Reasons of State (36 page)

“Money! Fuck! Money!”

The Mayorala shows me her bundle of clothes. “The cash is in here.” I open it, to make sure. Yes. Between petticoats and blouses, there are the $200,000 of my private reserve, in four bundles of fifty notes each, with portraits of Washington on them, of course.

And now everything seems to speed up. Peralta is running; the Mayorala is running. A trunk appears. Without
thinking clearly what I’m doing I start putting things in it. Too many things. The blotting paper from my writing table, several medals and decorations, the book of our eleven constitutions, a photo of Ofelia with Gabriele D’Annunzio, that toy—a lizard made of rope—given me by my mother, that beautiful edition of
Les femmes savantes
, containing the lines that, at this moment of crisis, come absurdly to my memory, enlivened by a glass of rum: “
Guenille si l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère
.”

“Don’t put any more rubbish in the trunk,” shouts the Mayorala.

“Two shirts, one pair of pants, that’s enough,” shouts Peralta.

“Two ties and three vests,” shouts the Mayorala.

“And now put this waterproof cape right over yourself. Like the poor when they’re ill and go to hospital,” says Peralta.

“But quickly, for God’s sake, quickly!” yells the Mayorala, her voice echoing through the vastness of the Deserted Palace. And they wrap my head in bandages and strips of sticking plaster. A little ketchup to look as if I’d bled. And I go downstairs. The first time in more than twenty years that I don’t hear cries of “Attention!”; no one is there to salute me. Palomo, the porter’s dog, comes and licks your sweaty hands. You’d like to take him with you.

“
Out of the question. No one has ever seen a dog in an ambulance
.”

And you lie on the stretcher for urgent cases, under the smell of macintosh, disguised as a wounded man—carnival is still going on, terrifying carnival, an apocalyptic transformation scene—and during the vicissitudes of the journey, you live through the hazards of the road you are travelling. Out through the back gate of the palace—former entrance for horse-drawn carriages. Turn to the right. Drive over asphalt.
Calle Beltrán: a short stretch of cobblestones. Left: smoothness of asphalt. Calle de los Plateros. Peralta in the driving seat—a bogus nurse-chauffeur of the Emergency Service—sets the siren going. I’m terrified, thinking we must be attracting attention: but no; it’s exactly what we aren’t doing. No one looks at the face of the man driving a wailing ambulance. They look at the siren; what’s more, anyone who can help by doing so tries to clear the road. Right: more asphalt, the Boulevard del Brasil with its cafés—the Paris, the Tortoni, the Delmonico—sure to be shut because of the strike. Then we drive on and on: there seems to be no traffic on the roads. Peralta doesn’t stop at crossroads. And there’s a huge rut; there at the corner of the Gallo—the Ministry of Works gave sixty thousand pesos for it to be filled in and the drain put right, but it was never done. I know where we are, and suddenly, for that very reason, I feel afraid, terribly afraid. My flesh tightens over my bones; my thighs are trembling; my breathing has become irregular. Why are we driving so slowly? I know why. And now the male nurse with the stethoscope and smoked glasses is braking—his white cap is well pulled down right over his brows. There is a silence which opens my bladder—I can do nothing to stop it.

“
Excuse me: I’ve got a seriously wounded man here
.” Another silence, worse than the first. And then the Mayorala’s voice: “
Please, Captain, let us by. Don’t stop us, for his mama’s sake … My brother
 … A
bullet … In front of the palace
.”

The soldier’s voice: “
Did they shoot your cunt of a mother too?
”

“
They shot her … [
whistle
] bang!… From the balcony … Now [
a long blood-curdling whistle on a downward note
] … they’re dragging her away … And leaving bits of brains … [
a loud slap
] … at every corner
.”

Soldier: “
Thank God for that!
”

Peralta: “
May we please go by, Captain?
”

“
Go on!
”

And now the streets are of trodden earth. I seem to feel all through my body the ambulance wheels heeling over, falling, rising, staggering, between potholes full of water, whose stench of decay reaches me in my moving cell in spite of the wafts of chloroform pervading it.

“
I ought to have thought about that
.” A little beyond the Italian villas with their nacreous domes, cornucopias, box hedges, and vine arbors—miniature gardens of Aranjuez or Chantilly—we reach the suburbs of the Cerros, Yaguas, and Favelas; villages made of cardboard, dung, and tin cans, with paper walls, the tins rusty, cut up with scissors to cover the roofs—dwellings, if they deserve the name, that are ruined, knocked down and demolished by the rains every year, leaving the children paddling about like pigs, in puddles and mud.

“
I should have thought about that. A plan to build houses for poor families. There would still be time …
”

The Mayorala’s voice: “
The road’s clear
.” And the ambulance begins to climb, creaking, bumping, bouncing, turning, twisting but always climbing. I recognise the corners on the road. I know we have already reached the farm of El Rengo, from the smell of the brushwood fire burning esparto grass, something forbidden by law; now we are coming to the Little Spanish Castles, because there is the sound of a plank bridge beneath us. The zone of pine forests is beginning. Our road is edged with mulberry trees, whose shade attracts so many poisonous snakes.

I am so exhausted from fighting my terror that I fall asleep.

I open my eyes. We have passed in front of the Germans’ Lutheran Church. I take off my bandages and sticking plaster. The ambulance doors open and I descend into the square
with an air of calm dignity. But although a few people are about, no one looks at me. The Woglindes, Wellgundes, and Flosshildes go on with their milking. Too many curtains are drawn across windows. I expect human smiles and all I see is braces drawn tight over backs, and backsides with broad buttocks in leather breeches. Peralta talks to the pastor:

“The mechanics are on strike. So do what you like. We shan’t interfere.”

Followed by the Mayorala, who has just finished tying up my badly fastened suitcase with her sash, we go to the little brick station with its weathercock and imitation stork’s nest occupied by a marbled bird lifting up a lobster-red foot. The Little Train is put away in its little hangar. There’s enough coal in the tender. And the burnished engine, polished and shining like something just out of a luxury shoe shop, soon starts puffing out smoke. It is as if I could feel its impatient, vibrating life in the levers throbbing under my hands. All the houses in the Olmedo Colony have shut themselves into a darkness whose aim is to ignore me. I let in the steam: the connecting rods begin to move. And the Little German Train enters the curving track cut in the flank of the mountain. We pass the pines—leaving their scent behind—and descend steep slopes covered with cactus and agave, where the spikes of the asphodels are buzzing with bees and quivering in the sea breeze; then, from small to large, from grassy filaments to plumes, come the reeds, bamboos, shady banana trees, with their red fruit tasting of poverty; and then the ochre patches of bare earth—I don’t see them, but guess at them from familiarity with the deep ruts in them—before arriving at the sandy plain, where we advance in a straight line as fast as possible, without signals or lights or level-crossing gates, until we stop in the tiny terminus of Puerto Araguato with a tremendous bump owing to tardy braking.

Several marines—white leggings and sweatshirts, rum drinkers’ eyes—are drawn up on the two platforms. I discover that they have already occupied the power station, the vital points, bars and brothels of the town, after pissing on the Monument to the Heroes of Independence as they passed it. The North American Consul comes up to me, wearing creased trousers and a cowboy shirt of the sort that has little air holes in the armpits.

“Here I am; I’ve got the auto outside.” And he drives us in a Pathfinder creaking in every joint to the building diplomatically representing his country: a wooden house, with columns and pediment, in a strictly Jeffersonian style, and a North American eagle with a shield on its breast displayed on the balcony.

“You’ve given me a fat lot of trouble,” says the Consul, taking us to the kitchen. “I’ve got orders to put you on one of our cargo boats arriving here tomorrow, and send you to Nassau. If you’re hungry, there are some packets of cornflakes, tins of Campbell’s soup, and pork and beans. There’s whisky in that cupboard. Help yourself, Mister President, because we know that if you don’t get your booze you very soon go around the bend.”

“A little more respect, please,” I say in a stern tone.

“We’re all equals here,” says the Consul, going into an office full of bills and papers.

“The Hermès case, Peralta: I prefer our own.”

The walls of the kitchen were decorated with cuttings from
Shadowland
and
Motion Pictures
: Theda Bara in
Cleopatra
: Nazimova in
Salomé
; Dempsey knocking out Georges Carpentier; a scene from
Male and Female
with Thomas Meigham and Gloria Swanson; Babe Ruth hitting a home run under the welcoming—almost presbyterian—eyes of an umpire dressed in dark blue.

We’ve eaten something, and are now sitting in the reception–waiting room–living room of the house, Peralta, the Mayorala, and I. After the tension of the last days, and the paroxysms of anxiety of the last few hours, I feel almost serene. My muscles relax. I begin fanning myself with a palm leaf, rocking myself in what the gringos call a rocking chair and we call, I’ve no idea why, a Viennese chair—I’ve never noticed any furniture of this description in Vienna. I look at my secretary:

“For the present, we must concentrate on saving our skins.
Guenille si l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère
. Now the sea, Bermuda. And afterwards, Paris. In the end we’ll get a bit of rest.”

“Yes,” replies Peralta.

“Our morning walks. Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons. Aux Glaces, the Rue Sainte-Apolline, the Chabanais.”

“Yes,” replies Peralta.

“Happiness prevails, I see,” I say.

“Yes,” replies Peralta with a gesture of displeasure and boredom.

“When one’s luck is out, even dogs piss on one,” says the Mayorala, with her usual philosophy, expressed in proverbs and sayings. And she flings herself down to sleep on a raffia ottoman. Close to the gramophone horn, on an antique corner cupboard, lies an old Bible, used by the Consul when some sailor who had lost his papers in a drinking bout could lay valid claim to having been born in Baltimore or Charleston only by swearing with one hand on the Scriptures. Knowing the habits of the members of certain North American sects at moments of crisis, I shut my eyes, opened the book at random, and, after describing three circles with the forefinger of my right hand, I let it fall on a page: “
Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink; let me be delivered from them that
hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the water flood overflow me; neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth on me
” (Psalm 69). I tried again: “
Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth. For mine enemies speak against me; and they that lay wait for my soul take counsel together
” (Psalm 71
)
. A third time (Jeremiah 12
)
: “
I have forsaken mine house, I have left mine heritage
.” “Fuck the book!” I exclaimed, shutting it so violently that a cloud of dust came out of the binding. And I lounged in the Viennese chair, which was ornamented with a blue ribbon passed through the holes in the wickerwork, and fell into a drowsy state not far from actual sleep. Confused noises. Reality becomes blurred and transformed into incoherent images. I’m asleep.

But I can’t have slept long, because very soon—I think—a hand shook the rocking chair violently to waken me.

“Peralta,” I said, “Peralta.”

“No use calling him,” said the Consul. “He’s just decamped.”

“It’s true,” said the Mayorala.

And I learned, in a state of such astonishment that I couldn’t take in everything I was being told, that dozens of automobiles displaying the greenish-white emblems of Alpha-Omega were driving around the town, and that one of them—which appeared to be a grey Chevrolet—had come to fetch my secretary.

“They’ll kill him!” I cried.

“I don’t think so.”

“But—this is insane! Didn’t he resist? He was armed!”

The Consul looked at me sarcastically.

“They were some charming young men wearing greenish-white armlets and a badge—
Alpha
in silvery metal—on their lapels. They embraced Doctor Peralta, who seemed very pleased, and set off for the capital laughing and joking.”

“And Peralta didn’t explain anything? Didn’t he leave me any message?”

“Yes: that I was to tell you he was sorry, but his country came first.”

“It’s true!” shouted the Mayorala, seeing my stupefied expression, as if it were necessary to shout or I wouldn’t understand.

“
Tu quoque, fili mi …
”

“What
tu quoque
, and what the hell,” said the gringo. “He was doing the dirty on you, that’s all. You don’t need Latin to see that. It’s just politics, and happens everywhere,”

“I thought the bastard was a traitor,” muttered the Mayorala. “My aunt Candelaria, who knows a lot, saw it in the snails and by breathing into a plate of flour. And now I’m beginning to believe that those bombs that went off in the palace were brought by him in that French case of flasks. It was the only thing that wasn’t searched at the door.”

And there was the Hermès case, open, with its ten bottle tops in two rows of five. We took out the pigskin-covered flasks. That smell—it seems to me, but I’m not sure—is bitter almonds: the same smell left by the explosion.