Reasons of State (43 page)

An atheist because his inner questionings did not seek for replies on religious soil; a disbeliever because disbelief was natural to his generation, and the way had been prepared by the scientific spirit that came before; an enemy of the politics and compromise that so often, in his world, took the Church into the camp of his adversaries, and in the name of faith maintained a false order that was self-destructive, the contemplator of the Sun Windows was nevertheless responsive to the dynamic quality of the Gospels, and recognised that their texts had, at one time, had the merit of causing a resounding devaluation of all the totems and inexorable spirits, dark presences and zodiacal threats, of oracles, submissions to the ides of March and inevitable fate. But if some new self-awareness—putting the drama of life
within
instead of outside himself—had induced man to analyse the values that led him into primitive terrors, he had developed into an erring giant, tyrannised by others like himself, who had become faithless to their first vows and had created new totems, new destinies, temples without altars and irreligious cults that it was necessary to destroy. Perhaps the days were close at hand when the trumpets of the Apocalypse would sound, but this time it would not be by the angels of the Last Judgement but by those appearing before it. It was time to decide upon the protocols of the future and to plan a Tribunal of Redistribution.

The young man looked at his watch. Four o’clock. The train. He sank himself again into the total beauty of his surroundings, now that it was time to return to his own. “I don’t feel needed where everything is so perfect,” he thought, as he left Notre-Dame by the centre door—the door of the Resurrection of the Dead. There was still time to drink some of the excellent Alsatian wine to be had in the café where he had left
his suitcase in the care of a waiter. He crossed the road and went into the bistro without noticing that three people—a woman and two men—sitting on a bench at the back were staring at him in amazement. Paying for his drink, the Student returned to the street and hailed a taxi.

“
A la garra del Norte, please
.”

His appointment was in the station buffet, where several delegates for the First World Conference against Colonial and Imperialist Politics were already gathered; it was to open next day, February 10, at Brussels, with Barbusse as president. Among them was the Cuban Julio Antonio Mella, whom he had met a few hours before, in company with Jawaharlal Nehru, delegate for the National Hindu Congress.

“The train has come in already,” said someone, pointing to Platform 8. The three picked up their shabby cases and got into a second-class carriage. The Indian was sitting in a corner by the window studying some papers, while Mella was showing interest in the political situation of our country.

“We’ve just got rid of a dictator,” said the Student. “But the struggle goes on, because our enemies are the same as before. The curtain has gone down on the first act, and very long it was. Now we’re in the middle of the second, which, in spite of new scenery and lighting, is very like the first.”

“We’re just starting on what you’ve been through,” said Mella. And he told him about the dictator recently in power in Cuba, whom he had defeated by means of a stubborn, prolonged, and successful hunger strike in prison, forcing his enemy to give him his liberty and then leaving for Mexico, where the fight was still going on …

Gerardo Machado was much like our Head of State in physical appearance, political behaviour, and methods, but he was different because, being quite uncultured, he didn’t build temples to Minerva like Estrada Cabrera (almost his
contemporary) nor was he a francophile, as so many dictators and “educated tyrants” of the continent had been. To him, Supreme Wisdom was to be found in the north: “I’m an imperialist,” he declared, looking enthusiastically towards Washington. “I’m not an intellectual, but I am a patriot.” However, he showed unconscious humour when he informed the public one day in his newspapers that he was “studying the tragedies of Aeschylus.”

“He’s a good candidate to join the clan of the Atrides,” said the Student.

“From what one can see he already belongs to the family,” said Mella.

“He’ll soon give orders for the confiscation of
red books
,” said the Student.

“He’s done it already,” said the Cuban.

“One goes down here and another goes up there,” said the Student.

“And that’s a sight we’ve been seeing repeated for the last hundred years.”

“Until the public gets tired of seeing the same thing.”

“We must hope for the best.”

Opening their leather wallets—both Mexican, with the Aztec calendar embossed on the outside—they exchanged the scripts of their reports and articles, to read on the journey. In his corner, Nehru, with several papers on his knees, seemed to be absorbed in his own thoughts, hidden behind wide-open eyes. There was a long silence. The train reached the frontier in the night—the twofold night—of the coal mines.

“Cool, cool,” said Nehru, leaving the others uncertain whether he meant to say “cool” or “coal”—but it was indeed cold in this second-class carriage, excessively cold for these men from hot climates. And the Indian went on sleeping with his eyes open until the train got to Brussels.

“EXILED …”

“Banished …”

“Or fled …”

“Escaped …”

“On the run …”

“What I know is that he was in a church,” remarked the Mayorala. “And Communists don’t go to church, not even in Holy Week.” And they started on their conjectures again:

“Exiled …”

“Banished …”

“Escaped …”

“Repentant, perhaps …”

“Converted …”

“A spiritual crisis …”

“Had a fight with his friends …”

And for days and days nothing else was talked about in the Rue de Tilsitt, while they waited for the newspapers from
over there
—February numbers in April—to arrive on their
specially slow cargo boats, in tight rolls of seven numbers with a picture of the Tutelary Volcano on the stamps. Because, of course, the papers published here said nothing at all about the Student, an individual of no interest to them. And at last they received news, thanks to a copy of
El Faro
of Nueva Córdoba arriving in May, about the World Conference at Brussels, where the National League of Mexican Countrymen and the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (which had affiliations in our country) had both been represented.

“That explains it all,” said the cholo Mendoza.

“What foolishness,” murmured the
Ex
. “Imperialism is stronger than ever. That’s why the man of the moment in Europe is Benito Mussolini.”

And the chestnuts bloomed again, and conversations on the usual topics went on in the attic. They talked at enormous length, under the slate roof, about “the old days.” The most trivial events, contemplated in perspective and seen from a distance, acquired significance, greater charm, strangeness, or transcendence. “Do you remember? Do you remember?” became a sacramental—almost daily—formula, evoking dead people and dead things that were explained by the often secret mechanisms of a resurrected past, taken out of its distant context and brought to these latitudes. All at once, refreshing his crowded memory, the patriarch began revealing the hitherto concealed background to certain strange events or tiny circumstances, which gave the clue to what might before have caused baffled questioning and a flavour of mystery. As a fakir or conjuror, grown old and retired from the stage, may enjoy revealing the technique of his tricks and miracles, the
Ex
remembered the business of issuing money without security, in order to boost the national finances; the gaming houses set up by the government, where marked cards were used (there was a North American press that manufactured them with such
subtle indications on their backs that only experts could understand them), and where the stakes had to be made in dollars, pounds sterling, or—to get hidden reserves of cash out of people’s houses—in old gold coins or silver Mexican pesos. Then there was the affair of the Diamond in the Capitol, that octagonal diamond of incomparable brilliance, officially bought and solemnly inserted in the floor at the foot of the statue of the Republic, to mark the zero point where all the roads of the nation met—a gem that was so expertly stolen one night that, according to the daily papers, the theft could be attributed only to some international gang, unless they were anarchists or Communists who were very proficient in such tasks. Elmira laughed when she heard this story: “He sent me there [
she pointed to the Patriarch
]: I put my friend Juliana up to occupying the night watchman, while I [
gesture
] with a chisel you can buy in the ironmonger’s at Monserrate, and a hammer that I had hidden between my tits, lifted out the diamond and carried it to the palace in my mouth. My word! I could hardly breathe! And afterwards, what a hullabaloo! But … how we laughed! How we laughed!” And now her laughter was echoed by the Head of State’s laughter, as he waved his hand towards a drawer in the cupboard.

“I’ve got it there. It brings me good luck. Besides, it’s what the anarchists call
restitution
. And I, too, have a right to restitution.”

“Bravo, my President!”

“My
Ex
, my dear boy; my
Ex
!”

The months passed while chestnuts were replaced by strawberries, and strawberries by chestnuts, leafy trees by bare trees, green leaves by rust-red leaves, and the Patriarch, all the time growing less interested in outside events, was gradually reducing, limiting and closing in the ambit of his existence. That Christmas was celebrated in the attic, with
our carols, with drum and tambourine, Christmas dinner of suckling pig, with lettuce and radish salad, red wine, and Spanish
turrón
—as we used to celebrate it
over there
. And seeing the cloth spread and the table laid, the Head of State began talking about Napoleon, who was rising in his estimation every year; but tonight he was not remembering Jena, Austerlitz, or Wagram, but was enjoying something he had read in a book: that Bonaparte and Josephine used to eat at Malmaison—he a Corsican, and she from Martinique—in our fashion, just as Elmirita arranged things: all the dishes spread out together, some cold, some hot, in reach of each person’s spoon and fork, without all that passing to and fro of dishes which went on in the houses of
nouveaux riches
, trying to behave like real princesses—and I know what I’m talking about!—with long waits and delays and rows of dishes that take your appetite away and scour your stomach with so much useless ceremony. Here you could take the bottle and fill your glass without someone muttering the date in your ear—as if the date were so important, when what one wanted above all in a wine was
cheerfulness
, which was nothing to do with a few years more or less.

And when the Head of State was in this happy condition, he sometimes glanced towards the Arc de Triomphe and declaimed in a deep voice the famous tirade of Flambeau in
L’Aiglon: “Nous qui marchions fourbus, blessés, crottés, malades,”
reciting with brio the last verse—a pretty revolting one, it must be said—where we are offered the blood of a dead horse to drink. But the cholo Mendoza noticed that as time passed more and more gaps appeared in the
Ex
’s recitations: some alexandrines never got beyond eight syllables; Spain and Austria were erased from the poetical map; the sabres, tinder boxes, shakos, soldiers’ songs, roasted crows, flags, and bugles remembered by Napoleon’s veteran on the march were
all reduced to a rhymed medley in the reciter’s memory, on the pharmaceutical model of:

And the cholo Mendoza ended by thinking that if this last rhyme remained alive in the Head of State’s memory, it was because jujubes for the throat were first cousins to the liquorice pastilles he was so addicted to. And perhaps this mnemonic element was necessary, because it was clear that the mental mechanisms of someone who had plotted, calculated, and schemed throughout his very long career were beginning to become disorganised. On rainy days, for example, after announcing that nothing would induce him to go out, he was impelled by the absurd need to visit a distant bookshop and buy a work by Fustel de Coulanges or the twenty volumes of Thiers’
History of the Consulate and Empire
—which he never even glanced inside when he returned, wet and with a cold in the head, from his useless expedition. Always fond of opera, he took it into his head to put on evening dress and go to hear some sort of a
Manon
at the Opéra Comique, but was bewildered because he didn’t see Mephistopheles in the act in Saint-Sulpice. The action of
Carmen
got entangled in his mind with that of the
Barbiere
, because they both took place in Seville; and he muddled up the end of
La Traviata
with that of
La Bohème
, because in both the heroine died in the arms of her lover.

In his conversation, too, he often made mistakes, such as saying that Plutarch’s history was written in Latin, or that the virus of Spanish influenza was called the Peloponnese. Soon he began dictating a leader on the political situation in our country, but stopped astonished, when well into his
discourse, because he realised he had nowhere to publish it. Talking for talking’s sake, he appointed and sacked ministers, planned and decorated imaginary public buildings, and ended by laughing at himself when he returned to reality in front of a bottle of Monsieur Musard’s Beaujolais nouveau. He had a surprising passion for visiting museums. He went to the Carnavalet to look at the toy guillotines. In the Louvre, in front of David’s
Coronation
, he observed disconcerting parallels between Letitia Bonaparte and Colonel Hoffmann’s Aunt Jemima. He visited the Musée Grévin to see if perhaps (one never knew) he might find a wax figure of himself in one of the rooms. And the cholo began to be alarmed by the Patriarch’s eccentricities one May 5, when he awoke with the fixed intention—luckily half effaced at noon by news from the homeland—of sending an enormous sheaf of flowers to the Invalides because it was the anniversary of Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena. Yet a certain majesty, a certain strength, gave dignity and style to the person of the old dictator. The dignity and style of despots who have come down in the world; of those whose will has for years and years been law in some part of the globe. It was enough for him to lie down in his hammock for that hammock to turn into a throne again. When he was swinging in it, with his legs over the edge—now this way, now that, by pulling the cord that controlled it—he became a giant, a horizontal immortal ignored by
Pequeño Larousse
. And then he would talk about
his
armies,
his
generals,
his
campaigns, like the one—do you remember?—against the traitor Ataúlfo Galván—and do you remember that night?—but no; it wasn’t you—in the thunderstorm in the Cave of the Mummies.