The Orchids

by Thomas H. Cook

  I have seen them come and go, seen them all. I have sat upon my verandah, sipping vodka laced with lime, and watched the long, strutting parade of bejeweled potentates who have marched through the history of the Republic. They are nothing more than dung-crusted scrappings from the monument of him who came before them, the little orphaned paperhanger with the big ideas.

  He, the Leader, refused, even in his last hours, to confess. For him, there was no reason for penitence. He had nothing to confess but the weakness and timidity of his race. In the dank, burrowed solitude of his bunker, he issued a call to arms, reiterated the pillars of his certain faith, all those fiery ideas with which he had hoped to transform the world, and then, bowing courteously before the eyes of his adoring secretary, he took his leave.

  You may be sure that El Presidente will not leave the world so remarkably unbowed. And even should he wish to dictate some final message to mankind, he would have to do it in a motley, disorganized fashion, for there are no professional secretaries here in the Republic to record his lachrymose pronouncements. Indeed, there is little paperwork at all in the Republic. And although the file cabinets no doubt bulge in the Ministry of Police, those other great engines of government are here reduced to the pieties of the clergy and the rhetoric of the state. Here all is fever, usurpation, and combustible religion. That in the midst of so much richness, presided over by so much squalor, there is no one to be found to scratch one’s thoughts across a page as they are dictated presents itself as one of the contradictions of underdevelopment.

  And so, those who wish the lineaments of immortality here in the Republic are reduced to the machinery of transcription, a little purring disc spooling up yards of slick brown tape. El Presidente, in his last hours, must rely upon imported gadgetry to deify himself. The Leader, in his relentless stolidity, in his raging appetite for esteem, would have cringed at such indignity.

  And yet, it is difficult to know at what point the search for dignity descends into the vulgar. It can be said of my father that he had a certain bearing that was not without dignity. He was a tall, stately man who all his life affected a benign but studiously military carriage. The walls of our small provincial house, the walls inside which I came of age, were adorned with large paintings of heroic and mythological events. Suffering Prometheus hung upon his mountain fiercely defying black hordes of rapacious birds. Icarus soared above a little globe of earth, his wings melting forlornly at his sides. My father walked confidently among these icons of tortured heroism, but there were times when his eyes seemed to take on a latent ferocity, a bewildered rebellion against the unremitting mediocrity of bourgeois life. In the arc of his belly and the flaccid droop of his jowls, he sensed the insult of his body. He dreamed of the hard muscularity of his Teutonic gods and in his victimized imagination saw himself as a trim, steel cylinder of righteousness and knight-errantry. Once, during a Wagnerian excess at the opera house, I looked up and saw that he was panting. In this, even the boy I was could sense the grunt of his desire. In his pained and inescapable lowliness, he wished to clothe himself in immortal light, to rise above the petty annoyances and insufferable trivialities of his legal practice, the incessant bickerings of his disordered marriage, the pinched and carping contrivances of the bureaucratic state. He seemed always charged and ready for explosion. In the mute bitterness with which he endured his frustration one could sense the last strivings of his romance. Once released, his volcanic resentfulness could certainly have been channeled into special and cathartic action.

  “Peter! Peter!” It was my father calling. I could hear him in the little foyer down the hall. I opened the door of my room and saw him standing in the distance, his bald pate slick and shiny under the frosted lampshade that hung above him.

  “Yes, Father.” I remember my child’s voice as weak and thready, a sound that must have grated horribly on my father’s robust ear.

  He stretched out his hand. “Come.”

  I walked forward and took his hand. He led me out into the street and down the small alleyway toward the little park near the center of our village. The sky overhead was pewter gray, flat and monotonous as a sheet of smudged paper. Perhaps it might rain, I told my father, perhaps I should get my boots. He tightened his grip on my hand and quickened his pace.

  At the park he sat down and positioned me in front of him, standing at attention like a little toy soldier. To my right I could glimpse the brick-and-wrought-iron stand where the military bands played marches in the spring.

  “Peter, look at me.”

  I looked at him. He was a perfect representation of the stolid, provincial burgher, dressed in a suit and white shirt buttoned to the top, his shoes carefully laced and double-knotted. He had a pink, plump face with cheeks so flushed they looked purposefully rouged. His eyes bulged slightly behind his neat, black-framed glasses.

  “Peter,” he said, “the war is lost.”

  I was nine years old. What could such a statement mean to me? For children who are not actually devastated by it, war is no more than a merciful interruption of routine. In the schools there had been drives for steel and tin and clothing, each of which added a certain tension to the day, made it pass more quickly than usual.

  “Do you understand me?”

  What was I to understand? What does a child know of defeat, of humiliation, of devastated pride? We knew that in France since 1914 something mighty had been going on. But what, in the end, did it have to do with us? How could something so far away bring such sorrow to my father’s face?

  I said nothing. It was getting dark, the trees turning black against the sky.

  “We have been defeated,” my father said. He shook my shoulders slightly. “Defeated, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Father,” I said in a low voice.

  His face seemed to shrink back as he looked at me. I know now that what he wanted — what he always wanted — was for me to join him in his fantasy, to play Lohengrin in his Parsifal. “Is that all you have to say?” he demanded.

  “Defeated,” I repeated. I could feel the air of evening turning cool.

  My father delicately removed his glasses and wiped his eyes with a folded handkerchief. Even in grief, he was obsessively fastidious. “It’s not our fault,” he said, replacing his glasses. “You must remember that.”

  “Not our fault,” I said.

  “Yes,” my father said. He drew a deep, painful breath that seemed to expand his bulk from within, as if something were blowing up inside him. “It’s important that you remember that it was not our fault.”

  “Yes, Father,” the little brigadier said.

  My father placed both his large hands on my shoulders and pressed down. “I will not have you growing up defeated, do you understand?”

  I nodded. A small breeze blew a strand of hair across my forehead. He quickly swept it back.

  “We are never to feel defeated,” my father said. His voice was restrained, but there was an undiscoverable ferment behind his eyes, a crazed unrest.

  “I won’t, Father,” I said.

  He touched the side of his head with his index finger. “We must keep this in our minds.”

  I imitated his gesture. “In our minds.”

  “It is important.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  My father watched me suspiciously, his lower lip trembling. All his life, he was a creature of unfathomable loneliness.

  I stood quietly in front of him and probably would have stood there through the night if he had wanted, but suddenly the smell of sugar cookies surrounded me, lifting my spirits. I smiled.

  My father frowned. “What is it?”

  I stiffened my back reflexively. “Nothing, Father.”

  “That smile, what was that for?”

  “Nothing.”

  My father squeezed my shoulders. “Answer me!”

  I could not.

  My father stood up instantly and stared down at me with intense disapproval. “How can you smile after what I’ve told y
ou?” he said angrily.

  “I was not smiling,” I said quickly. The very idea of sugar cookies became nauseating.

  My father glared at me, then raised his hand and slapped my face. I could hear the sound of the blow ringing through the park.

  “You dishonor me!” he cried.

  “No, Father.”

  “You dishonor me!”

  I lowered my head.

  He took my chin in his hand and lifted it up. “You are like your mother,” he said. His face showed his disgust.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” I said desperately.

  “Like your mother. Stupid. Stupid.”

  For a moment I saw myself positioned in his sense of the Chain of Being, a vile, crawling thing that sickened him unspeakably.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” I whined. “I didn’t mean to smile. It was the sugar cookies.”

  My father’s face hardened. “Sugar cookies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sugar cookies? What are you talking about?”

  “From the bakery on Telemannstrasse,” I explained. “They are making them. They smell sweet.”

  “How can you think of such things?”

  “It was just the smell,” I said, trembling. “I didn’t mean to smile.”

  My father dropped to the bench, his shoulders slumping forward. “Sugar cookies,” he muttered.

  Then I saw defeat. Not in France, but in him. “Father, I’m sorry,” I said weakly.

  My father’s head bent forward. I could almost see my face reflected in the sleek smoothness of his skull.

  “I didn’t mean to smile, Father,” I said again.

  He looked at me. “You must learn to care about things, Peter. Do you think the world is sweet? Do you think it is made of sugar cookies?”

  “No, Father,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  My father shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said wearily. And then, in a low voice, almost to himself, “They will come here. We are at their mercy now.”

  “Who?”

  “The enemy.”

  In my childishness I could not even be sure exactly who the enemy was.

  “It’ll be all right, Father,” I said.

  “I don’t know what will happen now,” my father said without looking up.

  “Nothing will happen. It will be all right,” I said. I felt the urge to touch his shoulders, but I was afraid to do it.

  “They will come here,” my father said. “The enemy.”

  And then in my imagination I saw them, the enemy. They were not people at all, but great, woolly monsters. In my mind I saw them clawing up the pavement of the Unter den Linden and scratching their matted, filthy behinds on the lofty archway of the Brandenburg Gate.

  OLD MEN watch the world from a certain distance. From the heights of my verandah I can see Esperanza as she bends over the river scrubbing my white linen shirts on a large flat stone. There are no modern conveniences in El Caliz. And throughout the Republic there are very few. Of course, in El Presidente’s palace the rooms are stacked to the ceiling with every imaginable mechanical contraption. He is a connoisseur of all the little humming trinkets of advanced industrial society. From the great enterprising nations he imports thousands of toasters, televisions, electric pencil sharpeners, and the like. It is said that he has devoted one huge hall to the working of such things. The walls are empty save for row upon row of electrical outlets. These he uses to feed a current through a jungle of extension cords powering hundreds of small machines, infinite in their variety. When he pulls the switch, they clang and hiss and sizzle, and it is said that nothing can be heard above this metallic bedlam except the gleeful laughter of El Presidente.

  Esperanza slaps a shirt against a stone. The very monotony of her action makes it clear that part of the tedium of the primitive lies in the incessant passing of day into day until the nature of labor becomes, finally, the nature of life. The lowly character of Esperanza’s work reflects the low esteem with which she and all her kind are regarded by El Presidente. And yet Esperanza has triumphed over the debased quality of her circumstances. From within the depths of her impoverishment she has seized a spirit in its flight and prisoned it within the confines of her potions and incantations. She has captured God, and dispenses his indecipherable favors to the villagers who gather nightly in her hut. They come to hear their futures spun out from Esperanza’s mouth like the endless string of Fortune’s wheel. Will the child be a changeling? Will the sugar cane rise tall in season? Will the bats suck dry the herds? To all these questions Esperanza gives certain answer, and the villagers, in the desperate precariousness of their need, remember when she is right and forget when she is wrong.

