Mandragon Read online

  This edition first published in the United States in 2014 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write to the address above

  Copyright © 2014 by R. M. Koster

  Copyright © 1979 by Sueños, S. A.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now know or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1051-1

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Author

  About Mandragon

  For Otilita, Ricky, and Lily

  PREFACE

  This is the third book of a trilogy. Like The Prince and The Dissertation, its setting is (mainly) the imaginary Central American Republic of Tinieblas, its subject is (largely) politics, its structure is that of a concerto for solo instruments and orcherstra, its chief character—the soloist who strtives against the collective—is a particular sort of leader. Certain characters are shared among the three books. Tinieblas itself can be seen as the main character of the work entire. There are, besides, thematic linkages. Each book, however, tells its own story and may be read independently of the others.

  Mandragon is the shortest of the three, the simplest in design, and the least populous in characters, but it gave me the most trouble—no doubt because I didn’t give it proper respect. I knew before I started how it would end which wasn’t the case with The Prince or The Dissertation. I knew it would be relatively short. I didn’t prepare for a life-or-death struggle, and for that the book taught me a lesson. It fought me for every page and came close winning. As a rule, when an author destroys an important character, it is as a scapegoat for himself.

  What I like best in Mandragon are the Rotunda of Astounding Miracles in Amichevole’s circus and the two Ticamalan customs men in Chapter 24. The drought, also, is well realized. What I find most interesting, however, are the visions it extracted from me, at once clear and skewed. I found myself writing about the holy man as political leader. I also found myself writing about a billionnaire who finds refuge in Tinieblas, a refuge he gets because they want to shake him down for money. I had no idea why I was doing that, except that it helped me get a more important character back to Tinieblas and that it was fun. I made him a kind of Howard Hughes figure. One of the things I had him do was set up a modern dress version of the Garden of the Assassins as described by Marco Polo when he touches on the Nizari Shiites in thirteenth-century Persia. Okay, I finished the book in September 1978, and during 1979 I discovered what I was really doing. First Khomeini takes over in what was once called Persia, the holy man as political leader. Then the Shah of Iran takes refuge in Panama, where they try to shake him down. I have no way at all to account for it, but I find it interesting.

  I wasn’t seeking topicality, however. In 1983 an interviewer from the Rio paper O Globo asked me if I’d written my trilogy to take advantage of the noteworthiness that Central America was experiencing. I told her no, nothing of the sort. When I wrote my Tinieblas books, no one cared about Central America, and my great hope was that (to paraphrase J. K. Galbraith on Southeast Asia) that Central America may somehow recapture the obscurity God intended for it.

  I didn’t go to Panama looking for trouble, but Panama is where I met the twentieth century and learned there’s a Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in an interesting period of history.”

  Anything you live intimately with for a long time—a dog, a car, a book—gets to be like a person. I feel gratitude toward The Prince. It didn’t baby me, but it was on my side; it gave me confidence while I was writing it and, later on, my first success. I love The Dissertation: it gave me every pleasure generously. Mandragon I respect. A canny, tough, and thoroughly ruthless foe, it gave me scars. With its publication in this Overlook edition, the trilogy is available in a uniform, paperback format.

  —R. M. K.

  Panama, March 2014

  NOTE

  The artist’s business, akin to Mandragon’s, is to put people in touch with things not readily accessible in the ordinary course of reality. The artist’s method may be called controlled dreaming.

  This book is the third in a series of three—the right-hand panel, as it were, of a triptych—depicting imaginary people and imaginary events in the imaginary Republic of Tinieblas. How fine my frenzy was, how well I’ve turned these unknown things to shapes, the reader may judge for himself—favorably, I hope—but I dreamed them up.

  —R. M. K.

  El quinto angel derramó su copa sobre el trono de la bestia; y su reino se cubrió de tinieblas, y mordían de dolor sus lenguas.

  —APOCALIPSIS 16-10

  1

  One day Mandragon toured a personal future. One day I had a vision of myself:

  A street slopes between three-story buildings hung with balconies. It is crowded with brown-faced people. Young men in undershirts, in T-shirts blazoned with soft-drink logos, in brightly colored sport shirts. Older men in flowing white four-pocket guayaberas, in linen suits. Girls and women in thin dresses, in slacks and brightly colored blouses, some with heads kerchiefed and their hair in rollers. The mulato-mestizo crowd of a Latin city.

  They fill the walks and spill into the gutters, closing the greater portion of both lanes so that barely a yard is clear along the center. They push and jostle for a better vantage. They rise on tiptoe, peer up the street into the lifting sun. The sun roars at them from a hazy sky.

  Above, the balconies are packed, the windows gargoyled with thrust torsos and craned faces. Everyone peers up along the street, which is overhung with leaning balconies and buildings, and widens toward a plaza higher up. Bolívar Avenue! Ciudad Tinieblas!

