Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  “Although it was all very hush-hush, Ariel knows that he spent several days in Washington,” commented Peralta, “which only shows yet once again that in politics no enemy is ever dead.”

  The Head of State reflected out loud: “And those were the people, those, whose interests I always made a point of defending; they got anything they wanted out of me, and now they accuse me of everything that has gone wrong in the country. They won’t admit that the crisis is nothing to do with us: it’s general, it’s universal. Let them take a look at Europe, where all they’ve done is turn the map upside down, ruin currencies, create artificial nationalities—chaos, I tell you, absolute chaos. And now they’re trying to interfere in our troubles by means of this idiotic professor.”

  “They think a change—it’s the everlasting Myth of Change—will straighten out our problems. Perhaps they think we’re moth-eaten, a bit vieux-jeu,” groaned Peralta, while the President was revolving in his mind an idea that had for several days perturbed him:

  “What an imbecile I was not to polish off the Student when I had him in front of me as plain as I see you now. And with my Browning on the table. A mere gesture. And for the benefit of the public; he tried to attack me and I defended myself. The Mayorala Elmira could have fired a shot at the right-hand shoulder of my frock coat suspended from a coat hanger, and I would have put it on afterwards. And a good photo of the young man stretched on the carpet, the unfortunate victim of my legitimate instinct of self-preservation. Plain as a pikestaff. All clear. And the first applause would have come from the American Club.”

  “It wouldn’t have improved the situation at all.”

  “But the Student is still here: he hasn’t gone. Our police are just as unable to get him today as they were yesterday. And he’s still publishing his pamphlets on India paper.”

  “Principally read by the members of the American Club. Because the public it’s intended for are almost illiterate. His ideas are too complicated for our people in sandals and overalls.”

  “They don’t understand our young man’s ideas, but they believe in him.”

  “Bah! In an abstract way. He’s someone-who-will-put-things-to-rights. The Myth of Change again! But he’s lacking flesh and blood, an image, palpability. For our peasants, Saint Speed (unknown to the calendar of saints) has more solidarity and is someone they can turn to when they want something, just as they pray to a picture printed in Paris, showing the Miracle worker, unknown to the Church, brandishing a sword with the word Hodie, only they pronounce it Jode, engraved in the steel.”

  “And you think Leoncio has more popular appeal than the Student?”

  “Not at all. But it’s just because the gringos are afraid of the Student—and especially of the ideas he represents—that they support the man from Nueva Córdoba. They care very little about the individual. But he’s come to personify a type of democracy that they invoke every time they want to change something in Latin America.”

  “A matter of vocabulary.”

  “Everyone has their own; they talk about Defender of Democracy, we about Defender of the Established Order.”

  The Head of State began thinking aloud again: “Perhaps we could twang the string of national honour: the unforgivable interference of Yankees in the interior affairs of our country. Our people loathe gringos.”

  “Our people do—yes; but our bourgeoisie always gets along with them. To our wealthy people Gringo is a synonym for Order, Technique, and Progress. Those sons of the family who aren’t educated by the Jesuits of Belén are at Cornell or Troy, if not West Point. We’re being invaded—and you know it—by Methodists, Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists. North American Bibles are part of the furniture of our rich houses, like Mary Pickford’s photo in a silver frame rubber-stamped with her familiar ‘Sincerely yours.’ ”

  “We’re losing all our character: we’ve got too far away from Mother Spain.”

  “We shan’t do any good by bemoaning that. You’ve got plenty of guts and I’ve fought bulls myself in better days. Generals like Ataúlfo Galván and Walter Hoffmann were the real danger, with some of the army behind them. At least we haven’t got to keep our eye on the barracks.”

  “That’s true enough: I can count on the army. Without the smallest doubt.”

  “And the Yankees know that, President; that’s one thing the Yankees know.”

  Just then music from stringed instruments struck up from behind the flamboyant trees in Central Park, slow, sweet, and smoothly bowed.

  “There they go!” cried the Head of State. “Elmirita says they’re bringing a coffin. Shut that window, Peralta.”

  And the secretary shut the window, suddenly shocked by this contact with the everyday Business of Death, the only thriving business, managed in these times of crisis by clever men, connoisseurs of a safe clientèle moved by ancestral and scatalogical emotions towards that Sleep-Which-Has-No-Awakening. Throughout the country, by a fusion of traditions wherein Extremadurans—our first Conquistador had come from Cáceres, like Pizarro—had combined with Indians, funeral ceremonies were complicated, ostentatious, and prolonged. When someone died in a village, the neighbours invaded the house and turned the wake into a collective activity with widespread repercussions, a gathering of men in doorways, on patios and pavements, against a dramatic background of weeping, wailing, and fainting women; and the whole night was punctuated by servings of black coffee, cups of chocolate, strong wine, and brandy, with much histrionic and emotional embracing, speeches and lamenting around the coffin, and exaggerated reconciliations between relations who had been at daggers drawn and passed years without meeting, before coming together on this solemn occasion. Afterwards came mourning, half-mourning, quarter-mourning, and then permanent mourning, which in the case of a good-looking widow was observed until she married again. And this continued in the important modern capital, although the scenario was somewhat transformed. The corpses were no longer laid out and the wakes held in private houses, but in undertakers’ establishments, which were becoming more numerous all the time—with a growing population, more deaths—and competing with one another in the sumptuous innovations they offered their clients. And, little by little, these funerals had multiplied in the middle of the town, spreading a taint of affliction around the Presidential Palace—with constant coming and going of coffins and flowers, movements of angels and crosses, horses draped in black, hearses with glass sides, arrival by night of stiff corpses wrapped in green sheets …

