Part IV
GOOD TO SEE you again, Don Pedro.”
I had seen the tail of dust wind down the mountainside, soiling the morning air, as Don Camillo’s limousine moved toward my compound.
“I was not expecting another visit,” I tell him.
Don Camillo smiles. “No, I suppose not.”
“Would you care for refreshment?”
“No, not for me.”
I glance at the two bodyguards who stand beside his chair. They shake their heads. No refreshment, then.
“I hope nothing is wrong, Don Camillo.”
“Nothing serious,” Don Camillo says. He roots himself deeply into the chair. “So, I suppose you are wondering what brings me here so quickly after my last visit.”
“Yes.”
Don Camillo glances off the verandah toward the large tent that is spread across the ground. “Very nice, the national colors.”
“Dr. Ludtz’s idea, Don Camillo,” I tell him.
“Very apt. You Europeans are always so conscious of just the right touch.”
“We have planned fireworks …”
“No, no,” Don Camillo says quickly. “No fireworks, Don Pedro. It is too distracting for the guards.”
I nod. “As you wish.”
Don Camillo takes a gold cigarette case from the pocket of his white linen suit. “Cigarette, Don Pedro?”
“I don’t smoke.”
He takes a cigarette from the case. “I do.” He lights the cigarette, takes a deep inhalation, and blows a column of tumbling smoke toward my face. Just the right touch for mild intimidation.
“You were about to tell me the purpose of your visit, Don Camillo,” I remind him.
Don Camillo’s face hardens with mock seriousness. “You know, of course, about this trouble we’ve been having in the northern provinces.”
“We have spoken of it before,” I tell him. “I was not aware that it was very serious.”
“Serious? Well, no. But it’s growing, I’m afraid, Don Pedro, steadily growing.”
“I see.”
“It appears that two of the northern provinces have fallen completely to the rebels. Most distressful, as you can imagine.”
“Yes.”
“Most unfortunate,” Don Camillo says. “Don’t you think so, Don Pedro?”
“Of course.”
Don Camillo smiles with reptilian suspiciousness. “Of course, yes,” he says flatly. He takes another puff from his cigarette and leans back in his chair, his head cocked slightly toward the revolver in the belt of the guard who stands beside him. “You realize, don’t you, Don Pedro, that if El Presidente should be overthrown, your own position here in the Republic would be jeopardized?”
“Naturally.”
“Not only jeopardized, Doctor,” Don Camillo adds. He leans forward for emphasis. “Let’s speak plainly. They would crucify you, Dr. Langhof.”
It surprises me that Don Camillo thinks me capable of being moved by so common an allusion. “I know what the rebels would do,” I tell him. “I realize that my security is tied to El Presidente’s.”
Don Camillo smiles that thin, basilisk smile. Somewhere in the Republic there must be an academy that teaches these base, totalitarian facial expressions. In the Camp, there was nothing so ugly as a smile.
“Do you?” Don Camillo asks through his sneer.
“Do I what?”
“Do you perfectly realize how you are tied to El Presidente?”
Across the river I can hear a mynah bird cawing. I turn and glimpse its bright, orange beak through a fan of leaves.
“Do you perfectly understand, Dr. Langhof?” Don Camillo repeats.
I turn to face him. “Why do you doubt me, Don Camillo?”
“I doubt everyone,” Don Camillo tells me. “It is one of the rules of political life, as you must surely know, Doctor.”
I watch Don Camillo through a cloud of smoke. He insists upon a military aspect even to his civilian attire and festoons his chest with a display of ribbons and medallions. They tinkle slightly when he shifts in his seat. He has worn them to impress me with his capacity for terror. They represent his license to extract anything he wants from me, by any means he sees fit. It is the garment that legitimizes torture, that makes of it a civilized function. And so the man who wears the badge of state and then applies electrodes to his victim’s testicles does not do so as a base sadist slavering in his bedchamber, but as a cool and stately instrument of the civil will.
