Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  FIVE

  … I am, I exist, that is certain. But … for how long?

  —DESCARTES

  14

  AY … BEE … CEE … DEE … AY … THE ALPHABET resounded strangely, very strangely, in the classrooms of the North American Methodist Colleges and Augustinian Lycées now open in our principal cities, arousing serious doubts concerning the efficiency and modernity—especially the modernity—of the teaching given to children by the Salesian fathers and French Marists, the Dominican and Ursuline nuns, or the Little Sisters of Tarbes. Now one could hear: “This is a pencil, this is a dog, this is a girl,” where formerly the classical declensions of Rosa, Rosae, Rosa, Rosam had flourished, obliterating the memory of the inevitable jokes at Aunt Jemima’s expense, a short while earlier, when they had moved on to adjectives of the first category with Nigra, Nigrae, Nigra, Nigram. The Cid, Roland, Saint Louis, the Catholic Queen, and Henry IV emigrated from the history books along with sword, horn, centenarian oak, pawned jewels, chicken stew, and all the rest, to be advantageously replaced by Benjamin Franklin, with his lightning conductor and Poor Richard’s Almanac; Washington at Mount Vernon, surrounded by good negroes whom he treated like members of his family; Jefferson and Independence Hall in Philadelphia; Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; the migration to the west and the dramatic death of General Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn against the barbarian hordes of Sitting Bull. As soon as they were weaned by their Indian wet nurses who sang them nursery rhymes and taught them, like Pythagoras, that it was bad to poke the fire with a knife, children were guided to where the little Mozart lay in the Pantheon of Infant Prodigies, next to Daniel Webster because of his early battle against a malignant growth—which, as it was God’s creation, had a right to life just as the slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a right to life. Rapidly moving on from L’Illustration, Lectures pour tous, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post—with attractive covers by Norman Korwin—they began to tell the truth (bitter truths, maybe, but now it was possible to speak plainly, and history was history) about the recent war.

  Without “Over There” and General Pershing, France would have been lost. Britain had fought half-heartedly, without conviction: the “Tommies” belonged to folklore, Marble Arch, and tea served in the trenches to turbaned sepoys and Scots with bagpipes. Italy was a country of bad soldiers with cock feathers in their hats, and only one battle: Caporetto. As for Russia: the monk Rasputin, the Tsarevich, haemophilia, Madame Virúbova, mystical orgies, inspired idiots, Resurrection, Yasnaya Polyana, and the unstable, tortured Slav soul, always oscillating between the angelic and infernal abysses, had collectively borne fruit in a deluded reformer—a man of the Kremlin like Ivan the Terrible—the ephemeral Marxist Paraclete, whose days were already counted, weighed, divided by the onslaught of the forces of Denikin, Wrangel, Kolchak, and the Franco-British armies of the Baltic, who would quickly achieve the ruin of a system already doomed to disaster. For (as the Evangelists said in a verse of the Bible as emphatic as it is difficult to find amongst so many pages printed in two columns on India paper) there would always be both rich and poor in the world—and as for the camel and the eye of the needle, we know that a rather low and narrow Door of the Needle existed in Jerusalem, through which intelligent camels could always pass if they bent their knees a little. It had been proved that Europeans were incapable of living in peace, and President Wilson had been obliged to cross the Atlantic to put some order into their affairs. But this would be the last time. We would never again trouble to devote our youthful energies to defend a culture whose axis of gravitation—as it was time to say openly—had been displaced in the direction of America, North America, of course, while awaiting the time when we of the south finally succeeded in freeing ourselves from the evil traditions that kept us living in the past. The world had entered the technical age, and Spain had bequeathed us a language incapable of developing a technical vocabulary. The future belonged to Inventors, not Humanists. And Spaniards had not invented a thing for centuries. The internal combustion engine, the telephone, electric light, the phonograph, on the other hand …

  If, by some whim of the All-Powerful, Columbus’ caravels had crossed with the Mayflower and stopped at the island of Manhattan, while the English Puritans had hit on Paraguay, New York would today be rather like Illescas or Castilleja de la Cuesta, whereas Asunción would astonish the whole world with its skyscrapers, Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge, and all the rest of it. Europe was the world of the past. A good world in which to float in a gondola, dream among Roman remains, look at stained-glass windows, visit museums, and spend pleasant, instructive holidays—but a world whose decadence was being speeded up by an increasing amorality manifest in everything to do with sex, with women who were ready to go to bed with anyone, with those “horrid French customs” brought back by young North American soldiers and sometimes alluded to in a hushed and shocked voice (though the mother of a family ought to know everything) by the chaste “Daughters of the Revolution.” The triumph of Latinity—as Latin American papers persisted in calling the European war—had had the most disastrous consequences for Latinity in our countries, by renewing the Quarrel of the Investitures,* and by the multiple influences of the north. Bookshops formerly selling the works of Anatole France and Romain Rolland—nor must the legendary success of Barbusse’s Le Feu be forgotten—now displayed The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, Ben-Hur, Monsieur Beaucaire, and the novels of Elinor Glyn, in gaudy coloured wrappers suggesting that they would appeal to readers who wanted to keep up to date with the latest literary movements. And in contrast to a feeble European cinema without any outstanding stars—they all seemed to have fallen in battle—the magnificent artistry of the miracle-working David Griffith, mover of multitudes and explorer of Time, was showing us images such as we had never before seen (much more impressive than any erudite evocation), interpreting the Birth of a Nation, the Tragedy of Golgotha, the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, and even the world of Babylon—although Doctor Peralta, who was an addict of Mallet’s handbooks and Reinach’s Apollo, declared that the enormous Elephant Gods appearing in Griffith’s Babylon had never been seen there, and irreverently described them as the “visions of a gringo with a hangover.”

