The Orchids

HERE IN THE REPUBLIC there is much insouciance. In the village square the men and women leap in a furious guaracha, kicking yellow dust into each other’s eyes. In the bars, the old men lean toward the candles and drink mescal down to the worm while the young ones nod drowsily outside the brothel door. And in the capital, the ermine-coated and bejeweled wives of the ministers of state sit in steamy halls and watch endless fashion shows with strained and calculating faces.

And yet, from my verandah I can see the foothills of the mountainous northern provinces, a place where, it is said, humor still exists in the form of low-minded jokes about El Presidente. Huddled around their dying fires, the insurrectionists talk of El Presidente’s teeth. It is said that they are made of gold and that he has inserted a small homing device to assure their quick recovery, should anyone be fool enough to steal them. In the northern provinces, every part of El Presidente’s body comes in for ridicule. There is much talk of a silver rectum that makes the sound of a cash register when El Presidente makes his toilet. It is said that his urine is tested by a chemical refinery built exclusively for that purpose and that the four-word motto of the Republic has been inscribed on the lead plate in his head. Just beneath the stitched scalp, it reads in elegant script: FREEDOM OBEDIENCE COUNTRY VULGARITY.

In the far hills of the northern provinces they laugh like jackals in the blinding heat. They laugh as they flip the sticky pages of Casamira’s Official History. They laugh at the mosquitoes drowning in their coffee. They laugh at fever, vomiting, and infection. They laugh because it is absurd to laugh, and find their laughter strange as orchids growing on the moon.

In the Camp, they laughed at the milky soup and rotten bread. They laughed at the striped uniforms and the blue tattoos. They laughed at prayer and mourning. They laughed at the ridiculousness of their ever being born. They laughed, while they had strength to laugh, at the slough of their despair.

And in the small amphitheater that the Special Section used for scientific displays, they laughed.

The dedicated hygienist could barely keep from smiling himself at the pitiful figure in the loose-fitting gray smock who stood before the two officers while the doctor poked at his ears and nose and legs with a thin wooden pointer.

“One has only to observe a member of the vermin race in order to understand their inferiority,” the doctor said matter-of-factly. He turned the cringing figure before him slowly around, then told the two officers to remove the smock. They stepped forward and pulled it over the vermin’s head so that he stood naked except for a wrinkled loincloth.

“There, now,” the doctor said. He looked up at the rows of silent, uniformed Special Section initiates. “All of you, observe for a moment.”

They observed the figure as the doctor had commanded. Some of them scratched short entries into their notebooks. Others grinned humorously and whispered into each other’s ears.

Rudolf Schoen leaned toward Langhof. “What do you make of that?” he asked lightly.

Langhof pretended to nod thoughtfully. “Interesting,” he said.

Below them, the interesting specimen of the vermin race made a weak attempt to wrap his arms around himself, but the doctor slapped at him lightly and the arms returned to their positions at his sides.

“Now,” the doctor said, “let me make a few observations of my own.” He raised the pointer slowly up from the vermin’s foot to his waist. “Note the shortness of the legs and their spindly construction.”

A few of the students nodded appreciatively and scratched their chins.

“Observe the length of the legs as compared to the trunk,” the doctor went on. “As you can see, they are short in comparison. Thus, whereas the waist should be the approximate midpoint between the top of the skull and the bottom of the foot, here we have a definite and unmistakable disproportion.”

Langhof suppressed a smile. This was not science. This was aesthetics.

“Now,” the doctor continued, “we must concern ourselves, always concern ourselves, with the question of proportion. Proportion is the key, gentlemen. Arms that are too long appear to us as apeish. It is the same with legs, such as these, that are too short.” He watched the students. “What are we to gather from this?”

Schoen reluctantly raised his hand.

“Yes?” the doctor asked.

“This disproportion is a sign of degeneracy,” Schoen said.

The doctor shook his head. “No. Not at all. Degeneracy would suggest that people characterized by such disproportion once occupied a higher position in the hagiology of race, a position from which they somehow degenerated. No, gentlemen, this is not a case of degeneracy, but a case of … arrested development.”

The vermin stared straight ahead, his eyes avoiding the gaze of the students.

Schoen leaned toward Langhof’s ear. “This is an excellent way to present the facts,” he whispered.

Below, the human orrery bent his knees, raised his arms, flared his nostrils on command as the doctor moved through the cosmology of race.

“It is so clear!” Schoen said enthusiastically. “I never thought it could be demonstrated so clearly.”

Langhof’s head snapped around. “Be quiet, Schoen,” he hissed.

Sitting here now on my verandah, as I watch the river take its course, I wonder if it was cruel to speak so curtly to the imbecile Schoen. Here in the Republic — except of course in the northern provinces and certain chambers within the district prisons — no one speaks cruelly to anyone. The people are numbed by constant allusions to their greatness, their nobility, their destiny. El Presidente infuses the nation with grandeur while, on a lesser scale, Esperanza brings the consciousness of God to bear on the villagers’ running sores. Harmless illusions. Comforting illusions. In the Camp we made a factory of such ideas and piped our delusions up four square chimneys.

Schoen, rebuked, turned quickly away and held his eyes firmly on the scientific proof coming to a close at the front of the amphitheater.

“Well, gentlemen,” the doctor said, “I hope this presentation has been of help to you. It is important that these matters be kept in mind.” He paused, watching the students. “Are there any questions?”

The room was silent.

“Very well, then,” the doctor said. He took his notes from the lectern and tucked them snugly under his arm. Then he turned, his eyes catching those of the vermin who stood motionlessly before him. And at that moment, something of the past, something of a nobler and kinder world rose quite accidentally within him, odd and out of place, astonishing as an open book on a hangman’s scaffold. It was a simple gesture: he bowed quickly to the vermin, in the same courtly way with which he might have excused himself from a men’s club. “Thank you,” he said.

The vermin stared at him, his eyes taking on a certain incomprehensible light, as if with a mere clapping of his hands he might suddenly change all of this, as if the amphitheater, the grinning, black-booted students, the contrived biology were as frail as papier-mâché, a stage set for some outlandish farce upon which, for some perverse reason, the curtain refused to fall.

In the Royal Chapel that rests within the shadow of the Tower of London, the lords and ladies of the realm came to pray before they were executed. Victims of court intrigue, ensnared by their ambition, they yet retained a certain reverence for style. And so they came to this small, elegant chapel, dressed in their finest attire, looking like the splendid lords and ladies of the court. And here, in the Royal Chapel, they bowed their heads in futile prayer. The block stood outside the chapel door, and beside it, the executioner in his black hood. He must have heard their mutterings, must have heard the soft crinkle of the great, broad skirts as the ladies bowed, then rose, must have heard the muffled pad of their stockinged feet as they moved toward the door, then opened it to face him. At that moment he must have seen their eyes widen, then contract, as they watched his hooded head or stared at the broadaxe nestled in his arms. Did he nod to them? Did he bow? Did he perhaps say, from beneath the anonymity of the hood, “Thank you, my lady, for not detaining me too long”?

The vermin nodded politely to the doctor and stared at him, hollow-eyed. Then two officers stepped forward briskly, each taking one of the vermin’s arms, and escorted him from the room.

“Please forgive my rudeness,” Schoen said to Langhof in that groveling manner of his.

Langhof watched the vermin disappear behind the door at the front of the room. The doctor remained near his lectern, his eyes perusing a large chart upon which the human skeleton was displayed.

Doubtless, there are certain moments in certain human lives when the intelligence, formerly scattered and disconnected, suddenly forms itself into a thin, firm blade and begins the process of ripping into all the vagaries and seductions that surround it. Proust bites into a madeleine or stumbles on uneven paving stones, and the world shifts into focus. A man is walking with his child, the child lurches from the curb in front of a passing automobile, and suddenly the man sees each person’s isolation, each person’s helplessness, sees the mechanics of faith and the structure of purpose dissolve before his eyes. There was nothing to seize the child or swerve the car. Nothing. Only the impact of matter against matter, a child’s head against a headlight; only metal moving at a certain velocity toward the delicate tissue of brain and bone. At such a moment, even the least lonely feels utterly alone. What is left is only the sullen recognition and an overwhelming sadness.

But was it this emasculating sadness that Langhof felt as he stood among his fellows and watched the vermin disappear behind the great oak door of the amphitheater?

No. Not sadness. Not pity. Only the terror that comes with the first, awesome comprehension of our infinite capacity for contradictions: the hard, irreducible fact that a man could humiliate another man with a wooden pointer and yet retain the sense of high civility that decrees a polite bow and a crisp “Thank you” at the end of the display. It seemed to Langhof that a creature capable of such ideological gymnastics was truly fearful. For if the Special Section doctor was capable of such ambidexterousness, who else might be capable of it? Schoen? Of course. Trottman? Yes. But what about Goethe? Beethoven? The scientist in our hero affirmed the undeniable, that it is a universal capacity. Nor was it only a question of ignorance. Schoen might be overwhelmed by the imbecilic biology of the regime, but no one, it seemed to Langhof, could claim immunity from this greater lunacy.

Given this new recognition, what was our frightened philosopher to do? Perhaps he could announce his discovery — run about in the streets, grab astonished pedestrians by their shirt collars, shake them, shout in their faces, “Can’t you see? It’s not safe to be in this world! It’s not safe to live among us! Men are not only stupid, they are inconsistent!” How trite an observation, how comic. How horrible its implications.

What, then, did our hero of the intellect do with this frightening new intelligence?

Nothing. Except to pursue the science of hygiene and carefully brush the twin lightning bolts on his uniform lapel.