Thus, in the Republic, nature is both good and evil, an animated spirit that both conserves and debauches. Those “possessed by nature” are good, perhaps divine, but only if they can overcome nature’s Manichean aspect, harness its schizophrenic drive toward both redemption and destruction. El Presidente, by piercing into the mystical heart of nature, enslaved it. In the Republic, to know a thing is to conquer it.
And again:
From earliest youth, then, El Presidente was regarded with awe by the simple people of the village. They came to him with their problems and he endeavored to acquaint them with the facts of their existence. No easy task in the southern provinces.
And what are these facts of existence which it is no easy task to teach in the southern provinces? The Official History enumerates them:
Satan coils under every shrub.
All things must serve the common good.
A people who do not believe in their own destiny will not have one.
Sheep herds should not be kept less than one kilometer from human habitation.
Darts is a game for fools.
Thus enlightened, the southern provinces flourished. But it was the destiny of El Presidente to depart them. And so he embarked upon that journey which would take him to his own, private destiny. He traversed the southern districts in search of revelation. According to the Official History, he was assailed periodically by “blinding lights” and “burning rivers.” Once, to test himself, El Presidente fought a lion with his bare hands, finally strangling it to death. Much is made of this in the Official History, even though there are no lions in this hemisphere.
Here in the Republic, no witnesses are permitted. Those who appeared pale-faced and withered before the press to tell of El Presidente’s mortal combat have since been swallowed up by earthquakes or entombed in landslides. The entire village of El Presidente’s birth was mysteriously erased by what the Official History calls “a band of wicked and hideous marauders.” A picture is presented as proof. Amid the smoking ruin of the village, a single uniformed soldier can be seen standing absently over the body of an eviscerated woman. Under a looking-glass the insignia on the soldier’s sleeve is clearly visible, a large red A encircled by a field of blue. Company A was a unit under the exclusive command of El Presidente.
The facts are not significant in the Republic. But there are realities upon which only the satirical can shed light. Thus Casamira, exiled poet of the Republic, writes his sardonic Official History with a pen dipped in vitriol. He is made of equal parts, mockery and vituperation. Sometimes I see him in a dream sitting among the imagined ruins of El Presidente’s palace. He is clothed in smoke, but with a look of unutterable peace. He leans back on a fallen column, propping himself casually on his elbows. A smile of complete satisfaction plays upon his lips, suggesting the totality of his triumph. He closes his eyes slowly as the wind shakes the banana trees.
THE LEADER believed that history stopped with him. His greatest tactical mistake was his inability to subdue his own cosmic egotism. Because of that, he attempted to accelerate history so that his titanic dreams could be accomplished within the pinched scale of a single human life, his own. This form of individualism is so severe that it is no longer aware of its own dreadful whimsy. Here is an epic compression, Napoleonic in its strenuousness and awesome in its sweep, a juggernaut of self that endeavors to move not with the insufferable lethargy of evolution, but with the girded power of passionate and unalterable human motive. Of all forms of cowardice, the Leader most despised the timidity of time. And the greatest achievement of his delusion lay in convincing us that we could stoke the engines of history with such force and momentum as actually to bring it to its termination while we lived. To see paradise in one’s own lifetime, to see the triumph of the species, the final actualization of existence, to sit upon the blazing, uplifted tower of our completedness, to ride for one glittering moment at the pinnacle of that ultimate creation of all man’s effort and resource — that was the dream he offered, the apotheosis of romance.
From the rooted dreariness of individual life and the recent humiliations of national history he extracted the necessary substance with which to forge his ideal and himself, and which he then joined together in the musty arenas of our minds. At El Caliz, where the searing light seems to boil the river, it is easy to comprehend the process as it presents itself in the graven image of the superficial. Scholars bending feverishly beneath the green shades that glow within their studies have seen as much and called it explanation. But for those who were actually ingested into the infernal workings of his machine, those for whom memory is either misery or accusation, the judgments of scholarship are as futile and unenlightening as the shards of bat bone Esperanza uses to divine the rain.
And so we must look again and again and again, becoming as we do scholars of monstrosity.
Look again, then, and see the little boy standing in the park, his stomach recoiling from the detestable smell of sugar cookies.
• • •
My father stood up and grasped my hand limply, as if touching something that defiled him, as if my hand were some pornographic device that repelled him, but to which he was inseparably attached.
“Where are we going?” the little soldier asked.
“Home,” my father said.
“So soon?”
“Home,” he repeated.
At home we sat in the dining room under the small brass chandelier, which seemed to twinkle irreverently in the gloom. My father made delicate incisions in the wurst and forked the pieces glumly into his mouth. My mother bustled about obliviously, and I suddenly saw her as my father always had — a large, flabby woman who cared nothing at all for great ideas or events and for whom national defeat could be rendered wholly meaningless by a flick of the wrist and a disgruntled groan.
“Dessert?” she asked, and when I did not reply, she plopped a sodden piece of strudel onto my plate. Its smell reminded me of sugar cookies. I pushed it away.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t want strudel?”
“Not tonight,” I said. I dropped my hands into my lap.
“Perhaps he’d like to have a sugar cookie,” my father mumbled without looking at me.
I felt a wind blow through me, scattering my insides like bits of soiled tissue paper.
“Are you sick?” my mother asked.
My father looked up from his plate. “Leave him alone and go about your business.”
My mother shrugged and began gathering the dishes. When she had finished, she marched silently into the kitchen.
“You want to be like her, Peter?” my father whispered.
“No, Father.”
“What, then?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What kind of answer is that?”
I turned my eyes downward. Hearing him sit back in his chair, I knew he was still looking at me and that what he saw disgusted him.
My mother strode back into the dining room and pinched my cheek. “Maybe you’d like to go to the cinema tonight,” she said cheerfully.
“Cinema?” my father roared. He banged the table with his fist. “You ass, don’t you know what has happened today?”
My mother turned toward him, aghast.
My father leaped from his chair. “Get out of my sight!”
My mother stepped back and raised her hands as if protecting her face from blows.