  Aware that she was losing ground in these spheres, France arranged to send us a short official tour—a three-day convention, while the Head of State was resting at Bellamar from the disappointments of his operatic venture—including Sarah Bernhardt, plastered with powder and paint, gravitating on the axis of her one leg, bewigged like one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s clowns, but still sustained by her desperate determination to rise superior to her own decline, and declaiming the most pathetic alexandrines from Phèdre, or the dying tirades of an almost octogenarian Aiglon, in a quavering voice of approaching doom—while having to be carried in someone’s arms, lean on the furniture, sit on a throne, lie prostrate, or be conveyed in King Titurel’s litter. Next, to be greeted by the cheerful indifference of a public enthralled by dazzling young actresses from Hollywood, Italy sent us Eleanora Duse, fantastically attired in a braided and frogged hussar’s jacket and high black hat as one of Heine’s grenadiers, bringing with her the ruins and broken columns of La Città Morta by D’Annunzio, an author the young had suddenly tired of, after years of enthusiasm for La figlia di Iorio. All this belonged to the past, and as things of the past do, it seemed to them to smell of funereal flowers. Perhaps this was why there was an increase in the sales of North American reviews, or periodicals like The New York Times, whose Sunday magazine provided information about new music, extraordinary painting, and eccentric literary movements going on in Paris (despite what was said, they seemed to be having a minor renaissance there). L’Illustration and Lectures pour tous ignored these developments, or if they alluded to them at all it was only to trounce them in the name of “order, proportion, and moderation,” so that to find out about these surprising innovations—the poetry of someone called Apollinaire, for instance, who died on the ve
ry day of the Armistice—people had to go to New York publications.

  “Young people always like newfangled things,” said the Head of State. But he didn’t know that these verses without rhyme or punctuation, these sonatas full of dissonances, amounted, interestingly enough, to formidable criticisms of our country. One morning, the news spread quickly that the New York Times expert on Latin American affairs had published a long editorial, ruthlessly analysing our financial ruin, alluding to repression by the police and torture, going into the mystery of some disappearances, denouncing assassinations that no one here knew about, and reminding its readers that the Head of State—who was put in the same category as Rosas, Doctor Francia (permanent Dictator of Paraguay), Porfirio Díaz, Estrada Cabrera of Guatemala, and Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela, not to mention all the Louis of France and Catherines of Russia—had been nearly twenty years in power.

  Orders were given for the issue to be instantly suppressed—there were no copies left on kiosks and book-stalls, except three found by Doctor Peralta on a vegetable stall, whose owner regularly bought this paper to wrap up his cabbages, greens, and yams in its 120 pages.

  “We ought to ban the paper from coming into the country,” said the secretary, noticing the anger on the Head of State’s face as he read it.

  “A Yankee paper. A major scandal. They’ll soon be dumping the whole of Randolph Hearst’s chain on us.” There was a pause. “Besides, the printed word slips in everywhere. You can put a political enemy in prison. But you can’t stop the circulation of a foreign paper even if it tells lies about your mother. One copy is enough. It arrives by air, is hidden in travellers’ briefcases, diplomatic bags or ladies’ petticoats, and passes from hand to hand, across frontiers, rivers, and mountain ranges.” There was another silence, rather longer than the last. “It was a bad day when I signed the order for English to be taught in schools. Now everyone here can say ‘Son of a bitch.’ ” There was a third silence, even longer than the second, broken by Peralta, who had just re-read the editorial:

  “It alludes here to Article 39 of the 1910 Constitution.” And, quoting by heart, as if it were part of a betrothal ceremony: “Presidential elections will take place not less than three months before the current six-year period has expired.” There was a fourth silence, longer than the third.

  “But who the hell told them that we had elections of any description here?” burst out the Head of State suddenly.

  “Yes, but the 1910 Constitution says …”

  “It says what you’ve said, but it also says that those elections aren’t held if the nation happens to be in a state of armed conflict or war declared against a foreign power.”

  “Exactly. But who are we fighting, except those shits in the interior?”

