by Unknown
‘In my case, the voice will be Hercules Lighthouse,’ said Tito Balboa, Stringer. ‘Who better to entrust a voice to? A novel in which the lighthouse will describe the things it’s seen. Can you imagine everything the lighthouse has seen?’
‘Over two thousand years,’ mused Gabriel.
‘Under this lighthouse, there’ll be another. Or what do you think? That there weren’t lighthouses and lighthouse keepers before the Romans?’
‘You can talk about the first fight between Hercules and the giant Geryon, which gave rise to the city.’
‘No, thanks. No mythology. The lighthouse will describe.’ Balboa grins naughtily, ‘I bet it’s always been a good place for a quickie. Now couples do it in the car. Listening to foreign radio stations. Thing about the lighthouse is you can see without being seen.’
‘How about you?’ asked Gabriel. ‘Have you seen that?’
‘No. But the lighthouse has.’
The green door. Dr Montevideo’s students of advanced stenography entered and left through there. In addition to Tito or Stringer, Gabriel paid particular attention to a man who reminded him of the actor Monty Clift. Because of his sunny and afflicted, scrupulous expression, with a curly fringe, and because of the changes in his appearance. He was almost always well dressed, even elegant. But other times he looked terrible, hadn’t shaved, with creases in his clothes as if he’d slept in them. Dr Montevideo was never among those who came and went. Gabriel had never seen him, but knew he couldn’t be one of them. When Catia agreed, said he could try, give it a go, he almost ran towards the green door.
Gabriel opened the green door, walked along a windowless corridor with the light on, and then climbed a spiral staircase which led to a room in the mezzanine. He knocked at a second green door with a pane of frosted glass. Thought he heard a kind of onomatopoeia, a verbal piece of stenography. Pushed open the door. Found himself immersed in a space that was both tiny and infinite. Whose four walls were covered in murals showing marine life. The style was unmistakably Sada’s, and Gabriel remembered what this painter, his mother’s friend, used to say about the sea’s restless paradise, shoals that were now only to be found deep down. In this illusion of anemones, starfish, polyps, spirographs, sponges, gorgonians, sea-lilies, urchins, jellyfish, the bed where this smoky Poseidon was sitting seemed to be afloat. Gabriel noticed a colony of sea urchins in one corner of the room. They looked like a chromatic wheel containing all the passions. Among the lighter, pink violet urchins, he distinguished a scarlet urchin. The colour of Catia’s nails.
Dr Montevideo was sitting up in bed, against some pillows, writing on sheets supported by a wooden book-rest. He was smoking a large cigar held more by his teeth than by his lips – a yellow, uneven, gap-filled set of teeth. To his right, on a night table, was a bottle of whisky and a glass. The rest of the bed was strewn with papers, most of which had been covered in shorthand, though some had been typed and corrected by hand. To one side of the bed was a cardboard box wrapped in silver foil which served as a wastepaper basket. It was full of scrunched-up pieces of paper. Some had fallen to the floor like decomposed spheres.
His bulging eyes seemed to be held in place by thick-framed glasses. He rested his cigar on a ceramic plate. Still writing, without looking up, he asked, ‘What would you think of someone who recites beautiful poems and sings melancholy songs before committing a crime? Does this affect the poems they recite and the songs they sing?’
‘I don’t see why it should,’ answered Gabriel.
‘You don’t see why it should? Well, think about it. And tomorrow we’ll talk. You know? A friend of mine, the argonautic painter, wants high literature from me. I’m currently tied up with the implications.’ He coughed. ‘Actually I just scrawl, it’s poor Catia who does the writing. One day, there should be a tribute to the heroines of typing. Now help me bring a bit of order to this apocalypse. Put those planets back in the wastepaper basket and then pour me two glass-dilating fingers from the bottle. Make it three.’
Some time later, Gabriel Samos would know that what Dr Montevideo was writing was A Dramatic History of Culture. Being the first to arrive at the academy, he’d often find Catia immersed in the work of typing up the doctor’s notes. He liked to act as Green Door Messenger between the classroom where Catia held sway and the doctor’s sea-bed. He felt comfortable in the mezzanine and, though he abandoned his classes for much of the course, he didn’t stop visiting the Tachygraphic Rose to see Catia, of course, and to climb the stairs to the cabin, to experience this strange ascent to the depths of the sea. He came back the following summer, in the middle of June 1963, with renewed anxiety. The transcription of the doctor’s notes meant Catia was busier than ever and even devoted some class time to her labour. She typed with astonishing speed, without apparent effort. Her hands transformed the heavy Hispano-Olivetti into a fantastic machine. Her face had also changed. She typed the same or more quickly, but with a sense of urgency. Gabriel approached the corner where she worked one day to ask her something. She carried on typing. Said, ‘Just a moment!’ He looked for the sake of looking. Peered over her shoulder. He liked to see how the words appeared. As if they’d been excavated rather than printed. As Catia’s fingers galloped along, possessing the machine, he tapped his fingers against his thighs, keeping time. A reflex action. Except that now his fingers moved nervously like the Stanley compass needle. He read on the excavated page:
Who was this German jurist Spain paid tribute to in 1962? He was something more than a jurist. He was once considered the Kronjurist, the Third Reich’s ‘official jurist’. The architect . . .
‘Yes, Gabriel, what is it?’
The lawyer Paúl Santos described Dr Montevideo’s classes of advanced stenography as a chair of humanism. The man who resembled Monty Clift was, needless to say, his most attentive pupil. And more and more openly drawn to Catia. They – Stringer, Gabriel and the other pupils – were also admirers, but it was enough for them if she’d straighten their elbows. Sometimes they’d do it deliberately, get out of shape, so that she’d come and correct their posture.
‘What’s your job?’
‘I’m a lawyer, Mr Montevideo. A lawyer.’
‘A lawyer, eh? A man of law. That’s good. A good lawyer has to be a good writer. Use words with the utmost propriety. Like a doctor. A good doctor is the one who puts together a story that will convince his patient. As for a pathologist, he has to be even more precise, since he has to convince a corpse, not a patient. High praise of a text is that it’s as precise as a forensic report. Some writers aspire to this, to forensic precision. I’ve known pathologists, however, who were very competent in their field, but dissatisfied with their scientific language and envious of the precision of poetry. “Meadows sweet where flames are under.” What do you think? “A Song of Opposites” by Mr Keats. Now isn’t that an example of extraordinary precision concerning human beings? A good prosecutor should also be a good writer. And a judge. A judge has to rearrange all the pieces and construct a credible story for the future as well. Not make a mockery of justice. It sounds as if it’s asking too much. But it isn’t.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘For justice today, it’s enough not to be unjust. Not as difficult as they make it out to be. You just have to let conscience do its thing. “Conscience is the mental activity of esteeming the good.” Xohán Vicente Viqueira, yes siree! But there’s something else very important. The police report. Which could be described as materia prima. The point of origin. The policeman who produces that report really does have to be a good writer. He’s the one who investigates. The sniffer dog who follows the trail. Selects clues. Everything a policeman writes is politically committed literature. Don’t you think so, Mr Santos?’
He knew he’d been detected. Peered through the doctor’s thick lenses like a corpse trying to return the pathologist’s searching gaze.
‘I quite agree, Dr Montevideo.’
‘Can I help?’ asked Gabriel.
Before alighting on the keys, his fingers trembled like the Stanley compass needle. After that, it was plain sailing.
‘A Sacred Feast’
Madrid, 21 March 1962
It took place in the main auditorium of number 1 Marina Española Square, central headquarters of the only party, known as the National Movement. ‘Large turnout,’ it said in the newspaper reports. In the presence of ministers and numerous representatives of the regime, together with members of the judiciary and ecclesiastical hierarchy, the then director of the Institute of Political Studies, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, welcomed Carl Schmitt as an honorary member. The first time such an award had been made in this centre which was conceived as a factory of ideas during the dictatorship. Created in 1939, after Franco’s victory and Hitler’s rise to power, the Institute always gave Schmitt preferential treatment, as an intellectual, publishing his texts and commentaries on his works.
Who was this German jurist Spain paid tribute to in 1962? He was something more than a jurist. He was once considered the Kronjurist, the Third Reich’s ‘official jurist’. The architect of Nazi legality. The proponent of ‘a state of emergency’, for whom, after Hobbes, ‘auctoritas non veritas facit legem’. Authority, not truth, makes law. The deviser of Decisionism, by which the ‘providential’ nature of absolute power was brought up to date, so that the monarch was now the Caudillo or the Führer. In practice, a futuristic formulation of tyranny for the masses. Unlike other periods, when the mark of a tyrant was his obscene contempt for the law, Schmitt’s great conjuring trick was to transform the tyrant into Supreme Judge, the maker of law, the one who imprints the law with his footsteps.
After the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, Carl Schmitt spent a brief period in the internment camp of Berlin Lichterfelde-Süd and in Nuremberg as a defendant and witness, proceedings he managed to slip away from with customary ease. Regarding this experience, he wrote Ex Captivitate Salus, which contains a single show of repentance in the use of Macrobius’ Latin phrase ‘Non possum scribere in eum qui potest proscribere’. I cannot write against one who has the power to proscribe. An equivocal statement in a master of oblique expression. A surprising device in someone who read Melville and knew the scrivener Bartleby’s response when asked to do something that went against his conscience, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Some were brave enough to say no. In the legal field, the courageous Hans Kelsen, for example, who had an argument with Schmitt about parliamentary democracy and, having been proscribed, branded ‘an enemy’, carried on defending freedom while in exile. Some at least resisted the crushing totalitarian machine in silence. Schmitt did not. On the contrary, his contribution to the rise of Nazism was enthusiastic and systematic during the crucial period 1933–1936. Before that, he had helped to undermine the Weimar Republic by proposing an abuse of presidential power that foreshadowed modern forms of dictatorship.
He had Donoso Cortés, the gleam of the sabre, in mind.
He was helped to join the Nazi party in 1933 by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, later Rector of Freiburg University, who also wanted to descend to Plato’s cave and requisition the projector of ideas. ‘Whoever loves storm and danger should listen to Heidegger!’ he exclaimed on 30 November in Tübingen. Such rhetoric excited Schmitt, who also declared, ‘When Heidegger speaks, the mist disappears from in front of our eyes.’ This may not have been so important. For many, part of Schmitt’s charm resided in his ability to use disguises. With a following wind, however, he would abandon his cryptic style and his prose would advance with perilous determination. On 1 August 1934, the then professor in Berlin wrote in the German jurists’ newspaper, Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, the most daring legal formulation of tyranny in modern times: ‘Only the Führer is called to distinguish between friends and enemies. The Führer heeds the warnings of German history, which gives him the right and the necessary force to bring about a new State and a new order. It is the Führer who defends law against abuse when, at a moment of danger, through the powers invested in him as Supreme Judge, he directly creates Law.’ This was not just an instrumental gift for Hitler’s future. The text served to justify, a posteriori, the executions ordered by the Führer on 30 June that year, during the so-called Night of the Long Knives. Among those eliminated was an old friend of Schmitt’s, the chancellor Schleicher. Later his contributions, which continued to be forthright, were aimed at legitimising the Third Reich’s aggressive expansion. There is an idea that pervades his work, that of war as midwife.
‘And Cain killed Abel. This is how the history of mankind begins.’ Schmitt’s lapidary statement. During a lecture at Cologne University in 1940, he instructed his students to convert ideas and concepts into ‘pointed weapons’. His whole way of thinking is martial. Including ‘true’ politics, which he considers inseparable from the dialectic friend-enemy. Nor are the numerous images and metaphors inspired by religion disconnected from the idea of a theocratic totalitarianism which would influence his Spanish friends so strongly. It is no coincidence that his greatest affinity was with those who advocated ‘holy intransigence, holy coercion and holy shamelessness’. Schmitt defined himself as ‘a Christian Epimetheus’. Epimetheus ignored his brother Prometheus’ advice and married Pandora, who opened the jar or box and unleashed devastating forces. ‘I am a Catholic not just in accordance with my religion,’ he wrote in 1948, ‘but also in accordance with my historical origins and, if I might say so, with my race.’ The most complete construction of his identity was the character of katechon. A concept taken from Christian apocalyptic writings, in particular the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, one of the most enigmatic texts in the New Testament. There is a power or person (ho katechon) who prevents the arrival of the lawless one (ho anomos) and restrains him. Anyone who assumes that role, as is the case with Schmitt, is performing a sacred, providential mission. Though there is another school of thought, which says the lawless one’s most successful disguise would be to present himself as the katechon.
It is, therefore, no surprise that, at the tribute organised by leaders of Franco’s regime on 21 March 1962, Don Carlos should invoke Providence and define the act as ‘a sacred feast in the winter of life’. What had happened to him, the Kronjurist, the brains of Nazi legality, prior to celebrating the winter of life in Madrid?
A biographical error that is kind to Carl Schmitt has it that he was more or less sidelined at the end of 1936, having been criticised in an SS publication. And yet the all-powerful Göring supported him. He continued to be Professor of Law in Berlin until the end of the war. Nor was he otherwise silent. His activity as a lecturer and propagandist for the Nazi legal model was intense and continued almost until the end of the struggle for conquered or conspiring Europe. At the tribute in 1962, there was a veiled allusion to his visit to Madrid twenty years earlier, in 1942, the moment of greatest German pressure for Spain to throw in its lot with the Axis. It would seem he was then secretary of the German Cultural Institute in Madrid. ‘Representing this centre and the German embassy’ (Arriba, 22 April 1942), he attended a conference that opened with an address by the Italian Fascist Giuliano Mazzoni. Sidelined? So what was the ‘providential’ mission that brought Schmitt to Madrid at that time?
As always, the enemy.
‘I never forget that my personal enemies are also Spain’s enemies,’ he wrote to Francisco J. Conde in a letter dated 15 April 1950. ‘A coincidence that raises my private situation to the sphere of objective spirit.’ Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) is the key to Carl Schmitt’s early relationship with Spain or at least its more reactionary elements. The Marquis of Valdegamas was a happy Extremaduran liberal in his youth. Until, in his own words, he became ‘a pilgrim of the Absolute’. Such an embittered pilgrim, who viewed sinful humans with such contempt, in the end he thought they deserved periodic cleansing. Donoso’s was an orgy of reactionary bad temper which shocked the historian Menéndez Pelayo, a reactionary himself, but a more sober one, who wa
s horrified by some of the marquis’ statements. This one, for example: ‘Jesus Christ did not conquer the world by the holiness of his doctrine or by miracles and prophecies, but in spite of those things.’ Delirious, thought the orthodox Menéndez Pelayo. Later events in Spain, in particular the blessing by bishops of the 1936 war as a Holy Crusade, bear the stamp of this delirium.