Reasons of State (44 page)

And one morning he woke early talking of it, and suddenly wanted to visit the museum in the Trocadero. And he went with the cholo to that gloomy palace, built in a style
compounded of Saragossa, Moorish, and the Baron de Haussmann, with its graceless arcades and false minarets; the custodian was dozing with his jacket unbuttoned in front of a huge Easter Island head. (The Patriarch’s mind can’t have been functioning very well that morning, as he asked the name of the sculptor of that object.) And they set off through the galleries, each longer than the last, each containing more canoes, totem birds, idols bristling with nails, dead gods of dead religions, dusty Eskimoes, Tibetan horns, and drums piled up in corners—broken drums, with loose cords, worm-eaten parchment, now silenced forever, after having presided at scenes of revelry or sounded appeals for rain or calls to revolution.

And thus, going from bone sewing needles to the ritual masks of the New Hebrides, from negro amulets to gold breastplates, from shaman rattles to stone axes, the Head of State arrived at what he was looking for: that rectangular glass case in the middle of the room, mounted on a wooden base, where that mummy—“I’ve spoken to you about it so often”—was eternally sitting: the mummy found in the cave on the night of the thunderstorm.

A ruinous piece of human architecture, consisting of bones wrapped in shreds of material, its skin dry, full of holes, worm-eaten, supporting a skull bound with an embroidered fillet, a skull whose hollow eyes were endowed with a terrifying expression, whose hollow nose looked angry in spite of its absence, and with an enormous mouth battlemented with yellow teeth, as if immobilised for ever in a silent howl at the pain in the crossed shinbones, to which there still adhered rope-soled shoes a thousand years old, yet seeming new because of the permanence of their red, black, and yellow threads.

And here this thing was still sitting—as it had been
over
there
—only a few paces from Rude’s Marseillaise, like some gigantic fleshless foetus that had gone through all the stages of growth, maturity, decrepitude, and death, a thing that hardly could be called a thing, a ruined skeleton looking out through two hollow sockets beneath a repulsive mass of dark hair that fell in tattered locks on either side of the dried-up cheeks. And this exhumed king, judge, priest, or general was looking out angrily across countless centuries at those who had violated his grave.

He seemed to be looking at me, at me alone, as if to start a conversation, and I said something like: “Don’t complain, you bastard, because I took you out of your mud and turned you into a person … into a per—” Uneasiness, vertigo, collapse. Voices. People arriving … And I find myself in my hammock, where the cholo and the Mayorala have put me to bed. But my legs refuse to obey me. Here they are, where they ought to be, they are mine and yet they are alien to me, because they remain inert and refuse to move. The doctor: Doctor Fournier, much aged. His Legion of Honour. I remember. I lift my forefingers to my ears to show him that I can hear and understand.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” he says, taking a hypodermic syringe out of his bag. And the faces of Ofelia and Elmirita are going around and around my hammock, appearing, coming together, talking, and I’m asleep and I wake up. Again—or has he been here all the time?—here is Doctor Fournier with his hypodermic. And I’m awake. And I feel fine. I think of Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons. But they say no. Not yet. Very soon. But I can’t be so well—although I feel pretty good when they rock me in the hammock—because Ofelia and Elmirita have filled my room with pictures of Virgins. There they are, in rows on the wall, surrounding me, watching over my sleep, present as soon as I open my eyes, the Virgin of Guadalupe,
the Virgin del Cobre, the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, the Virgin of Regla, the Virgin of the Coromotos, the Virgin of the Valle, the Virgin of Altagracia, the Paraguayan Virgin of Caacupe, and three or four different pictures of the Divine Shepherdess of my own country, and naval Virgins and military Virgins, Virgins with white faces, Indian Virgins, black Virgins, virgins of all of us, Ineffable Intercessors, Señoras of help in all trouble, disaster, plague, helplessness, or misfortune—all are here with me, covered in gold, silver, and sequins, beneath flights of doves, the brightness of the Milky Way and the Music of the Spheres.