  But the most extraordinary of all these establishments had just been set up nearby, next to the Ministry of the Interior and the dyeworks: this was an imitation of the Deuil en vingt-quatre heures to be seen in Paris behind the Madeleine, at the corner of the Rue Tronchet. The speciality of “Eternity” was that the families could choose a style of furnishing, decoration, and ambience in which to receive condolences at the foot of the coffin. There was a Colonial Room, an Imperial Room, a Spanish Renaissance Room, a Louis XV Room, an Escorial Room, a Gothic Room, a Byzantine Room, an Egyptian Room, a Rustic Room, a Masonic Room, a Spiritualist Room, a Rosicrucian Room, all with seats, emblems, ornaments, and symbols adjusted to the character of the funeral chapel. And if the users wished, they could benefit from a great innovation introduced from the United States: the wake could be accompanied by noble and serene music, devoid of contrasts in loudness or tempo—although not at all funereal—performed by quartets or small string orchestras with harmonium, perfumed with incense and hidden behind a trellis of evergreens or a hedge of wreaths on trestles. Their repertory was drawn from the “Méditation” from Thaïs, Le cygne by Saint-Saëns, Massenet’s “Élégie,” Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” as well as Gounod’s, played and played again tirelessly from the arrival of the urn until its departure to the cemetery. When these melodies came creeping into the palace in the small hours, the Head of State, exasperated at hearing the same tune over and over again, repeated a hundred times—and louder when there were no cars circulating in
Central Park—ordered all the windows to be shut, though he went on suffering torments from the themes reverberating inside his head. And he could get to sleep again only with the help of the Santa Inés rum in the Hermès case, which was always placed on the night table at the head of his hammock.

  And since that had been going on for weeks and weeks, there came a morning when he felt deafened—but deafened by the silence, the unaccustomed silence. The windows had been opened early that morning by the Mayorala Elmira, but the light breeze coming into his room smelling of the verdurous dawn did not bring with it the “Élégie,” Le cygne, the “Méditation,” or the Ave Marias.

  “Something strange is happening,” he thought. And something strange, very strange indeed, was in fact happening: something never before seen or remembered—even by the oldest inhabitants with the longest memories. The capital was starting the day—that day—in silence, a silence that was not merely funereal, a silence of other eras, a silence of distant dawns, a silence of the days when goats grazed in the main streets of the town; a silence broken only by a far-off donkey’s bray, the cough of someone with bronchitis, the wail of a child. No buses went by. There was no tinkling from trams. Milk floats weren’t going their rounds. And what was stranger still, early businesses like the bakers and cafés hadn’t opened their doors, and the shops still had their metal shutters down. The total absence of street cries—no “hot churros” nor “tamarinds for the liver,” nor “fresh oysters from Chichiriviche,” nor “good tamales,” nor the fruit seller’s bugle—seemed to announce events of extreme gravity, with that sense of contraction, that fearful expectation, latent and undefined, which is often felt—although the warning is never listened to—on the eve of great earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. (The trees in the Parícutin region were afraid, turned grey with silent terror, many weeks before the slow, inexorable advance of lava had bubbled with a dull sound around their roots.)

  “But—what’s happening? What is all this?” asked the Head of State, seeing Doctor Peralta enter his room followed by ministers and military officers, unceremoniously violating his privacy and over-riding protocol:

  “General strike, Señor President.”

  “General strike? General strike?” he asked (asked himself, rather) as if stunned, not hearing what they said, nor what he said himself.

  “General strike. Or, if you prefer: a general standstill. Everything is shut. No one has gone to work.”

  “And public servants?”

  “There are no buses, trams, or trains.”

  “And there’s not a soul in the streets,” said the Mayorala Elmira, making her way between alpaca suits and military uniforms. The Head of State went onto the balcony. The palace dogs, led by the remains of the police force, were pissing around the fountain in the park. But dogs had no souls. They weren’t people. And that undertaker’s establishment without music …

  He turned back to the others in the room with a face of thunder: “A general strike, is there? And you knew nothing about it?” The others began talking incoherently, tying themselves up in explanations, clarifications and excuses—“You remember I advised you,” “You remember that at the last council meeting, I …” but they never succeeded in producing a single convincing argument. Hitherto, real strikes had been seen only in the interior of the republic, in Nueva Córdoba and the ports; calls for a standstill had had no more serious consequences here; it was true that during these last days papers and clandestine leaflets had been distributed; moreover it was the Student who had predicted strikes of farmworkers, porters, road men and so forth, and everyone knew that merchants, shop workers, and members of the middle classes had never listened to the Student’s instructions and calls to action; men employed on regular work didn’t feel that Proletarians of the Whole World referred to them, because they never thought of themselves as proletarians; “and I was away from the capital, and I had to take my family to Bellamar and I couldn’t imagine it, all the same my daughter told me …” (we don’t care a fuck what your daughter told you); besides, never, never, never in the history of the continent had a strike of white-collar workers been seen; that sort of hooliganism was confined to disreputable characters, so we didn’t pay attention to all the rumours; my daughter told me that the nuns of Tarbes … (stop bothering us with your daughter); I always said that that campaign of rumours, false epidemics, the wooden horse in the aqueduct, threats of death, skulls sent through the post, in fact I always said that …

  “And now we’re on the subject of deaths,” said Peralta, interrupting the confused sound of voices all talking together, “the Mayorala has just told me something most unexpected, most unusual: all the undertakers’ staff has joined the movement. Not only the musicians of ‘Eternity,’ but those who lay out the corpses, the drivers of hearses, gravediggers and sextons. Families have to keep watch at home over anyone who died last night, because no one will come and take charge of them.”

  “People who died last night didn’t at least join the strike,” said the Head of State, suddenly calming down. “What’s more, we’ll give them some company so that they shan’t be bored in the Next World. They deserve a reward.” There was an expectant silence. “Let’s talk briefly and to the point. Ask Elmira to bring some coffee.”

  At about ten in the morning vehicles began driving rapidly through the streets—fire engines and motorcycles with sidecars, manned by police who yelled through leather megaphones and aluminium speaking trumpets, such as are used at sporting contests, to tell any tradesmen with ears to hear that anyone failing to open his shop before two o’clock, either with or without his workers, would be deprived of his licence and punished by fines and imprisonment; and that anyone of foreign origin—however long ago he might have been naturalised—would be expelled from the country. These warnings were repeated again and again until the Cathedral clock struck twelve:

  “At least the bell ringer isn’t on strike,” observed the President.

  “That’s because an electric machine has been installed,” explained Peralta, very quickly repenting of saying what might be interpreted as a joke. “We must wait.”

  The Mayorala brought bottles of cognac and earthenware jugs of Hollands, and Romeo and Juliet Havanas and Henry Clays.

  At least once every half hour the Head of State took out his watch to see whether an hour had passed. One o’clock. Two. A coffin emerged from “Eternity” carried on the shoulders of black-clad men—obviously members of the family—who set off on foot towards the cemetery. And at three the same silence as before reigned throughout the capital. Only a few Cantonese traders had opened their shops selling fans, screens, and ivory goods, for fear of being sent back to China, which was now in the hands of the Kuomintang and the Warlords.

  Suddenly the President broke the long wait by saying curtly and firmly to the Commander-in-Chief of the army: “Machine-gun the closed shops.” A click of the heels, and a salute.

  A quarter of an hour later the first fusillade was heard, bullets against metal shutters, corrugated iron, signboards, and shop windows. Never had such a frivolous war been waged. Never had the infantry enjoyed themselves so much as on this moving shooting range, where without aiming, merely firing bullets in strips, they were bound to hit some target—a splendid battle with no danger of reply from enemy bullets. It was a massacre of wax people—wax brides with wax orange blossom; gentlemen in frock coats with wigs on their wax skulls; amazons playing golf and tennis, with very pale wax complexions; a maid, dressed in the French style and made of less pale wax; the footman, like our Sylvestre in Paris, but of darker wax than the maidservant; an acolyte, a mace bearer, a jockey, all represented by a shade of wax suitable to their occupations—and, of course, the Virgins and Saints, brought from the Saint Sulpice district, in their robes of polychrome plaster, with haloes and other attributes, offered for sale by traders in missals and articles of devotion. As well as the 30-30s, the army fired off their Mausers and even some old Lebel rifles, brought from the back
regions of the Arsenal. And in this great battle-against-things, shop windows disintegrated, dinner services set out as wedding presents were sent flying, bottles of scent, Dresden and Murano vases and porcelain were splintered to bits, earthenware casseroles, flagons, and pitchers broken, and bottles of sparkling wine liberated so much energy as they exploded that they broke the bottles next to them. For several hours the attack on toys went on, firing on babies’ bottles, fusillade of Buster Brown and Mutt and Jeff, defenestration of puppets, massacre of Swiss cuckoo clocks, and a second decapitation of Saint Dionysius, who saw the head he was already carrying in his hands fall to the ground, struck in the middle of the cheek by a large-bore bullet.

  But in spite of all this activity and travail, night fell over the city without public illumination or spotlighting in parks, and with bulbs in the advertisements and streetlamps unlit—only a few gas jets still remained, and the lamps carried by watchmen in the poorer quarters—even the moon was waning and overcast with clouds. It was a long, interminable night, a night of gloom weighing on a paralysed, silent town, a town abandoned to senseless firing—a few intermittent bursts of which could still be heard here and there. During these hours of waiting, of not knowing what the morning would bring, people realised that certain silences, silences not leading to any sound of voice or meaningful phrase, could be more agonizing than the clamour of a prophet or the delirium of an inspired diviner.