Horacio Castellanos Moya - Tyrant Memory

Don Tobías asked us if we’d heard the latest news: the authorities had learned that the big blue house at mile nine had been inhabited by a guerrilla group for several months. He said he couldn’t believe his ears when he heard it on the radio news that morning. He had not delivered any mail to that address that whole time; he delivered the utility, water, or telephone bills to a post office box; there was nothing unusual about that, many people in the neighborhood preferred to receive their personal mail in a box in the city, given how remote this area is. I told him we had also heard the news on the radio, and fortunately the house had already been vacated by the time the authorities burst in, and there were no victims to mourn.

“Hard to believe the things that are starting to happen,” Don Tobías said as he handed the glass back to Carmela; he wiped off his mustache, thanked us, and said goodbye.

Carmela read the letter again, then she handed it to me. I went back out to the terrace to sit down in the rocking chair. The temperature was rising; the dry season was in its final gasps, the earth was parched and the vegetation withered, and we still had at least a week to go before the first rains. At the end of the letter, under her signature, Maggi drew the same drawing she has been drawing ever since she was a little girl: the sun with a bird in the middle. She was about to turn fifty. I put the letter aside; I offered my gratitude to the invisible ones that my daughter was still alive. Clemente had been murdered a year before, and Old Man Pericles had taken it badly, very badly, even though he tried to convince himself of the contrary. Clemente, the eldest son, had died unreconciled with his father.

One night, as he was leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the Centroamérica district of San Salvador, he was shot in the back. At first we thought it was a political assassination because the country was in the turmoil of the elections. Old Man Pericles was still in exile in Costa Rica; the authorities gave him permission to return. They never caught the culprit, and I assume the case has been shelved. According to hearsay, it was most likely a powerful military officer’s act of revenge for a cuckolding. From the time he was a young man, Clemente had had a knack for getting into trouble over women.

A few days after the funeral, Old Man Pericles came over and confessed to being plagued by contradictory feelings: on one hand, his grief at Clemente’s death; and on the other, his blind rage, at him, the world, life. That’s when I told him that by some strange law that seems to follow a swinging, pendulum-like movement, children always position themselves at the opposite extreme of where their parents want them to be, and the more foolishly we try to determine their futures, the further they go from where we wish them to be. I’m the perfect example: I’m an agnostic, awash in esoteric ideas, always having disdained the emptiness of Catholic rituals and rejected the corruption of the Church, and I’ve had to accept that my only daughter became a nun, out of her own free will and vocation.

“The best proof, Old Man, that life makes decisions to spite us,” I told him.

But Old Man Pericles was a hard nut to crack.

“The difference, Chelón, is that you believe there’s something beyond this, an afterlife, that’s why you can forgive. I don’t,” he said.

“You don’t believe in the afterlife or you can’t forgive?”

“Neither.,” he said, as if to settle the matter.

“You still can’t forgive Clemente for not being like you?” I insisted. “Perhaps he simply broke from your concept of the world in the same way you broke from the colonel’s.”

Old Man Pericles wrinkled his brow.

I was tempted to tell him that sometimes what we most hate and never forgive in those around us is some hidden part of ourselves we neither recognize nor accept, but the old man just would have looked at me scornfully and asked where I had left my cassock.

Old Man Pericles used to call Clemente “that blundering fool,” a way of mitigating his disappointment in his firstborn, for whom he’d had such high expectations. Clemente participated in the attempted coup against the dictator in April 1944. At the time, he was condemned to death by firing squad but miraculously managed to escape. So great must have been his terror that, from then on, he foreswore politics and for the rest of his life supported military governments.

“Nobody should judge another’s fear,” I told the old man that day after Clemente’s funeral. Who knows what that young man felt, sentenced to death, the shock and disorientation at the prospect of facing a firing squad, something he could never quite get over, and despite his father’s example of struggle, he was grateful to his conservative grandfather, who had saved his life.

“One thing is fear, another is shamelessness. He could have simply abstained from politics without turning into the priestly confidant of alcoholic military officers and the shoulder for their sluts to cry on,” he said, without mitigating his scorn and bitterness one iota.

I didn’t insist, though for me Clemente’s portrait had to be drawn with heavy brushstrokes: from the terror of death he sank into alcoholism, and to emerge from both he needed faith, which he found in AA, where he became a fierce activist. He ended up organizing groups of recovering alcoholics among the top brass of the military, and that’s the world he moved in.

Clemente’s private life also provoked Old Man Pericles’s wrath: first he married a floozy who left him; then he married a Honduran girl from a good family who represented everything Old Man Pericles hated most, but whom, after Clemente’s murder, he’d begun to visit and had grown quite fond of. And there was, moreover, the family secret, his trampling on a reputation when he was a young man, an episode that was never so much as mentioned.

That morning, sitting in the rocking chair, wandering through my memories and waiting for Old Man Pericles to arrive, I reminded myself yet again that the history of the Aragón family was not material for a short story but rather a tragedy, one I would never dare write — out of modesty, loyalty, incomprehension, lack of skill, and because life had already passed me by, and if I went back and lived it again, I would perhaps opt for silence, as Old Man Pericles did, but without his bitterness. And then I told myself that we humans are hopeless, there I was gloating over Old Man Pericles’s misfortune, wondering about the best way to write it, as if I didn’t have my own cross to bear, as if the rage that devoured me during Maggi’s tragedy wasn’t still with me, forever and unutterable. And now, while writing down these recollections of the old man, I can assert that we men are incorrigible, inconstant, we almost always end up doing what we have set our minds to avoid, and vice versa.

The telephone rang again; it startled us. I feared the old man may have had some mishap, but no, it was Ricardito, Carmela told me, the young man who was selling my paintings. I took the handset: he asked me if he could stop by in the afternoon. I told him I already had plans, we should put it off till the following day. He was curious, kind, and meddlesome; he told me he wanted to be my agent, manage my entire oeuvre, as if that’s what I needed. I explained that between the galleries, he, and Carmela, it was enough, I wasn’t that prolific. He loved to get me wound up so I’d talk to him about esotericism, Eastern thought, maybe hoping I would give him a greater percentage of sales if I could make him my disciple. I gave him free reign to ask questions and offer his opinions as much as he wished, and once in a while I’d get fired up and run off at the mouth. Carmela warned me there was something about him she didn’t like, she could smell the bird of prey in him. I told her that when vultures start circling it is because they are attracted to something that’s putrefying, so it is best to keep them distracted and thus defer the moment they start pecking at our flesh.