of blue. Company A was a unit under the exclusive command of El Presidente.
The facts are not significant in the Republic. But there are realities upon which only the satirical can shed light. Thus Casamira, exiled poet of the Republic, writes his sardonic
THE LEADER believed that history stopped with him. His greatest tactical mistake was his inability to subdue his own cosmic egotism. Because of that, he attempted to accelerate history so that his titanic dreams could be accomplished within the pinched scale of a single human life, his own. This form of individualism is so severe that it is no longer aware of its own dreadful whimsy. Here is an epic compression, Napoleonic in its strenuousness and awesome in its sweep, a juggernaut of self that endeavors to move not with the insufferable lethargy of evolution, but with the girded power of passionate and unalterable human motive. Of all forms of cowardice, the Leader most despised the timidity of time. And the greatest achievement of his delusion lay in convincing us that we could stoke the engines of history with such force and momentum as actually to bring it to its termination while we lived. To see paradise in one’s own lifetime, to see the triumph of the species, the final actualization of existence, to sit upon the blazing, uplifted tower of our completedness, to ride for one glittering moment at the pinnacle of that ultimate creation of all man’s effort and resource — that was the dream he offered, the apotheosis of romance.
From the rooted dreariness of individual life and the recent humiliations of national history he extracted the necessary substance with which to forge his ideal and himself, and which he then joined together in the musty arenas of our minds. At El Caliz, where the searing light seems to boil the river, it is easy to comprehend the process as it presents itself in the graven image of the superficial. Scholars bending feverishly beneath the green shades that glow within their studies have seen as much and called it explanation. But for those who were actually ingested into the infernal workings of his machine, those for whom memory is either misery or accusation, the judgments of scholarship are as futile and unenlightening as the shards of bat bone Esperanza uses to divine the rain.
And so we must look again and again and again, becoming as we do scholars of monstrosity.
Look again, then, and see the little boy standing in the park, his stomach recoiling from the detestable smell of sugar cookies.
• • •
My father stood up and grasped my hand limply, as if touching something that defiled him, as if my hand were some pornographic device that repelled him, but to which he was inseparably attached.
“Where are we going?” the little soldier asked.
“Home,” my father said.
“So soon?”
“Home,” he repeated.
At home we sat in the dining room under the small brass chandelier, which seemed to twinkle irreverently in the gloom. My father made delicate incisions in the wurst and forked the pieces glumly into his mouth. My mother bustled about obliviously, and I suddenly saw her as my father always had — a large, flabby woman who cared nothing at all for great ideas or events and for whom national defeat could be rendered wholly meaningless by a flick of the wrist and a disgruntled groan.
“Dessert?” she asked, and when I did not reply, she plopped a sodden piece of strudel onto my plate. Its smell reminded me of sugar cookies. I pushed it away.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t want strudel?”
“Not tonight,” I said. I dropped my hands into my lap.
“Perhaps he’d like to have a sugar cookie,” my father mumbled without looking at me.
I felt a wind blow through me, scattering my insides like bits of soiled tissue paper.
“Are you sick?” my mother asked.
My father looked up from his plate. “Leave him alone and go about your business.”
My mother shrugged and began gathering the dishes. When she had finished, she marched silently into the kitchen.
“You want to be like her, Peter?” my father whispered.
“No, Father.”
“What, then?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What kind of answer is that?”
I turned my eyes downward. Hearing him sit back in his chair, I knew he was still looking at me and that what he saw disgusted him.
My mother strode back into the dining room and pinched my cheek. “Maybe you’d like to go to the cinema tonight,” she said cheerfully.
“Cinema?” my father roared. He banged the table with his fist. “You ass, don’t you know what has happened today?”
My mother turned toward him, aghast.
My father leaped from his chair. “Get out of my sight!”
My mother stepped back and raised her hands as if protecting her face from blows.
“Get out of this house,” my father shouted. “I don’t care where you go, but get out of my house!”
“Martin,” my mother said helplessly, “are you all right?”
“Get out,” my father bawled. His eyes looked like small red bulbs.
My mother glanced at me timidly.
“Get out!” my father screamed. “Get out of here this minute!”
My mother rushed out of the room, hiding her face in her hands. A few moments later I heard her close the front door.
My father bent over the table and raked his bald head with his hand.
I sat frozen in my chair. I had never in my life seen such passion. He raised his head and seemed to gather himself together slowly.
“I will not endure such insults,” he said threateningly. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Father.”
“I will not endure it.”
I nodded fearfully.
He began to weep softly. He lowered his head to the table again, cradling it in one elbow and gently hitting the surface of the table with his hands. They were soft, muffled blows and each seemed to me like a moan.
I stood up and thrust out my chest. “I will not endure it either,” I said loudly.
My father did not look up.
“Father? I will not endure it either.”
My father drew his head up slowly.
I assumed the strong, firm-jawed look of the soldiers in the war posters. “I will not endure it,” I repeated.
My father stared at me coldly. “You are nothing to me,” he said.
I felt my chest cave in.
“Nothing, Peter,” my father said evenly, “nothing to me at all.”
“Father … I …”
“Sugar cookies,” my father said bitterly. “Strudel. Cinema.”
I could not bear the intense reproach in his eyes. I turned away and watched the wind rustle through the ivy
