Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  They seated themselves in the front row, the conductor raised his baton, and the huge orchestra spread at his feet began to play, soundlessly. It made no sound, but emitted a murmur, a quivering, a whispering of a note here and a note there which didn’t amount to music …

  “And is there no Overture?” asked the Head of State.

  “It’s coming, it’s coming,” said Peralta, hoping that the sound would grow, rise, become definite and swell into a fortissimo. “Faust and Aida begin like this, almost in silence (I think they call it a la sordina), so as to prepare one all the more for what is to come next.” But now the curtain was going up and it was still the same. The musicians were all there, numbers of them, intent, with their eyes on their music—yet they had achieved nothing. They were testing their reeds, shaking the saliva from their horns, giving a half-turn to their instruments, making a string vibrate, sweeping their harps with their fingertips without succeeding in producing anything like a definite melody. A little stress here, an imperceptible plaint there, themes sketched, impulses still-born, and on the stage two characters gassing away but unable to make up their minds to sing. And now—a change of scene—here is a mediaeval lady reading a letter aloud in an accent from Kansas City. An old man is listening. Shaking his head like someone who didn’t want to hear, who was bored; and then came the interval.

  The sight of the galleries and corridors now aroused some amusing and pungent reflections in the President’s mind, about the artificiality of the aristocracy of New York, and how pompously they showed off, compared with that of Paris. However well-cut a tailcoat might be, on the back of a Yankee it made him look like a conjurer. When he bowed in his white tie and shirtfront one expected a rabbit or a pigeon to emerge from his top hat. The matrons of the Four Hundred wore too much ermine, too many tiaras, too many of Tiffany’s wares. Behind them one glimpsed luxurious houses, with gothic fireplaces bought in Flanders, columns from Cluniac monasteries transhipped in the holds of transatlantic liners, pictures by Rubens or Rosa Bonheur and some authentic Tanagras, whose dancing movements were out of rhythm with the beat of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” pouring in through the renaissance windows. Although some surnames from the former Dutch or British ascendancy went back to the seventeenth century, when they were heard in proximity to Central Park they absorbed an indefinable quality of being imported products—at the same time false and exotic, like those vague titles of Marqueses de la Real Proclamacion or del Merito or del Premio Real that we have in Latin America. That aristocracy was as fictitious as the atmosphere of the opera they were putting on this evening, with its floating Mediaevalism, its ogival arches all over the place, its vaguely dynastic furniture, its battlements of no special date emerging from a perpetual mist to suit the taste of the designer.

  The curtain went up again and other scenes and another interval followed; the curtain went up yet again and more scenes followed, all submerged in evanescent pearly haze, with caves, shadows, serenades, an invisible chorus, doves that didn’t fly, three dead beggars, distant flocks of sheep, things seen by others but not visible to us … And when at last the final interval was reached the Head of State broke out: “No one is really singing here; there is no baritone, tenor, or bass … there are no arias … no ballet … not a single ensemble … and what a little squit that fat-arsed American girl is, dressed as a boy, looking through the window to see what’s going on in the room where, needless to say, the handsome young man and the long-haired blonde are hard at it. And the cuckold in despair downstairs. And that old man with a face like Charles Darwin, who says that if he was God he would be sorry for human heartache. The fact is that although our friend the Academician, and that other chap, D’Annunzio, tell me that this is a masterpiece, I’d rather have Manon, Traviata, and Carmen. And talking of whores, take me to a brothel.”

  And, in no time, the three of them found themselves in an apartment on Forty-second Street where some blondes, with faces made up and hair combed to look like cinema stars, served them with mixed drinks—it was the fashion at this time to mix drinks—after which they amused themselves by comparing what was provided here with the Veracruzan minyules of the Hotel Diligencias, pink punches of the Antilles and Cuban mojos with their iced mint leaves, rocios de gallo (made of gin and angostura) and zamuritas of cress or lemon, pineapple or agave juice with salt, from our Torrid Zone. The women were amazed that in spite of his obvious age the Head of State could swallow so many drinks—always with a regal and deliberate gesture—without getting tangled up in stories that never ended, or losing his aristocratic air. It was unusual for his son Ariel to see him drink like this—“It’s a special occasion,” said Peralta—because when the Dictator was moving in palace circles he was—with his famous drinking of healths in mineral water, and his praise of Peregrino, whose bottling establishment he had bought—a model of sobriety. At fiestas and celebrations he never exceeded one or two glasses of champagne, and his tone became emphatic and his brow furrowed when he broached the serious theme of the constant proliferation of bars and taverns, one of the great social problems of the nation, a defect we owed to the vicious nature of the Indians and the Spanish colony’s ancient monopoly of aguardiente. But people didn’t know that inside a case invariably carried by Doctor Peralta—which looked as if it contained papers of transcendental importance—there were in fact ten flasks, very flat and curved to slip easily into a pocket, such as are made in England, which, being covered in pigskin—and bought at the smart Parisian shop Hermès—never clinked when they were thrown together. So it was that in the presidential study, in the dressing room attached to the Council Chamber, in his bedroom—and of course the Mayorala Elmira was in on the secret—in the train, in the pauses of any journey by road, it was enough for the Head of State to put a thumb to his left ear for one of the flasks instantly to appear out of the secretary’s bureaucratic briefcase. In other respects, the always serious, frowning drinker—a “before-breakfast man” for whom the good Elmira prepared lots of tamarind juice quite early to refresh “his livers” (she always used the plural)—took the greatest possible care to hide a long-standing addiction to Santa Inés rum, which—it must be admitted—in no way affected the rhythm of his movements, nor the balance of his judgement when faced with some unexpected predicament, nor the almost natural flow of his perspiration: he always talked to people—his head slightly on one side so that his breath would be diverted—across a table, or keeping a definite distance, thus increasing the respect due to his patriarchal figure. To these precautions he added constant use of toothpaste, peppermint lozenges, cachous, and a suspicion of liquorice, flavouring the halo of eau de Cologne or lavender water that always clung to his under-garments and stiff shirts, all most suitable to the dignity of the Head of the State.

  Seeing his father drinking that night, Ariel was amazed to find he had a power of absorption greater than his own.

  “It’s because he has a virgin organism,” said Doctor Peralta. “He’s not like us, who carry the ‘mother liquor’ about inside us and can never get rid of it.”

  Next day, after purchasing from Brentano’s an exquisite edition of Sarmiento’s Facundo—which gave rise to some bitter thoughts about the dramatic fate of Latin American peoples, always engaged in a Manichaean struggle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and dictatorship—the Head of State went on board the Dutch cargo ship which was to make a short call at Havana. And the sea was becoming less grey, and the broad yellow Caribbean moons were shining on a recurring baroque pattern of sargasso and flying fish.

  “The air already smells different,” said the Head of State, absorbing a breeze laden with the unmistakable scent of mangroves.

  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, th
e 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.