… when we are particularly pleased with ourselves our injuries seem to us all the greater.
—DESCARTES
THAT SUMMER WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND THE sunniest recorded by European meteorologists. The monks in all the German hygroscopes had their hoods permanently thrown back on their necks; the peasant with the umbrella of Swiss hygroscopes remained hidden in his rustic alpine chalet, while that personification of fine weather, the girl with a red apron, was out all the time. The chestnuts bloomed gaily and the birds sang often among the statues in the gardens of the Tuileries and Luxembourg, ignoring the perpetual warlike preparations invading the life of the capital; but there was considerable dismay at a succession of events which took many people by surprise, notwithstanding a succession of dramatically premonitory signs, and reminded those who had experienced it in a disquieting way of the chaotic epic of ’70. The Head of State assumed that the very costly campaign of praise of his country and government in the newspapers could now come to an end, since the public was interested only in news of the furies unleashed upon Europe. His campaign had been doubly useless, because of what was now happening and because (to tell the truth) it had not re-established his prestige in quarters where he had been most anxious to have it restored. Or, anyway, he could see no signs that it had. No one had rung him on the telephone to make favourable comments about any article—except his tailor and his barber, of course. The people he was interested in were all on holiday—holidays that had been wisely prolonged in expectation of developments. Reynaldo Hahn, whose opinion he had been brave enough to ask, gave a short, inconsistent, and slippery reply: “Yes, I saw … Yes, I saw … All very good … I congratulate you, compatriot.” It was obvious that at the end of the year, when he was over there again, he wouldn’t receive all those cards covered in bells and mistletoe from Paris, those cards on filigree paper, with signatures (far more soothing to his spirit than the praise handed out to him daily by the local press) written by highly esteemed and admired hands in response to his own carefully thought-out Christmas wishes, always accompanied by some charming object made by our country’s craftsmen. He had therefore to give up cultivating those persons whose company and friendship he counted on for the days when, having resigned from office—out of boredom, fatigue, or anything else—he could pass the last days of his life in this always agreeable and comfortable mansion in the Rue de Tilsitt. He had no intention of leaving Paris at the moment—and in fact there wasn’t much danger here—provided that the treatment of his arm was soon completed; it had already nearly been cured by the skill of Doctor Fournier, obliged by his duties as a house surgeon to remain in the city. Accompanied by his secretary, the President took long, aimless walks, waiting for the evening papers; sometimes, when he felt a desire for fresh verdure, getting as far as the Bois de Boulogne, whose Sentier de la Vertu was now deserted, while the swans on the lake stretched their necks interrogatively, vainly hoping for pieces of biscuit that passers-by and children would have thrown them, even a few days ago. They sat together in front of the Pré-Catalan, feeling nostalgic for the charming frivolities of other days, although the Head of State, passing from intimate monologue to semi-confession, suddenly began considering this war from the viewpoint of a somewhat bitter and stern moralist, to Peralta’s increasing surprise. Nations given over to luxury and indolence—he said—grew soft and lost their fundamental virtues. Aestheticism was all very well, but to recover the use of muscles grown feeble in the contemplation of Beauty, man felt a need—after his long period of dreaming—for hand-to-hand fighting, agon. The romantic figure of Ludwig of Bavaria, celebrated by our Rubén Dario and even by Verlaine, was all very fine, but for the unity and greatness of a divided and dormant Germany, a solid, rough character like Bismarck, always ready for war, could do much more than the musical prince, builder of castles as poetic as they were remote from all reality. This contest would not last long (“three months, three battles, three victories,” said the generals themselves) nor would it be so bloody as the war of ’70, because people had learned from the remembered experience and wouldn’t allow it to be prolonged as it was in the horrors of the Commune. And France would soon be subjected to a jolt, a therapeutic emergency, a shock to shake her out of her self-sufficient lethargy. She was too stuck up, she needed a lesson. She still believed she ruled the world, whereas in fact her great resources were exhausted, she had entered on a phase of obvious decadence. The Reign of the Giants—Hugo, Balzac, Renan, Michelet, Zola—was over. Minds of such universal brilliance were no longer being produced here, and that was why France was beginning to pay for the grave sin of proudly underestimating, in this multiform century, what lay outside her frontiers. Nothing foreign to his own country interested a Frenchman, convinced as he was that he was born to delight humanity. But today he was confronted by a new man, thunderously declaring what he wanted, a man who might make himself master of this age: Nietzschean man, motivated by an implacable Will to Power, the tragic and aggressive protagonist of an everlasting reward, repeated today in actions that disturbed the world.
