Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

The Wife of the Dictator

THE WIFE OF THE DICTATOR IS SALLOW AND strange. She’s a plump woman, uncomfortable here in the hot sun with our cocktails and croquet. She has not yet learned to perspire with grace; in one hour her gray silk dress is dotted, then black with moisture. She speaks little, moves in a series of small fidgets, wears a corset. When she stands to excuse herself and gives us her hand it is so soft it seems almost to not exist at all.

What has been reported is true: the dictator has brought back a wife from his last visit to America. It is also true that she is not one of us.

We survey the hole in the air where she had been sitting, let it fill for a moment with the scratchy tenor on the gramophone. The children shriek at the edge of the lake with their nannies; we mix more gin into our drinks. When the dictator’s black car slides from the compound, dips from sight into the city, and later beetles up the hill toward the pink palace glistening in the sun, we, at last, feel free to wonder.

The dictator is an enormous man with a cruel mouth: we like to watch him on his chestnut charger when his troops are doing maneuvers on the parade grounds. Wherever could he have gotten this plump sparrow of a wife? And why, when he could have plucked one from the ten thousand good families of his own country, trembling girls with downcast eyes and charming virginal figures? If he must marry an American to discharge what secret debts he holds, could he not have chosen one of our daughters or one of our friends, some fine, laughing girl who would know how to entertain us at the palace, a girl who would at least look good beside the dictator on horseback?

The tiny monkeys chew red fruits and cast the sticky seeds down into our hair.

Her family must be very rich, we say, and imagine train lines, coal mines, houses in Newport. Woozy under the sun and drink, someone says she looks like a medium, and we imagine her in a dark room, ectoplasm spinning from her mouth, voices of the dead rising from within her to enchant the dictator into an occultish love. Or maybe, we say, she sat opposite him on a train, and her plainness moved the dictator to pity, his hard heart dissolving into a thousand small butterflies that flitted away with his sense.

We drink, we speculate, until our heads ring wild. We are ossified, we laugh; we are zozzled. At home, in a pique, we put our good dresses away; they hadn’t been worth wearing, now, had they. The evening cools and from the city smells of strange cooking waft up to us. When our husbands come home from the Company, from the Embassy, we sit beside them as they eat their supper. Like our children who hold up for our scrutiny the strange stones they find by the lakeside, green-veined, bulb-shaped chunks of this country, we hold the dictator’s wife up for our husbands’ amusement. We exaggerate her oddness, say she reminds us of our mothers’ generation, conservative and dark, of Queen Victoria. We turn her this way and that, and, in the process, we make her an object of wonder.

THE DICTATOR IS ONLY two years a dictator, a man from an obscure mountain city. There had been unrest in his country for a decade, bloodshed and bandits; from the turmoil the dictator was spat into power, as smooth and hard as a gem. This city is still ensconced in the nineteenth century, with its alabaster gas lamps and carriages still more plentiful than automobiles; his grandeur suits it well. There is something in him that makes other men smaller. At the few dinners to which we were invited when he was a bachelor, we watched his tanned, scarred face, his hawk nose, the vast breadth of his shoulders, and when he put his eyes on us we might as well have been nude.

By hints and dribbles we hear of the dictator’s wife in her former life in Saint Louis. To escape the humid fug we float in the women’s pool, waiting for the cocktail hour, and talk of what we’ve learned. She is four years older than the dictator, we know now, the widow of another man, the mother of a dead son. She was born into nothing, a provincial dull family, married a boat captain on the Mississippi. On their boy’s ninth birthday his father took him on a trip. A flash flood, and the ship foundered and sank, drowning her husband, her boy.

In grief, the dictator’s wife took up painting. She painted scenes of epiphany, revelation, saturated with color, details to make grown men weep. She is Catholic, like the natives, we hear: and we can’t help but see her in the confessional, the grille casting shadows like lace on her skin, her thin mouth hungry for grace.

