Free Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier

operations. The general aspect of the situation, although serious, could be considered optimistically.
    “And Nueva Córdoba?” he asked, however, thinking of that extraordinary city of ruined palaces, so rich in mines, possibly too Indian, always leaving a disconcerting aftertaste, alarmingly prone to produce unexpected surprises, which had been such a centre of tough resistance in former revolutions.
    “Nothing,” replied Hoffmann. “Ataúlfo isn’t popular there. So he’s left it untouched. Besides, he promised to respect English and North American interests, and there are a lot there, and he wants to show he’s as good as his word by keeping the war away from that region.”
    The Head of State was sleepy. He asked the Mayorala Elmira to get his battle uniform ready, polish his boots, and shammy-leather his peaked hat; then, moved by a suddencaprice, he seized her without warning, pulled up her skirts while she stood with her elbows on a marble sideboard, amazed at the “good condition” the Señor had arrived in from Paris—that stupendous Paris, where men lose their very souls … after which he curled up in his hammock and slept for a few hours.
    When he awoke he was confronted by the face of Doctor Peralta, but frowning and preoccupied this time. The students of the ancient University of San Lucas had had the temerity to circulate an insolent, inadmissible manifesto, which the President read with growing rage. They remembered that he had gained power by a coup d’état; that he had been confirmed in it by fraudulent elections; that his powers had been extended during an arbitrary reform of the Constitution; that his re-elections … in other words, it had been as usual in such matters. The time had come to put an end to an authority without trend or doctrine, expressed in ukases and edicts by a president proconsul guided in governmental affairs by messages in cypher from his son Ariel. But the gravity of the present situation—and its new feature—lay in the fact that the students had proclaimed that at the present time there was no difference between a uniform and a frock coat, and that the government cause was every bit as uninteresting as that of the so-called revolutionaries. The players had changed places around the same board, but an interminable game, begun more than a hundred years ago, was still going on.
    And to aid the return to a constitutional and democratic order, the figure of Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez had come forward, an austere professor of philosophy and translator of Plotinus, well known to Peralta, who had been a pupil of his. He was a man with a high, narrow, balding forehead with prominent veins, dry and short in speech, abstemious and anearly riser, a militant vegetarian, father of nine, admirer of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, who had corresponded with Francisco Ferrer, the great Barcelonese anarchist, and started a demonstration in the city when the news was received that he had been shot at Monjuich. The Head of State winked at this demonstration because indignation was universal, and because in fact, now that Ferrer was done for and couldn’t rouse any rebels, a procession starting at dusk and ending in the nine o’clock evening breeze (three hours of shouting that had nothing to do with opposing the government) would show our respect for liberty, our tolerance of ideas, etc., etc. Doctor Luis Leoncio Martínez combined his libertarian convictions with a form of theosophy, nurtured on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Annie Besant, Madame Blavtsky, and Camille Flammarion, was interested in metaphysical phenomena, and attended very intimate seances for table turning, hypnotism, knocks, and levitation, demonstrating the presence of the spirits of Swedenborg, the Comte de Saint Germain, and Katie King, or of the still-alive but far-distant Eusapia Paladino.
    And now this dreamer, this pale utopian, had appeared unexpectedly in Nueva Córdoba, and was inciting the