Reasons of State

by Alejo Carpentier

  Here, at Aux Glaces, I found the only permanence that had always existed—despite larger breasts or smaller breasts—here as over there I found presence and uniqueness, dialectic of irreplaceable forms, a common language of universal understanding. In the irreversible time of the flesh it was possible to pass, according to period, from the style of Bouguereau to that of a medieval Eve, from the décolletage of Boldini to the décolletage of Tintoretto, or, inversely, from Rubens’ multitudinous buttocks and bellies to the fragile, ambiguous appearance of a nymph by Puvis de Chavannes; aesthetic fashions, variants and fluctuations of taste all passed, lengthening silhouettes, playing with proportions, amplifying—while in other departments of life, too, fashions were subject to perennial changes—yet never altering the fundamental reality of a nude. Here, looking at what I am looking at, I feel I am witnessing the Arrest of Time, somewhere outside the present epoch, maybe in the days of sun clocks or sand clocks, and therefore liberated from everything that binds me to the dates of my own history. I am less aware of being unseated from my bronze horses, thrown down from my pedestals; less of an exiled ruler, or actor in decline, and more identified with my own ego, still possessing eyes for looking, and impulses arising from the depths of a vitality that is deliciously stimulated by something worth looking at—riches definitely preferable (I feel, therefore I am) to those of a fictitious existence in the stupid ubiquity of a hundred statues in municipal parks, patios, and town halls.

  When such serious reflections beset me in a place where I hadn’t come for that purpose, and I took in the disparity between thought and situation, I burst out laughing, and made a remark to the cholo Mendoza that never failed to delight him: “Anything but ‘To be or not to be’ in a whorehouse.” “That is the question,” he replied (for he, too, fancied himself as well-read), making signs to an ample Leda, who knew she had been chosen beforehand, and so was awaiting her time without impatience, drinking some aperitif flavoured with aniseed at the next table, and counting on a client who had said nothing to her but was worth waiting for, because foreigners were generous clients and knew how to appreciate professional conscientiousness in work of every kind.

  20

  SUDDENLY CURED OF HER FEVER AND PAINS, THE Mayorala had arisen from beneath her eiderdown, clamouring to know where she could find a church in which to carry out her promise of dedicating prayers and candles to the Virgin.

  “Church, church,” she cried to the concierge, who was amazed to be approached by someone wearing three petticoats, one on top of another, for fear of the dew produced by the unusually early summer sunshine.

  “Church, church,” she repeated, crossing herself, joining her hands in a gesture of prayer, and displaying a rosary of silver beads. The concierge, possibly understanding, signed to her to go “there, turn left, turn right, and go straight on a little way.” And the Mayorala, life now restored to the strong calves of her legs, had walked, walked, walked until she came to an enormous church—it must be a church, although there was no cross on it, because it had somewhat religious-looking sculptures, such as Miguel Estatua used to make, at the top of a façade with many columns—whence came organ music, murmured prayers, and where a priest was saying things she didn’t understand, but an altar is an altar everywhere, the holy images had a familiar air and the smell of incense left no room for doubt.

