Reasons of State (45 page)

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Authors: Alejo Carpentier

Tags: #Fiction, #Hispanic & Latino, #Political, #Literary

BOOK: Reasons of State
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The creeper grows no higher than the trees that support it
.


DESCARTES,
DISCOURSE ON METHOD

1972

… stop a little while longer and consider this chaos …


DESCARTES

22

GREY WITH HEAVY RAIN, NOT A LITTLE SNOW AND years of neglect, the small pantheon with two doric columns still stood in the cemetery of Montparnasse, not far from the tomb of Porfirio Díaz, and close to those of Baudelaire and General Aupick. Anyone gazing into the interior through the black grille protecting a door with glass panes set in gold-coloured metal would see a simple altar on which stood an image of the Divine Shepherdess—a copy of the image worshipped in her Sanctuary at Nueva Córdoba. At her feet, under a mystic garland of roses and cherubs, was a marble ark supported on four jaguars, in which a little of the earth of the Sacred Soil of the Homeland was kept.

What perhaps some people didn’t know was that Ofelia, thinking that the Earth is all one and that the earth of the Earth is earth of the Earth everywhere—
memento homo, quia pulvis est et in pulverem reverteris
—had collected this sacred earth, guarded in perpetuity by the four symbolic jaguars, from a flower bed in the Luxembourg gardens.

Havana–Paris
.

1971–1973

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

AFTER MIDNIGHT
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THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE
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THE LATE LORD BYRON
by Doris Langley Moore
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THE TRAIN
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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP
by W. H. Davies
978-1-61219-022-8
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FAITHFUL RUSLAN
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978-1-935554-67-7
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THE PRESIDENT
by Georges Simenon
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THE WAR WITH THE NEWTS
by Karel Capek
978-1-61219-023-5
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AMBIGUOUS ADVENTURE
by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
978-1-61219-054-9
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THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH
by Raymond Radiguet
978-1-61219-056-3
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THE MADONNA OF THE SLEEPING CARS
by Maurice Dekobra
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THE BOOK OF KHALID
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YOUTH WITHOUT GOD
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THE TRAVELS AND SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN
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SNOWBALL’S CHANCE
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FUTILITY
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THE REVERBERATOR
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THE RIGHT WAY TO DO WRONG
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A COUNTRY DOCTOR’S NOTEBOOK
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I AWAIT THE DEVIL’S COMING
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