When next we see her, dutiful at the dictator’s side at a dance, we watch her delicate hands with a new interest, see the poignancy of the gold cross at her throat, study the way her dark hair frames her face. We feel a warmth not unlike pity in our chests. This surprises us.

Mater dolorosa, she has become newly interesting. A dark flower of sorrow transplanted to the strange soil of this bright place; a woman famous for painting angels.

THE RAINY SEASON ARRIVES and we can no longer swim in the pool, or walk by the lake, or play croquet, or complain about the heat. We can no longer stand on the hill and watch the young officers through our binoculars. There are the endless tea parties, the dramatic recitations of Shakespeare, the new Chaplin we love no less for being a whole year late. The remaking parties when we take apart our old dresses and refashion them according to the magazines our friends and sisters send us, letting down the waists and necklines, heaving up the hems. We smoke cigarettes out the windows, eat pastries until we gasp for air in our clothing, squash spiders under our thumbs, too weary to make much of a fuss. Affairs spark up during the rainy season and fizzle along in the dampness. Our husbands eat their lunches at the club and we are relieved that we don’t have to entertain them, too. When we are reduced to watching the pots of geraniums on the verandas fill with water and overspill, we scold our servants for their lapses in housekeeping. They stand, eyelashes on their cheeks, until we release them. We’re sure they talk about us in their language in the kitchen. It aggravates us until we want to slap them. Sometimes we do.

We watch the pink palace on the hill, a subdued coral now that it is wet. We wonder if the dictator’s wife ever slaps her servants. We doubt it, and we resent her for it.

The rains let up at last and we allow our children to play in the mudpuddles. The dry air in our chests feels like a long sob. Some of our servants’ sisters work in the palace, and it is from them that we hear that the dictator’s wife is now thickening around the middle.

When we meet one another on a clear, cool day, we laugh behind our hands. So that’s what the dictator and his wife do when it rains, we giggle. Though the image of the dark plump woman and the grunting vast man together is surreal, it does make a certain sort of sense.

We have asked our sisters and friends to send us articles about the dictator’s wife and her art. Famous people consume us because we are bored. In the articles she is described the way we see her, but in kinder tones, words like pale for our sallow, unearthly for our strange. She describes her art as products of visions, ghastly revelations that would not let her sleep until she set them down as exactly as possible on her canvases.

When, at one of our bridge parties, out of boredom or tipsiness, we blurt out a question about her painting, she flushes. She looks down at her jostling knees, and in her quiet voice, she says, But I no longer paint, you know. I haven’t needed to since I married the dictator.

We are so flabbergasted that hers is a talent that can turn on and off like a fountain, according to need, that it is only later, when we are alone and drifting off to sleep, that we realize how odd it is that she, too, calls her husband the dictator.

OUR HUSBANDS AT NIGHT tell us a story. The dictator took a few of his generals, some of the higher ranking of the Company and Embassy, over to his hunting camp where the sugarcane meets the jungle. A party of thirty, plus servants, they were there to hunt boar.

They awoke before dawn, when the jungle was filled with hooting monkeys and great cats slinking in the shadows. When the thrashers at midmorning rustled up an enormous boar, grunting with horrific power and fury, the men circled their horses and waited for the dictator’s command.

In lieu of bringing the gun to his eye and simply killing the beast, though, he slid down and put his gun on the ground. He approached the boar, which fell silent, watchful, as he neared. When the dictator was a mere foot away, the boar bowed his head, the prelude to spearing it up and gutting the dictator with his tusks. But before he could, the dictator planted his knife in the base of the boar’s neck and the great beast collapsed in a geyser of blood.

When our husbands tell us this story, we wonder what it is like to be married to a man who could kill such a beast with his hands. We look at our husbands’ balding temples, their concave chests, their pale shoulders, and try not to laugh.

That isn’t the end of the story, our husbands protest. They prop themselves on their arms, leaning over us in their eagerness. As he drove the knife in and the boar collapsed, there was a smile on the dictator’s face. It was a sweet, shy look, our husbands say: it was the kind of smile better worn by a man in love.

WE HEAR REPORTS: there is unrest again at the country’s edges. If possible, the dictator grows even more stern. Our husbands tell us not to listen to the radio, that we should not worry one whit, and because we know not to ask what they do at the Company or the Embassy, we take them at their word. There are few cars in this small country, and those that pick our husbands up in the morning, whether from the Company or the Embassy, appear to be the same.

When the wife of the dictator is six months expecting, the dictator rides off with a few battalions to quell the militants. Over the city falls a new gentleness, a new quiet, and in the trees land flocks of strange green birds that end their rills with metallic clicks. When the birds startle at a sound, it looks as if the trees are tossing handfuls of their own leaves into the skies. We can hear the bands in the square at the bottom of the hill; we find ourselves dancing to them as we ready ourselves for bed. We Shimmy, we Charleston, we Bunny Hug; we imagine ourselves at great gay parties where these things come to us with ease.

The night the wife of the dictator goes into labor, heat lightning branches blue across the sky and our hair yearns staticky toward our brushes. We can’t sleep. We sit on our verandas, smoking our clandestine cigarettes and across the compound see other embers floating, fireflies of disquiet.

The electricity breaks around two with a thunderclap and torrential rain. We are chasing frogs from our porches in the morning when we hear the news. The dictator charged into the city on his wheezing horse in the midst of the storm and hurried into the palace. The mud clotted thick and black on the carpets behind him. When he reached his wife, his face was so dirty and wet she screamed as if he were a baboon come in from the jungle. The dictator knelt, he shuddered. He held her little pale feet in his hands, as if they were delicate as teacups, and he kissed them.

With the last push and convulsion, the dictator’s wife near dead with fatigue and fear, the tiny baby emerged at last, all skinny and blue. The dictator sat back on his heels, country-style. And when the doctor at last got the baby to breathe and mewl, the dictator stood and left the room, because she was only a girl.

WE SEE THE DICTATOR’S wife everywhere, it seems, and nowhere: while the dictator is fighting the rebels she pushes her babe down by the lake in her perambulator, trailed by the useless, pretty nannies the dictator hired. She refuses a wet nurse, which is not done here, and the native ladies have turned indignant. We hear they have refused to invite her to their teas; we wonder at her solitary life now. It can’t, we think, be a hardship for her.

The news from the border is not good. The opposition forces, they say, are resilient and clever at blending into the countryside. The papers hold photos of the dictator, enormous and severe, in his command tent in the jungle. When we see them, we are filled with a hot thrill and wish, briefly, that we could read the language and understand the captions. Some of our husbands are sent to the plantations, the mines, the Embassy, with more frequency, and when they return they stare at their knees with a blank look. But a few days soaking in the gentlemen’s pool, a few nights at the club, and they are normal again. We have our charity bazaars for the victims of the dengue fever, which is gripping certain tight-packed segments of the city. We have our ice cream socials. We keep busy.

Our servants’ sisters who work in the palace relay rumors that the dictator’s wife sometimes awakes shrieking in the nights. They say she wanders the white marble halls in her humble slippers, passing like a ghost through the shadows. When a servant comes upon her, she does not appear to see, and passes as if her eyes are fixed on another world. We wonder what the dictator’s wife is thinking of at those times: her dead son, her dead husband, those two souls lost under the thick murmuring water of a distant river. Or if, like us, she dreams of a vaster country, one where she is not caged in the palace as we are caged in our compound. Or if she ever longs to take up brush and palette again, paint that old life away until the grief rises, time and again, gently back into the heavens.

THE DICTATOR IS SHOT in the foot. He returns home to the palace, gray-faced and grim, to recuperate. He has left his generals in charge in the jungle. The little girl is walking now, an unfortunate small replica of her mother, and in public she shrieks into her mother’s skirts and hides her face from our children, who would not hurt her.

