Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  “That’s not what we’re talking about; pornography does no harm to anyone, after all,” said the Minister for Education. “We mean books on anarchism, socialism, communism, workmen’s Internationals, revolution—Red Books: that’s what they’re called everywhere.”

  “Don’t let’s digress, gentlemen; don’t let’s digress,” said the Chief of Police, somewhat peevishly. The problem was simpler. As everyone knew, certain printed leaflets were in circulation, full of insults against the government, and written in an unmistakably Creole style—calumnies, of course, but the sort of calumny in common use among some sectors of the opposition. Not nihilist, nor anarcho-syndicalist, nor of the “as the gentleman says, but I don’t understand English” description. Our enemies were, quite simply, politicians in disguise, who were trying every way they knew to stir up feelings and overthrow the government. They’ve been watching us, they are all around; and now, with last night’s business, they have declared open war. And now that it was war, we would reply with war, he said, laying his pistol on the table.

  “But if there is to be war, we must know where the enemy is,” remarked the President.

  “Leave that to me. I know where to begin. I’ve already got some names on my list. I’ll read them if you like …”

  “Better not, Captain. I’m quite capable of being too lenient to some. I trust you entirely. Carry on. At once and forcibly. We understand one another.”

  “A mistake would be disastrous, however,” put in Peralta.

  “Errare humanum est,” concluded the Head of State in Petit Larousse Latin. And to cheer up his ministers, who were still looking worn out with anxiety and their late night, he sent for some bottles of cognac: “Just this once,” he said, filling a glass.

  “You’ve got every justification,” chorused the rest.

  The masons and plumbers were beginning to arrive to repair the bathroom, bringing tiles, blow lamps, and tools.

  “Anyway, look into this business of Red Literature,” said the Head of State to the captain, but in the tone of someone who doesn’t consider the matter of great importance.

  “Don’t worry, Señor. I have people trained for that sort of thing,” replied the other, taking his leave with the praiseworthy haste of someone who is eager to get to work.

  “We shall pull in a fine haul of pro-Germans today,” said Peralta.

  The people of the capital were treated to a strange and unexpected performance at about two in the afternoon that day. It was the hour when employees went back to their offices, the hour of dessert in restaurants, or of drinking under the awnings of cafés—the Tortoni, the Granja, or the Marquise de Sevigné—installed as a great novelty in imitation of what one saw in Paris, so the streets were full of people. And in these crowded streets there suddenly appeared, preceded by small cars—Fords, naturally—with their sirens screaming, some Black Marias, like cages on wheels, with fierce-looking policemen standing on the back steps, rifle in hand. It was soon learnt that these sinister vehicles, recently acquired by the government, were being used as substitutes for the earlier prison cars—“bird cages” as they were called—hitherto used to pick up drunks, thieves, and homosexuals. At the same time, unusual activity was noticed among the city police. Motorcycles going to and fro. Sudden appearances, now here, now there, of detectives, quickly spotted as such by their obvious attempts at “not attracting attention,” and dressed in a commerical traveller style mixed with that of Nick Carter, which left no room for doubt. And all the time those sirens went on calling to one another, stridently, disturbingly, from district to district, over the roofs and terraces, causing a panic among the pigeons fluttering between the modern buildings.

  “Something’s up,” people said in surprise. “Something’s happening.”

  And a great deal was happening, a great deal was in fact happening that day, which was becoming more and more overcast, with warm drizzle falling, hour by hour. At half past two in the afternoon the Vice-Chancellor of the University was explaining in a lecture the nominalism and voluntarism of William of Occam when the police burst into his classroom and took him and all his pupils prisoners for holding a demonstration. Continuing their task of subjugating the Faculty of Humanities, they carried off eight more professors with kicks and shoves towards the new prison cars. Tired of hearing him call upon their century-old rights and autonomy, Captain Valverde threw the Chancellor into the fountain in the central court, along with his mortarboard and gown—attributes he had tried to use to gain the “invaders” respect.