“God with me and I with Him,” I murmur, remembering a simple prayer I learned as a child …

Convalescence. Elmirita brings me a meal of our own sort—pancake, tamale, stuffed pastries, double egg flip, custard powdered with cinnamon, the only things that seem to me to taste of anything. I’m beginning to walk fairly well, though now I need a stick. The doctor tells me that soon, perhaps tomorrow, he will let me take a short walk. Perhaps go and sit on a seat in the Avenue du Bois, near the beds of gladioli. Watch the dogs from the great houses romping on the lawns, under the vigilant eyes of the servants of the great houses. Then I’ll go in a taxi—my body demands it—to the Bois-Charbons. And I suddenly think that it’s some time, a long time, since I made love. The last time—when?—was with Elmirita. Now all I ask of her is that she lift her skirts a little—a thing she does with innocent simplicity. It does me good to contemplate, now and again, that firm flesh, well shadowed with hair, deep, generous: here is transcendent goodness. She has changed very little since the days of my triumphant maturity, and looking at her, I feel a renewal of desire to carry on this brute of a life. Because I’m not beaten yet, no. I take my daily walk now. A little farther from the
house every day. And one day, I don’t know why, I think of the cemetery of Montparnasse, where my double, Porfirio Díaz, is buried. (From here I can see through the window the house where his minister Limantour lived.) So we go to the cemetery—the cholo, Elmira, and I—where also lies Maupassant, whose stories are so much read and imitated in our countries. We buy some flowers near Joffin’s marble works. And we are taken in tow by the porter, dressed in navy blue like the custodian of the Trocadero.

“
Cette tombe est très demandée
” [
sic
].

We pass in front of Baudelaire, whom they buried next to General Aupick—a sinister joke. And now we are with Don Porfirio. A sort of Gothic chapel has been raised above his remains—either a dwarf church or a huge dog kennel, grey, ogival—where, in an altar under the dedication to the Ineffable One of Tepeac, is a marble ark containing a small quantity of Mexican earth. And this mediaeval tomb, dated 1915, is presided over by the secular and mythical Eagle and Serpent of Anáhuac.

I think about death. About Baudelaire, so close, although I can’t remember those lines of his—my memory is failing badly—which speak of old bones and a deep grave for a body more than dead, dead among the dead. When my time comes, I would like them to bury me here. I tried to make some macabre joke, suitable to our surroundings, to show the others that I wasn’t afraid of Death. But nothing occurred to me. We returned to the Rue de Tilsitt in silence. And that evening I lost the use of my legs again. And cramp in my left arm. And those sudden cold sweats in the nape of my neck and on my forehead. And that painful bar across my chest at times, but seeming much more as if it were on my flesh—outside—than beneath it. Doctor Fournier wants them to put me to bed. He says a hammock isn’t a bed; that it’s folklore, belonging to
Indians and Fenimore Cooper. The bloody conceit of these people. They would like to put me in a Louis XIII bedroom, so that I can suffocate under a canopy, or in one of those beds like those at Malmaison, which were so narrow and short that I wondered how Napoleon and Josephine could ever make love in them. In the end they left me to rock in my hammock, which moulds itself to the weight of my body—my body that now seems to be full of buckshot. I go to sleep. When I wake, the cholo tells me that Ofelia and Elmirita have gone to the Sacré-Coeur to make vows for my speedy—“and certain”—he added, recovery. Early in the morning they dressed themselves as penitents—or
promesas
, as they say
over there
—in violet dresses, with sandals, but no hat or scarf in spite of the rain, with an orange cord round the waist, and they went up the hill to Montmartre, prostrating themselves on the seats of the funicular before going on their knees, tapers in hand, up the stairs to the chief altar of the church. I go back to sleep. (When they came out of the sanctuary at Montmartre, the Mayorala insisted on putting some flowers at the feet of a saint on the right, who was alone and unprotected and must be very full of compassion, because he had been put in a place apart, very visible, chained to his post, reliving his martyrdom. She kneels on the wet asphalt … She prays … But Ofelia brutally forces her to get up, and drags her away from her devotions after reading the inscription at the saint’s feet: “To the Chevalier de la Barre, executed at the age of 19 years, on July 1, 1766, for failing to salute a procession.” Elmirita doesn’t understand how a monument to a heretic can be put up so close to a church. Ofelia decides it would be too tiring to enter into explanations that the zamba would in any case not understand, because to her the words “free thinker” savour of an anarchist sect or something of the sort.)

I wake up. And Ofelia is leaning over me, in her penitent’s
dress, and Elmirita in hers, but pouting out her breasts in an automatic gesture very typical of her, forgetting the garment she is wearing. And now a new figure, a nun of Saint Vincent de Paul—but a real one this time—who injects my right arm with a needle. Her head-dress is starched, her collar is starched, her apron is starched; her blue dress, the blue of washed-out indigo, reminds me of the North American overalls worn by all the workmen in my country. Candles, such as they’ve lit in front of the Virgins in my room; candles, just lit and beginning to sweat their wax; little red candles of altar lamps, floating in a cup of oil. Candles that will soon be put around me. I see it in those faces, yellow in the light of so many candles, leaning over my hammock and looking at me with forced smiles, while a pharmaceutical smell pervades everything. I sleep. I wake. There are times when I wake and don’t know whether it’s day or night. An effort. To my right I hear ticking. What time is it? Quarter past six. Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s quarter past seven. 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 nine. That’s not right either. My spectacles. Quarter past ten. That’s it. I think so, because—as I notice now—daylight is shining on the pieces of stuff the Mayorala has fixed up to muffle the light that pours into this attic from the skylight in the roof. I think about death, as I do whenever I wake. But I’m not afraid of death. I shall accept it bravely, although I’ve realised for some time that death is neither a struggle nor conflict—mere literature—but a surrender of arms, acceptance of defeat, dreamlike desire to outwit pain that is always possible, always menacing, with its accompaniment of hypodermic needles, its Saint Sebastian martyrdom—the body pierced again and again—the smell of drugs in the nostrils, dry saliva and the sinister arrival of cylinders of oxygen, heralding the end as
certainly as the oils of extreme unction. All I ask is to sleep without physical suffering—although it annoys me to think of the gang of bastards
over there
who will rejoice to hear of my death. Anyway, if I want to figure in history I must utter some phrase when the end comes. A phrase. I remember reading one in the pink pages of
Pequeño Larousse: “Acta est fabula.”

“What did he say?” asked the cholo Mendoza.

“Something about a fable,” said Ofelia. “Aesop? La Fontaine? Samaniego?”

“He also spoke of a certificate.”

“That’s easy to understand,” said the Mayorala. “He didn’t want to be buried without a death certificate. Catalepsy …” (That was the greatest fear of all country people
over there
.) “In my village they buried a man as dead, and as he wasn’t dead he woke in his coffin, and he managed to break the lid but he could only get one hand through the earth … And there was another case in La Verónica.”

It was Sunday. Ofelia closed her father’s eyes and covered him with a sheet that fell to the ground on both sides of the hammock like the tablecloth at a feast. Then she opened the drawer containing the Diamond from the Capitol.

“I’ll keep it; it’ll be safe. When they’ve re-established order in our unfortunate country, and the revolutionaries and Communists can’t get hold of this jewel, I’ll go myself and solemnly return it to its proper place at the foot of the statue of the Republic.”

Meanwhile, until this was possible, the diamond was dropped into the Infanta’s handbag, and there, amongst powder and lipsticks, it marked the zero point where all the roads in her distant country met. But now Ofelia seemed to be in a hurry:

“The cholo will see to the matter of the certificate. I don’t understand anything about it. And don’t announce his death
until tomorrow. It’s the Day of the Drags today. I must go and get dressed.”

And soon there was an unusual noise of horses’ hooves and wheels in front of the main gate of the house. Elmirita looked out the window: there was something like a coach there, with a roof and windows, drawn by four horses, and people perched inside, very like the mule-drawn bus that, when she was a small child and there were no trains, made the journey from Nueva Córdoba to Palmar de Siquire.

“How old-fashioned these people are,” thought the zamba. And she saw Ofelia go out in a bright dress, open a white sunshade, and climb into the carriage. Whips were cracked and the horses trotted off amidst a great noise of laughter and jollity. One candle in a silver candlestick was burning on each side of the hammock where the body of the Head of State was resting. The nun from Saint Vincent de Paul was saying the rosary. Outside the little balls of the boy hero were turning gold in the sun.

“What indecency!” said Elmirita, shutting the window before proceeding to dress the dead man, whose corpse would be laid out downstairs in the great drawing room. On the back of a chair hung the last tailcoat he had ordered to be made on the eve of his illness: it was too big now for his thin body. But that would make it easier to get him into it—with the wide crimson band, which had been for so many long years the symbol of his Investiture and Power.