Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  The Head of State’s “Residencia Hermenegilda” dominated the beach from a neighbouring hill. It was built in a style somewhere between Balkan and the Rue de la Faisanderie, with caryatids reminiscent of 1900, dressed like Sarah Bernhardt and magically supporting on their plumed hats—better indeed than the Atlases of some Berlin palaces—a wide terrace-balcony, enclosed by banisters shaped like seahorses. A tower-belvedere-lighthouse overtopped the roofs, and displayed the eternal brilliance of variegated majolica. The vast, cool, high rooms were furnished with rocking chairs of New Córdoban make, hammocks suspended from rings, and a few red lacquer chairs, a gift from the old Empress of China in gratitude for a consignment of toys—a cable railway, some kaleidoscopes, whistling spinning tops, a music box full of Bernese bears, and a battleship the size of a water lily for the pond at the Winter Palace—which the Head of State had sent her years before, knowing her tastes. In the dining room was a copy—reduced in size, of course—of The Raft of Medusa, opposite two charming seascapes by Elstir, which were somewhat overpowered, truth to tell, by the dramatic weight of the Géricault. The house was surrounded by a vast garden tended by Japanese gardeners, where among the box hedges stood a white marble Venus, disfigured by a greenish herpes of fungi hanging from her stomach. A little farther on under the pines one could see the chapel consecrated to the Divine Shepherdess by the devout Doña Hermenegilda—a chapel the sight of which now caused the President increasing remorse, as he remembered that the promise he had made her at an extremely painful moment in Paris, of ascending the steps of her basilica with a candle in each hand, still remained unfulfilled. (But at the same time he reflected that the Virgin was as intelligent in matters of policy as in everything; the Virgin, who had just given him eloquent proof of her Divine Protection with Trumpets of Victory, would understand that at such a moment the fulfilment of his promise in the sight of everyone, an ostentatious proof of Catholic fervour, would bring down on him—who already had so many enemies—a whole world of freemasons, Rosicrucians, spiritualists, Theosophists, and those who clamoured against the clergy, not to mention many atheists and free thinkers—a blaspheming legion of priest haters, all of them devotees of France, where the clergy were not allowed to teach in schools, theological students were subject to military service, and where the only religion possible in this portentous twentieth century had germinated and grown: The Religion of Science.)

  Behind the house a little grove of pomegranates shaded the discreet path along which, when night fell, Doctor Peralta used to lead some cloaked woman to the Head of State’s bedroom. (“Don’t go and die as President Félix Faure did,” the secretary used invariably to remark as he left his charge with his master. “Attila and Félix Faure were the two men who most enjoyed their deaths,” the Head of State replied, also invariably.)

  Early every morning the locomotive of the Little German Train used to whistle. And the President would go out onto the balcony, with a cup of coffee in his hand, to watch it pass. The little engine shone like polished enamel in those green mornings, with its gleaming copper connecting rods and rivets, climbing the mountain by its narrow track with a cheerful funicular snorting, as it dragged its small red awning-covered carriages behind it up to the Olmedo Colony; it was, in every way, like the cable railway the Head of State had sent to the old Empress of China to enrich her collection of automatic and mechanical devices. As soon as the little convoy left Puerto Araguato, everything it passed through seemed to diminish in size—intermediate stations, bridges over torrents, level crossings and their gates, signals—yet it was with a great clamour that it entered the minuscule terminal above, with its load of ten passengers, a few parcels, several barrels, the post, the newspapers, and a calf poking its head out of the window of the only cattle truck. As if it had just come out of a Nuremberg toy shop, gleaming, repainted, and varnished, the little train rested at the end of its journey in a strange exotic world, quite different from that below, with its Black Forest houses built between palms and coffee trees, its beer shop displaying the sign of King Stag, its women in Tyrolese dress, its men in leather breeches, braces, and hats with a feather in the band. In spite of being excellent citizens of the republic for more than a century, they could hardly speak Spanish. Ever since they had been brought here by a certain Count Olmedo, a rich man of Creole ancestry, a landowner obsessed by the idea of “keeping the race white,” the immigrants had been careful not to mix with women from here, who were all suspected of being zambas, cholas, or quadroons—one because her hair was frizzy; another because her eyes were blacker than usual; another because her nose was rather flattened, even though her complexion was pale. So, from father to son, they wrote to Bavaria or Pomerania to ask for women, and generation by generation they had increased and multiplied, singing the Lutheran chorale, playing on the accordion, growing rhubarb, making beer soup, and dancing an old-fashioned landler, and now plump shepherdesses with Aryan pubic hair were to be seen bathing in the mountain streams, and their names might be Woglinde, Wellgunde, or Flosshilde. The Head of State had bothered very little about these peaceable, law-abiding folk, who never got involved in politics, and when elections came along always voted for the government, on condition that their customs weren’t interfered with. But now his daily reading of the French papers made him regard these people with some irritation. Although their houses were traditionally adorned with coloured plates of snow-covered landscapes, the banks of the Elbe, the Festival of Wartburg, or the mythical maiden in a winged helmet who carried the bodies of young athletes killed in battle up to heaven, there hung beside these pictures a portrait of Wilhelm II. And Wilhelm II was materializing in the Press as Antichrist. His armies, his gang of supporters, his terrifying Uhlans had penetrated into harmless little Belgium, into the Flanders of Velazquez’s lances—the forerunners of our own plainsmen’s pikes—razing everything to the ground. They had advanced as conquerors between ruined cathedrals, stately homes laid low and scattered, and after burning the Library of Louvain had marched sacrilegiously over a pavement of incunables hurled on the ground. Eins … Zwei … Eins … Zwei. And with barbarian tread, trampling on unique bindings, priceless manuscripts, parchments with rich capitals and superb lettering, they had marched on, not attacking men so much as the distinguished figures in the Testaments, displayed for centuries, like the pages of open books, on the tympana and over the porticos of cathedrals. Eins … Zwei … Eins … Zwei. German cannon had thundered against Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Esdras, against Solomon and the Shulamite, and David, who with Bathsheba—this was the theme of the manuscript play we had bought from our friend the Distinguished Academician—plotted the destruction of the old cuckolded general (every general in a campaign was probably a cuckold, reflected the President, and especially if he was old), before relentlessly hurling themselves against the Beau Dieu at Amiens, or the ineffable figure—now broken and pulverised in an irreversible twilight—of the most beautiful of the Smiling Angels. But perhaps even this was less horrible than the appalling chronicle of rape. L’Illustration included some grey pages, not to be read by children, describing how when the German troops took a village or town they dragged innocent girls, schoolchildren and adolescents, to the back of a shoemaker’s shop or undertaker’s, and violated them—there were nine, ten, eleven such cases, said L’Illustration; probably fifteen, said Louis Dumur, who specialised in these atrocities—an operation carried out with servile German discipline, while the Feldwebels, who controlled proceedings, said: “Now it’s your turn … Get ready, next man.” But all this, the destruction of cathedrals, ruin of hagiography, altarpieces split in half, decapitated sibyls, burning, dynamite, rape, crime, were as nothing before the unprecedented tragedy of the children without hands. A German soldier had found them wandering amongst the ruins searching for their lost or dead mother, and hearing them weeping had gone closer as if to help them, but instead with an unexpected blow of his sabre (Did the infantry really carry sabres? asked Peralta) cut off two soft lit
tle hands: “So that they can never hold weapons against us.” On the title page of a supplement to L’Illustration there was a sketched portrait of one of the victims of this atrocious ablation, holding up his stumps against an apocalyptic background of the ruins of Ypres.

  The Head of State absorbed this literature daily, marking in red pencil anything that seemed to him worth reproducing in the national press, to cause confusion and shame among certain officers, ex-associates of Hoffmann, or “Little Fredericks” in the making, who were known to be disgusted—though they didn’t show it openly—by the recent suppression of the pointed helmet with full dress uniform in the National Army. These readers must be de-Germanised, and the articles he destined particularly for them were those about the sacking of famous castles, theft of clocks—this had begun in ’70—melting down of bells six hundred years old, using cathedrals as latrines, profanation of the host, and shooting matches by intoxicated captains with Memlings or Rembrandts as targets.

  The Head of State looked towards the cloudy heights of the Olmedo Colony—black rocks, between mulberry trees, an occasional naturalised silver fir, light northerly breezes in the mornings—and thought that those bastards up there, in spite of the shouts of “Loooooong live our cooooountry!” from girls with fair plaits wearing national dress, who received him with bunches of violets when he paid a visit to their chief village, were at heart in sympathy with the men who cut off children’s hands in Artois or Champagne, whose cataclysmic landscapes—eroded, defoliated, mutilated by shells—were shown us in the pictures of Georges Scott and Lucien Simon, offered for sale complete with passe-partout, their muddy colours accentuating in a masterly fashion the tragic desolation of village squares, ruined town halls, and mediaeval houses reduced to the skeletons of their beams, while like some accusation proffered by the earth itself, the bare trunk of an ancient oak seemed to speak in the middle of all this desolation through the hundred mouths of its lacerated bark.

