Reasons of State (5 page)

“Certainly,” agreed the Academician: but our politics, our abject politics, with its rioting, and conflict between parties and fierce parliamentary battles, was introducing confusion and disorder into this essentially rational country. The Panama scandal or the Dreyfus Affair would have been inconceivable in the time of Louis XIV. Not to mention the “socialist mire,” which, as our friend Gabriele D’Annunzio said, “is invading everything,” befouling all that was beautiful and pleasant in our ancient civilisations. Socialism (he sighed, looking at the toes of his patent-leather shoes). Forty kings had made France great. Look at England. Look at the Scandinavian countries, models of order and progress, where stevedores wear waistcoats at work and every bricklayer has a watch and chain under his overalls. Brazil was great when it had an emperor, like Pedro II, who was the friend, fellow diner, and admirer of that same Victor Hugo you all think so well of. Mexico was great when it had Porfirio Díaz as its almost permanent president. And if my country enjoyed
peace and prosperity, it was because my fellow countrymen, more intelligent perhaps than others on the Continent, had re-elected me three, four—how many times? Knowing that the continuity of power is a guarantee of material well-being and political equilibrium. Thanks to my government.

I interrupted him with a gesture of defence against the expected encomium, which would have relegated our countries of volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes to the peaceful latitude of Flemish lace makers or the aurora borealis.

“
Il me reste beaucoup à faire
,” I said. Nevertheless I was proud—very proud—of the fact that, after a whole century of tumult and uprisings, my own country had brought the cycle of revolutions to an end—revolutions that in America were counted merely as adolescent crises, the scarlatinas and measles of young, impetuous, passionate hot-blooded races, who had to be subjected to discipline sometimes.
Dura lex, sed lex …

There were cases when severity was necessary, the Academician thought. Besides, as Descartes put it so well: “Sovereigns have the right to modify customs to some extent.”

Ofelia had finished her very long session with “Für Elise”—we hadn’t noticed that the piano had been silent for some while—and she now came into the library, looking dazzling but strange, dressed in light-coloured muslin, a feather boa around her neck, a hat wreathed in flowers and with a hummingbird nesting among its roses, embroidered gloves, and a parasol whose handle was made of finely carved ivory; perfumed, and with a suggestion of hidden lingerie wafting through her clothes, her hair waved, her figure enhanced by bows and tight lacing. She advanced with a lively air, like a ship before the wind, a fully rigged model of Boldini’s.

“It’s the day of the Drags,” she said, reminding me that while I was talking to the Distinguished Academician a few
moments before, I had in fact seen crossing the Place de la Concorde some of those old-fashioned English carriages with double doors and high box seats, drawn by four horses, which would shortly drive off amid a great turmoil of sunshades, whip-cracking, and postillions’ bugles, to where the President of the Society of Steeplechasers was awaiting them, flanked by two huntsmen in scarlet livery.

“
Jamais je ne vous avais vu si belle
,” said the Distinguished Academician, weaving thereupon an elaborate compliment comparing my daughter to some sort of beautiful Gauguin rising from the foamy waves of a summer dawn.

“We
are
having fun,” murmured Peralta.

My face became serious: all this about Gauguin stressed our being foreigners—but Ofelia took it all in good part. “
Oh! Tout au plus la Noa-Noa du Seizième Arrondissement!
”

The truth is that her smooth complexion, derived from her Indian ancestry, was a feature of my daughter’s beauty. She had inherited none of the roundness of face, thickness of thighs, and width of hips of her sainted mother, who was much more of a peasant in complexion and figure. Ofelia was long-legged with small breasts, and slenderly built—a woman of the new race springing up
over there
—nor did her straight hair, artificially waved to suit the fashion, possess any of the natural fuzziness that many of our countrywomen counteracted by using the famous Walker Lotion, invented by a chemist of New Orleans.

Covering me in exaggerated caresses, Ofelia asked my permission to go away that same night, after the dinner at the Polo de Bagatelle to which she was invited. She wanted to be present at the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, which was opening on the following Tuesday with
Tristan und Isolde
.

