Horacio Castellanos Moya - Tyrant Memory

“I don’t understand why your returned,” Old Man Pericles would say to me, shaking his head as if I had disappointed him. “You should have stayed in New York, or moved to Paris, where artists are worshiped.”

Ten years earlier, when I had told him about my scholarship from the American Embassy to attend a fine art academy in New York, fearful that he would be devastatingly critical of me because of his anti-Yankeeism, and doubtful myself if it was worthwhile to go live in a city where we had no family and knew not a soul, Old Man Pericles spared no arguments to convince me to accept the scholarship.

“Everything has its time, Old Man,” I told him, “and my time up north is over.”

We returned to the rocking chairs on the terrace; Old Man Pericles seemed content with his cigar in his mouth.

“They’re the same ones Fidel smokes, according to Signore Ambassador Strasato,” I noted.

The old man shot me a withering look; I knew my friend had spent one year on Castro’s island after the triumph of the revolution, something of an ambassador for our native communists. It was a few months after Haydée’s death. The change must have helped him deal with his grief. After his surreptitious return, I invited him over, hoping to satisfy my own curiosity about his Caribbean experience. “The Cubans get high on noise,” he declared sententiously. A few weeks later he was arrested and again sent into exile.

Carmela was cleaning up in the kitchen. She asked if we wanted her to make us another coffee before she took her nap.

Old Man Pericles said he’d rather have another whiskey, unusual as he always drank only before lunch.

I went to get it for him; fortunately, there was some ice left.

“Recently I’ve felt like death has always been here, lurking, waiting,” Old Man Pericles said, touching both hands to his chest, where his lungs were.

A breeze from the park swept over the terrace, spreading its shards of mist.

“It’s not poetry or cheap metaphysics. Don’t get me wrong, Chelón,” he said, taking another drag off his cigar; he always referred to “cheap metaphysics” whenever we talked about the afterlife, the invisible, or other possible worlds. “It wasn’t some revelation or a sudden urge to discover new worlds, just a sensation, as if my body were telling me. Very strange.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in anything,” I said, without reproach, just to needle him.

“You know well enough that it has nothing to do with belief,” he mumbled, the cigar held firmly between his lips. And I knew that he knew that I knew, I thought playfully, with a small burst of ingenuity, and to avoid remembering the spot where my death was lurking, waiting.

He gulped down his whiskey.

“Difficult to get used to the idea that one is finished,” he said, rocking back and forth in his chair.

I assumed that if that cancer had always been lurking in his lungs, it must have flexed its muscles and decided to spread only about a year ago, in February, when Clemente was murdered. I could be wrong: maybe there’d never been any hope for the old man, and his body’s hour had simply come, as mine will, very soon now.

I never quite understood how Old Man Pericles subsisted during that last period, how he scraped together the little money he needed to survive. After his return from Europe, he began to work for the newspapers that opposed the dictatorship; the general was ruling in all his splendor, but soon the Second World War would come and with it his decline. Then there was a long stretch during which I associate him with the radio; that was when he struck up his friendship with the Pole, a Jew with whom he founded a radio station and who, as the years went by, became the most important radio impresario in the country. While the old man was getting poorer and poorer because of his communist activities and having to live from hand to mouth between jail and exile, the Pole was swimming in money and founding new businesses right and left. They stopped seeing each other, but the friendship persisted, and especially the Pole’s respect for Old Man Pericles. I know of this first hand, because one of the Pole’s daughters bought a couple of my paintings; she said her father always spoke about Old Man Pericles with great admiration, for he had been like a big brother to him and had taught him about integrity, even though he didn’t share his political ideas.

After Haydée’s death, he told me he was earning a small salary as a clandestine correspondent for a Soviet news agency. I’ve always assumed Haydée must have left him something from what she inherited from Don Nico.

“These last few days I’ve been waking up afraid. I know I’ve been dreaming something horrible, but I forget it the moment I open my eyes. I don’t want to remember,” Old Man Pericles said, placing the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, as if he’d smoked enough.

“Maybe it’s death,” I suggested.

“That’s what I think,” he said.

“Did you used to remember your dreams?” I asked him.

“There you go. ”

The neighbor’s cat walked across the patio; he gave us a passing glance out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t stop. When Layca was alive, that cat didn’t dare come near here: our boxer bitch never even had to chase him, she’d paralyze him with a single look.

“Is it true you can do anything you want in your dreams, as if you were awake?” he asked, shifting his position in his chair.

I told him about that once; at the time, he was intensely curious, but he never fully believed me.

“It’s just that sometimes I’m awake while I’m dreaming, so I can move around fairly easily, but there’s a big difference between that and being able to do anything I want,” I said.

“So you can fly or go anywhere you want in a split second? What’s it like?” he insisted.

“So-so. It’s simple: while you are dreaming, you know you are dreaming. That’s the only extraordinary part of it.”

“Hard to believe.”

“As you say, Old Man, it’s not a matter of belief; it’s a gift,” I explained.

“If that’s true, there must be something after.”

“I’m telling you there is, but it has nothing to do with all that church nonsense about Heaven and Earth that you hate so much. Anyway, death is a personal matter and each of us experiences it differently,” I said, feeling somewhat ill at ease and fearing I was simply repeating clichés. “Are you afraid?” I asked him.

He took off his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes, as if the glare were burning them.

“Of pain, that’s all,” he murmured. “And it’s right here, devouring me,” he said, touching his chest.

“Almost all suffering is futile,” I said.

“Indeed, Mr. Schopenhauer,” he said with his old grimace. Then he said, “I wonder what would happen if you decided you didn’t want to return. ”

“What?” I shot back, confused.

“If, when you are conscious that you are dreaming you suddenly decide you don’t want to return, you are doing quite well there and badly here, and you want to remain in the dream. What would happen then?”

“One can’t decide when to return,” I said. “Your body brings you back.”

I asked him if he was going to smoke the rest of his cigar, Carmela didn’t like the stale smell of burned tobacco. He told me I could toss it. I picked up the ashtray and went to the washroom to dump it.

“A while ago I read that there’s an exercise for people who want to wake up inside their dreams,” I told him when I got back; I placed the clean ashtray on the coffee table. “You’ve got to get into the habit of taking a little hop every five minutes, no matter what you’re doing, and while you are taking the little hop you ask yourself, ‘Am I awake or am I dreaming?’ It’s a method so that the little hop, together with the question, get etched into your unconscious. ”