Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  “I’m a southerner … New Orleans. White enough to pass as a white man, although my hair—well, my hair would be too frizzy if it weren’t for the pomades they make to deal with that. (B flat, damn you!) I’ve ‘crossed the line,’ as we say there, although in sentimental matters, as you might call them, I only get on well with darkies. That way I take after my great-uncle Gottschalk, a musician—you wouldn’t know him—who, though preferred to Chopin by Théophile Gautier, adored by the same Lamartinian and philharmonic nymphs who went to bed with Franz Liszt, celebrated in Europe, favoured by royalty, friend of the Queen of Spain, ten times decorated, yet suddenly left all this (public, palaces, coaches, lackeys) to respond to the imperious, urgent call of negresses and mulattos waiting in the tropics to reclaim from him what was theirs by temporary right of conquest. And he followed them to Cuba, Puerto Rico, all the Antilles, rejuvenated, adventurous, liberated from protocol and honours, restored to the billing and cooing of early days, to his adolescent appetite, finally going to die in Brazil, where the Sacred Places of his peregrination also abounded—and how! ‘Et les servantes de ta mère, grandes filles luisantes, remuaient leurs jambes chaudes près de toi qui tremblait … sa bouche avait le goût des pommes-roses, dans la rivière, avant midi.’ ” (I don’t know who wrote what he had just recited, but I do remember, yes, I remember that when my daughter, Ofelia, was learning the piano she played some charming Creole dances by that same Moreau Gottschalk, and that I was told how he once let loose on Havana a symphony he had written, including thunderous African drums among its instruments.)

  The Consul goes on: “He was a friend, a very great friend of the amazing W. C. Handy, who wrote this ‘Memphis Blues’ I’m playing now.” From there he passes to the “St. Louis Blues” by the same Handy, which has the effect of rousing the Mayorala and starting her off dancing—and probably very well, because she suits her steps and swaggering movements magnificently to the rhythms of music quite new to her.

  “It’s that they’ve got it in their blood,” says the southerner. I look at his hands moving over the keys: it’s a sort of dialogue—sometimes a battle—opposition and agreement between the female hand (the right) and the male hand (the left), which combine, complement each other, respond, but in a synchronisation that is situated both within and outside the rhythm. The Mayorala, as though under the spell of a novelty that she is absorbing through her skin, sits herself down on the harmonium stool, making sexy, enveloping and brazen movements with her shoulders, with one buttock unsupported because there isn’t room for both in the space left by the Consul. He forgets his keys and presses his face to Elmira’s neck, while she laughs as though being tickled, letting herself be sniffed with the delight of a Christian penetrating the perfumed ambit left by a censer.

  Guidé par ton odeur vers de charmants climats

  Je vois un port rempli de voilures et de mâts

  comes from the Consul.

  “Leave Baudelaire alone!” I cry, jealous at this incursion into my own territory, first ploughed and tilled by me more than twenty years ago, and always yielding to my desires ever since, and which now that I had lost everything was all that I had left, the only plot ruled over by me in a country that was mine yesterday, mine from north to south, from ocean to ocean, and now reduced to a wretched shed made of rotten planks, filled with dead roots, a beggarly landing stage, where I must wait for tomorrow’s launch—how far away, remote, unattainable that tomorrow seemed!—fated to be smuggled out of here like contraband goods, like a dead man’s coffin in a rich hospital, from here, where I had been the master of men, destinies, and property. Hauling her up by one arm, I drag the Mayorala from where her sexual behaviour is exceeding what is admissible, and push her into an armchair in the corner of the room.

