“On the run …”
“What I know is that he was in a church,” remarked the Mayorala. “And Communists don’t go to church, not even in Holy Week.” And they started on their conjectures again:
“Exiled …”
“Banished …”
“Escaped …”
“Repentant, perhaps …”
“Converted …”
“A spiritual crisis …”
“Had a fight with his friends …”
And for days and days nothing else was talked about in the Rue de Tilsitt, while they waited for the newspapers from over there—February numbers in April—to arrive on their specially slow cargo boats, in tight rolls of seven numbers with a picture of the Tutelary Volcano on the stamps. Because, of course, the papers published here said nothing at all about the Student, an individual of no interest to them. And at last they received news, thanks to a copy of El Faro of Nueva Córdoba arriving in May, about the World Conference at Brussels, where the National League of Mexican Countrymen and the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (which had affiliations in our country) had both been represented.
“That explains it all,” said the cholo Mendoza.
“What foolishness,” murmured the Ex. “Imperialism is stronger than ever. That’s why the man of the moment in Europe is Benito Mussolini.”
And the chestnuts bloomed again, and conversations on the usual topics went on in the attic. They talked at enormous length, under the slate roof, about “the old days.” The most trivial events, contemplated in perspective and seen from a distance, acquired significance, greater charm, strangeness, or transcendence. “Do you remember? Do you remember?” became a sacramental—almost daily—formula, evoking dead people and dead things that were explained by the often secret mechanisms of a resurrected past, taken out of its distant context and brought to these latitudes. All at once, refreshing his crowded memory, the patriarch began revealing the hitherto concealed background to certain strange events or tiny circumstances, which gave the clue to what might before have caused baffled questioning and a flavour of mystery. As a fakir or conjuror, grown old and retired from the stage, may enjoy revealing the technique of his tricks and miracles, the Ex remembered the business of issuing money without security, in order to boost the national finances; the gaming houses set up by the government, where marked cards were used (there was a North American press that manufactured them with such subtle indications on their backs that only experts could understand them), and where the stakes had to be made in dollars, pounds sterling, or—to get hidden reserves of cash out of people’s houses—in old gold coins or silver Mexican pesos. Then there was the affair of the Diamond in the Capitol, that octagonal diamond of incomparable brilliance, officially bought and solemnly inserted in the floor at the foot of the statue of the Republic, to mark the zero point where all the roads of the nation met—a gem that was so expertly stolen one night that, according to the daily papers, the theft could be attributed only to some international gang, unless they were anarchists or Communists who were very proficient in such tasks. Elmira laughed when she heard this story: “He sent me there [she pointed to the Patriarch]: I put my friend Juliana up to occupying the night watchman, while I [gesture] with a chisel you can buy in the ironmonger’s at Monserrate, and a hammer that I had hidden between my tits, lifted out the diamond and carried it to the palace in my mouth. My word! I could hardly breathe! And afterwards, what a hullabaloo! But … how we laughed! How we laughed!” And now her laughter was echoed by the Head of State’s laughter, as he waved his hand towards a drawer in the cupboard.
“I’ve got it there. It brings me good luck. Besides, it’s what the anarchists call restitution. And I, too, have a right to restitution.”
“Bravo, my President!”
“My Ex, my dear boy; my Ex!”
The months passed while chestnuts were replaced by strawberries, and strawberries by chestnuts, leafy trees by bare trees, green leaves by rust-red leaves, and the Patriarch, all the time growing less interested in outside events, was gradually reducing, limiting and closing in the ambit of his existence. That Christmas was celebrated in the attic, with our carols, with drum and tambourine, Christmas dinner of suckling pig, with lettuce and radish salad, red wine, and Spanish turrón—as we used to celebrate it over there. And seeing the cloth spread and the table laid, the Head of State began talking about Napoleon, who was rising in his estimation every year; but tonight he was not remembering Jena, Austerlitz, or Wagram, but was enjoying something he had read in a book: that Bonaparte and Josephine used to eat at Malmaison—he a Corsican, and she from Martinique—in our fashion, just as Elmirita arranged things: all the dishes spread out together, some cold, some hot, in reach of each person’s spoon and fork, without all that passing to and fro of dishes which went on in the houses of nouveaux riches, trying to behave like real princesses—and I know what I’m talking about!—with long waits and delays and rows of dishes that take your appetite away and scour your stomach with so much useless ceremony. Here you could take the bottle and fill your glass without someone muttering the date in your ear—as if the date were so important, when what one wanted above all in a wine was cheerfulness, which was nothing to do with a few years more or less.
And when the Head of State was in this happy condition, he sometimes glanced towards the Arc de Triomphe and declaimed in a deep voice the famous tirade of Flambeau in L’Aiglon: “Nous qui marchions fourbus, blessés, crottés, malades,” reciting with brio the last verse—a pretty revolting one, it must be said—where we are offered the blood of a dead horse to drink. But the cholo Mendoza noticed that as time passed more and more gaps appeared in the Ex’s recitations: some alexandrines never got beyond eight syllables; Spain and Austria were erased from the poetical map; the sabres, tinder boxes, shakos, soldiers’ songs, roasted crows, flags, and bugles remembered by Napoleon’s veteran on the march were all reduced to a rhymed medley in the reciter’s memory, on the pharmaceutical model of:
Nous qui pour notre toux n’ayant pas de jujube,
Prenions des bains de pied d’un jour dans le Danube.
And the cholo Mendoza ended by thinking that if this last rhyme remained alive in the Head of State’s memory, it was because jujubes for the throat were first cousins to the liquorice pastilles he was so addicted to. And perhaps this mnemonic element was necessary, because it was clear that the mental mechanisms of someone who had plotted, calculated, and schemed throughout his very long career were beginning to become disorganised. On rainy days, for example, after announcing that nothing would induce him to go out, he was impelled by the absurd need to visit a distant bookshop and buy a work by Fustel de Coulanges or the twenty volumes of Thiers’ History of the Consulate and Empire—which he never even glanced inside when he returned, wet and with a cold in the head, from his useless expedition. Always fond of opera, he took it into his head to put on evening dress and go to hear some sort of a Manon at the Opéra Comique, but was bewildered because he didn’t see Mephistopheles in the act in Saint-Sulpice. The action of Carmen got entangled in his mind with that of the Barbiere, because they both took place in Seville; and he muddled up the end of La Traviata with that of La Bohème, because in both the heroine died in the arms of her lover.
In his conversation, too, he often made mistakes, such as saying that Plutarch’s history was written in Latin, or that the virus of Spanish influenza was called the Peloponnese. Soon he began dictating a leader on the political situation in our country, but stopped astonished, when well into his discourse, because he realised he had nowhere to publish it. Talking for talking’s sake, he appointed and sacked ministers, planned and decorated imaginary public buildings, and ended by laughing at himself when he returned to reality in front of a bottle of Monsieur Musard’s Beaujolais nouveau. He had a surprising passion for visiting museums. He went to the Carnavalet to look at the toy guillotines. In the Louvre, in front of David’s Coronation, he observed disconcerting p
arallels between Letitia Bonaparte and Colonel Hoffmann’s Aunt Jemima. He visited the Musée Grévin to see if perhaps (one never knew) he might find a wax figure of himself in one of the rooms. And the cholo began to be alarmed by the Patriarch’s eccentricities one May 5, when he awoke with the fixed intention—luckily half effaced at noon by news from the homeland—of sending an enormous sheaf of flowers to the Invalides because it was the anniversary of Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena. Yet a certain majesty, a certain strength, gave dignity and style to the person of the old dictator. The dignity and style of despots who have come down in the world; of those whose will has for years and years been law in some part of the globe. It was enough for him to lie down in his hammock for that hammock to turn into a throne again. When he was swinging in it, with his legs over the edge—now this way, now that, by pulling the cord that controlled it—he became a giant, a horizontal immortal ignored by Pequeño Larousse. And then he would talk about his armies, his generals, his campaigns, like the one—do you remember?—against the traitor Ataúlfo Galván—and do you remember that night?—but no; it wasn’t you—in the thunderstorm in the Cave of the Mummies.