  Her prayers said, she bought candles with some French money the Head of State had given her when they arrived at Cherbourg (“in case you get lost when you want to pee”), descended a few steps, and stopped in a very pretty flower market—although these carnations didn’t have so much scent as the ones over there—stopping afterwards in amazement in front of a shop window where a solitary and magnificent mango was offered for sale, reclining on a bed of fine cotton wool. There, mangoes were sold in barrows decorated with palm leaves, “five for half a peso,” and here it was lying in a box, like the gems displayed in French jewellers’ shops in her country. The Mayorala boldly entered the store. From table to table, from counter to counter she went in delighted surprise; the yucca reached out brown arms to her as if calling her attention; green bananas were turning greener before her eyes, the rough peel of yams was developing pale blotches on its redness—more like coral than a subterranean fruit. And farther on she found the intense black of beans, the liturgical white of custard apples. And by means of her language of gestures and onomatopoeia, making signs, using her fingers, exclaiming, and grunting assent or negation, she had secured five of these, three of the others, ten of those, eight from this sack, fifteen from the box, and put the lot in one of the wide baskets sold there—which basket she proceeded to put on her head when the time came to pay, to the great astonishment of the cashier: “Vous voulez un taxi, Mademoiselle?” She understood not a word. She left the shop and took her bearings. On her way here the sun had been in her face. The sun hadn’t yet got overhead and she wasn’t hungry: therefore it must be ten or half past. So, to retrace her steps, she must walk with her shadow in front of her. The trouble was that these bloody streets turned, twisted, and changed direction, and her shadow—getting smaller all the time—crossed over from right to left and refused to remain in the desired position. Then she saw so many strange things to distract her: that café full of Americans—you could tell them by their clothes; the toyshop with a blue dwarf in it; that enormous column with a tiny man on the top—a liberator, obviously; that park full of statues with a grille. Here, with the trees on the left, her shadow came back to its proper place. She walked and walked, till she came to a vast square where there was a stone standing, like those in some of the cemeteries over there, but much bigger—and however had they managed to stand it upright? Now came an avenue, with some goats pulling little carriages. There were stalls of sweets and toffees. And now the basket was beginning to weigh more than she’d bargained for, but suddenly—when the sun was directly overhead—she saw far off at the top of the road that enormous, heavy, but life-saving monument called the Arc de Triomphe or What-Have-You. She walked faster. Home at last. She wanted to go straight to the kitchen, but just then she was struck by a sharp pain in the back. And her fever returned. She left the basket in a corner of the room, took a glass of rum beaten up with balsam of Tolu, and went back under her eiderdown, complaining bitterly of these countries with climates cold enough to skin one alive.

  And at about half past eleven next day, Ofelia was woken by unusually loud voices. The maid came in, looking and sounding upset: “Mademoiselle, pardonnez-moi, maís …” The cook wanted to see her; to see her immediately, she insisted. There she was. Furious. And she came in, dishevelled—very like a Fury, in fact—telling everyone whether half asleep or not, who would listen, that this was impossible, it was intolerable, and she wouldn’t stay another day in the house, she’d hand back her apron. And she suited the action to the words, taking it off and handing it over with an angry expression, looking like some venerable master mason returning his leather apron. It was intolerable: a short while ago a woman had come down from the attic, wearing three skirts, gesticulating, dark-skinned—“une peau de boudin, Mademoiselle”; she had taken possession of her world of pots and pans, and set about cooking extraordinary things—“des mangeailles des sauvages, Mademoiselle”—dirtying everything, spilling oil, throwing corncobs into corners, contaminating the casseroles with mixtures of pimentos and cocoa, using a carpenter’s plane to slice plantains, cramming handfuls of fritters into brown paper. And after preparing this unspeakable pigswill, and leaving the kitchen poisoned with greasy vapours and the stink of frying, she had carried off trays and soup bowls to the little room that used to belong to Sylvestre, which out of respect for the memory of that exemplary servant had remained exactly as he left it before he went away and died gloriously in battle on the plateau of Craonne, with the Croix de Guerre on his breast and his photo published in L’Illustration because of his heroic behaviour in the face of the enemy.

  Beginning to understand the situation, Ofelia returned her
apron to the cook, wrapped herself in a dressing gown, and went up to the attic.

  The Head of State and the cholo Mendoza, their shirts undone, hairy and unshaven—and looking as if they had hangovers—were sitting at a long table, which was really a door taken off its hinges and placed on two chairs. On several trays and dishes, as if in some low restaurant in the tropics, were laid out green avocados, red chillis, ochre and chocolate sauces from which emerged breasts and joints of turkey, frosted over with grated onion. In a row on the carving board there were little maize cakes and omelettes seasoned with chillis, next to yellow tamales, wrapped in hot moist leaves and exuding aromas suggestive of a country fiesta. There were fried ripe bananas, plantains cut in fine slices by the carpenter’s plane (those that had been crushed in handfuls). And yam fritters and coconut cakes browned in the oven, and a punch bowl where, in a mixture of tequila and Spanish cider such as was drunk at weddings over there, there floated pine kernels, green lemons, mint, and orange blossom.

  “Care to join us?” asked the cholo Mendoza.

  “And who prepared all this?” asked Ofelia, still stupefied by her sudden awakening and the cook’s protestations.

  “Elmirita, servant of God and your honour,” replied the mulatto, bowing with her legs crossed as girls are taught to do in French Dominican colleges.

  Ofelia had been about to overturn the improvised table and put an end to the junketings, but now a maize tamale on the end of a fork approached her eyes and descended to her mouth. When it was opposite her nose, a sudden inner emotion, coming from a long way off, a fluttering in her entrails, weakened her knees and made her sit down on a chair. She bit into it, and all at once her body grew younger by thirty years. In white socks, and with her hair in curling papers, she was on the patio with the millstones and the tamarind tree. And from the tree dangled cinnamon-coloured parchment pods full of dark pulp, with a forgotten bittersweetness that made her mouth water. And there came back to her, too, the smell of fermented guavas—ambiguously combining pears and raspberries—from behind the fence where Jongolojongo the pig, with his long bristles and long snout, was grunting and rooting among broken tiles and rusty old tins. And the smells from the kitchen full of pots, vases, jugs, and black pottery, whence came the sounds of chewing, of the slow tread of boots on wet earth, of the pestle falling as rhythmically as a pendulum on the milky, fragrant, foaming mass of maize pulp. And Mayflower the cow, who had just calved, was calling to her little one to relieve her udders, and outside a street seller was crying molasses for sale; and the bell from the hermitage among the medlar and cherry trees; and this maize here (I’m seven years old, and already I look at myself in the mirror every morning to see if I’ve grown breasts in the night) entering my body at every pore. I’m seven years old:

  Santa Maria,

  Save us from evil

  Protect us, Señora

  From this terrible devil

  And then everyone sang:

  To kill the devil

  The Virgin seized a blade

  On all fours the monster

  Lay down in a glade.

  “Des mangeailles des sauvages,” said the cook, standing in the doorway with her arms akimbo.

  “To hell with Brillat-Savarin!” cried Ofelia, her cheeks blazing from the cider mixed with tequila and pineapple juice, tasting this and that, plunging her spoon in the avocado salad and dipping a turkey joint into chilli sauce. And suddenly seized by an unexpected impulse of affection, she sat on her father’s knees and kissed his cheeks, where once again she recaptured the smell of tobacco, aguardiente, French lotion (with some hint of mint, liquorice, and Mimi Pinson powder)—but less old, more virile, almost young—in a marvellous rediscovery of time past. For the first time since the days of the plateau of Craonne, they played the gramophone that had remained silent ever since Sylvestre’s heroic death. They heard, in tones that grew deeper or almost died away when the mechanism ran down, several tunes collected by the cholo Mendoza: Lerdo de Tejado’s “Faisan,” “Alma campera,” “El Tamborito,” and “La Milonguita,” flower of luxury and pleasure, men did you wrong and now you would give anything for a cotton dress; and listen to the story the old gravedigger told me one day: it was a lover whose sweetness cruel fate stole away; and goodbye lads, my lifelong friends; and every night he went to the cemetery to see the corpse of his beloved, and crowned her skull with orange blossom and covered her horrible mouth with kisses; and goodbye lads, my lifelong friends of happy days; and the day that you love me will be sunnier than June, with music by Beethoven singing from every flower; and again and again and again those happy festive days, and goodbye and goodbye, light of my nights, sang the soldier underneath the window …

  By now Elmirita and Ofelia had their arms around each other and were singing a duet, skilfully keeping to intervals of thirds and sixths, which the cholo accompanied with opportunely onomatopoeic flourishes on an imaginary guitar.

  And when night fell, what with drinking, singing, and titbits of tomato and chilli sauce, the Head of State decided to instal himself finally in Sylvestre’s rooms, entering and leaving by the back staircase: “I shall be more independent like that.” Then Ofelia, down below, could go on having her parties of young people and live amongst those horrible pictures which so frayed his nerves—quite apart from the fact that he didn’t understand them and never would. And the Mayorala would go on living here in the room next door, to keep him company and look after him. The Infanta agreed: Elmirita was a splendid girl, most unselfish and good, “Much more respectable and honourable than many of the friends of Madame What’s-her-name, with her musical evenings, who doesn’t want to clap eyes on you now that she’s become a princess.” But the zamba must be dressed differently. And Ofelia ran to her wardrobe to find her some clothes she no longer wore. Although full of praise for their quality, the Mayorala eyed them a little suspiciously: this one was cut so low as to be brazen; the slit skirt of the other seemed to her immodest. When she saw the lapels of a suit tailored by Redfern: “I don’t wear men’s clothes.” To a black ensemble by Paquin she said, “Yes, perhaps it would do for a funeral.” In the end she happily accepted a model of Paul Poiret’s, partly inspired by Léon Bakst’s designs for Schéhérazade, which reminded her of the flowered skirts and blouses of her own people. And that night they finally consecrated the new dwelling by fixing two rings in the walls, knotting cords to them, and hanging up the woven hammock for the Head of State to sleep in—“I beg your pardon: the Ex,” corrected the Patriarch, enjoying his first swing in it.

  The Mayorala soon became familiar with a large region of Paris centred around the Arc de Triomphe and with the river as its extreme frontier—a river she never crossed, because people who did a lot of ironing and cooking were in danger of catching a chill if they crossed a bridge. She had come across a church in the square where a bronze horseman, a very good poet who had been a friend of the Emperor Pedro of Brazil—so the cholo Mendoza had explained—seemed plunged in endless thought, and behind the church of Saint Honoré of somewhere or other was a superb fish market where they sold octopuses, prawns, and quahogs fairly like those she used to get over there, as well as clams identical with the ones from the beaches of La Verónica, which came out of the sand as though drawn by a magnet whenever they found out that a woman eager for a man had sat down on them. In a shop close by, earthenware pots and casseroles were sold, and by stealing bricks from a house being built—she carried them two at a time in the oilskin bag she used for lemons, garlic, and parsley—she had transformed the stove in the attic into a Creole range, feeding it with wood brought, tied up in wire, from Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons, where she went very often these days, having become much addicted to Muscadet and sweet Gaillac—wines that she used to say “toned up her system.”

  And she began to live there, under the slate roof, in a latitude and at times belonging to another region and another epoch.

  The early morning was filled with the aroma of strong coffee
, filtered through a woollen stocking and sweetened with cane syrup, which the zamba got near the Madeleine; she could always find her way there without getting lost, because she had proved that by going under the Arc de Triomphe exactly in the middle she could see the Standing Stone a long way off, and having reached it she turned left and found the building with many columns where she had given thanks for her recovery. Then followed a short rest on her hammock with a glass of aguardiente and a Romeo and Juliet cigar, and later still a cry of “Come along in” announced the appearance, on two broad mahogany tables supported on carpenter’s trestles, of a country breakfast of eggs in peppery sauce, fried black beans, maize tortillas, pork, and white cheese pounded together in a mortar and served in any leaf available—so long as it was green—for lack of a banana leaf. After that came her morning siesta, interrupted when she was half asleep about eleven, by the cholo Mendoza, bringing the daily newspapers. But these papers hadn’t seen the light in the small hours on Parisian printing presses. They were papers from overseas, had travelled a long way and were concerned with things other than current events. Le Figaro, Le Journal, and Le Petit Parisien never came up to this floor; they had been gradually supplanted by El Mercurio, El Mundo, and Ultimas Noticias from over there, or even by El Faro from Nueva Córdoba or El Centinela from Puerto Araguato. The Head of State was beginning to forget the names of politicians over here, and he cared very little what was happening in Europe—although the recent assassination of Matteotti had stimulated his admiration for Italian fascism, and that great man Mussolini who was going to put an end to international communism—he was interested only in what might be happening over there.