Reasons of State (45 page)

GREY WITH HEAVY RAIN, NOT A LITTLE SNOW AND years of neglect, the small pantheon with two doric columns still stood in the cemetery of Montparnasse, not far from the tomb of Porfirio Díaz, and close to those of Baudelaire and General Aupick. Anyone gazing into the interior through the black grille protecting a door with glass panes set in gold-coloured metal would see a simple altar on which stood an image of the Divine Shepherdess—a copy of the image worshipped in her Sanctuary at Nueva Córdoba. At her feet, under a mystic garland of roses and cherubs, was a marble ark supported on four jaguars, in which a little of the earth of the Sacred Soil of the Homeland was kept.

What perhaps some people didn’t know was that Ofelia, thinking that the Earth is all one and that the earth of the Earth is earth of the Earth everywhere—
memento homo, quia pulvis est et in pulverem reverteris
—had collected this sacred earth, guarded in perpetuity by the four symbolic jaguars, from a flower bed in the Luxembourg gardens.

Havana–Paris
.

1971–1973

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

	AFTER MIDNIGHT by Irmgard Keun	978-1-935554-41-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE by Ödön von Horváth	978-1-935554-47-9 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE LATE LORD BYRON by Doris Langley Moore	978-1-935554-48-6 $18.95 / $21.50 CAN
	THE TRAIN by Georges Simenon	978-1-935554-46-2 $14.00 / $16.00 CAN
	THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP by W. H. Davies	978-1-61219-022-8 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	FAITHFUL RUSLAN by Georgi Vladimov	978-1-935554-67-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE PRESIDENT by Georges Simenon	978-1-935554-62-2 $14.00 / $16.00 CAN
	THE WAR WITH THE NEWTS by Karel Capek	978-1-61219-023-5 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE by Cheikh Hamidou Kane	978-1-61219-054-9 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet	978-1-61219-056-3 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

	THE MADONNA OF THE SLEEPING CARS by Maurice Dekobra	978-1-61219-058-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	THE BOOK OF KHALID by Ameen Rihani	978-1-61219-087-7 $15.00 / $17.00 CAN
	YOUTH WITHOUT GOD by Ödön von Horváth	978-1-61219-119-5 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	THE TRAVELS AND SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN by Rudolf Erich Raspe	978-1-61219-123-2 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	SNOWBALL’S CHANCE by John Reed	978-1-61219-125-6 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	FUTILITY by William Gerhardie	978-1-61219-145-4 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	THE REVERBERATOR by Henry James	978-1-61219-156-0 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	THE RIGHT WAY TO DO WRONG by Harry Houdini	978-1-61219-166-9 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	A COUNTRY DOCTOR’S NOTEBOOK by Mikhail Bulgakov	978-1-61219-190-4 $15.00 / $15.00 CAN
	I AWAIT THE DEVIL’S COMING by Mary MacLane	978-1-61219-194-2 $16.00 / $16.00 CAN