  The Head of State looked at his secretary with an expression of sly solemnity. “We’re still at war with Hungary.”

  “So we are!”

  “I’ve not signed a peace treaty with Hungary, nor do I intend to at present, because it’s in utter chaos. The Ambassador hasn’t received his salary for months and has had to pawn his wife’s jewels. If his country goes on like that we shall soon see him playing the violin in some gypsy cabaret. It’s bloody well all up with them! But we’re at war with Hungary. And when there’s a war there are no elections. To hold elections now would be to violate the Constitution. Quite simply.”

  “Ah, my President! There’s nobody like you!” said Doctor Peralta, bringing up the Hermès case to celebrate this unforeseen prolongation of the world war. This business about war with Hungary smacked of a marvellous cocktail of cumbias and czardas, bambas and friskas, creole serenades and Liszt Rhapsodies, all dominated by the oneiric voice of the soprano who inhabited the looking-glass of Jules Verne’s Castle of the Carpathians—just as the Mayorala Elmira was now inhabiting the mirrors of this audience chamber, busily looking for wine glasses.

  The New York Times published three more articles on the country’s economic and political situation, and these were widely circulated in spite of Peralta’s vigilance in buying up all copies of the paper as soon as they arrived at the bookshops, including the American Book Shops. But the fact was that an office as clandestine as it was active—and obviously run by supporters of Doctor Leoncio Martinez—secretly translated the articles, had hundreds of copies made by a machine, and distributed them by post in envelopes of various sizes, very often fraudulently stamped with the trademarks and patent names of well-known industrial and commercial businesses, so that they were circulated like innocent advertisements. Meanwhile our own press, although censored and prevented from broaching the numerous subjects it was thought desirable to suppress, devoted itself with increasing skill—inspired by old supplements of Le Petit Journal and New York tabloids—to exploiting the sensationalism of any horrific incidents or unusual developments. Suddenly the Crime of the Calle Hermosilla or the Trial of the Parricide Sisters filled whole pages with headlines stretching across six columns and lasted for several weeks. And they were a blood-curdling and monstrous procession, making magnificent use of adjectives, subtle euphemisms for the scabrous, sly metaphors for the sexual, osteological nomenclature, terms from legal anthropometry, the language of necrophily and the dissecting room. There was the case of “The Man Buried Alive at Bayarta,” “The Child Born with the Head of a Cavy,” “A Troglodyte Village in the Middle of the Twentieth Century,” “A Doctor’s Honour Cleared,” “The Sextuplets of Puerto Negro,” “He Killed His Mother Without Cause,” “Sadism in Seaport Taverns Must Be Suppressed,” “Savage Shooting Affray at Birthday Party,” “Old Man Devoured by Ants,” “Den of Sodomy Discovered,” “Recrudescence of White Slavery,” “Woman Quartered at Crossroads”—all this sort of stuff being mixed with matters of permanent interest, historical or human content, such as the Queen’s Necklace, the death of the Prince Imperial at the hands of Zulus, the drowned continent of Atlantis, the story of Abelard and Héloïse, subjected to necessary euphemisms when it came to the action of Canon Fulbert, whom certain blackguards identified—so eager were they not to miss a trick—with the Chief of the Judicial Police.

  In the midst of homicides, crimes of passion, and unheard-of events, the season of the Nativity came around, and in a strange guise, for it was the first time that it was transformed into Christmas. Charming family traditions were quickly forgotten: no cribs were constructed by sticking together pieces of paper, with manger, Virgin, Saint Joseph, ass, ox, and shepherds—more numerous if the house was a richer one—who came to adore the chubby, angelic Child, lying on a bed of guava leaves, which were changed every day to give more fragrance to the scene. Families no longer worked hard at re-painting and varnishing the figures of saints from last year, glueing together those that were broken, and fixing the Angel of the Annunciation to his gold wire under the silver star on the ceiling. Strange things happened this year: a forest like that which advanced on Dunsinane marched up to the capital from the Atlantic ports: they were thousands of fir trees from Canada and the United States, bringing their exotic aroma to the rich quarters of the city, where they were set up and festively decorated with glass balls, garlands of gold tinsel, small twisted candles, and paper bells covered with cotton-wool snow. Peculiar deer with branched horns appeared, never seen before in the country and known as “reindeer,” pulling sledges laden with parcels. And at the doors of toyshops stood bearded old men dressed in red, called Santa Claus—or Petit Journal by the populace. The traditional Nativity of yesteryear, of all time, was supplanted in a single day by the Nordic Christmas. This year no parties of revellers singing carols to tambourines went out into the street and called on the neighbours with their normal “Rat-a-plan … Who is it?… Men of peace,” their singers reeling through the streets from all the aguardiente, etc., they had been given as a reward for the happy news that the Messiah had become flesh once again, and was alive among us. These old-fashioned songs were supplanted in respectable houses by music boxes playing such tunes as “Silent Night” or �
�Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”