Horacio Castellanos Moya - Tyrant Memory

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.”

I began this book in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in March 2005, and finished it in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the end of 2007. I am grateful to Henry Reese and Diane Samuels, directors of the City of Asylum program in Pittsburgh, for their generous support, without which I would not have been able to complete this work.

This book is a work of fiction. The principal characters are fictional. However, the historical setting of the first part (“Haydée and the Fugitives”), as well as many of the situations and characters alluded to therein are based on historical events in El Salvador in 1944. Let me be clear: in this book, history has been placed at the service of the novel, that is, I have taken liberties with it according to the needs of the fictional narrative. Do not, then, look for “historical truth.”

Herewith are the titles of several books that aided my understanding of that period and were of great use to me: Relámpagos de libertad [Flashes of Freedom], by Mariano Castro Morán (Editorial Lis, San Salvador, 2000); Insurreccion no violenta en El Salvador [Nonviolent Insurrection in El Salvador], by Patricia Parkman (Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, San Salvador, 2003); April y mayo de 1944 [April and May 1944], by Francisco Morán (Editorial Universitaria, San Salvador, 1979); and El Salvador, 1930–1960 [El Salvador, 1930–1960], by Juan Mario Castellanos (Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, San Salvador, 2002). I wish to thank Beatriz Cortez, in Los Angeles, and Miguel Huerzo Mixco, in San Salvador, for sending me these texts. Jimmy and Clemen’s escape was inspired by the testimony of Captain Guillermo Fuentes Castellanos, recounted in the book by Colonel Castro Morán, mentioned above, though Jimmy is not Captain Fuentes nor is Clemen Lieutenant Belisario Peña. The Gavidia brothers were executed by firing squad in real life, but Merceditas is a fictional character.