Reasons of State (8 page)

“And Nueva Córdoba?” he asked, however, thinking of that extraordinary city of ruined palaces, so rich in mines, possibly too Indian, always leaving a disconcerting aftertaste, alarmingly prone to produce unexpected surprises, which had been such a centre of tough resistance in former revolutions.

“Nothing,” replied Hoffmann. “Ataúlfo isn’t popular there. So he’s left it untouched. Besides, he promised to respect English and North American interests, and there are a lot there, and he wants to show he’s as good as his word by keeping the war away from that region.”

The Head of State was sleepy. He asked the Mayorala Elmira to get his battle uniform ready, polish his boots, and shammy-leather his peaked hat; then, moved by a sudden
caprice, he seized her without warning, pulled up her skirts while she stood with her elbows on a marble sideboard, amazed at the “good condition” the Señor had arrived in from Paris—that stupendous Paris, where men lose their very souls … after which he curled up in his hammock and slept for a few hours.

When he awoke he was confronted by the face of Doctor Peralta, but frowning and preoccupied this time. The students of the ancient University of San Lucas had had the temerity to circulate an insolent, inadmissible manifesto, which the President read with growing rage. They remembered that he had gained power by a coup d’état; that he had been confirmed in it by fraudulent elections; that his powers had been extended during an arbitrary reform of the Constitution; that his re-elections … in other words, it had been as usual in such matters. The time had come to put an end to an authority without trend or doctrine, expressed in ukases and edicts by a president proconsul guided in governmental affairs by messages in cypher from his son Ariel. But the gravity of the present situation—and its new feature—lay in the fact that the students had proclaimed that at the present time there was no difference between a uniform and a frock coat, and that the government cause was every bit as uninteresting as that of the so-called revolutionaries. The players had changed places around the same board, but an interminable game, begun more than a hundred years ago, was still going on.

And to aid the return to a constitutional and democratic order, the figure of Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez had come forward, an austere professor of philosophy and translator of Plotinus, well known to Peralta, who had been a pupil of his. He was a man with a high, narrow, balding forehead with prominent veins, dry and short in speech, abstemious and an
early riser, a militant vegetarian, father of nine, admirer of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, who had corresponded with Francisco Ferrer, the great Barcelonese anarchist, and started a demonstration in the city when the news was received that he had been shot at Monjuich. The Head of State winked at this demonstration because indignation was universal, and because in fact, now that Ferrer was done for and couldn’t rouse any rebels, a procession starting at dusk and ending in the nine o’clock evening breeze (three hours of shouting that had nothing to do with opposing the government) would show our respect for liberty, our tolerance of ideas, etc., etc. Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez combined his libertarian convictions with a form of theosophy, nurtured on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Annie Besant, Madame Blavtsky, and Camille Flammarion, was interested in metaphysical phenomena, and attended very intimate seances for table turning, hypnotism, knocks, and levitation, demonstrating the presence of the spirits of Swedenborg, the Comte de Saint Germain, and Katie King, or of the still-alive but far-distant Eusapia Paladino.

And now this dreamer, this pale utopian, had appeared unexpectedly in Nueva Córdoba, and was inciting the workers in the copper and tin mines to rebel, with the help of half a dozen student leaders. It seemed a bold undertaking, all the more so when one reflected that he was an academic from the university, admired by some local inhabitants but without political following in the rest of the country. The President’s calm was restored by a drink served him most opportunely, and analysing the situation from the tactical point of view, he decided that in fact an attack by a common enemy on General Ataúlfo Galván’s rear was in his favour, because it limited rebel action to two provinces of the north-east. And if this affair of Nueva Córdoba really came to something, he could
in the last resort count on the help of the United States, since the White House was now more than ever opposed to the smallest germ of an anarchistic or socialistic movement in that other America, which was already so revolutionary and Latin. And now the Head of State was beginning to discuss the situation with Colonel Hoffmann when a second news sheet, written in a satirical and mocking tone, was brought in and revived his subsiding anger—and this time to a more violent degree than before. It made fun of his oratory in markedly Creole prose, describing him mockingly as a “Musical Comedy Tiberius,” “the Satrap of the Torrid Zone,” “Moloch of the Public Treasure,” and “Upstart Monte-Cristo,” who always travelled about Europe with a million in his wallet. His ascent to power had been the “Gangsters’ 18th Brumaire.” His Ministry was a “Gold Rush,” “Court of Miracles,” and “Council of Buddies.” No one was spared: Colonel Hoffmann was “a Prussian with a black grandmother in the back yard”; General Ataúlfo Galván a “jabbering street hawker, an Ostrogoth with sword and buckler,” just as a great many functionaries and police chiefs were cast in the mould either of the Inquisition or farce, according to whether they were assumed to be tragic or grotesque. But the worst of all was that his daughter, Ofelia, was dubbed the “Infanta of King Midas,” as a reminder that, while the barefoot women of this country had no hospital to give birth in, the favoured Creole, collector of antique cameos, exquisite musical boxes and racehorses, had given thousands of the national pesos (at an exchange of 2.27 against the dollar) to enterprises and organisations such as “Missionary Work in China,” the “Society for the Protection of Gothic Art,” and the “Drop of Milk Foundation,” this last having a European duchess for president. So they passed from joke to joke and the President didn’t care for jokes. Moreover, Colonel Hoffmann now arrived with the news that the students
had shut themselves inside the University and were holding a meeting to oppose the government.

“Send the mounted police into the building,” said the President.

“But … what about their ancient privileges? Their self-government charter?”

“I can’t be bothered with such swine. They’ve caused quite enough trouble with that bloody self-government of theirs. We’re in a state of emergency.”

“And what if they resist, if they throw tiles from the roofs, if they hamstring the horses as they did in 1908?”

“In that case … shoot them! I repeat: we’re in a state of emergency and this disorderly behaviour can’t be tolerated.”

Half an hour later shooting was going on in the courtyards of the University of San Lucas. “And if some are killed,” said the Head of State, as he buttoned his tunic, “none of those solemn funerals, with coffins carried on shoulders and speeches in the cemetery, which are merely demonstrations sheltering under the guise of mourning. Just give the stiff to the family and let them bury it without weeping and wailing, because if they do otherwise the whole family, mother, grandparents, and their brats too, will go to prison.”

Outside, the firing went on. Eight killed and more than twenty wounded.

“Much good their education has done them,” said the Head of State, getting into the long black Renault that was to take him to the railway station. “Have any soldiers been killed?”

“Two, because one student and a janitor were armed.”

“See that they have national funerals with gun carriages, funeral marches, and places in the Pantheon of Heroes, since they fell in the performance of their duty.”

And the armed forces gathered on the pavements with a
great display of helmets, leather belts, chin straps and spurs, binoculars and riding whips, and with much to-ing and froing of sergeants looking like German
Feldwebels
and piling the troops into coaches, cattle trucks, and luggage vans. They began with the élite: the chasseurs and hussars, with shining boots and soldierly spit and polish; they were to go in the presidential convoy. Then, in other trains, came shabbier infantry, in stained tunics and unpolished boots, and after that third-class infantry, with machetes, cartridge belts, old rifles, and odd pairs of shoes. And slipping in everywhere among the groups of soldiers, sneaking through the carriage windows, climbing onto the roofs, were the camp followers carrying stores and kitchen utensils, wrapped up in bedding and bags. Two Krupp cannons had been set up on platform wagons on a turntable, with its complicated machinery of cog wheels, levers, and handlebars.

“And is all this going to be needed?” asked the Head of State.

“It’s been proved by experience,” said Hoffmann, “that water conduits and four yoke of oxen can be carried in railway wagons.”

“Very practical for quick action,” said the President, who had been put in a good humour by all these preparations.

In the end, after a delay of three hours spent intercalating trucks, moving trucks, interpolating trucks, extrapolating trucks, finding this wouldn’t do but that would do, that the one farther up was blocking the brakes, that the cistern wagon was full of putrid water, and that the cement mixer didn’t work, and after two more hours occupied in pulling up bogies from disused lines, breaking up strings of trucks to make others, moving forwards, backing, while locomotives whistled and the bugles of the military bands sounded, the army started off, to the accompaniment of the indispensable song:

The Head of State withdrew early with Peralta into his comfortable presidential compartment, to drink what had been brought in the Hermès case, out of sight of the captains and colonels who were celebrating their departure to the front in the Pullman car around bottles bearing good labels. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he gazed gloomily at the toes of his shining boots, his Sam Browne belt hanging from a peg, his pistol in its holster—heavier and of larger bore than the light Browning for his own personal use.

“General” … “My General” … “Señor General” …

And the sleepers under the railway lines repeated with obsessional regularity as the wheels passed over them: “Gen-ral … Gen-ral … Gen-ral … Gen-ral … Gen-ral.” Possibly he was the only general in the whole world to whom the title of general gave no pleasure, and he accepted it only when he was with soldiers, or when he had, as now, to direct some operation. Because the truth was that he had conferred that title on himself a great many years ago, in an early incarnation of his political life, when he had placed himself at the head of an armed contingent back in Surgidero de la Verónica, and led about seventy men to attack a small fort occupied by some rebels against the government to which at that time he was loyal—though he was to overthrow it later on (but then with the help of real generals) and instal himself in the Presidential Palace. Now, for a while—as long as the operations lasted—he would once again become “General,” “My General,” “Señor General.” And again he looked at the toes of his boots, his spurs and belt. And he thought mockingly of himself as being
like the character in Molière’s comedy who was a cook when he wore a cap and a coachman when he put on livery.

“Give me a drink,” he said to Peralta, “and reach me that book.”

And while waiting for sleep to come, he turned the pages till he came to a certain Sixth Volume that he had been interrupted when reading weeks before.
Chapter XI
: “Since I have arrived at this point, it would seem to be not inappropriate to set forth the customs of Gaul and of Germany and the difference between these nations. In Gaul, not only in every state, and every canton and district, but almost in each several household, there are parties … 
There are parties …
” “That’s why they were able to blast them to blazes as they did blast them,” commented the Head of State between two yawns … Outside, the singing went on:

WHEN GENERAL ATAÚLFO GALVÁN HAD BEEN beaten in the first pitched battle and crossed the Rio Verde behind his wretched, broken troops, leaving on the bank his two camp followers, Misia Olalla and Jacinta the Negress—who had stayed behind to load up with parcels of blouses, worn blankets, and ribbons stolen from the shops of a recently sacked village—the first of the lightning flashes that seemed to crack the sky from top to bottom was seen and two endless claps of thunder resounded, forming the overture to months of hard, inexorable, exasperating rain; persistent, sustained rain such as is seen only in these forests. The forested lands lay on the flanks of mountains that were always haze-covered, veiled in mists that cleared in one place only to thicken in another, letting the sun filter through a gap of sky—a few minutes here, a few minutes there—to illuminate the unknown splendour of nameless flowers, scrambling over the tops of hidden trees, or to magnify uselessly, since there was no one to see them, some superb efflorescence of orchids on the roof of the jungle; these were the rain forests, where the mahogany trees, júcaros, cedars, and quebrachos, and species so numerous and so rare as to confound traditional classifications—they had even confounded Humboldt himself—were bathed in rains so profuse that when men realised their proximity by smelling them from afar, they had the impression of
embarking on a year seven months long occupying its special place within the twelve-month year, or of abandoning the four seasons to keep to only two: one short, moss-covered, a time for hard work, and the other long and wet, of interminable boredom. When the storms had died away a new life began—a new stage, a new stride forwards—surrounded by vegetation so damp and so entangled in its own dampness that it seemed to have been engendered by the lagoons and marshes below, always croaking with frogs, covered with toads, iridescent with wandering bubbles arising from submerged decay …