Mandragon Read online

  Sancudo was staying in Judge Ernesto Paniagua’s house. The occupants had been moved out, the pictures taken down, the walls hung with horoscopic charts. The place was lit, after the power failed, with jasmine-scented candles. Sancudo waited alone on the ground floor. When he heard the car, he went to meet his guest, candle in hand.

  The chauffeur had offered her his coat; she had refused it. When Sancudo saw her, he staggered as from a blow, then held the candle at the level of her waist and studied her for about a minute. His gold front teeth shone dully in the uncertain light. An old scar at his throat glowed purple and gouted blood onto the velvet collar of his smoking jacket. She bore his gaze without flinching.

  Sancudo put the candle down and reached for her.

  When Alejandro Sancudo touched the girl’s beige skin, he forgot his triumphs and disasters, his destiny and his astrologer’s predictions. When she left the house the following morning, wearing one of Judge Paniagua’s daughter’s dresses, she was pregnant.

  She never went home. She took a bus to the capital and stayed there until after Sancudo’s election and inauguration. Then she heard that he was searching for her and fled from town to town. Sancudo’s agents gave out that he was wild for her and meant to keep her villa’d in luxury at Medusa Beach. It may have been so. It may have been that he recalled the prophecy and wanted to make sure she had no child. In any case, she wanted nothing to do with him and eluded pursuit.

  Late that year she found herself in a remote village. There she gave birth to a monster, a child with certain external organs of both sexes, who entered the world wrapped in the caul, with eyes open and face serene and milk teeth cut. A few days later she took sick and died.

  Another story goes that Mandragon’s mother worked in a brothel, that Mandragon’s father was an anonymous client of the place, that Mandragon was conceived in the normal course of business.

  This was Lo Que el Viento se Llevó, the premier fornicatorium of the continent, a sixty-room mansion, columned and porticoed, built and owned by Don Horacio Ladilla and set back from the airport road on a damp savanna. The earth around it oozed odors of generation and decay. Beside it a huge fig tree bowed its roots into the air and drooped its branches to the spongy soil. Torches flared along the muddy drive, and the air throbbed with music and rude laughter. And inside were women from all corners of the hemisphere, most of them handpicked for wit and beauty by Don Horacio himself.

  But not Mandragon’s mother. She was plain and plump and placid. She was for drunk and rowdy clients, that girls more in demand would shy away from. The grosser rioters led her away like a tame heifer and returned sweetened. One of them left her pregnant.

  Don Horacio raged like a madman when he noticed her condition. He’d built a whorehouse, not a lying-in home! A pregnant woman was a clear reminder of the sterner side of love, a side his house was designed to help men forget. But the girl pleaded so meekly that he said she could stay on, as a chambermaid, until her child was due.

  This happened just after midnight, on the first day of the new year. A huge celebration was in progress on the ground floor, and the stairs groaned under a ceaseless parade of couples. Mandragon’s mother wasn’t the sort to trouble others with her problems, especially if they were busy with their own. When her pains came, she kept them to herself. But a friend looked in to give her New Year’s greetings, and finding her in labor advised the madam, who had a heart of mush. Already weepy with farewelling the old year and drunk with welcoming the new, she got up on the bandstand and wailed for silence. A million fucks, she said, had been performed under her roof, and all had come to nothing. Now one was at the point of bearing fruit. Couldn’t one of the vagabonds out there be of some use?

  Mandragon was delivered by the minister of health, and baptized by the bishop of the diocese. Both happened to be in the house that night, and both performed zealously. Their auspicious presence offset the shame of the birth.

  Don Horacio wanted mother and child out at once.

  “The only bastards here will be the clients! And any tit-nibbling will be done by them!”

  For once, madam and girls stood up to him.

  “If they go we all go. You can take the clients on yourself.”

  So Mandragon stayed on, the pampered pet of sixty of the most lovely and accomplished whores on earth, until the place was sacked and burned by soldiers from the US military base, and Don Horacio Ladilla judged that an age had ended, and that its monuments ought not to be restored.

  Another version, one popular with those inclined toward politics, makes Mandragon’s mother a victim of imperialism, a symbol for her outraged country. It has her working in a law firm in the capital, whose offices were on Avenida Washington, opposite the US base, the Reservation. One night, after she’d been working late, two gringo soldiers pulled her into a car and drove her to an isolated sector of the encampment. They raped her, and beat her up.

  A military police patrol found her at dawn. They scoffed when she told them what had happened. Nobody raped Tinieblan girls, they said. Nobody had to. Nobody beat them up either, unless they tried to charge an unfair rate. They took her to the gate and thrust her out. Whores weren’t allowed on base, they said, and she should be grateful they didn’t lock her up.

  Her father went to her employer, a prominent attorney who represented many foreign firms. He gave assurances that justice would be done. The next day one of his assistants called. They’d best forget the matter. The attorney had spoken to the base commander. There’d been no rape, and it was likely, were the matter pressed, the girl would be arrested for soliciting. She needn’t return to work. Her services were no longer required.

  Other lawyers said the same, but at length León Fuertes took the case. He was just back from Europe then, had just entered practice. He didn’t care what gringo generals said, he cared about justice. But when he interviewed the girl, she said she’d gone straight home from work, had seen no soldiers, hadn’t set foot inside the base. And as for rape, the question was insulting. She was a virgin.

  She had forgotten the matter.

  She ate little, neglected her appearance, scarcely spoke. When it was obvious that she was pregnant, her parents sent her to relatives in a small village. Still, she refused to admit a child was on its way. When she gave birth, she refused to nurse or even hold the baby. The first day she was up, she tried to smother Mandragon with a pillow. Then she ate roach powder and died.

  A fourth account promotes León Fuertes from bit player to costar, and makes love, however brief and careless, the motive of Mandragon’s bastardizing.

  León Fuertes made a fortune at the law and became president of Tinieblas, but he spent part of his youth self-exiled. He served with the French in World War Two, rose to captain and won a tunicful of medals, then took a law degree at the Sorbonne, but he owed these years away from home to an unhappy love affair. A girl had killed herself over him, and it so scarred him that he fled the country. At the time of his return, he hadn’t held a woman in his arms for ten years.

  He disembarked at Bastidas and took a bus for the capital. Mandragon’s mother was on it.

  There’s a wag’s saying here that the Iberian colonists invented man’s greatest boon: la mulata. Mandragon’s mother might have inspired it. She was delectable, with laughing eyes and soft pouting lips and skin like mocha cake icing. When León saw her, his blood, frozen ten years, began to thaw. He sent her a look of longing that might have touched the cruelest woman, and she was neither cruel nor vain nor shallow. She had a great store of tender gen erosity for all those wounded by desire for her, especially when they were handsome, and had a presence of command. She smiled back.

  The bus climbed half-empty into the premature twilight of rain showers, then dropped to darkness beyond the cordillera. The girl was dozing when she felt León’s fingers touch her cheek. She let him lead her to a seat farther back. Rain drummed on the roof and pelted on the tarp stretched over the stacked luggage. Mist glazed the windo
ws. Passengers sprawled sleeping, all but two.

  Mandragon was engendered there in the humid stifle. The girl’s hips synched with the humps and swayings of the bus as she knelt spraddled to León. Her lips nibbled his face. Her moons jounced in his palms like caramel custard. Then she pulled his face down and sighed and shuddered, and he flung himself up into her, home at last.

  • • •

  In the last story, Mandragon’s mother was an orphan that a slum family kept as a slave. They mistreated her, they beat her, but she was a good girl. No man had ever touched her.

  The wind spoke to her. She could see the harbor from the tenement balcony, and when she went out there the wind bent to her and spoke into her ear. The wind told her to go out to Punta Amarga and bathe there at night, when the beach was empty. The wind gave her no peace, and so she went.

  The wind swirled sand about her calves. It bent the palms and drove the breakers. But when she walked down to the line of spume and took off her dress and sandals, the wind dropped, and the sea grew calm and phosphores cent. She waded out.

  A single wave rose and laved her. Then the wind whispered for her to go back onto the sand and kneel down facing the high ground.

  The wind rose, sweeping a cloud across the moon. The wind pressed her shoulders, bending her forward so that her check lay against the sand. The wind struck her raised hindquarters and entered her. It filled her with a terrible disquiet.

  She went from town to town. She begged for food. She slept in corners. Her belly swelled. The child in her took life. The wind no longer spoke to her, but she had no peace. Whenever she stopped, disquiet stung her onward.

  One night the Civil Guard sergeant in a remote village heard what he thought was a sick calf moaning outside the guard post and one-cell jailhouse where he lived. He went out with a flashlight and found a pregnant girl huddled against the wall. He carried her in and put her on a straw mat in the cell.

  She was no more than fifteen, ragged and filthy. Feeble-minded too. She couldn’t say how or why she’d come there, and when the sergeant wondered out loud what kind of man would take advantage of a child, she said no man had ever touched her.

  He nodded. “Sure!” Then he went to get the local midwife.

  She saw the girl had been in labor for some time, and that her pelvis was too narrow to admit normal delivery.

  “This one goes to the clinic. Whoever put the kid in her, only someone with a knife can get it out.”

  The road was deeply pitted by fall rains. The pickup pitched and staggered crazily. The midwife held on with one hand and cradled her patient with the other. The sergeant wadded his ears with newspaper against the screams. About an hour before dawn, when they were still twenty miles out, the girl stopped screaming.

  The midwife beat on the cab roof till the sergeant braked. She told him to come back and bring his flashlight. When the girl stopped breathing, the midwife took the knife she kept for cutting navel cords and carved Mandragon from the virgin corpse.

  Five myths. I can’t say what truth there is to any of them, but I like them all, the last as much as any. Outsiders scorned it, but it was popular among my tribe. And there are precedents. At each celestial turning comes a sign.

  It fits well, also, with my acts and powers. It fits my essence. Mandragon unites the opposites and reconciles them. Male and female, good and evil, strife and peace. Active and passive. End and beginning. Destruction and salvation. I gave my voice to none of these stories, but I denied none either. My tribe believed them all.

  Night has fallen. A breeze out of the west has swept the rain clouds toward the cordillera. Starlit, the low hills of Otán roll gently like deep-ocean swells.

  Mandragon’s tribe are gathered in a pasture. They have prayed and sung. Later they will make love on the moist grass. Now they sit about a tall bonfire whose flames flare toward the vault of heaven, whose sparks fly up among the stars. Circles of hunch-shouldered figures ripple out into the gloom. They and Mandragon listen as a relay of tellers chant the myths of the birth.

  Mandragon rises. Steps into the bonfire, climbing lightly up on its heaped logs. Flames leap about Mandragon toward the sky.

  In the gloom beyond, youths and girls clutch each other’s shoulders, rocking gently, moaning softly, as the teller’s chant drones on.

  7

  Strange, this last.

  One moment curled here, remembering stories and reflecting on them; the next I stood in air above the pasture, viewing the starlit hills, my tribe, myself. Mandragon had healed the land of drought, had cleansed it of tyranny, and we were gathered in Otán, preparing for the end and the beginning. But what I saw was not a recollection, no memories composed into a scene. I was there, six months back ward in time, three hundred miles north of here. I witnessed the rite, observed my people. I watched myself, Mandragon, as another.

  Strange, because my powers have left me. I’d say it was a journey out and back, except my gift is gone. Such trans ports were once commonplace for Mandragon, daily occurrences, though I only had one vision of myself, and that was future. But strange that one should come upon me now.

  Of course, it wasn’t any vision. Trick of my mind, particularly vivid memory. I don’t have visions anymore.

  And yet before, when I recalled the loft, something came on me. I was flung back there, then flung back again. Mandragon ascending. Mandragon adored. Mandragon and Apple on the day I took her. I was present, unnoticed, observing what took place in the third person. Or so it seemed.

  Thrown forward also! Paloma in the police wagon near the park. Paloma and Apple. I saw and heard them, just before my hanging or just after, but future anyway, tomorrow morning. And I was present at Full Moons’ interview. Yesterday perhaps, perhaps next week. That was no memory! I knew the young man craved to smooth her hair. It had the texture of an actual event, either past or future, which I, Mandragon, presenced, unseen yet there.

  Hallucinations or true journeys? Have I that gift again? Might I, then, journey out from here now if I cared to, downstairs for instance to the cells and see my loyal ones?

  Best not to think about it. Best not to look for pain and disappointment. What’s over’s over. I have moved objects without touching them. I have bathed in fire and not been singed. By the strong power living in me I have healed and punished. I have created and destroyed, murdered and saved. I have played in the minds of strangers, apportioned them emotions of my choosing, fashioned up their acts out of my whim. I have composed the world, and I have looked—clearly, unblinking—on what’s to come. All this, and more, power has performed through me. But now power has left me. My gifts are gone. Best not to think about them.

  Beyond these rooms there is a prison full of pain and disappointment. Thieves and brawlers beasted down on cement floors. Cramped with dysentery, bruised from the guards’ truncheons. Trying to sleep waiting for morning, for weak coffee and a trusty to hose out their cages. And downstairs, the politicals. My girls in a damp cell below ground level. Huddled together, comforting one another, mourning Mandragon.

  A prison and a city. Women standing at screenless windows in ramshackle tenements. Plucking sticky cloth from sweaty flesh. Peering into alleys, hoping for breeze. Men strewn together in dimly lit cantinas—blared music, the rum—loud bray of their own throats. Tipped back against the walls, hunched over tables. Swilling and swearing. Tonight and last night and tomorrow night.

  The colonels scheming their own abuse of power. And before the colonels it was Angela and Mandragon. And before us it was Alejandro Sancudo. And before Alejo, it was General Manduco. And before him it was the Mercantile Club group. Before and before. Oligarchs, demagogues, despots, opportunists, juntas. Around and around.

  In the palace Angela lies naked between silk sheets. Bites her lip between tiny, pointed teeth. Turns restlessly. Doesn’t enjoy being a figurehead, and even that’s uncertain. Scheming how to get the better of the colonels before they toss her in here. Take all three of them to bed, I’d say. On
e at a time, of course, and make them jealous of each other. Let them get the better of themselves.

  Or she gets up. Goes to the window and looks out into the park. Grandstand set up. Pulley already rigged on the big tree. They’ll bring the Jeep in at dawn and rig the cable, about the time they come to take me downstairs. People already on the seawall. Cooler there, and they can doze on the stone benches and be assured of a good view tomorrow morning.

  High tide now, or nearly high and rising. Slap of waves against the ancient stones. Fish-salty breeze. Beyond, out in the roadstead, the running lights of anchored freighters. Voyaged in from every sort of country, each one as futile as Tinieblas. A prison and a city and a world.

  I shall curl here nuzzling soft fabric. Or perhaps flip over and lie semireclined. Here at the center where there is no movement. No pain of trying and no disappointment. No powers and no gifts, no responsibilities to them. Pleasures of helplessness. Pampered confinement, reminiscent of my early life.

  8

  I didn’t speak till I was eight or nine years old.

  My vocal cords were sound, so was my hearing. When people spoke to me, I understood—if understanding was convenient. But I used no words, not even in the privacy of my own mind.

  It may be I had intuitions about language: a tool for chopping perceptions into handy bits: useful but dangerous. Words give you a firm grasp, and yet they work with only a small fraction of reality. As a child begins speaking, as he begins conversing with himself, he stops perceiving things language can’t process. He puts a word membrane between him and the world. Marvels fade, or disappear entirely. The rest is broken up in labeled fragments, so unity fades too. A kind of bargain where you lose as much as gain. Maybe more.