Horacio Castellanos Moya - Tyrant Memory

I opened the door. I took the cutlery out of the drawer of the china cabinet and was about to set it out when the old man appeared.

“Just look at you, making yourself useful as always,” he said, putting his bag down on the sofa. He was dressed as he almost always was: a white short-sleeved guayabera, dark gray slacks, black loafers, and tortoiseshell glasses; his face was impeccably shaved.

He held out his hand to me, gave a kiss to Carmela, who had just appeared at the kitchen door, then asked to be excused, he had to use the washroom.

Old Man Pericles always claimed that his rebelliousness came from way back, that he had inherited his bitterness from his mother. He came to this conclusion with the passing of time, and the older he got, the more his certainty grew. His grandfather was a famous general, commander of a troop of indigenous soldiers and a liberal leader, who was executed by the conservatives around 1890 after leading a revolt. Old Man Pericles’s mother, Doña Licha, then a young lady of fifteen and the general’s eldest daughter, was taken to the main plaza to watch her father face the firing squad; the rebel general’s head was then placed on top of a stake at the entrance to the town to dissuade the natives from offering any further resistance. “That’s the only way I can explain the rage I feel against those bastards,” Old Man Pericles told me one night he allowed himself to confess. What he didn’t say was how disappointed he was that neither of his sons had inherited his rebellious spirit, his resentment of the powerful, which he considered to be one of his own dearest virtues.

“I didn’t go in,” Old Man Pericles said, sitting in the rocking chair, a glass of whiskey on his lap.

“Why not? What happened?” Carmela asked from the kitchen, raising her voice.

“The older that woman gets, the keener is her hearing,” I noted, because Old Man Pericles was with me out on the terrace, and he was speaking so only I would hear him.

Soon Carmela was there, standing behind us, drying her hands on her apron, worry etched all over her face.

“They postponed your treatment? Till when?” she asked.

“I said, I didn’t go in,” Old Man Pericles repeated, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, appealing to my good offices, because Haydée had died twelve years before, and he had probably lost the habit of explaining himself, of being questioned by a woman. “I was in the waiting room and I decided not to go in, so I didn’t. I came here instead,” he said and took a long sip of whiskey; then he turned to look at Carmela, for just a few seconds, but enough for her to understand.

“Then what?. ” she asked, dismayed.

“Then nothing,” I intervened. “Can’t you see that he’s here now?” I said somewhat emphatically.

Carmela returned to the kitchen. I knew she was on the verge of tears because she had understood that Old Man Pericles had decided to let himself die, and she, Haydée’s best friend, had promised her, at her bedside when she was dying so suddenly of breast cancer, that she would take care of the old man as if he were her brother.

“I don’t need to go through any more ordeals. The doctor warned me the treatment would be painful and, with luck, it could only hold the cancer at bay but never reverse it,” Old Man Pericles said as he lit a cigarette.

Noon had come with its steamy breath, its glaring light: not a touch of a breeze; the leaves on the trees, unmoving.

“But you don’t stop smoking,” Carmela said, carrying a plate of toast with beans and avocado; she said it angrily, as if the harm he was causing was to her.

“What for, said the parrot, the hawk’s already caught me.,” the old man mumbled, repeating an old folk saying.

“I remember when you used to smoke a pipe,” Carmela said, now in a different tone, as she offered us the plate of hors d’oeuvres. “That did you less harm, smelled better, and you looked more elegant.”

Old Man Pericles was extremely circumspect, a stranger to speechifying; his style was the caustic or sarcastic phrase, the query, or the doubt. Two years after that insurrection, he left for Brussels with Haydée and the three children, as an ambassador; he would return after becoming an opponent of the general, who jailed him more than a few times during his twelve-year dictatorship. I never knew how he became a communist, where he had been recruited, nor by whom. Once I asked him; he answered that so many many years had passed, and his memory was in such poor shape, that it wasn’t even worth trying to recall; this was his elegant way to avoid digging through the garbage of the past. But one afternoon, with the snippets I’d heard over the years and my shameless imagination, while lying idly in the hammock on the terrace, I elaborated a story that begins at a cocktail party at a Latin American embassy in Brussels around 1935, perhaps the following year, after the Civil War in Spain had broken out, a cocktail party where Old Man Pericles is wandering around alone carrying a glass of whiskey, looking for his Central American colleagues, when he is suddenly approached by a man he has never seen before.

“Are you Ambassador Aragón?” the man asks in perfect Castilian Spanish. He is blond, with pale skin and blue eyes.

“At your service,” the old man says.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” the man says, with a touch of an accent the old man can’t quite place. “My name is Nikolai Ogniev. I am a journalist, a correspondent for the Soviet newspaper, Pravda .”

The man holds out his hand.

“My pleasure,” the old man says, politely but already on his guard. “How can I help you, Mr. Ogniev?”

“I understand you were once a journalist, before you devoted yourself to politics and diplomacy.”

The old man takes a sip of his whiskey, then places the glass on a shelf and pulls a silver cigarette case out of his pocket.

“Would you like one?” the old man asks; the other man says no.

The old man lights a cigarette just as a fat jolly man with a stentorian voice approaches them. He is the host.

“If I may, I would like to borrow the ambassador for a moment,” the fat man says to Nikolai, as he takes the old man by the arm and leads him away. He quickly whispers something to him than goes to join another group.

“Forgive me. You were telling me that you are a journalist,” the old man says when he returns, picking his glass of whiskey off the shelf.

A waiter offers them a tray of sandwiches.

“Precisely. And my specialty is Spanish-speaking countries. ”

“You are quite far away from your specialty,” the old man comments.

“Please allow me to explain,” Nikolai says. “I am stationed here in this city, at a bit of a remove from the whirlwind in Europe precisely so I can use my spare time to write a book about the current situation in Hispanic America.”

At the far end of the hallway, past a swarm of other guests, the old man catches a glimpse of his colleagues from Guatemala and Nicaragua. He longs to join those clowns in their banter.

“I have no doubt,” Nikolai continues, “that you are deeply knowledgeable about the reality in your country, as a participant and as a witness, and I feel quite fortunate to have met you at this precise time and place. I would like to request an interview, have the opportunity to ask you a few questions about Central American history. Nothing formal. We could meet for dinner any day that’s convenient for you.”

From the other end of the hallway, the eagle-eyed oaf from Guatemala gestures to the old man with a barely perceptible nod of his head — a question and an invitation.

“In particular, you might be able to help me understand the events that took place in your country three years ago at the time of that bloody insurrection,” Nikolai says and makes a grimace, fleeting, slightly malicious, or perhaps it is just a nervous tick, the old man isn’t sure.