“
Œuvre sublime!
” exclaimed the Academician, starting to hum the theme of the Vorspiel with the gestures of someone
conducting an invisible orchestra. Then he spoke of the superhuman voluptuousness of the second act, of the great solo for cor anglais in the third, of the paroxysmal chromatic progression, almost cruel in its intensity, of the “Liebestod,” and went on to ask my daughter whether she would enjoy visiting the Villa Wahnfried. Gratified by Ofelia’s dramatic emotion, as she declared that the mere thought of the Famous Mansion was to her so moving and sacred that she would never dare to enter it, the Academician went to the little boule Santa Inés writing table and took a sheet of paper. Would she take these lines of introduction to his friend Siegfried, a noted composer, although his works were seldom performed? But … how could one compose music if one was the son of Richard Wagner? And now his pen stopped its calligraphic career, adorned with Greek “e”s and tall “l”s: “
Voici, Mademoiselle
.” Would she greet Cosima affectionately from him? He warned her that the seats in the Festspielhaus were rather uncomfortable. But the pilgrimage to Bayreuth was something that every cultivated person must experience, even if only once in a lifetime—just as the Mohammedans went to Mecca or the Japanese climbed Fujiyama.

Taking the letter he had embellished with a Renaissance flourish composed of very carefully drawn capital letters, Ofelia left us, with renewed demonstrations of affection for such a kind father, who indulged her in everything—although to tell the truth I hadn’t given the smallest sign of pleasure at the idea of this sudden journey, which in fact thwarted my plan for her to act as hostess to a reception shortly to be given here in honour of the editor of the
Revue des Deux Mondes
, who was very much interested in publishing a long article on the splendid prosperity and stability of my country. Her kisses on my forehead had been pure humbug and play-acting for the benefit of our visitor, because in fact she never needed my
advice or consent to do whatever she fancied. She used and abused the terror inspired in me by her appalling rages, sudden losses of control whenever I tried to oppose her wishes—rages expressed in frantic stamping, obscene gestures, and such foul and insulting language that it seemed to come from a brothel or low nightclub. At such moments the “cunts” and “pricks” of the Infanta—as my secretary called her—reached as high as the allegoric figures on the Arc de Triomphe. But when the storm had passed, and she had got what she wanted, Ofelia used to return to her usual delicate language full of such subtle nuances that sometimes, after listening to her, I had to go to the dictionary to discover the exact significance of some adjective or adverb, possibly destined in the future to fill the sails of my own oratory.

When we were alone again, the Academician suddenly seemed depressed, remembering the years of poverty Richard Wagner had gone through, and the contempt that was felt for true artists in this horrible epoch. There was no Maecenas, no Lorenzo the Magnificent, no cultured Borgias, no Louis XIV, no Ludwig of Bavaria. Perhaps some Louis of the card table? He himself, in spite of his successful literary career, was not immune from want—so very far from immune, in fact—that under pressure from emissaries of the Law in cocked hats who might be knocking on the door of his house tomorrow with their symbolic ivory sticks (would such a thing have been conceivable in the Grand Siècle?) he had sorrowfully made up his mind to sell the manuscripts of two plays:
Robert Guiscard
(a historical pageant, whose chief characters were the Norman condottiere, his brother Rogerio, and the unfortunate Judith d’Evreux, which in spite of a masterly interpretation by Le Bargy, was a resounding flop) and
L’absent
(a drama of conscience: David and Bathsheba, whose nights of love were poisoned by the ghost of Uriah, etc.) which had been
performed more than two hundred times at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, to the great fury of that swine of a Jew Bernstein, who had thought of writing a piece on the same theme … But the bookshop around here hadn’t any funds available, and lawsuits couldn’t be postponed: tomorrow those men in cocked hats with their ivory-handled sticks … But perhaps the National Library of my country …?

He had no need to say more. I quickly wrote him out a cheque, which he received with the distrait air of a nobleman, without even looking to see what sum was written on it, although I suspect he knew from having watched the way my hand moved as I traced the numerals.

“
Ils sont très beaux
,” he said: large pages of art paper, enclosed in leather cases stamped with his ex-libris. “
Vous verrez
.”

The package, left downstairs, was brought up by Sylvestre. I untied the string, fondled the covers with their calligraphy in two different inks and drawings illustrating the text; I turned the pages with respectful slowness and felt grateful to the distinguished friend who had thought of the Library of my country to save these invaluable writings—a library that, modest though it was, possessed some extremely valuable incunables, Florentine maps, and a few codices from the Conquest. And noticing that his movements were being orchestrated into an ambiguous ceremony of departure, I stood up, as though to look towards the Arc de Triomphe, declaiming:

Feeling obliged to show me some gratitude, the Distinguished Academician picked up his top hat and his white
gloves and—knowing that it would please me—said that Hugo wasn’t such a bad poet after all, and it was understandable that we, who were so generous with our admiration for French culture, should continue to appreciate his great virtues as a lyric poet. But we must also get to know Gobineau; we
must
read Gobineau.

