Reasons of State (42 page)

And she began to live there, under the slate roof, in a latitude and at times belonging to another region and another epoch.

The early morning was filled with the aroma of strong coffee, filtered through a woollen stocking and sweetened with cane syrup, which the zamba got near the Madeleine; she could always find her way there without getting lost, because she had proved that by going under the Arc de Triomphe exactly in the middle she could see the Standing Stone a long way off, and having reached it she turned left and found the building with many columns where she had given thanks for her recovery. Then followed a short rest on her hammock with a glass of aguardiente and a Romeo and Juliet cigar, and later still a cry of “Come along in” announced the appearance, on two broad mahogany tables supported on carpenter’s trestles, of a country breakfast of eggs in peppery sauce, fried black beans, maize tortillas, pork, and white cheese pounded together in a mortar and served in any leaf available—so long as it was green—for lack of a banana leaf. After that came her morning siesta, interrupted when she was half asleep about eleven, by the cholo Mendoza, bringing the daily newspapers. But these papers hadn’t seen the light in the small hours on Parisian printing presses. They were papers from overseas, had travelled a long way and were concerned with things other than current events.
Le Figaro
,
Le Journal
, and
Le Petit Parisien
never came up to this floor; they had been gradually supplanted by
El Mercurio, El Mundo
, and
Ultimas Noticias
from
over there
, or even by
El Faro
from Nueva Córdoba or
El Centinela
from Puerto Araguato. The Head of State was
beginning to forget the names of politicians
over here
, and he cared very little what was happening in Europe—although the recent assassination of Matteotti had stimulated his admiration for Italian fascism, and that great man Mussolini who was going to put an end to international communism—he was interested only in what might be happening
over there
.

(Hailed as restorer and custodian of Liberty, after a triumphal entry riding on a black horse—but without boots, and in the white drill suit he had always worn in the University—Luis Leoncio had climbed the stairs of the Presidential Palace he had described in a recent manifesto as an “Augean stable” with the majestic step of an archon, his expression stern, his gestures few, and looking coldly—with some vague threat in his retinas—at those who were over-reaching themselves to congratulate him on his triumph. Much had been hoped of the Man who—after making a roll of public employees, thanks to a prompt North American loan—had undertaken in a monkish, frugal manner the enormous task of examining the national problems. For weeks and weeks he shut himself up in his study, silent and remote, poring over estimates, statistics, and political documents, preferring to get help from technical books, encyclopedias, reports, and memoranda, rather than consult experts trained to go into these questions in detail, and analyse a whole, in the Cartesian manner, into parts whose multiplicity was obscuring the vision of the whole itself. They awaited the results of his toil with unction and eager impatience. People walked through Central Park almost on tiptoe every evening, talking in low voices and pointing to the window where lights would be burning until the small hours, and behind which Something Important was being worked out. Everyone was waiting for the Wise Man of Nueva Córdoba to speak. It couldn’t be long now. And at last he did speak, before an immense crowd gathered
in the Olympic Stadium. And his speech was a torrential onslaught—without pause to take breath—as if a dictionary were unbound, let loose, with pages in confusion, words in revolt, a tumult of concepts and ideas, accelerated impact of figures, images and abstractions in a vertiginous flood of words launched to the four winds, and moving from Morgan’s Bank to Plato’s
Republic
, from the Logos to foot-and-mouth disease, from General Motors to Ramakrishna, coming at last to the conclusion—or at least some understood it thus—that from the Mystic Marriage between the Eagle and the Condor, and as a result of the fertilisation of our inexhaustible soil by foreign investment, our America would be transformed by the vigorous technology that would come to us from the north (and we were on the threshold of a century that would be the Century of Technology for our Young Continent), by the light of our own innate spirituality, a synthesis would be born of the Vedanta, the Popol Vuh, and the parables of Christ-the-first-socialist, the only true socialist, nothing to do with Moscow Gold or the Red Peril, or an exhausted, dying Europe, without sap or talent—and it would be as well for us to break finally with its useless teaching—whose hopeless decadence had been proclaimed not long ago by the German philosopher Oswald Spengler. The start of this new era, in which the thesis-antithesis of north-south was complemented by the telluric and the scientific, would be manifested in the creation of a New Humanity, the Alpha-Omega, the party of Hope, expressing the
sturm-und-drang
, the political pulse of new generations, marking the end of dictatorships in this continent, and establishing a true and authentic Democracy, where there would be freedom of syndical action, provided that it did not break the necessary harmony between Capital and Labour; the need for an opposition must be recognised, provided that it was a
co-operative opposition
(critical, yes, but always
constructive
); the right to strike was accepted, provided that the strikes didn’t paralyse private enterprise or public services; and, finally, the Communist Party would be legalised, since it in fact existed in our country, provided that it did not obstruct the functioning of institutions nor stimulate class war.

And by the time the orator brought his speech to an end with “Long live our country!” he had uttered so many “buts,” “howevers,” “neverthelesses,” “despite the sayings,” and “provided thats” that his hearers were left with the impression that time had stood still, independently of the ticking of clocks, and that when the Austere Doctor stepped down from the rostrum he left behind him a total mental emptiness—blank brains and an agnostic trance in his listeners.

And in the ensuing months all was dismay and confusion. The Provisional President—not so provisional after all—could never come to any decision. Every suggestion made by his colleagues, every measure to be applied at once, seemed to him “premature,” “inopportune,” “hasty,” because “we weren’t ready,” “it wasn’t yet time for that,” “the masses weren’t mature enough,” etc. And after a few months scepticism and shrugging of shoulders became the order of the day, and living for the day’s pleasure, and renewed interest in lottery tickets and guitars and maracas on the part of those who had been too optimistic, while at the same time there was talk of “Discontent in the Army.”

“A military coup on the way,” prophesied the Head of State. “It wouldn’t be anything new. As the proverb says: ‘One stripe more on a tiger makes very little difference.’ ”

“But now they say that it’s the
young officers
who are involved,” remarked the cholo.

“Sub-machine guns instead of machetes,” said the former holder of Power. “It’s all the same.”

But there was something new in the air:
Liberation
, now a legal newspaper, appeared every morning and contained eight pages—in spite of which, from time to time it would be unexpectedly suppressed by officious members of Alpha-Omega, who overturned crates, dispersed the galley proofs, and beat up the linotypists. People who couldn’t possibly be suspected of Communist affiliation were working together on the paper at the time, and signing their names at the foot of their articles. The music publishing house of Francis Salabert in Paris had received an order for a thousand copies of the “Internationale,” which was now being sung
over there
in a Spanish translation, recently published in Mexico by Diego Rivera in a review called
El Machete
.

And so the months passed, February papers being read in April, and those of October in December, while past events were talked of more and more and vanished individuals came to life. A Yesterday, unmistakably
yesterday
though present today, was living among us in flesh and blood that was in process of losing its fleshly nature, because it was obvious that the usually tall, strapping figure of the
Ex
was beginning to deteriorate, as it was also obvious that the passage of time was progressively speeding up, diminishing and narrowing the space between one Christmas and the next, between one military review of July 14 and the next military review of July 14, so that the huge flag fluttering beneath the Arc de Triomphe appeared to have been there ever since the last occasion. Chestnuts bloomed, chestnuts dropped their flowers, chestnuts bloomed again, as pages from the calendar were thrown into the wastepaper basket, and Monsieur le Président’s tailor came again and again to the Rue de Tilsitt to alter his clothes to fit a dwindling anatomy, growing thinner day by day. His watch chain retreated visibly over a less prominent waistcoat, while his shoulders, formerly held up
with inflexible rigidity, were now drooping over collarbones relieved of the extra flesh on his thorax—as the Mayorala noticed when at bath time she rubbed her President’s chest with sponge and loofah. And since this progressive loss of flesh alarmed her and she didn’t believe in medicine in bottles such as was sold here, she had dictated—stammered, rather—a letter to the cholo Mendoza, arranging that a certain Balbina, from the village of Palmar de Siquire, where there was no post office, should send her a parcel of healing herbs—to travel by donkey, mule, bicycle, bus, several trains, two boats, and another train, and be picked up today by Elmira at the Parcels Office in the Rue Etienne Marcel. Her Ex-President and Ex-Ambassador went with her because a great many forms had to be filled in and signed, and all this was for people who could read and write—and in French, which made it far worse.

With the package wrapped in a scarf, and all three wearing thick overcoats because it was a cold day, though the sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky, Elmira had her first sight of the towers of Notre-Dame. When she heard it was the Cathedral of Paris she insisted on going there to light a candle to the Virgin. She stopped still in amazement in front of the building.

“What I say is: we ought to do things like this in our country to attract tourists.” The figures on the tympanum and lintels reminded her of the sculptures of Miguel Estatua, her fellow countryman from Nueva Córdoba.

“The zamba isn’t being foolish,” remarked the
Ex
, who hadn’t hitherto noticed the stylistic resemblance between the two, especially in the devils’ faces, the rearing horse, the horned demons, and all the infernal zoology of the Last Judgement. There followed an awestruck Penetration into the Nave—the nave alight with the whole gamut of colour from its windows, the figures of the visitors making dark silhouettes
against this brilliance, slight forms in this mid-afternoon of fictitious spring. They sat down to rest between the two rose windows in the transept. At the other end of the row of seats, a young man in a long overcoat and warm muffler was gazing at everything with deep and careful attention.

“A worshipper,” said the Mayorala.

“An aesthete,” said Mendoza.

“A student from the Beaux-Arts,” said the Head of State. And in a low voice, to entertain the zamba, he began telling her, like a grandfather to his grandchild, true stories of things he had seen here: the archdeacon who was enamoured of a gypsy who used to make a white nanny goat dance to a tambourine (Elmira had seen gypsies like that when she was a child, but they had made a bear dance); and the story of the itinerant poet who egged on some beggars to attack the church (“When there’s rioting churches always get damaged,” said Elmira, remembering a case that it would have been better to forget); and the story of a hunch-backed bell ringer, who was also in love with the gypsy (“hunchbacks are very amorous, and women notice this, but only want to touch the hump because it brings good luck”); and the story of two skeletons that seemed to be embracing and perhaps were those of Esmeralda and the bell ringer (“such cases have been seen, so the old village sexton used to tell in his song; we’ve got a record of it”). But now the organ began blaring a sudden outburst of music. They couldn’t hear each other speak.

“Let’s go,” said the
Ex
, thinking of the delicious Alsace wine they served at the café on the corner, where it would certainly be warmer than here.

But the “worshipper”—as Elmira had called him—was still sitting in his seat at the far end of the row, absorbed in dazzled contemplation. It was his first encounter with Gothic architecture. And the Gothic arches and stained-glass windows
rising on both sides were an unsuspected revelation to him; beside this all other architecture seemed to him primitive, rooted in the earth, chthonic, even when it was expressed in terms conforming to the principles of Proportion, the Golden Rules. This building, soaring upwards in exaltation of verticality, seemed to him to make even the pediments of the Parthenon dwindle, for they were merely a living, exalted version of the sloping roof of the archaic dwelling, and its fluted column was a transcendent, glorified form of the roof tree—four tree trunks, six or eight—which supported the lintels and cedarwood beams of the rustic doorways of peasants. In Greek and Roman times this original relationship with the telluric and vegetal was lost. From the hut of Eumeus the swineherd to the temple of Phidias, the way was clear and open, through a series of successive stylisations. Here, on the other hand, architecture had become a matter of invention, ideas, pure creation, materials had achieved unheard-of lightness—as if stone were weightless—with a nervature owing nothing to the structure of trees—and with the characteristic suns of the prodigious rose windows: Northern Sun, Southern Sun. The contemplator in the transept was caught between these two suns, the fiery red of the sunset and the grave, mystical blue symphony of the north window. On the north window the Mother occupied the centre of a temporal court—to receive Intercession, as it were—of prophets, kings, judges, and patriarchs. On the south—in the blood of sacrifice—the Sun ruled over an ecclesiastical court of apostles, confessors, martyrs, wise virgins and foolish virgins. The entire mystery of birth, death, the eternal renaissance of life, and the changing seasons was to be found in the straight, imaginary, and invisible line stretched between the two central circles of those immense sources of light, openings in a structural magnificat rising from the ground, as if suspended weightlessly from its
bells and gargoyles. From the shadows, the organ pipes suddenly broke out into triumphal fanfares.