The Pacific and Other Stories (33 page)

I was about to resent that, but Claudia had already disappeared into the kitchen. I ran like crazy through the citrus trees, thinking that I had imagined the wall and that I might go all the way to the point and not see anything. Then I would have to come back, though if I walked slowly it might all be forgotten. I remember that I wished I had imagined it, even at the cost of my own embarrassment.

I nearly ran right into it, for it was in a place that had once been perfectly open. It
was
five meters high, and it was made of stone. I ran along it, inland, until I no longer felt safe, and then I ran all the way back to the beach. There I checked to see that it came almost down to the pier, as I had reported, and I looked around it. On the other side were now three or four little houses, booths, lined up along the beach. Back from them were the orange trees that had always been there, and the beach grass.

“There are little houses,” I reported breathlessly to my father.

“Bungalows?” he asked.

I didn’t know what a bungalow was, but it sounded right, so I said, “Yes, bungalows, lots of bungalows all over the place, everywhere you look.”

My father was downcast. “People from the bungalows will be walking all over our beach. Maybe it’s for the better that they have a wall. But why such a big one? And how could they have put it up so fast? Let’s go see.” I darted
ahead of my father, and when he reached the wall I was already standing on the pier.

When he joined me, he shook his head. “That wall must have cost twice as much as the land itself.” Then, as we stood over the waves coursing between the pilings, he turned and said, “Those aren’t bungalows. They’re sentry boxes.”

For the next few nights the wall and the sentry boxes were a main topic of dinner conversation. At first we thought they were part of a military base. But why a military base? My father said there was no possible reason for a military base there. A prison? No. The wall of a prison would go all the way around.

A few days later, when we had had to go into town to get more groceries, we stopped on a high point on the road and my father pointed to the enormous tiled roof. “It’s just a private house,” he said, and we started off again, wondering what kind of private house had risen so quickly and so splendidly right next to us in a single winter while we had been in school and my father had been trading cotton. No one in town knew anything about it, which was hard for us to believe, because those people seemed to know the name and life story of every lizard on every rock in the Mar Nueva.

On the way back, my father told us that it was a villa, just like ours, but that it belonged to someone very important. “I could scout around inside,” I volunteered.

“Don’t you dare,” he ordered. “I absolutely forbid you even to cross over onto their beach.”

“But the pier is half on their property and half on ours,” I protested.

“You can go to the pier,” he said, “but don’t go beyond it. Sentry boxes mean sentries, and sentries have guns.”

“Maybe they’re swimming houses,” I speculated.

“Swimming houses,” my father said, looking at me with disdain. “Stay out of there. The place belongs to someone very important, someone close to Santos-Ott.”

C
HILDREN THESE DAYS
do not understand—not even my children in their day knew—what it is like to live under a caudillo. All life is a contest between the caudillo and everyone else, and the caudillo must win. He must successfully
intimidate every walker on every street; every sitter in every café; clerks at their desks; lovers in hotel rooms; skiers on mountain slopes; peasants in the fields; and children in their classrooms, ever mindful of his stern portrait next to the flag.

You must fear even to think in opposition, lest you talk in your sleep or carelessly insult him in the presence of one of his agents. When I was six years old, a shopkeeper on our street in the city lost his wife in an automobile accident, and fell into despair. In a democracy he might have had to shoot himself or jump off a bridge, but under Santos-Ott he merely brought a phonograph to his shop and played the music of an exiled composer. We were at lunch on a spring afternoon when we heard the music. The moment my father recognized it he ran to the window and pleaded with the shopkeeper, for his own sake, to turn it off. As the music played, the street emptied. The shopkeeper, who sold vegetables and eggs, had put the phonograph on a table and pointed the horn into the air. He sat on the stone step leading to his little shop, with a glass of wine in his hand and tears in his eyes. My father put on his jacket so he could go downstairs and see what he could do, but by the time he got to our front door the music had stopped and the store was shuttered. Within a week a shoemaker had moved in. Once, I mentioned the name of the man who used to sell vegetables and eggs, and my father said, “Just forget him. Put him out of your mind.”

