Reasons of State (20 page)

“Ah, what a war this is, my President,” groaned Doctor Peralta every morning between a cup of very black coffee and the first cigar of the day.

“Terrible, terrible,” the Head of State would reply, thinking about the Little German Train: “And how long it’s lasting.”

But then they heard that those who discussed strategy in the capital over brandy and grilled steak had been celebrating the news, received by cablegram, that
Le Matin
had just published a really sensational headline covering eight columns: “Cossacks only five days’ march from Berlin.”

“So now the Cossacks are the new defenders of Latinity, along with the Sepoys and Senegalese we already had on our side,” remarked Peralta slyly.

“Let’s hope they get held up on the way!” murmured his friend, thinking that, thanks to the expectations and enthusiasms provoked by this amazing war, many people had had their attention diverted to remote events. The Head of State was at last enjoying peace and quiet in the shade of a flowering tree.

THE HEAD OF STATE PROLONGED HIS STAY IN Marbella from week to week, carrying out the business of government from a somewhat Pompeian pergola in the middle of a labyrinth of orange trees at the far end of the garden. He took an early-morning ride along the shore on his horse Holofernes, a powerful sorrel with a glistening coat, wild and uncontrollable with most people but hypocritically submissive to a master who brought him a pail of the best English beer in his stable every afternoon, which he always received with delighted whinnying. The President had reasons for feeling contented during these months, for he had never known such a prosperous and happy period for the nation. This European war—which really, though it was better not to say so, was turning out a blessing—was raising the prices of sugar, bananas, coffee, and gutta-percha to unheard-of heights, swelling the funds in the banks, making fortunes, bringing the country luxuries and refinements that until yesterday had seemed to belong to worldly novels or films centred around the almost mythological figures of Gabrielle Robinne, Pina Menichelli, Francesca Bertini, or Lydia Borelli. Surrounded
by age-old forests, the capital had itself become a modern forest of scaffolding, wooden beams pointing to the sky, cranes in action, and mechanical scoops, accompanied by a perpetual clanking of pulleys, hammer blows of iron on steel, pouring of cement, rivetting and percussion, interspersed with shouts between workmen up aloft and workmen on the ground, whistles, sirens, trucks carrying sand, and snorting of engines. Shops enlarged their premises overnight, and dawn showed them with new windows where a few wax figures—another novelty—were celebrating their first communion, showing off wedding dresses, the latest fashions, and even officers’ uniforms, well cut and finished in English gabardine. Toffee-making machines, installed in the entrance to the old Royal Granary, astonished passers-by with the concerted movements of their metal arms, mixing, stretching, and compressing white substances streaked with red, and smelling of vanilla and marshmallow. Offices, banks, insurance companies, chain stores, and brokers proliferated. Theodolites and other surveying instruments transformed flooded regions, wasteland, and goat pastures, dividing them into a number of marked-out squares, which having been since remote times “The Lazar’s small-holding,” “Mexican farm,” or “Misia Petra’s ranch,” suddenly adopted the names of “Bagatelle,” “West Side,” or “Armenonville,” and were divided into plots to be selected from a plan but hardly ever built on, since their price increased every time they were bought and sold (sometimes several times in one day) in offices with many Underwood typewriters, gilt ventilators, relief maps, attractive maquettes, and brandy and gin in the safe, with much haggling and discussing between drinks and Havanas, and telephone calls from women—this was quite new—who offered their services by telephone in foreign accents, promising refinements that were refused—and it was the worse for them—by our
own too-modest tarts, with whom “the business” had to be performed in the classic manner, with nothing baroque, perverse, or fantastic such as went on in other countries. Pianolas had invaded the capital, rolling and unrolling cylinders of “La Madelon,” “Roses of Picardy,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” from dawn to midnight. In the bars where cards and dominoes were played, or where Santa Inés rum gave way to White Horse whisky, the only subject of conversation was the profits, due to the war, which had made them forget the war itself, although everyone—whites, cholos, zambos, Indians, and those of swarthy complexion—had become Frenchified, pro-tricolor, avengers, cockade wearers, Joan-of-Arcists and Barrèsians, declaring that we should soon get our own back for the disaster of Sedan, and the storks of Hansi would come back to the steeples of Alsace and Lorraine. At the same time the first skyscraper arose—five stories and an attic—immediately followed by the Edificio Titán close by, with eight. And the old city with its two-storey houses was very quickly transformed into an Invisible City. Invisible because, changing from horizontal to vertical, there were no eyes now that could see it and know it. Each architect, engaged in the task of making his buildings higher than those that went up before, thought only of the particular aesthetic qualities of