Peralta was well aware of the modest standard of his friend’s powers of thought; he was convinced that the Head of State had never read Nietzsche, and that if he was quoting him so authoritatively today it was because in some article read yesterday he had come across some of his views, duly placed between inverted commas. Besides, he was accustomed to follow the ups and downs of his character, and understood that behind these general reflections the President concealed a bitter spite against the people who had humiliated and offended him, closing the road to his chosen abode. When he uttered the names of Bismarck or Nietzsche, he was aiming the mental batteries of his resentment at Brichot the Sorbonne professor, the insolent Couvoisier, the Forchevilles, and the Comte d’Argencourt, the unsuccessful diplomat who, on meeting him casually in a bookshop where they were both buying pornography disguised as the Compendium of Hindu Erotism or The Licentious Writers of the Eighteenth Century but illustrated with actual photographs, had ignored him with haughty disdain, leaving his outstretched hand in the air. And Peralta, maliciously observing him, stirred the fire of this growing aggressiveness by trying to find weighty arguments in his casual and unmethodical reading of the previous days about miraculous appearances of the Virgin all over the world, to support articles about “the miracle of Nueva Córdoba,” though they hadn’t yet been published—or paid for.
One morning he gave the Head of State enormous pleasure by showing him an essay by a famous Catholic writer, celebrated for his irascibility, the outcries and imprecations of an ungrateful beggar (“ungrateful beggar” was his own name for himself), wherein he stated that after the Chosen People of Israel, France was the nation most beloved by God. Without France “God would not be entirely God,” he said. Besides, everything went to prove it: the considerate lilia agri of the Scriptures announced the Fleur de Lys of French Royalty, the Gallo of the Last Supper was a plain allusion to the Coq Gaulois. France of the Lily, France of the Cock, France of the Good Bread and Good Wine of the Communion Service, whose position as home of the Chosen Race had been confirmed in modern times—added the writer—by three appearances of the Virgin in thirty-three years; at Pont-main, Lourdes, and La Salette.
These prodigies can never have aroused such hearty laughter: “So France is the land of the Paraclete? And what place does this gentleman allow to Spain, which spread the Catholic faith through a portion of the planet stretching from the Rio Grande in Mexico to the snows of the South Pole? And as for Virgins!” The radiant Virgin of Guadalupe, on her sacred rock of Tepeyac; the Virgin of Cobré in Cuba, whose image appeared floating miraculously, robed in sargasso beside the boat manned by Juan Odio, Juan the Indian, and Juan the Slave; the Virgin of Regla, patron saint of sailors and fishermen everywhere, standing in her star-spangled cloak on the Globe of the World; the Virgin of the Valley in Costa Rica; our own Divine Shepherdess; the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, with her proud bearing and beautiful breasts, very much the woman and the lady too, with her castellated crown; the Virgin of Coromotos, who had left her portrait—after an ineffable appearance—in an Indian’s hut; the Virgin of the Amazon fighters of la Fe, clad in fiery armour beneath her protective cloak; the Virgin of Quinche, who led the Army of Ecuador; and the Virgin of Indulgences, patron of the army, and military leader of Peru, always accompanied by Saint Pedro Claver, patron of slaves, and the negro Saint Benito—“as black as the nails in the Cross”—and Saint Rose of Lima, dazzling Queen of the Continent, who owned the greatest forests, the longest mountain ranges, the Greatest River in the World. These Virgins advanced in a formidable Squadron of Splendour, Our Lady of Regla somewhat blackened, the Virgin of Coromotos with almond eyes; strong and full of pity, beautiful and gentle, carrying the Seven Dolours of their Seven Swords, prodigies, succour, good fortune, and miracles, ready to come to the aid of anyone who called them, seen a hundred times, heard a hundred times, diligent and magnificent, omnipresent and ubiquitous, able to appear—like God to Saint Teresa—in the depths of a stewpot or on the summit of an ivory tower; mothers, above all, the Mothers of a prodigious Offspring wounded in the side, who one day (seated on the right hand of Our Lord) would distribute punishment and rewards and submit us all to a judgement against which there is no appeal.
