Pandemic of Lies: The Exile

By Pedro C. López

After Manuel Cruz moves from the United States to the South American Republic of Banador, he thinks he is going to live in paradise. Instead, he finds himself hiding out in a hut at the edge of a marsh, after leaving behind his wife, children, and haciendas. Somebody wants Manuel dead, and he thinks it is a diabolical political geniusthe president of Banador. President Alejandro has an insatiable thirst for power. In just two years, he has seized control of nearly every major branch of the government and two television stations that pepper the airwaves with self-indulgent propagandaall without a coup dtat. At one time, Manuel was not only President Alejandros good friend, but also his presidential advisor. But when Alejandro makes a covert state visit to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro, Manuel takes revenge. Soon Alejandros wife and their children are leaving Banador for Europe; she wants a divorce, and Alejandro wants nothing more than for Manuel to disappear forever. In a last attempt to save his life, Manuel helps Alejandros political opponent defeat his former friend in the upcoming presidential electionbut as turmoil continues to swirl around him, he wonders if he will ever be able to trust anyone again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450253338

Pedro C. López

Pedro C. López was born in Caibarién, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States when he was ten. He holds a BA in English and a MA in comparative literature from the University of Illinois. His previous publications include Poems from the North/Poemas del Norte, M, and Pandemic of Lies: the Exile. López currently lives in Ecuador with his wife and teenage sons and is writing the second volume in the Pandemic of Lies trilogy.

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PANDEMIC OF LIES: THE EXILE

PEDRO C. LÓPEZ

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Pandemic of Lies

The Exile

Copyright © 2010 by Pedro C. López

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-5335-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-5333-8 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-5334-5 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010912557

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 10/11/2010

To my wife Lady and my sons Jean-Pierre and Pedro William.

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.

Homer, The Iliad

Contents

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 1

Your wife sends you her love, Raúl said, giving me a hug and a smile. How is it going, buddy?

Hanging in there, I responded grimly. You know something? I said, shaking my head. When I moved to Banador, I thought I was going to live in Paradise. But after all is said and done, I might have to admit I should have listened to my aunt.

And what did your aunt say? Raúl asked, wrinkling his brows.

"She warned me about leaving the good old US of A to go live in a third-world country. ‘Have you lost your mind,’ she scolded me. ‘Why would you want all of a sudden to go live in a country called Banador? I couldn’t pinpoint it on a map if my life depended on it. It’s probably a banana republic from the sound of it. You’ll probably turn into a guajiro macho and catch some strange disease over there!’ And to add insult to injury, she added: ‘When you turn into a millionaire in your banana republic, please write me a note.’ Imagine!"

"By the way, what’s a guajiro macho?"

"In Banador you’d call him a montubio," I explained.

Raúl nodded his head. Then he said, And have you become one?

What? A hillbilly farmer?

Yeah.

No. Not really.

Not even deep down inside your heart? Raúl insisted. Out of gratitude?

With a half-million-dollar home in Suburbión, I have an outlook on things very different from that of a hillbilly farmer. But I tell you what: I’ll start acting and thinking like one the day the Pope turns into a rabbi.

"But you have made money hand over fist in Banador, haven’t you?"

I hate to talk about my personal finances, I quickly riposted.

Oh, I see. Anyway, add the value of that house you just mentioned to that of your other home in Campalvo and all the rice land, cars, trucks, tractors, harvest combines, and commercial buildings you own, and your assets reach into the millions of dollars. Not to mention your agro-distribution company.

Pardon me, Raúl, but my net worth is none of your business, I said, my voice bristling.

Don’t take it the wrong way, Raúl pleaded, touching my shoulder. I was complimenting you actually. You’ve worked hard in this country and you deserve the wealth you’ve earned here.

I let out a long breath. Thanks.

But I can’t help wanting to ask you one more question.

I hope it’s not about whether I’ve caught some strange disease or not in this part of the world, I said stiffly.

Of course not, he chuckled. Relax.

Then shoot, I said defiantly.

Did you ever let your aunt know you had become a millionaire in Banador? Raúl said, his black eyes smiling sardonically.

No, I never did, I said, gulping. Why should I? Then with a heavy frown, I went on to warn him: "Listen, man. If you don’t stop insinuating I’m the Banadorian version of Bill Gates, I’m going to get really pissed off at you. Hear? As the old saying goes, cría fama y acuéstate a dormir. Build up a reputation—it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or false—and it sticks to you forever, like glue. I have enough problems as it is with the head honcho of this frigging nation, and you want to add the Banador Internal Revenue Service to my list of headaches. I sighed. Besides, can’t you tell by the looks of things that I’m living the spiritually uplifting, exhilarating experience of going from riches to rags, without losing my wealth or my marbles—or my life, for that matter—yet?"

Raúl laughed, alone. Then his face assumed a worried expression. Hey, bro, are you starting to get depressed on me?

"Shouldn’t I? Or are manic-depressive people the only ones with the right to feel disconsolate and down in the dumps? Because I am in the dumps! Just look around this bamboo box, I ordered. Does it look like a five-star hotel to you? Maybe the Hilton or the Sheraton? And look through that crappy window. Does that marsh back there look like an 18-hole golf course?"

"That’s what you get for being true to your gringo nature, he shot back, not without grinning and padding me on the shoulder in a friendly manner. Always getting into wars that don’t concern you. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Banador politics."

Yeah, I guess you’re right, I said, frowning. "But I’m not a gringo, okay?"

Then what are you?

I scratched my head for a moment. That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out since I left Cuba when I was just a child.