  At three o’clock, under orders from Lieutenant Calvo, the chosen expert, the authorities occupied several bookshops where cheap editions were on sale of such books as Red Week in Barcelona (a tract about the anarchist Ferrer), The Knight of the Red House, The Red Lily, Red Dawn (Pîo Baroja), The Red Virgin (a biography of Louise Michel), Le Rouge et le Noir, The Scarlet Letter (by Nathaniel Hawthorne)—all examples, according to the expert, of red literature, revolutionary propaganda, to a large extent responsible for such incidents as had happened at the palace last night. The books were thrown into lorries and dispatched on their way to the rubbish incinerator, built a short while before on the outskirts of the town.

  “Take Little Red Riding Hood while you’re about it,” shouted one of the booksellers, beside himself with rage.

  “You’re under arrest, you joker,” said Lieutenant Calvo, handing him over to one of his agents.

  Then—it was about five—they began on private houses: police rained from heaven, ran over roofs, jumped onto patios, entered kitchens, broke down doors, crept under beds, searched wardrobes, turned drawers upside down, and opened trunks, while women wept, children screamed, and old women cursed, a patriarch raged from his wheelchair, and a consumptive, near to death, declared that the Head of State was the son of a drunk and that his late wife Doña Hermenegilda, so often described as a saint, had worn herself out accommodating the organ of a young officer of hussars, famous for his exceptional proportions.

  So night fell, amidst confused rumours of arrests, detentions, disappearance of “subversive elements,” German spies, and pro-German socialists, yet the pulse of the city’s normal activities seemed unchanged. The advertisements for Vino Mariani, Gyraldose, and Urodonal turned on their lights, bells rang in the cinemas, while—in cafés and bars—people vainly turned the pages of the evening papers, which mentioned everything except what they were looking for. The Black Marias seemed to be taking a rest from their rounds. As it was a Thursday, the Fire Brigade Band played the march called “Sambre et Meuse,” the ballet from Samson and Delilah, and several bullfight pasodobles in the bandstand in Central Park. The streets in the red light district—San Isidro, la Chayota, el Mangue, Economia, and San Juan de Letrán—filled with clients. But on the stroke of eleven there was a sudden, violent invasion of brothels, gambling dens, bars, and halls where people danced to violin and guitar. Everyone who couldn’t prove that he was a public employee or a soldier was piled into military lorries—sometimes without his clothes—and carried off to the old Central Prison, whose cells, corridors, and courtyards were already crammed with people.

  And when dawn came, Terror reigned in the city. The arrests continued. The Black Marias went their rounds again. But in spite of the terror, when the Mayorala Elmira was cleaning the little library of the Council Chamber that afternoon, she found, behind a copy of Cesar Cantú’s Universal History, a suspicious-looking tin of animal crackers, which turned out to be a crude home-made bomb. It was defused in time by one of the palace guards, apprentice to an expert.

  “We’ll have to tighten the pressure,” commented Peralta.

