs from our porches in the morning when we hear the news. The dictator charged into the city on his wheezing horse in the midst of the storm and hurried into the palace. The mud clotted thick and black on the carpets behind him. When he reached his wife, his face was so dirty and wet she screamed as if he were a baboon come in from the jungle. The dictator knelt, he shuddered. He held her little pale feet in his hands, as if they were delicate as teacups, and he kissed them.
With the last push and convulsion, the dictator’s wife near dead with fatigue and fear, the tiny baby emerged at last, all skinny and blue. The dictator sat back on his heels, country-style. And when the doctor at last got the baby to breathe and mewl, the dictator stood and left the room, because she was only a girl.
WE SEE THE DICTATOR’S wife everywhere, it seems, and nowhere: while the dictator is fighting the rebels she pushes her babe down by the lake in her perambulator, trailed by the useless, pretty nannies the dictator hired. She refuses a wet nurse, which is not done here, and the native ladies have turned indignant. We hear they have refused to invite her to their teas; we wonder at her solitary life now. It can’t, we think, be a hardship for her.
The news from the border is not good. The opposition forces, they say, are resilient and clever at blending into the countryside. The papers hold photos of the dictator, enormous and severe, in his command tent in the jungle. When we see them, we are filled with a hot thrill and wish, briefly, that we could read the language and understand the captions. Some of our husbands are sent to the plantations, the mines, the Embassy, with more frequency, and when they return they stare at their knees with a blank look. But a few days soaking in the gentlemen’s pool, a few nights at the club, and they are normal again. We have our charity bazaars for the victims of the dengue fever, which is gripping certain tight-packed segments of the city. We have our ice cream socials. We keep busy.
Our servants’ sisters who work in the palace relay rumors that the dictator’s wife sometimes awakes shrieking in the nights. They say she wanders the white marble halls in her humble slippers, passing like a ghost through the shadows. When a servant comes upon her, she does not appear to see, and passes as if her eyes are fixed on another world. We wonder what the dictator’s wife is thinking of at those times: her dead son, her dead husband, those two souls lost under the thick murmuring water of a distant river. Or if, like us, she dreams of a vaster country, one where she is not caged in the palace as we are caged in our compound. Or if she ever longs to take up brush and palette again, paint that old life away until the grief rises, time and again, gently back into the heavens.