Santos-Ott dressed in white summer uniforms or, in winter, in a long military coat. His portraits were executed only when he was in this coat, so that even in late November as we sat in class fanning ourselves with our exit cards he looked down upon us coolly, with not a bead of sweat, absolutely motionless in the ten-kilo coat. It had two rows of buttons and a black collar with silver oak leaves. I know, because I stared at it through a thousand boring lessons. It was monumental, and he himself was tall. His peaked hat, with a visor and many more leaves, helped to make him seem like a giant.

I used to see the coat also in the pictures of him in
La Prensa Color.
It was not quite tan and not quite gray but, rather, the color of a Weimaraner dog. This, and the fact that Santos-Ott himself had absolutely blue eyes, gave rise to a universal comparison that never could be spoken but that never needed to be.

Though Santos-Ott had the typical dictatorial attribute of always receiving flowers from exemplary little girls in the national dress, everyone in the country looked in the little girls’ eyes and could see that, even at four or five years of age, thinking that they might trip or hand over the bouquet incorrectly, they were numb with fear.

My teacher dared not criticize him. My father did not speak ill of him even at home. He seemed to me to be like God. I imagined that his children, if he had them (we never knew), would be more frightened than anyone else. Until the revolution, in all my life I had never heard a single soul but one speak against him—no strong man, intellectual, priest, or peasant, not even foreigners, who soon learned to bite their tongues. Only my sister, Claudia.

I
WILL KEEP FOREVER
and with great affection a vision of her, at seventeen, on a fall day when the air was so cold and clear that we had to wear sweaters. Our father had gone to Norway and brought back sweaters that he said were from a special batch made for the Norwegian royal family: because he was a cotton broker, he had contact with textile manufacturers and weavers, and we always had the best clothing, although it almost never fit well.

Claudia was tall and had not yet filled out. Because she moved her long limbs as if they were already heavier, she was awkward. Sometimes she would become so frustrated with herself that she would cry, and then my mother would take her in her arms and tell her that it would be just a matter of time until everything came into balance.

Her hair was the color of white gold, her eyes bluer than the eyes of Santos-Ott. The boys in her form shunned her, merely because they imagined that she would not even consider them. But anyone who cared to look closely could have known how lonely she was, for although in repose she was formidable and off-putting, as soon as she moved or spoke her animation and charm turned the burnished colors into soft allure, as if she were overjoyed just by the fact that someone was talking to her. At seven years her junior, I thought of her as a grown woman.

I remember that the pattern of her sweater was entrancing, especially as her long shining hair moved across it in soft sheaves, parting here and there,
so that you wanted to brush it aside to see how the animals were placed in the flowers. A band of white and blue crossed the top of the yoke, and the yoke itself was so resolute, deep, and detailed that it seemed like a patch of mountainside. Mine was different. It had a herd of reindeer with a forest of brown antlers floating above them.

In 1932, a group of colonels on the Altiplano attempted a coup. It didn’t make sense to start a coup from the Altiplano, and their efforts brought them a short civil war in which they were quickly driven into their sanctuaries. Even on their own ground they behaved like amateurs, and when the army closed in on the provincial capital, they fled on foot. Santos-Ott, commanding his own troops, had known their character. Anticipating that they would flee, he waited with two massive cavalry columns on a field between some high ridges along the route the plotters had hoped to use for their escape.

This became the Battle of Rosario, in which two thousand disorganized, retreating rebels were met by eight thousand men on horse. The action was much like that of an exercise at the military academy. The cavalry made diagrammatically perfect sweeps and charges on just the right lines, with little worry about being shot off their mounts, as only half their opponents were armed and those who were armed had little ammunition. The newspapers spoke of a pitched battle that had lasted for days, but still the truth got out. There were almost eight thousand survivors, the victors. They told their families. Their families had tongues.

Santos-Ott was quick to realize that those men who had been trapped between stone cliffs and ranks of cavalry and slaughtered at leisure over a period of ten or twelve hours had presented his opponents with two thousand martyrs. After dark, cavalry units had crisscrossed the field, crushing the wounded under their horses’ hooves, until the drop in temperature relieved them of that task. Patrols circled the battleground to prevent families from coming to the aid of the defeated, and to shoot anyone alive enough to move. The victorious army made camp on a plateau not too far away, and a thousand bonfires kept them warm as those wounded rebels who still hung on slowly froze to death. The image that captured the public imagination was of men dying of cold while looking at the glow of the orderly fires around which their enemies were drinking hot tea.

Though Santos-Ott knew that two thousand martyrs are not nearly as effective
as one, he moved to protect himself. Abandoning his pride and violating the tenets of dictatorship, he appealed to the public in a carefully mounted political offensive. For us, this rarity consisted of an army lieutenant colonel addressing the assembled student body of our school. One morning, a month after the battle, he appeared at the lectern of the assembly hall and nervously tried to assure us that everything was fine: the government was not merely firm—and correct—but desperately necessary, and good in its heart.

Though he wore the same kind of tentlike coat as did Santos-Ott, and the same kind of hat, and was roughly the same age, he had the face not of a hardened soldier or a cold political functionary but of a tobacconist who has spent the greater part of his life sitting in a kiosk that afforded him most of the sorrows and none of the glories of a man who is shot from a cannon.

Perhaps the lieutenant colonel would not have been intimidated by guns and sabers, but he was intimidated by a sea of children’s faces. The adolescents and younger children stared at him with a kind of lunatic freshness, and with a skepticism born of freedom and almost total ignorance. Even in our authoritarian school, where the nuns were always rapping us on the knuckles, we moved from place to place in an uncontrollable tide, numerous fat children were always unable to stifle their giggles, and we had half a dozen semiprofessional anarchists. How does one deal with untutored spirits? Teachers have difficulty. An army lieutenant colonel was at sea.

When he stood to address us he had the cautious, amazed air of someone in a monkey house. Though each child was confined to a seat, there was so much writhing and fidgeting that it was like a storm blowing through the jungle.

He introduced himself, and stated that he had come to stress the need for vigilance after the Battle of Rosario. For political reasons, enemies of the state would seize the opportunity to spread falsehoods, but he had come to describe the incident solely according to the facts.

Then he began his falsified account of the battle—falsified, we knew, because it was exactly parallel to the descriptions in
La Prensa.
The more he went on, the more relaxed he became. In describing the maneuvers and their classical antecedents (Santos-Ott was a great admirer of Napoleon) he won the majority of the boys over to his side, as an engineer might have in explaining
a marvelous machine. I myself have always been strongly drawn to objective beauty, and I delighted in the decisiveness and power of which he spoke and which he claimed to represent. And we, after all, the boys of a private academy, were the stuff that made up the officer corps.

When he finished, he was confident enough to ask for questions. Indeed, boys as young as eight were jumping in their seats, wanting to pose questions about flying wedges, crossfires, saber charges, and what have you.

The girls, however, had not been enthralled. In their stubborn and infuriating way, they were undoubtedly thinking about sewing or pastries. I wondered how they were content to dismiss things of great excitement, how they could insist upon looking at the world as if the most important part of it were the little kingdoms of which they were the queens. Nonetheless, my sister, who was in the next-to-last form, seemed surprisingly agitated. From the way she was moving around in her chair, and from her expression, I was sure that she was about to speak, but she did not raise her hand. I suspect that she felt obliged to stand and question him on behalf of those who had died. Everyone thought she was hard and pure, and she often rose to the part with great courage.

Mind you, I was not analytical then, not capable of understanding what moved my sister to be as impetuous, outspoken, and daring as often she was (she would, for example, at great risk to her standing among the teachers, flay alive any nun who dared to come to class unprepared). But I have remembered, and as the years pass, even though I have—I think—long understood her, I am surprised. For me, the power of recollection has always seemed sadly and inversely related to the power of action. My memories grow more intense, as if they had a life of their own. And if I close my eyes I see the pattern of her sweater in the most exact and luminescent detail, the way you see something bright that you have apprehended from the dark. I see her hair shining under the light. I have trouble recalling her voice, at seventeen, but the words are there, exactly.