I have many fine helmets bound in rich Corinthian leather

Jan 31, 2010  ·  06:34 PM  ·  permalink

Revolution was in the air, and you could taste the tension with every breath. Lifelong friends passed each other in the street, eyes cast downward, busy getting back to their homes, a minimal nod their only acknowledgment- a public conversation could arouse suspicions, and suspicions were sufficing for proof these days.

Word on the street was that the old man was dead, or dying, and his brother ready to take the country in a different direction. The iron scepter with which he’d held back the march of progress for the last half century was being passed; the meek and powerful alike suspected the transition would not be without the usual saber-rattling.

People like me had had a good run in the old regime. When the needs of the many make scarce even the most basic requirements, there’s always a few who are willing to extend themselves to achieve a better life. I never discriminated; that was my brand. Currency is credibility, and politics didn’t interest me. You pay, I make it happen. Whatever it is.

I worked with a farming collective that had secreted away a food store- they needed supplies to rebuild the homes raided and destroyed by the Army the year before. The irony that the soldiers had been looking for stolen food being used to fuel the resistance was not lost on anyone- but faced with the choice of shelter for their families or freedom for their ideologies, few are strong enough to condemn their children for the sake of their cause.

Requests spanned the unenviable gamut between the tedious and the mundane, each series of subsistence requests breaking your heart as much as warming it when the task was complete.

I suppose it’s fitting that at the end of the realm we were all be thinking back on the smaller triumphs that allowed us to survive it. My moment was brief, the payment substantial, and the net effect to humanity minimal. But it was mine, not ours, and it would stand the test of time- it was to be my legacy.

I first saw the exquisite Cairn Pluton, I suspect, in a dream. Surrounded by the trappings of success, my estate awash in richly upholstered furniture and tended to by an unfathomably beautiful collection of women, I valued most that which had gotten me where I was right then: my intellect, obviously, but my brain, specifically. And so I imagined the most opulent method by which to protect this key to my empire. The softest leather tanned to the deepest hue, with hand-stitched accents that contrasted perfectly.

It was the first time I had deployed my considerable resources to acquire an item that wasn’t technically necessary for my life on the Pearl of the Antilles. It served less as the ANSI-certified snowsport protection for which it retails today, than as a shining example of the indomitable spirit of a people who had suffered so much, for so long. For my network of trusted conspirators, it was the crowning achievement of forty years of favors and a triumph of subterfuge- smuggled from France in a case of Champagne bound for the wedding of Raúl’s daughter Mariela. And as her uncle’s reign ebbed into history, I took a moment to glance northward, appreciating it also as a modest monument to my own success.