his
façade, as if it could be seen from a hundred yards off, whereas the streets were made to take only one car at a time—one mule train, one cart—and were only six or seven yards wide. Thus, with his back to an infinitely tall column, the passer-by tried in vain to admire the elegant decoration lost in the sky among vultures and turkey buzzards. It was
known
that up aloft there were garlands, cornucopias, and caducei, or there might even be a Greek temple perched on the fifth floor with Phidias’ horses and everything; but this was only
known
, because those citadels, domes, and entablatures existed—city
upon city—in a kingdom that could not be seen. And higher still were solitary, unknown, banished statues, of Mercury—on the Chamber of Commerce—or of Minerva, whose lance attracted August lightning, of charioteers, winged spirits, Christian saints, isolated from one another and unknown to men, who yet lorded it over intricate gradations of terraces, slate-covered roofs, water tanks, chimneys, lightning conductors, and huts containing lift machinery. Without realizing it, people were living in unsuspected Ninevehs, vertiginous Westminsters, and flying Trianons, with gargoyles and bronze figures who would become old without ever having had contact with the people below, busy among the porticos, arcades, and colonnades that carried the great weight of invisible constructions. And as everyone was eager to have what was new, those who had inhabited colonial mansions for two centuries hastily left them and moved into new, modern houses in the Roman, Chambord, or Stanford White style. So the huge palaces of the old town with their plateresque façades and coats of arms carved in stone were taken over by the rabble, the poor and diseased—the fictitious blind man with a paid guide, the drunk whose hands trembled in the mornings, the wooden-legged accordion player or the poor paralytic, begging alms for the love of God. The beautiful rooms were full of dishevelled women, ragged children, whores, and tramps, living in the fumes from stoves and clothes hung up to dry, while the patios were given over to boxing, cock fights, and conjurors with pickpocket partners. Hundreds of Ford cars—like those in Mack Sennett films—streamed along the badly paved streets, avoiding the potholes, running onto the pavements, knocking over baskets of fruit, breaking shop windows, in a mania for speed never before known in these latitudes. It was all urgency, haste, rush, and impatience. In a few months of war, oil lamps had been supplanted by electric
bulbs, gourds by bidets, pineapple juice by Coca-Cola, lotto by roulette, Rocambole by Pearl White, the messenger boy’s donkey by the telegraphist’s bicycle, the mule cart with its tassels and bells by a smart Renault, which had to go forwards and reverse ten or twelve times to get around a narrow corner and enter an alley recently christened “Boulevard,” causing a frenzied flight among the goats which still abounded in some quarters where the grass growing between the paving stones was good. The Ursuline nuns instituted a Grotto of Lourdes with wonderful effects of electric light; the first dance hall was opened, with a jazz band from New Orleans; horses and jockeys were brought from Tijuana to race in a gaily decorated hippodrome made on the site of the swamp, and one morning the Old Town, described as “Very Loyal and Very Illustrious” in the deed of its foundation in 1553, awoke to the full realisation that it had become a leading twentieth-century capital. The last reptiles—rattlesnakes and elaps—vanished from the building sites, the goldfinches were silent, and phonographs opened their mouths. And there were bridge championships, fashion parades, Turkish baths, money changers, and exclusive brothels, admitting no one with darker skin than the Minister for Public Works, who was taken as a yardstick because although not perhaps the black sheep of the Cabinet he was indubitably its brownest sheep. The police exchanged their worn slippers for regulation boots, and their white-gloved hands controlled a traffic whose noise was enriched by klaxons with several rubber bulbs, so that they could play “The Merry Widow Waltz” or the first bars of the National Anthem.

As he watched the metropolis grow and grow, the Head of State was sometimes worried by the changes in the view from the palace windows. He was himself involved in a real-estate business managed by Doctor Peralta, whose buildings were
destroying the panorama for so long part of his life, so that when his attention was suddenly drawn to some alteration in it by the Mayorala Elmira—“just look at that,” “look at that”—he started as if at some evil omen. The factory chimneys he had had erected broke up and destroyed a natural scene until recently innocent of the ugly cross-trees of telegraph poles. The Volcano, the Grandfather Volcano, the Tutelary Volcano, abode of the Ancient Gods, symbol and emblem, whose cone figured on the National Coat of Arms, was less a volcano—less even the abode of the Ancient Gods—when on misty mornings its majestic presence seemed to insinuate itself, with the modesty of a humiliated king, a monarch without a court, above the dense clouds of smoke sent up by four tall chimneys from the recently inaugurated Central Electricity Company. By becoming more vertical and geometric, and by dividing up the verdant background of mountains, hills, and distant valleys, the city was shutting the President in. The population was being augmented by an ever-increasing influx of peasants, labourers, day workers, artisans from the provinces, attracted by the wealth of the metropolis, all bringing their dependants with them: grandfathers with bilharzia or weak from years of malaria, scrofulous children, sufferers from amoebic dysentery—easy preys to the periodical epidemics of virulent influenza coming from no one knew where—and it was a common sight to see a funeral procession tightening its circle of black clothes and coffins around the Presidential Palace.

“Here comes the Whore!” the Mayorala Elmira would exclaim when a hearse appeared in the Plaza Mayor on its way to the cemetery.

“Be off!” replied the Head of State, joining the first and little fingers of both hands to ward off the Evil Eye.

“Even Napoleon couldn’t lick you,” concluded the
Mayorala, giving actual existence to someone whose name she took to represent the greatest power God had ever given to a human being, because coming from nothing, born in the manger as one might say, he had finally conquered the whole world—while still remaining a good son and brother, a good friend (even of his laundress, it was said when he became a great man!), and always the lover of fine women, like that one from the Caribbean, who had got hold of him you know where, because mulattos and cholas are born with the Devil between their legs … (There were some men who would throw up everything, disappear and leave home at the summons of Women of Great Power, who held their lamps in the doorway, repeating as often as there are beads on a rosary: “Let him come after me like a mad dog. Amen.”)

After a great deal of thought the Head of State devoted himself with renewed energy—energy that was diminishing with age in some directions—to the project of a great building, the material symbol in stone of his government: he would give the country a national capitol.

Once the decision was made, he planned to promote a great international concourse, open to all architects, so that they could compare ideas, projects, and plans. But hardly was the news spread around than the nation’s own architects, who had recently formed themselves into a college, protested that there were quite enough of them for such an undertaking. And then began a tiresome process of criticisms, changes, arguments, producing a succession of metamorphoses in the appearance, style, and proportions of the future building. First it was a Greek Temple with Doric columns without bases, thirty metres high—a copy of Paestum with the dimensions of the Vatican. But the Head of State thought he remembered that Kaiser Wilhelm, incarnation of Prussian barbarism, was addicted to such Hellenisms, going so far as to possess an
Achilleion, reminiscent of the Parthenon, in Corfu. Besides, the Greeks had no domes, and a capitol without a dome is no capitol at all. Better to look towards eternal Rome, mother of our culture. Therefore, our architects quickly substituted Corinthian for Doric (without passing through the Ionic) with a dome rather like that of the Palais de Justice at Brussels. However, the two hemicycles—Chamber and Senate—were too reminiscent of the theatres at Delphi and Epidaurus, and looked rather austere, cold, and false when it came to adding the rostrums, whose existence in such a place were a vital democratic necessity. A new national architect, succeeding two national architects who were already discredited and fallen into disgrace as a result of the intrigues of a great many other national architects, took his inspiration from an English illustration of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, and drew a plan of a hemicycle in the Roman style with columns above, which was for a while approved by the Council of Ministers. But then they remembered that the country was a great producer of mahogany, and that our mahogany, a deep warm red in colour, ought to be copiously used in a work of such size, to face the walls and make panelling, rostrums, benches, doors, presidential throne, etc., in both hemicycles. And since the Romans never used wood in this fashion, a fifth project for the Capitol arose, based on the neo-Gothic style of the Budapest Parliament. But as the Austro-Hungarian empire was at war with Latinity, these plans too were rejected, and someone remembered the genius Herrera and the imposing bulk of the Escorial.