Reasons of State (32 page)

“All right. As you don’t want to come to an understanding with me, I give you three days to leave the country. Ask Peralta for anything you want. You can go where you like. Paris, for instance. I’ll give instructions for you to get a month’s allowance extra, unconditionally. You won’t have to go to our embassy. Your friends won’t be surprised to see you go, because they’ll know that you’re
finished
as a revolutionary here … No! Wait a moment! Don’t be melodramatic! I’m not trying to buy you off: I’m offering you the Paris of women and Maxim’s restaurant, as I would one of our social climbers. I’m offering you the Paris of the Sorbonne, of Bergson, of Paul Rivet, who seems to know a lot about us, and certainly published the other day a magnificent piece of research into a mummy I presented to the Trocadero Palace. The rest is your affair. Salute Racine from me when you visit Saint-Etienne-du-Mont; and Voltaire and Rousseau in the Panthéon. Or if you want to make your Prayer on the Acropolis in the Bolshevik manner, you’ve got the Mur des Fédérés at Père Lachaise … There’s something for all tastes … you can choose.” (And he repeated “You can choose” several times in an increasingly ambiguous tone of voice.)

“I’ve got nothing to do in Paris,” said the Student, after a marked pause.

“I leave it to you. Stay here, then. But from Tuesday” (the day after tomorrow) “I shall give orders for you to be killed without hesitation, wherever you are found.”

“My death would be the worst possible publicity for you.”

“My boy, the law of flight is a universally accepted lie. Like saying that a fugitive committed suicide, or that a man hanged himself in his cell because they forgot to take away his shoelaces. And that happens in the most civilised countries, where they have spendid leagues of human rights and other equally respectable institutions to safeguard the Liberty and Dignity of the Individual. Ah! And I warn you that anyone who has sheltered you will fall with you, their family and all. Understand?”

“May I go now?”

“Go to hell! And prepare your epitaph:
Here lies one who died because he was stupid
.” The Student got up. The Head of State made a gesture of dismissal, not wanting to risk holding out his hand for fear of a snub.

“You don’t know how sorry I am. Such an estimable young man. The worst of it is that I envy you: if I were your age I should be with your lot. But you don’t know what it’s like governing these countries. You don’t know what it’s like cultivating the soil with human material that …” The Head of State’s reflection vanished in an avalanche of broken glass. The mirror, the shelves, pictures, and fireplace had come crashing down in a confusion of plaster, broken laths, gilt woodwork, splinters, and paper, with a thunderous, ear-splitting noise, which seemed to reverberate in the chest and stomach. The President, very pale, brushing away the powdered plaster that whitened his frock coat, gazed at the destruction. The Student had fallen on the floor. Now he was feeling himself all over
and looking for blood on his hands. His face, first, because women were important to him.

“Nothing. We’ve escaped death this time,” said the President.

“And did you think I was idiotic enough to throw bombs at myself?” said the other, getting up.

“Yes, I believe you now. But that changes nothing. What I said before; that’s all.”

The room was filling with people: servants, officials, police, the Mayorala Elmira, the secretaries.

“Go out this way,” said the Head of State, taking the Student to a little room next door, decorated in pink with elegantly licentious engravings on the wall and a wide sofa covered in cushions, connected with the street by a spiral staircase, the subject of much gossip in the town.

“Is this how the girls come in?”

“At my age, I can still hold their interest. You’ve realised that.” And putting his hand on the young man’s shoulder: “To you I must seem a sort of Caligula, don’t I?”

“More like Caligula’s horse,” replied the other, driven to some unheard-of insolence, before dashing down the stairs with the speed of a squirrel.

The Head of State was so dumbfounded that when Doctor Peralta appeared, all he could say was:

“Open up downstairs. And let him go free.”

“They’ve just brought the first-aid chest, Señor.”

“I don’t think I need it. I’m quite all right. All right. All right.” And he felt his body, from chest to knees, but his fingers found neither pain nor moisture.

IN MARCH OF THAT YEAR IT WAS NECESSARY TO extend the Moratorium, because the result of an official decision not to extend it had been that all those who normally operated it had prolonged, stretched, and extended it to the limits of the calendar. Bad faith, trickery, and cunning combined with insolvency, all sheltered under the magic, healing, and somewhat sepulchral word
Moratorium
. No one paid for anything. The inhabitants of labourers’ quarters and tenements received rent collectors with blows from sticks and stones, and loosed the dogs at them to drive the message home. Merchants from the Canary Islands, Syrian pedlars, and dealers on credit were accused of being anarchists by housewives sure that the police were close at hand, should they insist on presenting a long-due account for lace or lingerie. Things were bought on credit and pawned the same day, cash taken from here to stop a deficiency there, and people had recourse to bullies and moneylenders, were perpetually shuffling papers or attaching signatures and bribes to the margin of denunciations, and lived by expedients and miracles, by lotteries and borrowing, while there were so many dud cheques in circulation that even those who still had a reputation for wealth had to pay cash for everything. The result of all this was that the
new town decreased—that is the word:
decreased
—as rapidly as it had increased. What had been large grew smaller, flatter, contracted, as if returning to the clay of its foundations. Suddenly exuding poverty, the city’s ambitious skyscrapers—now more like fogscrapers than skyscrapers—looked smaller as their topmost storeys were deserted, abandoned by companies that had gone bust, and made opaque and gloomy by stains of damp, the sadness of dirty windows, loneliness of statues grown leprous in a few weeks. Unpainted, uncared for, these buildings combined to make a sort of urban grisaille that degraded, crippled, and decomposed the modern part of the town, swathing it in the decay of what had already been old at the beginning of the century. The porches of the Stock Exchange, half asleep and almost deserted, had been transformed into a market for the sale of singing birds, parrots, and turtles, with stalls of salad vegetables and sweet corn, workshops for cobblers and knife grinders, sellers of prayers and amulets and booths where one could consult healers using mountain herbs. (“For you with sugar in your blood, an infusion of purple basil is good; for you, for your asthma, cigars of double bellflower; for you, for the discharge from your member, coconut milk with hollands; and for you, neighbour, for delayed monthly, balsam tea with two leaves of lentisk, applied here—excuse me—between your legs …”)

“The merchants of the temple,” sighed the Head of State, in biblical mood.

“In spite of the Treaty of Versailles, things are going badly in Europe,” said Doctor Peralta by way of consolation, dreaming of another good long, enjoyable war, perhaps nearer than people thought. “With his Fourteen Points, Wilson has annoyed everyone.”

Countless notices of clearance sales and liquidations sang the requiem of business firms. Abandoned by their
contractors, buildings that had not passed the stage of their milk teeth (with incipient walls not yet as high as a man) were to be seen everywhere, ruins of the unborn, presences of what had never existed, permanent beginnings, with roofless drawing rooms, staircases leading nowhere, involuntarily Pompeian columns, while vast urbanisations and building lots in the outskirts had been re-conquered by the plants descending from the mountains—plants returning to the capital with their bells and festive plumes; and behind them shrubs, and behind the shrubs trees and tree ferns, all the seedling vegetation of Quick Advance and Quick Growth, shading the small stones amongst which exiled snakes were now returning to spawn. Meanwhile, the hills surrounding the city had been overspread with a rash of shacks made of corrugated iron, tarred cloth, packing-cases, or newspapers pasted together, supported on wooden props, and placed on such impossibly steep slopes that the early spring rains were tilting their floors and tumbling whole families into the river bed. These were the Squalor towns, the Hunger towns, the Shanty towns, from which every night the spectator could contemplate the paradisal view of the town with all its lights—shops selling silver and cut glass, specialist philatelists, and wine shops with their vintage bottles, where there were still people who planned tombolas in aid of the Preservation of Colonial Churches, or elected a beauty queen to represent us (Creole, but not too dark-skinned) in the International Contest of Coral Gables, whence came the waltz “On Miami Shore,” now all the rage.

That year the sugar mills had closed down earlier than usual. Left to their fate, the wounds in the trunks of the rubber trees in the southern jungles healed over. There were more strikes in the north, rioting in the sawmills of Ciudad Urrutia, bloody clashes between miners and the army in Nueva Córdoba. Several armed bands, under hitherto
unknown ringleaders, roamed the mountains of the south, burning farms, sacking warehouses, attacking barracks, and for two or three days taking possession of villages where they made the mayor, merchants, and notables dance to their tune, firing at the ground to increase their animation. The authorities of some provinces were powerless against the rebels, who—as had been observed more than once in the history of the country—awoke from their meek, resigned slumber of thirty years’ duration to pass suddenly, when least expected, to a violence thought by our sociologists to be foreign to the congenital good nature so characteristic of the national temperament. Peasants suffering from malaria and bilharzia, sandal-shod, and hollow-eyed with disease, now rode on wretched flea-bitten nags, covered with sores and spavins, against the magnificent shining Kentucky-bred horses of the Rural Police. There were battles between catapults and Mausers, or the knives and goads of farmhands against well-sharpened regulation machetes. In the bigger villages they fought with tiles, bricks, stones, and sometimes dynamite, against bullets.

All these events kept the Head of State confined within an island, an island with lookout posts and windows, many gates, and a symmetrical arrangement of palm trees which was the Presidential Palace—where he received so many confused, contradictory, false or true reports, optimistic or tinged with gloom, that it was impossible to gather a clear, general, and chronological picture of what was happening. Anyone wanting to minimise the severity of a defeat denied its importance and spoke of a meeting between bandits and cattle rustlers, when they had really clashed with a strong popular force; anyone wanting to justify his impotence exaggerated the size of the hostile forces; anyone wanting to conceal his complete lack of information sidetracked the facts.

“You remind me of those European generals,” said the Head of State angrily, “who, having lost a battle, speak of ‘strategic withdrawal’ or ‘straightening the line,’ elegant ways of admitting that they’ve received a thorough thrashing.”

And governors and garrison commanders fell from grace, as did leaders in uniform or in panama hats; so that there was a continual shuffle and re-shuffle of dismissals, replacements, substitutions, responsibility taken away and given back again, unwelcome tasks entrusted to those who preferred to remain at home, renunciations exacted by telegram, summonses to ex-colleagues out of a job, patriotic speeches, and exhortations to national concord. And the island of the palace became more isolated day by day, with its ever-closer concentration of government servants, who felt themselves protected and defended, as it were, between these walls of good Colonial masonry, against hostile forces which like a swell caused by distant hurricanes (for their course was just as unpredictable) pounded against sentry boxes, loopholes, and parapets, where the bluish metal of long weapons gleamed at all hours of the day. And there were sandbags—a precaution that is never unnecessary—on the flat roofs of the building. There was a smell of criminal assault in the air. A door suddenly banging in the wind, the brutal starting up of a motorcycle, a flash of lightning from a dry sky, without the warning of rain—as so often happened during these months—produced a sudden scare, and the Mayorala Elmira’s “Don’t be so stupid!” echoed through the vastness of the well-guarded corridors like the repeated leitmotiv in a Wagnerian opera.

“Be tough with them, President, be tough. You must be tougher,” said Peralta when some unpleasant incident occurred to darken a new day. But the worst of it was that, though he might have been tough previously, it had now become difficult, because beside the island of the palace another
island—extremely close yet inaccessible—had sprung up in the city: a yellow island, overcharged with mouldings and ornament, Californian plateresque in style, in the shape of a block almost next door, which grew and grew steadily. In it were to be found the cool shadows of the Hotel Cleveland, the grocery smelling of maple syrup, the half-asleep Clearing House, Sloppy Joe’s Bar, and various curio and souvenir shops, which for lack of local handicrafts—our people were very musical but deficient in plastic feeling—sold ponchos from Oaxaca, Cuban rattles, shrunken heads, half nutshells containing fleas dressed for weddings and funerals, gaudy buttons and other things not produced in the region, as well as bogus archaeological finds. And the centre of this island was the American Club—where, according to reliable information—as well as poker parties, meetings of Daughters of the Revolution, sessions of Masons wearing Turkish fezes, celebrations of Independence Day, Thanksgiving, July 4, and Halloween—with firecrackers and children carrying illuminated pumpkins—serious discussions took place about the national crisis, disorder and bankruptcy, reaching the incredible conclusion that, for lack of anyone better, the Man needed at this moment—their last hope as it were—might well be Luis Leoncio Martínez, defeated at Nueva Córdoba it was true, but suddenly and astonishingly approved by the North American Department of State.