Reasons of State (19 page)

This was no time for Shakespeare’s cry of “My kingdom for a horse,” seeing that the guilty man, perhaps burdened by his own remorse and pursued by the Furies of our arms, actually entered the Kingdom of Shadows on his galloping steed. But the important thing was not that the Enemy of Order had been swallowed up in the quagmire of Las Tembladeras. The important thing was that by so doing he had fortified our Consciousness of Latinity in the face of the conflict now terrifying the world; because we
were
Latin, profoundly Latin, intimately Latin, trustees of the great tradition of the Roman pandects, foundation of our law, and of Virgil, Dante, Don Quixote, Michelangelo, Copernicus, etc., etc. (a long paragraph, ended by a long ovation). Aunt Jemima, who had exchanged her usual checked cotton handkerchief for a black one in token of mourning, climbed painfully up to the platform to give the Head of State a message of regret from the Hoffmann family, whispering in his ear at the same time that the general’s wife deplored her husband’s misdeeds and begged the favour of receiving the pension due to her as the widow of a soldier with more than twenty years’ service, in accordance with the Law of June 18, 1901.

Tired out by a war that had taken him to the most unhealthy jungles in the country, the President went for a holiday to his house at Marbella. There was a beautiful long beach, although its black sands were too often invaded by an abundance of bladdery dead jellyfish lying amongst patches of tar and oil washed up from the port close by. The sharks and giant rays were kept at bay by a quadruple barbed-wire fence, festooned with ragged seaweed. And if there were still a few morays in the hollows of a little rocky promontory, it was a great many years since a man had been emasculated by a barracuda in this resort. When the winds blew from the north—“
yelitos
” they were called—the sea darkened to shades of deep blue while gentle waves moved in slow, majestic rhythm to cast their foam at the very feet of the coconut and soursop trees. But there were mornings, too—in summer—when the water appeared singularly smooth and transparent, without any of its usual light turbulence; a bather diving into it at once had the strange sensation of falling into a lake of gelatine. And then he would find that he wasn’t swimming, but
gliding
in a mass of transparent and almost invisible molluscs, as big and as round as coins, which had arrived on the beach during the night at the end of some long and mysterious migration. To make the resort more attractive, the municipality had constructed a cement pier with a casino at the end supported on piles, the whole affair copied from Nice—metal framework, orange tiles, iron dome, green with saltpetre. Roulette, baccarat, and chemin-de-fer were played there, and the few croupiers in dinner jackets, counting in
louis
and
centens
—out-of-date gamblers’ coins—had given up saying “Don’t be afraid to stake” and “Not another cent,” as at Creole gaming tables, and taken to “
Faites vos jeux
” and “
Rien ne va plus
,” carefully if always peculiarly pronounced.

The Head of State’s “Residencia Hermenegilda” dominated the beach from a neighbouring hill. It was built in a style somewhere between Balkan and the Rue de la Faisanderie, with caryatids reminiscent of 1900, dressed like Sarah Bernhardt and magically supporting on their plumed hats—better indeed than the Atlases of some Berlin palaces—a wide terrace-balcony, enclosed by banisters shaped like seahorses. A tower-belvedere-lighthouse overtopped the roofs, and displayed the eternal brilliance of variegated majolica. The vast, cool, high rooms were furnished with rocking chairs of New Córdoban make, hammocks suspended from rings, and a few red lacquer chairs, a gift from the old Empress of China in gratitude for a consignment of toys—a cable railway, some kaleidoscopes, whistling spinning tops, a music box full of Bernese bears, and a battleship the size of a water lily for the pond at the Winter Palace—which the Head of State had sent her years before, knowing her tastes. In the dining room was a copy—reduced in size, of course—of
The Raft of Medusa
, opposite two charming seascapes by Elstir, which were somewhat overpowered, truth to tell, by the dramatic weight of the Géricault. The house was surrounded by a vast garden tended by Japanese gardeners, where among the box hedges stood a white marble Venus, disfigured by a greenish herpes of fungi hanging from her stomach. A little farther on under the pines one could see the chapel consecrated to the Divine Shepherdess by the devout Doña Hermenegilda—a chapel the sight of which now caused the President increasing remorse, as he remembered that the promise he had made her at an extremely painful moment in Paris, of ascending the steps of her basilica with a candle in each hand, still remained unfulfilled. (But at the same time he reflected that the Virgin was as intelligent in matters of policy as in everything; the Virgin, who had just given him eloquent proof of her Divine
Protection with Trumpets of Victory, would understand that at such a moment the fulfilment of his promise in the sight of everyone, an ostentatious proof of Catholic fervour, would bring down on him—who already had so many enemies—a whole world of freemasons, Rosicrucians, spiritualists, Theosophists, and those who clamoured against the clergy, not to mention many atheists and free thinkers—a blaspheming legion of priest haters, all of them devotees of France, where the clergy were not allowed to teach in schools, theological students were subject to military service, and where the only religion possible in this portentous twentieth century had germinated and grown:
The Religion of Science
.)

Behind the house a little grove of pomegranates shaded the discreet path along which, when night fell, Doctor Peralta used to lead some cloaked woman to the Head of State’s bedroom. (“Don’t go and die as President Félix Faure did,” the secretary used invariably to remark as he left his charge with his master. “Attila and Félix Faure were the two men who most enjoyed their deaths,” the Head of State replied, also invariably.)

Early every morning the locomotive of the Little German Train used to whistle. And the President would go out onto the balcony, with a cup of coffee in his hand, to watch it pass. The little engine shone like polished enamel in those green mornings, with its gleaming copper connecting rods and rivets, climbing the mountain by its narrow track with a cheerful funicular snorting, as it dragged its small red awning-covered carriages behind it up to the Olmedo Colony; it was, in every way, like the cable railway the Head of State had sent to the old Empress of China to enrich her collection of automatic and mechanical devices. As soon as the little convoy left Puerto Araguato, everything it passed through seemed to diminish in size—intermediate stations, bridges over torrents,
level crossings and their gates, signals—yet it was with a great clamour that it entered the minuscule terminal above, with its load of ten passengers, a few parcels, several barrels, the post, the newspapers, and a calf poking its head out of the window of the only cattle truck. As if it had just come out of a Nuremberg toy shop, gleaming, repainted, and varnished, the little train rested at the end of its journey in a strange exotic world, quite different from that below, with its Black Forest houses built between palms and coffee trees, its beer shop displaying the sign of King Stag, its women in Tyrolese dress, its men in leather breeches, braces, and hats with a feather in the band. In spite of being excellent citizens of the republic for more than a century, they could hardly speak Spanish. Ever since they had been brought here by a certain Count Olmedo, a rich man of Creole ancestry, a landowner obsessed by the idea of “keeping the race white,” the immigrants had been careful not to mix with women from
here
, who were all suspected of being zambas, cholas, or quadroons—one because her hair was frizzy; another because her eyes were blacker than usual; another because her nose was rather flattened, even though her complexion was pale. So, from father to son, they wrote to Bavaria or Pomerania to ask for women, and generation by generation they had increased and multiplied, singing the Lutheran chorale, playing on the accordion, growing rhubarb, making beer soup, and dancing an old-fashioned landler, and now plump shepherdesses with Aryan pubic hair were to be seen bathing in the mountain streams, and their names might be Woglinde, Wellgunde, or Flosshilde. The Head of State had bothered very little about these peaceable, law-abiding folk, who never got involved in politics, and when elections came along always voted for the government, on condition that their customs weren’t interfered with. But now his daily reading of the French papers made him regard these people
with some irritation. Although their houses were traditionally adorned with coloured plates of snow-covered landscapes, the banks of the Elbe, the Festival of Wartburg, or the mythical maiden in a winged helmet who carried the bodies of young athletes killed in battle up to heaven, there hung beside these pictures a portrait of Wilhelm II. And Wilhelm II was materializing in the Press as Antichrist. His armies, his gang of supporters, his terrifying Uhlans had penetrated into harmless little Belgium, into the Flanders of Velazquez’s lances—the forerunners of our own plainsmen’s pikes—razing everything to the ground. They had advanced as conquerors between ruined cathedrals, stately homes laid low and scattered, and after burning the Library of Louvain had marched sacrilegiously over a pavement of incunables hurled on the ground.
Eins … Zwei … Eins … Zwei
. And with barbarian tread, trampling on unique bindings, priceless manuscripts, parchments with rich capitals and superb lettering, they had marched on, not attacking men so much as the distinguished figures in the Testaments, displayed for centuries, like the pages of open books, on the tympana and over the porticos of cathedrals.
Eins … Zwei … Eins … Zwei
. German cannon had thundered against Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Esdras, against Solomon and the Shulamite, and David, who with Bathsheba—this was the theme of the manuscript play we had bought from our friend the Distinguished Academician—plotted the destruction of the old cuckolded general (every general in a campaign was probably a cuckold, reflected the President, and especially if he was old), before relentlessly hurling themselves against the Beau Dieu at Amiens, or the ineffable figure—now broken and pulverised in an irreversible twilight—of the most beautiful of the Smiling Angels. But perhaps even this was less horrible than the appalling chronicle of rape.
L’Illustration
included
some grey pages, not to be read by children, describing how when the German troops took a village or town they dragged innocent girls, schoolchildren and adolescents, to the back of a shoemaker’s shop or undertaker’s, and violated them—there were nine, ten, eleven such cases, said
L’Illustration
; probably fifteen, said Louis Dumur, who specialised in these atrocities—an operation carried out with servile German discipline, while the
Feldwebels
, who controlled proceedings, said: “Now it’s your turn … Get ready, next man.” But all this, the destruction of cathedrals, ruin of hagiography, altarpieces split in half, decapitated sibyls, burning, dynamite, rape, crime, were as nothing before the unprecedented tragedy of
the children without hands
. A German soldier had found them wandering amongst the ruins searching for their lost or dead mother, and hearing them weeping had gone closer as if to help them, but instead with an unexpected blow of his sabre (Did the infantry really carry sabres? asked Peralta) cut off two soft little hands: “So that they can never hold weapons against us.” On the title page of a supplement to
L’Illustration
there was a sketched portrait of one of the victims of this atrocious ablation, holding up his stumps against an apocalyptic background of the ruins of Ypres.

The Head of State absorbed this literature daily, marking in red pencil anything that seemed to him worth reproducing in the national press, to cause confusion and shame among certain officers, ex-associates of Hoffmann, or “Little Fredericks” in the making, who were known to be disgusted—though they didn’t show it openly—by the recent suppression of the pointed helmet with full dress uniform in the National Army. These readers must be de-Germanised, and the articles he destined particularly for them were those about the sacking of famous castles, theft of clocks—this had begun
in ’70—melting down of bells six hundred years old, using cathedrals as latrines, profanation of the host, and shooting matches by intoxicated captains with Memlings or Rembrandts as targets.

The Head of State looked towards the cloudy heights of the Olmedo Colony—black rocks, between mulberry trees, an occasional naturalised silver fir, light northerly breezes in the mornings—and thought that those bastards up there, in spite of the shouts of “Loooooong live our cooooountry!” from girls with fair plaits wearing national dress, who received him with bunches of violets when he paid a visit to their chief village, were at heart in sympathy with the men who cut off children’s hands in Artois or Champagne, whose cataclysmic landscapes—eroded, defoliated, mutilated by shells—were shown us in the pictures of Georges Scott and Lucien Simon, offered for sale complete with passe-partout, their muddy colours accentuating in a masterly fashion the tragic desolation of village squares, ruined town halls, and mediaeval houses reduced to the skeletons of their beams, while like some accusation proffered by the earth itself, the bare trunk of an ancient oak seemed to speak in the middle of all this desolation through the hundred mouths of its lacerated bark.

Every morning the Head of State stopped reading this painful material to watch from his window as the Little German Train started to ascend the mountain, sometimes braking with furious whistling to drive away a goat capering in the young grass between the rails. And after his usual breakfast of maize tortillas, curds, and meat pancakes, he used to sit at his Welte-Mignon pianola, a present from the Spanish colony of Nueva Córdoba. Pedalling hard and manipulating the regulators so as to extract “Für Elise” from the perforated roll, and the beginning—he never got beyond the beginning—of the
Moonlight Sonata
, he reflected that working this
musical machine must be a little like the activity of the engine driver who was now taking the Little German Train up to the woods, where imported squirrels were frisking, and in the opinion of a trouble-making journalist—an unfair opponent—threatening to cause an epidemic of psittacosis among the country’s cattle, already ailing and in a state of decline, it was quite true, since experience showed that the cows of the region suffered from weak legs and narrow haunches and couldn’t support the weight on their hindquarters of the stock bulls, brought from Charolais to improve the breed, when they mounted them.