Reasons of State (29 page)

In the midst of homicides, crimes of passion, and unheard-of events, the season of the Nativity came around, and in a strange guise, for it was the first time that it was transformed into Christmas. Charming family traditions were quickly forgotten: no cribs were constructed by sticking together pieces of paper, with manger, Virgin, Saint Joseph, ass, ox, and shepherds—more numerous if the house was a richer one—who came to adore the chubby, angelic Child, lying on a bed of guava leaves, which were changed every day to give more fragrance to the scene. Families no longer worked hard at re-painting and varnishing the figures of saints from last year, glueing together those that were broken, and fixing the Angel of the Annunciation to his gold wire under the silver star on the ceiling. Strange things happened this year: a forest like that which advanced on Dunsinane marched up to the capital from the Atlantic ports: they were thousands of fir trees from Canada and the United States, bringing their exotic aroma to the rich quarters of the city, where they were set up and festively decorated with glass balls, garlands of gold tinsel, small twisted candles, and paper bells covered with cotton-wool snow. Peculiar deer with branched horns appeared, never seen before in the country and known as “reindeer,” pulling sledges laden with parcels. And at the doors of toyshops stood bearded old men dressed in red, called Santa Claus—or
Petit Journal
by the populace. The traditional Nativity of yesteryear, of all time, was supplanted in a single day by
the Nordic Christmas. This year no parties of revellers singing carols to tambourines went out into the street and called on the neighbours with their normal “Rat-a-plan … Who is it?… Men of peace,” their singers reeling through the streets from all the aguardiente, etc., they had been given as a reward for the happy news that the Messiah had become flesh once again, and was alive among us. These old-fashioned songs were supplanted in respectable houses by music boxes playing such tunes as “Silent Night” or “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Alarmed by this sudden transformation of Christmas, priests (in their Midnight Mass sermons to which few listened) denounced Santa Claus as a heretic invention, an introduction of Saxon customs, which, like decorating a fir tree, could only represent a revival of German paganism—dating from a period when (while we were listening to the divine voices of Ambrosian plainsong and witnessing the splendid ritual of the Sacrament) they were still hairy savages living in forests, just as Julius Caesar had found them, wearing rough, horned helmets, drinking mead, and worshipping the Holly and the Mistletoe. Besides, no lives of the saints referred to this “Santicló” who brought toys to children
three days before
the Three Magi had done the same thing—as had always happened here. Spanish shopkeepers, whose dolls in Toledan, Valencian, and Galician dress, little kitchens with earthenware cooking pots, and rocking horses had still not been unloaded in Puerto Araguato, protested against the unpatriotic competition, which had filled their windows ever since December 20 with mechanical objects, Red Indian feather head dresses, ouija boards to play at spiritualism—I ask you!—and cowboy outfits—Texan hat, sheriff’s star, studded belt, and two pistols in a fringed case.

Some said that Santicló was really Saint Nicholas. But
people who understood hagiography declared that neither Saint Nicholas of Mira, patron saint of Russia, nor Saint Nicholas the Great, the first pope of that name, had had anything to do with selling toys. And someone finally asked ironically, in an article overlooked by the censor, if this Santicló in his species of Phrygian cap, dressed all in red, in spite of the white trimmings, might not be a
Red
in the most dangerous sense of the word. However, the journalist and his attempt at a joke came to a bad end, because when Holy Week came around he was still shut up with pimps and sodomites in Gallery 13 of the Model Prison. And if this last Christmas had been strange, Holy Week was stranger still, because instead of evoking the Story of the Cross, the length and breadth of the country witnessed the Story of the Strike.

It all began on Ash Wednesday, in the quietest way imaginable, when some hands in the American Refinery unexpectedly stopped work and refused to accept vouchers exchangeable for goods instead of wages. The movement quickly spread to all sugar mills. The rural police, the mounted police, and the provincial garrisons were all mobilised; but there was nothing they could do against men who were not demonstrating nor rioting, who were not creating a public disturbance, but who remained quietly in the doorways of their houses, refusing to work, singing to the accompaniment of lutes or guitars:

That strike was defeated. But on Easter Saturday the miners of Nueva Córdoba began one of their own, as a protest
against arbitrary dismissal, and this was promptly followed by that of the stevedores of Puerto Araguato and the dockers of Puerto Negro.

Like the rashes of those tropical diseases that break out unexpectedly and redden first one shoulder before moving on to the right thigh and the left hip, the evening before they reach the chest, by way of those parts of the human body where the Cabbalists located the centres of Splendour, Triumph, Love, Justice, and Stability, the red eruptions suddenly appeared without warning on the map of the republic, here, there, in the north, in the south, where the fruit of the cacao was ripening, mounds of coal were steaming, bananas were growing, tobacco plants were coming into leaf, or rocks were waiting to be blown up with dynamite. Nothing could halt the epidemic; threats and edicts from the authorities, proclamations, troops with machetes or bayonets; people had become aware of the tremendous strength of inertia, folded arms and silent resistance, and when they were herded to their farms and factories with kicks, they went determined to do their work badly, to produce very little, using every trick like causing a mechanical fault, paralysing the cranes, or filing through the links in chains, when they didn’t throw handfuls of sand into the axle of the principal wheel in the conduit of a pump. It was said that the Student—that same “student” who was beginning to be someone to reckon with, incessantly active though invisible, on the move and ubiquitous, working underground but manifestly, travelling from the plains to the mountains, from the fishing ports to the sawmills of the Torrid Zone—was the instigator and originator of the whole business. And it was obvious now that he wasn’t alone in these multiple, combined activities; there were many, many more who adopted his tactics and ingenuity and used the same system.

“They work in
cells
,” said Doctor Peralta, trying to
explain everything by a term the Head of State didn’t fully understand.

