Horacio Castellanos Moya - Tyrant Memory

“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 the 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.