have already made plans for the visit?”
“Yes.”
“May I know what they are?”
“A large banquet. The whole village will be invited. I know how much they love El Presidente, and how much he loves them, as well.”
Don Camillo smiles happily. “Splendid. That should improve his spirits.”
“Such is my intent.”
Don Camillo eyes the wall of records inside my office. “There is a particular musician El Presidente admires, Don Pedro. I wonder if you might have any of his recordings.”
“What is the name?”
“Chop-pin.”
“Chopin,” I say gently.
Don Camillo smiles self-consciously. “Oh, is that how it is pronounced? I have only seen the name written on the albums. One does not hear such names pronounced very often here in the Republic.”
In the Camp, the orchestra was not permitted to play Chopin, because he was a Pole. “It wouldn’t matter if you did,” I tell Don Camillo.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It wouldn’t matter if you did hear such names pronounced here, Don Camillo. Pronunciations are of no importance.”
“Exactly,” Don Camillo says. “Although I’m sure El Presidente knows the correct form of speech.”
“A man of refinements,” I add.
“Profoundly so,” Don Camillo says. He slaps his thighs. “Well, I think my work is done here, Don Pedro. I’m happy to see that you have made the proper arrangements for El Presidente’s visit.”
“Everything will be taken care of, you may depend on it, Don Camillo.”
Don Camillo rises, draws a handkerchief from his coat pocket, and mops his brow. “This business in the northern provinces, it has exhausted me.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Ah, well, part of the job,” Don Camillo says. He replaces the handkerchief. “It’s those people up there. They are never satisfied. No matter what El Presidente does for them, they want more.”
“Perhaps if they had more copper —”
Don Camillo laughs. “Copper? No, there’s no copper to be had in that region of the Republic. Believe me, it has been investigated.”
“Something else then, perhaps.”
“No, nothing,” Don Camillo says with certainty. “It’s their nature, that’s all. Mountain people. Uncivilized. Sometimes I think that we will never have peace in the northern provinces until every last one of them has been killed.” He looks at me knowingly. “A process, I believe, in which you have some expertise, Doctor.”
My machine pistol rests in the top drawer of my desk. It is only a few inches from my hands.
Don Camillo laughs, but his eyes do not. “Perhaps you have a plan for the northern provinces.”
It would be a matter of opening the drawer, one quick, deft movement, and he would dance until the clip emptied.
“I would not want to be involved,” I tell him.
“Once is enough for anyone, I suppose,” Don Camillo says with a malicious wink.
I stand. “Tell El Presidente that I am waiting for him with great eagerness.”
Don Camillo wipes the shimmering beads of sweat from his mustache. “And you tell Dr. Ludtz that I regret not seeing him.” He offers me his hand. I take it and shake it briskly. “So nice to have seen you, Don Pedro,” he says.
“And you, Don Camillo.” In the Republic, civility is important.
Don Camillo turns and moves down the stairs. His bodyguards watch me, and two other bodyguards a little ways distant watch them. In the Republic, no one can be trusted.
I raise my hand. “Adios, Don Camillo.”
Don Camillo turns before entering his mud-caked limousine. “Y usted, tambien,” he calls to me. Then he steps inside the car, surrounded by his sloe-eyed janissaries in their dark green uniforms. They stare out the window, their eyes cruising the river bank or rising to riffle through the trees searching for blue rifle barrels peeping from the vines like the heads of wary serpents.
Don Camillo’s car pulls away quickly, heaving up a trail of swirling orange dust. In the distance, I can see Esperanza watch the limousine. She is wearing a dark red rebozo that falls over her shoulders and drops almost to her knees. Ritually, she claps her hands three times as the car passes. I do not know if this is a blessing or a curse.
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.
“?Que pasa?” she asked.
“Nicht … nada.”
“Oi romper alguna cosa.”
“Una copa. No es importante.”
She watches me suspiciously. “Si, 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 orquideas?”
“Si.”
Reluctantly he takes the pouch.
I tell him to bury it now. “Ahora, favor.”
“Si, 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. “Si, 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.