  Every morning the Head of State stopped reading this painful material to watch from his window as the Little German Train started to ascend the mountain, sometimes braking with furious whistling to drive away a goat capering in the young grass between the rails. And after his usual breakfast of maize tortillas, curds, and meat pancakes, he used to sit at his Welte-Mignon pianola, a present from the Spanish colony of Nueva Córdoba. Pedalling hard and manipulating the regulators so as to extract “Für Elise” from the perforated roll, and the beginning—he never got beyond the beginning—of the Moonlight Sonata, he reflected that working this musical machine must be a little like the activity of the engine driver who was now taking the Little German Train up to the woods, where imported squirrels were frisking, and in the opinion of a trouble-making journalist—an unfair opponent—threatening to cause an epidemic of psittacosis among the country’s cattle, already ailing and in a state of decline, it was quite true, since experience showed that the cows of the region suffered from weak legs and narrow haunches and couldn’t support the weight on their hindquarters of the stock bulls, brought from Charolais to improve the breed, when they mounted them.

  “Ah, what a war this is, my President,” groaned Doctor Peralta every morning between a cup of very black coffee and the first cigar of the day.

  “Terrible, terrible,” the Head of State would reply, thinking about the Little German Train: “And how long it’s lasting.”

  But then they heard that those who discussed strategy in the capital over brandy and grilled steak had been celebrating the news, received by cablegram, that Le Matin had just published a really sensational headline covering eight columns: “Cossacks only five days’ march from Berlin.”

  “So now the Cossacks are the new defenders of Latinity, along with the Sepoys and Senegalese we already had on our side,” remarked Peralta slyly.

  “Let’s hope they get held up on the way!” murmured his friend, thinking that, thanks to the expectations and enthusiasms provoked by this amazing war, many people had had their attention diverted to remote events. The Head of State was at last enjoying peace and quiet in the shade of a flowering tree.

  10

  Many things that may appear to us supremely extravagant and ridiculous are generally accepted and approved by other great nations.