  “That’s better,” says the gringo, laughing, “because that is what sunk me in my career.” This word career—diplomacy, presumably—in the other man’s mouth, in view of who he is and where he is, is associated in my mind with the epithet of “great nonsense” given by Don Quixote to a chivalrous romance badly represented by the figures in an altarpiece. For every Latin American of my generation, a career is a sinecure involving little work and much pleasure, in embassies surrounded by scenes from grand opera, Italian marbles and the lights of Versailles, with violins on the platform, waltzers in braided uniforms and low-cut dresses, solemn ushers, chamberlains in knee-breeches, intrigues, soirées, love affairs, alcoves, romance, the manners of the Marqués de Bradomin and the wit of Talleyrand, prodigies of tact and “savoir vivre,” much too remote generally from the notions of our own people, who never succeeded in absorbing the rules of etiquette and who—through not asking, and not taking advice—committed errors such as (it happened in my palace) arranging for the “Rondo alla turca” to be played when Abdul-Amid’s ambassador was presenting his credentials, or Huerta’s “Hymn of Riego” for one of Alfonso XIII’s ministers.

  “Everything went well with me,” went on the southerner, “until they found out in Paris that I went too often to a Martiniquan dance hall in the Rue Blomet. Since then, I have only filled brilliant posts in North American diplomacy. Consul in Aracajú, in Antigua, in Guanta, in Mollendo, in Jacmel, and even in Manta, opposite the beaches of which sharks appear at noon every day with a punctuality comparable only to that of the Apostles in Strasbourg Cathedral. And now I am here, which is the devil’s own hideout. And it’s because they knew” (he was looking at the Mayorala) “that I … well, you and I understand each other.” He played an arpeggio. “If I were to show myself as I now am at my birthplace I should be lynched by the cowled members of the Ku Klux Klan; chaps with white souls and white robes, with that peculiar whiteness, very much ours, which was also Benjamin Franklin’s, according to whom the negro was ‘the animal who ate most and produced least’; the whiteness of Mount Vernon, where a slave owner used to philosophise about the equality of men before God; the whiteness of our Capitol, the temple where the hymn of the Gettysburg Address is sung—‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’—with a chorus of negro street sweepers, boot blacks, ash-can emptiers, and lavatory attendants; whiteness of our most illustrious White House, where the roundabout of uniforms, frock coats and top hats is organised, which in this Latin America of ours brings thieves and sons of bitches to the fore—present company not excepted—with each turn of the handle.”

  I remarked to the Consul that the epithet “son of a bitch” was rather strong in tone for someone who barely forty-eight hours ago was Head of State of a free and sovereign nation, which, as to heroic antecedents, great men, history, etc., etc.

  “If my tongue was loosened, it was the fault of Santa Inés,” said the Consul, filling my glass. “I had no desire to be offensive. Besides …”

  “Look, look!” said the Mayorala in a tone that boded no good, inviting us by gestures to go close to a small window with broken panes giving onto the bay.

  “Yes,” said the gringo, “something is going on there on the wharf.” He opened the exit hatches of the—hitherto non-existent—racing launches. Over there, towards the end of the quay used by sugar boats, something strange was undoubtedly happening. A crowd had collected around one or two lorries—the same they had seen a little time ago, which were loaded with enormous objects, upright or horizontal, a bazaar of shapes laid crossways and in disorder, which …

  “Take the binoculars,” said the Consul to me. I looked. Singing and dancing tipsily, people were lowering from lorries and throwing into the sea, with roars of laughter and shouts, busts and heads and statues of me that had years ago been officially set up in schools, colleges, town halls, public offices, town and village squares, or one-horse dumps, where they had often kept company with some Lourdes Grotto or rusticised niche full of candles and tapers always kept lit in honour of our Divine Shepherdess. And there were marble figures, the work of local sculptors or pupils of the School of Fine Arts; and there were bronze busts, cast in Italy in the same foundry where Al
do Nardini’s gigantic Republic had seen the light; standing statues—the full figure—in tailcoat with crosses and ribbon in relief, as general of the armies (with such an exaggerated kepi that my enemies used to say there was “a peak in advance and a peak in retreat”), and as Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of San Lucas (this had been in 1909) in cap and gown with a tassel falling over the left shoulder, as a Roman patrician, as a tribune making some sort of signal with his arm (inspired to some extent by the statue of Gambetta in Paris), as a thoughtful paterfamilias; a stern Mentor, as Cincinnatus crowned with laurels—now all these were lying prostrate, carried on stretchers, loaded onto carts and barrows, drawn by oxen, dragged along and thrown into the water, one after another, with crowbars and the rhythmic shoving of men and women together: “one … two … threeeee.” Finally my equestrian statue appeared—the one I used to see every day from the palace balconies—lying on a railway truck, but now without its rider, because the rider had been torn down on the night of my flight, leaving only the bronze horse. And the horse, hoisted to an erect position by a crane and deprived of Him who used to control his bit from above, rose for a moment in one final heroic rearing movement before plunging into a sheet of foam.