I went with him down the red-carpeted stairs as far as the front door. And I was just going to suggest to Doctor Peralta that we should go to the Rue des Acacias and visit Monsieur Musard’s
Bois-Charbons
, when a taxi drew up in front of us and out got the cholo
^*
Mendoza in a remarkably agitated state. Something serious had happened to my ambassador, because he was sweating—he always looked sweaty, but not so much as this—his parting was crooked, his tie carelessly knotted, and his grey felt boot tops badly laced. I was about to make a joke about his disappearances of several days—whether to Passy, Auteuil, or who could say where?—with the blonde of the moment, when with an agonised expression he handed me a deciphered cablegram of several pages: it was from Colonel Walter Hoffmann, President of my Cabinet:

“Read it … Read it.”

IT IS MY DUTY TO INFORM YOU THAT GENERAL ATAÚLFO GALVÁN HAS REBELLED SAN FELIPE DEL PALMAR WITH INFANTRY BATTALIONS 4,7,9,11,13
(
FOREMOST IN THE COUNTRY
)
AND THREE CAVALRY REGIMENTS INCLUDING
“
INDEPENDENCE OR DEATH
”
SQUADRON, AND FIVE ARTILLERY UNITS, TO CRIES OF
“
LONG LIVE THE CONSTITUTION, LONG LIVE THE LAW
.”

“The cunt! The son of a bitch!” yelled the Head of State, hurling the cables to the ground. “I’ve not finished reading it,” said the cholo Mendoza, picking up the papers. The movement had spread to three provinces of the north and threatened the Pacific zone. But the garrisons and officials of the Centre remained faithful to the government, so Hoffmann assured me. Nueva Córdoba was unaffected. Troops were patrolling the streets of Puerto Araguato. Curfew had been imposed, presumably pending guarantees of constitutional behaviour. The newspaper
Progreso
had been suppressed. The morale of government troops was good, but there was a shortage of armaments, especially light artillery and Maxim machine guns. His Excellency knew how loyal to him the capital was. They awaited instructions. “The cunt! The son of a bitch!” repeated the Head of State, as if his vocabulary was limited to these sordid phrases when thinking of the treachery of the man whom he had dragged from the squalor of a provincial barracks, the rubbishy, third-rate soldier whom he had helped, made rich, taught to use a fork and pull the lavatory chain, and converted into a gentleman, giving him braid and epaulettes, and finally appointing him Minister for War, and who now took advantage of his absence to … The man who, when in his cups at receptions at the palace, had so often called him his benefactor, providence, more than a father, a friend, godfather to my children, flesh of my flesh, to be rebelling thus, in the Bolivian style or that of the sudden risings of a past era, clamouring for respect for a constitution that had never been observed by any government since the Wars of Independence, because as we say
over there
: “theory is always buggered by practice” and “a leader with any spunk pays no attention to documents.”

“The cunt! The son of a bitch!” repeated the Head of State, who had now returned to the large drawing room and
was pouring himself great swigs of Santa Inés rum—a rum that no longer seemed merely the nostalgic breath of patriotic feelings in
laissez-vivre
Paris, but had suddenly become the wine of battle, hot and strong, foretelling hard, rough marches and counter-marches in the near future, the smell of horses, soldiers’ armpits, and gunpowder. And all at once, blotting out Jean-Paul Laurens’ blessed Radegonde, Elstir’s seascape, and Gérome’s gladiators, they were in the middle of a council of war. Forgotten was the adolescent hero of the Arc de Triomphe, although it was true that on its walls was inscribed the name of Miranda, precursor of American independence, who had refused to imitate the treachery of the infamous Dumouriez—another version of Ataúlfo Galván; forgotten was Monsieur Musard’s
Bois-Charbons
, where the Prime Minister and Doctor Peralta were so fond of taking a glass of Muscadet in the mornings, an aperitif at noon, and a Pernod in the evening, because that establishment with its aroma of charcoal, its modest counter set parallel to a wall covered with out-of-date almanacks, its allegorical picture of the Ascent and Descent of the Ages, its advertisements for Géraudel pastilles and Vino Mariani, reminded them of the bars and taverns of
over there
—with the same ambience, and decorative posters, and the cheerful sallies of clients fuddled on red wine, but always ready to discuss questions to do with cycling, recent films, women, politics, boxing, the passing of a comet, the conquest of the South Pole, or whatever they liked …