Don Camillo leans forward again, for emphasis; he is a man of limited gestures. “They are still hunting you, you know. That old man. Arnstein. The one who has tracked down so many others. He’s still looking. A phone call, and it would be all over for you, Dr. Langhof.”
Sometimes I see the old man, Arnstein, in my mind. He is slumped over a desk filled with papers and photographs, one of the crime’s relentless scholars.
“Many years have passed,” Don Camillo continues, “but never believe that you are forgotten.”
Against the far wall in Arnstein’s office, the files bulge, open-mouthed, screaming.
“They are still looking for you, Doctor,” Don Camillo goes on tediously, “be assured of that.”
I can see Arnstein’s files in my mind. They stand ghostly and alone — gray, silent cabinets filled with thousands of tattered papers. Somewhere among the thumbed, soiled pages, my name is underlined in red.
“There is no need to threaten me, Don Camillo.”
“A little party of commandos,” Don Camillo continues, “coming over the ridge there. What chance would you have against them? None. None whatever, let me assure you. They would come, and you would end up in a glass booth like the others.”
“How would such a circumstance serve El Presidente, Don Camillo?” I ask.
Don Camillo shakes his head. “It wouldn’t,” he says. “Not yet.” He leans back, watching me, imagining that I squirm under his gaze. His is the foolishness that conceives terror as the absolute solution. For him, the world is made secure by fear. If dread were a woman, he would take it to his bed for buggering.
“How could my leaving the Republic ever serve El Presidente’s purposes?” I ask.
“Oh, it probably couldn’t, Don Pedro,” Don Camillo admits. “But this business in the northern provinces, it’s very expensive. The treasury has been diminished. It is in need of resupply. It might be profitable for you to show your concern.”
“How might I show it?”
Don Camillo smiles. “You are very direct.”
“I have learned to be.”
“Yes. Good. Well, to your question. These diamonds you have in your possession.”
“What about them?”
“Forgive me for saying so, but you’ve been doling them out rather stingily over the years, Don Pedro.”
“El Presidente thinks me ungrateful?”
Don Camillo laughs. “No, no. Not at all. But you see, these rebels — the ones in the northern provinces — suppressing them is very expensive. My point is that perhaps you might be persuaded to give a little more than usual when El Presidente comes for his visit.”
“Then I will.”
Don Camillo looks surprised by my quick agreement. It is one of the self-justifications of the greedy to think everyone as greedy as themselves.
“You intend to make a special offering, then?” Don Camillo asks.
“Yes.”
Don Camillo’s eyes narrow. “How much?”
“Enough to make El Presidente happy.”
Don Camillo looks at me pointedly. “El Presidente is very sad, Don Pedro.”
“I will make him joyous.”
Don Camillo slaps his hands together loudly and a flock of parrots spray noisily into the air over the river. “Excellent!” Don Camillo cries. “Excellent! I knew I could depend upon you, Don Pedro.”
“You can tell El Presidente that I intend to make his visit here a very happy one.”
“I’m sure you do,”
Don Camillo says. “He always looks forward to seeing you, Don Pedro. He considers you to be one of the first citizens of the Republic.”
“I will reaffirm my loyalty to him. You may be assured of that.”
“He never doubted it, of course,” Don Camillo says. He smiles broadly, then glances at his watch. “I must go, I’m afraid.”
“So soon?”
“I’m afraid so, Don Pedro,” Don Camillo replies. He grips the arms of the chair, grunts, and rises with difficulty from the seat. He is weighed down by the burdens of state and imported cream cheese. On his feet now, he extends his hand toward me. “So good to have seen you again, Don Pedro,” he says.
“And you, Don Camillo.”
“And Dr. Ludtz, how is he?”
“He is ill. A fever.”
Don Camillo crinkles his brow, imitating concern. “Sorry to hear it. I hope he’ll be better when El Presidente visits. I would not want him to miss such an occasion.”
“Nor would I.”