“As for cells, there’s the Model Prison,” he replied. “And there aren’t enough to take so many.” (He tried to laugh.) “I’ve become the foremost hotelkeeper in the republic.” And he impatiently turned the pages of
Anti-Dühring
and the
Critique of the Gotha and Erfürt Programmes
, which were still lying on the table. “There’s nothing here about cells. Nor in the
Manifesto
. The only clear statement is this on the last page but one: ‘
The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order
.’ ”

At about this time Doctor Peralta brought the President a strange periodical that had arrived by ordinary mail. It was a curious publication, the like of which had never been seen in the country: printed on India paper, consisting of eight pages in 16mo, small and light, no bulkier than an ordinary letter. Its title was simply:
Liberation
. Well produced, however, with four columns to a page but as perfectly legible as a dictionary. This “Number 1, Year 1” began with an editorial severely attacking the regime, without unnecessary adjectives, but as sharp as the crack of a whip and written in clear and concise prose.

“This is something new,” murmured the Head of State, finding its contents much more upsetting than the exaggerated and outrageously Creole insults commonly fired at him by the supporters of Luis Leoncio Martínez. Afterwards came a full report on the most recent brutalities committed by the police, with the names of the victims and agents. Next, a thorough analysis of the recent strikes, drawing practical conclusions from their successes and mistakes. And in the middle pages came the worst of all—a detailed list with dates and numbers, undoubtedly obtained from highly secret documents, of the most private business carried out by the
President, his ministers, generals, and followers in the last few months.

“There’s a Judas among us,” cried the Head of State in a furious rage.

“But … who published this?” asked Doctor Peralta in a puzzled tone.

“No need to ask. Read the sentence at the end of this number:
‘Workers of the world unite!
’ ”

“Damn it, that’s the end of the
Manifesto
!”

“What it means is that this unsigned pamphlet is really signed.”

Before ten o’clock it turned out that thousands of people had received this clandestine pamphlet in their morning mail. Typographical experts, summoned to a cabinet meeting to examine the situation, gave their opinion that it could only have been produced outside the country, judging by the type used, the style of composition, and the origin—German, apparently—of the India paper, which wasn’t available in the city at present. Perhaps the printing press was in some frontier town. Censorship was therefore imposed on all correspondence from neighbouring countries. But on the following Tuesday, soon after waking up, the Head of State received Number 2 of
Liberation
on his breakfast tray, brought to him by the Mayorala Elmira. Internal censorship was next imposed on all distribution offices. But this didn’t prevent the appearance of Number 3, without help from the post office—in a wrapper but with no stamp—in the letter boxes of ministries, public offices, businesses, and private houses, not to mention copies passed from pocket to pocket or drawer to drawer, slipped under doors, thrown onto balconies, or left on flat roofs and windowsills by mysterious hands. All the printing presses in the republic were put under military guard. There was a detective in every newspaper office, and behind
every linotype and every machine turning out proofs. But nothing could prevent Numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7 of
Liberation
from appearing. The clandestine printing press, the ghostly, invisible, silent press, went on working with exasperating efficiency. It was like some central laboratory, a gnomes’ forge, perhaps here in this quarter of the town, or perhaps in that, farther away, but producing without noise or fuss those accursed little 16mo pages, which kept the Head of State awake every night.

It was about now that, during one cabinet meeting, the Minister of the Interior uttered for the first time a threatening and sinister phrase: “Moscow Gold.”

“What Moscow Gold, what on earth do you mean by Moscow Gold?” roared the President. “The Bolsheviks haven’t any; they’re all dropping dead, and you think they have gold to spare for …” (He picked up a recent number of
Illustration
from Paris.) “Look. Look at these photos. Mountains of corpses on the shores of the Dnieper and the Volga. Children nothing but bones and eyes. People starving as they did in the year 1000. Cholera. Typhus. Grand duchesses begging in the streets. Endless, hopeless poverty.”

The Minister insisted. All this was quite true. But those Bolsheviks were selling the treasures of Potemkin and Catherine the Great, crowns from the Kremlin, jewels confiscated from princes and boyars, the pictures from the Hermitage, so as to pay for international revolution, the only thing that could save communism from disaster.

“Read, read Kerensky’s articles in the North American press.” Moscow Gold was no fiction. Moscow Gold was the only thing that could explain the existence of something like
Liberation
in this country (Number 8 had just appeared), with its expensive paper, its presses hidden in some cave or in one of the undiscovered passages that—according to some
historians—the Spanish Conquistadors had made underneath what was today the capital of the republic, to connect three fortresses, now in ruins.

And when, a few nights later, another petard exploded in the palace—although it did little damage, as it had been put in a storeroom full of useless furniture—the Head of State became convinced of the reality of Moscow Gold. The caricatures in
Le Rire
, showing a bear throwing bombs with fuses alight onto the map of Europe, were not foolish fantasies by humorists, nor was the picture of the Red Octopus, stretching its tentacles to every corner of the globe from the onion domes of Saint Basil. One of those tentacles had entered our country.

“We must take emergency measures,” murmured Peralta.

“And what is left for us to do?” replied the President, as if suddenly exhausted, suddenly missing the Arc de Triomphe, which if it stood here instead of this useless Volcano would have led him under its high vault into the delicious peace, smelling of wine and wood, of Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons.

In times of agitation and anxiety he used to yearn for the Land of Intelligence, where even in the Métro one could read an alexandrine worthy of Racine:

A country where, as the Distinguished Academician (now so far away) would sometimes remark,
Athalie
’s Azarias, reincarnated in the person of the Station Master of the Pigalle Station, might have said, “
en un lieu / souterrain par nos pères creusé
” (
Athalie
, Act 5) as the train set off for L’Etoile: