Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  However, there were many houses, silent houses with the blinds drawn, ministers’ or generals’ houses, houses belonging to those in power or wearing soutanes, there were attics, rooms beyond the patio, where someone would go by with a lantern or an oil lamp, or candles held high, to conceal things, take jewels out of trunks, lock boxes, dust suitcases, sew banknotes (especially dollars) inside the linings, lapels, and skirts of suits, coats, and capes, in preparation for some possibly necessary flight. In the morning the children would be sent to the Atlantic beaches (they were anaemic; medical prescription); many families would disperse into the provinces or towns of the interior (sick grandmother; grandfather of ninety-seven) or had gone to their ancestral homes (my sister had a miscarriage; the other is queer in the head) while they waited to see what was going to happen. Meanwhile, in kitchens whose only light came from cigars outlining a face with every puff, the men of the family, smoking more as they felt more conscious of danger, gathered around bottles of rum and whisky, groping for them in the dark to refill their glasses gropingly, and discussing the situation. A dull, infectious, increasing panic filled all the shadows and was brooded over in a thousand different ways, until the sweat of fear broke out on temples and napes of necks …

  The Great and Little Bears and other constellations were fading in the grey dawn, and still there was silence in the capital. The whole country was plunged in silence. The machine-gun fusillade had been useless. Slowly the sun invaded the streets, striking small flashes of light from the broken glass covering the pavements. And now, as a last straw, the Chief of Police found out that his men were panic-stricken. They hadn’t seemed so timid and surly-looking when called upon to fight their way up streets, or assault barricades, during some clash between infantry and horsemen, or when marching shoulder to shoulder against a mob armed with sticks, belaying pins, metal pipes, or even firearms (generally old pistols, sporting rifles, or antique muskets); what terrified them was this silence, the solitude all around them, the emptiness of streets leading to the lower slopes of the surrounding mountains, where there wasn’t a single passer-by as far as the eye could see. They would have been less afraid of an attack from an angry crowd than of solitary, isolated shots; these separate, single, carefully considered shots, taking careful aim, from a roof or a terrace, might leave a man stretched on the asphalt with a hole bored through his temple or brow as cleanly and surely as if drilled by a saddler’s bit. The troops were in barracks; the infantry bivouacked on the patios and the sentries smoked in their sentry boxes. And there was nothing. Silence. A silence broken occasionally—very seldom—by the clamour of a motorcycle (they were always of the brand called Indian) accelerating as the terrified rider made his way to the palace with some disagreeable, laconic, and confidential message. There, some of them lying exhausted in armchairs or on divans, and those too soaked in liquor to drink more keeping awake with the help of tobacco and coffee, were the high officials and dignitaries of the nation, waxen-faced, their necks sweating, their coats off and braces dangling. In the middle of this general collapse, the Head of State was waiting, tense, motionless, dignified and frowning; he was waiting for the Mayorala Elmira, who had muffled herself in a lacy shawl and gone out to get some hot news, walking about in the streets, listening at doors, peering through shut windows, getting information from some unlikely passer-by—such as a drunk female crony and collector of gossip, tremulous with aguardiente. But now she came back, after having walked a long way and not heard anything of interest. Or rather, yes: one thing only. On all the walls and palings of the city, thousands of mysterious hands had written in pale chalk—white, blue, or pink—a single phrase, always the same: “Get out! Get out!”

  After a brief pause the President rang a hand bell, as though in a parliamentary session. The others got up from where they were resting, straightening their ties, doing up buttons, and smoothing their hair in an attempt to regain a little composure.

  “Excuse me—your fly,” said Elmira to the Minister of Communications, who had left it undone.

  “Gentlemen,” said the Head of State. And there followed a good speech, dramatic but free of emotion or eloquence, a straightforward commentary on the Mayorala’s narrative. If his compatriots thought it necessary for him to resign, if his most faithful colleagues (and he begged them to answer simply, frankly, and with equanimity) shared this judgement, he was determined to hand over power immediately to whomever was thought best fitted to assume it. “I await your reply, gentlemen.” But the gentlemen did not reply. And after a few minutes of stupor and agonised consideration of the facts, they were left with the fear, overpowering fear, insuperable Blue Funk caused by the people’s war cry. Suddenly, looking at one another, they were all thinking that the permanence, the rigour, and above all the Full Acceptance of Responsibility, the Full Acceptance of Guilt, of the Man who was awaiting the sound of their voices with growing impatience, was the only thing that could save them from the menace now haunting them. If the anger of the populace were unloosed, if the masses rushed into the streets, they would look for an abscess to lance, an object on which to rain their blows, a scapegoat, a Head to raise aloft on the point of a pike, while the rest of them might perhaps take different escape routes and manage to get away somehow or other. Otherwise, the general fury would reach them all equally, and for lack of the Body now standing before them their bodies would end up, dragged along, quartered, unidentifiable in the city drains—unless they had been hung up on a telegraph post with infamous placards pinned to their chests.

  At last the President of the Senate spoke up and said what they all wanted him to say: That after so many sacrifices for the good of the nation (here came a list of some of them), at a time when our country was threatened by dissolving forces (here came imprecations against all socialists, Communists, international crooks, the Student and his paper, the professor of Nueva Córdoba and the party he created yesterday and gave the pedantic name of Alpha-Omega—“he’s the worst bugger of the lot” remarked Peralta, and was immediately silenced by a gesture of annoyance from his listener), in these critical hours they were asking a supreme proof of self-sacrifice, etc., etc., on the part of the Head of State, because if in so serious a moment of peril he abandoned us, and deprived us of the help of his lucidity and political sense (here came mention of his other qualities and virtues), our friendless country could only groan, like our Lord on the Cross: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.”

  The President, who had been listening to all this with bent head and chin on his breast, now flung his arms apart and straightened his whole body.

  “Gentlemen, let us set to work. The Council is open.” There was long applause and each man took his place at the long table running down the middle of the room next door, which was hung with Gobelins.

  At three o’clock that day a great many telephones began ringing. At first there were a few only, intermittent and at intervals. Then more numerous, with louder voices, impatiently shouting. A host of telephones. A vast chorus of telephones. A world of telephones. And calls from patio to patio, voices running along roofs and terraces, crossing gaps, flying from corner to corner. And windows began opening. And doors began opening. And someone leans out, gesticulating. And ten lean out, gesticulating. And people run out into the streets; and some embrace and others laugh, some run, meet, gather in groups, inflate their chests, form into a procession, and another procession, and more processions appear at the entries to streets, come down from the hills and up from the depths of valleys, and coalesce into a crowd, an enormous crowd, shouting: “Long live Liberty!”

  Now everyone knows and is telling his neighbour: the Head of State has just died. Of a heart attack say some. But no; he was assassinated by conspirators. No, not that either: he was shot by a sergeant affiliated with Alpha-Omega. No, that wasn’t right either: someone really in the know said that he was killed by the Student, with the same Belgian pistol the Man always had on his desk, and that he emptied the whole lot of bullets—some sa
id it contained six, others eight—into his body. One of the palace servants had seen the whole thing, and he said … But he’s dead, all right. He’s dead. That is the great, beautiful, joyful, tremendous cause for jubilation. And it seems that they are taking the Corpse—the enormous Corpse—through the streets. The people living in the San José district saw it being dragged along by a lorry, with the skull bumping on the paving stones. Now everyone must go to the centre of the town, singing in chorus the National Anthem, the Liberator’s Anthem, the “Marseillaise” and the “Internationale,” which unexpectedly came to mind.

  But at this moment the armoured cars of the 4th Motorised Division appear and open fire on the crowd. The men of the palace garrison fire all together from behind the cover given by the wide banisters of the upper terrace and sandbags brought days before. Grenades fall from the telephone tower, leaving screaming gaps in the crowds holding a meeting below. Dozens of machine guns poke out from corners. Closing the avenues, police and soldiers are now advancing at a slow, measured tread in close files, letting off their rifles at every three paces. The now-terrified people are running, fleeing, leaving bodies and more bodies and yet more bodies on the pavements, throwing down flags and placards, trying to get inside houses by forcing shut doors, or jump into interior patios or lift the lids of sewers. And still the troops advance, slowly, very slowly, firing all the time, trampling on the wounded lying on the ground, or finishing off with bayonets or the butts of their rifles any who clutch at their boots and leggings. And at last, after the crowd has been reduced and dispersed, the streets are once again deserted. The fire brigades come out to put out a few fires. Here and there are heard the long, vicious, insistent sirens of ambulances. When night falls all the streets are patrolled by the army. And everyone—all those who had sung so many hymns and given cheers for this and that—had to face an appalling truth. The Head of State had assassinated himself; he had spread abroad the news of his death, so that crowds should throng the streets and be shot down with supreme ease.

  And now, sitting on the presidential chair with all his supporters around him, he was celebrating the victory.

  “You’ll see, they’ll open all the shops tomorrow and stop making such bloody nuisances of themselves.”

  Outside, the chorus of sirens was still going on.

  “Bring some champagne, Elmira. The best: from that cupboard; you know where it is …”

  An occasional single rifle shot could be heard, far away, and sounding feebler than the weapons of the army.

  “There are still one or two fools left,” said the President. “Gentlemen, once again, we have won.”

  So much had happened during the day, and public buildings were so deserted that nobody noticed one very strange thing: the sudden disappearance—by theft of course—of the Diamond from the Capitol; yes, of that enormous Tiffany diamond set in the heart of a star at the feet of the gigantic statue of the Republic, and marking the zero point—of convergence and departure—of all the major roads in the country.

  SIX

  … if the contest is too unequal, it is better to choose honourable resignation or abandon the game rather than expose oneself to certain death.

  —DESCARTES

  17

  WHEN I REMEMBER THAT DAY, IT SEEMS TO ME THAT I lived through some sort of improbable carnival, whose hours were fuller, more crowded than whole years—a confusion of images, descent into hell, mobs, aimless shouting, figures revolving, masks, metamorphoses, mutations, din, substitution of one thing by another, everything upside down, owls hooting at midday, sunshine in shadow, appearance of harpies, lambs biting, roars of the meek, fury of weaklings; uproar where yesterday there was only whispering; and faces that have stopped looking, and receding backs, and a decor suddenly changed by the scene shifters of tragedies hatched in secret, grown in shadow, born in my proximity, although, deafened as I was by other choirs, I would not have heard the sound of real choirs—choirs with few singers, but those few possessing the voices of Great Singers …

  And so I “opened my heart” to you—as they say here—with the help of the wine of that triumphant night; at dawn, after everyone left, I added a bottle of Armagnac, as we sat there alone watching the peaks of the Tutelary Volcano turn blue; we must have a sort of Chamonix up there, and a skating rink—skiing is marvellous exercise—and a cable railway to get there, as they do in Switzerland; two swings of the hammock and it was three in the afternoon; thus, as an adolescent, you opened your eyes on the operating theatre after being relieved of an appendix full of seeds—they said at the time that the appendicitis had been caused by eating guavas, whose pips accumulated in that useless organ, left over from the prehistoric days when men were vêtus de peaux de bêtes, like those painted by Cormon, and fed on roots and stones of fruits; so you emerged from the chloroform dream, and that male nurse with the white cap and stethoscope around his neck was leaning over you: have they taken it out already?; but the nurse is Peralta in male nurse’s clothes—why?—; and behind him—to my surprise—is Mr. Enoch Crowder, in his round spectacles, with his old puritan’s face, but now instead of his frock coat, he has come dressed in tennis clothes, here, to the Palace?, striped flannel trousers, with YALE in red letters on his sweater and his racket in his hand; the United States Ambassador coming into your room like this, without asking for an interview, without a top hat or a stiff collar; they aren’t trying to annoy you, you idiot; I’m high on aguardiente, remember; a half turn, a swing of the hammock, and leave me in peace to sleep; but now some words seem to be coming from a long way off, and swelling, getting louder as they approach, talking to me about a battleship; the Minnesota is in Puerto Araguato; a great big ship it is too, with its metal tower and its guns turning and taking aim by electricity, and by some strange chance navigating six miles off our coast for several weeks; they tell me (I’m understanding more and more) that they are going to land marines, that they are already landing; coffee, damn it, coffee! where is the Mayorala?; the marines, here; that’s what they did in Veracruz; what they did in Haiti, hunting down the niggers; and in Nicaragua and in many other places, with bayonets ready for zambos and Latins; intervention, perhaps, as in Cuba with that General Wood, who was a worse thief than the mother who bore him; landing, intervention, General Pershing’s “punitive” expedition, the man of “Over There” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the exhausted Europe of ’17, who was made fun of and harassed in Sonora by a few guerrillas with cartridge belts around their chests; I’m laughing, but it isn’t a joke—oh no; Mr. Enoch Crowder has come here like this, in tennis clothes, racket and all, because he’s spent two days without once leaving the Country Club, deliberating in conference with the live wires of the Bank, Trade, and Industry; and it’s these sons of bitches who are asking for the Minnesota to come here with her filthy marines; but the army, our army, won’t allow such an affront to our national honour; only the army happens to have revolted at the present moment; soldiers have deserted their sentry boxes and machine-gun posts, saying that that business yesterday wasn’t their fault; that they fired only because they were ordered to by their sergeants and lieutenants; and the sergeants and lieutenants have rebelled against their captains and generals, who have dug themselves into the tall building of the Hotel Waldorf, and go from the bar to the roof and from the roof to the bar, hoping that the marines will arrive and relieve them from being besieged by the crowd—the huge crowd yelling around the building and clamouring for their heads; the palace garrison has disappeared; not even a doorkeeper is left, nor a servant, nor a waiter; don’t ask for your ministers; no one knows where your ministers are; the telephone: the telephones aren’t working; don’t ask for coffee: much better have a glass of aguardiente, says Peralta (but why the hell is he dressed as a male nurse, with that stethoscope, and that thermometer in the pocket of his overall?); don’t ask for coffee, the Mayorala’s got other things to do; but yes, now that I consider the question more thoroughly I agree with the captains and generals;
let the marines land, let them land: we’ll arrange about that afterwards—we’ll negotiate, we’ll talk—but for the moment, order, order is what we need …

  “You’re crazy,” says the male nurse: “what these people of the Bank and Business, and also this gentleman here, all want is for you to go to hell; they’ve had enough; you’ve been playing the devil with their patience for more than twenty years; they don’t like you; no one likes you; if you’re still alive it’s because everyone thinks you’re with the others in the Waldorf; they can’t believe you could possibly be such a fool as to stay here alone, without companions or guards; it hasn’t entered anyone’s head; but when they do find out … I don’t like to think what’ll happen!… So let’s bugger off. But—at once!”

  I begin to understand. I get up. I hunt for my slippers.

  “But, fuck it all, I’ve not resigned! I’m the President!”

  “You think so?” says the male nurse. “Luis Leoncio is already in Nueva Córdoba. A procession of cars has gone to fetch him.”

  “That cretin, with his Alpha-Omega?”

  “He’s the only man who can clear up the situation,” says the tennis player.