Free Orientation by Daniel Orozco Page B

bean counters. And they are weeping, expelling violent and angry tears for their derailed careers, for that puto Gallardo smeared all over the street up ahead, and for the lost honor of the Glorious Republic of Paraguay.
    In the backseat of the Mercedes, the Presidente-in-Exile looks up from his paper.
    Gallardo’s arms fly up over his head in a referee’s goal signal of such ferocity that the arms tear off his shoulders. Gallardo’s head disappears. In its place, blood-gout from the neck like a dark, wet rose. Pieces of Gallardo fly up the hole in the roof, through three layers of armored steel flayed back. And the Presidente-in-Exile follows, in a geyser of metal and meat, glass and bone. Up and away.
    The Presidente-in-Exile rises.
    *   *   *
    His nickname was Tacho. In history he is referred to as Tacho II—“Tacho Dos”—to distinguish him from his father, the previous Presidente. The domestic press used to call him El Tachito, a diminutive that implied an unfavorable comparison. This was back when the press got away with such things, before reporters started disappearing. Until the mid-1970s, officials in the U.S. State Department called him the legitimate president of his country, for he was a vocal critic of Castro’s Cuba and thus a friend to the American people. The expatriate opposition called him bruto , monopolista , America’s Fart-Sniffing Lapdog. His self-bestowed title was jefe supremo , and everyone in his administration referred to him as such. But he allowed the comandantes of la Guardia Nacional to address him as señor jefe , or simply señor , an informality that revealed his soft spot for the glory days, when he was once a comandante among them. He liked to think that this gesture put them at ease. For they were his men, his compadres . They drank and whored with him. But they were never at ease with him. He was volatile and petulant, a man of brittle temperament. If you brought him bad news, you were doomed. He would shove members of his cabinet, slap documents out of their hands. He would throw food at banquets, snap pencils in two, sweep the contents of laden desktops to the floor. It was said he could barely speak Spanish. This was not true; he simply preferred English, calling it his mother tongue. He was schooled in America, in a military academy on Long Island, then at West Point, where he was—by mandate of the Undersecretary of State for Central American Relations—a 4.0 student. He was hazed by the upperclassmen in the name of unit loyalty and cohesion. Very often a line was crossed, and the rituals took on an erotically charged brutality. But he accepted the abuses and humiliations because he believed in the tradition of abuse and humiliation. These men did not care who he was or who his father was. He was simply a puke to them, and initiated as brutally—no more and no less—as the others were. This is what makes you a part of the whole. A puke among pukes, you become a man among men. He took little else from his formal military schooling except this, and a penchant for fancy titles and uniforms, and a love of World War II movies: Patton , The Guns of Navarone , The Great Escape , The Dirty Dozen , Hell in the Pacific . He was a fan of the actor Lee Marvin. He met him once at a Hollywood benefit for earthquake relief and pestered him for an autograph. The actor was drunk and belligerent, but accommodated him, and scrawled on a grimy dinner napkin:
    To the President of N______
    Piss up a rope, you bastard
    Lee Marvin
    When his presidency was toppled and he was run out in 1979, he was the majority stockholder of the national air and rail lines. He owned the beef ranches and the meat-processing plants, the timber tracts and the lumber mills. Coffee, cotton, bananas, sugar, tobacco, rice—from field to factory to export, it all belonged to him. Near the end, President Carter had asked him to give some of it back, to return something of his plunder— any thing—as a