Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  “The first metamorphosis of one commodity, its transformation from a commodity into money, is therefore also invariably the second metamorphosis of some other commodity, the retransformation of the latter from money into a commodity … M–C, a purchase, is at the same time C–M, a sale; the concluding metamorphosis of one commodity is the first metamorphosis of another. With regard to our weaver, the life of his commodity ends with the Bible into which he has reconverted his two pounds. But suppose the seller of the Bible turns the two pounds set free by the weaver into brandy, M–C, the concluding phase of C–M–C (linen, money, Bible) is also C–M, the first phase of C–M–C (Bible, money, brandy) …

  “The only thing I find comprehensible here is the brandy,” said the Head of State, in high good humour.

  “And what does this whacking great German tome cost?”

  “Twenty-two pesos, Señor.”

  “Then let them sell it, let them sell it; let them go on selling it. There aren’t twenty-two people in the whole country who would pay twenty-two pesos for a book as heavy as lead … –M–C, M–C–M … I never could get on with equations.”

  “But look at this, on the other hand,” said Peralta, taking a thin pamphlet out of his pocket: Breeding Rhode Island Red Poultry.

  “What’s this got to do with the other?” asked the President. “We’ve never been able to acclimatise American poultry here. Neither Nat Pinkertons, with feathers on their legs; nor Leghorns, though in the north they lay more eggs than there are days in the year; but here, I don’t know why, they shut up their arses and only lay four a week; as for those plump Rhode Island Reds, as soon as they get here they’re devoured by lice.”

  “Open this little book, President. And take a good look,” Marx-Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party.

  “Ah, hell! this is quite another thing!”

  And frowning suspiciously, he read aloud: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the Pope, Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.”

  There was a silence. Then: “As usual: hieroglyphics or prehistory. The Holy Alliance (wasn’t that after the fall of Napoleon?), the Pope who never bothered anyone, Metternich and Guizot (does anyone in this country remember that gentlemen called Metternich and Guizot ever existed?), the Tsar of Russia (which one? Even I can’t tell). Prehistory, pure prehistory.”

  However, when, turning several pages together, he came to the last lines of the pamphlet disguised as a guide to poultry-keeping, he paused deep in thought at a sentence he found there: “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.”

  There was an even longer pause. Then, at last: “The same anarchism as ever: bombs in Paris, bombs in Madrid; attempts to assassinate kings and queens; anarcho-syndicalism, communism, R.S.A., C–M–C, M–C–M, P.O.S.D.R., and Y.M.C.A. Alphabetic chaos, proliferation of initials, a sign of the decadence of the age. However, this business of breeding Rhode Island Reds. It’s ingenious. Order everyone found carrying this avicultural literature to be picked up and imprisoned. And also … But—what’s going on?”

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The clapper of the Cathedral bell began its solemn, measured strokes. And as if some gigantic hammer, progenitor of bell-children or children-bells, were striking the first bell created by some enormous liturgical bronze-worker, the sharp but never timid bells of the Hermitage of the Dove replied from up aloft on the snow-covered slopes of the Tutelary Volcano; then their voices were taken up by the soprano of San Vicente of Rio-Frio, the baritone of the Little Sisters of Tarbes, the coloratura of the carillon of the Jesuits, the contralto of San Dionisio, the basso profundo of San Juan de Letrán, the silvery music of the Divine Shepherdess, setting alight a festival of chimes and peals, of calling and ringing, rejoicing and gladness, while from their ropes were hanging, rising and sinking, striding, dancing in the air, bell ringers and acolytes, agile seminarists and dexterous capuchins, who kicked themselves off the ground and swung themselves aloft again in time to the tumult pouring from the great resonant shafts of the church towers. And the concert spread from north to south, and from east to west, involving the city in a prodigious polyphony of swinging, throbbing, and percussion, while factory sirens, motor horns, frying pans hit with spoons, saucepans, tins, everything that could make a noise, resounded, set up a deafening din, above narrow old alleys and wide new asphalt streets. Now railway engines whistled, fire-engine sirens wailed, trams set their copper bells quivering.

  “The war is over!” cried the Foreign Secretary, entering without waiting to be announced, and seizing the bottle of Santa Inés, which the Head of State and his secretary had left on the book table, after uncorking it in complete confidence that they were unobserved. “The war is over. Civilisation has triumphed over Barbarism, Latinity over Germanism. A victory which is our victory too!”

  “Then we’re buggered,” said the President softly. “Yes, now we’re properly buggered.”

  Children, let out of class, ran shouting and singing out of school. The gay girls of the Calles de La Chayota, Economia, or San Isidro rushed into the street wearing Lorraine headdresses, or black Alsatian bows in their hair. “The war is over … the war is over.”

  Artisans, bricklayers, piano tuners, pawnbrokers, brakesmen, hawkers of mangoes and tamarinds, maize millers, athletes in picture shirts, ice-cream sellers, organ grinders with monkeys dressed as Italians, street cleaners, professors with starched shirt fronts, sugar refiners, naturists, Theosophists, spiritualists, laboratory workers, homosexuals with carnations in their mouths, students of folklore, bookish men, gamblers, men in cap and gown, all streamed past shouting as one man: “The war is over! The war is over!”

  Newspaper boys appeared crying a special edition with 64-point type: “The war is over! The war is over!”

  Students, knowing that the police would have the good sense to leave them alone at such a time of rejoicing, ran into the streets in a dense crowd, those from the University of San Lucas carrying a wooden platform on their shoulders, on which a mechanical mule wearing a pointed helmet and with a German flag on its back was kicked into space and beaten each time by a blow from the sword of a dummy in tricolor and gold, representing Marshal Joffre. And the procession following behind sang:

  The Kaiser cuts capers

  And Joffre calls the tune.

  This animated allegory went around the town to Central Park more than once with their Joffre in red trousers. They stopped in front of the Presidential Palace. Then they followed the Boulevard of the Republic to the upper town, just as the priests of the Divine Shepherdess were bringing out another platform supporting the Virgin in a great glittering cloak, victoriously mounted on a green dragon twisted in its death agony—it had been taken from the altar of Saint George—from whose demonic head hung a cardboard notice bearing the word WAR written in thick indian ink letters. And this time women were singing the old village song:

  Santa Maria

  Save us from evil

  Protect us, Señora

  From this terrible devil.

  Then the others returned through the Calle del Comercio with their mule and marshal moved by wires, playing on maracas and firing off rockets:

  The Kaiser cuts capers

  And Joffre calls the tune.

  The retinue of the Divine Shepherdess entered the Calle de los Plateros and climbed the steps to the Boulevard Auguste Comte:

  To kill the Devil

  The Virgin seized a blade

  On all fours the monster

  Lay down in the glade.

  “We’re done for,” said the Head of State, watching all this with a far from happy expression.

  “But, President, it’s the triumph of Reason, the triumph of Descartes.”

  “Look here, Peralta: this means that the bottom will at once fall out
of our market for sugar, bananas, coffee, chewing gum and gutta-percha. The days of the Fat Kine are numbered. And people will say that my rule had nothing to do with the country’s prosperity.”

  The Kaiser cuts capers

  And Joffre calls the tune.

  “Give orders for a grand official banquet to celebrate the victory of Sainte Geneviève over the Huns, of Joan of Arc over Clausewitz, of the Divine Shepherdess over International Communism. Now the storks can come back from Hansi to the roofs of Colmar, and Déroulède’s glorious bugle will sound. Descartes won the war, but we must mop up the mess” …

  Santa Maria

  Save us from evil … “All the same, there is a way of getting a last cut from the conflict. Now, while people still have cash, we’ll open a large fund for the Reconstruction of the Devastated Regions of France. Send Ofelia a cable. Tell her to come as soon as possible. We can still make use of her Red Cross nurse’s outfit.” Indifferent to what was happening in the street, and out of sympathy with the general pandemonium, but a prey to nostalgia and secret anxiety, the Head of State wound up the long-horned gramophone sleeping in a corner of his study and listened to a record of Fortugé’s:

  Lorsque la nuit tombe sur Paris

  La belle église de Notre-Dâââââme

  Semble monter au Paradis

  Pour lui conter son état d’âââme.

  13

  THE CAMPAIGN TO COLLECT FUNDS FOR THE Reconstruction of Regions Devastated by the War was a magnificent success; besides procuring marginal benefits as plentiful as they were uncontrollable, it re-established the prestige of the country and its intelligent government in a Europe too absorbed in the problems of peace to remember small, local exotic events taking place in the now-blurred distance of a period before a certain historic August which had turned the world upside down.

  In her Red Cross nurse’s uniform, Ofelia travelled from city to city, from meeting to meeting, with an exhibition of prints, drawings, posters, and eloquent photographs showing scenes of destruction, dead villages, mine craters, severely damaged cathedrals, and crosses stretching to the horizon. “We ask you for schools for the children of these men” was inscribed on the desolate view of a military cemetery. “Give me back my home” was at the feet of a Christ pierced with bullets.

  Meanwhile, this exaggerated stimulation of an already inflated prosperity swelled the tide of speculation and extravagance, nor did those whom fortune favoured pay any attention to the gloomy forecasts of some economists—puritan killjoys whose sibylline calculations were out of tune with the confident tones of those singing the praises of a myth that was renewed every day. For they were living in a fable. Without being aware of it, people were taking part in a huge conjuring display, where all values were upset, ideas inverted, appearances changed, roads deviated, and disguise and metamorphosis created a perpetual state of illusion, transformations and topsyturvydom, through the vertiginous effect of a currency that changed its appearance, weight, and value between night and morning without ever leaving the purse—or rather, the bank account—of its owner. Everything was upside down. The poor lived in Foundation Palaces, dating from the days of Orellana and Pizarro—but now given over to filth and rats—while their masters inhabited houses belonging to no tradition, native, baroque, or Jesuitic, but theatrically got up in Mediaeval, Renaissance, or Hollywood-Andalusian colour schemes, and without the smallest connection with the country’s history, or else in large buildings aping the Second Empire style of the Boulevard Haussman. The new Central Post Office had a superb Big Ben. The new main Police Station was a temple from Luxor in eau-de-nil. The country house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a pretty miniature Schönbrunn. The President of the Chamber kept his mistress in a little Abbaye de Cluny, swathed in imported ivy. Fortunes were made and lost every night at Basque pelota courts and English greyhound races. People dined at the Villa d’Este or La Troika (a nightclub recently opened by the first White Russians arrived here via Constantinople) while only in Chinese eating houses could one eat the national dishes, now scorned as something connected with rope-soled shoes and ballads sung by the blind—Cantonese kitchen boys thus becoming conservers of the National Culinary Arts. The musical successes of the day were “Caravan,” “Egyptland,” “Japanese Sandman,” “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” and above all “Hindustan,” to be seen on the music stand of every piano, bound in a cover showing an elephant and a mahout silhouetted in black against a crimson sun. Women who profiteered from the boom didn’t know where to go to show off their tiaras, pendants, and necklaces, and their dresses from Worth, Doucet, and Callot. And by the same token the Head of State remembered his long-cherished but now realisable desire to install an Opera House inside the Opera-City, the Capital of Fiction, and offer his compatriots a spectacle like those to be seen in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro—towns that had always kept their eyes on the arts and refinements of the Old World. Adolfo Bracale was entrusted with the task of giving the National Theatre “the best staging in the world.” Impresario of American touring companies, animated by such a passion for lyric drama that he had taken Simon Boccanegra, Manon, and Lucia de Lammermoor to the Chilean nitre works, banana growers’ haciendas, southern ports, and rubber plantations in Manaus, crossing deserts, travelling up rivers, visiting the West Indian islands great and small with his cast, wardrobe, and scenery, he was a man capable of taking the baton if the principal conductor fell ill of malaria, or of putting on Madame Butterfly with an orchestra of a piano, seven violins, flute, saxophone, ophicleide, two cellos, and a double bass, if nothing better could be found.

