“Get me out of here,” it seemed to be saying. And Miguel seized his drill and his hammer and began to lower the level here and smooth the surface there, freeing front feet, and then back feet, a spine slightly convex in the middle, eventually finding himself confronted by an enormous frog, the result of his handiwork, which appeared to be thanking him. Excited by his discovery, Miguel began looking at loose rocks and schist, the hard substances surrounding him, with fresh eyes. That fallen rock over there contained a bat; he could see the tips of its wings. Over there was a pelican with its beak gloomily sunk on its breast. From that outcrop of rock a deer was trying to escape, having lain there for eternity, hoping for freedom.
“The mountain is a prison confining the animals,” said Miguel. “The animals are inside it; the thing is that they can’t get out until someone opens the door for them.” And so he began to use all his drills—he had them ending in points, blades, screws, and bits—to extract enormous doves, owls, wild boars, pregnant she-goats, and even a tapir, which stood in front of him in lifelike proportions. And Miguel looked at all this, the dove, the owl, the wild boar, the she-goat, and the tapir, and saw that it was good, and as he was tired with so much work, on the seventh day he rested.
He lined up all his pieces in an abandoned shed belonging to the Nueva Córdoba Railroad Company, which was no longer any use for mending coaches and trucks, and here people came on Sunday to see the exhibition of animals. His fame spread. One of the capital’s newspapers published an article on him, describing him as a “spontaneous genius.” But when members of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce came to him with a proposal that he should make a statue of the Head of State, Miguel had replied: “He doesn’t inspire me. I don’t do portraits of people like him.” Ever since, he was without further reason assumed to be against the regime. But others—members of the Literary Club—defended him: “It’s because he doesn’t dare attack a human figure. It’s nothing to do with politics, just fear of failure.” And any priests who came near him were commissioned to ask him to do the Four Evangelists, to be set up around the extension of the garden of the canons of the Divine Shepherdess.
“I can’t make men out of stone,” Miguel had answered. But when he learned that Marcos was starting on a lion (he had recently seen one in the circus that was giving performances in the villages nearby), that Lucas was working on a bull (a bull is a bull everywhere), and Juan on an eagle (there are no eagles here but everyone knows what eagles are like), he accepted the work and began by sculpting the symbolic animals attributed to the Survivors of the Apocalypse, leaving for later on a Matthew whose youthful face he couldn’t succeed in imagining. However, he worked, worked, and worked, digging out of the stone for the first time some human faces crowned with haloes, putting the finishing touches not with drills but with chisels as thin as knives, brought from the capital.
And he was busy on this task when he heard the news of the base capitulation. He instantly threw down his tools and rushed into the street. All at once the dreamer, reinventor of animals and people, the absent-minded eccentric, raised his voice at the crossroads, drew himself up to his full height, and created himself tribune, leader and caudillo of the people. Such was his authority that he was listened to and obeyed. He ordered the white flags to be hauled down and the white flags were hauled down, and Miguel Estatua saw that it was good to haul down the white flags, and also good to resume the battle. With a cartridge of dynamite in each hand and blazing tinder on his shoulder, he declared that it was necessary to resist until they had by fighting converted daily bread into Daily Bread, earned today and eaten today, and not owed to the stores run by Yankee, national, or “associated” companies, who ruled the mines and paid wages in vouchers for goods. There and then, calling on everyone who would listen, he organised one company of dynamiters and another of sappers. And, roused by a speech couched in sincere if crude and ill-expressed terms—eloquence from the heart, clamorous and rough, but more convincing than an elaborate harangue—the students, members of the intelligentsia, workers in mines and olive fields, makers of rope-soled shoes and sandals (who had lost faith in the cowardly Luis Leoncio Martínez, although he was still issuing proclamations to the country, asking help from people barely aware of his existence and declaring that he counted on aid from provinces which had never been involved in the movement) announced their decision to fight as long as their means lasted.
However, it was not enough for adolescents, young women and brave boys to mobilise themselves, while old women made lint bandages and old men worked in the forges transforming belaying pins into spears: all this in an open city, with no old walls—such as some other towns possessed—nor buildings that could be used as defences, and with streets ending in scattered adobe houses encroaching on the surrounding desert. And in spite of mined roads, sending shattered bodies flying into the air, shedding arms and legs in the roar of an explosion; in spite of a bloody battle from patio to patio, from rooftop to rooftop, waged by the defenders with old Winchesters, sporting rifles, blunderbusses from the armoury, Colt pistols, guns with ramrods, and three or four Maxim machine guns, which had to be cooled by urine for lack of water, the government troops captured the plaza around the cathedral, inside which some hundred desperate men had shut themselves with what was left of the ammunition, and were shooting out of windows, loopholes, and gateways. Most danger came from the bell ringers who took aim at everyone advancing along the streets that debouched into the Plaza Mayor. So the hours passed and there they still were, eating a snack and taking a drink now and again; but not succeeding in occupying the now-deserted municipal buildings, whose façades and galleries were in the line of fire from that handful of buggers who must still have had enough bullets or food for a short while longer. Hoffmann kept his Krupp cannon in readiness; he had brought them in bullock carts to a point whence they could be trained on the tower. A number of these animals, conspicuously coloured and slow in their movements, had been wounded from above; but even so, bleeding, with the second of the third yoke fallen and the first of the second yoke vomiting spittle, they had dragged their burdens to their destinations. Yet the Head of State for once appeared to hesitate: this was the National Sanctuary of the Divine Shepherdess, patron saint of the country and the army. An object of devotion, the goal of pilgrimages, a jewel of colonial architecture.
“Hell and damnation!” said Colonel Hoffmann, who was a Lutheran. “One can’t make war with sacred images.” When all was said and done, every building could be restored. And every restoration involved improvements in solidity and permanence for the future.
“And what if the Holy Image should be damaged?” enquired the Head of State.
“They sell some very pretty ones in Saint Sulpice in Paris,” remarked Doctor Peralta.
“What are you waiting for, to finish off those sons of bitches?” asked the North American Military Attaché. “Our marines would have liquidated them by now. They aren’t sentimental like you.”
“I see there’s no help for it,” said the Head of State at last. “If Pilate washed his hands, I shall stop my ears.”
“A strategic necessity,” said Hoffmann. The Krupp guns were tilted to the firing angle. The old artillerymen aimed it by “three hands up, two to the right, and a finger and a half of rectification,” etc., and the first shot was fired. Hit in the centre, the tower loosed its bells over the roof of the Sanctuary, with a thunder of falling stones and statues. A second shot was fired—by calculation and logarithms this time—and sneaked in at the main door and across the altar without touching the statue of the Divine Shepherdess, who remained there, intact, indifferent, standing on her pedestal without even wobbling—a portent that was thenceforth recorded as “The Miracle of Nueva Córdoba.”
“The Virgin was on our side!” shouted the victors.
“The Virgin,” said the Head of State, much relieved, “couldn’t possibly be on the side of an atheist, a believer in talking tables and gods with six arms …”
&
nbsp; And then all hell was let loose; free and uncontrollable, the troops abandoned themselves to hunting men and women, with bayonet, machete, or knife, throwing corpses into the streets, pierced through, cut open, beheaded, and mutilated, to warn the rest. And the last to put up a fight—some thirty or forty of them—were carried off to the Municipal Slaughterhouse, where, among hides of oxen, animals’ viscera and tripes, or pools of coagulated blood, they were battered and kicked, and hanged from hooks and beams, by the armpits, the knees, around the ribs, or by the chin.
“Who wants a skewerful of meat? Who wants a skewerful of meat?” shouted the executioners, imitating the town crier and giving another jab with a bayonet to a dying man, before posing in front of the camera of a French photographer, Monsieur Garcin, who had been living in the town for some time (scandalmongers said he had escaped from Cayenne), taking family groups and photographs of weddings, christenings, first communions, and “little angels” lying in their small white coffins.
“Look pleasant!” he said to the soldiers, changing a plate, about to press the rubber bulb. “Two pesos fifty for half a dozen, postcard size, with one hand-coloured enlargement as a souvenir … Don’t move. That’s it … Now another … With the four strung up over there … Another with these danglers … Pull down the woman’s skirt so as not to show her cunt … Another, with that chap with a trident in his guts … There’s a reduction for anyone taking a dozen.”
Already the turkey buzzards and vultures were flying over the patios of the Municipal Slaughterhouse. From the post office, from the poplars in the park, from the balconies of the Town Hall, hanged men were suspended in clusters. A few who tried to escape were lassoed like young steers in a rodeo, and dragged by horsemen over paving stones and bare pebbly ground. Some fifty miners, standing with their hands up, were run through in the baseball stadium, opened only a few months before by the Du Pont Mining Company. At the feet of the Divine Shepherdess, standing erect on her scorched altar in the ruins of her sacred dwelling, there was a confused heap of human bodies, from which emerged, like things broken off and out of context, a leg, a hand, a head frozen in its last grimace. Rifle fire was still to be heard from the miners’ quarter, where soldiers carrying drums of paraffin were setting fire to houses full of cries and entreaties.
And at midnight there was a huge explosion in the forgotten hangar of the Nueva Córdoba Railroad Company. Miguel Estatua had just destroyed himself and all his stone creatures with dynamite. A few fragments of the Evangelists flew over the crowd, killing three soldiers by slicing them with haloes filed as sharp as an axe by the chisel of the inspired driller and borer.
Now that the chief focus of resistance had been destroyed, the Head of State returned to the capital, entrusting to Hoffmann (raised to the rank of general for services rendered) the now-easy task of punishing those surrounding villages that had helped the rebels. Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez had fled towards the northern frontier by way of a dry ravine that lost itself in the inhospitable sierras of Yatitlán. Here and there he proclaimed himself Leader of a Government in Exile or of the National Legalist Party, etc., etc., building up an inefficient nucleus of political exiles, soon to be destroyed—the President knew all about this—by rivalry, defections, schisms, mutual accusations, and litigation, fed by periodicals printing three hundred copies, tracts, and news sheets with fifty readers. And the Apostle of Nueva Córdoba, deep in theories and wool gathering, ended up, like so many others, a forgotten man in some Los Angeles boarding house or squalid hotel in the Caribbean, writing letters and pamphlets quite without interest for those who knew only too well that what counts in politics is success.
When he returned to the seat of government, the Head of State was received with flags, triumphal arches, fireworks, and the march Sambre-et-Meuse, which he liked particularly. But in his first press conference he looked sad and was frowning, and declared that he felt overcome with grief at the thought—no doubt based on recent events—that the nation didn’t trust his honesty and disinterested patriotism. For this reason he had decided to relinquish the power and entrust his responsibilities to the President of the Senate, in the hope that elections would be held and some outstanding man, some good citizen, more capable than he was of controlling the fate of the nation, might be raised to the presidency, unless—unless, I say—a plebiscite should produce a contrary result. So the plebiscite was quickly organised, while the Head of State carried on his ordinary business with the noble and serene melancholy—not to mention pain endured with dignity—of someone who believes in nothing and nobody, and who has been wounded to the quick after having done everything possible for the good of other people. The misery of power! The classical drama of crown and purple! Bitter old age of princes!
As 40 per cent of the population could neither read nor write, coloured cards were prepared—white for “yes” and black for “no”—with a view to simplifying the mechanism of voting. But mysterious voices, sly voices, insidious voices began whispering in towns and countryside, in mountains and plains, from north to south and from east to west, that every vote, although secret, would be known to the rural or municipal authorities. There were new techniques today to make this possible. Cameras concealed in the curtains of the polling booths that functioned every time a citizen stretched out his hand to a ballot box. Where this arrangement didn’t exist, there were men hidden behind those same curtains. Then—without any doubt—they would examine the fingerprints left on the cards, not forgetting that in small villages everyone knows his neighbour’s political views, and twenty negative votes in such places would mean twenty individuals identified without possibility of error. A growing sense of alarm was taking hold of public servants—of whom there were many. On the other hand, the mysterious voices were now insinuating, more openly, in taverns, food stores, and bars, that the great mining and banana companies, manufacturers, etc., would sack anyone who opposed the Head of State’s remaining in power. The disaffected peasants had to look out for the machetes of the rural police. The schoolmasters would be thrown out of their classrooms. The tax returns of some traders—it was understood—would be severely checked, since they always managed to trick the tax collectors. It was remembered in time that any recently naturalised foreigner could have his citizenship card taken away and be sent back to his own country, if he fell into the ugly category of undesirable or anarchist.
As a result of all this, the plebiscite produced an enormous and massive “yes,” so enormous and massive that the Head of State felt obliged to accept 4,781 negative votes—a figure arrived at by dice thrown by Doctor Peralta—to show the complete impartiality with which the inspectors of the returns had worked.
There were more speeches, triumphal marches, fireworks, and Bengal lights. But the President was tired. Besides which, his right arm remained out of action day after day, because of some strange and unpleasant sluggishness, heaviness or disobedience of the muscles, and he had a sharp pain in the shoulder which neither massage nor medicine relieved, nor even the herbs prepared by the Mayorala Elmira, who, as the daughter of a herbalist, knew a lot about plants and roots, nearly always more effective than some of the concoctions of eminent chemists, advertised in the press by beautiful illustrations of Convalescence and Recovered Health. A North American doctor came specially from Boston and diagnosed arthritis—or something of the sort with one of the new names proliferating on the covers of medical magazines, causing great panic and confusion among the sick—indicating that this country didn’t possess a certain electric apparatus that was the only means of curing the trouble. The government unanimously begged the Head of State to go to the United States and recover his very important health. During his absence the President of the Cabinet would be responsible for governing, with the close collaboration of General Hoffmann, in charge of National Defence, and the President of the Senate.
So it was that the Head of State embarked on a voyage in a luxury ship of the Cunard Line. But once arrived in New York, he was aware of
sudden, irrational, almost childish fear—perhaps he was tired; his nerves had been affected by recent events—when confronted by Yankee doctors, who spoke a foreign language, were cold in their manner, too ready to use a scalpel, to cut without great cause, addicted to rough new methods whose consequences weren’t fully understood, very different from the gentle, bearable, and intelligent therapeutics of the French or Swiss specialists, who were undoubtedly—he was thinking of Doyen, of Roux, of Vincent—at the top of the tree over there. To the aseptic, white, impersonal surgeries full of forceps, probes, saw-edged scissors, and other cruel objects on view in the glass cases of these Yankee doctors, the President much preferred the consulting rooms hung with pictures by Harpignies or Carolus-Durand—the Persian carpets, antique furniture, books with eighteenth-century bindings, an almost imperceptible smell of ether or iodine—of the doctors with imperials, frock coats, and the Legion of Honour, who officiated, paternally and elegantly, in the Avenue Victor Hugo or the Boulevard Malherbes.
“Very well,” said Peralta. “But … do you think it’s wise to go so far away? And supposing there’s another coup, my President?”
“Ah, my friend … Everything is possible in our countries. But I don’t think it’s likely. We’ll be away only a few weeks. And my health comes first. I wasn’t born to be a cripple. And to become a cripple without having ever been to Lepanto would be stupid. Besides, with no right hand I can’t depend on my best friend. Because even when I’m in my country, where so many people love me, I feel calm, firm, and in control of myself only during audiences and visits, when I know that’s with me.” And he pointed with his chin at the place where he kept his Browning, there, under his left armpit, praising the lightness of its trigger and the style of its butt, with the tender accents in which a man boasts of the beauty of the woman he loves: it was faithful, docile, safe, beautifully shaped, of perfect proportions, pleasant to touch, slim and elegant right up to the mouth, well bored though invisibly, and with the National Arms engraved on the back of the butt. It was looked after with maternal affection by the Mayorala Elmira, who cleaned it every day when he removed it before he took a long bath, returning it to him recharged and ready for use, just as he was drying himself with a large plushy towel, one of those Ofelia bought for her father in La Maison de Blanc.
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