The dictator’s wife is wearing new colors, greens and purples and indigos, and on her head she now wears hats with chin-length veils. When we search out her eyes we believe we see bruises around them, and from that moment on we don’t search them out anymore. Later we wonder if they are not bruises, if she is simply exhausted from all of the sleep she has been missing. When they are together in public, the dictator rarely turns his eyes from his wife. We almost never hear her subdued voice now.

A BRIEF RESPITE: a cruise ship needing repairs docks at the marina, and there descends into the town a pair of celebrated lovebirds weeks into their honeymoon. They are known to everyone who knows anything about the theater. Our magazines are months behind; only recently have we gotten hints about this romance. The actress is golden as a songbird with a sharp little face; the actor is a small man with a barrel chest. When we hear they are in the port, we leave the pool in a hurry, still smelling of the oil we spread on our skin, and try not to run to the bazaar, where they are buying armfuls of textiles and tin sculptures.

When we arrive, however, so does a car for a luncheon arranged with the dictator’s wife. We can hardly see the actors before they are whisked away. Morose, we buy drinks at a bar that we believe has only ever known men, and sit at the tables abandoned by the chess players when they saw us coming. We move the pawns about, dreaming of what we would do with this country if we were the dictator’s wife, flicking the bishops and kings with our fingers.

In an hour, the car hums down the hill again. When the actors climb, laughing, from the car, after them climbs the dictator’s wife like their single dark shadow. She is smiling, we see: she follows them to the gangplank and they give her elaborate kisses on the cheek when they part.

The boat’s lines are thrown, the boat edges away from the dock. And when it is heading firmly toward sea again, we watch the small form of the dictator’s wife as she stares after it. When she turns, we lose the sharpness of our envy. Always pale, she is deathly white, and though she was plump when she came to the country, her clothes hang on her loosely now.

We wonder if what the servant girls say is true: that she sleeps very little any longer, that she spends her nights staring out the window, horror on her face. That the last time the dictator was home she ducked away when he tried to embrace her.

THE RAINY SEASON COMES and goes; our beautiful young lovers are gone in the war and we must content ourselves with books turned stale with humidity, phonographs playing the same fatigued songs. At our tea parties there fall long swaths of silence, which in earlier times we’d break by laughing, saying an angel is passing over our roof, though we do not bother now. Our servant girls bring reports of starvation in dark parts of the city, but when we go down in an investigatory cluster to see what we can do, the smell is so terrible we do not go again. We see writing on the buildings that appears to be angry, and there are people who stare at us with frowns on their faces. Our children seem pallid and whiny, mere specters of children. Our husbands are gone for longer stints and will not tell us where they have been when they return.

We pay the servant girls for their rumors, and the rumors trickle in more thickly. The guerrillas, they say, are peeling the dictator’s forces back, pushing them toward the city, decimating the ranks of those beautiful young men. Because we can do nothing about it we pretend not to know.

And we hear, now, worse rumors about the dictator, what cruelties his armies are unloosing. Suspected insurgents punched in the stomachs while their heads are held in buckets of water; almost drowned this way, they cough up any confessions that are suggested to them. A special battery hooked to the nipples, a special torture. Phalanxes of hooded insurgents marched somewhere, never seen again. Villages in the way burned, survivors gutted. We hear that there is an ex-butcher on the dictator’s special team called the Flayer, and we must stop ourselves from imagining what he does.

One day, before our husbands rise to the breakfast table, we flip open the newspapers and see the photograph on the front page. The dictator is frowning in his tall boots, and there is a pole suspended between two lieutenants beside him. Strung like beads on the pole, threaded through the tongue, are the decapitated heads of men. Each died grimacing.

We are modern women; some of us bob our hair and wear trousers at home; we are not the fainting types our mothers were. Still, after this, even we walk around the house feeling weak, feeling as if our legs are made of air.

