Reasons of State (7 page)

Arrived in Havana, the Consul told them that, in spite of his present lack of light arms, Colonel Hoffmann was maintaining his defensive position, although the revolutionaries had made no futher progress. Everything was the same
as when the cable was sent to Paris. As the news was good and carnival was in progress, the Head of State watched the fancy-dress procession and masquerades, and threw paper streamers down on them from above. Then he hired a black domino and went to the Shoemakers’ Ball, where a mulatto girl dressed as a marquise of the period of Louis XV or XVI—in a red crinoline, with powdered hair, a beauty spot on her rouged cheek, a red-and-green fan, and a tortoiseshell lorgnette—taught him how to dance without dancing, all on one tile; to jig up and down, almost without moving, in smaller and smaller, slower circles, ending up in mutual immobility, breathing the perfume of satin so drenched with sweat that it was more like skin than skin itself—all this in a din of cornets, clarinets, and kettle drums, produced by Valenzuela and Corbacho’s orchestra. When the masqueraders began to disperse, the lights of the theatre to go out, tier by tier, the mulatto invited the Head of State to sleep with her in a room she had near the Arco de Belén, in a “modest but respectable house”—so she said—with a patio planted with pomegranates, basil, and ferns. They took a cab, drawn by a scraggy horse whose driver urged it forward—it was practically asleep—with a spur fastened to the end of a stick, and passed between tall sleeping houses smelling of dried beef, molasses, and the steam of roasting, blown this way and that, as they entered the orbit of the breeze from the port, the effluvium of brown sugar, hot furnaces and green coffee, within a widespread reek of stables, saddlers, and mildewed old walls still cool with night dew, saltpetre, and mosses.

“Watch while I sleep, my friend,” said the Head of State to me.

“Don’t worry, my friend, I’ve got the needful here,” I said, taking my Browning out of my breast pocket. And while the Head of State and the mulatto disappeared for I don’t know how long behind a blue door, I installed myself on a cowhide
stool, with my weapon across my thighs. However, no one knew that my president was in the city. He had disembarked with a false passport, to avoid the news of his journey reaching the place where he wanted to arrive entirely unexpectedly.

The cocks crowed, the awnings were brought down, and in a few minutes the normal everyday noises increased; lorries and vans went by, with their crescendo and decrescendo of bells; blinds were pulled; shutters creaked; trays and buckets fell over: “Flooo-wers, flowers; brooo-brooms; lottery tickets; a lucky number?” Hawkers of fruit, avocados, and tamales cried their wares with a sound like Gregorian chant; others offered to exchange bottles for toffee apples, and the morning news was shouted by paper sellers: a Cuban airman, Rosillo, had beaten the Frenchman, Pegoud, at looping the loop at the Bien Aparecida airfield yesterday; a suicide by fire; cattle rustlers captured in Camagüey; a cold spell—13 degrees according to the Observatory—on the heights of Placetas; confused situation in Mexico—where there actually was a revolution going on, as we know by the terrifying accounts of Don Porfirio; and in our own country, yes, in our own country, the crier’s voice had named it, there had been a victory for Ataúlfo Galván (yes, “a victory,” I think he said) in the region of Nueva Córdoba.

The shock of this awoke the Head of State, who had been asleep with one huge thick thigh thrown over the just as fleshy but longer thigh of the mulatto, and composed and dignified, we now walked together to San Francisco Quay, where the cargo boat was waiting to weigh anchor. A barrel organ decked out in tassels and portraits of La Chelito and La Bella Camelia suddenly struck up the piercing din of a bull-fighting
pasodoble
.

“What a noisy town!” remarked the President. “Our capital is a monastery in comparison.”

And here we are now, in Puerto Araguato, where Colonel Hoffmann is waiting for us, standing stiffly to attention, wearing his best monocle, and with the good news that nothing has changed. The rebellion has been supported only in the northern provinces, whose population has a long tradition of hostility to the Central Power, believing themselves slighted, belittled, treated like a poor relation, although they possess the richest and most productive land in the country. Of the fifty-three risings in the last century, more than forty were led by caudillos from the north. Nobody yet knew, except the ministers and highest officers of the army, that the Chief of State was to arrive today. This should make the most of the surprise. (Feeling sadder now than before at the treachery of the man I had most trusted, I had been gazing at the view of the port from the deck of the cutter that was conveying me and was suddenly moved to sentimental but irrepressible tears by the sight of the rows of cottages and farms heaped up against the hill, like fragile cards in a house of cards. With my anger dissolving at this reunion with my own country, I noticed from the quivering of the lamplight that this air was the air of my air; that some water brought me to quench my thirst, though it was water like any other, suddenly reminded me of forgotten tastes, linked to faces from the past, to things seen by my eyes and stored away in my mind. Breathe deeply. Drink slowly. Go back. Paramnesia. And now that the train is going up and up, in endless curves and tunnels, making short stops now and again between cliffs and the scrubby woods of the Torrid Zone, I see, with the eyes of smell, the outline of leaves growing inside chapels of shadow; I depict for myself the architecture of a tree by the plaintive creaking of a bough; and know what fungi grow on the bark of the amaranth by the permanence of its remembered aroma.

As though naked and unarmed, mollified, disposed to
indulgence, settlement, possible accommodation—things derived from an
over there
that from hour to hour was being left further behind at the foot of its Arc de Triomphe—as I climbed towards the seat of the presidency and regained an aggressiveness possibly due to the surrounding vegetation and its uninterrupted battle to reconquer the open space of the railway line along which our locomotive was winding, I considered recent events with greater animosity and passion. Every two hundred metres climbed by the engine added to my authority and stature, strengthened also by the thin air from the high peaks. I must be hard, implacable; this was demanded by the implacable, pitiless Powers that still made up the dark and all-powerful reason of existence—the visceral peristalsis—of the world in gestation, though problematic as to shapes, desires, impulses, and limits. Because
over there—
now the over there of
over there
—the seaport of Basilia still continued to exist and carry on its Rhenish occupations of the year 1000, and the Seine with its
bâteau-mouches
was still cut up by the changeless cross-bars of the Pont Neuf with its booths and pseudo-renaissance tabarins; while here and now, jungle scrambled over jungle, estuaries twisted and turned, rivers changed course and left their beds between night and morning, so that twenty towns built in a single day out of anything from plastered dung to marble, from pigsties to castles, from gaucho guitar music to the voice of Enrico Caruso, suddenly fell into ruins, disreputable and abandoned, until even the saltpetre had ceased being of interest to the world, even the seabirds’ excrement—the guano, such as covers the rocks with milky slime—was no longer quoted on the Stock Exchange, with shouting and scribbling on slates, bidding and overbidding, now that its place had been taken by some chemical substance manufactured in German test tubes. As I filled my lungs with the breath of my native air,
I became more and more a president.) And I really was the President, standing erect and stiff on the platform of the train, my expression hard, whip in hand, my attitude grim, when we arrived at the capital through the familiar landscape of the suburbs; here was the soap factory, the sawmill, the powerhouse; on the right, the rambling country house with caryatids and telamons, and its ruined mosaic-covered minaret; on the left, the huge advertisement for Scott’s Emulsion and the other for Pompeian Lotion. Sloan’s Liniment, useful for everything; Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Mixture—a portrait with bare throat and cameos—sovereign cure for all menstrual disorders. And above all—above all—Aunt Jemima’s Flour—be sure to remember the brand—a universal favourite in suburbs, tenements, and smallholdings because the label had on it the figure of a negress from the south, with a checked handkerchief on her head such as is worn by the people of the lowlands hereabouts. (“She’s almost exactly like the grandmother of that Prussian, Hoffmann,” people used to say jokingly, remembering that the old woman had been relegated to the furthest outbuildings of his house, and was never present at the Colonel’s dinners and parties; she was seen in the street only when going to six o’clock communion, or she would take to haggling at the top of her voice over the price of marjoram or lettuce at the stalls of market gardeners, who used to drive their heavily burdened donkeys from the surrounding mountains in the early mornings, before the daily awakening in sunlight of the Tutelary Volcano.)