And one morning he woke early talking of it, and suddenly wanted to visit the museum in the Trocadero. And he went with the cholo to that gloomy palace, built in a style compounded of Saragossa, Moorish, and the Baron de Haussmann, with its graceless arcades and false minarets; the custodian was dozing with his jacket unbuttoned in front of a huge Easter Island head. (The Patriarch’s mind can’t have been functioning very well that morning, as he asked the name of the sculptor of that object.) And they set off through the galleries, each longer than the last, each containing more canoes, totem birds, idols bristling with nails, dead gods of dead religions, dusty Eskimoes, Tibetan horns, and drums piled up in corners—broken drums, with loose cords, worm-eaten parchment, now silenced forever, after having presided at scenes of revelry or sounded appeals for rain or calls to revolution.
And thus, going from bone sewing needles to the ritual masks of the New Hebrides, from negro amulets to gold breastplates, from shaman rattles to stone axes, the Head of State arrived at what he was looking for: that rectangular glass case in the middle of the room, mounted on a wooden base, where that mummy—“I’ve spoken to you about it so often”—was eternally sitting: the mummy found in the cave on the night of the thunderstorm.
A ruinous piece of human architecture, consisting of bones wrapped in shreds of material, its skin dry, full of holes, worm-eaten, supporting a skull bound with an embroidered fillet, a skull whose hollow eyes were endowed with a terrifying expression, whose hollow nose looked angry in spite of its absence, and with an enormous mouth battlemented with yellow teeth, as if immobilised for ever in a silent howl at the pain in the crossed shinbones, to which there still adhered rope-soled shoes a thousand years old, yet seeming new because of the permanence of their red, black, and yellow threads.
And here this thing was still sitting—as it had been over there—only a few paces from Rude’s Marseillaise, like some gigantic fleshless foetus that had gone through all the stages of growth, maturity, decrepitude, and death, a thing that hardly could be called a thing, a ruined skeleton looking out through two hollow sockets beneath a repulsive mass of dark hair that fell in tattered locks on either side of the dried-up cheeks. And this exhumed king, judge, priest, or general was looking out angrily across countless centuries at those who had violated his grave.
He seemed to be looking at me, at me alone, as if to start a conversation, and I said something like: “Don’t complain, you bastard, because I took you out of your mud and turned you into a person … into a per—” Uneasiness, vertigo, collapse. Voices. People arriving … And I find myself in my hammock, where the cholo and the Mayorala have put me to bed. But my legs refuse to obey me. Here they are, where they ought to be, they are mine and yet they are alien to me, because they remain inert and refuse to move. The doctor: Doctor Fournier, much aged. His Legion of Honour. I remember. I lift my forefingers to my ears to show him that I can hear and understand.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” he says, taking a hypodermic syringe out of his bag. And the faces of Ofelia and Elmirita are going around and around my hammock, appearing, coming together, talking, and I’m asleep and I wake up. Again—or has he been here all the time?—here is Doctor Fournier with his hypodermic. And I’m awake. And I feel fine. I think of Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons. But they say no. Not yet. Very soon. But I can’t be so well—although I feel pretty good when they rock me in the hammock—because Ofelia and Elmirita have filled my room with pictures of Virgins. There they are, in rows on the wall, surrounding me, watching over my sleep, present as soon as I open my eyes, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin del Cobre, the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, the Virgin of Regla, the Virgin of the Coromotos, the Virgin of the Valle, the Virgin of Altagracia, the Paraguayan Virgin of Caacupe, and three or four different pictures of the Divine Shepherdess of my own country, and naval Virgins and military Virgins, Virgins with white faces, Indian Virgins, black Virgins, virgins of all of us, Ineffable Intercessors, Señoras of help in all trouble, disaster, plague, helplessness, or misfortune—all are here with me, covered in gold, silver, and sequins, beneath flights of doves, the brightness of the Milky Way and the Music of the Spheres.
“God with me and I with Him,” I murmur, remembering a simple prayer I learned as a child …
Convalescence. Elmirita brings me a meal of our own sort—pancake, tamale, stuffed pastries, double egg flip, custard powdered with cinnamon, the only things that seem to me to taste of anything. I’m beginning to walk fairly well, though now I need a stick. The doctor tells me that soon, perhaps tomorrow, he will let me take a short walk. Perhaps go and sit on a seat in the Avenue du Bois, near the beds of gladioli. Watch the dogs from the great houses romping on the lawns, under the vigilant eyes of the servants of the great houses. Then I’ll go in a taxi—my body demands it—to the Bois-Charbons. And I suddenly think that it’s some time, a long time, since I made love. The last time—when?—was with Elmirita. Now all I ask of her is that she lift her skirts a little—a thing she does with innocent simplicity. It does me good to contemplate, now and again, that firm flesh, well shadowed with hair, deep, generous: here is transcendent goodness. She has changed very little since the days of my triumphant maturity, and looking at her, I feel a renewal of desire to carry on this brute of a life. Because I’m not beaten yet, no. I take my daily walk now. A little farther from the house every day. And one day, I don’t know why, I think of the cemetery of Montparnasse, where my double, Porfirio Díaz, is buried. (From here I can see through the window the house where his minister Limantour lived.) So we go to the cemetery—the cholo, Elmira, and I—where also lies Maupassant, whose stories are so much read and imitated in our countries. We buy some flowers near Joffin’s marble works. And we are taken in tow by the porter, dressed in navy blue like the custodian of the Trocadero.
“Cette tombe est très demandée” [sic].
We pass in front of Baudelaire, whom they buried next to General Aupick—a sinister joke. And now we are with Don Porfirio. A sort of Gothic chapel has been raised above his remains—either a dwarf church or a huge dog kennel, grey, ogival—where, in an altar under the dedication to the Ineffable One of Tepeac, is a marble ark containing a small quantity of Mexican earth. And this mediaeval tomb, dated 1915, is presided over by the secular and mythical Eagle and Serpent of Anáhuac.
I think about death. About Baudelaire, so close, although I can’t remember those lines of his—my memory is failing badly—which speak of old bones and a deep grave for a body more than dead, dead among the dead. When my time comes, I would like them to bury me here. I tried to make some macabre joke, suitable to our surroundings, to show the others that I wasn’t afraid of Death. But nothing occurred to me. We returned to the Rue de Tilsitt in silence. And that evening I lost the use of my legs again. And cramp in my left arm. And those sudden cold swea
ts in the nape of my neck and on my forehead. And that painful bar across my chest at times, but seeming much more as if it were on my flesh—outside—than beneath it. Doctor Fournier wants them to put me to bed. He says a hammock isn’t a bed; that it’s folklore, belonging to Indians and Fenimore Cooper. The bloody conceit of these people. They would like to put me in a Louis XIII bedroom, so that I can suffocate under a canopy, or in one of those beds like those at Malmaison, which were so narrow and short that I wondered how Napoleon and Josephine could ever make love in them. In the end they left me to rock in my hammock, which moulds itself to the weight of my body—my body that now seems to be full of buckshot. I go to sleep. When I wake, the cholo tells me that Ofelia and Elmirita have gone to the Sacré-Coeur to make vows for my speedy—“and certain”—he added, recovery. Early in the morning they dressed themselves as penitents—or promesas, as they say over there—in violet dresses, with sandals, but no hat or scarf in spite of the rain, with an orange cord round the waist, and they went up the hill to Montmartre, prostrating themselves on the seats of the funicular before going on their knees, tapers in hand, up the stairs to the chief altar of the church. I go back to sleep. (When they came out of the sanctuary at Montmartre, the Mayorala insisted on putting some flowers at the feet of a saint on the right, who was alone and unprotected and must be very full of compassion, because he had been put in a place apart, very visible, chained to his post, reliving his martyrdom. She kneels on the wet asphalt … She prays … But Ofelia brutally forces her to get up, and drags her away from her devotions after reading the inscription at the saint’s feet: “To the Chevalier de la Barre, executed at the age of 19 years, on July 1, 1766, for failing to salute a procession.” Elmirita doesn’t understand how a monument to a heretic can be put up so close to a church. Ofelia decides it would be too tiring to enter into explanations that the zamba would in any case not understand, because to her the words “free thinker” savour of an anarchist sect or something of the sort.)
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