Reasons of State (10 page)

In any case, the more centuries ago the brass plate was dated, the greater the prestige of his country, which would thus possess remains comparable in antiquity to finds in Mexico and Peru, whose pyramids, temples, and necropolises represented as it were the heraldry of our civilisations and proved that we were in no sense a new world, nor the New World, since our emperors wore magnificent gold crowns, jewels, and quetzal feathers when Colonel Hoffmann’s presumed ancestors were wandering in dark jungles dressed in bearskins with cows’ horns on their heads, and when the Gateway of the Sun of Tihuanaco was already old, the French had not got any further than erecting a few menhirs—piles of stones without art or charm—on the coast of Brittany.

ALTHOUGH, AFTER THE VICTORY, THE HEAD OF STATE would have liked to give the troops a rest, proceeding meanwhile to evacuate the many casualties wounded by bullets, bayonets, machetes, or peasants’ knives, he realised that the Rio Verde must be crossed today, because last night’s rain—and it was still falling—was raising its level hour by hour. It was still possible for the cavalry to take advantage of a ford nearby; but the infantry had to use barges, scows, and any boats available, such as a mould-covered ferry boat, abandoned among the rushes, which was speedily repaired and used to take across impedimenta—some Krupp cannon, six pieces of light artillery, the artillery park, blacksmith’s equipment, tinned foods and cases of gin and brandy for the officers, as well as pots and pans and portable stoves for the troops—to which, to the great joy of the Head of State, General Hoffmann gave the pompous inclusive name of “logistics,” when according to Doctor Peralta it deserved only the title of “swill, kettles, and aguardiente.”

But now operations were going ahead with speed, though there was no enemy to fight, because the rebel forces were retreating towards the sea with the obvious intention of entrenching themselves among the low hills surrounding
Surgidero de la Verónica, base of the Atlantic Fleet, with its two small cruisers of old-fashioned design and cannons of limited range, as well as several coastguard vessels of a more modern type now laid up for careening behind the Naval Arsenal. Although all villages and hamlets had been despoiled in their retreat by Ataúlfo Galván’s men, the sutlers and camp followers always managed to find pigs, young bulls, and hens hidden in caves, cellars, and even the vaults of cemeteries, or bottles of rum, flasks and earthenware jars of strong cane liquor and plum spirit buried in domestic patios, sacristy gardens, and even in the dust of graveyards. And so there followed carousing, uproar, and revelry throughout the night watch, quarrels and music from guitars, gourd rattles, drums, and maracas, while mulattos and half-breeds of all descriptions stamped their feet with a will to the rhythm of the
bamba, jarabe
, and
marinera
, before leaving the campfire and going with their men into some thicket nearby to give them bodily pleasure.

In April the first attacks were made on the advance positions of Surgidero de la Verónica, obliging the enemy forces to dig themselves in, in the city suburbs.

“Foch’s wise remark is relevant now,” said the Head of State, quoting a French authority in order to pique Hoffmann: “When one of two adversaries gives up an offensive, he digs trenches and buries himself underground.” And from the summit of one of the three hills dominating the town, he studied its domes and cupolas, its baroque bell towers, its old walls built in the colonial period, with tender emotion. There he had been born and given his first lessons by the Marist Brothers (in that two-storey building with ogival windows between cement pilasters), from charming illustrated books that told him about the Nile floods, the breaking-in of Bucephalus, Androcles’ lion, the invention of printing, how Fray
Bartolomé de las Casas was lawyer to the Indians, how the Eskimoes made igloos out of ice, and how the monk Alcuin, creator of Carlovingian colleges, used to prefer studious boys, even of humble birth, to the lazy and careless sons of the nobility. Later on he had received an intelligent education in history and French combined, using texts in which more space was occupied—naturally enough—by the Soissons Vase than the Battle of Ayacucho, and by Cardinal Balue’s cage than the Conquest of Peru, and which necessarily laid more stress on Saint Louis of the Crusades than on Simón Bolivar of Carabobo—although they informed us of the interesting fact that his name had been used to designate a tall hat favoured by Parisian dandies of the last century …

So the boy grew up on lesson books—he understood little mathematics but remembered some classics—and the Head of State was reminded of his adolescent escapades in the streets around the port, noisy with sailors, fishermen, hawkers, and tarts, with their lively taverns with such names as The Triumphs of the Venus de Milo, Wise Men Without Learning, The Staggering Monkeys, The Ship on Land, or My Workshop; with its trade in fish hooks, baskets, and nets, its rope makers, its trucks carrying oysters, octopuses, and jurels along pavements where the smell of tar, brine, and troughs full of anchovies mingled with the jasmine and tuberose scents worn by prostitutes.

