Short Story: Leader Guillermo's Madness

What people found special about Leader Guillermo, the great former dictator of much of the entire world, was not the trajectory of his rise, his upward mobility from humble beginnings, and the almost total separation between what he became and what he used to be, but rather the endurance of his power, the number of years he had managed to exceed his rivals, and even the kind of consistency that they noticed on his face and form—how nothing looked to be tarnished or ever pale, neither with worry nor even with the passage of time that inflicted gashes on everything else. 

When Channel 5 attempted a celebratory documentary on the 50th anniversary of his reign, they were hard pressed not to find people willing to talk about his power. Everybody, it seemed, knew him, even at the time when he was a rather humble fellow. It was as if no more than a change of garbs had declared him to be powerful, and he was already the leader of the world though long before the celebratory gesture of formal inauguration had occurred. “His 25 years of reign was actually 50 years of reign over local neighborhoods, friends and family, but all in a humble way,” felt an old neighbor, looking at the interviewers with a slanted eye and a still, white cat which he rubbed on his lap. 

His only remaining family was his mother. She was fond of talking about him, but her speech was a bit off the day they interviewed her, on account that she had been to the dentist recently to have her tooth removed. So, instead of giving a detailed account of his childhood, she thought of saying something about him as tersely as she could. She recounted the episode from his early life, one of the first indications, she said, that he was going to be a special leader. His father, then a regular teacher, had given him a three-wheeled bicycle as a birthday present. His uncle, who was a traffic policeman, was invited to his birthday party, and had walked in with a STOP sign that he was supposed to install in the intersection of the neighborhood street by midnight. “When they were all dancing,” his mother recalled, “I saw Guillermo walk with purpose to his bicycle, and then mount it, and ride it with a pace unsuited for a three-wheeler and right past the STOP sign. Of course, this being my corridor rather than a road, nobody made much fuss of the symbolic passage beyond the STOP sign, but when I then rushed to Guillermo, and held him in my hands, and I could sense that he was sweating with rage, and I saw in his eyes, I saw it as clear as anything, that he had understood that STOP sign, that red STOP sign, forbidding him from doing something, and that he had found that unbearable, and so he had simply taken his bicycle, the one resource he had back then, and showed the others his bravery in going beyond these ordinary STOP signs thrown at him in his life.”

Whatever the truth of this particular episode in Leader Guillermo’s life, one thing about it certainly rang true—that he did not see metaphors as metaphors. That were you to put something symbolic before his eyes, he would take it not as a representation of something else, but a self-referential sign that stood entirely for the meaning it contained. Here was the main reason why he exceeded the others, because, for one, he did not see the formality of contracts, he simply tore them up before the eyes of many a trembling leader of a foreign land, so that they knew they would get no mercy from him, and that there would be no basis for an agreement. It was not because he did not trust the wording or the myriad clauses that littered those things, meant to please him and appease him and lose him, for once, in the meaning of words, but he knew that in that very moment, as all manners of leaders faced him, if he were to do such a dramatic gesture, he would get their eyes, he would captivate them and cause them to fear him, so that they would never think of stopping him any further in his quest.

Within the secrecy of his high court and palace, Leader Guillermo was seen as a flamboyant character. His choice of exotic birds for the gardens was unmatched by the other men; even the best artists in the world often were held enthralled by Leader Guillermo’s findings in the jungles, and painted them with a bitten-lip at not being able to represent those great natural beauties with the needed accuracy. He had more a taste for fasting than for good food, although he did not hold back in having his people well fed and, if the mood was truly celebratory on some particular flash in his golden age, he was always on hand to pour the impressive courtiers a further glass of good wine. His clothing was vibrant and glowing, made from the best hands in the tailors’ quarters of the east, and shipped in special containers that none could see within, until he wore them, and raised his figure to the main world-facing balcony, and stood there in complete silence till his newest attire was beholden by thousands.

And so, the ordinary folks of the market place interpreted all these little trivia and episodes to try and comprehend the great madness that he eventually succumbed to. Others, thinking themselves to be more learned, simply dismissed it as having been caused by excessive greed and wealth that occurred when he began isolating himself. It was only in the confines of the asylum where he was consigned since the last ten years that the others in there understood that what had really driven him insane was something to do with his power, the very positivity of and force behind his rise, which had, quite frankly, been paralleled only by the golden age of his own kingdom. 

The ones who saw Gods in intricate tapestries, identifying beings in every nook of heaven, understood best what had happened to Leader Guillermo. They were, unfortunately, reluctant to talk, especially to the Channel 5 folks who came with the only goal of rescuing his legacy, which was plain for all others to see to be impossible now. The only possibility, the asylum’s ones saw, was to reconcile all peoples outside, all the ordinary folks, with the unstated beauty of his madness, with the universal truth it held for all those in power or striving to be there. When the word “greed” was mentioned by one of the more cynical Channel 5 interviewers, a man thought thus far to be completely deaf-mute rose from his leather chair, sundered the leather straps tying him down, and shouted at the top of his voice, “What could a great man who had everything, who had heard the most exotic music that the world could offer, really be greedy for?! Don’t you see that he had the entire world at his feet?!”