Don Camillo turns slowly and moves toward the stairs. I follow behind him until one of his guards steps between us and presses his palm against my chest. “No,” he says. His face is smooth and brown, his eyes very dark, like his hair. He has the look of a matinee idol, clean and piercing. But the nature of his function contradicts the beauty of his person, transforming his lovely, graceful body into a rattling machine.
Don Camillo eases himself around. “¿Qué pasa?” he asks the guard. Then he notices the hand pressed against my chest. He laughs and sweeps the hand away. “El doctor es un amigo mio,” he says. He winks at me. “Well trained, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
Don Camillo turns again and proceeds down the stairs. “Adiós, Don Pedro.”
“Adiós.”
The guard continues to eye me carefully for a moment, then turns and follows Don Camillo down the stairs, quickly unsnapping the guardstrap of his holster. His is the thoughtful precision of the devoted servant.
At the limousine Don Camillo turns back toward me and waves his hand. In his grotesque rotundity, Don Camillo is that perfect metaphor of bloat about which exiled poets write when they turn their eyes homeward to the Republic. Casamira in New York and Sanchez in Leningrad, these two forlorn poets, separated by oceans real and ideological, and yet who both seized on the obesity of Don Camillo as the apt image for a famished land, rendered him immortal in their songs. In their twisted verse they map the sagging glut of underdevelopment and feed the minds of the northern provinces with visions of release.
A short distance from Don Camillo’s limousine I see Dr. Ludtz stagger out onto his porch, his fevered bulk supported by two canes. He lifts his hand in greeting to Don Camillo, but the grinning minister does not see him and completes the task of maneuvering himself into the back seat of the car.
As Don Camillo pulls away, a sudden cool breeze sweeps down from the mountains, splitting the heat like a sword through gossamer. Here in the Republic, we are accustomed to inversions: to the chill within the swelter, the knife beneath the velvet, the sea snake twisting in the cool, blue wave.
BELOW THE VERANDAH, the workmen are beginning to prepare the tent. They work under a sun that turns the river to a flowing amber. They erect the corner posts carefully, as they have been instructed. The poles must stand absolutely straight. Nothing is allowed to lean here in the Republic. And when the posts have been set deep in the ground, they raise the tent, a brilliant panoply of red and orange stripes. Underneath the tent, they set the table that I will prepare for El Presidente. He will bring his officers with him, for it is his habit to surround himself with the weak, the stupid, and the worshipful, all those too cowardly, incompetent, or avaricious to call his person into question.
Here, underneath the tent, the El Presidente of Casamira’s satirical invention will engorge himself with meat and fruit. He will stuff the dripping flanks of pigs into his mouth, follow that with fistfuls of brandied dates, and wash it all down with papaya juice mixed with beer. For a few hours, this compound upriver from the village of El Caliz will become the mead hall of the Republic, a place of noise and brawling, of lewd jokes and lurid tales. The people of the village will observe it all, standing barefoot behind a velvet cordon defended by well-heeled soldiers. As El Presidente feasts upon the meat and sweets, they will feast on him while their stomachs rumble under frayed rope belts. It is part of the nature of adoration to find immunity from the contradictions of reality.
The key to sudden transformation, that is what El Presidente offers. In the great sports arena where the Leader spoke, they came by the benighted millions in search of that one blinding instant that would lift them effortlessly to another life. Observe the little bald-headed burgher failing in business, despised by his wife, dismissed by his children; a man without credential, place, or influence; a man whose mind is held captive by every illusion that ensures mediocrity; a religious man to whom the Church in her grandeur gives no more than a passing nod; a business man whose connection to the engines of finance does not extend beyond a dwindling bank account; a family man whose children pay greater heed to movie stars and black musicians; a community man whose duties and responsibilities reach no further than his obligation to sweep the sidewalk once a week; a political man whom the state regards as nothing more than an annual source of petty revenue. To such a one, the Leader’s voice was clarion, concentrating all his fear and rage into one shrill cry of indignation. Through all the history of crime there runs one immemorial complaint: Save me! Save me! For I cannot save myself!
