Reasons of State (12 page)

“Hell and damnation!” said Colonel Hoffmann, who was a Lutheran. “One can’t make war with sacred images.” When all was said and done, every building could be restored. And every restoration involved improvements in solidity and permanence for the future.

“And what if the Holy Image should be damaged?” enquired the Head of State.

“They sell some very pretty ones in Saint Sulpice in Paris,” remarked Doctor Peralta.

“What are you waiting for, to finish off those sons of bitches?” asked the North American Military Attaché. “Our marines would have liquidated them by now. They aren’t sentimental like you.”

“I see there’s no help for it,” said the Head of State at last. “If Pilate washed his hands, I shall stop my ears.”

“A strategic necessity,” said Hoffmann. The Krupp guns were tilted to the firing angle. The old artillerymen aimed it
by “three hands up, two to the right, and a finger and a half of rectification,” etc., and the first shot was fired. Hit in the centre, the tower loosed its bells over the roof of the Sanctuary, with a thunder of falling stones and statues. A second shot was fired—by calculation and logarithms this time—and sneaked in at the main door and across the altar without touching the statue of the Divine Shepherdess, who remained there, intact, indifferent, standing on her pedestal without even wobbling—a portent that was thenceforth recorded as “The Miracle of Nueva Córdoba.”

“The Virgin was on our side!” shouted the victors.

“The Virgin,” said the Head of State, much relieved, “couldn’t possibly be on the side of an atheist, a believer in talking tables and gods with six arms …”

And then all hell was let loose; free and uncontrollable, the troops abandoned themselves to hunting men and women, with bayonet, machete, or knife, throwing corpses into the streets, pierced through, cut open, beheaded, and mutilated, to warn the rest. And the last to put up a fight—some thirty or forty of them—were carried off to the Municipal Slaughterhouse, where, among hides of oxen, animals’ viscera and tripes, or pools of coagulated blood, they were battered and kicked, and hanged from hooks and beams, by the armpits, the knees, around the ribs, or by the chin.

“Who wants a skewerful of meat? Who wants a skewerful of meat?” shouted the executioners, imitating the town crier and giving another jab with a bayonet to a dying man, before posing in front of the camera of a French photographer, Monsieur Garcin, who had been living in the town for some time (scandalmongers said he had escaped from Cayenne), taking family groups and photographs of weddings, christenings, first communions, and “little angels” lying in their small white coffins.

“Look pleasant!” he said to the soldiers, changing a plate, about to press the rubber bulb. “Two pesos fifty for half a dozen, postcard size, with one hand-coloured enlargement as a souvenir … Don’t move. That’s it … Now another … With the four strung up over there … Another with these danglers … Pull down the woman’s skirt so as not to show her cunt … Another, with that chap with a trident in his guts … There’s a reduction for anyone taking a dozen.”

Already the turkey buzzards and vultures were flying over the patios of the Municipal Slaughterhouse. From the post office, from the poplars in the park, from the balconies of the Town Hall, hanged men were suspended in clusters. A few who tried to escape were lassoed like young steers in a rodeo, and dragged by horsemen over paving stones and bare pebbly ground. Some fifty miners, standing with their hands up, were run through in the baseball stadium, opened only a few months before by the Du Pont Mining Company. At the feet of the Divine Shepherdess, standing erect on her scorched altar in the ruins of her sacred dwelling, there was a confused heap of human bodies, from which emerged, like things broken off and out of context, a leg, a hand, a head frozen in its last grimace. Rifle fire was still to be heard from the miners’ quarter, where soldiers carrying drums of paraffin were setting fire to houses full of cries and entreaties.

And at midnight there was a huge explosion in the forgotten hangar of the Nueva Córdoba Railroad Company. Miguel Estatua had just destroyed himself and all his stone creatures with dynamite. A few fragments of the Evangelists flew over the crowd, killing three soldiers by slicing them with haloes filed as sharp as an axe by the chisel of the inspired driller and borer.

