Night of the Caudillo

 “I’ve watched the days pass with the slow downhill feeling we all experience sooner or later.” Javier Marias, All Souls

The would-be American Caudillo is angry. Seething in the Florida night. Indicted. Criminally indicted. This is new, uncomfortable, and can’t be part of the script. It’s preposterous because he did nothing wrong, he never does anything wrong; evil and jealous people want to take him down. He’s a victim. They persecute him because he is strong and beats them all the time. Don’t they know he never loses, at anything! Indestructible. Infallible. Immense. His likeness must be carved into monuments, cast in bronze, captured in marble and placed for eternity in the Great Hall of the Patriots. He poses before a full-length mirror, tilts his chin up, glares with contempt. He likes the look. Tough. Manly. Virile. He sucks in his stomach. Still got it. 

His loyalists in the legislative branch rush to his defense, attack the prosecutor’s race and integrity. The nerve of the man! All politically motivated they say, all designed to derail the Caudillo’s candidacy for a triumphant second term. It doesn’t matter that the alleged crimes were being investigated long before the Caudillo announced his intent to run again, it’s still a political hit job. The loyalists line up to speak to the scribes and cameras, and in chorus link the prosecutor with a cabal led by a wealthy Jew, one of history’s most reliable and durable villains. In service of the Caudillo, evidence is unnecessary and logic the obsession of impotent intellectuals. What matters is the narrative. Create it, repeat it, add to it as needed, alter it on the fly. Keep it simple so the faithful understand. Us against them. Our kind against those others. 

Everyone is out to get him. 

The Florida night feels inhospitable and the shadows beyond the windows bend like the bars of a cage. In another room, behind a dead-bolted and electronically alarmed door, his wife sleeps alone. No comfort there. The gilded ballroom is empty. He doesn’t tolerate the quiet of these hours well because thoughts creep in, memories, sensations, and he struggles to hold them at bay. He reminds himself that there has never been a more perfect human specimen than him. He’s the one without defects or flaws or blemishes. Mental and physical perfection. The ultimate winner. His father drummed into him that peace is for the faint of heart, the weak. Be a killer, son. Win, whatever the cost. Hasn’t he always?

He learned to keep his own hands clean by getting others to do the heavy lifting, the unpleasant work. He also learned the importance of having someone or something to blame when things don’t fall his way. Accuse the accusers. Turn the tables. Twist the truth. Push the boundaries. Stoop low.

The night reminds him of the military boarding school his father sent him to, a place he hated from the moment he arrived. The older cadets lorded over the younger cadets, treating them with meanness and cruelty. They stole sheets from beds and urinated in boots and jerked off into socks. Bastards! How he hated them. In the communal showers they pointed at his cock and compared it to a Vienna sausage. They nicknamed him “Stubby.” Only Thomas understood because he was also harassed and ridiculed. Thomas lived down the corridor, the last room on the left. He spent hours in that room after Thomas’s roommate returned home for medical reasons. Sitting side by side on Thomas’s single bed, shoulders touching, the room dimly lit by the lamp on the desk. Talking quietly about this and that, but mostly about their hatred of the older cadets. Plotting revenge. Totally simpatico.

He remembers how the warmth of their young bodies mingled. Even now he can feel Thomas’s arm around his shoulders. Forbidden thoughts became forbidden deeds committed under the coarse sheet and heavy wool blanket of Thomas’s bed. It was breathless and furtive, a first for both. Clumsy and uncertain and shrouded by the risk of discovery. When he placed his lips on Thomas’s neck he felt the boy’s racing heartbeat. 

Where, he wonders, is Thomas now? Aside from his father, Thomas is the only other person he never betrayed.