Railway lines crossing, signals rushing to meet us, and at two o’clock in the morning we entered the deserted station of the Great Eastern Railway, all made of iron and frosted glass—much of it broken—built some time ago by the Frenchman Baltard. The United States military attaché was waiting
for us on the platform, along with members of the Cabinet. And in several motor cars we crossed the silent town, as silent as if uninhabited, because of the curfew, which had been put forward from eight o’clock in the evening to six, and (starting today) to half past four. Grey, ochre and yellow houses with doors and windows closed and rusty pipes spouting water from their roofs slept on raised sidewalks. The equestrian statue of the Founder of the Nation loomed in melancholy solitude, in spite of the presence of the bronze heroes standing beneath him in the Plaza Municipal. The Grand Theatre, with its classical columns, looked like some sumptuous cenotaph in the absence of any human figures. All the lights of the Government Palace were lit, in honour of the Extraordinary Council, which had lasted ever since breakfast time. And at ten o’clock, in response to a very sensational special edition of the morning newspaper, an enormous crowd had assembled in front of the façade of tiles and volcanic stone built in the days of the Conquest by an inspired Jewish architect, a fugitive from the Holy Inquisition, to whom we owe the most beautiful colonial churches in the country—the finest of all being the National Sanctuary of the Divine Shepherdess in Nueva Córdoba.

When the Head of State appeared on the balcony of honour, he was greeted with acclamations that sent a great cloud of pigeons over the roofs and terraces that chequered the valley with red and white, between thirty-two more or less aspiring belfries. After the cheering had died down, the President slowly and with marked pauses, as was his custom, began to make a clearly articulated speech in his resonant tenor voice, exact in its purpose, though embellished, so thought some, with too many expressions such as “nomadic,” “myrobalantic,” “rocambolesque,” “eristic,” “apodeictic”; before this he had already elevated the tone by a glittering mobilisation of
“acting against the grain,” “swords of Damocles,” “crossing the Rubicon,” trumpets of Jericho, Cyranos, Tartarins, and Clavileños, all mixed up together with lofty palm trees, solitary condors, and white pelicans; he then set about reproaching the “janissaries of nepotism,” the “imitative demagogues,” the “condottieri of fastidiousness,” who were always ready to break their swords in some wild undertaking: creators of discord, whereas industry and a patriarchal view of life should make us all members of one great family—but of a Great Family, which although reasonable and united was always severe and inexorable to its Prodigal Sons—who, instead of repenting of their errors as in the biblical parable, tried to set fire to and destroy the Homestead where they had grown to Man’s estate and been heaped with honours and degrees. The Head of State was often a good deal jeered at for the affected turns and twists of his oratory. But—or so Peralta believed—he didn’t use them out of love of pure verbal baroque; he knew that such artificial language had created a style that was part of his image, and that the use of words, adjectives and unusual epithets seldom understood by his hearers, far from being prejudicial, flattered some atavistic taste of theirs for what was precious and flowery, and thus gained him fame as a master of language, whose tone was in strong contrast to the monotonous, badly constructed military pronouncements of his adversary.

The speech ended with an emotional call to all citizens of good will to be calm, peaceful, and united, worthy heirs of the Founders of the Nation and Fathers of the Country, whose revered tombs were lined up in the aisles of the pantheon close by (“… turn your heads and contemplate with the eyes of your mind the tall Babylonian tower that …” etc., etc.).

Hearing an end to the cheering, the orator retired into the Council Chamber, where several maps were spread out on
a large mahogany table. With little flags on pins—one sort for the nationalists, another for the reds—Colonel Walter Hoffmann, President of the Council and now Minister for War, traced a compact and clear picture of the military situation. On this line were the bastards and sons of bitches; here, here, and here, the defenders of the national honour. The bastards and sons of bitches had been joined by other bastards and sons of bitches during the last few weeks: this was obvious. But now that the Pacific zone had been handed over to United Fruit, the possibility of their landing munitions in the Bay of the Negro had been nullified. The loyalists had contained the advance of the revolutionaries to the north-east.

“But if we had had more arms we could have done more.”

“Within a week we shall have everything we need,” said the Head of State, checking the invoices of the cargo put aboard in Florida. Meanwhile he must strengthen the morale and combativeness of the constitutional troops. He would set off himself that same night for the zone of operations. The general aspect of the situation, although serious, could be considered optimistically.