Now that the chief focus of resistance had been destroyed, the Head of State returned to the capital, entrusting
to Hoffmann (raised to the rank of general for services rendered) the now-easy task of punishing those surrounding villages that had helped the rebels. Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez had fled towards the northern frontier by way of a dry ravine that lost itself in the inhospitable sierras of Yatitlán. Here and there he proclaimed himself Leader of a Government in Exile or of the National Legalist Party, etc., etc., building up an inefficient nucleus of political exiles, soon to be destroyed—the President knew all about this—by rivalry, defections, schisms, mutual accusations, and litigation, fed by periodicals printing three hundred copies, tracts, and news sheets with fifty readers. And the Apostle of Nueva Córdoba, deep in theories and wool gathering, ended up, like so many others, a forgotten man in some Los Angeles boarding house or squalid hotel in the Caribbean, writing letters and pamphlets quite without interest for those who knew only too well that what counts in politics is success.

When he returned to the seat of government, the Head of State was received with flags, triumphal arches, fireworks, and the march
Sambre-et-Meuse
, which he liked particularly. But in his first press conference he looked sad and was frowning, and declared that he felt overcome with grief at the thought—no doubt based on recent events—that the nation didn’t trust his honesty and disinterested patriotism. For this reason he had decided to relinquish the power and entrust his responsibilities to the President of the Senate, in the hope that elections would be held and some outstanding man, some good citizen, more capable than he was of controlling the fate of the nation, might be raised to the presidency, unless—unless, I say—a plebiscite should produce a contrary result. So the plebiscite was quickly organised, while the Head of State carried on his ordinary business with the noble and serene melancholy—not to mention pain endured with dignity—of
someone who believes in nothing and nobody, and who has been wounded to the quick after having done everything possible for the good of other people. The misery of power! The classical drama of crown and purple! Bitter old age of princes!

As 40 per cent of the population could neither read nor write, coloured cards were prepared—white for “yes” and black for “no”—with a view to simplifying the mechanism of voting. But mysterious voices, sly voices, insidious voices began whispering in towns and countryside, in mountains and plains, from north to south and from east to west, that every vote, although secret, would be known to the rural or municipal authorities. There were new techniques today to make this possible. Cameras concealed in the curtains of the polling booths that functioned every time a citizen stretched out his hand to a ballot box. Where this arrangement didn’t exist, there were men hidden behind those same curtains. Then—without any doubt—they would examine the fingerprints left on the cards, not forgetting that in small villages everyone knows his neighbour’s political views, and twenty negative votes in such places would mean twenty individuals identified without possibility of error. A growing sense of alarm was taking hold of public servants—of whom there were many. On the other hand, the mysterious voices were now insinuating, more openly, in taverns, food stores, and bars, that the great mining and banana companies, manufacturers, etc., would sack anyone who opposed the Head of State’s remaining in power. The disaffected peasants had to look out for the machetes of the rural police. The schoolmasters would be thrown out of their classrooms. The tax returns of some traders—it was understood—would be severely checked, since they always managed to trick the tax collectors. It was remembered in time that any recently naturalised foreigner could have his citizenship card taken away and be
sent back to his own country, if he fell into the ugly category of undesirable or anarchist.

As a result of all this, the plebiscite produced an enormous and massive “yes,” so enormous and massive that the Head of State felt obliged to accept 4,781 negative votes—a figure arrived at by dice thrown by Doctor Peralta—to show the complete impartiality with which the inspectors of the returns had worked.

There were more speeches, triumphal marches, fireworks, and Bengal lights. But the President was tired. Besides which, his right arm remained out of action day after day, because of some strange and unpleasant sluggishness, heaviness or disobedience of the muscles, and he had a sharp pain in the shoulder which neither massage nor medicine relieved, nor even the herbs prepared by the Mayorala Elmira, who, as the daughter of a herbalist, knew a lot about plants and roots, nearly always more effective than some of the concoctions of eminent chemists, advertised in the press by beautiful illustrations of Convalescence and Recovered Health. A North American doctor came specially from Boston and diagnosed arthritis—or something of the sort with one of the new names proliferating on the covers of medical magazines, causing great panic and confusion among the sick—indicating that this country didn’t possess a certain electric apparatus that was the only means of curing the trouble. The government unanimously begged the Head of State to go to the United States and recover his very important health. During his absence the President of the Cabinet would be responsible for governing, with the close collaboration of General Hoffmann, in charge of National Defence, and the President of the Senate.