  —DESCARTES

  THE HEAD OF STATE PROLONGED HIS STAY IN Marbella from week to week, carrying out the business of government from a somewhat Pompeian pergola in the middle of a labyrinth of orange trees at the far end of the garden. He took an early-morning ride along the shore on his horse Holofernes, a powerful sorrel with a glistening coat, wild and uncontrollable with most people but hypocritically submissive to a master who brought him a pail of the best English beer in his stable every afternoon, which he always received with delighted whinnying. The President had reasons for feeling contented during these months, for he had never known such a prosperous and happy period for the nation. This European war—which really, though it was better not to say so, was turning out a blessing—was raising the prices of sugar, bananas, coffee, and gutta-percha to unheard-of heights, swelling the funds in the banks, making fortunes, bringing the country luxuries and refinements that until yesterday had seemed to belong to worldly novels or films centred around the almost mythological figures of Gabrielle Robinne, Pina Menichelli, Francesca Bertini, or Lydia Borelli. Surrounded by age-old forests, the capital had itself become a modern forest of scaffolding, wooden beams pointing to the sky, cranes in action, and mechanical scoops, accompanied by a perpetual clanking of pulleys, hammer blows of iron on steel, pouring of cement, rivetting and percussion, interspersed with shouts between workmen up aloft and workmen on the ground, whistles, sirens, trucks carrying sand, and snorting of engines. Shops enlarged their premises overnight, and dawn showed them with new windows where a few wax figures—another novelty—were celebrating their first communion, showing off wedding dresses, the latest fashions, and even officers’ uniforms, well cut and finished in English gabardine. Toffee-making machines, installed in the entrance to the old Royal Granary, astonished passers-by with the concerted movements of their metal arms, mixing, stretching, and compressing white substances streaked with red, and smelling of vanilla and marshmallow. Offices, banks, insurance companies, chain stores, and brokers proliferated. Theodolites and other surveying instruments transformed flooded regions, wasteland, and goat pastures, dividing them into a number of marked-out squares, which having been since remote times “The Lazar’s small-holding,” “Mexican farm,” or “Misia Petra’s ranch,” suddenly adopted the names of “Bagatelle,” “West Side,” or “Armenonville,” and were divided into plots to be selected from a plan but hardly ever built on, since their price increased every time they were bought and sold (sometimes several times in one day) in offices with many Underwood typewriters, gilt ventilators, relief maps, attractive maquettes, and brandy and gin in the safe, with much haggling and discussing between drinks and Havanas, and telephone calls from women—this was quite new—who offered their services by telephone in foreign accents, promising refinements that were refused—and it was the worse for them—by our own too-modest tarts, with whom “the business” had to be performed in the classic manner, with nothing baroque, perverse, or fantastic such as went on in other countries. Pianolas had invaded the capital, rolling and unrolling cylinders of “La Madelon,” “Roses of Picardy,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” from dawn to midnight. In the bars where cards and dominoes were played, or where Santa Inés rum gave way to White Horse whisky, the only subject of conversation was the profits, due to the war, which had made them forget the war itself, although everyone—whites, cholos, zambos, Indians, and those of swarthy complexion—had become Frenchified, pro-tricolor, avengers, cockade wearers, Joan-of-Arcists and Barrèsians, declaring that we should soon get our own back for the disaster of Sedan, and the storks of Hansi would come back to the steeples of Alsace and Lorraine. At the same time the first skyscraper arose—five stories and an attic—immediately followed by th
e Edificio Titán close by, with eight. And the old city with its two-storey houses was very quickly transformed into an Invisible City. Invisible because, changing from horizontal to vertical, there were no eyes now that could see it and know it. Each architect, engaged in the task of making his buildings higher than those that went up before, thought only of the particular aesthetic qualities of his façade, as if it could be seen from a hundred yards off, whereas the streets were made to take only one car at a time—one mule train, one cart—and were only six or seven yards wide. Thus, with his back to an infinitely tall column, the passer-by tried in vain to admire the elegant decoration lost in the sky among vultures and turkey buzzards. It was known that up aloft there were garlands, cornucopias, and caducei, or there might even be a Greek temple perched on the fifth floor with Phidias’ horses and everything; but this was only known, because those citadels, domes, and entablatures existed—city upon city—in a kingdom that could not be seen. And higher still were solitary, unknown, banished statues, of Mercury—on the Chamber of Commerce—or of Minerva, whose lance attracted August lightning, of charioteers, winged spirits, Christian saints, isolated from one another and unknown to men, who yet lorded it over intricate gradations of terraces, slate-covered roofs, water tanks, chimneys, lightning conductors, and huts containing lift machinery. Without realizing it, people were living in unsuspected Ninevehs, vertiginous Westminsters, and flying Trianons, with gargoyles and bronze figures who would become old without ever having had contact with the people below, busy among the porticos, arcades, and colonnades that carried the great weight of invisible constructions. And as everyone was eager to have what was new, those who had inhabited colonial mansions for two centuries hastily left them and moved into new, modern houses in the Roman, Chambord, or Stanford White style. So the huge palaces of the old town with their plateresque façades and coats of arms carved in stone were taken over by the rabble, the poor and diseased—the fictitious blind man with a paid guide, the drunk whose hands trembled in the mornings, the wooden-legged accordion player or the poor paralytic, begging alms for the love of God. The beautiful rooms were full of dishevelled women, ragged children, whores, and tramps, living in the fumes from stoves and clothes hung up to dry, while the patios were given over to boxing, cock fights, and conjurors with pickpocket partners. Hundreds of Ford cars—like those in Mack Sennett films—streamed along the badly paved streets, avoiding the potholes, running onto the pavements, knocking over baskets of fruit, breaking shop windows, in a mania for speed never before known in these latitudes. It was all urgency, haste, rush, and impatience. In a few months of war, oil lamps had been supplanted by electric bulbs, gourds by bidets, pineapple juice by Coca-Cola, lotto by roulette, Rocambole by Pearl White, the messenger boy’s donkey by the telegraphist’s bicycle, the mule cart with its tassels and bells by a smart Renault, which had to go forwards and reverse ten or twelve times to get around a narrow corner and enter an alley recently christened “Boulevard,” causing a frenzied flight among the goats which still abounded in some quarters where the grass growing between the paving stones was good. The Ursuline nuns instituted a Grotto of Lourdes with wonderful effects of electric light; the first dance hall was opened, with a jazz band from New Orleans; horses and jockeys were brought from Tijuana to race in a gaily decorated hippodrome made on the site of the swamp, and one morning the Old Town, described as “Very Loyal and Very Illustrious” in the deed of its foundation in 1553, awoke to the full realisation that it had become a leading twentieth-century capital. The last reptiles—rattlesnakes and elaps—vanished from the building sites, the goldfinches were silent, and phonographs opened their mouths. And there were bridge championships, fashion parades, Turkish baths, money changers, and exclusive brothels, admitting no one with darker skin than the Minister for Public Works, who was taken as a yardstick because although not perhaps the black sheep of the Cabinet he was indubitably its brownest sheep. The police exchanged their worn slippers for regulation boots, and their white-gloved hands controlled a traffic whose noise was enriched by klaxons with several rubber bulbs, so that they could play “The Merry Widow Waltz” or the first bars of the National Anthem.