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

secretaries with tales of early glory. Ginzburg went out whistling and Rausch with a look of rude surprise.
    Here in the Republic, El Presidente contemplates his final resting place. He has considered many alternatives, but as he ages the search becomes more desperate. It is said that in the northern provinces entire mountain ranges have been sheared off in preparation for El Presidente’s monument. Some say he will build a great glass tomb beneath the sea so that his soul can watch the sharks and barracuda. Others claim that the desert wastes have already been selected and that a great golden shaft is to be erected there, one so tall that its shadow will pass over the curvature of earth.
    To nestle the world within the crook of our arm. That is the age-old and ageless dream in its perversity. And this mania is by no means the special pleasure of underdevelopment. In the great manorial halls of the privileged classes, behind the towering walls of stone and marble there are rooms seldom used but elaborately decorated, with great curtains covering intricacies of inlaid glass, boasting hearths of dark malachite, polished floors of mosaic design, and ponderous carved-mahogany doors whose task it is to enclose this splendor. Within all this, one may divine part of the psychology of pomp. For although the grand, silent, empty rooms entomb something that resists ultimate decortication, there is also something that betrays itself within the context of the splendid. Indeed their very grandeur and stolidity bespeaks the paranoia of the impermanent. They are built to withstand the intrigue of time and the whimsy of taste. By their magnificence they attempt to rise above judgment and dwarf all that might subsequently attempt to mar or defame them. They are the very instrument by which power is made manifest on earth, and those who move easily within them carry some physical notion of the resplendent, the immaculate, and the immortal.
    The orphaned sons of petty attorneys, however, must find less lofty devices through which to consecrate themselves. Mine was Anna.
    At best our romance was not the stuff from which epics could be made. There was sufficient pubescent melodrama to fashion a lusterless novelette, and if it had flowered into marriage and family, perhaps a neat, bourgeois roman-fleuve. But beyond such mundane possibilities, nothing.
    Three years after our encounter across the street from Kreisler’s shop, we made groping, unruly love in her small room, while two Bavarian milkmaid dolls watched us from atop an oak armoire. Their lifeless ceramic eyes remain as much a part of my memory of that scene as the first shock of breasts and thigh. But I also remember that I wanted to pull myself into Anna’s body, wanted to mold a pallet for myself within her. It is one of our illusions to believe that once we have entertained such feelings we never really lose them. But they are, at the most, transitory, and if they are not allied to some form of riches that lies more deeply within us, then they are no more than passing incidents, as vacant and useless as sheafs of paper upon which nothing has been written.
    And yet even this, or the prolongation of it, came abruptly to an end.
    â€œI have bad news,” Anna said quietly.
    We were sitting in a small park. It was late evening and the park was almost entirely empty.
    â€œBad news?” I could already feel a lethal fluttering in my stomach. I imagined that she was going to let me go, set me adrift, and then rush off to that handsome lover who was already waiting naked in her bed.
    â€œMy father has lost his job,” Anna said.
    I felt relieved. “I’m sorry. But he’ll find another one, I’m sure.”
    Anna lowered her eyes. “He says there are no jobs to be found here.”
    â€œNo jobs?” I laughed. “Of course there are jobs. He just has to look for one, that’s all.”
    Anna shook her head. “He says there are no