The President and the Frog by Robertis Carolina de

Author:Robertis, Carolina de [Robertis, Carolina de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Politics, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780593318416
Amazon: 0593318412
Goodreads: 55559895
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2021-08-03T07:00:00+00:00

On and on he sat in the hole, a man alone with his own filth. A story in which nothing happened. Except, sometimes, it seemed to him the hole was a place where everything happened. Where the story was large. A great battle roaring down in that abysmal place, a hidden epic, factions warring over the soul of a man, over the soul of a nation. He spun out the story in his mind to fill the hours, mixing it with scenes from the Iliad, though maybe, he also thought, it was more like Don Quixote, the delusions of a crazed man. Those two authors he’d swallowed whole just before dropping out of university, Homer and Cervantes, Cervantes and Homer, holding hands across time, their books overlapping with each other in his mind, and what would his professors say if they could see him now? He could imagine their horror or pity or disdain. He was pathetic. Pompous. Listen to him, with his ridiculous thoughts: soul of a nation, as if this were some grand Hollywood movie, as if foreign Hollywood had ever concerned itself with such a hole and such a man, or even with such a little far-flung country; but then he’d think what the hell, so what, at this point I have absolutely nothing to lose and I can be as pompous or ridiculous as I like, knowing that, no matter how grand my thoughts, to the world outside this is still nothing but a hole. A stinking darkness. A godforsaken place, though even that was the stuff of fantasy, he couldn’t help thinking, as it would require a God to forsake it. The hands arrived, delivered food down a rope, retracted, disappeared. To them there was no epic battle below. They ignored the man or shrank in disgust as with any other vermin, ants, rats, cockroaches, frogs. He was vermin now, and it wasn’t true that to the world outside this was nothing but a hole, no, he thought, that’s much too generous, to the world outside this place doesn’t even exist. He’d disappeared from reality. And yet, here he was. Breathing, shitting, feeling hunger and cold. Ordinary things, nothing grand about them. A human being trying to stay intact through the horror of his days. What could be more ordinary than that?

But it was different now. He’d had company in the hole. Now there was a part of him that waited, piqued, tuned up, for the frog’s return. When would that be? No way to know. It had been days now, too long. How much longer. There were no schedules down here, no telephone, no paper on which to write an invitation, not that a written invitation would mean a damn thing to a frog. He thought of calling out for him, tried it, frog, frog, but it didn’t work, nothing happened, perhaps because he didn’t know the frog’s name, which shouldn’t really be surprising as he barely knew his own, wasn’t sure he had one anymore, and maybe the frog didn’t either.

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