Reasons of State (39 page)

And that afternoon I wept. I wept because a dictionary—“
Je sême à tout vent
”—was unaware of my existence.

SEIGNORIAL AND HARMONIOUS, SOLIDLY ESTABLISHED within the circle of architectural blocks that surrounded the triumphal square—as if armoured against some attack from outside by a thick patina, growing darker every year, and variegated by mouldings and reliefs—the house in the Rue de Tilsitt received him in the lap of her porch protected by high black grilles, just as a mountain inn receives the alpinist who has lost his way and knocks at the door after a hallucinatory journey between avalanches and precipices. It was five o’clock in the morning. Using his private key so as not to wake Sylvestre, the Head of State entered the hall and turned on the light. Behind him came the Mayorala, who had been shivering and coughing all the way from the Gare Saint-Lazare, in spite of the moth-eaten fur-lined coat she had bought in Bermuda; she complained of fainting fits, a cold on her chest, and aching bones, and asked for rum, a bed, and some balsam of Tolu.

“Give her whatever Santa Inés is left and take her up the back stairs to one of the rooms in the attic,” said the
Ex
(he called himself the
Ex
now, with irritable irony) to the cholo Mendoza, who arrived with the luggage. Alone at last, he looked around, noticing changes in decoration and furniture. Where he had expected to find the mahogany table with Chinese vases on it, the marble flower in whose corolla visiting cards used to be left, the water nymph swathed in her hair
who had as long as he could remember stood in front of crimson velvet hangings covered in daggers and swords, he now found himself faced by the nudity of walls painted a pale colour and with no decoration besides a few plaster arabesques, which with much thought might be seen as a very stylised representation of curving waves. As for the furniture, there was a long bench with cushions of a fiery colour that was perhaps the shade known as “tango,” and standing on narrow pedestals were glass spheres, prisms, and rhombs, enclosing electric lightbulbs.

“It’s not ugly; but what was here before was more distinguished-looking, more in keeping with the house,” reflected the
Ex
.

He went up to the first floor, delightedly sniffing the aroma of the polished walnut stairs, whose very permanence helped to annihilate the long, infinitely long time that had passed. The pale yellow light of the rising sun was already beginning to appear through the drawing-room curtains. The President went to one of the windows and parted the brocade to look out into the Place de la Concorde. There, as magnificent and regal as ever, stood the Arc de Triomphe, with its open-mouthed Marseillaise, its vociferous Tyrtaeus in armour, and the old warrior in a helmet, followed by the boy hero with his little balls exposed to view. There, for all time, was represented the genius of Cartesian France, the only country capable of having created the anti-Cartesian world, imagined, given life, raised up and then broken by an improbable Corsican, a portentous foreigner, sexually bewitched by a mulatto from Martinique, who had lost his general’s hat in a Muscovite fire after his armies, diluted with Poles and Mamelukes, had been thrashed by the guerrilla troops of the Cura Merino and the indomitable Juan Martín. But behind the man looking at this monument were some pictures that
might have represented the spirit of Cartesian France more completely. He turned on the light and went up to them. And what met his eyes was so unexpected, so absurd, and so inconceivable that he sank into a chair, stupefied but trying to understand.

Instead of Jean-Paul Laurens’ Merovingian Saint Radegonde with her pilgrims from Jerusalem there now stood three persons, if persons they could be called, their perfectly flat anatomy reduced to geometric planes, whose faces—assuming they were faces—were covered with masks. One of them wore a monk’s hood and carried a musical score in his hand; the middle one, in a clown’s hat, was blowing on something like a clarinet; the third, in harlequin checks, had a mandolin or guitar or lute, or heaven knows what, slung around his middle. And these three persons—if they really were persons—were there, motionless and grotesque, like creatures in a nightmare, gazing out—if that was what they were doing—with the air of people who are annoyed by the presence of an intruder. “What are you doing here?” they seemed to be saying. “What are you doing here?”

But this wasn’t all: on the other wall instead of Elstir’s delicate seascape there was something indescribable: a conjunction of lines—horizontal, vertical, and diagonal, in the colours of earth and sand—on which had been stuck a piece cut out of a newspaper (
Le Matin
), which the
Ex
tried to remove with his thumbnail, but without success, as the varnish resisted his efforts. Opposite, where Dumont’s
Cardinals at Supper
used to hang, there was now something completely meaningless, which might perhaps be a pattern book of Ripolin paints, because it consisted of white, red, and green rectangles and circles, edged with thick black outlines. To the side, the place of Chocarne-Moreau’s
Little Chimney Sweep
had been taken by a kind of crooked, hunch-backed, bandy
Eiffel Tower, apparently broken down the middle by a titanic sledgehammer fallen from the sky. Over there, between the two doors, some women—women?—whose legs and arms were made of something like sections of central-heating tubing. Where I had placed Bérard’s
Fashionable Reception
, with its marvels of lace, décolletages, and figures silhouetted against the light, I was faced with an indescribable galimatias that, to crown all, displayed in clear round letters the title:
The Cacodylic Eye
. And there on a revolving pedestal of green marble stood a marble form, a formless form, without discernible meaning or purpose, with one ball—two—in its lower part, and a longer object above, which—forgive me the shocking idea—could only be taken for a not very realistic representation, much exaggerated in its proportions—and obscene of course—of what every virile male has where he has to have it.

“But what the hell is all this?”

“It’s modern art, Señor President,” murmured the cholo Mendoza softly; he had just left the Mayorala upstairs, wrapped in blankets, prostrate under a feather eiderdown.

And now the
Ex
hurried from room to room, finding everywhere the same pictorial transmutations, the same disasters: crazy, absurd, esoteric pictures, without any historical or legendary significance, without subject or message, dishes of fruit that weren’t dishes of fruit, houses looking like polyhedrons, faces with a set square for a nose, women with their tits out of place—one up, one down—or with one pupil on their temple, and farther on, so confused that it looked as if they must be fornicating, two fractured anatomies entangled in their own outlines, lesbian perhaps, although to paint two people doing
that
(and he had a good collection of pornographic plates locked away) one needed skill in draughtsmanship, knowledge of perspective, and art in portraying
entwined limbs, which these failed artists known as “modern” were very far from possessing, because they were incapable of drawing a nude perfectly, of planting a young Spartan in Thermopylae, of making a horse cantering that looked at all like a horse, of decorating—one may as well say at once—the ceilings of the Paris Opera House or of creating the illusion of a battle with Detaille’s epic brio.

“I shall give orders for all this filth to be taken down!” cried the master of the house, suddenly becoming the Master of the House and seizing hold of the picture of the
Cacodylic Eye
.

“What d’you think of it?” said Ofelia, who had just come into the room dressed in a dark blue tailor-made, her hair rather wild, her mascara smudged, and very obviously under the influence of drink.

“My dear girl!” said the Head of State, crushing her in his arms so suddenly and fondly that his voice ended in a sob. “My girl! My own flesh and blood!”

“Darling little papa!” she said, weeping also.

“So sexy and so lovely!”

“And you, so strong and splendid!”

“Come and sit beside me … I’ve got so much to talk to you about … I’ve so much to tell you …”

“It’s only that …” And over Ofelia’s shoulder, on which an orchid smelling of tobacco had finally finished fading, the
Ex
saw appearing, like the grotesque figures in a Flemish kermess, dishevelled, painted faces, faces that had been up all night and were certainly drunk.

“Some friends of mine … they shut the dance hall where we were having supper … We’ve come to go on with the party.” People, more people; unbuttoned, ungainly, slovenly people; rude, disrespectful, impudent people; people who made themselves at home—more than at home: as if in a
brothel—sitting on the floor, fetching bottles from the pantry, rolling back the carpet so as to be able to dance on the waxed wooden boards, regardless of the harm they might do. Women with their skirts above their knees, with their hair in a fringe that was the mark of a whore
over there
; young pederasts, with checked shirts that looked as if made out of cook’s aprons. And now the gramophone: “
Yes, we have no bananas
” (he had already endured this horror on board the boat throughout the whole Atlantic crossing), “
we have no bananas today
.” Ofelia was laughing with her friends, went away, turned, took records from the bookcase, came back with more drink, filled glasses, wound up the gramophone, and, as the
Ex
sat himself down resignedly on a divan, there was a dialogue of truncated scrappy sentences, never answered, and remarks that were left incompletely expressed between turns around the room: Ofelia hadn’t gone to the Gare Saint-Lazare, because the marconigram announcing his arrival had arrived yesterday afternoon when she was at a vernissage; from there they’d gone to celebrate and it wasn’t till now that she was given it by the concierge, who had only just got up: “But now we’ll really be happy; you mustn’t go back to that country of savages.” (“St. Louis Blues” was starting on the gramophone, bringing painful memories: it was what the Consul had played that afternoon.)

“Listen: I’ve brought the Mayorala.”

“And where is she?”

“Asleep upstairs.”

“Frankly, I wouldn’t have brought her,”

“She was the only person who didn’t betray me
over there …
why, even Peralta!”

“I always felt in my bones that he was a skunk.”

“Worse than that: a pocket Machiavelli.”

“Not that even: but Machiavelli’s pocket, perhaps.”
(Again:
Yes, we have no bananas
.) “I wouldn’t have brought the Mayorala: I can’t imagine her in Paris: she’ll be one more responsibility.”

“We must talk about that, we’ve got lots to talk about.”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.”

“But it already is
tomorrow
—it’s day already.” (“St. Louis Blues” again.)

“I say, are you going to leave all that filthy rubbish on the walls?”

“Oh, don’t be such a back number, my old darling; this is the art of today; you’ll soon get used to it.”

“And what about my Jean-Paul Laurens, my
Wolf of Gubbio
, my seascapes?”

“I sold them at the Hôtel Drouot; of course, I only got a miserable sum for the lot: people aren’t interested in that stuff now.”

“Damn it all! You might have asked me first!”

“How could I ask you when the papers kept saying at the time that they’d shot you? I got the news at the Seville Feria.” (
Yes, we have no bananas
once more.)

“And when they told you, did you cry much?”

“I cried and cried and cried.”

“Of course, you wore a black mantilla.”

“Wait, I must wind up the gramophone.” (“Yes,
we have no …
” rose in pitch from the depths where it had descended.)

“I say, are these people going to stay much longer?”

“If they want to stay, I won’t chuck them out.”

“It’s just that we’ve so much to talk about.”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow …”

“But it’s tomorrow already.”

“If you’re tired, why not go and have a sleep?” (A new record:
Je cherche après Titine, Titine, oh! ma Titine
: another obsessional tune from the boat.)

Now Ofelia left him alone on the divan and began dancing wildly with an Englishman with curly hair, whom she introduced to me as she passed, but without letting go of him, as Lord—I forget his name—whom she’d met in Capri and who—so I was told by the cholo Mendoza, now sitting beside me—had got into a scrape with the French police for using schoolboys from the Lycée Jeanson-de-Sailly in artistic scenic productions of one of Virgil’s
Bucolics
, yes, the one about Alexis, the shepherd boy; I know it, I know it. The
Ex
looked at his daughter and at all the others with growing irritation: those two women dancing together cheek to cheek. And those two men clutching each other around the waist. And that other short-haired female kissing the skinny blonde in a yellow shawl. And those stupid, incomprehensible paintings on the walls. And that obscene white sculpture, the marble phallus, surrounded by bottles of whisky with a horse on the label—white, too, but which had at least come to signify sterling worth. His face turned suddenly red in an access of rage—Mendoza recognised the symptoms—he crossed the room, lifted the sound box of the gramophone, threw several records on the floor, and stamped them to pieces.

“Clear all this drunken rubbish out of here!” he shouted. Standing protectively in front of the astonished few who remained, it was now Ofelia’s turn to look at her father with growing anger, like the chief of a tribe, measuring the strength of the adversary before attacking. The “darling little papa” was growing before her eyes—growing, blowing himself out, turning into a giant, breaking the walls with his hands and raising the roof with his shoulders. If he regained his old authority, and if she let him dominate her, order her about and make decisions in a house where she had dispensed with his presence very pleasantly for several years; if she didn’t humble his pride, and check his impulsive behaviour, he would end
up just as much of a tyrant
here
as he had been
there
—for he was accustomed to be a tyrant always.