Reasons of State (25 page)

Between amusement and annoyance—but more amused than annoyed—the Head of State contemplated this panorama of swindling and gangsterism every morning, reflecting that the least he could do was reward the fidelity and zeal of those
who served him with the currency of folklore. Because he was not, and had never been, a man for small transactions, owner of companies managed by stealth, he was Master of Bread and Fish, of Corn and Herds, of Ice and Springs, of Fluid and the Wheel, beneath a multiple identity of symbols, syndicates, trade names, and always anonymous societies immune from failure or setbacks. Thus the Head of State contemplated his early-morning windows, but observed that, in spite of the terror unleashed by the first bomb in the palace, there was
something
, something that his men had been unable to grasp, something that slipped from their fingers, that neither prison nor torture nor a state of siege could put a stop to;
something
that was moving in the subsoil, underground, that arose from urban catacombs not previously known to exist; something new in the country, with unpredictable manifestations, mysterious mechanisms, which the President could not explain. It was as if the atmosphere had been changed by the addition of some impalpable pollen or hidden ferment, an elusive, slippery, occult but manifest force, silent although throbbingly alive with a circulation of clandestine leaflets, manifestos, proclamations, pamphlets small enough to go in the pocket sent forth by ghostly printers (“And are you incapable of finding something so difficult to conceal, so noisy, as a printing press?” the Head of State would shout, on his angrier mornings). These didn’t insult him in the Creole argot of the tenement house, with its simple-minded puns and jokes as formerly, but described him as
Dictator
(a word that wounded him more than the most obscene epithet or untranslatable nickname, because it was annoyingly current abroad—especially in France) and revealed to the public in plain and cutting language many things about him—actions, business matters, decisions, and
eliminations
—that should never have been known.

“But who, who, who publishes these leaflets, libels and infamous calumnies?” the Head of State would cry aloud every morning to his usual stained-glass windows of sweating, twitching faces, distressed by their inability to answer. Those in the regulation colours of blue, white, and yellow stammered something or other; the pale Maieutic Brotherhood hinted at and contradicted one another, proceeding by elimination although obviously disorientated. They tightened their noose around the printed matter and searched for guilt between the lines. It wasn’t the anarchists: they had all been taken; it wasn’t Luis Leoncio Martínez’s followers, who were all shut up in different prisons; nor was it the timid oppositionists of other factions, who were thoroughly taped and watched, and hadn’t the technical means to keep an underground printing press functioning so continuously and exasperatingly.

And so, by dint of subjecting conjectures and hypotheses to the calculation of probabilities, and by joining the loose letters together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, they arrived at the word C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-M, the last to come to mind.

But the fact was—as the Head of State remarked when he was alone with Peralta—we were a very imaginative people, like all Latin Americans. It was enough for something to travel about the world—whether a fashion, a product, a doctrine, an idea, a style of painting, writing, poetry, or of foolish talk—for us to welcome it with enthusiasm. This was just as true of Italian Futurism as it was of the
Juvencia del Abate Soury
; or of Theosophy as of dancing marathons; of the philosophy of Krause as of table-turning. And now this exotic, impossible Russian communism, condemned by all honest men ever since the infamous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was stretching its tentacles towards America. Luckily this doctrine without a future and so alien to our customs had few supporters—or at least their activities had not been obvious hitherto—but
as soon as they thought of it as a possible motive, there rose to the minds of those present the despised figure of a young man called Álvarez or Álvaro or Álvarado—Peralta wasn’t sure which—better known as the Student ever since he had said in a particularly aggressive speech: “You mustn’t think of me as a student, but as any student, the Student,” and who had played a prominent part in recent university agitations. One informer had heard him talking approvingly of this fellow Lenin who had overthrown Kerensky in Russia and established a regime there in which riches, land, cattle, silver plate, and women were all shared.