In desperation we grasp at the possibility of miracle. And of all the things desperation needs, the cruelest is speed. Thus we must have our transfiguration, and it must be sudden and entire, for the labor of the will and wisdom is too difficult, uncertain, and slow.
Juan seeks a miracle to save the orchids, a pearl dropped into the humid soil from the hand of God. Esperanza, staring at the steamy, rotting innards of a crocodile, seeks salvation from her rooted humanness, seeks to know that mystery of creation which will lift her to a golden throne. Ludtz, picking lichens from his tomb, seeks the Virgin’s comforting smile, seeks the erasure of the past, seeks to pluck saintliness from a life of shame. Alberto and Tomás seek the miraculous between the spread legs of some brown girl and see paradise in her willing smile. Don Camillo seeks his redemption in vast fields of undiscovered copper. In the variety with which we yearn for the miraculous resides our sole infinitude.
In the Camp Langhof lost all notion of miraculous transformation. He lost the capacity to plan and to will. He never thought of escape or resistance. Once, he stood in the snow and watched a Mongoloid boy hanged on the gallows not far from the medical compound. The boy was hoisted slowly by hand rather than dropped, and it took him quite some time to strangle. As he flailed about, kicking at the ground, his face became horribly contorted, and as it darkened to a deep blue, the boy took on the aspect of an ape. The similarity between the two was striking, and Langhof observed it solemnly, silently, like a scientist recording one more piece of evidence for evolution.
And yet even in this comatose state Langhof was not utterly beyond human response. Something of him remained, and Kessler called it forth that day in the courtyard behind the medical compound.
Langhof had been reclining on his bunk, obviously watching the shadows glide forward then retreat on the ceiling as the light bulb swung back and forth. There was a knock at the door, and Langhof sat up.
“Come in,” he said.
He saw the door open and Kessler’s round, beefy face peep inside.
“Ah, Dr. Langhof,” Kessler said happily, “I’m glad to find you in.”
“What can I do for you, Doctor?” Langhof asked routinely.
“Come into the courtyard,” Kessler said. “I have something I’d like for you to observe.”
“Is it important, Dr. Kessler?” Langhof asked, protesting mildly. “I was just relaxing a bit.”
“I think you will be interested,
Dr. Langhof,” Kessler said. “It suggests that the areas of research here in the Camp are constantly expanding.”
Langhof got to his feet and followed Kessler down the hallway to the exit at the side of the building.
Kessler stepped out the door and made a sharp turn into the back courtyard, a flat surface covered with freshly fallen snow. He pointed as Langhof stepped to his side. “There,” he said. “This is another area of research.”
There were about twenty of them, naked, huddling together in the snow, their skin already turning bluish in the cold, the children clinging tightly to their mothers’ bodies, one baby sucking at a freezing breast.
“We’re going to see how long it takes,” Kessler said. “Our people on the eastern front have had a very bad time of it this winter, so we need to know more about the process of freezing.”
Langhof’s eyes remained fixed on the moaning, swaying crowd that squatted a few meters from him. He could see Rausch standing beyond them at the entrance of the courtyard, his feet planted wide apart, his machine gun held casually in his hands. When their eyes met, Rausch smiled and lightly tipped his cap.
“I have no expertise in this field,” Langhof said to Kessler flatly.
Kessler smiled indulgently. “No one does, my good man,” he said. “That’s why we’re conducting this experiment, to gain expertise.”
“This particular … area,” Langhof stammered, “it does not … does not interest me.”
“We cannot always choose what interests us, Doctor,” Kessler said.
Langhof straightened himself. “Yes, sir.”
Kessler appeared irritable for a moment, then calmed himself. “I didn’t mean to be sharp with you, Dr. Langhof.”
“Quite all right, sir.”
“Well, I understand this area of research is quite a distance from hygiene.”
“Yes, sir,” Langhof said. He could feel his throat closing.
The Orchids Page 14