Reasons of State (31 page)

To the Superior, his Inferior was a character from folklore, whom he was measuring, weighing up, and analysing, while conscious of surprise at having to attend to someone so unimportant. The man in front of him was something like a Latin American version of the classical student in Russian novels, full of dreams and theories, more of a nihilist than a politician, proletarian out of sense of duty, who lived in a garret, under-nourished, badly dressed, falling asleep among his books, roused to bitterness by the mediocrity of his existence. They had both had the same origins. But while the Superior, a pragmatist who thoroughly understood his environment, had taken with impatient haste the upward path, which was today bordered with statues and busts of himself, his Inferior had fallen into the trap of a new form of Messianism, whose fatal progress would carry him to the Siberias of the Tropics, to the indignities of Bertillon’s tests, or to the denouement—a theme for the articles of journalists in the far future—of disappearing-without-trace, leaving the relatives of this weak, insubstantial figure to take flowers on assumed anniversaries and lay them on aimless tombs, engraved with names, but with the sadness, worse even than that of an occupied coffin, of an empty grave.

And in a silence barely broken by the whistle of a bird frisking among the areca palms on the patio, there took place a dialogue between voices that never emerged from lips. Each was looking at the other:
He doesn’t realise to what extent he’s
playing a part / he seems more like a provincial poet than anything else / he’s absolutely “taken up a position” / one of those who win prizes in Flower Festivals / flashy clothes / suit from the Quality Shop / face like a bottom / cheeks like a girl / comes out paler in photos: as he gets older he returns to his origins / hair uncombed, tie crooked, to give himself some style / smells like a tart, with all that Cologne / he needs size, strength to make something of him / there’s a repulsive quality in his expression / he thinks he’s Masaniello / I thought he was older / I wonder if it’s hate or fear he’s looking at me with / his hands are trembling: alcohol / he’s got a pianist’s hands, but he ought to clean his nails / the classical Tyrant / the Archangel we all were once / a vicious, obscene man: it’s all in his appearance / the face of a boy who hasn’t screwed many women: intellectual lightweight / not even a monster: a petty tyrant giving himself airs / those weak ones are the worst / all this is pure theatre: this way of receiving me, the light on my face, that book on the table / capable of anything: he’s got nothing to lose / don’t look at me like that, I won’t lower my eyes / although he may be brave, he wouldn’t resist torture / I wonder if I could stand torture: some people can’t / I believe he’s afraid / … torture … / if they put him under a certain amount of pressure / they’ll try to get names out of me / why such a long wait? A good fright to start with / his hand’s going to the bell: he’s going to ring / no: I gave my word / I don’t know if I could resist / talk to him first / it’s horrible thinking of that, of that, of that … / one mustn’t make martyrs, one mustn’t make martyrs of these people: avoid it if possible / he gave me his word; but his word isn’t worth a fuck / everyone knows that He is here now, and that I’ve given my word / he’s going to ring: I shall be handcuffed / others, tougher than this one, have been persuaded / when will he decide to speak? / let him go, and have him followed: he must go somewhere / why doesn’t the bugger speak to me? Why can’t he open
his mouth? / He’s sweating! Now I’m sweating and I’ve no handkerchief, I’ve no handkerchief; not in that pocket either … / He’s afraid / he’s smiling / he wants to suggest something: some beastliness / I’ll offer him a drink / I’m sure he’s going to offer me a drink / he won’t accept it, so as to pride himself on his virtue / if only he’d offer me a drink: I’d feel better / I don’t want to risk a refusal / come on, go on, that’s it, risk it; it’ll be a bottle from that case; everyone knows what’s inside it / however, yes:
I tell you … I repeat … 
But he doesn’t seem to have heard me: that lorry / now it’s the tram / I don’t understand his expression / I don’t think he understood my expression / we’ve stared at each other quite long enough; now for the book, so that he can see …

The Head of State picked up the book on breeding Rhode Island Red poultry. He opened it and, pushing back his spectacles, began to read in a markedly sarcastic tone: “A spectre was haunting Europe: the spectre of communism.”

And the other went on, with even more marked sarcasm: “All the old European powers combined together to pursue this spectre: The Pope and Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George.”

“Metternich and Guizot,” corrected the President.

“I see you know the classics,” said the Student.

“I know more about poultry breeding. Don’t forget I’m a son of the soil. Perhaps that’s why …” And he stopped, perplexed as to the style he ought to adopt in this dialogue. Ornate language, like that of the “Prayer on the Acropolis,” would never do; a young man of the coming generation would find it ridiculous, nor must he fall into the opposite extreme of the rough vocabulary that coarsened his intimate conversations with Doctor Peralta and the Mayorala Elmira, though giving them a certain jauntiness. He therefore opted for a deliberate, humanistic tone, without the familiar form we always used,
a tone that by its remoteness from that world of drink and confidences immediately created a distance greater than that set by the table separating them. Like an actor very much in command of his gestures and talking between his teeth like Lucien Guitry, he addressed the boy in front of him as if he were a character in a tragedy, about to be overwhelmed by the inscrutable designs of Fate:

“Why do you
^*
detest me so much?”

His formal manner of speech sufficiently conveyed his verbal strategy to the Student /
he approaches me in the style of Voltaire when he tells us he “had the honour to go off” with an Indian woman in a loincloth … /
, who replied in the meekest and most peaceable voice that his terrified throat could produce:

“I do not detest you, Señor.”

“But actions speak louder than words,” said the Powerful One without raising the pitch. “Bombs aren’t thrown against the palace servants. Therefore there is hatred, anger in you.”

“Nothing against you, Señor.”

“But … those bombs?”

“I didn’t plant them, Señor. I don’t understand anything about explosives.”

“Well, it wasn’t you,
^†
then? But your followers planted them, your friends and accomplices /
he suddenly thought the word
accomplice
was vulgar and belonged to the vocabulary of police reports /
your co-religionists, your helpers, those on your side.” /
careful: I’ve dropped into flowery language again
.

“We don’t plant bombs, Señor.”

The Head of State began to grow impatient. The fable of the Wolf and the Lamb was being played out between them.

“But … who planted them, then? Who? Will you tell me?”

“Others, not one of us. We’ve too often seen the failure of anarchists’ attempts to change the world. Ravachol and Caserio are just as futile with their deliberate self-immolation as Bakunin and Kropotkin with their doctrines.”

“Don’t try and come over me with your pointless discussions and sophistries from the Council of Nicaea /
as if mine were different! /
it all amounts to the same thing, in fact. Even supposing you and your friends didn’t explode a bomb in my bath, you applauded it.”

“On the contrary, Señor. The worst that could happen to us now is that someone should kill
you
. I have a comrade, a practising Catholic—there’s nothing to be done about it—who prays and makes vows to the Divine Shepherdess to preserve your precious life for us.”

The Head of State got to his feet, moved by astonishment and rage mixed.

“My precious existence? You’ve got a nerve and no mistake! And
nerve
is a euphemism.” /
Now he’s beginning to call me “tú.” /

“We need you, Señor.”

The Powerful, Enormous man burst out laughing.

“That’s really great! So now I’m a Marxist, Communist, Menshevik, and revolutionary, and the same mother bore all these, who are all the same and all after the same ends: to be installed in the Kremlin, the Elysée, Buckingham Palace, or to sit on this chair (and he thumped the back of the presidential chair), enjoy life, fill one’s purse with money, and fuck all the rest. The Tsar’s ambassador who stayed here with us, waiting and hoping that all that business would come to grief, told me that Lenin’s wife used to wear the jewels, necklaces, and crowns of the Empress Alexandra.”

“It’s splendid that you think that way, and make up such
stories, Señor. It’s better we shouldn’t understand each other at all than only half understand each other. Those who half understand us fight us more effectively than those who take us for visionaries.”

“However, if I were in fact to die tomorrow …”

“It would be lamentable for us, Señor. Because a military junta would seize power, and everything would go on just the same or worse under the government of someone like Walter Hoffmann, God rest his soul.”

“Well, what
do
you want, then?”

In a slightly raised voice but not speeded up at all, the young man said, “That you should be overthrown
by a popular uprising
.”

“And afterwards? You would come and occupy my place, isn’t that certain?”

“I have never desired anything of the sort.”

“Have you got a candidate, then?”

“The word
candidate
doesn’t figure in our vocabulary, Señor.”

The Head of State shrugged his shoulders. “Tarradiddles! Because, in fact, someone, someone must take power. There must be a Man, always a Man, at the head of a government. Look at Lenin in Russia. Ah! I know! Luis Leoncio Martínez, your professor at the University.”

“He’s a cretin. He can go to hell with his Puranas, his Camille Flammarion and Leon Tolstoy” (and he laughed). “ ‘Return to the Earth’ indeed! Whose earth? The United Fruit Company’s?”

The Head of State was beginning to be irritated and impatient at the turn taken by the conversation.

“Then you mean to introduce socialism here?”

“We’re looking for a way.”

“The Russian way?”

“It may not be the same. Here we are in a different latitude. It’s both easier and more difficult.”

The President was pacing up and down his study and apparently talking to himself:

“Oh boys, boys, boys! If socialism was introduced here, in forty-eight hours you would have North American marines landing at Puerto Araguato.”

“It’s very probable, Señor.”

“And then?” (in a protective, amiable tone) “I envy you. At your age I thought about the same sort of things. But … now? Look here: they burned Joan of Arc at nineteen because if she had reached thirty she would have gone to bed with the King of France, and then she would have got as much by negotiating with the English and not had to die at the stake for it. You’ve got your idols. Good. I respect them. But don’t forget that the gringos are the Romans of America. And you can’t do a thing against Rome. And less, with the rabble” (an intimate tone, now). “You can talk to me in absolute confidence as if to an older brother. I have political experience, which none of you have. I can explain why some things are possible and others not. All I want to do is understand. Let us understand each other … Trust me … Tell me …”

“I’m not quite mad!” said the young man, suddenly laughing, and beginning to pace the room in the opposite direction to his interlocutor, in such a way that when one of them had his back to the fire of imitation logs the other was against the corbel supporting a mirror between two doors, which made the room look larger. Suddenly the President made a gesture of depression, in the style of a good actor:

“One never stops learning lessons in this life. Hearing you talk today, I suddenly realised that I’m the First Prisoner of the Nation. Yes. Don’t smile. I live here surrounded by ministers, officials, generals, and doctors, all bent double with
obsequiousness and bowing, who do nothing but hide the truth from me. They only let me see a world of appearances. I live in Plato’s cave. You know about Plato’s cave? Of course! Stupid of me to ask … And suddenly you arrive, full of faith, impetuosity, fresh blood, and the phrase of the French poet comes alive for me: ‘I learn more from a young friend than an old master.’ Ah, if I could count on the sincerity of men like you! I should make fewer mistakes! Now listen: you see one eager to take the conversation into a new climate. For instance, look here: I realise that we’ve been too—what shall I say?—rigorous in dealing with the problems of the University. How would you like it if we considered them now, face to face, and if you left here within an hour with a solution satisfactory to your people? It depends on you: what do you think?”

The young man walked from the fireplace to the mirror.

“Comedian!”

The President was taking irritated strides between the mirror and the fireplace, his former composure rapidly disappearing.

“Look here! If you’ve read Alfred de Vigny, so have I. Don’t try playing the part of Pius VII before Napoleon. Because before you’d said ‘Tragedian!’ you know what would happen.” And he took his Browning out of the left inside pocket of his frock coat and laid it on the table with the barrel pointing at the young man.

“So the war is to go on?”

“It’ll go on, with me—or without me.”

“You persist in your utopias, your socialisms, although they’ve failed everywhere?”

“That’s my affair—and a lot more besides.”

“The Mexican Revolution was a failure.”

“And taught us a lot, for that very reason.”

“The Russian Revolution has failed.”

“That’s not yet been proved.”

The Head of State was playing with his pistol, ostentatiously filling and emptying it of its five bullets.

“Kill me and have done with it,” said the Student.

“No,” said the President, taking up his pistol again. “Not here in the palace. It would dirty the carpet.” There is a silence. The hummingbirds are twittering in the patio. Two pairs of eyes avoid each other by looking at the walls. (
How long is this going on?… That picture wants straightening … A situation with no way out
.) At last, as if it cost him an effort, the President spoke: