Reasons of State (37 page)

“Maybe, maybe not,” said the Consul. “It’s pretty like the smell of old leather that has had a lot of rum spilled on it.”

“The snails don’t lie,” murmured the Mayorala.

“Maybe yes, maybe not,” repeated the Yankee.

Burdened by an enormous feeling of sadness, as of a father spat on, or a beaten cuckold, or King Lear thrown out by his daughters, I hugged my dear Elmira: “You’re the only one I’ve got left.”

“Better look out the window,” said the Consul, “but be careful you’re not seen.”

OUTSIDE, BEYOND THE GUARD OF EIGHT MARINES with rifles sloped from hip to shoulder, a slow and silent procession of people were passing and re-passing, but always looking towards the house. They knew I was there, and they went on walking around and around, like students on a Sunday walk, hoping that I would look out a window, open a door, or make my presence shown somehow or other.

“In the capital, they’re looting the ministers’ houses, hunting out police and informers, carrying off spies, burning secret archives. The people have opened the prisons and set free all political prisoners.”

“The end of the world,” said the Mayorala, looking panic-stricken.

“And when will they get me?” I said, with a forced smile.

“I don’t think they’ll jump over the wall,” said the Yankee. “And they won’t do that because the Student—the chap who started the strike—has distributed an intelligent manifesto to the public. Read that …”

But my hands were trembling too much, and my spectacles were misted with sweat.

“Better tell me.”

“Well, to sum it up: he says they mustn’t provoke our soldiers (no throwing stones or bottles, nor even insulting them); they mustn’t attack our diplomatic representatives, nor our compatriots; in fact, nothing that could justify a major military action on our part. Up till now, there’s been no
intervention
, only a
landing
. Question of subtle differences of meaning—
nuances
, as the French say. And the Student understands nuances. He says that the pleasure of hanging you from a telegraph pole isn’t worth the risk of an
intervention
, which might very well turn into
occupation
.”

“As in Haiti,” I said.

“Exactly. That’s what the Student doesn’t want. He’s intelligent, that boy!”

And I was thinking of the vertiginous transformation of roles that had taken place in the course of a few hours in the scenario of the revolt. Now it was the Student who had in a flash become the custodian of my threatened existence. And, while still remaining hidden, without replying to the calls from Alpha-Omega, who offered him guarantees and invited him to collaborate in the National Coalition Government, which Luis Leoncio Martínez was setting up in the palace, with the advice of Enoch Crowder and the help of those of the military leaders not implicated in the shooting of the day before yesterday, and one or two sergeants promoted to colonels, he remained faithful to his underground work as Invisible Man, and could still with one word control those who had collected in front of the Eagle-with-a-Shield-on-Its-Breast, and were beginning—by ones, twos and threes—to join their voices in a chorus of insults.

“So long as they don’t go further than shouting,” says the Consul. But I’m beginning to be afraid that they will in fact go further than shouting. And I suddenly see myself
in a looking-glass covered in fly shit, supported on a rickety bracket and covering one wall of the office; I’m a pitiful sight; the dressing gown I was wearing when I left the palace is filthy; my shirt from New and Lingwood in London is filthy and crumpled from so much coming and going, all the starch of its collar melted by the sweat of fear; my pearl-grey tie, very suitable to the Head of State, is stained with the saliva that has trickled from my mouth during my recent sleep. And my striped trousers, suddenly detached from a stomach dwindled in size in the last few hours, are slipping down over my hips, giving me the look of the funny man in an English music hall. And the Mayorala is replying with tremendously obscene gestures, illustrating a large repertory of internal imprecations, to those people shouting outside. And all at once I’m terrified.

“Why don’t you take me on board the
Minnesota?
” I entreat.

