Reasons of State (30 page)

ONE MORNING THE NEWS WENT AROUND THAT A dead and putrefied horse, with a blown-up stomach, had turned up in the city’s chief reservoir of drinking water, and that as a result anyone who had drunk from the taps connected with the Municipal Aqueduct—and it was now eleven o’clock—was threatened with typhus. But when the Minister of Health went in person to investigate the situation, he found that the only thing floating in the famous Almond Basin, pride of national hydraulic engineering, was a black wooden horse with silver hooves: a famous model from the harness maker’s, “The Andalusian Horse,” stolen thence during the night by sinister jokers. As soon as calm was restored, a fierce and blazing red fire—too red—broke out in a tobacco warehouse in the suburbs. And when a lot of wailing fire engines had been mobilised, the firemen found themselves faced with a large flare of Bengal lights, set going in some inexplicable way and bringing their display to an end with a cheerful explosion of rockets. Next day, several newspapers published in all good faith the announcement of the death (with corresponding
requiescat in pace
) of some officials who were actually enjoying the best of health. This was the beginning of a period of
mystification, of unpleasant jokes, spreading of rumours to create a climate of disturbance, anxiety, mistrust, and uneasiness throughout the country. Skulls were received by post; funeral wreaths arrived at houses where no one had died; the telephone rang in the middle of the night to say that the master of the house, who was away, had died of a heart attack in a brothel. And there was a flood of anonymous correspondence, sometimes made from letters cut from newspapers, with threats of imprisonment or assault, accusations—nearly always truthful—of homosexuality or adultery, false reports of risings in the provinces, disagreement in the Military High Command, imminent strikes, failure of insurance companies, and preparations to ration essential foods. They were pitched in a minor key, promoted gatherings, processions, protests, arguments with the police, and spread false news of profitable exchanges—old casseroles for sewing-machines, tools for Swiss watches, wheelbarrows for bicycles—in shops with a wealthy clientele or a recently opened American grocery. Workers were advertised for at magnificent wages in factories long since closed down.

“Don’t eat meat of animals with foot- and mouth-disease,” warned a handbill circulated at midday. “The National Bank is suspending transactions,” announced another at dusk, and next morning people rushed to the guichets. And life went on in the midst of disorder, with incorrect information, street notices altered, the crossing of wires, where the telephone from the morgue was mysteriously connected with the Head of State’s office, and the number of a brothel rang the papal nuncio very early in the morning. Someone who ordered a Steinway piano from New York found a decapitated donkey inside it; someone who bought a record of Tito Schipa, a tenor much admired because he sang in Spanish, heard a stream of abuse of the government as soon as the needle was placed on
the disk although it bore the trademark of His Master’s Voice. All these escapades, growing more and more audacious, were the work of activists who started panics in cinemas with explosions of magnesium, carried off tramway rails, and cut electric wires—leaving half the town without light, the better to throw stones at the windows of business houses.

There was a whole underground army, mobile, intelligent, full of bright ideas and treachery, operating everywhere to disorganise the structure of society, disconnect administrative arrangements, keep the authorities in a perennial state of shock, and above all to stimulate an increasing climate of alarm. No one trusted anyone any longer. And the police were impotent in spite of their numbers being continually augmented by agents, detectives, informers, and spies, and they kept on making false moves without ever catching the people really responsible for this or that incident. Two bombs had exploded in the palace, although visitors were all searched when they entered the building and all parcels from outside were examined. And since someone had to be accused, yet none of them liked to admit their bewilderment, they tried to find valid reasons for being sure that the promoter of everything, the mastermind behind these fiendish activities and mysterious devices, was the Student. But the editorials of
Liberation
—never signed, of course—stated that the strange events disturbing the citizens were not due to Communist action:

“We do not make use of jokes and mystifications to further our struggle.” And then in a more characteristically Latin American tone: “True revolutionaries don’t come from brothels and gambling dives.” And next to this as usual was a collection of Marxist ideas printed inside a frame: “Humanity only sets itself problems that can be solved, because if they are carefully studied it is found that the problem arises only
where material conditions for solving it exist” (
Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy
).

“I’m beginning to believe,” said the President, much disturbed, “that that little bastard is telling the truth. He’s got other aims in view. He’s deluded. But sincere. He wouldn’t waste time telephoning to say I died like Félix Faure last night.”

“But the bombs?” said Peralta.

“Yes, the bombs,” said the Head of State, once more undecided. “Communists, like anarchists, put bombs anywhere they can. One only has to see the pictures in the international press. All the same …”

“The trouble is that people think the Student is responsible for everything that’s happening here,” remarked the secretary. “And so he’s becoming a sort of myth: something like Robin Hood but who owns Gyges’ ring. And our poor population is charmed by such stories.”

And he was quite right, for the novels of Ponson du Terrail, and also Les Misérables, had had an extremely wide appeal throughout the country, with their characters who changed name, age, and appearance and always deceived their pursuers. Gaston Leroux had shown a criminal’s powers of mimicry in his often translated and much read Mystery of the Yellow Room. So it was against a background of classic rebels, historical outlaws, impossible to catch and always on the side of justice, that the image of the Student was evoked among little groups of farmworkers, in tenement-house gatherings, in the coplas sung softly in the back rooms of village shops (although in fact these people had very little idea what communism was), as a sort of fighter for reform, defender of the poor, enemy of the rich, scourge of corruption, saver of a nation alienated by capitalism, a descendant of the popular leaders in our wars of independence, whose generous and just
deeds lived on in people’s memories. The fame of his ubiquity, above all, increased day by day: he was the genius of unpredictable journeys, who made fun of police cordons, customs officers, and sentinels, and flew from the mines in the north to the dockyards of La Verónica, from forest to cistus-covered highlands. And the legend of the Student, greatly enriched by stories of laudable deeds, whispered news, and ballads that passed from mouth to mouth, slipped through windows so narrow that it seemed like magic; he ran over the roofs, jumped from terrace to terrace, now disguised as a protestant pastor, now as a Franciscan capuchin, pretended to be blind one day, acted the policeman another—farmhand, miner, muleteer, doctor with his black bag, English tourist, wandering harpist, loader of crates. And while the forces of State Security were hunting for him, clattering about on their motorcycles and besieging whole suburbs, the hunted man was probably sitting on a seat in Central Park, wearing an old man’s wig, a white beard, and black spectacles, with his nose buried in the daily paper, while a few of his followers—if they really were his followers—began singing far away amongst the agaves and prickly pears, the nets and seaweed, the mountain wheatfields and threshing floors among the clouds, a copla very popular in Mexico some years ago:

“I don’t like myths,” said the Head of State, faced with the increasing reality of the Student, whose imaginary—but unknown—profile crossed between the large window in his study and the earthly presence of the Tutelary Volcano every
morning. “I don’t like myths. Nothing can travel about so far and so fast in this continent as a myth.”

“Certainly, that’s true,” observed the schoolmaster who often emerged in Peralta. “Montezuma was overthrown by the messianic Aztec myth of a-man-with-a-pale-skin-who-was-to-come-from-the-east. The Andes knew the myth of the Inca Paraclete, later incarnate in Tupac Amaru, who put up a good fight against the Spaniards. We had the myths of the Resurrection-of-the-Ancient-Gods, which gained us a Fantastic City in the jungles of Yucatán when Paris was celebrating the advent of the Century of Science and worshipping the Good Fairy Electricity. There was Auguste Comte’s myth in the Brazilian style, with a mystical marriage between Batacada and Positivism. Myth of the gauchos being immune to bullets. Myth of that Haitan—I think he was called Mackandal—who could tranform himself into a butterfly, an iguana, a horse, or a dove. Myth of Emiliano Zapata, going up to heaven after his death on a black horse breathing out flames.”

“And in Mexico too,” observed the President, “our friend Porfirio Diaz was done for by the myth of ‘effective suffrage, no re-election,’ and the awakening of the Eagle and the Serpent, who had both been asleep for rather more than thirty years, luckily for their country. And now, here, everyone believes the Myth of the Student—the virtuous redeemer, spartan and omnipresent. We must deflate the Myth of the Student … And our bloody police, trained in the United States, are no fucking use; they don’t know how to tie men up and beat and torture them, or drown them in the bathtub.”

But Peralta was already opening the Hermès case to calm his master’s rage, when the surprising, unhoped-for, and altogether astounding news arrived that the Student had been found in the least likely place and feebly allowed himself to be
taken prisoner without resistance or glory at a customs office in the south, where the ingenuous police—but not as ingenuous as all that—had been surprised to find a cane cutter with uncalloused hands travelling in a cane cart. The photo of this individual, taken at the time, agreed with one on his student’s record of entry to the University. And for almost two hours he had been shut up in a cell in the Model Prison, of course denying that he was the Student—didn’t he like
cells
?

“For God’s sake, don’t do him any harm!” exclaimed the Head of State. “A good breakfast with corn griddle cakes, butter, cheeese, black beans, fried eggs, and even a long drink if he wants one. And afterwards bring him to my study. We’ll have a man-to-man talk. And I give you my word I have no intention of using my powers against him. That way there will be less resistance.”

The Head of State had set his scene very carefully. Dressed in an austere frock coat bound with silk—a pinkish grey tie, a decoration in the buttonhole—he was sitting with his back to the large plate-glass window giving onto the central courtyard of the palace, with his work table in front of him, so that the light would shine on his victim’s face. In the middle of the table was a classical grey blotter bound in embossed leather; an inkpot—a napoleonic eagle on a pedestal of green marble; the obligatory leather cylinder full of well-sharpened pencils; a paperweight souvenir of Waterloo; a gold paper knife with the arms of the republic engraved on the handle, and files—a great many files in ostentatious disarray, with their papers turned out, here, there, as when someone is laboriously going through their documents. And here, on the right of the blotter, as if casually, lay a copy of the manual on breeding Rhode Island Reds in its yellow cover.

Doctor Peralta showed the Student into the room with the utmost courtesy, although the Head of State did not
interrupt his apparent checking of numbers and ticking them with his fountain pen. Raising his occupied hand, he indicated an armchair to the visitor. And after clipping together a few pages he handed them to his secretary:

“There was an error of 320 pesos in the estimate for the viaduct. That won’t do. Tell those gentlemen they had better see about getting one of those ‘adding machines,’ as they call them, from the United States.”

Peralta left the room and there was a long silence. Corpulent, heavy-shouldered, his stature increased by the regal proportions of the presidential chair, the Head of State gazed at his adversary in some surprise. Where he had thought to find an athletic young man, his muscles hardened by playing fives at the University, with a tense defiant face, as if ready for battle, he was now looking at a thin, frail youth, halfway between adolescence and maturity, his hair rather ruffled, his face pale, but who was certainly confronting him almost without blinking, with very bright eyes, perhaps grey-green, perhaps grey-blue, and who in spite of a somewhat feminine sensibility expressed the force of character and determination of someone who can act when necessary with the toughness of a convinced believer.

So they both looked at each other, the Master, the Invested, Immovable Ruler, and the Weak, Invisible Utopian, across the trench dividing the generations, seeing each other in flesh and blood for the first time. Their mutual contemplation produced a lamentable effect on both. To the Inferior his Superior was an archetype, an exhibit in a historical museum, a figure created to take the centre of one of those posters (the products of very recent folklore) that illustrate the triad situated in a single body, of Power, Capitalism, and the Boss, an image as invariably printed on the retina as were, centuries earlier, those of Turlupin or the Matamoros of the Italian
Commedia dell’Arte. Today’s protagonist of revolutionary allegories was this individual sitting in front of him in his frock coat and striped trousers, with a pearl tiepin and expensive scent, lacking only the emblem of a shiny top hat and a cigar stuck between his fierce teeth to symbolise—sitting on sacks of dollars that really existed, even if in the vaults of a Swiss bank—the Spirit of the Bourgeoisie.