The Best in the World

The sad little dictator is neither a handsome man nor an ugly one. He has a weak chin. He smokes imported cigars that he is assured are the best in the world, takes one out on the balcony of his room, looks out over the sparkling lights from town.

Mine, he thinks, mine. Stubs the cigar out on the balcony wall. There is a smudge in the place where he always does it. His private maid has spent hours scouring it off with a hard-bristle toothbrush, but it always returns.

The sad little dictator has seven half-sisters and two dead women he calls mother. Only one of them has a painting hung on the castle walls. He remembers the way her lip would curl whenever she first saw him, how she always forced her expression into a bland smile.

Son, she called him, but her eyes were always looking after all those lost girls she had born.

A defective woman, the sad little dictator’s father would say. Could never give me a boy.

Sometimes he would call her lucky: lucky he hadn’t had her and all those daughters killed, lucky to be his wife, lucky the way his son was lucky, the way his subjects, he called them, were.

While she is still alive, this defective and lucky woman has a room that the future sad little dictator is taken to once a week for all of his childhood. There are nurses in white aprons and a lingering smell of chicken soup and something sharp.

Mother, the sad little heir calls her.

Your father is a great man, she says.

Everyone says that his father is a great man. When the woman he calls mother says it, she blinks rapidly. It is the only time he ever sees her move quickly, and only that one piece of her. He sits in the room quietly with her and that smell of soup and a bladed something. From time to time, she asks him how his studies are going, what he is learning.

Once, she says to him — your mother, how is she doing?

They are not meant to acknowledge that she isn’t his mother, that he isn’t hers by birth, but there is something flame-wild in her eyes that day, and the nurses in the room with them go back and forth from her bed to the sink with dripping washcloths they lay against her bare skin, pretending not to hear her words.

Your mother, she says, a washcloth pressed by a plain-faced nurse to the side of her face, how is she doing?

Well, says the soon-to-be sad little dictator. He always responds well to the woman’s questions: how are your studies going? Well. How is your father? Well.

He says well now, and his hand clutches the fabric of his pants. It is an expensive fabric, but scratchy and rough even so. He is always wearing miniature versions of his father’s suits and ties, always practicing standing with his shoulders firm and his back straight. His muscles ache with the effort.

He says well and clenches the fabric of his pants, realizes his mistake, and quickly says how are you doing, mother?

The woman in the bed smiles at him. It is actually only the imitation of a smile, something shadowed and wan.

The same as always, she says.

Have you seen her lately, she says.

The future sad little dictator doesn’t answer. He lowers his head. He isn’t supposed to lower his head to anyone except his father, but he finds he can no longer look the woman in the bed in the eyes.

They don’t speak to each other for the rest of the visit, and when the sad little dictator is fetched by his nanny, he doesn’t say goodbye mother as he usually does, goes out the door all quiet and wrinkled pant-leg. When he sits down to dinner with his father later that night, the man says your mother, your mother, and wipes his chin with one of the napkins made from the same fabric as the sad little heir’s pants. He says your mother and the sad little heir doesn’t know which one he means.

Both of the sad little dictator’s mothers die before his father does. He thinks of doves when he sees their fluttering little feet, he thinks of the sound of rustling wings and wind.

The castle grounds house proud peacocks and wretched little peahens. Their shriekings fill the air.

Majestic creatures, his father called them, but he didn’t seem to care much for them. Of course, the gruff old despot never seemed to care much for anything.

The sad little dictator has never seen a peacock anywhere outside the walls of the castle grounds. There is someone who feeds them and grooms them, someone who tucks them in for the night. They sleep in little rows like chickens. They are never wholly quiet. They never fly.

The sad little dictator thinks he might hate them.

While his father is alive, he hates them. After his mothers and father have died, he hates them.

When the lights go out in the castle for his mother’s death (his second mother, his first is never acknowledged, his first mother never exists, except in the length of the sad little dictators fingers and the arch of his left eyebrow, a sad little hum in his first wakeful breath), it is quiet except for the shrieking of the peacocks from their hutch, and the sad little dictator sits in the dark and thinks that he might hate them very much indeed.

When his mother dies (his second mother), he is made to sit beside her bed and hold her hand. His father cannot be there. His father is a busy man. The sad little dictator feels the clench and loosening of her hand (it is made of sticks, he thinks, it could be broken like little thin sticks), he watches her feet come out from under the covers in their little white socks, kick, kick, kick.

He thinks of doves. He thinks of his mother. He thinks of doves and doves and doves.