The Orchids

DR. LUDTZ is moving up the stairs toward me. His face is almost soothing in its blankness, a pink and hairless mass, featureless as a wad of gum. For years we toiled together in the Camp, effacing our disparity of thought with an identity of act.

At the top of the stairs he taps at my door, then eases himself in. “Still in the office, Doctor?” he says. “It would be good for you to get out once in a while, you know.”

A wall of heat enters with the open door. “Perhaps.”

“The day is first rate.”

“I can see that. Did you enjoy your excursion on the river?”

“It was wonderful. You should have joined me.”

“Perhaps next time, Dr. Ludtz.”

Dr. Ludtz eyes me suspiciously. “I also noticed — I didn’t mention it earlier — but I also noticed that you were up quite late last night.”

“Was I?”

“I could see the lights burning here in your office. I was somewhat worried, you know.”

I can imagine him sitting by his window, peeping through a slit in the shutters at the lights burning in my office, wondering if at that very moment I might be in the hands of some commando unit Arnstein has sent to snatch us both.

“I don’t sleep as well as I once did,” I tell him. “Age, I suppose. The arthritis.”

“Very uncomfortable, I imagine.”

“Yes, sometimes. Would you like for me to have Esper-anza prepare something for you?”

“No, thank you, Dr. Langhof,” Dr. Ludtz says. He leans back in his chair. It cracks softly under the pressure of his weight. “Tell me, what do you have in mind for El Presidente?”

“In mind?”

“Festivities. What sort of festivities?”

“The usual arrangements.”

“Nothing special?”

“Everything will be prepared,” I tell him. “You need not concern yourself.”

Dr. Ludtz looks slightly rebuked. “Concern myself? No. Entirely your affair, Doctor. I assure you I have no wish to interfere. Just curious, that’s all.”

“Well, as it stands, there will be a dinner, of course. And I intend to invite the entire village for his visit. As you know, El Presidente enjoys large welcoming crowds for his arrival.”

Dr. Ludtz nods enthusiastically. “Yes. Large crowds. A necessity. Anything else?”

“Perhaps some fireworks after the evening meal to light up the sky in celebration. He would no doubt enjoy such a thing.”

Dr. Ludtz grins conspiratorially. “He would probably prefer a comet, don’t you think?”

“I cannot provide a comet, I’m afraid.”

Dr. Ludtz laughs rather stiffly. “No, of course not. More’s the pity.” He pauses, looking at me cautiously. “Would you mind a suggestion, Dr. Langhof?”

“Not at all.”

Dr. Ludtz smiles happily. “Well, in terms of the actual display, I think it should be done with a concentration upon bright oranges and reds — the national colors.”

In the Camp, Dr. Ludtz was nothing if not meticulous. He had a jeweler’s eye for the significant detail. Once I saw him carefully measuring the toenails of three sets of twins who had been provided him. They had been shot in the back of the neck so as not to mar any important physical characteristics. They rested on their backs, naked, their faces perfectly serene, while he examined them tirelessly, making measurements and recording his findings in the spattered data book that lay beside the bodies.

“Well, what do you think of my suggestion?” Dr. Ludtz asks.

“Orange and red. Yes, I think that would be best.”

“Excellent,” Dr. Ludtz says excitedly. He claps his hands.

I turn toward the window and watch a sudden rustling of the leaves. “Do you remember, Dr. Ludtz, how in the last year, spring seemed never to come?”

Dr. Ludtz stares at me quizzically. “Last year?”

“Of the war.”

Dr. Ludtz shakes his head nervously. “No, no. I never noticed.” His face seems to have curdled.

“Perhaps it was only the gloom that made it seem so,” I tell him.

Dr. Ludtz waves his hand dismissively. “Long ago. Best not to recall.”

I can see the tension growing in his face. I do not wish to drag him through the squalor of his past. Once, in the Camp, I saw a guard press the face of a young girl into her own feces.

“Perhaps you’re right,” I say.

“In any event,” Dr. Ludtz says quickly, “I do suggest a bright orange and red motif. We do want to make it as pleasant as possible for El Presidente.”

“Quite right, yes, Dr. Ludtz. Thank you for the suggestion. I will do what I can.”

“Very good,” Dr. Ludtz says softly. He watches me with ill-concealed apprehension. “You really should try to enliven yourself a bit, Doctor,” Dr. Ludtz suggests.

I turn to face him. “Enliven?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Ludtz says worriedly, “but you have become somewhat depressed of late, am I right?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you know why?”

“One grows old.”

“I hope that you are not … well …”

“Becoming like my father?”

“Certainly not that, I trust,” Dr. Ludtz says.

Not long after I came to El Caliz I related the story of my father’s suicide to Dr. Ludtz. I told it very coolly, but I could see pity in his eyes. It disgusted me that I had sunk so low as to initiate his compassion.

“Don’t concern yourself about it, Doctor,” I tell him. “It’s the heat that’s bothering me. Very oppressive, don’t you think?”

Dr. Ludtz wipes his forehead in a sympathetic gesture. “Yes, the heat. Like you, I have never grown accustomed to it.” He glances out the window. “It’s cooler on the river. You really should come rowing with me sometime. As I keep saying, it would do you good.”

“Perhaps someday I shall. But for now, I’m much too busy.”

“I understand, believe me.” Dr. Ludtz says. “May I ask another question?”

“Of course.”

“Have you decided on the menu?”

“Roast pork, I think. And a fine red wine to go with it.”

“Excellent,” Dr. Ludtz says. He rises. “Let me know if I may be of assistance to you. You shouldn’t tire yourself.”

“I won’t. Thank you.”

He moves out the door and down the stairs. He is a man who must continually give the appearance of being busy. There is nothing whatsoever for him to do in the compound. Everything is provided. Like the sparrow, he need neither sow nor reap. And yet he bustles about in a constant state of unnecessary activity, a gyroscope of obsessive redundancy, producing for neither use nor exchange, his incessant labor nothing more than the broom with which he sweeps clean his mind.

Esperanza opens the glass door that separates my office from the verandah. She asks if I have need of anything.

“Nada. Gracias.”

She nods and casts a curious glance in the direction of Dr. Ludtz’s retreating figure.

In Spanish, I ask her what she thinks of him.

She grimaces. “El ojo de mal,” she mutters, and slinks back onto the verandah.

The evil eye, that is what she says of Dr. Ludtz. Here in the Republic, evil is the great reductive principle. Sickness is evil, so there are few medical schools in the Republic, for evil is not a thing that can be ministered to by science. The mouths of children fill with running sores dropped into them by Satan’s fingers. Evil demons infect the bush and putrefy the air. They squat under the morning mist and fly upon the hornet’s back. They gurgle under the green sludge of the open sewers and mire themselves within the canker’s pus. Here, malevolent animism is the great disease, a spiritus mundi against which the clergy fights feeble and symbolic war, sweeping into dying villages, flinging yellow holy water drawn from contaminated streams. And then they sweep out again, leaving the fevered peasants their catholicon of faith, while, overhead, vultures ebonize the sky.

Here it is deemed man’s fate to abide patiently within a geography of hell. For evil is our constant curse. It guides the machete in its flight, inflames the rapist’s eye, and squeezes shut the strangler’s hand. Evil leers outside the maiden’s bedroom window and lurks behind the oddly open door. It is war and pestilence and famine. It is poverty and greed and dissipation and lacy garter belts. It is the black scarf wrapped around our eyes.

But in the Camp, evil was made man and kept in check by wire and bayonet until the world could be cleansed of it by fire and poison gas. There, amid an orgy of purification, the world was to be made new, the black stain of evil bleached white in fields of bone.