The Dissertation by R. M. Koster

Author:R. M. Koster [Koster, R. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC037000; FIC019000; FIC000000
ISBN: 9780061250507
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Published: 1975-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

23. Discord and Disfavor

PRESIDENT LEÓN FUERTES returned from San José to find his honeymoon with the Republic of Tinieblas over. The communiqué regarding his meeting with John Kennedy preceded him, and he was met at Monteseguro Airport by a sizable mob of strife-peddlers who accused him by voice and placard of having betrayed his country.

The specifications were at once a tribute to the paranoid imagination and a proof of that segment of information theory which holds zero can be a cause. From the absence in the communiqué of any reference to the Day-Cornudo Treaty, Canino and claque charged that León and Kennedy had concluded a secret pact which confirmed Day-Cornudo in perpetuity and granted the United States missile bases in Otán and Tuquetá; that León had accepted a check for five million dollars drawn by Joseph P. Kennedy and countersigned by Richard Cardinal Cushing; that León had applied for U.S. citizenship.

After a glance at the placards and an earful of shouts, León refused the microphone that had been set up at the foot of the ramp, asked his wife and the other members of his party to excuse him for a moment, and walked jauntily toward the mob, which a line of sweating guardias was restraining in the shadow of the terminal. The demonstrators pushed toward him angrily, buckling the soldiers’ line, but without slowing his pace León spread his arms, palms forward, in front of him, and the crowd opened as though divided by a wedge. He went in among them.

“What would I do with gringo citizenship?” he asked a signbearer, grinning at him, clapping him on the neck with the kind of rough affection coaches give their athletes. “My mamá would disown me.”

“One gringo base is more than enough,” he told another. “Do you really think I offered them others?”

“I told you when I was running not to expect much,” he said to a group of the loudest shouters, who now stood congealed in silence, wincing as he stabbed a finger at them. “I’m telling you now I didn’t sell the country out. I’m not going to mention that again. If you want to believe in fairy tales, go right ahead, but this country doesn’t need to be sold out. I’m not ashamed of this country, so I can face the facts about it. Tinieblas isn’t a world power. We don’t have much to bargain with against the U.S.A. I know how you feel. I sympathize. I’m doing what I can. But I have to think of all the people’s welfare, not just your obsessions.”

He turned then and walked away, and the demonstration crumbled behind him, but his difficulties were only beginning. A few weeks later he brought the anger of both landowners and peasants on himself by vetoing a land reform bill prepared by his own Ministry of Agriculture but passed by the Chamber in grossly diluted form.

“No one can call me an extremist,” he told the Deputies, taking his veto message to them personally, “but this bill is too moderate for me to sign.

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