“Well, you must look for him,” said the President. “Maybe we’ll get something out of him.” But the usual morning stained-glass window at once became a picture of consternation. There was no conceivable way of seizing the Student. And as he had seemed too harmless even to be kept under observation—he was more interested in poetry than politics—the Security Experts couldn’t agree about his physical appearance, height, physiognomy, or degree of corpulence. Some said he had green eyes, others that they were chestnut; some that he was of athletic build, others that he was weak and sickly; he was twenty-three years old according to the university registers; his mother was dead; his father was a schoolmaster who had been killed in the Nueva Córdoba massacre. He should be in the city, however; but when the police broke into his hideout all they found was a rumpled bed with indications of recent occupation, a half-empty bottle of beer, burned papers, cigar ends, and a book lying on the floor: Volume I of
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx, bought—as could be seen by the shop stamp—in the Atenea bookshop, kept by Valentin Jiménez, now in prison for selling red books.

“That’s it!” cried the Head of State when he heard. “The cretins were busy confiscating
Le Rouge et le Noir
and
The
Knight of the Red House
, but left the most dangerous books in the shop windows.”

And as the Distinguished Academician had sometimes talked to him in Paris about the “Marxist danger” or “Marxist literature,” he instructed Peralta (“he’s much more intelligent than these bloody detectives, including present company”) to bring him all the literature of this type he could find in the city …

Two hours later, a number of volumes were ranged on the table of the presidential study: Marx’s
The Class Struggle in France (1848–1850)
, Louis Bonaparte’s
18 Brumaire
, and
The Civil War in France (1871)
.

“Bah! All that’s prehistory,” said the Head of State, pushing the books away contemptuously. Marx-Engels:
Critique of the Gotha and Erfürt Programmes
. “This seems to savour of a pamphlet against the European nobility. Because Gotha, as you know, is a sort of annual telephone book of princes, dukes, counts, and marquises.” Engels:
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
. “I don’t think that’s likely to pervert our tram conductors.” Marx:
Value, Price, and Profit
. And the President read aloud: “The determination of the values of commodities according to the relative amount of work incorporated in them is totally different from the tautological method of determining values of commodities by the value of the work and the wages.” … “Do you understand any of it? Nor do I.” … Marx:
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
. He skimmed through the book as far as the appendix, which provoked his hilarity: “With poems in English, poems in Latin, and poems in Greek. Let’s see if they can indoctrinate the Mayorala Elmira with this.” (“You always think I’m stupider than I really am,” she said, piqued.) And he laughed again when he picked up another volume: “Ah! Here’s the famous
Kapital …
Let’s have a look:

“The first metamorphosis of one commodity, its transformation from a commodity into money, is therefore also invariably the second metamorphosis of some other commodity, the retransformation of the latter from money into a commodity … M–C, a purchase, is at the same time C–M, a sale; the concluding metamorphosis of one commodity is the first metamorphosis of another. With regard to our weaver, the life of his commodity ends with the Bible into which he has reconverted his two pounds. But suppose the seller of the Bible turns the two pounds set free by the weaver into brandy, M–C, the concluding phase of C–M–C (linen, money, Bible) is also C–M, the first phase of C–M–C (Bible, money, brandy) …

“The only thing I find comprehensible here is the brandy,” said the Head of State, in high good humour.

“And what does this whacking great German tome cost?”

“Twenty-two pesos, Señor.”

“Then let them sell it, let them sell it; let them go on selling it. There aren’t twenty-two people in the whole country who would pay twenty-two pesos for a book as heavy as lead … –M–C, M–C–M … I never could get on with equations.”

“But look at this, on the other hand,” said Peralta, taking a thin pamphlet out of his pocket:
Breeding Rhode Island Red Poultry
.

“What’s this got to do with the other?” asked the President. “We’ve never been able to acclimatise American poultry here. Neither Nat Pinkertons, with feathers on their legs; nor Leghorns, though in the north they lay more eggs than there are days in the year; but here, I don’t know why, they shut up their arses and only lay four a week; as for those plump Rhode Island Reds, as soon as they get here they’re devoured by lice.”

“Open this little book, President. And take a good look,” Marx-Engels:
Manifesto of the Communist Party
.

“Ah, hell! this is quite another thing!”

And frowning suspiciously, he read aloud: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the Pope, Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.”

There was a silence. Then: “As usual: hieroglyphics or prehistory. The Holy Alliance (wasn’t that after the fall of Napoleon?), the Pope who never bothered anyone, Metternich and Guizot (does anyone in this country remember that gentlemen called Metternich and Guizot ever existed?), the Tsar of Russia (which one? Even I can’t tell). Prehistory, pure prehistory.”

However, when, turning several pages together, he came to the last lines of the pamphlet disguised as a guide to poultry-keeping, he paused deep in thought at a sentence he found there: “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.”

There was an even longer pause. Then, at last: “The same anarchism as ever: bombs in Paris, bombs in Madrid; attempts to assassinate kings and queens; anarcho-syndicalism, communism, R.S.A., C–M–C, M–C–M, P.O.S.D.R., and Y.M.C.A. Alphabetic chaos, proliferation of initials, a sign of the decadence of the age. However, this business of breeding Rhode Island Reds. It’s ingenious. Order everyone found carrying this avicultural literature to be picked up and imprisoned. And also … But—what’s going on?”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The clapper of the Cathedral bell began its solemn, measured strokes. And as if some gigantic hammer, progenitor of bell-children or children-bells, were striking the first bell created by some enormous liturgical bronze-worker, the sharp but never timid
bells of the Hermitage of the Dove replied from up aloft on the snow-covered slopes of the Tutelary Volcano; then their voices were taken up by the soprano of San Vicente of Rio-Frio, the baritone of the Little Sisters of Tarbes, the coloratura of the carillon of the Jesuits, the contralto of San Dionisio, the basso profundo of San Juan de Letrán, the silvery music of the Divine Shepherdess, setting alight a festival of chimes and peals, of calling and ringing, rejoicing and gladness, while from their ropes were hanging, rising and sinking, striding, dancing in the air, bell ringers and acolytes, agile seminarists and dexterous capuchins, who kicked themselves off the ground and swung themselves aloft again in time to the tumult pouring from the great resonant shafts of the church towers. And the concert spread from north to south, and from east to west, involving the city in a prodigious polyphony of swinging, throbbing, and percussion, while factory sirens, motor horns, frying pans hit with spoons, saucepans, tins, everything that could make a noise, resounded, set up a deafening din, above narrow old alleys and wide new asphalt streets. Now railway engines whistled, fire-engine sirens wailed, trams set their copper bells quivering.

“The war is over!” cried the Foreign Secretary, entering without waiting to be announced, and seizing the bottle of Santa Inés, which the Head of State and his secretary had left on the book table, after uncorking it in complete confidence that they were unobserved. “The war is over. Civilisation has triumphed over Barbarism, Latinity over Germanism. A victory which is our victory too!”

“Then we’re buggered,” said the President softly. “Yes, now we’re properly buggered.”

Children, let out of class, ran shouting and singing out of school. The gay girls of the Calles de La Chayota, Economia, or San Isidro rushed into the street wearing Lorraine
headdresses, or black Alsatian bows in their hair. “The war is over … the war is over.”

Artisans, bricklayers, piano tuners, pawnbrokers, brakesmen, hawkers of mangoes and tamarinds, maize millers, athletes in picture shirts, ice-cream sellers, organ grinders with monkeys dressed as Italians, street cleaners, professors with starched shirt fronts, sugar refiners, naturists, Theosophists, spiritualists, laboratory workers, homosexuals with carnations in their mouths, students of folklore, bookish men, gamblers, men in cap and gown, all streamed past shouting as one man: “The war is over! The war is over!”

Newspaper boys appeared crying a special edition with 64-point type: “The war is over! The war is over!”

Students, knowing that the police would have the good sense to leave them alone at such a time of rejoicing, ran into the streets in a dense crowd, those from the University of San Lucas carrying a wooden platform on their shoulders, on which a mechanical mule wearing a pointed helmet and with a German flag on its back was kicked into space and beaten each time by a blow from the sword of a dummy in tricolor and gold, representing Marshal Joffre. And the procession following behind sang: