Reasons of State (13 page)

And the Head of State, followed by his secretary, entered a well-known bistro, rather Flemish in style, with a dartboard and a statuette of the Manneken-Pis, where one could drink Hoegaarde bitter, or another beer the colour of cherry juice, or strong Lambic—“branded” with a red-hot nail dipped in the froth—all of them good to start off a day that should be full of health-giving savour. Everything seemed pleasant today—people sitting outside cafés, soldiers’ red trousers, the zouaves’ skullcaps, the burning carrot advertising Le Brazza, the buses with their placards advertising the Opéra, République, Bastille, Parc Monceau, and tours of the Napoleonic sights. The returned travellers renewed their old habits of taking idle strolls according to whim, from the Chope du Panthéon to the tulip bulbs of the Quai de la Mégisserie; from Chaponac’s occult and Rosicrucian bookshop (fortune-telling cards, initiatory leaflets, the works of Estanislao de Guaite) to a gymnasium where they still practised the noble art of all-in wrestling; from the sky-blue shop selling religious objects close to Notre-Dame-des-Victoires to Aux Glaces, at 25 Rue Sainte-Apolline, where in the mornings an ample blonde was often on duty who was particularly skilled at manipulation à la Duc d’Aumale—which gave an air of somewhat aristocratic raffishness to the cavalry barracks nearby. Everything above and behind the zinc bar counters spoke the language of smells and taste: brioches in their paper cases; madeleines, fluted like scallop shells from Compostela, in square glass containers; Dubonnet’s cat, the
bersagliere
on the Cinzano bottles, the gleaming pottery of the flasks of Dutch gin, the wooden ladders enclosed in bottles of marc brandy; the aroma of Amer Picón—something between orange peel and tar.

“We’re better off here than in the Mummies’ Cave,”
murmured the Head of State. And finally they hailed an open car and were driven to the Rue de Tilsitt.

“Paris will always be Paris,” opined the secretary when, between the horses of Marly, the Arc de Triomphe appeared in the distance, useless and magnificent.

And now, installing himself, sinking into his leather armchair, the Head of State felt something approaching an organic need to re-establish relations with the city. He put through a telephone call to the house on the Quai Conti where delightful concerts often took place: Madame was not at home. He rang up the violinist Morel, who congratulated him on his return in the hasty and evasive tone of someone who wants to end the conversation quickly. Next he telephoned Louisa de Mornand, whose housekeeper kept him waiting longer than she should and then told him that the beautiful lady was away for a few days. He rang Brichot, professor at the Sorbonne.

“I’m almost blind,” he answered, “
but I have the newspapers read aloud to me
.” And he hung up. “As irritable as ever,” thought the Head of State, rather surprised by this strange response and looking up another number in his diary. He rang, rang, rang, first one friend then another, always—except when it was his tailor or hairdresser—being answered by voices that had apparently changed their tone and style. Then he thought of D’Annunzio; perhaps he would be in Paris. After a maid had told him that her master had just left for Italy, he heard the poet’s own voice giving the lie to what she said, and launching a terrific invective against the creditors who were literally besieging him in his house. Yes,
besieging
was the word: suggesting a tribe of Erinyes, of Eumenides, of Furies; of Hecate’s hellhounds, there at all hours, stationed in the bistro opposite, in the
tabac
at the corner, in the neighbouring bakeries, with their eyes on his door, waiting for him to go out so that they could hurl themselves
on him, destroy and tear him with their savage demands for money.

“Ah, what wouldn’t I do to have the power of a Latin American tyrant, and be able to cleanse the Rue Geoffroy l’Asnier of rogues and scoundrels as our brave friend who was talking just now did in Nueva Córdoba.”

Realizing that the blow was about to fall—and it wouldn’t be the first—the Head of State struck the mouthpiece with his fountain pen, saying: “
Ne coupez pas, Mademoiselle!… Ne coupez pas
,” and then hung up the receiver in the middle of a sentence from his interlocutor, to make him think they had been cut off. But he felt uneasy and disconcerted. He didn’t know how to take this talk of a “tyrant” even though the poet habitually used “imaginific” and ambiguous language, but as to Nueva Córdoba, he wasn’t aware that D’Annunzio even knew the name of the town. Something was up. Perhaps it would be a good idea to ring up Reynaldo Hahn, his amiable and pleasant “compatriot” from Puerto Cabello. The composer came to the telephone, speaking in his agreeable Spanish with a Venezuelan accent, curiously interspersed—a habit he couldn’t explain himself—with occasional turns of speech obviously coming from the River Plate. After the usual greetings, Reynaldo informed him, in his characteristically mild, slow, and rather lazy tones, as if he were talking about something different, that
Le Matin
had published a series of savage reports on the events
over there
in which his “compatriot” was described as “The Butcher of Nueva Córdoba.” All of Monsieur Garcin’s photographs had appeared, occupying three or four columns, and showing corpses lying in the streets, mutilated corpses, corpses being dragged along, corpses hanging by their armpits, by their chins, by their ribs, from the meat hooks in the Municipal Slaughterhouse, and pierced with pikes, tridents, and knives. And female defenders of the town
being forced to run naked through the streets of with bayonets in their backs. And others raped after taking refuge in the church. And other women thrown into cattle pens. And the miners shot down with machine guns
en masse
in front of the cemetery wall with military bands and cheerful bugles playing. All this, accompanied by portraits of the Head of State in battle dress, in profile, half-face, or sometimes back view, but always identifiable by his corpulent frame giving the order for the artillery to fire on the National Sanctuary of the Divine Shepherdess (“It wasn’t me, it was Hoffmann,” he protested), that marvel of baroque architecture—
la Notre-Dame du Nouveau Monde
as the newspaper called it. And the unkindest cut of all perhaps was that when his son Marcus Antonius was questioned by a reporter two days ago on the beach at the Lido, where he was staying with an Arsinoe from the Comédie Française, instead of defending his father, he declared: “
Je n’ai que faire de ces embrouillements sudamericains
.”

At last, the appalled listener understood the reason for so many excuses and ancillary rebuffs; now Louisa de Mornand’s fictitious absence and Brichot’s strange reply were explained.

“I know there’s a lot of exaggeration in it all, compatriot. They do extraordinary things nowadays in the way of trick photography … You wouldn’t be capable … Of course it’s all false.” But he couldn’t dine with him at Larue that night. Nor tomorrow, as he had a date with Gabriel Fauré. A lot of work on hand, also: a project for an opera on Moratin’s
El si las niñas
, a concerto for piano and orchestra. He was extremely sorry …

Overwhelmed, the Head of State fell into the hammock, swinging diagonally from the rings that he had ordered to be fixed to two corners of his bedroom, months ago. He wasn’t even cross with the cholo Mendoza, who could well have warned him. But he knew very well that the only French
papers his diplomats read were
Le Rire, Fantasio
, and
La Vie Parisienne
, and they were always the last to know what was being written about their country. He gazed at the moulded plaster on the ceiling with the bitterest feelings he had perhaps ever known. It would have upset him very little to be treated as a “butcher,” a barbarian, a savage, or whatever else, in places he had never been attached to, and which he had for that reason spoken about slightingly. In his view, Berlin was a city that had every right to its primitive name of “place of bears,” with the architectonic heaviness of the Brandenburg Gate, like some granite locomotive, its walled-in temple of Pergamum and Unter-den-Linden: Vienna, in spite of its reputation for elegance and voluptuousness derived from its operettas and waltzes, was really terribly provincial, with its little officials from the dyeworks, its ten or twelve restaurants anxious to be like those of this city, besides its café-au-lait-coloured Danube, which looked blue only on an occasional February 29 of leap year; Berne was a boring town with its heraldic statues in the middle of streets that were one vast shop window of watches and barometers; in Rome, every square, every street corner was a scene from an opera, and whatever the passers-by wore or talked about, they always had the air of the chorus in
La forza del destino
or
Un ballo in maschera
, whereas there was a certain smallness about Madrid, with its kiosks selling mineral water, sweets and aguardiente, its night watchmen with key rings at their belts, and its social gatherings in cafés where the dawn rose on a provincial panorama of last night’s cups of chocolate and yesterday’s toast, some people just going off to bed while others were starting the day early with fritters and tobacco. On the other hand, Paris was an Earthly Paradise, the Promised Land, the Shrine of Intelligence, the Metropolis of
Savoir-vivre
, the Source of All Culture, and anyone fortunate enough to live
here
found that its
dailies, weeklies, reviews, and books, year after year, praised Rubén Dario, Gómez Carrillo, Amado Nervo, and many other Latin American writers who had, each in his own way, contributed to make the Great City into a City of the Gods.

Slowly, overcoming reserve, observing strict rules of polite behaviour, always carefully dressed according to hours, days, and seasons, giving valuable but never ostentatious presents, sending flowers at odd times, showing generosity to charity sales and tombolas for good causes, befriending artists and writers who were not eccentric bohemians, and attending important concerts, fashionable meetings, and theatrical and musical first nights—thereby showing that our countries
also
knew how to live—he had opened a way for himself, which without elevating him to the peaks of Gotha had nevertheless three times admitted him to Madame Verdurin’s musical evenings—not such a bad beginning. When he was tired of all the agitations and crowds of
over there
, he intended to retire and await death in the house that every journey made more pleasant to him. But now everything had collapsed. Forever shut against him would be the doors of the great houses he had dreamed of entering when as a provincial journalist he had walked the steep streets of Surgidero de la Verónica, reciting poems in which Rubén Dario sang of “the times of King Louis of France, a sun with a court of stars on a blue field, when the splendid and majestic Pompadour filled his palaces with fragrance.” Or when, sitting in some tavern in the port, in the steam of prawns on the grill, his nose buried in reviews from
over there
, he used to come across works by the most famous painters in the world, showing him the gold and crimson of the foyer of the Opéra, the whiteness of sylphides and wilies, the aristocratic confidence of horsewomen at a gymkhana, the greyness of cathedrals in the rain (“
il pleut dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville
”), and
the iridescence of women whose portraits showed them as birds of paradise, symphonies of jewels, unimaginable beings, suddenly blazing out from the pages of
L’Illustration
—as he sat there, between the siren of a Danish cargo boat and the squeaking of the crane as it loosed a torrent of coal on to a dirty quay close by.

Now he thought he read scorn and mute accusation in the eyes of everyone who looked at him: his manservant Sylvestre was rather evasive; the cook, whose gesture of wiping her hands on her apron when she saw him could have various different interpretations; the concierge, reserved and cold, seemingly uninterested in his arm in its sling—or else not thinking it discreet to allude to it; the familiar old Bois-Charbons, where he had the half-fearful curiosity to go that same evening to drink a bottle of Beaujolais with Doctor Peralta. Monsieur Musard seemed to be in a bad mood. His wife didn’t come out to greet him. And, to judge by their glances, those two men in caps at the other end of the bar were talking about him. In all the cafés the waiters had strange expressions on their faces. In the end, in order to soothe his nerves and after taking Peralta’s advice, he turned up without warning at the house of the Distinguished Academician, who owed him so many favours. There, in an apartment full of shadows and with views over the Seine, surrounded by old books, Hokusai prints, portraits of Sainte-Beuve, Verlaine, Lecontede-L’Isle, and Léon Dierx, the President received an affectionate welcome, understanding, and lucidity, which touched him. Power entailed terrible obligations, his friend declared. “When kings carry out their promises it is terrible, and when they don’t carry them out it’s just as terrible,” he said, perhaps quoting Oscar Wilde. No leader of men, no great monarch or captain, had had clean hands. Dramatic and comforting pictures passed before the President’s eyes, pictures of the
destruction of Carthage, of the siege of Numantia, of the fall of Byzantium. Sudden images arose, confusedly shuffled at random by his memory, of Philip and the Duke of Alba, Saladin, and Peter the Great obliged by reasons of state to exterminate the Naryshkins in a courtyard of the Kremlin. Besides … who had ever been able to control the frenzied excesses and cruelties—lamentable but repeated throughout history—of a brutal soldiery, drunk with victory? And worse still when a rebellion of Indians and negroes had to be crushed. In fact, to speak frankly, that affair had been the result of a mob of Indians and negroes running amok.

His strength of mind restored, and his mood made more aggressive by the conversation, the Head of State suddenly discarded his rather careful French, with its attention to pronunciation and choice of the right word, and impetuously triggered a deluge of Creole insults, which his astonished friend received like a verbal invasion of ideograms outside the scope of his understanding. Indians and negroes, yes; but “
zambos, cholos, pelados, atorrantes, rotos, guajiros, léperos, jijos de la chingada, chusma, y morralla
” (Doctor Peralta tried to translate this into a language learnt at Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons, as
propres-à-rien, pignoufs, galvadeux, jeanfoutre, salopards, poivrots, caves, voyous, escarpes, racaille, pègre, merde
) and above all—now the President returned to French—
socialists
, socialists affiliated with the Second International, anarchists, men who foretold an impossible levelling of classes, who fomented hatred in the illiterate masses, who exploited for their own advantage the conceit of uneducated people who had refused the schooling offered them, people crazed by practising witchcraft and unimaginable superstitions, and devoted to saints somewhat like our saints but who were not our saints, since these illiterate people, hostile to the three Rs, called the Beautiful God of Amiens Elegná,
Velásquez’s
Crucified Christ Obatalá
, and Michelangelo’s
Pietà Ochum
. They didn’t understand that
over here
.