“Let that ungrateful beggar, or whatever he calls himself, come here and talk to me about his three French Virgins; the authenticity of one of them, Our Lady of La Salette, has been questioned by the Vatican itself!” We had Virgins, real Virgins, and it was high time to rid these people here of their conceit and suicidal ignorance of everything that didn’t belong to them. They would soon realise what was meant by a strong, well-organised, disciplined, progressive race.
And Germany, where he had spent very little time, suddenly appeared to him as an illuminated tapestry of Black Forests, Master Singers, Soldier Kings, and cathedrals from whose Gothic windows apostles and trumpeters emerged on the stroke of twelve, beside the Rhine—that great Rhine with its incredible castles, sung about and sketched by Victor Hugo—and its water nymphs who caught young men in the nets of their hair, and its beer festivals attended by cheerful men with solid calves to their legs, who combined yodelling and playing the accordion with a taste for philosophy of the contorted Heidelberg variety, a genius for mathematics, a cult of obedience, and love of marching ten abreast—to sum up: everything that those dirty Latins of the Second Decadence lacked. But now they would see who was best, when Generals Moltke, Kluck, Bülow, and Falkenhayn paraded through the Arc de Triomphe (he would be watching the spectacle, standing stiffly erect at his window, although perhaps moved by what others might be suffering, but resolved in the Cartesian manner to take as proved everything whose truth was evident to him), mounted on magnificent sorrel horses, escorting the Crown Prince at the head of an impressive procession, with the black dolmans of hussars, frogged Brandenburgs, and helmets with a point, to the rhythm of the great march from Tannhäuser, taken at a military tempo, faster than is usual at the opera. On that day Germany would finally carry out the role of “regenerative ferment” prophetically assigned to her by Fichte in a historic manifesto—a manifesto that had not been read by the Head of State either, thought Peralta, although he had to recognise his infallible instinct for acquiring information at second hand.
Agitated by the threat creeping towards Paris (though in the streets people went on shouting, “À Berlin! À Berlin! À Berlin!”) and asking themselves if it wouldn’t be advisable to move their offices to Bordeaux, Marseilles, or Lyons, the consuls and high officials of Latin American embassies used to meet together at the times of the morning aperitif, the evening aperitif, and a great many late-night drinks in a café on the Champs-Elysées, and discuss the day’s events. Ever attentive to what was said at these gatherings, noting the opinions of each of them, the cholo Mendoza carried back information that confirmed the Head of State’s intuitions. The President had received from his friend Juan Vicente Gómez, one of those generals much addicted to a Kaiser moustache and a monocle wedged in one eye (by confidential word of mouth, because the Venezuelan dictator was afraid they would jeer at his handwriting), the wise advice to remain on the margin of the whole affair (because “the little fellow who gets into a row between big chaps always gets crushed”). Although nearly all these Latin Americans sympathised with France for cultural or sentimental reasons—some loved her literature, others her women, and their duties involved very little work and amounted to long and pleasant holidays while their governments lasted, in the place it was most enjoyable to spend them—there were quite a few who agreed that the war was already lost to this side. One had only to observe the confusion, the fruitless agitation, the pagaille they were living in, although it was not reflected in the newspapers, which confined themselves to half-truths or disguised news items, as even Doctor Fournier admitted in the daily sessions of massage and ray treatment he gave to the Head of State’s arm, which was every day becoming freer and more mobile. In the streets very different opinions were expressed from those filling the articles of Barrès, Déroulède, and other writers who were, like Tyrtaeus, stimulating the national energy: they spoke of whole regiments left without officers, or taken to sectors where nothing was happening and not knowing whether to stay there, advance, or retreat. In some units only half the men had proper uniforms, kepis alternated with police helmets, and puttees were supplanted by bandages from the chemist or waxed paper. Later came dramatic tales of rifles without bullets, shells without guns, ambulances losing their way, and field hospitals without surgical instruments. And next came rumours spread by romancers and alarmists and generally accepted in small cafés, porters’ lodges, and among groups of street-corner strategists: about Uhlans seen only a few kilometres from Paris; a highly secret German plan of penetrating the city through the tunnels of the Métro; the activity of spies, who were everywhere, looking, listening, transmitting messages by a system of curtains shut or drawn at night in attic rooms, according to a code of lights invented by a Prussian cryptographer.