But you’ve made more money here in Banador than in the U.S. or any place else. So from an economic stance…

That doesn’t change the issue, I said flatly.

Oh, so you’re like one of those strange new cars running around Banador that use gasoline and electrical power and what not, Raúl concluded.

You mean the hybrids?

He nodded a head crowned with wavy, jet-black hair thinning at the front. "Yeah, those. You’re like one of them. You’re a hybrid," he chuckled.

And you’re an asshole, I retorted.

Raúl was taken aback by my rude comment. Then he studied me thoughtfully and smiled sheepishly. "Hey, Manuel, changing the subject, are you going to help me with the groceries your loving wife sent you or what?" he asked, suddenly trying to sound sufficiently upbeat and affable to bring me out of my angry funk.

I thought about it for a moment. What if in plain daylight some passerby happened to see me, a blue-eyed, gray-haired white male that didn’t look anything close to your typical Banadorian, totally out of his habitat in this God-forbidden place, where "el Diablo dio las tres voces y nadie lo escuchó" as my father used to say? But the truth was I was so sick of being cooped up in that hovel made from caña guadúa, green bamboo, raised on legs from the same material some ten feet off the ground in order to avoid the incursion of rodents, snakes, and other troublesome animals into the household and to keep the house above water when the flooding waters came in the rainy season, that deep down inside I wished perhaps to be spotted and identified to end my claustrophobic misery once and for all.

Sure, let’s go get the stuff, I finally replied with a touch of bravado.

We retrieved all the provisions my wife had purchased for my sustenance in my hideout: crackers, canned tuna, canned fruits, fresh vegetables, stacks of TV dinners, insecticide spray bottles, soaps, all kinds of supplements in the form of vitamins and antioxidants, like vitamins C and E, multivitamins, Alpha Lipoic Acid, Ginkgo Biloba, Selenium, Omega-3, CoQ-10, Milk Thistle, Lecithin, Maca, and Pine Bark Extract, and various other items.

I picked up the bottle of Maca and stared at the bottle, smiling while remembering the good times the so-called Viagra of the Andes had provided me. Maca 100 capsules 300 mg. 100% Natural. But what was the purpose of the Maca in this neck of the woods and at this point in time? I thought. It would just get me horny for nothing. I put back the bottle back into the plastic bag it had arrived in and shook my head with nostalgic disappointment.

A while later, I mused out loud, You know, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if my wife provided me with a maid who could cook. It’s been just a few short weeks out here, and already I’m getting sick and tired of TV dinners and canned food, if you know what I mean. I kind of think it’s the vitamins and supplements rather than the food that are keeping me alive and sane.

The hovel was a one-room affair. No separations anywhere. A plastic table, plastic chairs, an inflatable bed that had yet to be pumped up and used for the first time and instead was kept in a box, a hammock, which had become my true bed, a cooking plate, a microwave oven, a medium-sized refrigerator, and other domestic paraphernalia—all were part of a strange mixture, spread around the place haphazardly without any aesthetic, organizational, or functional consideration. Definitely, the place looked more like an ecologically friendly, chaotic prison—set between an immense rice field of my ownership and a twisting muddy river and beyond the river a seemingly endless marsh—than anything else. How long I could hold out under such adverse conditions before breaking down emotionally, psychologically, or physiologically, or in all three departments at once, only God knew.

I’ll see what I can do, Raúl returned. "It would be best if I brought somebody from Maderquil instead of Campalvo. You’re not known in Maderquil, because, for one thing, you don’t live there and, for another, it’s a huge city. In Maderquil I can select a nice young lady from a population pool of two million. But you’re the talk of the town in Campalvo. At least, that’s what I hear from certain sources. And you know the old saying: pueblo pequeño, infierno grande. Small town, huge hell. So give me carte blanche on the selection process, and you can be sure I’ll bring you filet mignon, he said with a devilish grin. On the other hand, if you leave the assignment up to your wife, you’ll end up with an octogenarian for a cook who has hanging tits, bad breath, and false teeth."

My wife isn’t the jealous type, I assured him.

Are you kidding me? he said. There’s no such thing as a non-jealous woman, he pronounced, and then roared with laughter, his ample belly shaking seismically.

Over the years since his soccer career had ended with the Eléctricos, for which he had played delantero central or central forward or striker on account of his height (about six feet two inches, huge for a Banadorian) and his size (around two hundred pounds), he had obviously let his gut grow in protuberance and girth. He now had to be tipping the scales at two hundred and forty pounds at least. I figured speed had never been his strength. Bulk, primarily—and I didn’t know what else—had been his ticket to the Banadorian major soccer league.

Well, I have news for you, I argued. "There is such a woman: my wife."

Then your wife is from Mars, he grinned.

It was a typical Latin macho comment. But I was in no mood to continue arguing over a triviality.

I don’t care what you get me for a maid, I finally said. Just get me somebody who has enough cooking skills not to end up burning the water—or my hut.

We chuckled together.

I’ll get you somebody who can not only make palatable food for you during the day but also become palatable food for you at night.

I couldn’t help laughing again. You’re going to get me into trouble, I warned.

Sure, the type of trouble every real man loves, he said, squeezing my shoulder with a big brown hand of his.

Raúl walked over to the hammock made from black-colored thread. My aerial bed was tied to two bamboo poles about three feet apart each from the center of the hut. The double bamboo floor of the house creaked as he moved.

May I? he said politely, pointing at the hammock.

Go right ahead. I’m sick and tired of lying in it with books and reading my eyeballs out. There is nothing much else to do around here.

"Things will turn around once your sexy female chef arrives. Then you won’t want to leave this place. Ever. You’ll see. With her you’ll want to run around nude and go skinny-dipping in the Tacharí River, like Tarzan and Jane or Adam and Eve. You’ll want to screw her all day long and all night long."

Stop putting sinful ideas into my head, Lucifer, I said with a smile, and sat down in one of the four plastic chairs that served as living room furniture.

Raúl beamed back. The house creaked again when he deposited his voluminous body in the hammock. "Oye, Manuelito, in the meantime we’ve got to start thinking up new strategies to bury that pendejo in the runoff election?"

You mean Alejandro Salvador?

Who else?

Pendejo? A wimp? How could Raúl call Alejandro such a thing when Alejandro, as a political newcomer, had reached the Banadorian Presidency in his first attempt? How could Raúl say that when later on as President Alejandro had gone on to reach the pinnacle of power, gaining control of practically every other major branch of Banadorian government beside the Executive: the Supreme Court, the Assembly, and the Electoral Council? A wimp could have never done this. Alejandro had even seized absolute control of two private TV stations and through them peppered the airwaves with continuous propaganda favorable to the interests of his Presidency and government. And all this accomplished in the lapse of only two years without the need of a coup d’état. Or maybe there had been a coup d’état, an unofficial one, a constitutional one, an ghostly one, but no one had complained because, if indeed it had occurred, it had been smooth and bloodless, with the pain amounting to that caused by a mosquito bite. No, none of this was the work of a pendejo or nincompoop. Not at all. On the contrary, here was a political genius, perhaps misguided or misinformed or even mentally disturbed, but a genius, no matter which way you looked at the situation. At worst, a diabolical genius.

"Your pendejo is systematically turning himself into a Banana Republic dictator without having to fire a shot," I pointed out, uncomfortable with the fact that Raúl was bringing up the subject of Alejandro but at the same grateful that he was making conversation with me, an unwillingly secluded person who had only the sounds of the Banadorian countryside and Mother Nature to keep him company when Raúl wasn’t around.

Yes, and you and I put him where he is.

To a certain extent.

"To a great extent in your case. You gave him the idea of the cheap urea for the small farmer, remember? Or are you beginning to suffer from a selective form of Alzheimer’s?"

With that idea of mine put into effect, Alejandro Salvador had been able to capture the vote of the rice growers and the corn growers and the soybean growers and the vote of just about every Banadorian farmer not considered a latifundista. In other words, with my idea of having him promise farmers urea at nine U.S. dollars for the hundred pound bag, I had practically handed over to Alejandro on a silver platter the rural vote of Banador.

I nodded sadly at Raúl. I could hardly argue with his accusation. And for that little electoral-vote-capturing idea of mine, I had been rewarded with having to exile myself onto this rural shithole. Even though the shithole belonged to me as part of a two-hundred-hectare rice farm my wife and I had bought some years back, I would have never recommended it even to my worst enemy for living purposes.

On the other hand, before my exile here, I had taken my pound of flesh and exacted my revenge, ruining all possibilities of my ever being canonized as a saint after my death, even if my present enemies managed to erase me from the face of the earth prematurely and unjustly and, by so doing, turned me into a political hero. I had done something terrible and reprehensible to the twenty-first-century Savior of Banador, Alejandro Salvador. I had revealed something, a very dark secret in his life. So much harm had I done to him, especially in terms of his marriage and family life, that he had sent out his minions to find and eliminate me. At least that was how it all appeared to me. What a precious little monster of vengeance the former Catholic altar boy and Boy Scout, now president of Banador, had turned out to be!

But I also kicked him hard below the belt afterwards, I replied, not too proudly.

Yeah, a devastating kick at that, Raúl nodded, and to a very delicate part of his anatomy.

I grinned sheepishly.

The conversation was starting to have a positive effect on me, and some of the clouds of gloom were beginning to migrate slowly away from my head.

Yes, it was mean, terribly mean.

The prick deserved it, Raúl growled. He had it coming.

I felt betrayed, I said.

How so? Sentimentally, sexually? he quipped. Were you shocked and angry when you found out he had been Héctor Vidal’s lover all along?

"No jodas, I shot back, although I knew he was just joshing. The truth was I never could appreciate such boorish attempts at humor on Raúl’s part. Maybe he had picked up this sort of uncouth behavior, I thought, during his soccer-playing days. I felt betrayed because of the impression that he had tried to create that he would never lie, that he would never deceive, that he would never betray, that he was straight when he was gay. My God, for one moment there at the end of 2005, I thought he was the Banadorian George Washington!"

And what does George Washington have to do with Alejandro, he said, looking befuddled. Was George a pansy, too?

I chuckled at Raúl’s ignorance of American history. You don’t know the story of George Washington and the English cherry tree? I had plenty of free time on my hands and needed to kill my rural boredom.

Why should I? he argued defensively. "I’m Banadorian, not gringo like you?"

"There you go again with the gringo stuff. Your mother probably had a lover who was gringo, I said, and you’re his son."

With this color? Raúl asked, pointing at the skin of his arm and puckering his thick lips.

Anyway, let me tell you the most famous story about good old George. When he was a kid, he received a hatchet as a gift. Little George started cutting down every goddamn little tree in sight. One day he was tempted to cut down a young English cherry tree that was one of his father’s favorite in the family garden. When his dad discovered this, he called little George and asked him about the mishap. And little George uttered his most famous line: ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the tree.’

Raúl pushed off with his feet so that he swung slightly in the hammock as he rubbed his chin with a hand, showing puzzlement. The hut creaked again under his ponderous weight. Hmmm…And?

Well, George’s father, in full admiration for his child, replied, ‘Son, to tell the truth is more important than a thousand trees, even if they had silver blossoms and gold leaves.’ That’s why in America we say George Washington never lied.

Raúl shook his head. "Mierda!" he hissed.

Bullshit. How blasphemous!

Calm down, I said, and a little more respect for George. It’s nothing to get upset about. It’s just a story.

True, but where does Alejandro come into all this?

You remember the first time I brought Alejandro to Campalvo? Remember some of the things he said in the school auditorium about honesty and faithfulness?

He said so many things, how could I remember them all? Raúl said grumpily.

There was one thing he said that really caught my attention. He said suddenly, right out of the blue, ‘To betray your wife is like betraying your friend, and to betray your friend is like betraying your country.’ It was a moral syllogism.

And you fell for it? Raúl said, leaning forward and beaming mockingly.

Hook, line and sinker.

He let out a loud peal of laughter. You’re kidding me. That was as much bullshit as your George Washington story.

I held back my anger. That was one of the few things I disliked about Raúl. Even though he was about ten years younger than I, whenever the opportunity arose, he tried to emit airs that he was a lot more street-wise than I. It was akin to a rebellion against a mentor. But, as on previous occasions, I swallowed my pride and reacted humbly.

I was a fool, I must admit. I’ll never trust another Banadorian again. Except for my wife, I quickly added.

And me, he affirmed with cockiness.

Right. And you. I needed Raúl now more than ever. I could not afford to hurt his ego.

God, do you remember after that speech of Alejandro’s in the school auditorium in Campalvo, I said, shaking my head, when we had all gone to have lunch at my house and I told him how pleased I was to have heard him point out the importance of fidelity in marriage?

Raúl nodded, smiling. Yeah, you were convinced by then the dude was Banador’s Redeemer.

I even said to him he reminded me of President John F. Kennedy.

And the son of bitch straightened up and blew out his chest with great pride.

And I went on to clarify that he was Kennedy-like but without Jack’s foibles, like, you know, the womanizing and so forth. Then I remembered that John F. Kennedy, Jr., had been assassinated.

Of course, I had wanted right away to take back the comparison, because I hadn’t wanted to sound like the harbinger of a future Banadorian president’s death. But it had been too late. I had already opened my mouth in a stupid attempt to flatter the guy.

Well, to tell you the truth, Raúl put in, looking rather grim, every day I hope and pray you indeed prove to be a prophet in that regard!

Man, don’t say that!

I have every right to feel that way, Raúl grumbled. I practically put in all my personal assets into the first Alejandro Salvador presidential campaign. Over two hundred thousand dollars! And what did it get me, huh? Shit! That’s what it got me! He threw me out of the movement like a street dog with rabies! He treated me like a condom. He used me and then hurled me into the toilet and flushed. I’ll never forget the last time I tried to talk to him to explain that what Héctor Vidal had been saying about me was a big lie. God, I’ve never felt more embarrassed and humiliated in my life! I wanted to kill the two fags afterwards!

Alejandro had been sitting in the back seat of the dark green Nissan Patrol assigned to the presidency, the one that looked like a replica of mine. I had witnessed the incident but had never told Raúl I had watched the silently brutal event that had unfolded between Raúl and Alejandro Salvador, by then president of Banador. I calculated Alejandro had seen his former political coordinator for the province of Las Aguas, Raúl Cainú, through the corner of his eye as Raúl hurriedly approached the Nissan in the parking lot behind the provincial headquarters of the Peaceful Revolution Movement in Caralodo, capital of the Las Aguas province. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the tinted polarized window of the presidential SUV begin to rise with swiftness equal to that of Raúl’s steps. The darkened window, once shut hermetically, seemed to send out a cruel, politically eschatological message, as if from a hidden God, that Raúl had been irrevocably excluded from Heaven and condemned to Hell.

What I still couldn’t understand was my paralysis of action at the time. Maybe the shock factor had to be taken into account, but the bottom line was I had done nothing then or later to vindicate Raúl before Alejandro’s eyes. I figured the fact the rumors reaching me had played a key role in my passivity, rumors that Raúl had committed the sin of influence peddling in a gross attempt to place a cousin of his as director of the Banadorian Electrical Company in the Las Aguas province.

At that moment I felt like putting my hand through the car’s window, Raúl hissed through his teeth, looking fiercely at the bamboo floor of the hut as he slapped his clenched right fist into his open left hand a couple of times. I wanted to grab the fag by the neck and choke him to death, I swear. The only thing that held me back was the thought the window was most likely bullet-proofed and I would shatter the bones in my hand. I didn’t need another injury wreaked upon my body. During my soccer career I endured enough physical pain to last me a lifetime.

By now Raúl was breathing hard, almost to the point of hyper-ventilating, his wide nostrils flaring in such an exaggerated way they revealed more poignantly his mixed racial heritage, which very likely combined white, indigenous, and black blood lines. He ran his thick big brown hands through his undulating coal-black hair, more sparse up front, as if trying to calm down the storm of angry, murderous, thoughts running amok in his head.

Anyway, man, we’ve got to do something about this son-of-a-bitch of a con-artist. At least, we’ve got to stop him cold in the runoff, he pleaded, suddenly sounding more desperate than I.

His popularity has suffered significant erosion, I said placidly. At least that’s what I hear on the radio. By the way, I’ll need more batteries for my portable radio. Four double A Energizer batteries will do. At the present time the contraption is my only umbilical cord connecting me to what’s happening out there in the world.

That and your friend Raúl, he smiled.

Yeah, my Man Friday.

And what the hell is that, may I ask?

Oh, nothing much. Just a name from an old novel I was made to read when I was a kid living in the U.S.

Raúl frowned at me. Anyway, next time I’ll bring you newspapers, magazines, and what not, although I see you’ve got enough books around here to keep you busy reading for at least a decade.

In the future I’ll need my computer and internet, I told Raúl matter-of-factly.

Your computer—consider it done. I’ll ask your wife for it. Internet—I don’t know about that, really. It could be dangerous for you at this point in time. Maybe you should be patient and wait on that.

Alright. Just the computer then, I replied resignedly. I want to start writing.

Raúl gave a thumb-up sign. Writing will perk up your spirits, I’m sure. And as to the throwing of a monkey wrench into Alejandro’s campaign, what do you suggest at the present time, Chief?

Nothing. Alejandro is going to win the runoff, not by much, but he’ll be top dog at the end.

But in the primary we forced him into a second round of voting, thanks to you.

All I did was leak information to the press about all the corruption going on with the government-distributed urea—which was my original idea to begin with.

Minister of Agriculture Chailo Venecia had personally been making a mint out the government urea purchased from Hugo Chávez by a labyrinthic system of kickbacks. Pissed off to no end, I simply hadn’t been able to stand back and watch this scoundrel of a Minister continue to grow rich at the expense of our rice growers as well as other farmers. What troubled me most was the fact the corruption was possible thanks to an idea of mine.

Yeah, but you gave concrete details, Raúl reminded me. You provided the names of the owners of the two mansions in Suburbión secretly sold to Venecia at the hefty price of a million two hundred thousand U.S. dollars each, if I recall correctly.

The figure was right on the money, and the knowledge of it was what had really caused the furor among Banadorians. When the president had refused to dismiss Chailo as Minister, the people had gone to the voting booths and let their discontent be known. End result: Salvador had been forced into a humiliating runoff.

True, but there were a lot of other corruption stories breaking in the news then, I pointed out, "scandals of equal importance, coming from other sources that were thoroughly covered by the press and also caused heavy electoral damage on Alejandro."

Yeah, but you’re leaving out a very important event, Raúl said with a scowl.

Like what? I asked, although I knew perfectly well where he was leading.

Come on. Don’t go humble on me. Or have you forgotten the nasty little CD you left in Alejandro’s house for his French wife to watch?

Well, the truth was I wasn’t very proud of what I had done. That was what you could call, I guessed, moral Monday-morning quarterbacking. A week after my ungentlemanly deed, the president’s wife had stomped out of her conjugal house in Cerritos with her kids in tow. A whole bunch of suitcases had trailed behind them, carried by her new military escort, from which Paco had blatantly been removed. The French woman had hopped on a plane to Paris and hadn’t returned to Banador ever since.

That scandalous CD was a nuclear missile, bro, Raúl said. He slipped off the hammock and came over to where I was sitting and slapped and shook my knee in an appreciative manner. You homed it right in on his queer balls. He laughed uproariously.

But the owner of the Santillán Bank should also take the credit for what happened there, don’t you think? A lot more than I, that’s for sure. After all, it was the banker, not I, who hired the ex-CIA agents to film with hidden cameras Alejandro and Héctor going at it like naked Greek wrestlers inside a hotel room. And yet it’s Manuel Cruz who ends being the village idiot and paying for all the broken dishes. Fuck that, man!

You’re absolutely right, Raúl commiserated, turning serious again. He turned around and returned to the hammock. The whole thing is very unfair, he added, frowning.

I looked out the window and gazed at the Tacharí River, which at night would murmur and lull me to sleep, and, beyond that, at the marsh, home of mysterious birds and slithering animals. Then I returned my gaze inside the hut and saw Raúl straighten his back as best he could on top of the hammock.

Raúl cleared his throat suddenly. By the way, Manuel, you wouldn’t have an extra copy of that CD you gave the First Lady, would you? he asked hesitatingly. "With it, man, we could cause the greatest sex scandal ever in the history of Banadorian politics! The wife saw the proof of the pudding, but not the people of Banador, at least not yet. If the Banadorian voting population gets to know the truth, Alejandro will lose the runoff in a major landslide, hands down!"

A stinging shot of anger was released into my blood system, but I tried to control myself.

What are you looking for? Do you want another sex film in which Alejandro does more perverted things than in the first one? Maybe one in which he sucks and screws and is sucked and screwed in different positions or different settings, outside, inside, and with different partners or multiple partners under wild, orgiastic conditions? I said, in perfect seriousness to set him up. Is that what you want?

Raúl’s eyes lit up. That would be fantastic, bro! Yeah, something with more fucking weirdness than in the first flick!

Well, then you’re dreaming, buddy. What I handed out was all I had, and now I’ve been exiled to this hellish spot, out here in the boondocks, separated from my family and the things I love to do. I’m paying too high a price for seeking retribution and becoming an unwilling hero in a country I’m not even a citizen of!

But you’ve made a lot of money here, he squealed.

You’re sounding like a scratched record and making no sense.

Raúl placed his arms on his thighs and slouched forward, looking defeated.

Then we have to come up with something else, he said after a long silence, making an effort to sound positive. You’ve always said ideas are what matter.

Yes, with ideas you can conquer the world, but, unfortunately, as of late I’ve become quite stingy about providing them, I informed him. Sometimes good ideas are misused by dangerous misfits for bad ends. Like my cheap-urea idea for needy farmers.

Yeah, but you know I’m not one of those misfits, he replied despondently.

I wasn’t referring to you necessarily, I clarified.

CHAPTER 2

Once Raúl left, I started walking around the bamboo hut. He had left with a long list of things I wanted my wife to buy for me so that he could deliver them the following Sunday, the day we had both agreed he would visit me to replenish my stock of provisions. The list included a haircut kit and a mirror. I wanted to give myself a haircut with a certain frequency so that I wouldn’t start looking like Robinson Crusoe before long. The Cuban Revolution and its Maximum Leader, in particular, had developed in me a deep dislike for beards and long hair.

If it was true that our dialogue had raised my spirits, it has also made me restless. I would have wanted right then and there to have my computer and start writing about my plight. But in my lifetime I had developed the ability to replace that activity with launching myself into the thinking process, which I found even more liberating than writing because thinking had no constraints. Your mind wandered wherever it wanted to, meandering into the past and slipping back into the present and even projecting itself magically into the future. I found thinking even more liberating than writing because thinking was a natural Declaration of Independence from the tyranny of the word and the dictatorship of logic. Thinking was Freedom. Thinking was Infinity. Thinking was God.

So I started thinking and remembered my dead father. And the first thing that hit my mind when I recalled him was the story he had once told me about the most important lesson a Jewish father had once taught his son. My father never explained why the dad in the story was Jewish, but I had always suspected that perhaps one of his Jewish business friends in the state of Florida had narrated the story to him. In any case, the story had gone like this: a Jewish father told his son he wanted to teach him the most important lesson in his life.

The son said, Fine, Dad, no problem.

Well, Son, there might be a huge problem with this lesson. But you’ll learn a great deal from it. I’m sure it’ll become in the long run the most important lesson of your life.

Then let’s get on with it, Father, the son said enthusiastically.

Okay, but first you must get on top of the roof of the house, the father pointed out.

The son wanted to know, of course, why he needed to do such a thing, and the father explained that doing that was essential in receiving the most important lesson a youth could learn. The father suddenly asked the son if he fully trusted him.

Of course, Dad. Why shouldn’t I? I trust you one hundred and ten percent. You’re my dad.

The father was satisfied with the son’s answer and ordered him to climb right away on top of the roof.

Once up there on the roof, the son, his voice a little nervous, said, And what do I do now, Dad?

Do you trust me, Son? the father repeated.

Of course, Dad, the son reaffirmed. You’re my dad, aren’t you?

Okay. I’m going to count to three, and on the count of three you’re going to jump off the roof.

What!

On the count of three you’re going to jump off, the father repeated. Like Superman.

But… but, Dad! I’m not Superman! Neither do I have wings or a parachute!

Son, do you trust me?

Course, I do, but…

But nothing. Do you trust me or not?

You’re my dad, the son said, trying to sound resolute. "I’ve got to trust you."

Okay, so get ready to jump! Remember, I’ll be down here to catch you and prevent any harm from occurring to you. So are you ready? Okay, let’s start the count. One, two, three… jump!

And the son threw himself off into the infinite, legs and arms wide apart. The father opened his arms to receive the son, but just as the son was about to fall into them, the father swiftly stepped back and the son hit the grassy ground face downward. The son, confused and bloodied, turned his head sideways and mumbled, But, Dad, you said you’d catch…

Son, the father said, cutting him short, "you’ve just learned the most important lesson of your life: don’t ever trust anyone, even if that someone is your very own father!"

I had wanted to tell Raúl that story, but something had checked me from doing so. Perhaps it was my fear that Raúl would misinterpret the story and apply its message to our relationship. Undoubtedly, this was no time to create any sort of waves between him and me. I now needed him as badly as the air I breathed, as the food he brought me every Sunday. He was more than my Man-Friday. He was my umbilical cord to the civilized world. For that very reason, I had narrated to him only the story about George Washington, a story full righteousness and optimism, and now in the solitude of my bamboo hut, accompanied by the soft gurgling sound of the river below in back of my new primitive home, I understood clearly the sharp contrasts between the distinct visions of these two tales, the English-cherry-tree one and jump-off-the roof one, in terms of the concept of truth and human nature.

It was Mr. Strickland who had introduced me to the George Washington story. He had recounted it to me to show that young boys should never lie. The pleasant little story had been accompanied by a not so pleasant punishment for a recent lie of mine: no dinner that evening and seclusion in my room for the rest of the day. From my young boy’s point of view, I had deemed the punishment excessive and cruel. My real parents would never have punished me in such a harsh way, but I had then been living in America, where, according to Mr. Strickland, lying was the greatest crime and sin. When you grew older, lying could be considered a thing called perjury and land you in jail.

Still, there was a positive side to this issue. If you always told the truth, you could become a hero. That was why George Washington had been the first and greatest American president the U.S. had ever had. He simply had never lied, no matter what.

You should never lie so people can trust you, Mr. Strickland had also pointed out. On the other hand, my father had tried to teach me that you should never trust anyone, not even your father, for obvious reasons: everybody was a liar and a fake. So what was the sense of not lying if people like my father weren’t going to believe you anyhow? Two opposing worldviews, one optimistic, puritan, severe, unrelenting; the other, cynical, realistic, tolerant, worldly. With which of the two could a human being survive in the twenty-first century? And more concretely, with which of the two could he endure the embattlements of everyday life in such a treacherous place as Banador? The answer to me was obvious. But if you asked me which one of the two proponents of the contrasting weltanschauungs I would want to be like, I would have to cast a blank ballot.