  “Memento homo,” I said, leaving the rest unsaid, because the classical phrase had suddenly been supplanted in my mind by the recollection of a cruel joke the Student had made at my expense.

  “Don’t make fun of the text of the Requiem,” said the Consul. “Now those statues of yours are resting at the bottom of the sea; they’ll turn green with saltpetre, corals will cling to them, and sand cover them. And in the year 2500 or 3000 a dredger’s scoop will come across them and bring them to light again. And people will ask, in the tone of Arvers’ sonnet: ‘And who was this man?’ and very likely no one will be able to answer. It will happen just as it did to the Roman sculptures of the worst period that one sees in so many museums: all that’s known about them is that they represent A Gladiator, A Patrician, or A Centurion. The names are lost. In your case they’ll say: ‘Bust, or statue, of A Dictator. There have been so many and there still will be in this hemisphere that his name isn’t important.’ ” (He picked up a book lying on a table.) “Do you figure in Pequeño Larousse? No?… Well, then, that’s the end of you.”

  And that afternoon I wept. I wept because a dictionary—“Je sême à tout vent”—was unaware of my existence.

  SEVEN

  And deciding not to seek more knowledge than what I could find in myself …

  —DESCARTES

  19

  SEIGNORIAL AND HARMONIOUS, SOLIDLY ESTABLISHED within the circle of architectural blocks that surrounded the triumphal square—as if armoured against some attack from outside by a thick patina, growing darker every year, and variegated by mouldings and reliefs—the house in the Rue de Tilsitt received him in the lap of her porch protected by high black grilles, just as a mountain inn receives the alpinist who has lost his way and knocks at the door after a hallucinatory journey between avalanches and precipices. It was five o’clock in the morning. Using his private key so as not to wake Sylvestre, the Head of State entered the hall and turned on the light. Behind him came the Mayorala, who had been shivering and coughing all the way from the Gare Saint-Lazare, in spite of the moth-eaten fur-lined coat she had bought in Bermuda; she complained of fainting fits, a cold on her chest, and aching bones, and asked for rum, a bed, and some balsam of Tolu.

  “Give her whatever Santa Inés is left and take her up the back stairs to one of the rooms in the attic,” said the Ex (he called himself the Ex now, with irritable irony) to the cholo Mendoza, who arrived with the luggage. Alone at last, he looked around, noticing changes in decoration and furniture. Where he had expected to find the mahogany table with Chinese vases on it, the marble flower in whose corolla visiting cards used to be left, the water nymph swathed in her hair who had as long as he could remember stood in front of crimson velvet hangings covered in daggers and swords, he now found himself faced by the nudity of walls painted a pale colour and with no decoration besides a few plaster arabesques, which with much thought might be seen as a very stylised representation of curving waves. As for the furniture, there was a long bench with cushions of a fiery colour that was perhaps the shade known as “tango,” and standing on narrow pedestals were glass spheres, prisms, and rhombs, enclosing electric lightbulbs.

  “It’s not ugly; but what was here before was more distinguished-looking, more in keeping with the house,” reflected the Ex.

  He went up to the first floor, delightedly sniffing the aroma of the polished walnut stairs, whose very permanence helped to annihilate the long, infinitely long time that had passed. The pale yellow light of the rising sun was already beginning to appear through the drawing-room curtains. The President went to one of the windows and parted the brocade to look out into the Place de la Concorde. There, as magnificent and regal as ever, stood the Arc de Triomphe, with its open-mouthed Marseillaise, its vociferous Tyrtaeus in armour, and the old warrior in a helmet, followed by the boy hero with his little balls exposed to view. There, for all time, was represented the genius of Cartesian France, the only country capable of having created the anti-Cartesian world, imagined, given life, raised up and then broken by an improbable Corsican, a portentous foreigner, sexually bewitched by a mulatto from Martinique, who had lost his general’s hat in a Muscovite fire after his armies, diluted with Poles and Mamelukes, had been thrashed by the guerrilla troops of the Cura Merino and the indomitable Juan Martín. But behind the man looking at this monument were some pictures that might have represented the spirit of Cartesian France more completely. He turned on the light and went up to them. And what met his eyes was so unexpected, so absurd, and so inconceivable that he sank into a chair, stupefied but trying to understand.

  Instead of Jean-Paul Laurens’ Merovingian Saint Radegonde with her pilgrims from Jerusalem there now stood three persons, if persons they could be called, their perfectly flat anatomy reduced to geometric planes, whose faces—assuming they were faces—were covered with masks. One of them wore a monk’s hood and carried a musical score in his hand; the middle one, in a clown’s hat, was blowing on something like a clarinet; the third, in harlequin checks, had a mandolin or guitar or lute, or heaven knows what, slung around his middle. And these three persons—if they really were persons—were there, motionless and grotesque, like creatures in a nightmare, gazing out—if that was what they were doing—with the air of people who are annoyed by the presence of an intruder. “What are you doing here?” they seemed to be saying. “What are you doing here?”

  But this wasn’t all: on the other wall instead of Elstir’s delicate seascape there was something indescribable: a conjunction of lines—horizontal, vertical, and diagonal, in the colours of earth and sand—on which had been stuck a piece cut out of a newspaper (Le Matin), which the Ex tried to remove with his thumbnail, but without success, as the varnish resisted his efforts. Opposite, where Dumont’s Cardinals at Supper used to hang, there was now something completely meaningless, which might perhaps be a pattern book of Ripolin paints, because it consisted of white, red, and green rectangles and circles, edged with thick black outlines. To the side, the place of Chocarne-Moreau’s Little Chimney Sweep had been taken by a kind of crooked, hunch-backed, bandy Eiffel Tower, apparently broken down the middle by a titanic sledgehammer fallen from the sky. Over there, between the two doors, some women—women?—whose legs and arms were made of something like sections of central-heating tubing. Where I had placed Bérard’s Fashionable Reception, with its marvels of lace, décolletages, and figures silhouetted against the light, I was faced with an indescribable galimatias that, to crown all, displayed in clear round letters the title: The Cacodylic Eye. And there on a revolving pedestal of green marble stood a marble form, a formless form, without discernible meaning or purpose, with one ball—two—in its lower part, and a longer object above, which—forgive me the shocking idea—could only be taken for a not very
realistic representation, much exaggerated in its proportions—and obscene of course—of what every virile male has where he has to have it.

  “But what the hell is all this?”

  “It’s modern art, Señor President,” murmured the cholo Mendoza softly; he had just left the Mayorala upstairs, wrapped in blankets, prostrate under a feather eiderdown.

  And now the Ex hurried from room to room, finding everywhere the same pictorial transmutations, the same disasters: crazy, absurd, esoteric pictures, without any historical or legendary significance, without subject or message, dishes of fruit that weren’t dishes of fruit, houses looking like polyhedrons, faces with a set square for a nose, women with their tits out of place—one up, one down—or with one pupil on their temple, and farther on, so confused that it looked as if they must be fornicating, two fractured anatomies entangled in their own outlines, lesbian perhaps, although to paint two people doing that (and he had a good collection of pornographic plates locked away) one needed skill in draughtsmanship, knowledge of perspective, and art in portraying entwined limbs, which these failed artists known as “modern” were very far from possessing, because they were incapable of drawing a nude perfectly, of planting a young Spartan in Thermopylae, of making a horse cantering that looked at all like a horse, of decorating—one may as well say at once—the ceilings of the Paris Opera House or of creating the illusion of a battle with Detaille’s epic brio.