* * *
The Presidente-in-Exile is watching his mistress swim.
He reclines in a chaise by the pool. He wears slippers and white linen slacks and a cream guayabera. His legs are crossed at the ankles, slim and pale as a girl’s. Inside the slippers — Bergamo-silk-lined morocco loafers — his feet are bare, powdered and smooth, the heels exfoliated, the nails squared and buffed. He sips a Walker Blue Label on the rocks and pretends to read prospectuses, a batch of them in his lap. Bettinger insists on this, Bettinger always with a hard-on for the windfall scheme, the in-and-out deal, the killing: “They all want you, Tacho.” And they do. They all want his participation. Every cover letter says so: “We would be so pleased with your participation”; “Your participation is anxiously anticipated.” He is in fact meeting tomorrow morning with people who want him, an investors group at the Banco Alemán.
The Presidente-in-Exile yawns. It is near dusk, too dark to read anything. But he pretends, thumbing through a folder while, from the corner of his eye, he watches his mistress swim. She has packed on the pounds since their arrival in Asunción. He has told her: “Where is the woman I fell in love with? Where did this cow come from?” Sometimes he moos at her. It embarrasses him to watch her cross a room, galumphing and tottering to find her center of gravity in stiletto heels. But in the water she is supple and dolphin-sleek and powerful. She laps the pool again and again, in long, languid strokes that slice effortlessly through blue-black water. He marvels at her. He sips his whiskey. Ice cubes shift and clink in his glass. It is humid, late winter in Paraguay — the damp, immersive heat of the barber’s towel, of evenings in jungle encampments and in the kitchens of childhood. On the edge of his vision, lightning bugs shimmer and weave in the twilight. He can hear the distant music and tinny laughter of a TV somewhere, the clatter of parrots in the trees, the puling of a ship’s whistle on the river.
From out of the shadows, a guard steps in, salutes, approaches. And just like that, a spell is broken. He sends a message, a reminder about his engagement tonight. “Yeah, yeah,” the señor snaps. “Go tell Gallardo.” The guard salutes again, retreats.
The Presidente-in-Exile drains his whiskey. He must shower and shave and dress for dinner. But he pauses. In the cañón behind him, beyond the wrought-iron fence, he can hear the dogs scrabbling through thick brush. (Rottweilers, he’s been told. Attack dogs trained not to bark.) Far above, the roar of an airliner approaches, crescendos, recedes. All around, the sudden thrum of bush crickets revving up like evening’s engines. And the bug zappers, cerulean maws afloat in the enfolding dark, and the sputter and snap of their every tiny kill. And the slap of water and the delicious insuck of Dinorah’s breath at the near turn, where the Presidente-in-Exile sits, his slender ankles crossed, shaking up the ice in his empty glass and secretly watching his mistress swim.
* * *
The Presidente-in-Exile is telling a dirty joke.
Two whores come to the handsome young priest for absolution. The priest invites them both into his tiny confessional. Sins are detailed, passions are stirred, and contortions ensue, followed by the sudden appearance of a guileless and comely young nun, and then the village idiot, who is hung like a bull. The Presidente-in-Exile is mucking up the joke, but his audience is a forgiving one: Aurelio and Méme on leave from the counterinsurgency back home; Lucho, in from Rio; and Luís and Humberto and Papa Chepe from Miami — some of the old comandantes down for a visit, in a private dining room at Bolsi, the toniest of Asunción’s downtown restaurants.
The Presidente-in-Exile’s joke careens brakeless down its narrative tracks, the confession stall impossibly stuffed with one character after another — concupiscent anarchy, a Marx Brothers porn flick. The comandantes bark and roar with laughter. They are tossing back carafes of wine, pounding the table and each other’s backs. They are big men, and the cozy private room is a crush of humped backs and meaty forearms and big, ruddy faces. In the world of the joke, the alcalde’s virgin daughter has just entered the confessional. Papa Chepe runs out of the room and returns dragging the maître d’hôtel, a regal gray-haired woman in her fifties. The archbishop has now arrived for a surprise inspection, and Méme rushes into the kitchen, rousts a busboy, a Guaraní Indian who speaks no Spanish. Papa Chepe kisses the maître d’ on the mouth and pushes her to the carpet. Méme shoves the busboy on top of her. The restaurant proprietor, accompanied by three male diners, enters to attempt a rescue of the maître d’. Papa Chepe pulls a pistol and puts the muzzle in the proprietor’s mouth. The proprietor pisses his pants. Exit male diners. A vengeful pimp has arrived at the church and approaches the ruckus in the confessional, whereupon the proprietor is thrown to the carpet and compelled to gyrate at gunpoint against the busboy. Then the police arrive. Aurelio snatches Papa Chepe’s gun and submerges it in a tureen of bori-bori. The police are nervous. Their captain approaches the Guest of Honor warily. But the Guest of Honor is in a good mood. He laughs and cajoles. He peels bills off a wrist-thick wad and moves through the cadre of cops, tucking the money into shirt pockets and cap bands. The police officers talk among themselves for a moment, then arrest the proprietor, close the restaurant, and post guards outside.
Lucho raids the bar, returns with bottles of Chivas and Rémy. The men drink, sated and suddenly quiet, pensive. Luís takes a pull and passes the bottle and begins to reminisce about his first skirmish, against coffee farmers in rebel territory. His story, of a green recruit, of a boy compelled by duty to become a man, has the rest of them nodding wistfully, until more stories come — liquor-stoked recollections of the bunkhouse and the whorehouse, chronicles of love and war, and of the lusts of blood both literal and metaphoric. They regale each other with tall tales of jungle work and counterintel, and with anecdotes from the interrogation arts — stories of baseball bats and needle-nosed pliers and toilet bowls filled with excrement, stories of the light socket and the copper wire, of the salt and the wound, of the flesh and the spirit. Nostalgia like an emetic disgorges from them one dewy reminiscence after another until they are left weeping and hoarse, and Papa Chepe totters off the floor and caroms into the arms of the Presidente-in-Exile and tearfully kisses him on the lips. “Maricones!” Luís shouts. They all laugh. The Presidente-in-Exile stands up and speaks haltingly. He stammers something about family and comradeship, and discipline and duty, about his father and his legacy, and justice and reckoning and getting fucked in the ass by history. It goes around and around and then goes nowhere at all, and although it makes little sense, it is heartfelt. And so his men are moved. They cheer and curse and roil around their Presidente. They hoist him upon their shoulders and carry him about, and as they pass him across the threshold into the main dining floor, they whack his head on the lintel. Blood laces down his face and into his eyes, where it stings and mingles with his tears. For the Presidente-in-Exile is crying — a happy man, wobbly and unsteady upon the shoulders of his men, struggling for balance with one outstretched arm, and with the hand of the other pressed to his chest, attending to the barreling pulse of a damaged, brimming heart.