“You’re just talking big,” says the Yankee, in an unexpectedly joking tone, very unsuitable (truth to tell) to a diplomatic official. “I’m merely a simple consul, who believes he’s doing the correct thing in giving you shelter. If tomorrow it suits my people to say I’ve made a mistake, I shall accept that I’ve made a mistake, inform the press that I’ve made a mistake, and say I’m sorry I made a mistake; then they’ll send me somewhere else, and no one will be any the wiser. On board the
Minnesota
, on the other hand, you would be the official protégé of our Great American Democracy” (he made a comic military salute), “which can’t at a moment like this figure publicly as protecting the ‘Butcher of Nueva Córdoba,’ who has once more been appearing from coast to coast in Randolph Hearst’s chain of periodicals, along with Monsieur Garcin’s photos and everything that cooked your goose when they appeared in Paris. Besides, we don’t know how long the
Minnesota
will remain in these waters. Maybe a week; maybe a month; maybe years: just look at Haiti, where from
landing
to
intervention
and from
intervention
to
occupation—des nuances, des nuances, des nuances toujours
—one thing followed another. Don’t get into a stew. Keep calm. I’ll have you out of danger by tomorrow. Besides, I can’t do anything else: I’m carrying out instructions.”

I’m feeling swindled, made fun of, tricked.

“And I’ve always got on so well with all of you. You’re indebted to me for so many favours!”

The Consul is smiling behind his tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles: “And without that, how do you suppose you’d have kept in power so long? Favours, indeed? Now we shall receive them from the Professor of Theosophy.”

“And why not from the Student while we’re about it?” I said, to mortify him.

“That’s difficult to bring off. He’s a new species of man even within his species. A lot of his sort are appearing on the continent, although your generals and doctors try to ignore them.”

“They loathe you North Americans.”

“That can’t be helped: our Bibles and their
Kapital
are hopelessly incompatible.”

The row outside intensified. The Mayorala multiplied her dumb-show gestures in response to those who were insulting me. It would be easy enough to break through the guard of marines; easy enough to jump over the wall …

“Anyhow, I should be better off on board the
Minnesota
,” I insisted.

“I don’t think so,” said the Yankee. And speaking between little hiccoughs of suppressed laughter he said:

“You’ve forgotten the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Ever since 1919—I’m quoting
from memory—‘the manufacture and consumption (I said:
consumption
) of all forms of alcoholic drink in the entire territory of the United States is forbidden.’ The
Minnesota
is an integral part, in juridical and military terms, of the United States. All right for a man who drinks only ginger ale and Coca-Cola. But one doesn’t wake up with trembling hands on drinks like those …”

“But aren’t we on United States territory here, too?” I said, pointing to the case left by Peralta, so it happened, just beneath an orographic and hydrographic map of the country.

“I can’t prevent an invalid from bringing his medicines along. And as I’ve been
taken in
, over this whole affair, I can very well believe that this is chest mixture or Scott’s Emulsion. On the
Minnesota
they’d throw
that
into the sea, in strict observance of the Eighteenth Amendment of our Constitution—although left to himself, the captain might be more of a drunk than the mother who bore him.”

“They seem to be going away,” said the Mayorala, with her nose glued to the shutters. I looked out: as if impelled by some event, people were making off in groups towards the Customs House, where some sort of movement of lorries and goods’ trucks was going on.

“
The strike is over
,” I announced, deepening my voice without noticing it. “
The situation has been normalised
.”

“
There is order throughout the country
,” said the Consul, imitating me in a comic manner. And, regaining his good humour: “Come to Captain Nemo’s cabin. You’ll be better off there.”

And letting me out of the house by a passage at the back, he took me to a long outhouse with its doors hanging from the hinges, and shut in by the water of the bay, which reached under cover as far as the extremity of a floor of wooden planks, smelling of the green slime of winkles, clams
in shadow, stranded jellyfish, and rotting seaweed: with that penetrating odour of fermenting sourness, of sex and moss, dried fish scales, amber and saturated wood that is the smell of the sea at its work of destruction—a smell reminiscent of that of a wine press sleeping under its floor of grapes and nightly distilling its aftertaste of must. This was the boathouse where had been kept, only a short while ago, the elegant, light, pointed boats of the members of a yacht club that had come down in the world through the collapse of my currency. The boats themselves had vanished, and what in fact remained—the Consul’s remarks had prepared me for this—indefinably reminded me by their Victorian style, like a copperplate engraving, a
ciné Lumière
, and a junk shop at the same time, of the illustrations to
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
in the Hetzel edition, with its title stamped in gilt on raspberry-coloured boards. Old armchairs, furniture suitable to Mr. Pickwick, with hunting horns hanging on the walls; etchings so encroached upon by fungi and saltpetre that their subject had disappeared beneath fungus and saltpetre, and fungus and saltpetre had become the only subject. And, looking at these unexpected objects filling the place—feeling somewhat strengthened personally by the unhoped-for disappearance of the people who had been insulting me a few minutes ago, and my legs cured of their trembling by the drinks I had swallowed—I am surprised by the value certain elements in my surroundings have suddenly acquired, by the new significance objects now possess, and by the way time is lengthened and expanded by immediate danger of death. An hour suddenly seems to last for two hours; each movement becomes a member of a hierarchy of successive movements, as in a military exercise; the sun moves more slowly or more quickly; a vast space yawns between ten o’clock and eleven; night is so far away that its arrival might perhaps be indefinitely delayed;
the advance of an insect over the cover of that book acquires enormous importance; the spiders’ webs spread themselves out into works of art from the Sistine Chapel; the indifference of the seagulls, busy over their fishing as usual on a day like this, seems to me nothing short of indecent; the bell tolling once more from the hermitage in the mountains sounds disrespectful; I am deafened by the dripping of a tap, with its obsessional “never more, never more, never more.” Yet, at the same time, this fantastic capacity to give sustained, acute, excessive attention to the appearances of things, to what is revealed, or grows bigger without changing shape, is as if contemplation were equivalent to clutching something, to saying: “I see, therefore I am.” And since “I see” will have greater significance when I do see more, I am establishing the permanence of existence both within and outside myself.

Now the Consul is showing me a rare collection of root sculptures, sculpture roots, root forms, root objects—baroque roots of roots that are austere in their smoothness; complicated, intricate, or nobly geometrical; at times dancing, at times static, or totemic, or sexual, something between an animal and a theorem, a play of knots, a play of asymmetry, now alive, now fossilised—which the Yankee tells me he has collected on numerous expeditions along the shores of the continent. Roots torn up from remote soil, dragged along, cast up, and again transported by rivers in spate; roots sculpted by the water, hurled about, knocked over, polished, burnished, silvered, denuded of their silver, until from so many journeys, falls, collisions with rocks, battles with other pieces of wood on the move, they have finally lost their vegetable morphology, become separated from the tree mother, the genealogical tree, and acquired breast-like roundnesses, polyhedric arms, boars’ heads or idols’ faces, teeth, claws, tentacles, penises, and crowns, or are intimately connected in obscene imbrications,
before being stranded, after a journey lasting centuries, on some beach forgotten by maps. That huge mandragora with its fierce thorns had been found by the Consul at the mouth of the Bio-Bio, close to the jagged rocks of Con-Con, rocking in a hammock of black waters. That other mandragora, contorted and acrobatic, with its fungus hat and bulging eyes—rather like the “root of life,” which certain Asiatic peoples put in flasks of aguardiente—had been found near Tucupita in the estuary of the Orinoco. Others came from the island of Nevis, from Aruba, from the rocks like basalt menhirs that rise amidst thunderous marine gorges near Valparaiso. And it was enough to mention the name of a port to the collector for him to pass from the root found there to the invocation, evocation, presentation of images brought to life by the syllables making up its name, or the proliferative activity of the letters—so he said—a process such as was foreshadowed in the Hebrew Kabbalah. And merely by pronouncing the word
Valparaiso
there were plateaux of jurel fish lying on seaweed, a display of fruit in the church porch, the windows of inns showing the whole counter covered in apocalyptic spider crabs from Tierra del Fuego; and there were the German beer shops in the main street, where reddish-black sausages spotted with bacon fat lay beside warm strudels powdered with sugar; and there were the enormous public lifts, tirelessly moving parallel to each other, with orchestras of blind men playing polkas in the tunnels by which you reached them; and there were the pawnshops, with a broad-buckled belt, a reliquary made of shells, a scalpel with a jagged edge, a negro figure from Easter Island, slippers embroidered with
Souv
(for the left foot) and
Enir
(for the right), which, when put endways on to the passer-by, illustrated with amazing eloquence Kant’s Paradox of the Looking-glass.