Reasons of State (14 page)

“More than you think,” observed the Distinguished Academician, growing more indulgent and convinced all the time. Everything could be explained (and he returned to Philip II and the Duke of Alba, passing on to the America of Cortés and Pizarro) by Spanish blood, the inheritance of the Spanish temperament, the Spanish Inquisition, bullfights, banderillas, cape and sword, horses being disembowelled among sequins and
pasodobles
. “
L’Afrique commence aux Pyrénées
.” We had been born with that blood in our veins; it was fate. Men of
over there
were not like those
over here
, although of course they didn’t lack certain qualities, because there had been, after all, Cervantes, El Greco—who had, by the way, been revealed to the world by the genius of Théophile Gautier.

At this moment, that schoolteacher Doctor Peralta sprang up from his chair in a rage and shouted: “
Je vous emmerde avec le sang espagnol
.” And, in an irreverent outburst, he paraded before the amazed eyes of the Distinguished Academician, as in pictures from a magic lantern, Simon de Montfort’s crimes and the Crusade against the Albigenses; Robert Guiscard (the hero of his own play, the manuscript of which, bought by our National Library, told how the Norman
condottiere
had gone through the middle of Rome knife in hand); the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, that universal synonym of horror; the pursuit of the camisards, the massacres of Lyons, the
noyades
of Nantes, the White Terror after Thermidor, and above all, above all (by skilful handling of analogies), the last days of the Commune. Then, the most intelligent and civilised men in the world hadn’t hesitated to conquer revolutionary resistance by exterminating more than 16,000 men. The ambulance of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice—“
Oh! fuyez, douce image!
”—had become a scaffold in the hands of the people of
Versailles. And Monsieur Thiers, after his first walk through Paris in the days of punitive measures, had said, in the most ordinary way: “The streets are full of corpses; this horrible spectacle will be a lesson.” The periodicals of that time—those of Versailles, of course—were preaching the holy bourgeois crusade of murder and extermination. And recently … what about the victims of the Fourmies strike? And more recently still? Did the great Clemenceau show any mercy to the strikers of Draveil or of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges? Eh?

Under this frontal attack the Academician turned to look at the Head of State: “
Tout cela est vrai. Tristement vrai. Mais il y a un nuance, Messieurs
.”

And then, after a rather solemn introductory pause, raising his voice with each name, he reminded his listeners that France had given the world Montaigne, Descartes, Louis XIV, Molière, Rousseau, and Pasteur. The President had a mind to reply that though it had had a shorter history, his own continent had already produced great men and saints, heroes and martyrs, thinkers and even poets, who had transformed the literary language of Spain, but he reflected that the names he wanted to mention would fall into the void of a culture that knew nothing of them. Meanwhile, Peralta was encircling the Academician with awkward questions: just because it was here that Racine’s alexandrines were first heard and the
Discourse on Method
was so famous, certain barbarities were all the more inexcusable. It was deplorable that Monsieur Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, illustrious historian of the Revolution, Consulate, and Empire, should have given orders for the massacres of the Commune, the shootings at Père Lachaise, and the deportations to New Caledonia; it was less grievous that Walter Hoffmann, grandson of a half-breed and an emigrant from Hamburg, a bogus Prussian and tenor of military messrooms, should have carried out—since he had
been responsible for the whole thing—the repressive action at Nueva Córdoba.

“
La culture oblige, autant que la noblesse, Monsieur l’Académicien
.”

Seeing that his eminent friend’s forehead was dark and frowning, the President silenced his secretary with an expression of fatigue and buried himself between the arms of his chair in an attitude of mute despair. He looked at objects in the room without seeing them—the portraits, the old books, an engraving by Granville. The Academician, on the other hand, behaved as if unaware of Peralta’s presence, blundering into him as he passed—“Pardon!” (treading on one of his feet) “I didn’t hurt you, I hope?”—and walked from one end of the room to the other with the expression of someone reflecting deeply. “
On peut essayer! Peut-être?”

