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Authors: Alejo Carpentier
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Frenchman, Pegoud, at looping the loop at the Bien Aparecida airfield yesterday; a suicide by fire; cattle rustlers captured in Camagüey; a cold spell—13 degrees according to the Observatory—on the heights of Placetas; confused situation in Mexico—where there actually was a revolution going on, as we know by the terrifying accounts of Don Porfirio; and in our own country, yes, in our own country, the crier’s voice had named it, there had been a victory for Ataúlfo Galván (yes, “a victory,” I think he said) in the region of Nueva Córdoba.
The shock of this awoke the Head of State, who had been asleep with one huge thick thigh thrown over the just as fleshy but longer thigh of the mulatto, and composed and dignified, we now walked together to San Francisco Quay, where the cargo boat was waiting to weigh anchor. A barrel organ decked out in tassels and portraits of La Chelito and La Bella Camelia suddenly struck up the piercing din of a bull-fighting
pasodoble
.
“What a noisy town!” remarked the President. “Our capital is a monastery in comparison.”
And here we are now, in Puerto Araguato, where Colonel Hoffmann is waiting for us, standing stiffly to attention, wearing his best monocle, and with the good news that nothing has changed. The rebellion has been supported only in the northern provinces, whose population has a long tradition of hostility to the Central Power, believing themselves slighted, belittled, treated like a poor relation, although they possess the richest and most productive land in the country. Of the fifty-three risings in the last century, more than forty were led by caudillos from the north. Nobody yet knew, except the ministers and highest officers of the army, that the Chief of State was to arrive today. This should make the most of the surprise. (Feeling sadder now than before at the treachery of the man I had most trusted, I had been gazing at the view of the port from the deck of the cutter that was conveying me and was suddenly moved to sentimental but irrepressible tears by the sight of the rows of cottages and farms heaped up against the hill, like fragile cards in a house of cards. With my anger dissolving at this reunion with my own country, I noticed from the quivering of the lamplight that this air was the air of my air; that some water brought me to quench my thirst, though it was water like any other, suddenly reminded me of forgotten tastes, linked to faces from the past, to things seen by my eyes and stored away in my mind. Breathe deeply. Drink slowly. Go back. Paramnesia. And now that the train is going up and up, in endless curves and tunnels, making short stops now and again between cliffs and the scrubby woods of the Torrid Zone, I see, with the eyes of smell, the outline of leaves growing inside chapels of shadow; I depict for myself the architecture of a tree by the plaintive creaking of a bough; and know what fungi grow on the bark of the amaranth by the permanence of its remembered aroma.
As though naked and unarmed, mollified, disposed toindulgence, settlement, possible accommodation—things derived from an
over there
that from hour to hour was being left further behind at the foot of its Arc de Triomphe—as I climbed towards the seat of the presidency and regained an aggressiveness possibly due to the surrounding vegetation and its uninterrupted battle to reconquer the open space of the railway line along which our locomotive was winding, I considered recent events with greater animosity and passion. Every two hundred metres climbed by the engine added to my authority and stature, strengthened also by the thin air from the high peaks. I must be hard, implacable; this was demanded by the implacable, pitiless Powers that still made up the dark and all-powerful reason of existence—the visceral peristalsis—of the world in gestation, though problematic as to shapes, desires, impulses, and limits. Because
over there—
now the over there of
over
The shock of this awoke the Head of State, who had been asleep with one huge thick thigh thrown over the just as fleshy but longer thigh of the mulatto, and composed and dignified, we now walked together to San Francisco Quay, where the cargo boat was waiting to weigh anchor. A barrel organ decked out in tassels and portraits of La Chelito and La Bella Camelia suddenly struck up the piercing din of a bull-fighting
pasodoble
.
“What a noisy town!” remarked the President. “Our capital is a monastery in comparison.”
And here we are now, in Puerto Araguato, where Colonel Hoffmann is waiting for us, standing stiffly to attention, wearing his best monocle, and with the good news that nothing has changed. The rebellion has been supported only in the northern provinces, whose population has a long tradition of hostility to the Central Power, believing themselves slighted, belittled, treated like a poor relation, although they possess the richest and most productive land in the country. Of the fifty-three risings in the last century, more than forty were led by caudillos from the north. Nobody yet knew, except the ministers and highest officers of the army, that the Chief of State was to arrive today. This should make the most of the surprise. (Feeling sadder now than before at the treachery of the man I had most trusted, I had been gazing at the view of the port from the deck of the cutter that was conveying me and was suddenly moved to sentimental but irrepressible tears by the sight of the rows of cottages and farms heaped up against the hill, like fragile cards in a house of cards. With my anger dissolving at this reunion with my own country, I noticed from the quivering of the lamplight that this air was the air of my air; that some water brought me to quench my thirst, though it was water like any other, suddenly reminded me of forgotten tastes, linked to faces from the past, to things seen by my eyes and stored away in my mind. Breathe deeply. Drink slowly. Go back. Paramnesia. And now that the train is going up and up, in endless curves and tunnels, making short stops now and again between cliffs and the scrubby woods of the Torrid Zone, I see, with the eyes of smell, the outline of leaves growing inside chapels of shadow; I depict for myself the architecture of a tree by the plaintive creaking of a bough; and know what fungi grow on the bark of the amaranth by the permanence of its remembered aroma.
As though naked and unarmed, mollified, disposed toindulgence, settlement, possible accommodation—things derived from an
over there
that from hour to hour was being left further behind at the foot of its Arc de Triomphe—as I climbed towards the seat of the presidency and regained an aggressiveness possibly due to the surrounding vegetation and its uninterrupted battle to reconquer the open space of the railway line along which our locomotive was winding, I considered recent events with greater animosity and passion. Every two hundred metres climbed by the engine added to my authority and stature, strengthened also by the thin air from the high peaks. I must be hard, implacable; this was demanded by the implacable, pitiless Powers that still made up the dark and all-powerful reason of existence—the visceral peristalsis—of the world in gestation, though problematic as to shapes, desires, impulses, and limits. Because
over there—
now the over there of
over
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