It is better to modify our desires than the organisation of the world.
—DESCARTES
SO NEXT MORNING THEY WOULD CATCH THE train to Saint-Nazaire, whence a ship was leaving for New York, full of Americans who, having seen the Germans approach too close to the Seine and knowing that the war was by no means over, with its inconveniences and rationing, preferred to return to the opposite side of the ocean. After the crossing, there would be several days of enforced idleness—as before, at the Waldorf-Astoria. There was a possibility of seeing a performance of Umberto Giordano’s Madame Sans-Gêne, sung by Geraldine Farrar (for the Metropolitan Opera House had announced its world première), and although his daughter took him for an ignoramus where music was concerned, merely because he had on occasion been so bewildered and bored by the telluric entanglements of Rhinegold with its confusion of dwarfs, giants, and water nymphs as to fall asleep in his box, the President was very appreciative of Maria Barrientos’ coloratura, Titta Ruffo’s significant lyrical energy, the pure timbre of Caruso’s long, incredibly sustained high notes and his magic voice, so prodigiously enclosed in the body of a Neapolitan innkeeper.
After having got rid of it somewhere in Switzerland, Ofelia had left for London, to escape from this tiresome war, now making itself felt, according to her, in the lack of Russian ballets, tango orchestras, and elegant parties in full evening dress. In England, on the other hand, recruitment was voluntary, and life was fairly normal: so she would go to Stratford-on-Avon with a view to completing her Shakespearean education.
“I wonder if some Fortinbras or Rosenkranz will make her pregnant?” thought her father, well knowing that nothing that happened over there in their native land mattered to his daughter, who had decided some time ago to live forever in Europe, far away—as she said—from “that country of filth and sweat,” with no amusements except municipal concerts, family parties where everyone danced the polka, mazurka, and redowa, and palace soirées where the wives of ministers and generals clustered together at the farther end of the room from a group of men telling dirty stories, to talk about births and miscarriages, children, illnesses, deceitful servants, and deaths of grandmothers, interspersed with exchanging recipes for crême caramel, egg flip, babas, marzipan, and cream cake.
That night the Head of State and Doctor Peralta paid a farewell visit to Monsieur Musard at the Bois-Charbons, and drank heavily. Afterwards they took two girls picked up on the street to a luxury brothel in the Rue Sainte-Beuve, whose entrance hall, decorated with ceramics by Léon-Paul Fargue’s father, led to a rickety lift, worked by a piston rod and got up in traditional style so that it looked rather like the corner of a Norman dining room moving vertically. It was late when he got back to the Rue de Tilsitt, to find the corridors and rooms heaped with suitcases and trunks packed by Sylvestre. Doctor Peralta showed him some stereoscopic pornographic photographs—the Verascope Richard—he had bought the evening before, and which with their double images gave a surprisingly three-dimensional effect.
“Look. Do look at this. You’d think that man was alive. And you can see every hair on those two women. And what do you think of that combination of five in a row?”
In spite of having drunk so much, the Head of State, though intoxicated, was lucid and sad. He was invaded by a feeling of enormous fatigue when he thought of the efforts he had had to exert four times since he took on the government. Now there would be his arrival in Puerto Araguato. The train of old coaches climbing up to the capital through forests whose trees mingled—it was impossible to know which branches grew from the trunks and which had been cut by machetes—with those that roofed the huts in villages so melancholy and overshadowed by the universal vegetation that a laugh in one of them would have sounded like some obscene explosion of animality. Afterwards, the obligatory speech from the balcony of the palace. His battle dress, probably smelling of camphor, ironed by the Mayorala Elmira, his irreplaceable housekeeper, a woman of excellent judgement and (when he felt like it) a docile and complacent source of consolation; the journey to the battle front would be towards the south this time—a few months ago it was to the north, on other occasions it had been to the east or west. Now it led to the region of the Quaking Bogs, with their purplish lagoons constantly bubbling and pullulating with the animals and reptiles hidden beneath the deceptive peace of Victoria water lilies. Marching along flooded paths, with one’s face plastered with revolting ointment that for barely an hour kept off the stings of a hundred species of mosquito. It was a world of sweating hibiscus, false carnations—traps for insects—scum that tangled and disentangled its convolutions from sunset to sunrise, fungi smelling of vinegar, oily flowers growing from rotten trunks, greenish dust and tendrils, collapsed anthills, deceptive turf that ate into boot leather. And it was through such country that he must pursue General Hoffmann, find him, surround him, corner him, and finally put him up against the wall of a convent, church, or cemetery and shoot him. “Fire!” There was nothing else to be done. Those were the rules of the game. Recourse to Method.
But something else was perturbing the Head of State this time. And it was a problem of words. When he returned over there, before he again put on the general’s uniform that everyone knew was phoney—that was the truth, since he himself had assumed it, gold braid and all, on a day of youthful ragging, and kept it afterwards because one general more or one general less in his country … now, before increasing his stature by getting on horseback, before girding the cowboy spurs he usually wore during a campaign, he would have to make a speech, to utter words. And those words refused to come to mind, because the classical, fluent, serviceable words he had always used on former and similar occasions had been so often rehashed in different registers with corresponding pantomimic gestures as to have become worn out, old, and ineffective in the present contingency. Contradicted innumerable times by his actions, these words had passed from the marketplace to the dictionary, from fiery tirade to rhetorical repertory, from useful eloquence to an attic full of rubbish—devoid of meaning, dry, arid, useless. For years the pillars supporting his political speeches had been such expressions as Liberty, Loyalty, Independence, Sovereignty, National Honour, Sacred Principles, Legitimate Rights, Civic Conscience, Fidelity to Our Traditions, Historic Mission, Duty to the Country, etc., etc. But now these words (he was always a severe self-critic) had acquired such a ring of false money, of lead dipped in gold, that he felt tired of the twists and turns of his own verbal labyrinth, and began wondering how he would fill the audible gaps, the written spaces in the proclamations and admonitions inevitably involved in a military—and primitive—operation such as the one he must shortly embark on. Accepted formerly by most of his compatriots as a man of action, able to direct the fate of the country at a time of crisis or lawlessness, he had seen his prestige diminish and an alarming deterioration in his authority, in spite of every device he had invented to remain in power. He knew that he was hated, abhorred by the mass of the people, and this knowledge made him react against the external world, and at the same time increased the satisfaction and pleasure he found in the servility, solicitude, and adulation of his dependants, who had consolidated his interests and prosperity and extended to the utmost a sovereignty quite unsupported by legality and constitution. But he couldn’t fail to know that his enemies were in the right when they accused him of giving more and more concessions to the gringos, and it would have been foolish to deny that the gringos were universally detested on the continent. We all knew that they called us “Latins” and that, to them, this was as good as saying rabble, small fry, and negro rebels. (They had even invented the euphemism “Latin colour” to justify the admission of important persons whose complexion was a trifle exotic into New York and Washington hotels.)
And the Head of State went on thinking about the speech he had to make, without being able to imagine it in a favourable light. Words, words, words. Always the same words. But above all, nothing about Liberty—with the jails full of political prisoners … Nothing about National Honour or Duty to the Country—because these were the concepts always used by top-ranking military men. No Historic Mission nor Heroes’ Ashes for the same reason. No Independence, which in his case rhymed with dependence. No Virtues—when he was known to be the owner of the richest businesses in the country. No Legitimate Rights—since he ignored them whenever they conflicted with his own personal jurisprudence. His vocabulary was decidedly narrowing. And he had a formidable adversary: a regiment of the rebellious army; he would have to speak, yet the exasperated orator felt aphonic, without a language, as if he no longer had useful, dynamic, stimulating words at his disposal, because he had squandered them, blunted their edge, prostituted them in despicable skirmishes unworthy of such extravagance. As our countrymen would say: “He had wasted gunpowder on vultures.”
“I’m getting old,” he thought. But he had to make up something. Something.
He emptied one of the leather-covered flasks in a series of short but continuous gulps, and to pass the time of waiting for ideas that didn’t come he picked up one of the morning papers—Le Figaro—that lay folded on his writing table. There, in the first column of the front page, and printed in a special frame, was an article by the Distinguished Academician. Drawing conclusions from the Battle of the Marne, our friend affirmed that that military miracle—more than a victory of arms: a victory for intelligence—signified, above all, the triumph of the Latin over the German spirit. Heirs to the Great Mediterranean Culture, descendants of Plato, Virgil, Montaigne, Racine, and the magnificent sansculottes of Valmy—appropriate to the present situation although their memory was detested by the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain—they had opposed the Genius of their Race, made up of sanity, balance, and moderation, to the pathological aggressiveness of the Teutons. The Gallic Cock against dragons, cave-dwelling blacksmiths, and Niebelungen. The nervous, active, thoroughbred charger of the already almost sainted Maid of Orleans—she was in fact about to be canonised—against Brunnhilde’s fierce steed. Olympus against Valhalla. Apollo against Hagen. Versailles against Potsdam. Pascal’s essential wisdom against Hegel’s philosophical gigantism—expressed in that obscure Heidelberg jargon that our minds, addicted to lucidity and transparency in argument, have instinctively rejected. The battle of the marshes of Saint-Gond had been a victory for Descartes, rather than for the ’75 cannon. And the writer closed with a forcible, implacable, unanswerable denunciation of German culture—or Kultur, as he called it—of Wagner’s music, the bad taste of Berliners, the pedantic scientism of Haeckel, and the ideas of petulant dwarfs who (believing themselves to be superhuman and disguising themselves as Zarathustra, with swords at their belts and skulls on their shakos) had unleashed the present catastrophe, like modern sorcerers’ apprentices. It was war, more than war, it was a Holy Crusade against Prussian neo-barbarism.
When he had finished reading the article, the Head of State began to walk up and down his room. He suddenly understood his mistake: the pro-German attitude of a resentful “metic,” an alien in a foreign land—and he remembered that the Greeks didn’t use the word in a denigratory sense—was neither useful nor profitable to him. In these crucial moments in his political career, Von Kluck’s Uhlans and Von Tirpitz’s submarines could not help him. The Valkyrie’s cause was a bad cause for him—a cause that “didn’t pay.” He was forced to admit that in Latin America everyone sided with France—better to say: with Paris. And over there, to transfer the problem to our own country, pro-Germans were often Jesuits, pastors of a chosen flock, confessors to rich women and not very friendly to the humble French Marists who had educated them; pro-Germans were found among rich Spaniards, gentlemen of the Import-Export—when they weren’t grocers or pawnbrokers—with large balances in banks in Catalonia or Bilbao, antipathetic to the Creole by tradition and custom; and also—but this was a special case—amongst the population of the colony of Olmedo, descendants of Bavarian or Pomeranian workmen who had no importance in public life. Moreover—Good God! I’ve just realised!—all the Virgins of our countries were Latins. Because Christ’s Mother was a Latin, doubly Latin, now that those disgusting Lutherans—like Hoffmann and the “Little Fredericks” who sided with him—have thrown her out of their chapels. The Divine Shepherdess of Nueva Córdoba, the Virgins of Chiquinquirá, Coromotos, Guadalupe, La Caridad del Cobre, and all those who made up the Ineffable Legion of Intercessors, were the ubiquitous manifestations of the one and eternal Presence enthroned in the nave of Notre-Dame by Louis XIII, when he consecrated his reign to the worship of the Virgin Mary. The Virgins must therefore be reckoned on our side—on mine in this conflict, and her image erected on the labarum—since it was the duty of a ruler confronted by hostile forces to make use of anything that might advance his cause. A Leader of his People, a Director of Men, must be adaptable and never obstinate, although he might have to renounce his most personal desires at any given moment, in order to remain in power. The ideological basis—tactics—of his immediate struggle with the traitor Hoffmann thus became clear. One had only to consider his name; remember his German training; his eagerness to proclaim his pure Aryan blood, although he had relegated his somewhat negroid grandmother to the remotest buildings in his huge colonial domain. Suddenly Aunt Jemima—as the foolish people over there called her—would have to be converted into a symbol of Latinity. (Worried and depressed a few moments before, the Dictator recovered his spirits, drew himself up, banged on tables, and began to behave like an orator again.) After all, being a Latin did not mean having “pure blood” or “clean blood”—as the out-of-date phraseology of the Inquisition used to put it. All races of the ancient world had been mixed together in the great Mediterranean basin, mother of our culture. In that tremendous round bed Romans had lain with Egyptian women, Trojans with Carthaginians, the famous Helen with people of dull complexion. The wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus had several teats—and it was known that Italy would one of these days attack the Central Powers—and any cholo or zamba might have fed from them. To say Latinity was to say mixed blood, and in Latin America we are all mestizos; all of us have some negro or Indian, Phoenician, Moorish, Celtiberian blood, or the blood of Cádiz—and there’s always Walker Lotion, or something of the sort, to smooth our hair, hidden away in the family medicine chest. We are all mestizos, and should be honoured that it is so!
And now the Head of State’s mind began producing ideas; words returned to him and he was suddenly in command of a new vocabulary. Resplendent words, high-sounding, pleasant to the ear, which must be well received over there by those half-hearted, undecided, potential enemies, more or less dedicated to a pro-Ally outlook, who had all become strategists and showed their predilections by moving little tricolor flags on maps spread on café tables, far beyond the point where the army’s advance had been halted by the General Staff itself. People felt passionately, and it was intelligent to capitalise their passion for his own advantage. Alea jacta est. His mind was made up: he would be a modern Knight Templar joining the Holy Crusade of Latinity. A victory for Walter Hoffmann and his party would mean the Germanisation of our culture. It would be easy to ridicule him in the eyes of the public. With his personality, the books he read: the portraits of Frederick II, Bismarck, and Von Moltke that adorned his study; the fact that he treated the poor old woman to whom he owed his existence as a far from decorative ancestress—although she was a true incarnation of our race, flesh of our flesh—concealing her under the tamarind trees, close to the yard where the pig was being fattened for Christmas Eve. The rebel was a living mirror of the Prussian barbarism that had not only been loosed over Europe but would also soon be threatening these Lands of the Future, since the Germans believed they were predestined to govern the whole globe in virtue of a mystique about being a superior race, clearly expressed recently in an arrogant and xenophobic “Manifesto for Intellectuals” that had already appeared in our press. So he must raise the Crown of Saint Rose of Lima against the Shield of the Valkyries. Cuauhtémoc against Alaric. The Redeemer’s Cross against Wotan’s spear. The sword of all the liberators of the continent against the Technological Vandals of the Twentieth Century.
“Come here, Peralta.”
And for the next two hours, always finding striking adjectives and illuminating images—although this time his style was not too ornate—he dictated articles for his country’s newspapers, sketching the broad outline of the campaign as he believed it would develop before his arrival.
“Hurry along and take all this to Western Union.”
And now, his energies spent, perhaps tired by so much dictation, and with a delayed feeling of sadness, he gazed around the room at the friendly furniture, pictures, sculptures. Within a few hours he would have to leave this peaceful maternal lap, this period of repose among silks, satins, and velvets, and plunge his horse’s hooves for days, weeks, months maybe, in the mire of the southern Torrid Zone—lianas, mangrove swamps with their stagnant waters, murky streams, and tendrils lashing one’s face—far from everything that made him happy. He thought about his country over there, and felt in advance the boredom of returning to the point of departure after constantly moving forwards with passing years. It would soon be November—our November with All Saints’ Day, when the cemeteries were transformed into fairgrounds, with lanterns strung from tomb to tomb, barrel organs making a deafening din, guitars playing among the graves, maracas and clarinets close to the chapels of the dead, and girls being deflowered amongst the faded wreaths of a recent burial. Skulls made of sugar candy or pink icing, skulls made of toffee, marzipan, sesame-flavoured paste, amongst the sextons’ spades and straps, coffins, urns, a fine show of bronzes and portraits of grandfathers, soldiers, and children in their Sunday best seen through oval glass dimmed by dew and rain. And then would come the vendors of little skeletons wearing crowns, mitres, top hats, kepis, dancing their Dance of Death from cenotaph to cross, with their cries of “A skeleton for your little boy,” which on this day of all days was a summons to gaiety, aguardiente, and molasses. And what conversations were embarked on, what jokes and what quarrels flew between cross and cross, angel and angel, epitaph and epitaph!
