Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  And at this very moment in came Peralta himself, carrying a pile of books on top of which was a yellow copy of L’enfant de volupté—the French version of Il piacere—wherein my secretary had certainly not found, to his disappointment, the ribaldries promised by the title.

  “They were in my room, half read.” And he puts them down on the library table, while the tailor carries off his materials, after stripping me of expensive coatings, shapeless evening dress, and trousers badly cut in the fork.

  “Give me a drink.” Doctor Peralta opens my little boule writing desk and takes out a bottle of Santa Inés rum, with its label of gothic letters on a canefield.

  “This is a life saver.”

  “Especially after last night.”

  “You seemed to have taken a shine to nuns.”

  “And you to negresses.”

  “You know, my friend, I’m an incendiary.”

  “All of us from over there are incendiaries,” I said, laughing, but just then Ofelia, hearing I was awake, began playing “Für Elise” upstairs.

  “She gets better every day,” said my secretary, with his glass in mid-air.

  “Such smoothness and feeling …”

  Today “Für Elise,” coming so sweetly from my daughter’s rooms, although she always made a mistake in the same bar, reminded me of how it had always been played by Doña Hermenegilda, her unselfish and devoted mother—who always made the same mistake in the same bar—and how, over there, in those days at Surgidero de la Verónica—days of youthful hopes and torment, sturm und drang, escapades and brawls—after treating me to some waltz by Juventino Rosas or Lerdo de Tejada, she would move on to her classical repertory by the Deaf Master (“Für Elise” and the beginning—she never got past the beginning—of the Moonlight Sonata), Theodore Lack’s Idilio, and various pieces by Godard and Chaminade included in the album called Music for the Home. I sighed to think that it was now three years ago that we gave her a queen’s funeral, with her urn under a canopy, and a procession of ministers, generals, ambassadors, and grandees, with a military band reinforced by three others brought from the provinces—a hundred and forty performers in all—playing the Funeral March from the Eroica symphony, and—inevitably—Chopin’s. Our archbishop had delivered a funeral oration (considerably inspired, at my suggestion, by what Bossuet said in memory of Henriette de France: “She who reigns in heaven …” etc., etc.), adding that the merits of the dead woman were so exceptional and outstanding that her canonisation could well be contemplated. Doña Hermenegilda was married and the mother of children, of course—Ofelia, Ariel, Marcus Antonius, and Radames—but the Archbishop reminded his listeners of the blessed conjugal virtues of Saint Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, and of Monica, mother of Augustine. Naturally, the appropriate words having been said, I didn’t think it vital to send up any prayers to the high authority of the Vatican, especially since my wife and I had lived in concubinage for many years before the unforeseeable and agitating vagaries of politics led me to where I now am. The important thing was that my Hermenegilda’s portrait, made at Dresden in full colour by the initiative of our minister of education, was an object of worship throughout the length and breadth of the land. It was said that the flesh of the dead woman had defied the onslaught of worms, and that her face had retained the serene and kindly smile of her last moments. Women used to say that her portrait miraculously cured colic and the pains of childbirth, and that promises made to her by girls who wanted a husband were more effective than the hitherto common practice of putting the bust of Saint Anthony upside down in a well.

  I have just finished putting a gardenia in my buttonhole when Sylvestre announces that the Distinguished Academician has come to see me—a recently elected academician, I do not know how he got himself received under the Dome, since a few years ago he decribed the Forty Immortals as “green-clad mummies in cocked hats, the anachronistic midwives of a dictionary intended to increase our understanding of the evolution of the language—a sort of Petit Larousse for domestic use.” (Once elected, however—“J’ai accepté pour m’amuser”—he took the trouble to have the hilt of his sword designed by his famous friend Maxence, who had abandoned pictorial creation for silversmith’s work, and succeeded in incorporating the spirit of the Bible and mediaeval legends with a style combining the aesthetics of the scenic railway at the Magic City with a subtle flavour of Pre-Raphaelitism—too much for my taste.)

  Peralta hid the bottle of Santa Inés and we greeted this witty and polished man, who is now sitting in a ray of sunlight, full of ascending motes of dust, which picks out the red ribbon of his Legion of Honour. Upstairs, Ofelia is trying hard to remove those inconvenient flats from the passage of “Für Elise” that she always gets wrong.

  “Beethoven,” says the Distinguished Academician, pointing upwards as if giving us an important piece of news. Then, with the indiscreet hand of someone who always treats my house as his own, he turns over the books my secretary brought back a little while ago. Atheism by Le Dantec. Good. Solid reading. Bourget’s The Disciple. Not bad, but don’t let’s imitate the German emmerdeurs with their mania for mixing philosophy into their novels. Anatole France: undoubted talent, but overestimated outside France. Besides, his systematic scepticism doesn’t lead anywhere. Chanticleer: a strange thing. A success and a failure. Audacity that is both brilliant and unsuccessful but the only attempt of its kind in theatrical history. And he declaims:

  O Soleil! toi sans qui les choses

  Ne seraient pas ce qu’elles sont …

  (The Academician is unaware that for some years past ten thousand bars and whorehouses in America have been called Chanticleer.) He grunts ironically but acquiescently at the sight of an anticlerical pamphlet by Leo Taxil, but makes a face of disgust, of open disapproval, over Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain, without perhaps knowing that his own publisher, Ollendorf, has swamped the bookshops of our continent with a Spanish translation of this novel, presented as an incomparable example of French genius, with a coloured frontispiece of a naked Astarte by Géo Dupuy, which at least gives our schoolboys dreams. Now he’s laughing, slyly, indulgently, as he comes across Les cent milles verges, The sexual life of Robinson Crusoe, and Les fastes de Lesbos, by unknown authors (three asterisks), profusely illustrated and bought by me yesterday in a specialist shop in the Rue de la Lune.

  “Ce sont des lectures de Monsieur Peralta,” I say, coward that I am.

  But our friend suddenly becomes serious and starts talking about literature in the deliberate and magisterial way Peralta and I know so well, trying to prove to us that the true, the best, the greatest literature from here is unknown in our countries. We all agree in admiring Baudelaire—sadly buried under a sad stone in the cemetery of Montparnasse—but we ought also to read Léon Dierx, Albert Samain, Henri de Régnier, Maurice Rollinat, Renée Vivien. And we must read Moréas, above all Moréas. (I remain silent rather than tell him how, when I was introduced to Moréas some years ago in the Café Vachetti, he accused me of having shot Maximilian, although I tried to prove that, on grounds of age alone, it would have been impossible for me to be in the Cerro de las Campanas on that day. “Vous êtes tous des sauvages!” the poet had replied with the fire of absinthe in his voice.) Our friend laments the fact that Hugo, old Hugo, still enjoys enormous popularity in our countries. It’s known that over there workers in cigar factories—who subscribe to public readings to relieve the monotony of their work—are especially fond of Les Misérables and Notre Dame de Paris, while Oration pour tous (“naïve connerie,” he says) is still often recited at poetical soirées. And, according to him, this is through our lack of the Cartesian spirit (that’s true: no carnivorous plants grow, no toucans fly, nor do you find cyclones in the Discourse on Method); we are too partial to unbridled eloquence, pathos, platform pomposity, resounding with romantic braggadocio.

  Feeling slightly irritated—though he couldn’t have guessed the fact—by an evaluation that directly wounded my concept of what
oratory should be (to be more effective among us it must be luxuriant, sonorous, baroque, Ciceronian, original in imagery, implacable in epithets, sweeping in its crescendos), I try to change the subject by laying my hand on an extremely rare edition-de-luxe of Renan’s Prayer on the Acropolis, illustrated by Cabanel.

  “Quelle horreur!” exclaims the Distinguished Academician with a gesture of condemnation. I point out to him that this fragment figures in many manuals of literature for students of French.

  “An abomination, due to secular education,” says our visitor, qualifying the prose as amphigoric—pretentious, vocative, blown up with erudition and pedantic hellenisms. No. The people of our countries ought to look for the genius of the French language in other books, in other texts. Then they would discover the elegance of style, the distinction, the sovereign intelligence with which in L’ennemi des lois Maurice Barrès can show us in three lucid pages the fallacies and errors of Marxism—which are centred in the cult of the stomach—or give us a marvellous picture of Ludwig of Bavaria’s castles, in the phraseology of a true artist, very different from the professorial logomachy of a Renan. Or if we want to go back to the past century, let us read and reread Gobineau, that aristocrat of expression, master of the carefully constructed and unique phrase, who had exalted in his work the Super-Man, the Men of the Pléiade, sovereign spirits (according to him there were about three thousand in all Europe), proclaiming his inability to be interested in “the mass of those who are called men,” whom he saw as a swarm of despicable, irresponsible, and destructive insects, without Souls.

  At this point I decide to remain silent and not join in the discussion, because the question would bring to light an explanation that would be better avoided: during the fiestas for the Centenary of Mexican Independence, the authorities made arrangements for the wearers of sandals and shawls (rebozos), native musicians and cripples, to be kept away from the places where the main ceremonies took place, because it was better that foreign tourists and guests of the government shouldn’t see the individuals our friend Yves Limantour called “the Kaffirs.” But in my country, where there are many—too many!—Indians, negroes, half-breeds, and mulattos, it would be difficult to hide away our “Kaffirs.” And I couldn’t see the Kaffirs belonging to our intelligentsia—who are extremely numerous—being exactly pleased by reading the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races by Count Gobineau. It would be a good moment to change the conversation.

  Luckily, “Für Elise” starts up again upstairs. And the Academician pounces on this fact to deplore the extravagances of modern music—or what is called “modern”—a cerebral, dehumanised art, an algebra of notes, alien to any form of feeling (just listen to the Schola Cantorum group in the Rue Saint-Jacques), which betrays the eternal principles of melos. There are exceptions, however: Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Vintemil, and above all our beloved Reynaldo Hahn—born in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, which is not unlike Surgidero de la Verónica. I know that my “paisano” (he always calls me “paisano” in his smooth creole Spanish when we meet anywhere), before writing his sublime choruses for Racine’s Esther, had begun work many years ago on a very beautiful opera full of nostalgia for his native tropics, the action taking place in picturesque surroundings in every way reminiscent of the Venezuelan coast he knew as a child, although the programme described it as a “Polynesian idyll”: L’ile du rêve, inspired by Le mariage de Loti—and “Loti, Loti, voici ton nom,” sang Rarahú in this history of an exotic love affair, whose plot, according to certain mischievous critics fond of demolishing everything, was too much like that of Lakmé. But, come to that, one could say the same of Madame Butterfly, a later work then Reynaldo’s. And just as in the old days his Chansons Grises were heard at one of the regular musical evenings of the Quai Conti, we used to talk about people like the Belgian Chargé d’Affaires, the Comte d’Argencourt, who surrounded himself with sodomites although he wasn’t one, because he didn’t want to expose his too youthful mistress to the desires of manly men; or about Legrandin, who had the brilliant idea of endowing himself with the non-existent title of “Comte de Mes Eglises” or something of the sort—(“If he had been born in Cholula he could have called himself Count of the three hundred sixty-five churches,” broke in Peralta)—and was beginning to boast of being a snob in a world where snobbishness was taken as a sign of being enthusiastic for the “latest” in everything.

  Paris, so the Distinguished Academician went on to say, was getting like the Rome of Heliogabalus, opening its doors to everything strange, out of joint, exotic, barbarous, primitive. Modern sculptors, instead of being inspired by the great periods of the past, marvelled at Mycenaean, pre-Hellenic, Scythian art, the art of the steppes. There were people these days who collected horrible African masks, figures bristling with votive nails, zoomorphic idols—the work of cannibals. Negro musicians were arriving from the United States. A scandalous Italian poet had gone so far as to publish a manifesto declaring that it was necessary to destroy Venice and burn down the Louvre. That way could only lead us to exalting Attila, Erostratus, the Iconoclasts, the cakewalk, English cooking, anarchist outrages, and the reign of new Circes calling themselves Lyane de Pougy, Emilienne d’Alençon, or Cleo de Mérode.

  (“I’d willingly be transformed into a swine for them,” murmured Peralta.)

  But now, to cheer up our visitor, I said that every big city suffered from temporary fevers, foolish enthusiasms, fashions, affectations, and extravagances, which lasted only one day and made no impact on the genius of a nation. Juvenal was already complaining of the habits of dress, perfumes, cults, and superstitions of a Roman society fascinated by everything that came from outside. Snobbishness was nothing new. After all, Molierè’s Précieuses were merely snobs “avant la lettre.” You either have a great capital or you don’t have a great capital. And in spite of so many novelties, Paris was still the Holy of Holies of good taste, moderation, order, and proportion, and dictated the rules of polite behaviour, elegance, and savoir vivre to the whole world. And, as for cosmopolitanism, which was also a feature of Athens, it in no way harmed the authentic French genius. “Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français,” I say, proud of still being able to quote a certain Rivarol whom the Marist Brothers of Surgidero de la Verónica made me read in my schooldays.

  “Certainly,” agreed the Academician: but our politics, our abject politics, with its rioting, and conflict between parties and fierce parliamentary battles, was introducing confusion and disorder into this essentially rational country. The Panama scandal or the Dreyfus Affair would have been inconceivable in the time of Louis XIV. Not to mention the “socialist mire,” which, as our friend Gabriele D’Annunzio said, “is invading everything,” befouling all that was beautiful and pleasant in our ancient civilisations. Socialism (he sighed, looking at the toes of his patent-leather shoes). Forty kings had made France great. Look at England. Look at the Scandinavian countries, models of order and progress, where stevedores wear waistcoats at work and every bricklayer has a watch and chain under his overalls. Brazil was great when it had an emperor, like Pedro II, who was the friend, fellow diner, and admirer of that same Victor Hugo you all think so well of. Mexico was great when it had Porfirio Díaz as its almost permanent president. And if my country enjoyed peace and prosperity, it was because my fellow countrymen, more intelligent perhaps than others on the Continent, had re-elected me three, four—how many times? Knowing that the continuity of power is a guarantee of material well-being and political equilibrium. Thanks to my government.

  I interrupted him with a gesture of defence against the expected encomium, which would have relegated our countries of volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes to the peaceful latitude of Flemish lace makers or the aurora borealis.

  “Il me reste beaucoup à faire,” I said. Nevertheless I was proud—very proud—of the fact that, after a whole century of tumult and uprisings, my own country had brought the cycle of revolutions to an end—revolutions that in America were counted mere
ly as adolescent crises, the scarlatinas and measles of young, impetuous, passionate hot-blooded races, who had to be subjected to discipline sometimes. Dura lex, sed lex …

  There were cases when severity was necessary, the Academician thought. Besides, as Descartes put it so well: “Sovereigns have the right to modify customs to some extent.”