Reasons of State (26 page)

This animated allegory went around the town to Central Park more than once with their Joffre in red trousers. They stopped in front of the Presidential Palace. Then they followed the Boulevard of the Republic to the upper town, just as the priests of the Divine Shepherdess were bringing out another platform supporting the Virgin in a great glittering cloak, victoriously mounted on a green dragon twisted
in its death agony—it had been taken from the altar of Saint George—from whose demonic head hung a cardboard notice bearing the word
WAR
written in thick indian ink letters. And this time women were singing the old village song:

Then the others returned through the Calle del Comercio with their mule and marshal moved by wires, playing on maracas and firing off rockets:

The retinue of the Divine Shepherdess entered the Calle de los Plateros and climbed the steps to the Boulevard Auguste Comte:

“We’re done for,” said the Head of State, watching all this with a far from happy expression.

“But, President, it’s the triumph of Reason, the triumph of Descartes.”

“Look here, Peralta: this means that the bottom will at once fall out of our market for sugar, bananas, coffee, chewing gum and gutta-percha. The days of the Fat Kine are
numbered. And people will say that my rule had nothing to do with the country’s prosperity.”

“Give orders for a grand official banquet to celebrate the victory of Sainte Geneviève over the Huns, of Joan of Arc over Clausewitz, of the Divine Shepherdess over International Communism. Now the storks can come back from Hansi to the roofs of Colmar, and Déroulède’s glorious bugle will sound. Descartes won the war, but we must mop up the mess” …

THE CAMPAIGN TO COLLECT FUNDS FOR THE Reconstruction of Regions Devastated by the War was a magnificent success; besides procuring marginal benefits as plentiful as they were uncontrollable, it re-established the prestige of the country and its intelligent government in a Europe too absorbed in the problems of peace to remember small, local exotic events taking place in the now-blurred distance of a period before a certain historic August which had turned the world upside down.

In her Red Cross nurse’s uniform, Ofelia travelled from city to city, from meeting to meeting, with an exhibition of prints, drawings, posters, and eloquent photographs showing scenes of destruction, dead villages, mine craters, severely damaged cathedrals, and crosses stretching to the horizon. “
We ask you for schools for the children of these men
” was inscribed on the desolate view of a military cemetery. “
Give me back my home
” was at the feet of a Christ pierced with bullets.

Meanwhile, this exaggerated stimulation of an already inflated prosperity swelled the tide of speculation and extravagance, nor did those whom fortune favoured pay any attention to the gloomy forecasts of some economists—puritan killjoys whose sibylline calculations were out of tune with the confident tones of those singing the praises of a myth that was renewed every day. For they were living in a fable. Without being aware of it, people were taking part in a huge conjuring
display, where all values were upset, ideas inverted, appearances changed, roads deviated, and disguise and metamorphosis created a perpetual state of illusion, transformations and topsyturvydom, through the vertiginous effect of a currency that changed its appearance, weight, and value between night and morning without ever leaving the purse—or rather, the bank account—of its owner. Everything was upside down. The poor lived in Foundation Palaces, dating from the days of Orellana and Pizarro—but now given over to filth and rats—while their masters inhabited houses belonging to no tradition, native, baroque, or Jesuitic, but theatrically got up in Mediaeval, Renaissance, or Hollywood-Andalusian colour schemes, and without the smallest connection with the country’s history, or else in large buildings aping the Second Empire style of the Boulevard Haussman. The new Central Post Office had a superb Big Ben. The new main Police Station was a temple from Luxor in eau-de-nil. The country house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a pretty miniature Schönbrunn. The President of the Chamber kept his mistress in a little Abbaye de Cluny, swathed in imported ivy. Fortunes were made and lost every night at Basque pelota courts and English greyhound races. People dined at the Villa d’Este or La Troika (a nightclub recently opened by the first White Russians arrived here via Constantinople) while only in Chinese eating houses could one eat the national dishes, now scorned as something connected with rope-soled shoes and ballads sung by the blind—Cantonese kitchen boys thus becoming conservers of the National Culinary Arts. The musical successes of the day were “Caravan,” “Egyptland,” “Japanese Sandman,” “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” and above all “Hindustan,” to be seen on the music stand of every piano, bound in a cover showing an elephant and a mahout silhouetted in black against a crimson sun. Women who profiteered
from the boom didn’t know where to go to show off their tiaras, pendants, and necklaces, and their dresses from Worth, Doucet, and Callot. And by the same token the Head of State remembered his long-cherished but now realisable desire to install an Opera House inside the Opera-City, the Capital of Fiction, and offer his compatriots a spectacle like those to be seen in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro—towns that had always kept their eyes on the arts and refinements of the Old World. Adolfo Bracale was entrusted with the task of giving the National Theatre “the best staging in the world.” Impresario of American touring companies, animated by such a passion for lyric drama that he had taken
Simon Boccanegra, Manon
, and
Lucia de Lammermoor
to the Chilean nitre works, banana growers’ haciendas, southern ports, and rubber plantations in Manaus, crossing deserts, travelling up rivers, visiting the West Indian islands great and small with his cast, wardrobe, and scenery, he was a man capable of taking the baton if the principal conductor fell ill of malaria, or of putting on
Madame Butterfly
with an orchestra of a piano, seven violins, flute, saxophone, ophicleide, two cellos, and a double bass, if nothing better could be found.

