Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  (Hailed as restorer and custodian of Liberty, after a triumphal entry riding on a black horse—but without boots, and in the white drill suit he had always worn in the University—Luis Leoncio had climbed the stairs of the Presidential Palace he had described in a recent manifesto as an “Augean stable” with the majestic step of an archon, his expression stern, his gestures few, and looking coldly—with some vague threat in his retinas—at those who were over-reaching themselves to congratulate him on his triumph. Much had been hoped of the Man who—after making a roll of public employees, thanks to a prompt North American loan—had undertaken in a monkish, frugal manner the enormous task of examining the national problems. For weeks and weeks he shut himself up in his study, silent and remote, poring over estimates, statistics, and political documents, preferring to get help from technical books, encyclopedias, reports, and memoranda, rather than consult experts trained to go into these questions in detail, and analyse a whole, in the Cartesian manner, into parts whose multiplicity was obscuring the vision of the whole itself. They awaited the results of his toil with unction and eager impatience. People walked through Central Park almost on tiptoe every evening, talking in low voices and pointing to the window where lights would be burning until the small hours, and behind which Something Important was being worked out. Everyone was waiting for the Wise Man of Nueva Córdoba to speak. It couldn’t be long now. And at last he did speak, before an immense crowd gathered in the Olympic Stadium. And his speech was a torrential onslaught—without pause to take breath—as if a dictionary were unbound, let loose, with pages in confusion, words in revolt, a tumult of concepts and ideas, accelerated impact of figures, images and abstractions in a vertiginous flood of words launched to the four winds, and moving from Morgan’s Bank to Plato’s Republic, from the Logos to foot-and-mouth disease, from General Motors to Ramakrishna, coming at last to the conclusion—or at least some understood it thus—that from the Mystic Marriage between the Eagle and the Condor, and as a result of the fertilisation of our inexhaustible soil by foreign investment, our America would be transformed by the vigorous technology that would come to us from the north (and we were on the threshold of a century that would be the Century of Technology for our Young Continent), by the light of our own innate spirituality, a synthesis would be born of the Vedanta, the Popol Vuh, and the parables of Christ-the-first-socialist, the only true socialist, nothing to do with Moscow Gold or the Red Peril, or an exhausted, dying Europe, without sap or talent—and it would be as well for us to break finally with its useless teaching—whose hopeless decadence had been proclaimed not long ago by the German philosopher Oswald Spengler. The start of this new era, in which the thesis-antithesis of north-south was complemented by the telluric and the scientific, would be manifested in the creation of a New Humanity, the Alpha-Omega, the party of Hope, expressing the sturm-und-drang, the political pulse of new generations, marking the end of dictatorships in this continent, and establishing a true and authentic Democracy, where there would be freedom of syndical action, provided that it did not break the necessary harmony between Capital and Labour; the need for an opposition must be recognised, provided that it was a co-operative opposition (critical, yes, but always constructive); the right to strike was accepted, provided that the strikes didn’t paralyse private enterprise or public services; and, finally, the Communist Party would be legalised, since it in fact existed in our country, provided that it did not obstruct the functioning of institutions nor stimulate class war.

  And by the time the orator brought his speech to an end with “Long live our country!” he had uttered so many “buts,” “howevers,” “neverthelesses,” “despite the sayings,” and “provided thats” that his hearers were left with the impression that time had stood still, independently of the ticking of clocks, and that when the Austere Doctor stepped down from the rostrum he left behind him a total mental emptiness—blank brains and an agnostic trance in his listeners.

  And in the ensuing months all was dismay and confusion. The Provisional President—not so provisional after all—could never come to any decision. Every suggestion made by his colleagues, every measure to be applied at once, seemed to him “premature,” “inopportune,” “hasty,” because “we weren’t ready,” “it wasn’t yet time for that,” “the masses weren’t mature enough,” etc. And after a few months scepticism and shrugging of shoulders became the order of the day, and living for the day’s pleasure, and renewed interest in lottery tickets and guitars and maracas on the part of those who had been too optimistic, while at the same time there was talk of “Discontent in the Army.”

  “A military coup on the way,” prophesied the Head of State. “It wouldn’t be anything new. As the proverb says: ‘One stripe more on a tiger makes very little difference.’ ”

  “But now they say that it’s the young officers who are involved,” remarked the cholo.

  “Sub-machine guns instead of machetes,” said the former holder of Power. “It’s all the same.”

  But there was something new in the air: Liberation, now a legal newspaper, appeared every morning and contained eight pages—in spite of which, from time to time it would be unexpectedly suppressed by officious members of Alpha-Omega, who overturned crates, dispersed the galley proofs, and beat up the linotypists. People who couldn’t possibly be suspected of Communist affiliation were working together on the paper at the time, and signing their names at the foot of their articles. The music publishing house of Francis Salabert in Paris had received an order for a thousand copies of the “Internationale,” which was now being sung over there in a Spanish translation, recently published in Mexico by Diego Rivera in a review called El Machete.

  And so the months passed, February papers being read in April, and those of October in December, while past events were talked of more and more and vanished individuals came to life. A Yesterday, unmistakably yesterday though present today, was living among us in flesh and blood that was in process of losing its fleshly nature, because it was obvious that the usually tall, strapping figure of the Ex was beginning to deteriorate, as it was also obvious that the passage of time was progressively speeding up, diminishing and narrowing the space between one Christmas and the next, between one military review of July 14 and the next military review of July 14, so that the huge flag fluttering beneath the Arc de Triomphe appeared to have been there ever since the last occasion. Chestnuts bloomed, chestnuts dropped their flowers, chestnuts bloomed again, as pages from the calendar were thrown into the wastepaper basket, and Monsieur le Président’s tailor came again and again to the Rue de Tilsitt to alter his clothes to fit a dwindling anatomy, growing thinner day by day. His watch chain retreated visibly over a less prominent waistcoat, while his shoulders, formerly held up with inflexible rigidity, were now drooping over collarbones relieved of the extra flesh on his thorax—as the Mayorala noticed when at bath time she rubbed her President’s chest with sponge and loofah. And since this progressive loss of flesh alarmed her and she didn’t believe in medicine in bottles such as was sold here, she had dictated—stammered, rather—a letter to the cholo Mendoza, arranging that a certain Balbina, from the village of Palmar de Siquire, where there was no post office, should send her a parcel of healing herbs—to travel by donkey, mule, bicycle, bus, several trains, two boats, and another train, and be picked up today by Elmira at the Parcels Office in the Rue Etienne Marcel. Her Ex-President and Ex-Ambassador went with her because a great many forms had to be filled in and signed, and all this was for people who could read and write—and in French, which made it far worse.

  With the package wrapped in a scarf, and all three wearing thick overcoats because it was a cold day, though the sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky, Elmira had her first sight of the towers of Notre-Dame. When she heard it was the Cathedral of Paris she insisted on going there to light a candle to the Virgin. She stopped still in amazement in front of the building.

  “What I say is: we ought to do things like this in our co
untry to attract tourists.” The figures on the tympanum and lintels reminded her of the sculptures of Miguel Estatua, her fellow countryman from Nueva Córdoba.

  “The zamba isn’t being foolish,” remarked the Ex, who hadn’t hitherto noticed the stylistic resemblance between the two, especially in the devils’ faces, the rearing horse, the horned demons, and all the infernal zoology of the Last Judgement. There followed an awestruck Penetration into the Nave—the nave alight with the whole gamut of colour from its windows, the figures of the visitors making dark silhouettes against this brilliance, slight forms in this mid-afternoon of fictitious spring. They sat down to rest between the two rose windows in the transept. At the other end of the row of seats, a young man in a long overcoat and warm muffler was gazing at everything with deep and careful attention.

  “A worshipper,” said the Mayorala.

  “An aesthete,” said Mendoza.

  “A student from the Beaux-Arts,” said the Head of State. And in a low voice, to entertain the zamba, he began telling her, like a grandfather to his grandchild, true stories of things he had seen here: the archdeacon who was enamoured of a gypsy who used to make a white nanny goat dance to a tambourine (Elmira had seen gypsies like that when she was a child, but they had made a bear dance); and the story of the itinerant poet who egged on some beggars to attack the church (“When there’s rioting churches always get damaged,” said Elmira, remembering a case that it would have been better to forget); and the story of a hunch-backed bell ringer, who was also in love with the gypsy (“hunchbacks are very amorous, and women notice this, but only want to touch the hump because it brings good luck”); and the story of two skeletons that seemed to be embracing and perhaps were those of Esmeralda and the bell ringer (“such cases have been seen, so the old village sexton used to tell in his song; we’ve got a record of it”). But now the organ began blaring a sudden outburst of music. They couldn’t hear each other speak.

  “Let’s go,” said the Ex, thinking of the delicious Alsace wine they served at the café on the corner, where it would certainly be warmer than here.

  But the “worshipper”—as Elmira had called him—was still sitting in his seat at the far end of the row, absorbed in dazzled contemplation. It was his first encounter with Gothic architecture. And the Gothic arches and stained-glass windows rising on both sides were an unsuspected revelation to him; beside this all other architecture seemed to him primitive, rooted in the earth, chthonic, even when it was expressed in terms conforming to the principles of Proportion, the Golden Rules. This building, soaring upwards in exaltation of verticality, seemed to him to make even the pediments of the Parthenon dwindle, for they were merely a living, exalted version of the sloping roof of the archaic dwelling, and its fluted column was a transcendent, glorified form of the roof tree—four tree trunks, six or eight—which supported the lintels and cedarwood beams of the rustic doorways of peasants. In Greek and Roman times this original relationship with the telluric and vegetal was lost. From the hut of Eumeus the swineherd to the temple of Phidias, the way was clear and open, through a series of successive stylisations. Here, on the other hand, architecture had become a matter of invention, ideas, pure creation, materials had achieved unheard-of lightness—as if stone were weightless—with a nervature owing nothing to the structure of trees—and with the characteristic suns of the prodigious rose windows: Northern Sun, Southern Sun. The contemplator in the transept was caught between these two suns, the fiery red of the sunset and the grave, mystical blue symphony of the north window. On the north window the Mother occupied the centre of a temporal court—to receive Intercession, as it were—of prophets, kings, judges, and patriarchs. On the south—in the blood of sacrifice—the Sun ruled over an ecclesiastical court of apostles, confessors, martyrs, wise virgins and foolish virgins. The entire mystery of birth, death, the eternal renaissance of life, and the changing seasons was to be found in the straight, imaginary, and invisible line stretched between the two central circles of those immense sources of light, openings in a structural magnificat rising from the ground, as if suspended weightlessly from its bells and gargoyles. From the shadows, the organ pipes suddenly broke out into triumphal fanfares.

  An atheist because his inner questionings did not seek for replies on religious soil; a disbeliever because disbelief was natural to his generation, and the way had been prepared by the scientific spirit that came before; an enemy of the politics and compromise that so often, in his world, took the Church into the camp of his adversaries, and in the name of faith maintained a false order that was self-destructive, the contemplator of the Sun Windows was nevertheless responsive to the dynamic quality of the Gospels, and recognised that their texts had, at one time, had the merit of causing a resounding devaluation of all the totems and inexorable spirits, dark presences and zodiacal threats, of oracles, submissions to the ides of March and inevitable fate. But if some new self-awareness—putting the drama of life within instead of outside himself—had induced man to analyse the values that led him into primitive terrors, he had developed into an erring giant, tyrannised by others like himself, who had become faithless to their first vows and had created new totems, new destinies, temples without altars and irreligious cults that it was necessary to destroy. Perhaps the days were close at hand when the trumpets of the Apocalypse would sound, but this time it would not be by the angels of the Last Judgement but by those appearing before it. It was time to decide upon the protocols of the future and to plan a Tribunal of Redistribution.

  The young man looked at his watch. Four o’clock. The train. He sank himself again into the total beauty of his surroundings, now that it was time to return to his own. “I don’t feel needed where everything is so perfect,” he thought, as he left Notre-Dame by the centre door—the door of the Resurrection of the Dead. There was still time to drink some of the excellent Alsatian wine to be had in the café where he had left his suitcase in the care of a waiter. He crossed the road and went into the bistro without noticing that three people—a woman and two men—sitting on a bench at the back were staring at him in amazement. Paying for his drink, the Student returned to the street and hailed a taxi.

  “A la garra del Norte, please.”

  His appointment was in the station buffet, where several delegates for the First World Conference against Colonial and Imperialist Politics were already gathered; it was to open next day, February 10, at Brussels, with Barbusse as president. Among them was the Cuban Julio Antonio Mella, whom he had met a few hours before, in company with Jawaharlal Nehru, delegate for the National Hindu Congress.

  “The train has come in already,” said someone, pointing to Platform 8. The three picked up their shabby cases and got into a second-class carriage. The Indian was sitting in a corner by the window studying some papers, while Mella was showing interest in the political situation of our country.

  “We’ve just got rid of a dictator,” said the Student. “But the struggle goes on, because our enemies are the same as before. The curtain has gone down on the first act, and very long it was. Now we’re in the middle of the second, which, in spite of new scenery and lighting, is very like the first.”

  “We’re just starting on what you’ve been through,” said Mella. And he told him about the dictator recently in power in Cuba, whom he had defeated by means of a stubborn, prolonged, and successful hunger strike in prison, forcing his enemy to give him his liberty and then leaving for Mexico, where the fight was still going on …

  Gerardo Machado was much like our Head of State in physical appearance, political behaviour, and methods, but he was different because, being quite uncultured, he didn’t build temples to Minerva like Estrada Cabrera (almost his contemporary) nor was he a francophile, as so many dictators and “educated tyrants” of the continent had been. To him, Supreme Wisdom was to be found in the north: “I’m an imperialist,” he declared, looking enthusiastically towards Washington. “I’m not an intellectual, but I am a patriot.” However, he showed uncon
scious humour when he informed the public one day in his newspapers that he was “studying the tragedies of Aeschylus.”

  “He’s a good candidate to join the clan of the Atrides,” said the Student.

  “From what one can see he already belongs to the family,” said Mella.

  “He’ll soon give orders for the confiscation of red books,” said the Student.

  “He’s done it already,” said the Cuban.

  “One goes down here and another goes up there,” said the Student.

  “And that’s a sight we’ve been seeing repeated for the last hundred years.”

  “Until the public gets tired of seeing the same thing.”

  “We must hope for the best.”

  Opening their leather wallets—both Mexican, with the Aztec calendar embossed on the outside—they exchanged the scripts of their reports and articles, to read on the journey. In his corner, Nehru, with several papers on his knees, seemed to be absorbed in his own thoughts, hidden behind wide-open eyes. There was a long silence. The train reached the frontier in the night—the twofold night—of the coal mines.

  “Cool, cool,” said Nehru, leaving the others uncertain whether he meant to say “cool” or “coal”—but it was indeed cold in this second-class carriage, excessively cold for these men from hot climates. And the Indian went on sleeping with his eyes open until the train got to Brussels.

  21

  … those madmen try to make people believe they are kings, but they are only poor men who dress their nakedness in gold and purple.

  —DESCARTES

  “EXILED …”

  “Banished …”

  “Or fled …”

  “Escaped …”