Already the first papers referring to the “European War” were arriving from our countries—a fresh, good, and exciting subject in these monotonous times—full of sensationalism and emotion. Once again people were confronted by huge headlines, or “stop-press telegrams” printed in twelve-point type, as they had been in more interesting times—with some important “news flash” enclosed in a frame of its own. Many people, accustomed to suppress their thoughts about local happenings for fear of persecution, felt free, elevated and relieved, as it were cathartically, by these great but faraway events, suddenly brought into the forefront of reality. At last they could discuss, argue, conjecture, protest (insult Von Tirpitz, censure Italian neutrality, laugh at the Turks) in accordance with similar tendencies in all the countries of the continent. Over there the clergy were pro-German, because impious France promoted lay education and had separated Church from State, while the Spanish bankers, the many descendants of German emigrants, and the relations and friends of the little clan of officials who were jokingly called “Little Fredericks” were already applauding the Kaiser’s certain victory. But all the intelligentsia, writers, academics, readers of Rubén Dario or Gomez Carrillo were pro-Allies (no one understood about the Entente), as were all those who had been, or dreamed of one day becoming, schoolteachers, along with free thinkers, doctors trained in Paris, and a large section of the middle classes—above all those who, at social gatherings, sometimes talked French as affectedly and badly as the characters in War and Peace. Generally speaking, this was true of the whole nation, because the French came to our countries more for commercial than other reasons, and had never gone in for tiresome competition with the natives, but treated everyone alike amiably, and often allied themselves with zambas* and cholas, in this respect being very different from those who shut themselves up in “German Clubs,” or “German Cafés,” which admitted only those of pure white blood, and where the appearance of a negro or Indian would have been greeted by a Fafner-like baring of teeth.
And now they were entering the month of September, amidst doubts and anxieties, although the Head of State surveyed the daily prospect with almost enjoyable expectation. To judge from the speed of their operations, Von Moltke’s armies would soon reach the Arc de Triomphe without much difficulty, since France now possessed no generals of the stature of those whose names were inscribed on Napoleon’s monument. And this proud, perverted metropolis was to experience a purification by fire, which more than one French Catholic writer would have compared to Sodom and Gomorrah—or even to the whore of Babylon, after the erection (a word that should be used only in reference to statues or architectural works, according to Flaubert) of its Eiffel Tower, Tower of Babel, modern ziggurat, lighthouse of cosmopolitanism, symbol of the Confusion of Tongues, happily balanced by other pinnacles such as the white cupolas—though its architect had wanted them to be gold—of Sacré-Coeur. But the Head of State, who was a dispenser of indulgences when other people’s actions didn’t force him to be Distributor of Punishments, was not thinking about fire in terms of conflagrations and collapsing ceilings, but about a psychological fire, a moral chastisement that would force the Arrogant and Self-sufficient to humble themselves and ask for peace. That fire must not of course damage the frescoes of the Panthéon, the pink stone of the Place des Vosges, the windows of Notre-Dame, nor yet the chastity belts in the Abbaye de Cluny, the wax figures and illusions in the Musée Grévin, or the leafy chestnut trees of the avenue where the Comtesse de Noailles lived (although she was one of those who were cutting him) and still less the Trocadero, where as soon as the war was over our Mummy (now being fetched from Gothenburg by the cholo Mendoza) would be displayed in a glass case. And it could need only a few days, surely, for the war to be over. Doctor Fournier, as he discharged his patient—whose hand now went to his pistol easily and quickly, without his forefinger going numb on the trigger—broke into lamentations about the lack of preparation on the part of the Supreme Command, the improvidence, negligence, muddle—c’est encore la débâcle—that were carrying us towards inevitable defeat.
“Vous faites bien de repartir chez vous, cher Monsieur. Au moins, là -bas, c’est le soleil, c’est le rhum, c’est les mulâtresses.”
But on the afternoon of September 7 the Battle of the Marne began. (“A war is not won by taxi drivers,” the Head of State had remarked ironically.) It was soon apparent that in opposition to Jomini’s tactics and strategy, the French front line had no centre, this being occupied solely by a weak contingent of cavalry. On the eighth it looked as if they had lost. But on the afternoon of the ninth victory was theirs. That evening, the Latin American diplomats gathered together in their café on the Champs-Elysées and celebrated this triumph by inviting every prostitute who passed to have a drink, while the Head of State—who had joined them for once—looking imposing in his frock coat, and with a patriarchal wisdom recognised by all, muttered: “Certainly … certainly … However, this doesn’t settle anything.”
Next day he got up very early, in an embittered frame of mind, and stood contemplating the Arc de Triomphe, whose size seemed to increase or dwindle according to whether his defeatist desires were satisfied or frustrated. Now that his arm was cured, he must think about returning over there—he had no reason to stay on here—moreover, he must renounce for the present his hopes of a triumphal procession with deafening yet comic military bands marching like automatons, trombones and trumpets with blown-out cheeks, and all the musicians conducted by an enormous drum major. He was just going to telephone Peralta to suggest a stroll to Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons when the secretary came into the room, looking disturbed and holding a long message on blue paper:
“Read this … read this.”
The cable was from Roque García, President of the Senate: HAVE TO INFORM YOU GENERAL WALTER HOFFMANN REBELLED IN CIUDAD MORENO WITH INFANTRY BATTALIONS 3, 8, 9, 11. ALSO FOUR REGIMENTS INCLUDING HUSSARS, ALSO FOUR UNITS ARTILLERY TO CRY OF LONG LIVE THE CONSTITUTION, LONG LIVE LIBERTY.
“The cunt! The son of a bitch!” yelled the Head of State. But this was not all: three of the “Little Fredericks”—Breker, the blond “good chap,” always favoured by notes and instructions from above; González, who had trained as a soldier in Germany; and Martorell, a Catalan artilleryman become a Creole out of hatred of the Spanish monarchy—these three young soldiers, flattered, privileged, and rapidly advancing in the hierarchy, were all taking part in the coup.
“Sons of bitches! Sons of bitches!”
And suddenly giving way to paroxysms of rage, the Head of State shouted, raged, and stormed, and then sank into the depths of despair, groaning, wounded, seeming as if pierced to the heart, stammering out the most damaging adjectives he could find to describe treachery, felony, ingratitude, deceit, and fraud. His monologue reached a climax of exasperation, only to relapse once more into lamentations near to tears, as if he were unable to find words to express his disillusion; then, quickly recovering himself and again growing excited, he exploded into a fresh outburst of oaths and terrible threats.
(“I’ve heard that Mounet-Sully is a great tragedian,” thought Peralta, “but there can’t be another like my President.”)
And the Head of State was still shouting and raging, overturning furniture, throwing books on the floor, aiming at Gérome’s gladiators with his Belgian pistol, and making such a furious commotion that Sylvestre came hurrying from the pantry in alarm.
“Monsieur est malade?… Un médecin peut-être?”
Suddenly controlling himself—or pretending to do so—the enraged man turned to his servant: “Ce n’est rien, Sylvestre … Rien … Un mouvement d’humeur … Merci.”
And unfastening his tie, still red in the face, sweating, and with words of reproof ringing in his ears, the President began to walk from end to end of the room, giving orders and instructions to Doctor Peralta. Go to the nearest travel agency—the one near the Opéra would still be open—and do everything necessary to get them there as soon as possible. Ask Roque García for details of garrisons loyal to the government. Cable to Ariel; cable to our newspapers with a proclamation to go on the front page (“Once again, the blind ambition of a man unworthy of the rank he possesses, etc., etc. Good: you know what is wanted …”); cable to him, cable to the other, cables and more cables …
Just then the cries of the newspaper boys announced a mid-day edition, with the latest war news.
“As if I cared a damn for all that!”
And out of pure rage he kicked over a picture brought him a few hours before by a pupil of Jean-Paul Laurens, and a protégé of Ofelia’s, which was standing on the floor in front of him, waiting to be hung up: The Execution of Ganelon.
“The cunt! Son of a bitch!” repeated the Head of State, stamping on the canvas as if in the figure of the most famous traitor of mediaeval times he saw some similarity to the renegade, infamous, obscene soul of General Walter Hoffmann.
* Zambo (m.) and Zamba (f.) is the offspring of a negro and an Indian.