Reasons of State (11 page)

“It would be humiliating for our sovereignty,” observed the Head of State. “This operation won’t be difficult. And we must show these filthy gringos that we can manage our own problems by ourselves. Besides which, they are the sort who come for three weeks and stay two years, carrying out huge business deals. They arrive dressed in khaki and go away laden with gold. Look what General Wood did in Cuba.”

Three days passed in inspecting and preparing the East Railway, and after a grand campaigning Mass, at which they begged the Divine Shepherdess to grant triumph to the national forces, several convoys set off towards the new front, with a great noise of cheering and laughter under their regimental flags. It was almost midnight when the last train left, with a whistle and hiss of escaping steam. On the roofs of wagons and trucks men in ponchos and women in rebozos were singing hymns and songs together, while bottles of white
rum circulated by the light of lanterns, from the coal tender at the front to the rear lights on the guard’s van: “If Adelita sleeps with another, I’ll follow her by land and sea, by sea in a warship, by land in a troop train.”

Night lay behind them, and frogs croaked in the black marshes of Surgidero, now restored to the peace of its slow provincial activities, with gatherings in the barbers’ shops, a huddle of old women in the doorways, and—for the young—lotteries and games of forfeit, after telling their beads among the family with their minds focused on the fifteen mysteries of the Virgin Mary.

FOUNDED IN 1544 BY GOVERNOR SANCHO DE Almeyda, the city of Nueva Córdoba stood out against the surrounding wasteland—saffron-coloured deserts, anaemic patches of grass, cactuses, thorn bushes, and sponge trees smelling of the sweat of illness—as blindingly white as a Moroccan settlement, on the banks of a river (dry ten months of the year) whose sinuous course was hollowed out between stony tracts bristling with the bones, antlers, skulls, and claws of animals dead from thirst. Under the cloudless sky, from the rapid sunrise to crimson dusk, vultures and turkey buzzards flew over the hills at the mouths of mines, which were so divided up, and cut into steps with picks, shovels, and sledgehammers, that their original rotundities had been transformed into geometric shapes by the men who had for the last two centuries been extracting the slag hidden in their entrails. Like giants’ chairs and sofas, they were sculptures created by the rough, calloused, blackened hands of the peons of the Du Pont Mining Company, who had made of these euclidean shapes resulting from their labours a formless panorama of scree, ridges, and hills of rubbish, mineral waste, gravel, and pebbles, all adding their desolation to the sterility of the
desert. And there, in the most barren region of the country, hedged around by prickly pears, stood the rebellious, tendentious, combative city of Nueva Córdoba, defying the Head of State’s troops, already victorious in the east. Thousands of enemies of the regime had surrounded a dry university professor and made themselves into a Sacred Legion. And to defend the immediate neighbourhood of the city, the troops of General Becerra (as he now was) had had more than enough time to organise a strong line of defence, with a whole network of trenches and blockhouses surrounded by walls and palisades made from wooden sleepers destined for railway lines. Studying these military preparations through his field glasses, the Head of State murmured in a joking tone that ill concealed his annoyance: “Just as I’ve always said. In these countries strategy is the only thing that works—either Julius Caesar’s or Buffalo Bill’s.” And in a Grand Meeting of the General Staff it was decided that the most adequate way of dealing with the present situation was to prepare for a classical siege, cutting off all lines of communication with the small towns of the north—also disaffected—which were providing them with food and ammunition: “Even their drinking water has to be brought from elsewhere! The climate is on our side here …”

And, having pitched their tents at a reasonable distance from the defence lines, from which few shots were coming since the enemy couldn’t afford to waste ammunition on useless firing, they settled to wait. For lack of any other reading matter the Head of State had begun leafing through some of the classical works on military tactics that Colonel Hoffmann always carried in his luggage. And, to mortify the “Prussian with a black grandmother in the back yard,” as the wits of the opposition used to call him, he quoted the most glaring idiocies he came across with significant shouts of laughter.