OUR HUSBANDS COME home early from work one evening and tell us, grimly, that the barbarians are at the gates. The dictator has been useless, they say. When we press, they say that there are other forces at work; we should not worry our heads about it.

We wait. The pool is a blue stone inlaid in the ground, untouched. The monkeys get into the kitchens, leave floury imprints on the pianos, and we let them. The city itself seems to draw its tentacles in. Things are so quiet we can hear the distant sounds, the low dull explosions and the cracks of the guns. Some of our servants go home at night and do not return in the morning. We have difficulty finding coffee, then bread.

The dictator’s wife comes to sit with us on the overgrown lawn, the bougainvillea threatening to swallow the tennis court. She has been to the cathedral, she tells us, but the doors were closed. She found a side entrance to the priests’ house and found the priests at the kitchen table, eating toast, still in their pajamas. They would not look her in the eye. They would not give confession, she says. They silently refused.

She says this, her body still, this woman who jitters when calm. Never beautiful, she has become ugly with fatigue, her skin lined. Her daughter hides behind her chair, and we notice the girl’s mouth is the dictator’s own. One by one, she plucks out gray hairs from her mother’s head, and though her mother winces with each pluck, she allows it. We have little to offer the dictator’s wife now, except our silence and more tea.

I have dreams, the dictator’s wife starts to say. When she raises her face, her pupils have swallowed her irises. We are reminded again of a medium in mid-séance, of the plain, quiet widow she had once been in a Saint Louis parlor, limning a canvas with her paint and visions. I know everything he has done, she says.

In the middle of the night, a knock on the door, and we who have packed everything get into the cars and glide down the hill. The younger children are sleeping against our shoulders, and there is the smell of smoke in the air. Our husbands are grim and do not speak. We do not say good-bye to our remaining servants, or to the booze we cannot take home to our dry country. We do not say good-bye to the compound, our lovely houses, the pool in which we have spent so many of our years. The darkness swallows it all. The marina is protected by a line of our own officers with guns on their shoulders. If the natives know we are leaving, we do not see them in the night, and it would not matter, we cannot take them. In the distance there are terrible sounds.

When we are on the boat, we breathe again. Not one of us asks our husbands to fetch the dictator’s wife, who is alone in the pink palace on the hill, her daughter sleeping beside her. We have made our own choices in this life; the dictator was hers. There is something that unfurls in us when we think this, and we dare not examine what it is.

Still, as the boat unhitches from the dock and quietly moves into the harbor, we see the palace dwindle into a dark lump on the hill and imagine her there, in the gilded chamber, the dark carved bed swinging with velvet drapes. We imagine her at the window, watching the fires roil from the edges of the city. The sky is touched with a terrible glow and our ship is a dark spot fading against the greater darkness.

Then, in the moment between the thump of one heartbeat and its sweet sliding after, we at last see what is before her eyes. We see great flights of angels in flapping robes descending upon the city, their faces terrible with bloodlust and fury; we see the furious melee, the young boys falling, the old people huddled in their apartments, the dictator wild on a screaming horse and the boar-hunting knife in his hand. In this moment we know his strength is only her own last strength, which he pulls from her, for that is what this marriage was; the dictator coming into the gallery in Washington, feeling small under the power of those paintings, turning to the little dark woman standing patiently beside him in her widow’s weeds, knowing in that moment the terrific power in her, everything he could use of hers. We watch through her now as she sees the ragged bandits crash in one great wave, then two great waves against the palace, find entry. She closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the window. Like that she is emptied, at last.

We will not tell one another what we knew just then; we are not sure we will ever admit it to ourselves. As we see the city dwindle into a small speck of light, we lean against our husbands, who are not strong and do not fight, but at least have gotten us away. They, wanting to comfort, put their arms around us. And they are comforted for all their own errors, in their turn.