UNITED STATES—Allied Fruit girdled the globe from Boston to Bogotá. From Veracruz to Barbados. The largest private Navy in the world was its very own Great White Fleet, that took tourists to tropical ports, heretofore undreamed of, and brought back bunches of bananas. The cheeky motto, “every banana a guest, every guest a pest,” underscored the fleet’s merchant mission.
Allied also established the largest private health care system in the world, for its employees, an educational system whose graduates included the Fidel Castro and a young newspaper reporter from Aracataca, Colombia. Let it be clear that Celal Tasci and Songul Tasci, the British husband and wife team that heads Allied Fruit and Veg Ltd. in Edmonton, London, England are in no way associated with Allied’s historic octopus reach, though the predecessor of Chiquita bananas did have a presence at old Covent Garden as early as 1902, thanks to London-based banana importer Elders & Fyffes.
Then some seventy-three years later, The New York Daily News would have a loud, fat headline, The Power and the Gory, a pretty clever one, if I do say so myself; there besides a picture of you, Max, stricken by severe life-brain, right-brain separation on the ground starting at the top of your forehead and running down the back of your head. I know the score, Max. It’s not pretty and your offspring will be disturbed. And someone stole your Florsheim shoes. . .! That was of course, Max, when they cost a pretty penny and before the product fell victim with “brand dilution,” taking a prestige product and turning it into crap.
I know, I know. (Max thought to himself) I paid off one of the presidents in the isthmus to be sure the banana tax get reduced and undercut the competition. And then I paid one of the presidents $ 800,000.
“I’m amazed that he settled for that low a price,” said G-d.
“Well. . .” Max stammered.
“What well,” said G-d.
“This sounds just like a repeat of the conversation I had with my wife this morning.”
“Stop beating around the bush, Max,” said G-d, the father-mother.
“I’d promised him another 1.5 million in a Swiss bank account. I offered a pay-off, a necessary cost of doing business down there, but the snoops from Security and Exchange Commission call it corruption.”
“Who put you up to it, Max?” asked G-d.
“Nobody. It was me alone. I was behind the eightball. See, I paid for the company with loans borrowed against the company’s assets. Which turned out not to be what they were made out to be. . .”
“Don’t complain. Don’t explain,” said G-d.
“Look, nobody ever chose me to play stickball when I was a kid. I was short-sided, so I’ve gone it alone. Believe me it was lonely and chilly, it changes body and mind like being in love but all inside out, being an agent of something bad like that. It grates on you.”
The brilliant salesman had calculated that, in their country’s calamitous hour, after Hurricane Fifi, one and a half million dollars might persuade Honduras’ leader to pull out of the banana Cartel that had waged war on United Fruit.
“It was the way business was done of the isthmus.”
Max had heard it so many times, it was tattooed in his brain. It made his skin tingle when he thought of the money in the Swiss bank account. It was the way things were done, and he had so cleverly prepared everything and did not say a word. The Wall Street wolf who’d trained to be a rabbi didn’t say a peep to anyone when, perhaps, he needed a rabbi himself to confide in at this dicey juncture in his less than upstanding life. But, it was thrilling, his skin tingled, it felt oddly better than sex. In the midst of this dereliction of morals Max E. White suddenly bore the cross of lust, that returned with redoubled force from the lost lagoons of his teen years.
This fabulously successful company had spawned a black hole, all its mega-money inverted into a vacuum. How they seemed to drop off in uncanny numbers. Che Guevara died in Bolivia, shot by a CIA recruited Cuban-American exile, who later suffered terrible ulcers and nightmares. “Tell Fidel he will see a triumphant revolution in America,” were Che’s last words before telling his wife to remarry and try to be happy.
The Central players in the Guatemalan coup had died with off celerity as if sucked into the uncanny void that overtook Allied Fruit. Roy Renaud, driving his sleek brand-new Thunderbird in Thailand, where he’d taken a posting. The military president Conde Castillo on a street in Guatemala City in 1957. He was walking with his wife into a movie theater. An assassin shot him seven times. The death of Conde Castillo launched a civil war that spun out of control for generations, brutalizing the nation and leaving two hundred thousand dead, all heaped against the salvation of Sam Delaney, not to mention a combine for immigrants, a stream who came looking for better or more or simply peace.
Who, if we believe in karma, must already be among us again, striving toward that more perfect life, freer of brutality and richer in justice. In 1995, as life acquired a sheen at last of normality, the body of deposed president Jacobo Gastón Balverde was exhumed from Mexico City and brought by jet to Guatemala City and reburied beneath a mossy shrine as a huge crowd looked on and many speeches were made.
To be continued…