So, one fine morning, the train from Puerto Araguato entered the capital’s station bringing antique temples, alchemist’s retorts, a Scottish cemetery, several Japanese houses, the Castle of Elsinore, the platform of Sant’Angelo, monasteries, grottoes, and dungeons, all folded or rolled in pieces to be put together with expanding forests and fabric cloisters, filling so many cases that two trains were hardly enough to take the lot. And finally, when evening came, a third convoy—that of the ultra-modern dining car with its menu in French—arrived at the Terminal Station, glittering with celebrities who stepped onto the platform among magnesium flashes and a profusion of flowers, complete with officials, applause according
to their fame, and mandoline music by the Italian Colony. Chief among them was the great Enrico Caruso, wearing a double-breasted waistcoat, diamond tiepin, pale grey hat, and platinum cuff links. Amiable, verbose, and cheerful, but bewildered by so much solicitous flattery, he forgot where he was, greeted a lance-corporal as “General” and the Head Porter as “Excellency,” ignored the real minister but embraced a melomaniac who looked like a minister, distributed autographs by the dozen, kissed children, and seemed happy in surroundings reminiscent of some small Neapolitan piazza on a day of revelry. The next to appear was Titta Ruffo, scowling dramatically, robust of figure, roaring like a lion, and dressed in a light Palm Beach suit; it seemed impossible that a man of such athletic stamp could come to terms with the tormented fragility of Hamlet as displayed on the hoardings, a part he was to play in a few days’ time. Now Lucrecia Bori descended from the train, all teeth and coloratura, already assuming the role of Rosina in her Spanish hat and skirt; then Gabriella Bezanzoni, the contralto, with a knife in her garter, her expensive elegance contrasting cruelly with the feebleness of some pale North American ballerinas carrying their ballet shoes in oil-cloth bags, who got out of the presidential coach behind her. Riccardo Stracciari, wearing kid gloves and the frock coat of a close relative at an important funeral, replied to journalists’ questions in an affected voice. The tall, thin Mansueto, looking like a shady schoolmaster, had thought it amusing to disembark with Don Basilio’s shovel hat under his arm; and lastly came Nicoletti-Korman, whom we were to see bare-chested, Chaliapinesque and blaspheming in Boito’s
Mefistofele
.

The tailors of the capital worked day and night, snipping for all they were worth at cloth for tailcoats and piqué waistcoats, while the dressmakers ran from fitting to fitting
to put finishing touches or slight alterations to this and that, let out skirts, lower necklines, readjust some thin woman’s dress to her taste, stretch seams for some fat woman, let out an expectant mother’s waistband, modernise and adapt out-of-date fashions in line with the latest models. The chorus was organised from students and members of glee clubs; the best musicians in the country were united into an orchestra under the direction of an atrociously bad-tempered Bolognese who, without pausing in a passage he was conducting, would shout instructions like: “Sustain that note, you bastard,” or “Crotchets, you brute” … “
Dolce ma non pederasta
” (this was for the prelude to
La Traviata
), “
Allegro con coglioni
” (this for the overture to
Carmen
), declaring all the time—and in this he imitated his maestro Toscanini—that it was better to live among pimps and prostitutes than with musicians, although as a matter of fact as soon as the rehearsal was over he wrapped his neck in towels and went with them to the Roma, a popular and lively bar, to drink several glasses of Santa Inés rum diluted with Fernet Branca.

While waiting for the season to begin, a party was given every night in honour of the singers from La Scala and the Metropolitan, who always declared that they “weren’t in voice” before finally singing some romance from Piedigrotta’s repertory or else Tosti’s “Vorrei morire.” And meanwhile, in spite of hammering, grumbling, oaths, accidents, damage to scenery, trapdoors that failed to work, lost spears, broken accessories, a distaff left behind in Italy, inadequate spotlights, vapours from the underworld that never emerged at the right time, an invasion of rats in the dressing rooms, dysentery, spring colics, the soprano’s allergy to certain flowers, a quarrel between Mansueto and Nicoletti over a mulatto, contracts broken and signed again, the leader of the orchestra punching the second bassoon, an infinite number of complaints, several
attacks of lost voice, two boils due to the climate, mosquitoes, stained costumes, tropical rains, one hernia, more losses of voice, bruises and swellings—such an impressive and memorable
Faust
was mounted that its marvellous qualities at once passed into the verses of Gaucho singers, to the amazement of those who hadn’t heard it. Afterwards came a magnificent
Carmen
with Bezanzoni and Caruso, although in the smugglers’ act, because the pistols had been lost on the journey, the chorus was armed with Winchester rifles, but this was noticed only by the cognoscenti. Then there was a
Barber of Seville
wherein Mansueto’s Don Basilio was so truculent and comic that his performance excelled Titta Ruffo’s Figaro in brilliance and conception. Maria Barrientos’
Traviata
reduced the audience to a frenzy of delight: the
brindisi
had to be sung three times, the applause being so great as to prevent carrying on with the score; the great scene between the elder Germont and Violetta produced discreet tears, and at the end so many flowers were thrown onto the stage that when the performers made their bow they trod on a carpet of roses, carnations, and tuberoses.

The season continued triumphantly with
La Favorita
, Flotow’s
Marta
(one of Caruso’s greatest successes),
Hamlet
by Ambroise Thomas,
Rigoletto
, and
La Sonnambula
. The Head of State was happy. The opera had transformed the capital. After performances the smart cafés were full of expensively dressed people, glittering with jewels, and stared at from the street by crowds who were amazed to see here, within reach, as it were, a luxurious world hitherto only imagined through the media of romantic novels, films in a millionaire’s setting, or the covers of
Vanity Fair
in the magazine kiosks, and to find so many of our own women suddenly taking to fashion and finery in an ambience reminiscent of John Singer Sargent or Jean-Gabriel Domergue.

“We’re winning, Peralta; we’re winning them around,” said the President, looking at the sumptuous auditorium, where nothing was talked about in the intervals except racconto, portamento, fiato, tessitura, and arioso.