He put through a telephone call to the editor in chief of
Le Matin
. Monsieur Garcin’s photos—that damned Frenchman of Nueva Córdoba—had been carried off by some students, refugees from
over there
, who were now in Paris, talking and agitating in the cafés of the Latin Quarter—all of them followers of Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez. The newspaper couldn’t recant, nor yet cancel publication of forthcoming articles already announced. People would say that it had sold itself to someone known to possess enormous wealth. The best it could do was suppress from tomorrow’s issue a photo of the Head of State standing beside a corpse placed on a bodega counter, under a calendar advertising Phosphatine Fallière, whereon the date of the massacre could be clearly read. “That’s completely buggered us,” said the President, overwhelmed. And if only there had been—goodness knows what—something to distract the attention of the public: a big liner sunk like the
Titanic
, the appearance of Halley’s Comet announcing the End of the World, another eruption
of Mont-Pelée, an earthquake in San Francisco, some lovely murder like that of Gaston Calmette by Madame Caillaux … But there was nothing. In this bastard of a summer nothing happened. And in the sole place in the universe where other people’s opinion had some importance to him, everyone was giving him the cold shoulder. Seeing him sunk into a state of despair expressed by his hunched back and vacant gaze, the Distinguished Academician offered him the warmth of his friendship with a long press of his left hand, and began talking in a low and, as it were, confidential voice about a possible counter-offensive. The French press—sad though he felt to have to admit it—was tremendously venal. Of course he wasn’t referring to
Le Temps
, connected as it was with the Quai d’Orsay, nor was its editor, Adrien Hébrard, a man who would entertain a certain sort of transaction. No more could one think of
L’Echo de Paris
, to which his friend Maurice Barrès contributed, nor that splenetic Arthur Meyer’s
Le Gaulois
. But behind these leading papers were others, which on condition there were funds available (the Head of State nodded) would—well, you understand. Everything depended on doing things diplomatically.

So it was that, three days later,
Le Journal
published the first of a series of articles under the general title of
L’Amérique Latine, cette inconnue
, wherein, passing from the universal to the local, from general to particular, from Christopher Columbus to Porfirio Díaz (and showing,
en passant
, how a great country like Mexico had been overtaken by the most atrocious anarchy through not having suppressed a revolution in time), it then turned to our own country, praising its cataracts and volcanoes, its flutes and guitars, the clothes and huts of the Indians, its typical dishes such as tamales and chili stews, with references to the great moments in its history—a history that necessarily led to the period of progress, agricultural
development, public works, encouragement of education, good relations with France, etc., etc., due to the Head of State’s wise conduct of affairs. While other young nations of the continent were shipwrecked in disorder, that little country was setting an example, etc., etc., not forgetting that having to deal with populations that were often uncivilised and rebellious and easily seduced by destructive and subversive ideologies (here came opportune references to Ravachol, to Caserio, who killed President Carnot, to Czolgosz, assassin of McKinley, and Mateo Moral, who threw a bomb at the wedding coach of Victoria of Battenberg and Alphonso XIII); having to deal with an infiltration of libertarian and anarchist ideas, an energetic government was obliged to take energetic decisions, without always being able to prevent the much-provoked, angry, and sorely tried soldiery giving way on occasion to deplorable excesses, but, however, nevertheless, as soon as …

“You see? My President!” exclaimed Doctor Peralta, reading and re-reading the articles. “That ought to settle the hash of those filthy students who kick up rows in the Latin Quarter with their meetings without any audience and their leaflets that no one reads.”

Just then a cable arrived telling the Head of State that a case, a prodigiously large case, a magic case, a providential case had been dispatched a short while ago from Puerto Araguato: a case that contained, with all his ornaments, bits of cloth and bones, the Mummy—the Mummy of
that night—
destined for the Trocadero Museum. Skilfully strengthened with glue and invisible wires, sitting in a new funeral jar open in front—just enough for one to see the whole skeleton—invisibly restored by a Swiss taxidermist, more of a specialist in reptiles and birds, but who had done a masterly job in this case, the Mummy was on its way, was crossing the ocean, and
arriving, actually arriving in time to give material to a certain element of the press whose greed and absence of scruples were revealing themselves, and astonishing the President, day by day. For the house in the Rue de Tilsitt was now subjected to a perfect invasion from early morning to night. There were journalists, gossip columnists, editors of periodicals never seen on stalls or kiosks, reporters,
échotiers
, men in frock coats, in shabby suits, in bowler hats, in caps, with sword sticks and monocles—would-be specialists in foreign politics, who knew nothing about America except the condor of General Grant’s sons, the last of the Mohicans, La Perichole, and an Argentine tango called “El Choclo” that was the rage of the moment. They came at all hours “in search of information,” vaguely menacing, declaring that they were still receiving terrible news from
over there
, that it was known that students and journalists were being ruthlessly persecuted, many European interests threatened, and above all, above all, there was the extraordinary suicide of Monsieur Garcin—a former inmate of Cayenne it was true, but a Frenchman after all—whose body had been found a little while ago, hanging from a disused excavating machine a few kilometres from Nueva Córdoba. Behind
Le Petit Journal
, whose sales were diminishing seriously at that time, there loomed representatives of
L’Excelsior
, insidiously suggesting that pictorial matter was reproduced in its pages unusually clearly; behind
Le Cri de Paris
stood
La Libre Parole
, and so from greater to less, from blackmailing dailies to scandalmongering reviews, finally reaching the provincial papers—
Basses Pyrénées
,
Alpes Maritimes
, Echoes of the North, Armorican beacons, Marseillaise lampoons—forming a daily procession of treacherous cadgers, who had to be kept quiet by the language of figures, with the splendid help of the Mummy. There it was, photographed from every angle; there was the Ancestor of America, two,
three, or four thousand years old, according to the whim of the writer, but in any case the most ancient exhibit from the continent whose history had been sent rocketing vertiginously backwards by the discovery. There was promise for our scientific institutions, and for the Head of State, author of this sensational find; thanks for having made such a valuable present to a Parisian museum. But the Mummy didn’t arrive. Put on board a Swedish cargo boat, to be unloaded at Cherbourg, by some mistake it had got to Gothenburg, whither the cholo Mendoza had been sent to look for it.

And meanwhile, ever insatiable, ever-threatening reporters kept on arriving at the Rue de Tilsitt “in search of news.”

“I can’t take any more; I can’t take any more,” the Head of State groaned, after receiving a visit from a woman journalist from
Lisez-moi Bleu
. “These shits will fleece me utterly! They may say what they like, I won’t give them a centime more!” However, he went on handing out and handing out, although now that the Mummy had been photographed, described, and compared with other mummies—in the Louvre and the British Museum—it provided no material for any more articles. Searching for a new approach, Peralta studied cases of the Virgin’s appearance on earth, in order to relate them to our cult of the Divine Shepherdess—perhaps this theme might interest readers of Catholic papers.

And in the middle of all this confusion the pistol shot at Sarajevo rang out, followed by the shots that killed Jaurès in the Café du Croissant.

“Thank God something has happened at last on this bloody continent!” said the Head of State. On August 2 there was general mobilisation, and on August 4 the war began.

“Don’t let another journalist into this house,” said the President to Sylvestre. And to Doctor Peralta, “Now we can have a rest!”

That same night the Head of State began doing his former rounds. He and his secretary went to Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons, to Aux Glaces at 25 Rue Sainte-Apolline; to the house of the English schoolgirls and the little Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. Everywhere the talk was the same. Some said that the war would be short and French armies would soon arrive in Berlin: others said it would be a long, agonizing, dreadful war.

“Nonsense,” said the President. “The last war, because it was the last classical war, was the Franco-Prussian in ’70.” An eminent English economist had recently shown (“and you can find his book in Nelson’s Edition”) that no civilised nation was in a position to stand the expense of a prolonged conflict. Modern arms were too dear, no country could face the cost of maintaining armies that now added up to millions of men. Moreover, as the French General Staff had already proclaimed: “Three months, three battles, three victories.”

At this moment Ofelia arrived from Salzburg by way of Switzerland, pregnant by the Papageno in
The Magic Flute
. They had foolishly embraced one night, when she had drunk so much that she had forgotten to use the diaphragm she always carried in her bag for unforeseen circumstances—and idiotically let herself be fucked in a little house surrounded by pines on the Kapuzinnersberg. She arrived in a fury; furious at having to get rid of
it
elsewhere, because the stupid doctors here wouldn’t undertake this form of intervention, whatever one paid them; furious at the article in
Le Matin
, which had been echoed in Germany and Austria, and at a caricature in Munich’s
Simplississimus
showing the Head of State in a wide Mexican hat, cartridge belt across his chest, with a millionaire’s paunch and a cigar between his fangs, shooting a kneeling peasant woman.