“Ah, my friend! You’re happy with your little dead son!”
“Ah, my friend, and what a bastard and rogue yours was!”
“So they say, my friend! Yours wasn’t such a saint either!”
“That’s because he took after his grandmother, my friend!”
“Come now, my friend, how can one say who takes after whom?”
Remembering all this, the Head of State saw himself as someone who had been enclosed in a magic circle made by the sword of the Prince of Darkness. History, which was his because he played a part in it, was something that repeated itself, swallowed its own tail, and never moved forwards—it made very little difference whether the pages of the calendar were printed with 185(?), 189(?), 190(?) or 190(6?): it was the same procession of uniforms and frock coats, high English top hats alternating with plumed Bolivian helmets, as one saw in second-rate theatres, where triumphal marches of thirty men passed and re-passed in front of the same drop curtain, running when they were behind it, so as to be in time to reenter the stage, shouting for the fifth time: “Victory! Victory! Long live the Regime! Long live Liberty!” It was the classic example of the knife given a new handle when the old one wears out, and a new blade when that wears out in its turn, so that after many years it is still the same knife—immobilised in time—although handle and blade have so often been changed that their mutations can’t be counted. Time at a standstill, curfew, suspension of constitutional guarantees, restoration of normality, and words, words, words, to be or not to be, to go up or not to go up, stand up or not stand up, fall or not fall, just as a watch returns to the time it indicated yesterday when yesterday it told today’s time …
He looked at the silks, satins, and velvets, the defeated gladiator, the sleeping nymph, the Wolf of Gubbio, Saint Radegonde. He longed to stay here, to get out of the magic circle, but just as if it really enclosed him, he could not. His willpower was held firm by the roots of instinct, of what he perceived and understood when he opened his eyes onto the world. He knew there were many over there who detested him; he knew there were many, very many, too many who were hoping that someone, sometime would be brave enough to assassinate him (if his death could be caused by pressing the mythical button of the Mandarin in the story, thousands of men and women would press that button). All the same, he would go back. To show that even though he stood on the threshold of old age, although his body’s architecture was in decline, he was still tough, strong, and energetic, full of masculinity, very much a man. He would go on destroying his enemies while strength remained to him. He wouldn’t copy the sad end of the tyrant Rosas, who died in obscurity at Swaythling, forgotten by everyone—even his daughter Manuelita. Nor did he want to be like Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, pursuing a living death, promenading his corpse in frock coat, gloves, and solemn hat through the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne, sitting sunk in the mournful black leather seats of a phaeton drawn by horses whose slow ambling pace already heralded his funeral …
And now he remembered a certain Holy Week when the people of his home town had organised a great display of the Mystery of the Passion, from a seventeenth-century manuscript preserved in the archives of the parish church. For months and months women and children had saved the silver paper from their sweets and toffees to cover the helmets and shields of centurions, and collected hair from horses, mules, and donkeys to make them into crests. A purple velvet curtain had served for the Redeemer’s tunic; his belt was a sisal cord soaked in an infusion of acacia flowers; his crown of thorns came from the branch of a shrub known as “snakebite,” which grew on a hill nearby. The Judgement scene had taken place on the patio of the Town Hall, where the Head of State (he was Chief of Police at the time) had consented to take the part of Pilate, sitting in a red armchair in the Chapter House. He had handed the Son of God over to the Pharisees and washed his hands in a Japanese basin lent by the Suárez brothers’ china shop. And the ascent to Calvary had begun amidst the tears and lamentations of the crowd. A young and simple-minded beggar woman, who believed she was witnessing the real events she had seen in twenty altarpieces in village churches, had gone up to Miguel the shoemaker, who was playing the Son of God, and tried to take on her own shoulders the heavy wooden cross he was carrying, stumbling as he went, staggering, falling, and getting up again, covered in sweat, half dead, and uttering desperate groans—an amazingly theatrical martyr—as he advanced towards the hill where he was to pretend to be crucified. Pushing away the intruder who was threatening to spoil his splendid performance, Christ pointed his left hand at her and said:
“And if you take this from me, what shall I be? What will remain to me?” And then went on his way up the hill by the Way of the Cross, while the crowd sang an old tune, whose origins had been forgotten, with the slow inflexions of plainsong:
And if I have to die to tomorrow
Let them kill me outright.
Just at this moment Peralta returned from the Western Union office, and finding me still up and somewhat pensive, asked me:
“Why not let all this go to the devil, and stay here, enjoying what you’ve got? You’re not short of cash. What a lot of bottles we could drink! What a lot of women we could fuck!”
“And suppose I did get rid of all that, what should I be? What would remain to me?” I said. Yes, I remember saying it and thinking about the people who had turned against me because of that business at Nueva Córdoba, so that my personality had dwindled and become too small and helpless to play a part in this apocalyptic world. I was taking on the Crusade for Latinity in order to reinstate my image. And if it pleased the Ineffable One to whom my requests were addressed to grant me victory within the next few weeks, I pledged myself, yes, I promised that immediately after my triumph I would bow my head and go as a pilgrim to her Sanctuary as Divine Shepherdess, mixing with the people (but also with those pretending to belong to “the people”), as an act of gratitude and rejoicing for favours received, and sorrow for many sins committed. I would go with those who dragged along their wounded legs, or wept in the night with eyes rolled upwards or with noses eaten away and the stumps of their arms joined in an impossible attitude of prayer; amongst women with closed wombs and breasts of gravel; amongst those long past adolescence, who could only cry like babies and sidle rather than walk, with withered arms and twisted hands; amongst those whose voices were forever dead inside their deformed throats; with the purulent and the paralysed. I would cross the wide tiled floor on my knees and, rejecting the red carpet laid down for the priests, I would drag myself over the stones to the feet of the Mother of God, to express my gratitude in the prose of the liturgy—I don’t remember whether I learnt it from Renan or the Marist Brothers: Mystical Rose, Ivory Tower, Golden Mansion, Morning Star, Ave Maris Stella.
I look at my watch. Now I must rest a little. I’ll have to leave early tomorrow. Already in my nightshirt, for a joke, I put on my English cap with earflaps, and the checked Inverness cape I have bought for the journey.
“I look like Sherlock Holmes,” I say, admiring myself in the Empire looking-glass mounted on gilt sphinxes.
“You only need a magnifying glass,” says Peralta, slipping into my pocket one of the brandy flasks encased in pigskin … and the alarm already. Quarter past ten. It’s impossible. Quarter past nine. More likely. Quarter past eight. This alarm clock would be a marvel of Swiss watchmaking, but its hands are so slim that one can hardly see them. Quarter past seven. My spectacles. Quarter past six. That’s it. Daylight is beginning to show clearly through the yellow curtains. My foot can’t find the other slipper, which always gets lost among the colours of the Persian carpet. And in comes Sylvestre in his striped jacket carrying aloft the silver tray—made of silver from my mines:
“Le Café de Monsieur. Bien fort comme il l’aime. Monsieur a bien dormi?”
“Mal, très mal,” I reply. “J’ai bien de soucis, mon bon Sylvestre.”
“Les revers attristent / les grands de ce monde,” he murmurs, in an alexandrine whose classical scansion brings an echo of the Comédie Française into this house where, in an atmosphere of confusion, far from the scenes to which destiny was taking me, a new chapter in my history was opening early this morning.