  Four guardias on motorcycles lead a patrol truck down from Plaza Cervantes. Sirens on moan, bikes weaving in slow S curves, they carve a channel through the crowd. They ride straight-backed with elbows arced at shoulder level, and their mirror-lensed glasses, their plastic casques, their shiny carapaces of black leather, give them the aspect of gigantic bugs.

  The patrol truck follows with its head lamps blinking in the morning glare, its dome light whirling hysterically. The driver glances nervously into the tumult eddying beside his fenders, but the major beside him stares straight ahead, arms folded over camouflage jump suit, face copper-masked in scorn, in contempt.

  Someone t
rots behind the truck, on tether. Not someone! Mandragon! Me!

  Howls of happy hatred from the crowd.

  Handcuffed by the right wrist to the tow hitch at the rear of the patrol truck. Trots bent over, cupping the steel ball with both hands. Blue cotton prison shirt flaps loosely. Laceless prison slippers slap the street. Head hangs forward, bobs between stretched arms.

  Behind come three tall ten-wheelers, their engines grumbling sternly in low gear. Soldiers sit in rows along the truck flanks, snakefaced assassins in camouflage jump suits and berets. The blue-black barrels of their assault rifles poke up between their thighs.

  Objects are flying down from the balconies and windows. An egg splats on Mandragon’s shoulder. A corncob clips my heel. A mango fizzes by Mandragon’s ear and detonates on the floor of the patrol truck, shrapneling slime onto the boots of the three guardias inside, sending them scooting toward the cab to put more roof between them and incoming refuse. An old woman leans from a balcony; stretches out wizened neck the color of charred oak; smacks mandrill lips and spits.

  The troop carriers roll slowly down Bolívar Avenue, the driver of the first keeping respectful distance between his bumper and my bum. Mandragon trots bent over. The patrol truck guides me between jeers and curses. The cyclists weave and sway, carving a path. Down into Plaza Inchado. Across the square and on between the Alcaldía and the palace. Left between the palace and Parque Mocoso. Up to the porte-cochere, where all halt.

  Mandragon stands head down and panting. My shoulders produce an equine shudder. Then, while the sergeant and two privates jump down from the rear of the patrol truck and brace facing the palace, while the troops swarm down from their transports and form up in three ranks, while the major steps down from the cab and adjusts his beret, Mandragon sinks to knees, lays face on hands on the steel ball of the patrol-truck tow hitch. Eyes closed. Face smeared with terror and exertion. My powers have left me.

  Parque Mocoso is cordoned off with presidential guards. They wear dress uniforms, royal purple with yellow trim, and stand at five-yard intervals with their machine pistols at port arms. A band, also in purple, is phalanxed just inside the park near the lead cyclist. Simón Mocoso stands on his pedestal, his left foot slightly forward, his left hand thrust toward the palace, his right hand grasping a green-tinged bronze replica of the Tinieblan Declaration of Independence. Behind stands the old tree, leafless save at its top branches, which (now that the early haze is burning off) are drenched in sunlight. The rest of the tree, and all but the top of the seawall well behind it, are in the shadow of the palace.

  A pulley has been rigged on the first branch, about twenty feet up. A looped cable dangles from it. The cable runs down and back from the pulley to a winch on the front end of a Jeep parked to one side. In the Jeep sits a guardia in olive-green fatigues and a black hood.

  The seawall is crammed with spectators. Others, well dressed men and ladies, fill a grandstand set up near the back of the Alcaldía. Beyond it is a panel truck with a television camera tripodded on its roof, and beyond that a police wagon with the first and last of Mandragon’s followers. Five girls in prison smocks who clutch their fingers in the wire caging.

  Three officers stand at ease on the balcony above the porte-cochere, stand at ease in dress purples and high-peaked caps, in faces sculpted from dried dog shit. Two stories above them, at the roof of the palace, a large purple-green-and-yellow Tinieblan tricolor droops limply, flutters once in a light puff of breeze, then droops again.

  Off beyond the seawall, pelicans wheel and swoop above the shimmering Pacific.

  The major has got his beret set at a properly rakish, military jaunt. He steps round the patrol truck. Halts, comes to attention, and salutes. The officers on the balcony acknowledge. One of them turns back to the door and sticks his head inside. Draws his head out and nods it at his colleagues, who turn to face each other and salute while he, saluting, steps back and swings the door open. The major braces, bellows a command. Hands and weapons snap up in salute, bandmaster flourishes baton, musicians lift instruments. Loudspeakers crackle above the grandstand, hum and then blare forth:

  “SEÑORAS Y SEÑORES! LA EXCELENTISIMA SEÑORA PRESIDENTA DE LA REPUBLICA! DOÑA ANGELA DE SANCUDO!”

  Fanfare of trumpets. All rise in the grandstand. All stand, looking toward the palace. All except Mandragon. Mandragon remains kneeling, face on hands.

  A woman steps onto the balcony, a beautiful woman, more like an old-time queen or priestess than any modern head of state. Yellow hair and milk-white, chalk-white skin; pale eyes that seem much older than the rest of her. Her gait is graceful and her carriage stately. Black square-necked, long-sleeved dress, black fan. Stands at the parapet of the balcony. Opens her fan and holds it at her breast. Looks down at Mandragon. She smiles faintly, a smile both tender and derisive. Then, as the band takes up the Tinieblan anthem, she lifts her eyes toward the distant pelicans, and holds her gaze there through the solemn march.

  When the last note of the anthem fades, the three officers drop their salute. One moves a chair front and center, and the woman sits. The major bellows again. Hands and weapons drop; musicians lower instruments; people in the grandstand sit. The major about-faces and shouts again. Assault troops to port arms, face right and left and split into two bodies, trot past the presidential guards and take stations opposite the grandstand and the seawall. They level rifles at the spectators and stare forward with the alert immobility of Dobermans.

  The major marches to the rear of the patrol truck. Dips into the breast pocket of his jump suit. Plucks out a key. He tosses it to the sergeant, who catches it in both hands and turns to fit it in the cuff hooked to the tow hitch. He opens the cuff and hands the key back to the major. He draws the cuff, and my hand, behind my back. He seizes Mandragon’s left forearm and pulls it back. He snaps the empty cuff on my left wrist. Then, holding the chain linking the two cuffs, he pulls me up. Mandragon offers no resistance. Stands, head down and shoulders slumped. Lick my lips as though in thirst. My powers have surely left me.

  The two privates take Mandragon each by a bicep. They march me off into the park.

  The major balls his fist and punches it twice into the air. Drivers scramble up into their cabs, cyclists leap onto their bikes and stomp their starters. The convoy pulls away, swings left behind the south wing of the palace. The major marches off into the park, followed at two paces by the sergeant.

  The two privates have marched Mandragon to the tree, have turned me round so that I face the palace, so that the cable loop hangs just behind my back. The major arrives. He steps behind and drops the loop over Mandragon’s head. He pulls the cable till the steel fits snugly. Then he and the sergeant step four paces to Mandragon’s right front and come to attention. Major salutes.

  All this while, Mandragon, that Mandragon over there under the tree, has stood with head bowed, blinking quickly, licking lips and rubbing them together, looking afraid. Now, as the major lifts his hand in salute, I look up. I bare my teeth, which are very white against my dark-brown face. I look directly at the woman on the balcony.

  She flicks her fan closed. She holds it at arm’s length and flicks it up. She draws it back and opens it against her breast, smiling faintly.

  Slow roll of drums echoed by palace and Alcaldía. The major drops his salute and shouts a command. The Jeep starter whines. The motor catches and revs. The privates release Mandragon’s biceps and step back. The crowd grows still. The girls in the police wagon begin keening. The gears of the Jeep grate. The motor races. The winch turns. Mandragon rises.

  2

  That’s how I saw it, that’s how it will be. My second sight was always twenty-twenty.

  I will be handcuffed by my right wrist, not my left. The cob will clip my heel and not my ankle. My shoulders will produce an equine shudder. I’ll stand with my head bowed, blinking quickly, licking dry lips, looking afraid. And Angela will give the signal with a little black fan. Not with her empty hand or just by nodding. She
’ll flick me to a mechanized strangling with her fan.

  Spectators will gape at the gesture. Folks watching at home over TV will remark its aptness and originality. Flicking a bug off, you know. But I’ll not be surprised. That’s how I saw it, that’s how it will be. Tomorrow morning.

  I couldn’t turn the visions on or off. I couldn’t aim them. All I could do was suffer them when they came on me. But they were always clear and accurate. Twenty-twenty.

  It’s the precision that makes all the difference. There are all sorts of charlatans about who’ll daub you a rough sketch of what’s to come. Some use computers. Now and then one or another blunders near truth, fumbles out the gross out line, but that doesn’t make him any less a charlatan. The mark of your true seer is that his visions are precise in every detail.

  Futuretours really. Journeys forward. Mandragon would be snatched from the here and now, thrust to the there and then. To an embankment near Tokyo, for instance, where three weeks after I witnessed it two packed commuter trains performed a Guinness Book of World Records crash. To Madrid for the levitation of an admiral. Geyser of flame from the pavement, deafening blast. Limousine sailing upside down above the rooftops. Month or so later the event took place and made its hubbub, and I found out where I’d been and who I’d seen blown up. And to various capitals and hinterlands for what participants will call the end of the world. Which strictly speaking has begun already, though it’s still in the foreplay stage. Mandragon has viewed aspects of the consummation.

  Crops will cease growing in exhausted soil. Cities will explode and flame to cinder. Spectacular mutations will be spawned. I mean web-footed rats the size of collies, and babies like dolls, with no sex organs or excreting holes. Mandragon’s seen them! I’ve watched one feed upon the other!

  Billions will die. I’ve heard them shrieking. I’ve watched them trudge bewildered till they fall. Earth will be cleansed.

  And one day I was flung here to Tinieblas, for a sneak preview of my execution.