I walk off the verandah and into my office. The cut crystal goblet sits on top of the large wicker cabinet against the far wall. The light pouring through the bamboo curtain shatters in the crystal, sending a spray of mottled light across the room. Retrieving it from its place, I turn it in my hand and observe the delicacy of the pattern, the exquisite design. It was once the prized possession of my father, a family heirloom passed down through generations of uninspired petty officials and weary civil servants who sat with their noses buried in provincial paper and their minds in middling bank accounts. Warming their feet at tidy, bourgeois fires, they passed the crystal goblet down as something like a grail for the Langhof family. On holidays or family gatherings they would remove it from its sheltered vault and pass it carefully from hand to hand as if it were the heraldic shield of the Hohenzollern princes. But here in the Republic, the sense of the holy is reserved for certain raw materials that, when sold, support the titanic waste over which it is El Presidente’s function to preside.
I walk to my desk and place the goblet in a small cotton sack. I raise the marble paperweight in the air and bring it down. There is a small crunch as the glass shatters beneath the blow. I open the mouth of the sack and sprinkle the bits of crystal across the desk. Even in this fallen state, they sparkle with a blue and silver light. I select a few of the pieces and begin to file them down, putting each sculptured gem into a small red velvet pouch. Then I take the pouch and stuff it in my trousers.
I rise from the desk. Esperanza is staring at me from the verandah.
“¿Qué pasa?” she asked.
“Nicht … nada.”
“Oí romper alguna cosa.”
“Una copa. No es importante.”
She watches me suspiciously. “Sí, Don Pedro.”
I wave her from the door, then move down the stairs toward the greenhouse. Juan is inside, relentlessly fighting the demons that have come to destroy the orchids.
“¿Juan?”
He turns toward me.
I pull the pouch from my trousers and lift it toward him.
He looks at me strangely.
I tell him to take the pouch and to bury it under the orchids.
He stares at me, perplexed. “¿Las orquídeas?”
“Sí.”
Reluctantly he takes the pouch.
I tell him to bury it now. “Ahora, favor.”
“Sí, Don Pedro,” Juan says. He eyes the pouch, feeling the edges of the chiseled glass beneath his fingers.
I attempt to soothe his anxiety. “Para la enfermedad de las flores.” For the blight.
Juan nods silently, somewhat relieved, but not entirely so. “Sí, Don Pedro.”
“Bien.”
I walk out of the greenhouse and look toward the distant range of hills to the south. The pale orange cloud of dust billows up from the trees as Don Camillo’s spattered limousine speeds along those ancient trails the Indians once carved. In my mind I can see Don Camillo lounging in the back seat, squeezed in between his sleepless protectors, his mind squirming with visions of copper kingdoms in the provinces to the north.
BACK IN MY OFFICE, I sweep the shards of glass from my desk into the wastebasket at my feet. I sit down and think of the nature of my imagined confession:
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
How long has it been since your last confession?
There has never been a last confession.
What have you to confess, my son?
I confess that I have made myself a vessel of the will. I confess that I have taken up the metaphor of stars.
Yes, the metaphor of stars. For if the Leader had depended only upon himself, then his success would have been as limited as his person, and his person was supremely limited. I remember that when I saw him the first time in a small street café, I could not see this stooped, slight form hunched rather piggishly over his stein of lager as emblematic of the future. He had rounded shoulders that drooped pathetically under the weight of his military jacket; slick, black hair that poured across his smooth, undistinguished forehead like spilled ink; strange, Moorish eyes that protruded slightly from their oval sockets; a long broad nose, blunted at the end and set within flat, featureless cheeks that curved downward to form a small, trembling double chin; thin lips that arched neither up nor down but rested upon each other in a straight, severe slit, as if sliced by a straight razor; a close-cropped, squared, Chaplinesque mustache whose oddity seemed to blur the surrounding face.
And so it could not have been the Leader. Not for me. By the millions, others trembled at his voice. By the millions, women wept at the sight of him. But not me, not Langhof, the stalwart boy. For me he was never more than a crude parody of what he thought himself to be, a posturing little hysteric who somehow managed to vitalize the inert mind-lessness that surrounded him. Never for a single moment did I think him to be anything but what he was.
For me, it was the stars.
The boy stood in the park, watching his blue-eyed inamorata rush from him with something of himself still dangling in her hand. For a moment he felt the wind blow through him, stirring leaves and ashes. Then he began to gather himself together. He was unwilling to go home, unwilling to eat his mother’s charred strudel or smell the raw meat on his recently acquired stepfather’s soiled shirt. So he began to walk, and the village that was his neighborhood began to appear to him as the city it really was — a swell of grime and noise, a raw carcinoma growing beside a slow, pestilential river. As he walked, his eyes widened in a detestation so intense he could feel its naked energy in his blood. He conceived a larval hatred for everything that surrounded him: for gaudy lights blinking in hideous pinks and blues as the crackling traffic prowled the streets like huge, iron insects; for the numberless whores with rings of kohl about their eyes flirting with the French foreigners; for the jazz bands hurling strident tones and the colored singers wailing through cigar smoke in darkened cabarets; for the fat, smiling provincials and legless beggars, and the gay blades sporting wrinkled spats; for spike-heeled shoes and lacquered fingernails; for the redbrick burlesque palaces that squatted along the boulevard; for the men who danced with men, and the laughter in that knotted crowd; for the old women snoring in their windows and the drunken soldiers pissing in the alleyways; for the aroma of champagne mixed with sludge; for all the books that fanned the flames of all about him; and for all the politicians who soar above the fumes.
It is difficult to imagine a repulsion more pure than that of our hero as he walked the streets alone. It is difficult to imagine how he came to associate all that he saw with filth and grime.
Ah, so that’s the meaning of our tale: No one can guess what winds may blow within a devastated boy. Our little teenage hero, bereft of his first love, sees the sordidness of life, as all artists must eventually see it, and from that awareness he quite innocently surmises that a great purification must take place; this, in turn, leads him to accept those deranged notions that fluttered about the Leader’s mind. Hence, many years later, the Camp. Ah yes, it’s all quite clear now.
But it is not.
For although the realities of man’s befuddled life repelled our hero, the eccentricities of the Leader’s ideology did not attract him. He stood between a broken world and the maniacal schemes that claimed authority and competence to rebuild it. He could not accept the one any more than he could the other. And at that moment — at least figuratively — he looked up, and saw the stars.