  In the Camp, there were others such as she, people who claimed special powers of clairvoyance and enchantment. The withered vermin came to them, begging for blessings from their bony fingers. They sat hollow-eyed and shivering while these prophets rolled their eyes toward the sky. They pleaded with a special fervency for news concerning lost family and friends. The prophets listened quietly, then bleated these same questions heavenward, knowing all the time that the ashes of the loved ones were smoldering in the crematoria.

  Esperanza bats at a mosquito, then turns back to her work. Loudly, she slaps the shirts onto the rock, then kneads them with her fists. The sky is bleaching overhead. Heat in El Caliz acts as a great sponge, sucking up speculation. The heat is the given, a world unto itself, beyond which nothing is truly imaginable. El Presidente, however, has three huge air conditioners in his gilded throne room. He has attached long multicolored ribbons to the vents so that they blow wildly in the air, filling the room with the sound of their snapping. In the unnatural cool El Presidente may exercise his mind, hatching exotic visions of deflowered maidens and the smooth brown thighs of uninitiated boys. But Esperanza, slowly cooking in the heat, can think only of God and water.

  The Archbishop of the Republic also thinks of God, though less of water. He serves as spiritual adviser for El Presidente and acts as personal emissary between His Excellency and God. Often, he sits in the left-hand corner of the throne room, snoozing beneath his vestments. But there are times when he is said to rise and whisper advice into El Presidente’s gnarled ear. Citizens are not privy to the Archbishop’s recommendations, although it is known that on occasion he has warned against the education of the masses, a suggestion based upon his fear that they have not yet been properly prepared for the burdensome responsibilities of intelligence.

  Thus, learning in the Republic remains a matter of seed and prayer. The seed is winnowed from the ripening crops and gathered up in burlap bags. These sacks are held in the Central Warehouses, which are the exclusive possessions of El Presidente. On occasion — and at a whim — he is said to have denied access to these cordoned and garrisoned depositories, and whole villages have disappeared. It is not within the competence of El Presidente to hoard the fruits of prayer.

  Esperanza finishes her last shirt and rises, placing the large basket of clothes on her head. She lumbers toward the main house, her feet sinking slightly into the sodden clay along the riverbank. Her determined lurch suggests resolute purpose. She has taken on the intransigence of her task, and each gesture reflects this hard determination. Clothes must be cleaned because I, Don Pedro, have required it. There can be no turning from the task. The spirit world that flutters in her brain must momentarily retire into its own tumid cavern. It cannot be allowed to swirl in the soap and water, cannot be permitted to becloud the priority of labor.

  Two separate worlds coexist in the Republic: leisure and labor. Labor does not purchase leisure. It is a dreary coin that can buy nothing but more of itself. Leisure is the prerogative of birth. In the great rubber estates to the east, the children of the aging barons snore quietly under the vaporous whiteness of gently fluttering marquisette. For them, all labor is reduced to tending periodic disturbances of the head and bowels. They are born into a world of latticework and vine, marry under an arboreal arch, b
etray their spouses in a pool of water lilies, stupefy themselves with vodka imported from the workers’ paradise, and wait for their elders to die amid the priestly mummery of Christ. When at last they come into their legacy, there is nothing for them to do but acquire. And so they import vast quantities of luxury goods from the great nations of the developed world. They fill their halls with television sets, stock their kitchens with refrigerators and electric mixers — though often the web of electric wire that crisscrosses the Republic does not extend to their distant haciendas. Hence the tedium is unrelieved, and the local elite merely lounge on French settees or stand blank-faced as the portraits of Fragonard under enormous, tinkling, but unlit chandeliers.

  For them, El Presidente — both the real one and that of the outlawed poet Casamira’s wild invention — has nothing but contempt. Born from the grimy union of a sheep-herder and his toothless wife, he has seen the fire blazing on both sides. In the humid forests to the south, El Presidente came of age among the squalor of his kind. He saw banditti nail his brother to a jute tree and drunkenly throw darts at a crude target carved upon his. chest; saw his simple-minded cousin dragged slowly to death by a team of burros through a field of stumps and briar; saw his mother spit a clot of maggots from her mouth three days before she died. Beneath all his lunatic vainglory, El Presidente understands the Republic, understands the craving of the fallen for the holy, understands that nothing less than man transmogrified into God can hold the leprous body still. And no one in the Republic more clearly knows the value of a lie.

  In Casamira’s Official History of the Republic, El Presidente’s birth is described thus:

  El Presidente did not come easily to his people. The birth was long and torturous, and his mother, Mary, a gentle woman of the village and beloved by all the inhabitants there, behaved throughout her ordeal with that patience and self-sacrifice which have become the hallmarks of her firstborn son.