Luca stopped and asked if they knew why crazy people, everywhere in the world, always saw themselves as Napoleon Bonaparte. Why, he asked, whenever someone needs to portray a madman, why do they draw someone with a hand tucked into his vest and a bicorn hat on his head? It was true, wasn’t it? A quick sketch of Napoleon, that was the universal way to draw a madman. Had anyone thought of that? Luca asked. I am Napoleon, the locus classicus of the classic madman. But, why?
“We’ll leave that one stewing,” he said with a sly look in his eye, and escorted them down the hallway and into his office. To return to the question of the secretary, which they had left “pending,” he said.
Although the main office was luxuriously furnished, it was much deteriorated, with a layer of gray dust on the leather chairs and the long mahogany tables, moisture marks on the carpets and walls, the windows all broken, and white splotches of pigeon shit on the floor. The birds — not just pigeons, but also sparrows, ovenbirds, chingolos, and even a carancho — would come in through the roof, land on the iron crossbeams along the roof of the factory, and fly in and out of the building, sometimes building nests in different places of the edifice — all apparently without being seen by the Industrialist, or at least without being considered of sufficient interest or importance to interrupt his actions, or his speeches.
Luca had to place another ad, this time on the Church radio station, he told them, the parish station actually, X8 Radio Pius XII. Several sacristans and members of the Catholic Action applied, as well as a few seminary students who needed to spend a period of time in civilian life. These latter revealed a certain indecision that Luca noticed right away, they were like children, willing to collaborate, charitable, but reluctant to move into the factory with the exclusive dedication that the Industrialist would’ve demanded of them. Until finally, after interviewing a number of applicants and fearing that he wouldn’t find anyone, a pale, young man showed up who immediately confessed that he’d left the priesthood before being ordained. He said that he’d come to doubt his faith and that he wanted to spend time in the secular scene, as his confessor, Father Luis, had advised him. These were his words. And there he was, dressed in black, wearing his white-banded collar (“clergyman”) to prove he still carried with him “the mark of God,” as he told him. Mister Schultz.
“That’s why we hired him, because we understood that Schultz was, or would be, the right man for our legal task. After all, is justice not based on belief and the written word, like religion? There’s legal fiction, just like there are sacred stories, and in both cases we believe only what’s told right.”
Luca told them the young secretary was in one of the offices now, organizing their correspondence and typing up the nighttime dictations, but that they’d be able to meet him soon. Luca needed a secretary who’d be trustworthy, a believer, a convert in a sense. He needed a fanatic, someone willing to serve a cause. He had a long conversation with the candidate, whom he finally selected, about the Catholic Church as a theological-political institution and as a spiritual mission.
In these times of disillusion and skepticism, with an absent God — the seminary student had told him — truth resides in the twelve apostles who saw Him when He was young and healthy, in full use of His faculties. One should believe in the New Testament because it was the only proof of the vision of the embodiment of God. In the beginning there were twelve apostles, the seminary student had said — and one traitor, we added. This made the seminary student blush, Luca told them, he was so young that the word traitor had some kind of sinful, sexual connotation for him. The idea of a small circle, of an exalted and loyal sect, except with a traitor infiltrated at its core, an informant who’s not foreign to the sect, but constitutes an essential part of its structure — this was the true organizational form of any small society. One must act knowing that there’s a traitor infiltrated in the ranks.
“Which is what we didn’t do when we organized the board (with twelve members) that went on to direct our factory. We stopped operating as a family business and became a corporation with a board. That was our first mistake. As soon as they stopped working solely within the confines of the family, my brother and father started to waver and lose confidence. Faced with a series of economic crises and the onslaught of the creditors, they succumbed to the siren song of that vulture Cueto, with that little perpetual smile of his, and his glass eye. The songs of sirens are always signs of risks to be avoided, the songs of sirens are always precautions warning us not to act, that’s why Ulysses put wax in his ears, to avoid hearing the maternal songs that warn us about life’s risks and dangers, the ones that paralyze us, destroy us. No one would ever do anything if they had to avoid all the unforeseen risks of their actions. That’s why Napoleon is the hero of all madmen and of all failures, because he took risks, like a gambler who bets everything on the cards he has, loses, and plays the next hand with the same courage and spirit as if he’d won. There’re no contingencies and there’s no chance, there’re only risks and conspiracies. Luck is operated from the shadows. We used to attribute our misfortunes to the wrath of the gods, then to the fatality of destiny, but now we know that in reality the only things we really have are conspiracies and secret maneuvers.
“There’s a traitor among us,” the Industrialist told them, smiling. “That should be the basic operational sentence of every organization.” Luca gestured toward the street, toward the grafitti and posters on the walls outside the factory. “That’s what happened to us, because there was a traitor inside our family business who took advantage of the family’s well-being to squeal,” he said, again using a metaphor that revealed his origins, as was his habit. Or at least his birthplace.
Luca told them that there were two contradictory tendencies in the teachings of Christ — according to the seminary student — one in conflict with the other. On the one hand, we have the illiterate and dejected of the world, the fishermen, artisans, prostitutes, and poor peasants upon whom the Lord bestowed long and clear parables. For the meek He had not concepts or abstract ideas, but stories and anecdotes. In this line of teaching, arguments were made through narratives, with practical examples from everyday life, which were thus opposed to the intellectual generalizations and abstractions of the men of letters and the philistines, the eternal readers of sacred texts, the interpreters of the Book. Was He literate? What did He write on the sand? An undecipherable mark, or an actual word? Did He have God’s absolute knowledge and did He know all the libraries and all the writings, and was His memory infinite? Christ didn’t forecast a good end for the priests and the rabbis and the erudite men at all. To the poor in spirit, rather, to the wretches of the earth, to the humble and the oppressed, was destined the Kingdom of Heaven.
In the other line, the idea was that only a small group of the initiated, an extreme minority, can lead us to the high and hidden truths. This initiated circle of conspirators, who share the great secret, however, act with the conviction that there’s a traitor among them. They say what they say, they do what they do, knowing they’re going to be betrayed. What is said can be interpreted in several different ways, even the traitor doesn’t trust the explicit meaning, the traitor is not quite certain what he should or should not denounce. This is how we can understand how this young, Palestine preacher — a bit of a night owl, strange, who’s abandoned His family and speaks to Himself and preaches in the desert; a healer, a fortune-teller, a layer of hands who in His opposition to the occupying Roman forces foretells of a future kingdom — all of a sudden proclaims that He is the Christ and Son of God (You have proclaimed it, he said). This theological-political version of the eccentric community, the seminary student said, according to Luca, was the classic structure of a secret sect that knows there’s a traitor in its ranks, and protects itself by using a language suffused with hidden meanings.