During my one-and-half-year stay with the Strickland family in Winnetka, Illinois, and many years after that, I had disliked Mr. Strickland intensely. When I understood and spoke sufficient English, after having arrived as a ten-year-old Cuban refugee (via the Peter Pan Operation program, I was to learn many years later), Mr. Strickland had given me the option of addressing him in one of two ways.

You can call me Father or Dad or you can call me Sir or Mr. Strickland, he had said to me like a salesman showing to a customer several silk neck ties of insipid color and pattern for the purpose of choosing.

Despite my tender age, I reacted immediately. I’ll call you, Sir or Mr. Strickland, I answered in what was probably at the time heavily accented English.

It was only many years later that, with the help of the distancing in time and space and the aid of life’s experiences, I grew to appreciate what Mr. Strickland had meant to me.

He was totally different from my father, like day from night, like vinegar from water. Mr. Strickland was harsh, authoritarian, and, at times, even heartless. I came to the conclusion later on that part of his behavior had been shaped by his fighting experience in the Korean War.

At the time I had lived with the Strickland family, Mr. Strickland had been thirty-five years old or so. What was his first name? Somebody could threaten to kill me right then and there, and I wouldn’t be able to come up with his first name. Incredible, huh? As I said, my relationship with this ex-military man was on a strictly Sir or Mr. Strickland basis. Every time I had pronounced the words, they had felt uncomfortable and sour in my mouth. To be honest, I could not understand, even to this day, why that man couldn’t have been just a tad warmer and allowed himself to be called on a first name basis. What was the big deal? Even U.S. presidents, the most powerful people in the world, allowed themselves to be called by their first names and even encouraged it. They would say, Hey, just call me George or Call me Bill or It’s Jack. Well, to do Mr. Strickland justice, maybe I should speculate he had a very ugly first name he had been deeply ashamed of and wanted as few people as possible to know and remember.

Despite his cold behavior, though, you had to admire the guy, with the perennial military crew cut and, at five feet nine inches, with the look of a slim compact linebacker, for his incredible discipline. Ever since I met Mr. Strickland, I didn’t think I’d ever met a person more disciplined and organized than him.

Every day he would wake up, Monday through Friday without exception, at 4:30 in the morning, have breakfast, then walk to Sacred Heart Catholic Church to attend Mass, and from there go on to the Winnetka railroad station to hop on a train to go to Chicago, where he worked as an industrial engineer at a big company whose name I never learned or escaped my memory. It didn’t interest me one bit at what time he got up each day or what he did in the morning, until Mr. Strickland asked me to change my afternoon paper route (a tough assignment for any ten-year-old, which he had persuaded me to take up shortly after my arrival in Winnetka) to a morning one. He said it paid more: $5 per week for delivering papers in the morning, twice what I was getting for doing exactly the same thing in the afternoon.

Plus, he added, there are fewer dogs outside in the morning.

I had been bitten by a dog on one occasion on my afternoon route.

Furthermore, the tips were fatter, he assured, especially when the Christmas season came around.

Having a morning route meant that I would be awakened at five o’clock a.m. by Mr. Strickland, and that was rough for anybody at any age. Normally, he and I would have breakfast together. Now and again we would exchange a few words as we ate our cereals. Thus, I couldn’t remember any significant conversation we had had at the breakfast table, except the one time when he rebuked me severely for having gone to a beach on Lake Michigan with three school friends on our bikes.

What had alarmed Mr. Strickland about the lake trip were three things: my having taking along a girlfriend my age, my having given this girl a ring (which I bought for $5 with the earnings from my morning paper route), and my having been accompanied by a Cuban boy, who also took along a girlfriend. Mr. Strickland had gotten this information from his eldest son Chris, a year younger than I, in whom I had confided this amorous adventure of mine. Kit (that was apparently his family nickname), perhaps egged on by some dark envy over my prowess as a prepubescent lover boy, had decided to fink on me and tell his dad about my bold undertaking.

Mr. Strickland also learned from Kit that the male companion on the beach expedition had been a Peter Pan boy like I, and that seemed to make matters much worse. He forbade me to see my Cuban friend outside of school ever again and ordered me to ask my female friend to return the ring. I didn’t want to imagine what punishment I would have received if I had told Kit I had French-kissed with my girlfriend on the lake’s fishing pier. Since I was very embarrassed by the whole incident, I decided to buy another ring (much cheaper than the first one, of course) and gave that to Mr. Strickland, who was satisfied with what I turned into him, thinking it was the real McCoy. On the day that I was to leave the Strickland family forever, on an unforgettable, glorious sunny June morning, to return to Miami, Florida, to be reunited with my father there, Mr. Strickland returned to me the troublesome ring, by now a bit rusty, and then deposited in my hands an envelope with over $500, the sum of all the money he had forced me to save on a weekly basis from my afternoon and morning routes, the earned interest included.

Where was Mr. Strickland now? Was he dead like my father? If he was thirty-five years old at the time and I was ten, then he would be forty-seven years older now, in other words, eighty-two years old. My father had died at the age of eighty-two some five or six years ago. The chances were that Mr. Strickland was dead by now or very close to it. Or was it Mrs. Strickland who had already passed away, while the Korean War veteran was still alive and kicking? Dying for humans was the law of nature, especially under stressful circumstances created by life in the big city. Receiving a better job offer, Mr. Strickland had moved to New York with his whole family. I remembered this from the call I had received from him several months after I had left them to be reunited with my father. New York was definitely no Ecuadorian Vilcabamba, a sort of Shangri-La peacefully ensconced in the Andean mountains where its inhabitants enjoyed the privilege of drinking the purest, most uncontaminated water on the planet and lived to set incredible longevity records. Stress and smog were efficient silent killers in New York.

So it seemed as if I might never have the chance to tell him how much I appreciated some of the things he had done for me, especially the ones having to do with discipline. Forty-seven years had gone by and I had not made any sort of effort to contact Mr. Strickland, be it by phone or Internet or any other means. That didn’t speak well for me. It showed tremendous ingratitude on my part.

Of course, I could always justify my silence and indifference by pointing out I had been very young when I had lost contact with the Strickland family. When they had rung me from the state of New York, where the whole family had moved, I had been so overwhelmed by the phone call that I had failed to ask them for their phone number. I had been expecting them, I guessed, to call back again at some other time, but it hadn’t happened.

On the other hand, I could not overlook the resentment, still seething inside of me, toward Mr. Strickland for having been so insensitively strict with me. Years back, the more distant I put between the Strickland past and my present, the better—that was how I felt then. Now, ironically, it was the opposite. Perhaps because of the forced loneliness imposed by my latest life situation, I longed to hear the voice of any member of the Strickland family, including that of Mr. Strickland’s.

I smiled at myself, remembering the one Christmas I had shared with that American family when I had sung carols before the Christmas tree set up in the living room. I had received effusive compliments from both Mr. and Mrs. Strickland on account of my singing voice.

Thinking things over now in the seclusion of my hut, I was now leaning toward the perception that perhaps the reason why nobody from the Strickland family had ever buzzed me again after the first call many years ago was that they had interpreted the fear and shock in my voice as frostiness and indifference. How I would love to clarify this once and for all with them one day!

I could not clearly determine how long I would be bound to that small hut. But the truth was my sense of confinement was beginning to grow, although it was still distant from reaching alarming levels of claustrophobia.

So I decided to entertain my mind by keeping myself busy at something. I would check my computer for an internet connection as soon as it had arrived at my bamboo hut. Mextela had a broadband-internet service for portable computers in Banador. It was broadband only on paper, but with it at least you could get connected to the outside world. I hoped my wife had not cancelled my internet services with this company on account of my fugitive status. It would help me while away the time, which now seemed so agonizingly tedious and slow. I also hoped that the little internet antenna that you attached to the laptop for the purpose of connecting with cyber space had not been removed from the inside pocket of the computer briefcase where I had always kept it. Furthermore, I prayed it would remain undetected by Raúl. For some childish reason, he had determined Internet wasn’t convenient for me at this point in time.

Through Internet I could people-search the Strickland family, for example, at least the potential survivors: Christopher, Anne, Patrick, and Evelyn. Most importantly, I could be in touch with my two sons studying at one of the finest high schools in Suburbión, the ritzy suburb President Alejandro Salvador was always accusing of harboring the greatest number of oligarcas in its swanky neighborhoods protected by armed guards, surveillance cameras, and high concrete walls crowned by an electrified wire fence.

I could slip into Windows Messenger and chat with my boys about how they were doing in school. I could also send messages to them as to what I needed their mother to send me, even though they didn’t have the foggiest idea of where I was hiding—which meant I would have to masquerade things a bit. For all intents and purposes, my sons were under the false illusion that I was out of the country, staying at my mother’s house in Miami, distant and safe from the clutches of whoever wanted to do me harm; so that when I asked for something I would have to make it sound as if it were being solicited by one of my workers living on one of my haciendas.

All of a sudden, I heard a splashing sound outside and I immediately jumped out the hammock where I had been lying. My heart began to thump like a hammer.

CHAPTER 3

Bending down, I looked through the tiny spaces between the bamboo strips to try to detect something moving. It could be animal or human. The presence of either type would not be welcomed by me, although I would definitely prefer an animal format.

Deciding to arm myself in case of a threat, I crawled my way toward the trunk, where I had stored my most valuable possessions. I opened the trunk as slowly and silently as possible, not without maintaining a vigilant gaze toward where the sudden watery noise had come. Because, deep down inside of me, I did not feel a great imminent threat at hand, I chose the .22 caliber Ruger nine-shot pistol instead of the .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson six-shot revolver. Both guns were lying at the bottom of the trunk beneath some clothes and next to a small mountain of ammunition—all U.S.-made.

When I had first arrived in Banador, I had frantically searched for my guns in the numerous boxes containing my wife’s and my personal belongings which we had brought in a twenty-foot container from Miami. Of these boxes most of them were filled with books.

Becoming an avid reader at the age of fifteen, I had slowly but steadily amassed a personal library of over 10,000 books. My mother used to tell me I had taken my book-loving habits to an addiction level, and I would fire back that this was so no thanks to her, who had never been a book reader. If there was a person to thank for this important intellectual hobby of mine, it had to be Mrs. Strickland. During my stay at her home in Winnetka on an almost daily basis, she had made me read aloud to her from novels, like Little Women and Robinson Crusoe. As I read to her, she would correct my pronunciation and define difficult words for me.

It was in one of those book-containing boxes that I had hidden my guns in order to prevent Banadorian customs authorities from finding the weapons in the event they decided to open the container and search for contraband or something. Their corrupt ways were well known in Banador and all over the world, and I didn’t want to be placed in the position in which I would have to bribe a greedy Banadorian bureaucratic soul. I found such practices despicable. After months of searching in those boxes, I finally found my instruments of protection and destruction, each in a separate box, and soon I started taking one of them, the .22 caliber pistol, along with me every time I went to inspect the work of my