So it was that the Head of State embarked on a voyage in a luxury ship of the Cunard Line. But once arrived in
New York, he was aware of sudden, irrational, almost childish fear—perhaps he was tired; his nerves had been affected by recent events—when confronted by Yankee doctors, who spoke a foreign language, were cold in their manner, too ready to use a scalpel, to cut without great cause, addicted to rough new methods whose consequences weren’t fully understood, very different from the gentle, bearable, and intelligent therapeutics of the French or Swiss specialists, who were undoubtedly—he was thinking of Doyen, of Roux, of Vincent—at the top of the tree over there. To the aseptic, white, impersonal surgeries full of forceps, probes, saw-edged scissors, and other cruel objects on view in the glass cases of these Yankee doctors, the President much preferred the consulting rooms hung with pictures by Harpignies or Carolus-Durand—the Persian carpets, antique furniture, books with eighteenth-century bindings, an almost imperceptible smell of ether or iodine—of the doctors with imperials, frock coats, and the Legion of Honour, who officiated, paternally and elegantly, in the Avenue Victor Hugo or the Boulevard Malherbes.

“Very well,” said Peralta. “But … do you think it’s wise to go so far away? And supposing there’s another coup, my President?”

“Ah, my friend … Everything is possible in our countries. But I don’t think it’s likely. We’ll be away only a few weeks. And my health comes first. I wasn’t born to be a cripple. And to become a cripple without having ever been to Lepanto would be stupid. Besides, with no right hand I can’t depend on my best friend. Because even when I’m in my country, where so many people love me, I feel calm, firm, and in control of myself only during audiences and visits, when I know that’s with me.” And he pointed with his chin at the place where he kept his Browning, there, under his left armpit, praising the
lightness of its trigger and the style of its butt, with the tender accents in which a man boasts of the beauty of the woman he loves: it was faithful, docile, safe, beautifully shaped, of perfect proportions, pleasant to touch, slim and elegant right up to the mouth, well bored though invisibly, and with the National Arms engraved on the back of the butt. It was looked after with maternal affection by the Mayorala Elmira, who cleaned it every day when he removed it before he took a long bath, returning it to him recharged and ready for use, just as he was drying himself with a large plushy towel, one of those Ofelia bought for her father in La Maison de Blanc.

And so, leaving behind the electric apparatus, progressive inventions, and torture tables of North American clinics, which seemed to him like huge prisons, the Head of State embarked one morning on
La France
to take refuge, after so many trials and tribulations, in the charms of a Parisian summer—so sunny and warm that year, the newspapers reported, that nothing like it had been seen since the middle of the last century.

THE TRAVELLERS WERE MET AT THE GARE DU NORD by the cholo Mendoza—yellow gloves, gardenia in buttonhole, and grey spats as usual, although it was summer; he had been notified by aerogram sent off on the high seas, and had hastily returned from Vichy, where he was combining the water cure in the daytime with nocturnal cures in the bar, and this intelligent alternation of spring water with bourbon had given him the appearance of a twenty-year-old. The other embassy officials were on holiday with their children, at Trouville or Arcachon. And Ofelia was in Salzburg, where the Mozart Festival was opening that very day with
Così fan Tutte
. The diplomat’s expression showed his alarm when he saw that the Head of State had his inert right arm in a sling made from a cashmere shawl. A tiresome affliction, but not serious, Doctor Peralta explained. The doctors over here would put it right with their up-to-date scientific methods. Besides, the atmosphere, movement, gaiety, and civilised way of life …

Merely by breathing the air here—thus: breathe in, breathe out, expand the chest—one felt better. And it was well known that morale affects the physical state, since pain gets so much worse when we concentrate on the idea of pain, because, in fact, modern psychologists had agreed with Epicurus that etc., etc.; but one couldn’t talk in all this noise from trains, whistling engines, bustling porters, and perhaps you’d better go on ahead with the luggage, Cholo, while Peralta
and I take a little walk, as our legs are numb with sitting for so long.