There at his feet lay the town of La Verónica, still so like the copperplate engraving made of it by an English artist a hundred years ago, with the figures of slaves and their masters on horseback in the foreground; there it was, with the massive bulk of its Palace of the Inquisition, on whose terrace some Indians and negroes accused of witchcraft had been flogged, mocked by the crowd, and covered with excrement and filth a long while ago.

There was the town of La Verónica, with that big house and its three wings and two roofs—lightning conductor, sky-blue dovecote, and squeaking weathercock—where his children had been born while he was still leading the miserable existence of a provincial journalist and could provide them with only cane syrup one day and brown sugar the next, to sweeten the stew of bananas and crusts, which was their invariable supper dish. There, in that whitewashed patio, he and his family had taken the first jump in that game of hopscotch which, following in his father’s bold political footsteps, had taken them jump by jump, from square to square, from number to number, up the spiral path in the game of royal goose. From Surgidero they had gone to the capital, always ascending from the tiny area of our port life to the great world outside, the old world, for them the New World, although there was to be sadness among the pleasures and bright lights of that climax of good fortune. Ofelia was who she was—
sum qui sum
ever since a child—and would never be otherwise; she still had the character and appearance of the tempestuous, determined little girl, both stubborn and unstable, who had discovered the universe through blind man’s buff, “Frère Jacques,” ring-a-ring-of-roses, skittles, forfeits, and “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre.” Nothing could be said against Ariel: a born diplomat, he tricked the priests as a small boy, answered questions with other questions, lied when he wanted to, kept in with both parties, wore a row of decorations, and (when under pressure to explain some awkward incident) had instant recourse to a manual of ambiguities, just as Chateaubriand would have done with ministries in a similar predicament. Radames, amongst many successes, had been struck by cruel and sudden disaster and the evidence could still be seen in newspapers all over the world: having entered himself in a motor race against Ralph De Palma at Indianapolis, he shot
to heaven from the burning hot asphalt of the sixth mile, as a result of adding too much ether to his petrol so as to make it lighter, more explosive and dynamic. He had tried to forget the blow of being ploughed in an exam at West Point Military Academy in the intoxication of speed …

And there, limping among the hopscotch squares, he saw his youngest son, Marcus Antonius, in short pants, the most evasive and invisible of the clan, lost amongst the branches of trees that did not belong to this earth, but to some genealogical forest where he had taken refuge—perhaps because he was the least precocious of the family and the most exotic-looking, both as to profile and eyes. Much given to fantasizing—mad, we should say now—carried away by the impulse of the moment, he had experienced an adolescent mystical crisis on discovering one day, as he stood before the looking-glass on his cupboard, that his penis had become twisted into a corkscrew by the clap. Absurdly enough, he decided to go to Rome and kiss the Pope’s sandal, and cure himself with cardinal’s permanganate; but he had got no farther than the Cardinal’s antechambers, where, happening to run into a dealer in armorial bearings, he convinced himself that he was descended, by a rather crooked, collateral, indirect, and tangled line, from the Byzantine emperors, the last of whom, Palaeologus, died in Barbados, leaving descendants who came to our country. His mystical aspirations forgotten, he spent a great many pesos on acquiring the title of
Limitrophe
[
sic
: see Justinian’s Code], Count of Dalmatia, as it happened; he paraded his brand-new nobility throughout Europe, a Title among Titles, jealous of other Titles, expert in Titles, going to bed with women of Title, and many comments on his virility went the rounds among those who had experienced the virtues, well known amongst us, of a “stallion liana” often used by our ardent old men. With such talents, his life took him from
Andalusian estates to the farms of Peñaranda, from antique Venetian palaces to Scottish grouse moors, from the hunting parties of Kolodje to the Alfonsine regattas of San Sebastian, travelling according to a map of somewhat tarnished nobility that had seen better days, among whom credit and prestige was given to the North American coats of arms of Armour and Swift, the ketchup aristocracy of Libby, who promoted their advance to grandeur by studying, learning, and annotating the Almanack de Gotha (the entry of their names was always postponed to the next edition) with the close attention of a rabbi interpreting the Talmud, or a Saint-Cyran translating the Bible three times, the better to master the subtleties of its vocabulary and the complications of its hermeneutics. Marcus Antonius was both brilliant and useless; excitable and ambitious like his father, whose anxieties, however, were unknown to him; flesh of a flesh to which he felt alien, he declared himself to be a luxury product, the herald of our culture, a necessary factor in our international prestige, a lunatic, dandy, collector of gloves and sticks, refusing to put on shirts that hadn’t been ironed in London, a harsh critic of famous artists, pursuer of Woolworth heiresses (he dreamed about Anna Gould, who had presented Boni de Castellane with a pink marble palace), five times divorced, occasional aviator, friend of Santos-Dumont, champion polo player, skier at Chamonix, critic of duelling along with Athos de San-Malato and the Cuban Laberdesque, brilliant
rejoneador
^*
in the making, believer in miracles at roulette and baccarat, although somewhat absent-minded and Hamlet-like at times and given to signing dud cheques, which found their way by way of legal proceedings to our discreet embassies.

And there lay, at the feet of the Head of State, that same
Surgidero de la Verónica where a plaque set up by one of the doors was engraved with the date of his birth, and where Doña Hermenegilda had groaned as she gave birth to her four children under a mosquito net as blue as the dovecote outside.

And that was the town that fell into the hands of the government troops, intact and undamaged by shells, because almost all the disloyal officers surrendered, on a historic April 14.

Finding himself abandoned by his most trusted men, and with no one owning a boat or schooner ready to take him on board, General Ataúlfo Galván shut himself into the old castle of San Lorenzo, built by order of Philip II on a pinnacle of rock that narrowed the entrance to the port. And there, in the middle of the afternoon of the day of surrender, the Head of State disembarked, followed by Colonel Hoffmann, Doctor Peralta, and a dozen soldiers. The defeated man was waiting in silence in the main courtyard. His lips moved strangely, without any accompaniment from his voice, as if wanting to emit words that refused to be uttered. He was trying, with a checked handkerchief, to mop the sweat coming from under his kepi so copiously that it was making dark drops on the cloth of his military tunic. The President stood still and gazed at him for a long time as if measuring his height. Then suddenly, in a sharp, cutting tone: “Shoot him!”

Ataúlfo Galván fell on his knees: “No, no … Not that. Not a bullet … For your dear mother’s sake, no … For the sake of that sainted Doña Hermenegilda, who loved me so much … you can’t do that to me … you were like a father to me … More than a father … Let me explain … You’ll understand … I was misled … Listen to me … For the sake of your dear mother …”

“Shoot him!” He was dragged, groaning, weeping, and
imploring, towards the farther wall. Hoffmann arranged the firing squad. Unable to stand upright, the defeated man fell against the wall, his spine slipping slowly down the stonework till he was sitting with his boots in front of him, the toes turned in. The barrels of the rifles followed his descent and stopped at the correct angle.

“Aim!” The order reaffirmed the position they had already taken up.

“No … No … A priest … Confession. I’m a Christian …”

“Fire!” Rifle butts on the ground. Coup de grâce, because that was the drill. Crying of seagulls. A very short silence.

“Throw him into the sea,” said the Head of State. “The sharks will finish the job.”

This business was finished and done with. But there was still another, perhaps more serious: Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez, whose potential as a leader and fighter had been scorned and disregarded by us during the urgent emergency of military action, was free and active in Nueva Córdoba, from whose town hall he was sending out manifesto after manifesto attacking the government. He had built up a strong, a very strong position in the city, where he had gathered around him students, journalists, ex-politicians, provincial lawyers, those with socialist views, besides a few young officers, fresh from the School of Cavalry at Saumur, who constituted the army’s intelligentsia—an intelligentsia opposed to such men as Walter Hoffmann, but who, like him, had been formed by German instructors and were devotees of the pointed helmet. United there in permanent session, sleepless and with shirts undone, smoking cigarettes by the gross, drunk on black coffee and bad cigars, arguing, discussing, rounding on one another, cursing, their purity of aims worthy of a Committee of Public Safety, the rebels were drawing up a plan of reform that became ever more radical as the hours
passed, and which having settled the matter of trials to investigate peculation and illicit gains, embarked on the risky project of reducing large estates and dividing them up as common land. The Head of State had learned from letters received that same morning that events which at first he had viewed with a certain irony were really happening: “Utopian vegetarian notions,” he had said. Yet now, in Nueva Córdoba—among meetings, rallies, proclamations, and factions—intensive military instruction for students and workers was going on, under the leadership of an obscure Captain Becerra—a spare-time entomologist—who had been named Military Chief of the town. And, observing that the movement was gaining strength, with signs of syndicalism inspired by foreign, anti-patriotic doctrines, inadmissible in our country, the United States Ambassador offered a speedy intervention by North American troops, to safeguard democratic institutions. Some battleships happened to be manoeuvring in the Caribbean.