  So, one fine morning, the train from Puerto Araguato entered the capital’s station bringing antique temples, alchemist’s retorts, a Scottish cemetery, several Japanese houses, the Castle of Elsinore, the platform of Sant’Angelo, monasteries, grottoes, and dungeons, all folded or rolled in pieces to be put together with expanding forests and fabric cloisters, filling so many cases that two trains were hardly enough to take the lot. And finally, when evening came, a third convoy—that of the ultra-modern dining car with its menu in French—arrived at the Terminal Station, glittering with celebrities who stepped onto the platform among magnesium flashes and a profusion of flowers, complete with officials, applause according to their fame, and mandoline music by the Italian Colony. Chief among them was the great Enrico Caruso, wearing a double-breasted waistcoat, diamond tiepin, pale grey hat, and platinum cuff links. Amiable, verbose, and cheerful, but bewildered by so much solicitous flattery, he forgot where he was, greeted a lance-corporal as “General” and the Head Porter as “Excellency,” ignored the real minister but embraced a melomaniac who looked like a minister, distributed autographs by the dozen, kissed children, and seemed happy in surroundings reminiscent of some small Neapolitan piazza on a day of revelry. The next to appear was Titta Ruffo, scowling dramatically, robust of figure, roaring like a lion, and dressed in a light Palm Beach suit; it seemed impossible that a man of such athletic stamp could come to terms with the tormented fragility of Hamlet as displayed on the hoardings, a part he was to play in a few days’ time. Now Lucrecia Bori descended from the train, all teeth and coloratura, already assuming the role of Rosina in her Spanish hat and skirt; then Gabriella Bezanzoni, the contralto, with a knife in her garter, her expensive elegance contrasting cruelly with the feebleness of some pale North American ballerinas carrying their ballet shoes in oil-cloth bags, who got out of the presidential coach behind her. Riccardo Stracciari, wearing kid gloves and the frock coat of a close relative at an important funeral, replied to journalists’ questions in an affected voice. The tall, thin Mansueto, looking like a shady schoolmaster, had thought it amusing to disembark with Don Basilio’s shovel hat under his arm; and lastly came Nicoletti-Korman, whom we were to see bare-chested, Chaliapinesque and blaspheming in Boito’s Mefistofele.

  The tailors of the capital worked day and night, snipping for all they were worth at cloth for tailcoats and piqué waistcoats, while the dressma
kers ran from fitting to fitting to put finishing touches or slight alterations to this and that, let out skirts, lower necklines, readjust some thin woman’s dress to her taste, stretch seams for some fat woman, let out an expectant mother’s waistband, modernise and adapt out-of-date fashions in line with the latest models. The chorus was organised from students and members of glee clubs; the best musicians in the country were united into an orchestra under the direction of an atrociously bad-tempered Bolognese who, without pausing in a passage he was conducting, would shout instructions like: “Sustain that note, you bastard,” or “Crotchets, you brute” … “Dolce ma non pederasta” (this was for the prelude to La Traviata), “Allegro con coglioni” (this for the overture to Carmen), declaring all the time—and in this he imitated his maestro Toscanini—that it was better to live among pimps and prostitutes than with musicians, although as a matter of fact as soon as the rehearsal was over he wrapped his neck in towels and went with them to the Roma, a popular and lively bar, to drink several glasses of Santa Inés rum diluted with Fernet Branca.