“Listen to this, listen!” he said. And in a portentously
deep voice: “Victory resulted from the fact that the battle had been won” (Scharnhorst). “He who is on the defensive can pass to the offensive” (Lassau). “A battle is the only thing that can produce a result” (Lassau). “It’s essential for the head to be in command, because it controls the reason” (Clausewitz). “A leader must understand war and its hazards” (Von Moltke). “It is necessary for the leader to know what he wants and have a firm wish to conquer” (Von Schlieffen). “The general theatre of operations contains only three zones: one on the right; one on the left; one in the centre” (Jomini).

“Where there is no centre there is neither left nor right,” observed the Head of State, exploding with laughter. “And was this rubbish what they taught you in the military school?”

The days passed in an inactivity made exasperating by heat and flies, until one morning, dressed in an explorer’s pith helmet with a gauze veil over the neck, and shorts—in the style of Stanley in search of Livingstone—the United States Ambassador appeared in the camp. The news was serious. Several armed bands, under orders from agents of the so-called Caudillo of Nueva Córdoba, had violated the banana zone on the Pacific and taken possession of $200,000 kept in one of the offices of the United Fruit Company. All work at the Dupont Mining Company had been paralysed, with disastrous immobilisation of ships in Puerto Negro. It had become necessary to put an end to the socialist mysticism of Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez. We couldn’t tolerate the encumbrance of a second Madero in South America. If the country didn’t quickly return to a regime of calm and respect for foreign property, North American intervention would be inevitable. Under this pressure, the Head of State gave a definite undertaking that decisive operations would begin within the next forty-eight hours. And next day, employing all desirable guarantees for a military parley, he invited young General
Becerra to come to the camp, where, without any noise or action that might cast a slight on his honour, he bombarded him with 100,000 pesos, and a little something too—a bonus with several noughts—for the two lieutenants accompanying him. And, as dusk fell, white flags were hoisted over the trenches and blockhouses, to proclaim to the inhabitants of Nueva Córdoba that their capitulation had been accepted—in consideration of the superiority of government troops, with the humanitarian aim of avoiding unnecessary bloodshed.

But at this moment there suddenly appeared the gigantic, frightening, vociferous figure of Miguel Estatua, so-called because he worked and moved impassively, was strong and enormously tall, with broad shoulders widening sharply above a waist so slender that he always had to make extra holes in his leather belts to ensure that the silver buckle decorated with initials—his sole piece of finery—should stay firmly fastened in the centre of his stomach. A master driller and borer, thoroughly understanding the use of dynamite, and nearly always carrying cartridges of it in his mouth when he was going to blow up part of a quarry, the negro had made a name for himself throughout the country by his discovery that he could carve animals out of stone. Yes. That was how it was. He knew, of course, that the mountain trees are living creatures to whom one can talk, and that when one says the appropriate words they answer by the creaking and movements of their branches. But one day, up there on that ridge, he came across a great stone that apparently had two eyes and indications of nostrils as well as the outline of a mouth.

“Get me out of here,” it seemed to be saying. And Miguel seized his drill and his hammer and began to lower the level here and smooth the surface there, freeing front feet, and then back feet, a spine slightly convex in the middle, eventually finding himself confronted by an enormous frog, the
result of his handiwork, which appeared to be thanking him. Excited by his discovery, Miguel began looking at loose rocks and schist, the hard substances surrounding him, with fresh eyes. That fallen rock over there contained a bat; he could see the tips of its wings. Over there was a pelican with its beak gloomily sunk on its breast. From that outcrop of rock a deer was trying to escape, having lain there for eternity, hoping for freedom.

“The mountain is a prison confining the animals,” said Miguel. “The animals are inside it; the thing is that they can’t get out until someone opens the door for them.” And so he began to use all his drills—he had them ending in points, blades, screws, and bits—to extract enormous doves, owls, wild boars, pregnant she-goats, and even a tapir, which stood in front of him in lifelike proportions. And Miguel looked at all this, the dove, the owl, the wild boar, the she-goat, and the tapir, and saw that it was good, and as he was tired with so much work, on the seventh day he rested.

He lined up all his pieces in an abandoned shed belonging to the Nueva Córdoba Railroad Company, which was no longer any use for mending coaches and trucks, and here people came on Sunday to see the exhibition of animals. His fame spread. One of the capital’s newspapers published an article on him, describing him as a “spontaneous genius.” But when members of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce came to him with a proposal that he should make a statue of the Head of State, Miguel had replied: “He doesn’t inspire me. I don’t do portraits of people like him.” Ever since, he was without further reason assumed to be against the regime. But others—members of the Literary Club—defended him: “It’s because he doesn’t dare attack a human figure. It’s nothing to do with politics, just fear of failure.” And any priests who came near him were commissioned to ask him to do the Four
Evangelists, to be set up around the extension of the garden of the canons of the Divine Shepherdess.

“I can’t make men out of stone,” Miguel had answered. But when he learned that Marcos was starting on a lion (he had recently seen one in the circus that was giving performances in the villages nearby), that Lucas was working on a bull (a bull is a bull everywhere), and Juan on an eagle (there are no eagles here but everyone knows what eagles are like), he accepted the work and began by sculpting the symbolic animals attributed to the Survivors of the Apocalypse, leaving for later on a Matthew whose youthful face he couldn’t succeed in imagining. However, he worked, worked, and worked, digging out of the stone for the first time some human faces crowned with haloes, putting the finishing touches not with drills but with chisels as thin as knives, brought from the capital.

And he was busy on this task when he heard the news of the base capitulation. He instantly threw down his tools and rushed into the street. All at once the dreamer, reinventor of animals and people, the absent-minded eccentric, raised his voice at the crossroads, drew himself up to his full height, and created himself tribune, leader and caudillo of the people. Such was his authority that he was listened to and obeyed. He ordered the white flags to be hauled down and the white flags were hauled down, and Miguel Estatua saw that it was good to haul down the white flags, and also good to resume the battle. With a cartridge of dynamite in each hand and blazing tinder on his shoulder, he declared that it was necessary to resist until they had by fighting converted daily bread into Daily Bread, earned today and eaten today, and not owed to the stores run by Yankee, national, or “associated” companies, who ruled the mines and paid wages in vouchers for goods. There and then, calling on everyone who would listen, he
organised one company of dynamiters and another of sappers. And, roused by a speech couched in sincere if crude and ill-expressed terms—eloquence from the heart, clamorous and rough, but more convincing than an elaborate harangue—the students, members of the intelligentsia, workers in mines and olive fields, makers of rope-soled shoes and sandals (who had lost faith in the cowardly Luis Leoncio Martínez, although he was still issuing proclamations to the country, asking help from people barely aware of his existence and declaring that he counted on aid from provinces which had never been involved in the movement) announced their decision to fight as long as their means lasted.

However, it was not enough for adolescents, young women and brave boys to mobilise themselves, while old women made lint bandages and old men worked in the forges transforming belaying pins into spears: all this in an open city, with no old walls—such as some other towns possessed—nor buildings that could be used as defences, and with streets ending in scattered adobe houses encroaching on the surrounding desert. And in spite of mined roads, sending shattered bodies flying into the air, shedding arms and legs in the roar of an explosion; in spite of a bloody battle from patio to patio, from rooftop to rooftop, waged by the defenders with old Winchesters, sporting rifles, blunderbusses from the armoury, Colt pistols, guns with ramrods, and three or four Maxim machine guns, which had to be cooled by urine for lack of water, the government troops captured the plaza around the cathedral, inside which some hundred desperate men had shut themselves with what was left of the ammunition, and were shooting out of windows, loopholes, and gateways. Most danger came from the bell ringers who took aim at everyone advancing along the streets that debouched into the Plaza Mayor. So the hours passed and there they still
were, eating a snack and taking a drink now and again; but not succeeding in occupying the now-deserted municipal buildings, whose façades and galleries were in the line of fire from that handful of buggers who must still have had enough bullets or food for a short while longer. Hoffmann kept his Krupp cannon in readiness; he had brought them in bullock carts to a point whence they could be trained on the tower. A number of these animals, conspicuously coloured and slow in their movements, had been wounded from above; but even so, bleeding, with the second of the third yoke fallen and the first of the second yoke vomiting spittle, they had dragged their burdens to their destinations. Yet the Head of State for once appeared to hesitate: this was the National Sanctuary of the Divine Shepherdess, patron saint of the country and the army. An object of devotion, the goal of pilgrimages, a jewel of colonial architecture.