Read Online The Orchids by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online

good.”
    â€œPerhaps someday I shall. But for now, I’m much too busy.”
    â€œI understand, believe me.” Dr. Ludtz says. “May I ask another question?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œHave you decided on the menu?”
    â€œRoast pork, I think. And a fine red wine to go with it.”
    â€œExcellent,” Dr. Ludtz says. He rises. “Let me know if I may be of assistance to you. You shouldn’t tire yourself.”
    â€œI won’t. Thank you.”
    He moves out the door and down the stairs. He is a man who must continually give the appearance of being busy. There is nothing whatsoever for him to do in the compound. Everything is provided. Like the sparrow, he need neither sow nor reap. And yet he bustles about in a constant state of unnecessary activity, a gyroscope of obsessive redundancy, producing for neither use nor exchange, his incessant labor nothing more than the broom with which he sweeps clean his mind.
    Esperanza opens the glass door that separates my office from the verandah. She asks if I have need of anything.
    â€œNada. Gracias.”
    She nods and casts a curious glance in the direction of Dr. Ludtz’s retreating figure.
    In Spanish, I ask her what she thinks of him.
    She grimaces. “El ojo de mal,” she mutters, and slinks back onto the verandah.
    The evil eye, that is what she says of Dr. Ludtz. Here in the Republic, evil is the great reductive principle. Sickness is evil, so there are few medical schools in the Republic, for evil is not a thing that can be ministered to by science. The mouths of children fill with running sores dropped into them by Satan’s fingers. Evil demons infect the bush and putrefy the air. They squat under the morning mist and fly upon the hornet’s back. They gurgle under the green sludge of the open sewers and mire themselves within the canker’s pus. Here, malevolent animism is the great disease, a spiritus mundi against which the clergy fights feeble and symbolic war, sweeping into dying villages, flinging yellow holy water drawn from contaminated streams. And then they sweep out again, leaving the fevered peasants their catholicon of faith, while, overhead, vultures ebonize the sky.
    Here it is deemed man’s fate to abide patiently within a geography of hell. For evil is our constant curse. It guides the machete in its flight, inflames the rapist’s eye, and squeezes shut the strangler’s hand. Evil leers outside the maiden’s bedroom window and lurks behind the oddly open door. It is war and pestilence and famine. It is poverty and greed and dissipation and lacy garter belts. It is the black scarf wrapped around our eyes.
    But in the Camp, evil was made man and kept in check by wire and bayonet until the world could be cleansed of it by fire and poison gas. There, amid an orgy of purification, the world was to be made new, the black stain of evil bleached white in fields of bone.

I N LATE EVENING I can see Dr. Ludtz meticulously removing the lichens from his tomb, his fingers clawing at them like small paring knives. This is his futile thrust toward immortality, a stone table set in the jungle vastness. Despite the irremediable squalor of his life, Dr. Ludtz does not wish to airbrush himself from history, but rather to erect a monument to his being. Having once been, he seeks always to be. It is part of his lunacy and his crime, but the urge is not exclusively his.
    Other men choose different methods to immortalize themselves. In the Camp, they carved their names into rotting boards to prove that they were there. They plunged into gullies of poured cement and sank themselves into the machinery of their own destruction. They grasped the sizzling wire or danced insanely by the dead-line while the guards took aim above, cigarettes dangling casually from their lips. And in the capital, far away, the Leader descended into his tomb and ate strawberries and cream while he regaled his dutiful