Tyrant Memory (31 page)

Old Man Pericles and I had both married women who were one tier
above us, socially and economically speaking. Needless to say, things were different
at the beginning of the century: the prejudices and alienation arose later with the
advent of the middle class and the nouveau riche. Back then, there were the wealthy
few on the one hand and the people — the masses — on the other. None of us had any
pretentions or ambitions; ours was simply the preordained encounter of persons of
the same class and social standing. That’s why Old Man Pericles made so much fun of
his son Alberto, and was so disparaging of his longing to cut a figure in society, a
desire that ruled his life ever since he was young; he always wanted to be a dandy,
parade around the clubs, dress in the latest fashion, drive fancy cars to impress
the girls. “That one was born in the wrong place: a pearl among swine,” the old man
would say. And that’s what he’d call him, “The Pearl,” when he wanted to scoff at
his adventures. I always thought Alberto exhibited behavior typical of the youngest
son, the spoiled one, the one who believes the world is made for him; but Old Man
Pericles explained to me that he spent too much time with his maternal grandmother
when he was little, hence his mother-in-law was to blame for his son’s
frivolousness. “Even when he dabbles in politics he acts like a playboy on a
safari,” the old man said, laughing, derisive; at moments Old Man Pericles even
accepted Alberto’s frivolity, but he never forgave what he once in a broadside
called Clemente’s “betrayal.” At the time I sensed that he was not referring to
Clemente’s friendships with the same military commanders who ordered the old man’s
arrests and expulsions but rather a specific, crushing, painful, and unmentionable
act they would both carry with them to their graves, as I would in the case of
Maggi.

“What would you do, Chelón?” he asked me.

We were walking down the road toward the path that led into the grove of
Guanacaste trees, where those tall broad-leaved evergreens shade out the sun and the
air is cool, damp, and comforting. I was wearing my cap and carrying my cane.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

Although the rains had not yet begun, and the mountain was dry, the
color of straw, inside the forest the greens of the vines and the bushes emerged
seductively.

“Well, you should know, because your turn will come,” he said with touch
of a grimace.

“Maybe it’s better when it arrives all at once, no warning,” I
noted.

I had an intuition, a fleeting idea, but I shooed it away, like one
shoos away a fly.

“What I would do, Old Man, is settle any outstanding accounts; let go of
any resentments, hatreds, lay my burdens down, for where we’re going it’s all just
excess baggage anyway,” I said.

“And if we’re not going anywhere . . .”

“Still, the lighter, the better.”

“I have a fever,” the old man said, suddenly stopping.

“You want to return?”

“No, let’s do our usual route.”

He seemed exhausted, and he had always been the one to set the steady,
almost martial, pace, never showing the least consideration for my fear of
falling.

“If you don’t do the treatment, you’ll soon not have enough air to go
out of the house,” I said.

“I feel badly for María Elena,” he said.

Since Haydée’s death, María Elena spent half the week at the house with
Old Man Pericles and the other half with her family in her village.

“We’re going to avoid all that,” he said.

That was when I understood the raven’s reasoning.

We walked across the small hanging bridge over the spring; he
stood for a while holding onto the lateral ropes, his gaze lost in the thin tongue
of water.

“This morning, after talking to you, I called The Pole,” he said. “He’ll
take care of the wake and the burial.”

With my cane, I pushed aside an orange peel that was littering the
path.

“He’s very fond of you,” I said.

“It’s no skin off his back: he’ll write off the cost of the
funeral home and the cemetery as publicity for his radio stations,” he said,
smiling.

“Don’t be such an ingrate,” I rebuked him.

But Old Man Pericles was like that: he never missed an opportunity to
get in a jab.

We emerged from the forest into an open field; from there we could reach
the highway circling the park that would take us home.

“Pati and Albertico will come to take care of everything,” he said.
“Truth is, the only objects of any value in the house are Haydée’s.”

We walked along the sidewalk that ran parallel to the highway.

I would have liked to tell him to take it easy, not to let himself get
carried away by his obsessions, even in the worst-case scenario he still had a few
months, but he was laying all his cards on the table.

“Can’t let the pain have its way with me,” he mumbled as he took a deep
breath, just to make sure I understood.

I’ve often asked myself what we had in common, what united us,
apart from the friendship between our wives. He didn’t admire my paintings, or my
poems (“metaphysical poetry,” he’d say, despite my enthusiasm), or my way of
understanding the world (“too much Eastern marijuana, Chelón,” he’d insist in his
mocking tone). I couldn’t care less about his passion for politics, his militancy
alongside people he himself disdained, his loyalty to the interests of communists in
faraway land. But we never argued, not in the sense of ideas clashing head-on. It
seems we met over an ineffable, inviolable terrain, someplace far beyond any
generational empathy. Or as if deep down I was doing what he would have liked to do
and he was living an adventure I would have liked to live. It’s not worth delving
into too much. Some friendships are destiny.

Carmela was waiting for us with two glasses of fresh fruit
drink. Then she made coffee and cut a lemon tart she had baked earlier in the day.
Until that moment I hadn’t realized how much Pericles had declined in the last two
weeks: he was ashen and was having difficulty breathing, as if he would never
recover from what had been our traditional evening stroll for the past decade.

“If my lungs were in better shape, I would have liked to go to
th
e Devil’s Doorway,” Old Man Pericles said as he
drank this last coffee and smoked a cigarette.

The Devil’s Doorway was a huge cliff about three-quarters of a mile into
the park, where the mountain abruptly ended. The view there was spectacular: one
could see the sea and a good chunk of the coast; at night it was crowded with cars
full of furtive lovers.

“It wouldn’t have been good for you in this heat,” Carmela said.

Before I had so many ailments, I used to walk to the Devil’s Doorway
more often; I went many times with the old man. Watching the sunset from those
heights is a revelation.

But the name was derived from its more sinister side: Milena, a
feather-brained ballerina and a friend of ours from childhood, knocked off balance
by the ravages of old age, was the last to throw herself off the cliff into the
void, six months before. The list was long.

The old man lit another cigarette.

“It’s time for me to go,” he said.

Carmela gave him a piece of pie for María Elena; he put it in his
bag.

We walked him to the bus.

“Don’t be stubborn, old man. Get the treatment,” Carmela said to him,
with the voice of a scolding mother as he kissed her on the cheek. I know how she
must have struggled over whether to say those words, but now she was on the verge of
tears.

We hugged each other, as if it were just another parting, wordless.

The Viking had scampered onto the bus through the back door.

Old Man Pericles sat two rows behind the driver; he barely waved.

A few times, later that afternoon, amid waves of melancholy, we
would reminisce about Haydée. Above all, her enthusiasm during the general strike,
when she got involved in a way we never would have expected, with courage and
audacity, relentlessly demanding the old man’s release and amnesty for Clemen;
clearly etched in my memory is that night we found her in the crowd next to the
National Palace when we heard that the dictator had stepped down. Haydée was
jubilant, shouting and dancing with joy. And the following morning, when we
accompanied her to the Central Prison, in the midst of those throngs of people
waiting anxiously for the release of their families and friends, she was radiant,
shouting slogans, cheering, until finally Old Man Pericles and all the other
prisoners emerged, Pericles with that roguish expression on his face. That same
afternoon we learned that Clemen was alive and hiding on the island of Espíritu
Santo, along with his cousin, Jimmy Ríos. I never again saw her so happy, so
unreserved, so fulfilled.

Then we remembered the period toward the end of the fifties, when we had
just returned from New York and they from their exile in Costa Rica. Haydée and
Carmela suggested using their savings to start a patisserie. All four of us were
excited by the idea. Old Man Pericles joked around, saying I would dream up exotic
pastry designs and he would be in charge of the texts for promotion and publicity. I
warned him not to get his hopes up, that considering our wives’ characters, the most
we could aspire to would be to paint the walls of the place they rent. But when the
old man was suddenly arrested by the new colonel and again expelled from the
country, all our plans were dashed.

“You remember how she used to love to play dominoes?” Carmela asked, her
eyes tearing up, on that late afternoon of gray clouds that were not going to burst,
an afternoon of lethargy and nostalgia. And it was true: Haydée played dominoes with
the ferocity of a card shark, making bets, challenging her opponents, and making fun
of them; she was proud to show off the skills she had acquired during one of her
periods of exile in Mexico.

“Haydée died believing the old man would live to be eighty,” Carmela
recalled as we were preparing dinner.

“We thought the same thing about ourselves,” I said, just to irritate
her, to break through the grim atmosphere.

That’s when I remembered the sketches I had made while in the waiting
room at the hospital when we visited Haydée every day in the late afternoon;
sketches of others, waiting just like we were, to go in and see their sick, or of
some irritable nurse; sketches of the waiting room or any other notion my pen came
up with. Once, Haydée asked me to show them to her, then warned me that under no
circumstances should I draw her now, ravaged as she was by the cancer, and if I ever
did she would never forgive me and would come to me in the middle of the night and
pull off my covers. I promised her I never would; but that same night, after I came
home from the hospital and Carmela had already gone to bed, I shut myself up in my
studio and sketched her just as I had seen her that day in the hospital: all that
withered beauty between the sheets. Before going to bed, I went out on the patio and
burned the sketches.

The call came at seven thirty at night. I answered it. It was
María Elena; she was crying so hard she could barely talk. The moment I heard her
voice I knew that Pericles had gone on ahead; he always asserted that as far as
making decisions went, the sooner the better.

María Elena told me she had been in her room, at the back of the house,
watching her telenovela, the door closed because the sound of the television
disturbed the old man, when she heard a loud noise, as if a can had fallen off the
shelf in the cupboard. She went to check in the kitchen but found nothing out of
place. Then she had a premonition. She knocked on the door of Old Man Pericles’s
office, where he always went to read after dinner. There was no answer. She opened
it and immediately smelled the gunpowder: his body was lying draped over the
desk.

Carmela was watching me from the kitchen doorway. Without
thinking, almost automatically, I pointed my index finger into my temple; she began
to cry, inconsolably, heartrending sobs. I clung to my memory of the old man’s
embrace.

Then I called Ricardito, the first person I thought of who could come
immediately in his car to take us to the old man’s house.

It was going to be a long night.

I’ve just finished the painting of Old Man Pericles as a
fallen angel. He is sitting in the rocking chair on the terrace, as he did that last
afternoon, holding his glass of whiskey on his lap in both hands, the cigar in the
ashtray on the coffee table; most conspicuous are his tortoiseshell glasses and his
wings that fall over the shirttails of his white guayabera. There is a thin line of
blood coming out of a small hole in his right temple. His eyes came out too sad,
moist, but it’s too late to correct it. I’ve painted it for myself, my last effort;
it’s called THE FALLEN ANGEL WITH NO OCCUPATION. When Carmela saw it, she cried out,
“Haydée would have loved it.”