On the fourth year of filming, after spools of film reel had occupied all the major lots in the Channel 5 studio, the time had come to interview the man himself. The best interviewer was chosen for the job, the one who had the experience of interviewing major world leaders and thinkers, but who was quick enough to divert the talk away from a touchy issue if it were seen as threatening to the semblance of sanity that Leader Guillermo was to be portrayed in. Given an hour of a cosmetic session, interspersed with briefings and tests by the asylum’s most accomplished doctors, and the entire week to prepare himself psychologically for the interview, it was expected that a man of his greatness would appear sane and rational, and if anything at all, occasionally irritated, as was his habit from his great days, but never for once letting the agreed upon narrative slip.

For the first hour, Leader Guillermo established good rapport with the interviewer. They joked, they laughed about the state of the kingdom once he stepped down, and they lamented the fact that foreign adversaries were looking to mount an attack soon. Nothing was in control these days, was, to an extent, the most profound theme of the first hour of the interview. The interviewer, thinking that things were going exactly as according to plan, decided not to alter the script too much. In one of the short coffee breaks, the interviewer called the producer and said that he wanted the advertisements to be cancelled, for the final stretch of the interview to take the guise of a great uninterrupted moment in television media history. 

The moment that they came back from the break, Leader Guillermo had a graver look upon his face. He informed the interviewer that he wanted to talk about one single concept for the rest of the interview, although, he said, he would seem to meander if they did not listen closely. The interviewer did not hesitate, for he thought this to be a demand from a once-great king that could be met, and one did not hesitate to meet the demands of kings if they were seen to be at all feasible. He thought this was something of a personal blessing in disguise. Thinking that Leader Guillermo was going to reminisce about one of his hunting expeditions, which had always been a crowd favorite, the interviewer instructed the cameraman to just hone in on the face of the great leader, to take in all the character, and he retired quietly to the next room so as not to disturb what he thought would be a lively story. 

Leader Guillermo looked at the camera and for a moment did not speak. And as he heard the door click to a close in front of him, he said: “Asymptote.” It was the one concept he wanted to speak of. He explained what it meant in a single textbook line: “An asymptote is a curved line that always attempts to approach the limit, but never actually does so.”

There was a silence. He proceeded to inspect the floor with lost eyes, then his garb, hands and feet. He was expecting someone to barge in and cut him off then. He was expecting the bitter meds to be fed through tubes, and, in all honesty, there was no fight in him left against that. But nothing of the sort happened, as if the whole asylum had emptied all around. Feeling unobstructed, and surprised, he continued: “The asymptote is the closest thing to the limit. It is the fate of all who exceed lesser limits to become asymptotic to the main limit.” And then, looking with grave face at the camera, his expression even more expressionless than before, he said, with a pause after every word for emphasis, to the TV audience listening to this from all over the world, “I am the asymptote.”

And as satellites took his message to all corners, and broadcast them for all interested parties, which literally included the whole world of billions, it was the asylum’s other inhabitants from the dungeon-like rooms right next door, where a small TV set had been wheeled in for this special occasion, as if sanctioned by a merciful act by the great leader, that understood him best. For at night, when the nurses and wardens left, he reigned from bed to bed as a vibrant fire, a visible intensity. To them, he often spoke of the limit with a knowing look and of the asymptote with an even greater assuredness. And he had a crazed dance, a completely wild movement of limbs, in the midst of which he yelled out his history, the main points of his rise, in quick succession, before settling in a memorized and highly detailed account of his day to day when he became an unchallenged leader. And the observant asylum seekers looked on as he danced, as the lick of his flames danced upon the balls of their eyes, and they understood that he was dancing not for them but for the limit, that the tables were turned, even as they were fixed, for here, in Leader Guillermo, was someone who held the limit enthralled, by a dance, held it entranced and enchanted, flirtatiously close to it, always close enough such that a whisper sufficed to tell it, “I am coming, I am coming, just wait, I will be more than your asymptote." 

And as long as he was dancing at the limit, the light he shed, the sparks that flew when his hands met the dry walls and they screeched in pain, the limit itself shone forth, the captivated limit, and the pulsating asymptote, unrelentingly moving forth to eternity in its intense drive to approximate the limit, or at least to dance to it from even close and even close, so that no ordinary eyes could tell—after a certain point when clarity was to be abandoned, in the dark night of eternity, when hope was long lost that closure would be there, but pulsating, the two lines, like gamma-rays in the dark depths, one next to the other, seemingly approximating and diverting and approximating and diverting all the time, like two serpents hesitant to express their mutual love, and yet hissing, suggestive that there had been contacts—was it the asymptote, the powerful Leader Guillermo who approached the limit, the truth of every thing and all, or was it the truth itself that approached the power of Leader Guillermo, finally succumbing, hypnotized, but never submitting in full, to his eternal flirtation and dance?