  With age and the hardening of his arteries, the Head of State’s eyes—he would never wear spectacles, as he didn’t need them for reading—had acquired the strange defect of eliminating the third dimension. He saw things, whether near or far, as flat images without relief, like the stained glass in Gothic windows. So every morning, just as if they were figures in a Gothic
window, he looked at the Men of Regulation Colours—this one in blue and black, the next in white and gold, and the third in a buff-coloured tunic—who told him about the work they had carried out the day before, their night spent in police stations and prisons, barracks and cellars extracting words, names, addresses, and information from people who didn’t want to speak. And their accounts of ducking and racking, hanging and violence, their catalogue of pincers, truncheons, braziers, and even corncobs—these were for women—called up visions from hagiography, the downfall of the damned, illustrations of torture, all transferred to a large stained-glass window opening onto the remote splendour of the Tutelary Volcano. With a “Thank you, gentlemen,” the first stained-glass window broke, eliminating the blues, whites, and yellows of the original image, while in at the other door to take their place in the second window came the Listening and Looking men, the Watchers, the Hearers, the Hypocrites, the masters in maieutics, virtuosos in heuristics, who not only brought information extracted by skill, snatched in flight, half understood, of some guilty remark picked up at a diplomatic reception, a bar counter, in the warmth of a bedroom—they were everywhere, they entered without being seen, Guests of Glass one day, Guests of Stone if more acceptable, insinuating, snooping, often charming—but were in fact Watchers of the Watchful, Observers of the Cunning, recorders of everything invented, plotted, and schemed, even by the collaborators, familiars, and associates of the Head of State himself, thanks to his Exalted Protection. As he listened to these people of his, who had their eyes to the keyhole and their curiosity on the alert, he realised (sometimes with annoyance, sometimes with amusement) what diverse and picturesque transactions were going on behind his back: there was the business of a bridge built over a river that wasn’t shown on any map; the business of the Municipal Library without any books; the business of the stud animals from Normandy that had never crossed the ocean; the business of the toys and alphabets for kindergartens that didn’t exist; the business of the Peasant Women’s Maternity Homes, to which peasant women naturally never went, since for centuries they had been in the habit of giving birth on a broken stool, pulling on a rope hanging from the ceiling with their husband’s hat on their head so that they should get a boy; the business of the kilometre stones that were still only painted boards; the business of pornographic films sold in Quaker Oats tins; the business of the Chinese Charade (“jeux des trente-six bêtes,” as it was called by Baron Drummond, who introduced the Cantonese lottery of numbered animals to America), managed by the brigade of the National Police for the Repression of Illicit Games; the business of Erectyl, a Korean liquor containing mandragora root, the “stallion liana” from Santo Domingo, powdered tortoiseshell and extract of Spanish fly; the business of the slot machines—three bells, three plums, or three cherries gave you the jackpot—owned by the Chief of the Secret Service; the business of birth certificates ad perpetuam memoriam for those “interdits de séjour” and Frenchmen from Cayenne wanting to become our compatriots; the business of consultations with astrologers, fortune-tellers, palmists, card readers, horoscopes by correspondence, Hindu mystics—forbidden by law—who all had understandings with the Minister of the Interior; the business of the Verascopes of Love, tolerated in fairs and amusement parks, and owned by Captain Valverde; the business of Catalan postcards—less refined than the French, said those in the know—run by Captain Calvo; the business of “Lucky Sheets for Newly-weds” (“Draps bénis pour jeunes mariés” [sic]), manufactured in the Marais in Paris and designed for the trousseau of every Christian bride.

  Between amusement and annoyance—but more amused than annoyed—the Head of State contemplated this panorama of swindling and gangsterism every morning, reflecting that the least he could do was reward the fidelity and zeal of those who served him with the currency of folklore. Because he was not, and had never been, a man for small transactions, owner of companies managed by stealth, he was Master of Bread and Fish, of Corn and Herds, of Ice and Springs, of Fluid and the Wheel, beneath a multiple identity of symbols, syndicates, trade names, and always anonymous societies immune from failure or setbacks. Thus the Head of State contemplated his early-morning windows, but observed that, in spite of the terror unleashed by the first bomb in the palace, there was something, something that his men had been unable to grasp, something that slipped from their fingers, that neither prison nor torture nor a state of siege could put a stop to; something that was moving in the subsoil, underground, that arose from urban catacombs not previously known to exist; something new in the country, with unpredictable manifestations, mysterious mechanisms, which the President could not explain. It was as if the atmosphere had been changed by the addition of some impalpable pollen or hidden ferment, an elusive, slippery, occult but manifest force, silent although throbbingly alive with a circulation of clandestine leaflets, manifestos, proclamations, pamphlets small enough to go in the pocket sent forth by ghostly printers (“And are you incapable of finding something so difficult to conceal, so noisy, as a printing press?” the Head of State would shout, on his angrier mornings). These didn’t insult him in the Creole argot of the tenement house, with its simple-minded puns and jokes as formerly, but described him as Dictator (a word that wounded him more than the most obscene epithet or untranslatable nickname, because it was annoyingly current abroad—especially in France) and revealed to the public in plain and cutting language many things about him—actions, business matters, decisions, and eliminations—that should never have been known.

  “But who, who, who publishes these leaflets, libels and infamous calumnies?” the Head of State would cry aloud every morning to his usual stained-glass windows of sweating, twitching faces, distressed by their inability to answer. Those in the regulation colours of blue, white, and yellow stammered something or other; the pale Maieutic Brotherhood hinted at and contradicted one another, proceeding by elimination although obviously disorientated. They tightened their noose around the printed matter and searched for guilt between the lines. It wasn’t the anarchists: they had all been taken; it wasn’t Luis Leoncio Martínez’s followers, who were all shut up in different prisons; nor was it the timid oppositionists of other factions, who were thoroughly taped and watched, and hadn’t the technical means to keep an underground printing press functioning so continuously and exasperatingly.

  And so, by dint of subjecting conjectures and hypotheses to the calculation of probabilities, and by joining the loose letters together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, they arrived at the word C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-M, the last to come to mind.

  But the fact was—as the Head of State remarked when he was alone with Peralta—we were a very imaginative people, like all Latin Americans. It was enough for something to travel about the world—whether a fashion, a product, a doctrine, an idea, a style of painting, writing, poetry, or of foolish talk—for us to welcome it with enthusiasm. This was just as true of Italian Futurism as it was of the Juvencia del Abate Soury; or of Theosophy as of dancing marathons; of the philosophy of Krause as of table-turning. And now this exotic, impossible Russian communism, condemned by all honest men ever since the infamous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was stretching its tentacles towards America. Luckily this doctrine without a future and so alien to our customs had few supporters—or at least their activities had not been obvious hitherto—but as soon as they thought of it as a possible motive, there rose to the minds of those present the despised figure of a young man called Álvarez or Álvaro or Álvarado—Peralta wasn’t sure which—better known as the Student ever since he had said in a particularly aggressive speech: “You mustn’t think of me as a student, but as any student, the Student,” and who had played a prominent part in recent university agitations. One informer had heard him talking approvingly of this fellow Lenin who had overthrown Kerensky in Russia and established a regime there in which riches, land, cattle, silver plate, and women were all shared.

  “Well, you must look for him,” said the President. “Maybe we’ll get something out of him.
” But the usual morning stained-glass window at once became a picture of consternation. There was no conceivable way of seizing the Student. And as he had seemed too harmless even to be kept under observation—he was more interested in poetry than politics—the Security Experts couldn’t agree about his physical appearance, height, physiognomy, or degree of corpulence. Some said he had green eyes, others that they were chestnut; some that he was of athletic build, others that he was weak and sickly; he was twenty-three years old according to the university registers; his mother was dead; his father was a schoolmaster who had been killed in the Nueva Córdoba massacre. He should be in the city, however; but when the police broke into his hideout all they found was a rumpled bed with indications of recent occupation, a half-empty bottle of beer, burned papers, cigar ends, and a book lying on the floor: Volume I of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, bought—as could be seen by the shop stamp—in the Atenea bookshop, kept by Valentin Jiménez, now in prison for selling red books.

  “That’s it!” cried the Head of State when he heard. “The cretins were busy confiscating Le Rouge et le Noir and The Knight of the Red House, but left the most dangerous books in the shop windows.”

  And as the Distinguished Academician had sometimes talked to him in Paris about the “Marxist danger” or “Marxist literature,” he instructed Peralta (“he’s much more intelligent than these bloody detectives, including present company”) to bring him all the literature of this type he could find in the city …

  Two hours later, a number of volumes were ranged on the table of the presidential study: Marx’s The Class Struggle in France (1848–1850), Louis Bonaparte’s 18 Brumaire, and The Civil War in France (1871).

  “Bah! All that’s prehistory,” said the Head of State, pushing the books away contemptuously. Marx-Engels: Critique of the Gotha and Erfürt Programmes. “This seems to savour of a pamphlet against the European nobility. Because Gotha, as you know, is a sort of annual telephone book of princes, dukes, counts, and marquises.” Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. “I don’t think that’s likely to pervert our tram conductors.” Marx: Value, Price, and Profit. And the President read aloud: “The determination of the values of commodities according to the relative amount of work incorporated in them is totally different from the tautological method of determining values of commodities by the value of the work and the wages.” … “Do you understand any of it? Nor do I.” … Marx: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He skimmed through the book as far as the appendix, which provoked his hilarity: “With poems in English, poems in Latin, and poems in Greek. Let’s see if they can indoctrinate the Mayorala Elmira with this.” (“You always think I’m stupider than I really am,” she said, piqued.) And he laughed again when he picked up another volume: “Ah! Here’s the famous Kapital … Let’s have a look: