Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  “But …”

  “For the present we’re backing him.”

  “So you’re dropping me?”

  “Our State Department knows what it’s doing.”

  “How can they take that professor seriously, a man who …”

  The tennis player was showing signs of impatience: “I’ve not come here to argue, but to face facts. Doctor Luis Leoncio has the support of the active forces in this country. A lot of young people with democratic ideals are supporting him.”

  “I see: Belén, the Methodist colleges, and the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Don’t waste any more time, damn it: finish dressing!”

  “Doctor Luis Leoncio has ideas, a plan,” says the tennis player.

  “So has the Student,” I say.

  “But that’s a very different matter,” says the tennis player, passing his racket from one hand to another.

  “You must know that it was really the Student who did you in,” says the male nurse. “The bombs, those macabre jokes and false rumours all came from Alpha-Omega. But the general strike was the Student’s doing. A splendid piece of work, by the way. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it.”

  “And are you going to tell me that all the tradesmen who refused to open their shops were Bolsheviks?”

  “It was precisely because they were afraid of the Bolsheviks that they didn’t open their shops. By joining the stoppage they were protecting their goods. And now they will lay them at the feet of the Caudillo of Nueva Córdoba, defender of order and prosperity, who will try to tame the Student—or something of the sort—and give some legality to his party. Because now there’ll be political parties in the country.”

  “The businessmen are managing things intelligently,” said the tennis player; “wise men.”

  Coming to my senses, I suddenly say that there’s still time to do something: make peace with Hungary, which now has a stable government, restore constitutional guarantees, create a Ministry of Employment, remove press censorship, create a coalition cabinet until the forthcoming elections, to be supervised by a mixed commission, if that seems suitable.

  “Stop talking rubbish,” says the male nurse. “We’ve come to the crunch now. If we don’t clear out quickly, the crowd will soon be here, and you can imagine what that means. They loathe your guts!”

  At that moment a strange figure loomed up in the passage leading to the patio; it was Aunt Jemima, Walter Hoffmann’s grandmother, quietly making her way towards the main staircase, carrying on her head, as if it were a coffin, the grandfather clock from the dining room. “I’ve been in love with it for years,” she said as she passed. Behind her came several shady characters—obviously her great-great-grandsons, carrying trays of silver, decanters, and table ornaments taken from the sideboards. This struck me as a final warning:

  “I shall take refuge in the United States Embassy.”

  “Out of the question!” says the tennis player. “There’d be a riot in front of the building. Demonstrations. Violence. An impossible situation. The only thing I can do is give you shelter in our consulate at Puerto Araguato. There you will be protected by our marines. My government consents to that.”

  “You’ll take me in your car …”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t expose myself to being fired at on the way. The Morejón woodcutters don’t understand diplomatic car plates. And there are said to be armed bands in El Bajío.”

  “It’s only that there are no trains … the strike,” I say, in a voice that trembles because of saliva that refuses to be swallowed.

  “That’s not my fault,” says the tennis player. Peralta points to his clothes, his cap and stethoscope:

  “I’ve got an ambulance downstairs. There are no tolls on the road to the Olmedo Colony. And those Germans don’t care a fuck for our politics.”

  “Good luck, Señor President,” says the tennis player.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say under my breath. But he hears me and says, in the manner of a comic clergyman:

  “Rahab, the woman of Jericho, was a bitch. And today she’s reckoned among our Lord’s ancestresses. Try reading the Bible on your way, Señor. It’s a most comforting book and full of information. There’s a lot about overturned thrones in it.” And he picked up his racket, one of those—I remember—that are carried in a trapezoid wooden frame, with four screws holding down the rim of the racket, and took himself off without more ado (I think he said, “So long”), and as casually as if he were returning to the American Club, with its deep armchairs, bourbon on the rocks, tickertape, and central heating.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say, and say again and again, because I have no worse insults in my limited English vocabulary. Now I look towards the gleaming peak of the Tutelary Volcano, no longer white but a pale orange from the approach of dusk. And I can’t help my expression being saddened by the tender melancholy of departure. But now the Mayorala arrives, eccentrically attired as a Nazarene Penitent, in a purple tunic, yellow sash, sandals, a rebozo to match the tunic, and carrying a bundle of clothes.

  “She’s coming with us,” says Peralta. And she explains with her special combination of mimicry and onomatopoeia: “Everyone knows that when I was [gesture of pouting out her breasts and rounding her hips] … you me [a faint whistle, and one forefinger making a cross with the other] and although I’m not the same [hands re-modelling a face that was now a little coarsened] you and I still go on [now she joins her forefingers and rubs one against the other]. And with them being so mad at me, if they caught me [a whistle accompanied by a hand clapped to her forehead, and her head falling on her left shoulder with the mouth open]. So that’s why I …” (loud whistle and arms imitating the movements of someone running).

  “Besides, the Nazarene dress is a splendid idea,” says Peralta. And suddenly I come to myself and remember the most important thing of all:

  “Money! Fuck! Money!”

  The Mayorala shows me her bundle of clothes. “The cash is in here.” I open it, to make sure. Yes. Between petticoats and blouses, there are the $200,000 of my private reserve, in four bundles of fifty notes each, with portraits of Washington on them, of course.

  And now everything seems to speed up. Peralta is running; the Mayorala is running. A trunk appears. Without thinking clearly what I’m doing I start putting things in it. Too many things. The blotting paper from my writing table, several medals and decorations, the book of our eleven constitutions, a photo of Ofelia with Gabriele D’Annunzio, that toy—a lizard made of rope—given me by my mother, that beautiful edition of Les femmes savantes, containing the lines that, at this moment of crisis, come absurdly to my memory, enlivened by a glass of rum: “Guenille si l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère.”

  “Don’t put any more rubbish in the trunk,” shouts the Mayorala.

  “Two shirts, one pair of pants, that’s enough,” shouts Peralta.

  “Two ties and three vests,” shouts the Mayorala.

  “And now put this waterproof cape right over yourself. Like the poor when they’re ill and go to hospital,” says Peralta.

  “But quickly, for God’s sake, quickly!” yells the Mayorala, her voice echoing through the vastness of the Deserted Palace. And they wrap my head in bandages and strips of sticking plaster. A little ketchup to look as if I’d bled. And I go downstairs. The first time in more than twenty years that I don’t hear cries of “Attention!”; no one is there to salute me. Palomo, the porter’s dog, comes and licks your sweaty hands. You’d like to take him with you.

  “Out of the question. No one has ever seen a dog in an ambulance.”

  And you lie on the stretcher for urgent cases, under the smell of macintosh, disguised as a wounded man—carnival is still going on, terrifying carnival, an apocalyptic transformation scene—and during the vicissitudes of the journey, you live through the hazards of the road you are travelling. Out through the back gate of the palace—former entrance for horse-drawn carriages. Turn to the right. Drive over asphalt.
Calle Beltrán: a short stretch of cobblestones. Left: smoothness of asphalt. Calle de los Plateros. Peralta in the driving seat—a bogus nurse-chauffeur of the Emergency Service—sets the siren going. I’m terrified, thinking we must be attracting attention: but no; it’s exactly what we aren’t doing. No one looks at the face of the man driving a wailing ambulance. They look at the siren; what’s more, anyone who can help by doing so tries to clear the road. Right: more asphalt, the Boulevard del Brasil with its cafés—the Paris, the Tortoni, the Delmonico—sure to be shut because of the strike. Then we drive on and on: there seems to be no traffic on the roads. Peralta doesn’t stop at crossroads. And there’s a huge rut; there at the corner of the Gallo—the Ministry of Works gave sixty thousand pesos for it to be filled in and the drain put right, but it was never done. I know where we are, and suddenly, for that very reason, I feel afraid, terribly afraid. My flesh tightens over my bones; my thighs are trembling; my breathing has become irregular. Why are we driving so slowly? I know why. And now the male nurse with the stethoscope and smoked glasses is braking—his white cap is well pulled down right over his brows. There is a silence which opens my bladder—I can do nothing to stop it.

  “Excuse me: I’ve got a seriously wounded man here.” Another silence, worse than the first. And then the Mayorala’s voice: “Please, Captain, let us by. Don’t stop us, for his mama’s sake … My brother … A bullet … In front of the palace.”

  The soldier’s voice: “Did they shoot your cunt of a mother too?”

  “They shot her … [whistle] bang!… From the balcony … Now [a long blood-curdling whistle on a downward note] … they’re dragging her away … And leaving bits of brains … [a loud slap] … at every corner.”

  Soldier: “Thank God for that!”

  Peralta: “May we please go by, Captain?”

  “Go on!”

  And now the streets are of trodden earth. I seem to feel all through my body the ambulance wheels heeling over, falling, rising, staggering, between potholes full of water, whose stench of decay reaches me in my moving cell in spite of the wafts of chloroform pervading it.

  “I ought to have thought about that.” A little beyond the Italian villas with their nacreous domes, cornucopias, box hedges, and vine arbors—miniature gardens of Aranjuez or Chantilly—we reach the suburbs of the Cerros, Yaguas, and Favelas; villages made of cardboard, dung, and tin cans, with paper walls, the tins rusty, cut up with scissors to cover the roofs—dwellings, if they deserve the name, that are ruined, knocked down and demolished by the rains every year, leaving the children paddling about like pigs, in puddles and mud.

  “I should have thought about that. A plan to build houses for poor families. There would still be time …”

  The Mayorala’s voice: “The road’s clear.” And the ambulance begins to climb, creaking, bumping, bouncing, turning, twisting but always climbing. I recognise the corners on the road. I know we have already reached the farm of El Rengo, from the smell of the brushwood fire burning esparto grass, something forbidden by law; now we are coming to the Little Spanish Castles, because there is the sound of a plank bridge beneath us. The zone of pine forests is beginning. Our road is edged with mulberry trees, whose shade attracts so many poisonous snakes.

  I am so exhausted from fighting my terror that I fall asleep.

  I open my eyes. We have passed in front of the Germans’ Lutheran Church. I take off my bandages and sticking plaster. The ambulance doors open and I descend into the square with an air of calm dignity. But although a few people are about, no one looks at me. The Woglindes, Wellgundes, and Flosshildes go on with their milking. Too many curtains are drawn across windows. I expect human smiles and all I see is braces drawn tight over backs, and backsides with broad buttocks in leather breeches. Peralta talks to the pastor:

  “The mechanics are on strike. So do what you like. We shan’t interfere.”

  Followed by the Mayorala, who has just finished tying up my badly fastened suitcase with her sash, we go to the little brick station with its weathercock and imitation stork’s nest occupied by a marbled bird lifting up a lobster-red foot. The Little Train is put away in its little hangar. There’s enough coal in the tender. And the burnished engine, polished and shining like something just out of a luxury shoe shop, soon starts puffing out smoke. It is as if I could feel its impatient, vibrating life in the levers throbbing under my hands. All the houses in the Olmedo Colony have shut themselves into a darkness whose aim is to ignore me. I let in the steam: the connecting rods begin to move. And the Little German Train enters the curving track cut in the flank of the mountain. We pass the pines—leaving their scent behind—and descend steep slopes covered with cactus and agave, where the spikes of the asphodels are buzzing with bees and quivering in the sea breeze; then, from small to large, from grassy filaments to plumes, come the reeds, bamboos, shady banana trees, with their red fruit tasting of poverty; and then the ochre patches of bare earth—I don’t see them, but guess at them from familiarity with the deep ruts in them—before arriving at the sandy plain, where we advance in a straight line as fast as possible, without signals or lights or level-crossing gates, until we stop in the tiny terminus of Puerto Araguato with a tremendous bump owing to tardy braking.

  Several marines—white leggings and sweatshirts, rum drinkers’ eyes—are drawn up on the two platforms. I discover that they have already occupied the power station, the vital points, bars and brothels of the town, after pissing on the Monument to the Heroes of Independence as they passed it. The North American Consul comes up to me, wearing creased trousers and a cowboy shirt of the sort that has little air holes in the armpits.

  “Here I am; I’ve got the auto outside.” And he drives us in a Pathfinder creaking in every joint to the building diplomatically representing his country: a wooden house, with columns and pediment, in a strictly Jeffersonian style, and a North American eagle with a shield on its breast displayed on the balcony.

  “You’ve given me a fat lot of trouble,” says the Consul, taking us to the kitchen. “I’ve got orders to put you on one of our cargo boats arriving here tomorrow, and send you to Nassau. If you’re hungry, there are some packets of cornflakes, tins of Campbell’s soup, and pork and beans. There’s whisky in that cupboard. Help yourself, Mister President, because we know that if you don’t get your booze you very soon go around the bend.”

  “A little more respect, please,” I say in a stern tone.

  “We’re all equals here,” says the Consul, going into an office full of bills and papers.

  “The Hermès case, Peralta: I prefer our own.”

  The walls of the kitchen were decorated with cuttings from Shadowland and Motion Pictures: Theda Bara in Cleopatra: Nazimova in Salomé; Dempsey knocking out Georges Carpentier; a scene from Male and Female with Thomas Meigham and Gloria Swanson; Babe Ruth hitting a home run under the welcoming—almost presbyterian—eyes of an umpire dressed in dark blue.

  We’ve eaten something, and are now sitting in the reception–waiting room–living room of the house, Peralta, the Mayorala, and I. After the tension of the last days, and the paroxysms of anxiety of the last few hours, I feel almost serene. My muscles relax. I begin fanning myself with a palm leaf, rocking myself in what the gringos call a rocking chair and we call, I’ve no idea why, a Viennese chair—I’ve never noticed any furniture of this description in Vienna. I look at my secretary:

  “For the present, we must concentrate on saving our skins. Guenille si l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère. Now the sea, Bermuda. And afterwards, Paris. In the end we’ll get a bit of rest.”

  “Yes,” replies Peralta.

  “Our morning walks. Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons. Aux Glaces, the Rue Sainte-Apolline, the Chabanais.”

  “Yes,” replies Peralta.

  “Happiness prevails, I see,” I say.

  “Yes,” replies Peralta with a gesture of displeasure and boredom.

  “When one’s luck is out, even dogs piss on one,
” says the Mayorala, with her usual philosophy, expressed in proverbs and sayings. And she flings herself down to sleep on a raffia ottoman. Close to the gramophone horn, on an antique corner cupboard, lies an old Bible, used by the Consul when some sailor who had lost his papers in a drinking bout could lay valid claim to having been born in Baltimore or Charleston only by swearing with one hand on the Scriptures. Knowing the habits of the members of certain North American sects at moments of crisis, I shut my eyes, opened the book at random, and, after describing three circles with the forefinger of my right hand, I let it fall on a page: “Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink; let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the water flood overflow me; neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth on me” (Psalm 69). I tried again: “Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth. For mine enemies speak against me; and they that lay wait for my soul take counsel together” (Psalm 71). A third time (Jeremiah 12): “I have forsaken mine house, I have left mine heritage.” “Fuck the book!” I exclaimed, shutting it so violently that a cloud of dust came out of the binding. And I lounged in the Viennese chair, which was ornamented with a blue ribbon passed through the holes in the wickerwork, and fell into a drowsy state not far from actual sleep. Confused noises. Reality becomes blurred and transformed into incoherent images. I’m asleep.

  But I can’t have slept long, because very soon—I think—a hand shook the rocking chair violently to waken me.

  “Peralta,” I said, “Peralta.”

  “No use calling him,” said the Consul. “He’s just decamped.”

  “It’s true,” said the Mayorala.

  And I learned, in a state of such astonishment that I couldn’t take in everything I was being told, that dozens of automobiles displaying the greenish-white emblems of Alpha-Omega were driving around the town, and that one of them—which appeared to be a grey Chevrolet—had come to fetch my secretary.