The Orchids

BELOW THE VERANDAH, the workmen are beginning to prepare the tent. They work under a sun that turns the river to a flowing amber. They erect the corner posts carefully, as they have been instructed. The poles must stand absolutely straight. Nothing is allowed to lean here in the Republic. And when the posts have been set deep in the ground, they raise the tent, a brilliant panoply of red and orange stripes. Underneath the tent, they set the table that I will prepare for El Presidente. He will bring his officers with him, for it is his habit to surround himself with the weak, the stupid, and the worshipful, all those too cowardly, incompetent, or avaricious to call his person into question.

Here, underneath the tent, the El Presidente of Casamira’s satirical invention will engorge himself with meat and fruit. He will stuff the dripping flanks of pigs into his mouth, follow that with fistfuls of brandied dates, and wash it all down with papaya juice mixed with beer. For a few hours, this compound upriver from the village of El Caliz will become the mead hall of the Republic, a place of noise and brawling, of lewd jokes and lurid tales. The people of the village will observe it all, standing barefoot behind a velvet cordon defended by well-heeled soldiers. As El Presidente feasts upon the meat and sweets, they will feast on him while their stomachs rumble under frayed rope belts. It is part of the nature of adoration to find immunity from the contradictions of reality.

The key to sudden transformation, that is what El Presidente offers. In the great sports arena where the Leader spoke, they came by the benighted millions in search of that one blinding instant that would lift them effortlessly to another life. Observe the little bald-headed burgher failing in business, despised by his wife, dismissed by his children; a man without credential, place, or influence; a man whose mind is held captive by every illusion that ensures mediocrity; a religious man to whom the Church in her grandeur gives no more than a passing nod; a business man whose connection to the engines of finance does not extend beyond a dwindling bank account; a family man whose children pay greater heed to movie stars and black musicians; a community man whose duties and responsibilities reach no further than his obligation to sweep the sidewalk once a week; a political man whom the state regards as nothing more than an annual source of petty revenue. To such a one, the Leader’s voice was clarion, concentrating all his fear and rage into one shrill cry of indignation. Through all the history of crime there runs one immemorial complaint: Save me! Save me! For I cannot save myself!

In desperation we grasp at the possibility of miracle. And of all the things desperation needs, the cruelest is speed. Thus we must have our transfiguration, and it must be sudden and entire, for the labor of the will and wisdom is too difficult, uncertain, and slow.

Juan seeks a miracle to save the orchids, a pearl dropped into the humid soil from the hand of God. Esperanza, staring at the steamy, rotting innards of a crocodile, seeks salvation from her rooted humanness, seeks to know that mystery of creation which will lift her to a golden throne. Ludtz, picking lichens from his tomb, seeks the Virgin’s comforting smile, seeks the erasure of the past, seeks to pluck saintliness from a life of shame. Alberto and Tomás seek the miraculous between the spread legs of some brown girl and see paradise in her willing smile. Don Camillo seeks his redemption in vast fields of undiscovered copper. In the variety with which we yearn for the miraculous resides our sole infinitude.

In the Camp Langhof lost all notion of miraculous transformation. He lost the capacity to plan and to will. He never thought of escape or resistance. Once, he stood in the snow and watched a Mongoloid boy hanged on the gallows not far from the medical compound. The boy was hoisted slowly by hand rather than dropped, and it took him quite some time to strangle. As he flailed about, kicking at the ground, his face became horribly contorted, and as it darkened to a deep blue, the boy took on the aspect of an ape. The similarity between the two was striking, and Langhof observed it solemnly, silently, like a scientist recording one more piece of evidence for evolution.

And yet even in this comatose state Langhof was not utterly beyond human response. Something of him remained, and Kessler called it forth that day in the courtyard behind the medical compound.

Langhof had been reclining on his bunk, obviously watching the shadows glide forward then retreat on the ceiling as the light bulb swung back and forth. There was a knock at the door, and Langhof sat up.

“Come in,” he said.

He saw the door open and Kessler’s round, beefy face peep inside.

“Ah, Dr. Langhof,” Kessler said happily, “I’m glad to find you in.”

“What can I do for you, Doctor?” Langhof asked routinely.

“Come into the courtyard,” Kessler said. “I have something I’d like for you to observe.”

“Is it important, Dr. Kessler?” Langhof asked, protesting mildly. “I was just relaxing a bit.”

“I think you will be interested, Dr. Langhof,” Kessler said. “It suggests that the areas of research here in the Camp are constantly expanding.”

Langhof got to his feet and followed Kessler down the hallway to the exit at the side of the building.

Kessler stepped out the door and made a sharp turn into the back courtyard, a flat surface covered with freshly fallen snow. He pointed as Langhof stepped to his side. “There,” he said. “This is another area of research.”

There were about twenty of them, naked, huddling together in the snow, their skin already turning bluish in the cold, the children clinging tightly to their mothers’ bodies, one baby sucking at a freezing breast.

“We’re going to see how long it takes,” Kessler said. “Our people on the eastern front have had a very bad time of it this winter, so we need to know more about the process of freezing.”

Langhof’s eyes remained fixed on the moaning, swaying crowd that squatted a few meters from him. He could see Rausch standing beyond them at the entrance of the courtyard, his feet planted wide apart, his machine gun held casually in his hands. When their eyes met, Rausch smiled and lightly tipped his cap.

“I have no expertise in this field,” Langhof said to Kessler flatly.

Kessler smiled indulgently. “No one does, my good man,” he said. “That’s why we’re conducting this experiment, to gain expertise.”

“This particular … area,” Langhof stammered, “it does not … does not interest me.”

“We cannot always choose what interests us, Doctor,” Kessler said.

Langhof straightened himself. “Yes, sir.”

Kessler appeared irritable for a moment, then calmed himself. “I didn’t mean to be sharp with you, Dr. Langhof.”

“Quite all right, sir.”

“Well, I understand this area of research is quite a distance from hygiene.”

“Yes, sir,” Langhof said. He could feel his throat closing.

“But I hope you can understand the need for all our staff to have some knowledge of what we’re doing here.”

“Yes, sir,” Langhof said. He felt his hands squeeze together.

“You may return to your quarters, Doctor,” Kessler said.

“Thank you, sir,” Langhof said briskly. He began to move away quickly.

“You’re due in the laboratory in fifteen minutes, however,” Kessler warned.

“Yes, sir. I know,” Langhof said, almost running now.

Inside the building, Langhof stopped, drew in a long breath, then moved slowly down the hall. He entered his room, closed the door behind him, and sat down on his bunk. Staring at his boots, he could not connect himself to the world by means of any reliable image. It was as if everything had been swept up in a terrible wind and blown randomly, chaotically into the stratosphere. He could not feel his clothes over his shoulders or his boots on his feet. He could not feel the little breeze that wafted in from the small crack in the window. He could not hear the screams of the freezing vermin dying in the snow only a few meters away.

It was not clear to him what had happened. But now, at night when I can hear the sound of the macaw, I know what happened in the courtyard. I stand by the window and listen to the shrill cry of the jungle birds and they are transformed into the cries of the people slumped freezing in the snow. I hear the wailing and the moaning as I actually heard them, but in my imagination I can hear things now that I could not hear then. I can hear the slurping of the baby’s mouth. I can hear the crunching of the snow as the bodies topple over one by one, hour after hour. I can hear the scratch of Kessler’s pencil as he records the deaths. I can hear the slide of the bodies as the guards drag them from the courtyard and pile them onto the waiting lorries. I have magnified the world of sight and sound. I have learned to hear and see the smallest things, the rush of a final breath, the ant at work within a broken filling.

And so I know what happened to our hero in the courtyard. He walked out, following Kessler, in the same state of oblivion that had overtaken him months before, on the first night of his arrival. He turned the corner, saw the naked bodies, but did not see them. Instead he saw something else. He saw the actual physical face of that dread he had felt so long ago at the Institute. He saw the horror fully, and in a way that had not approached him before. He had extracted babies from the wombs of women and infected scores of people with disease. But he had always seen this as an inevitable circumstance of his being in the Camp. He had forgotten, conveniently forgotten, that in a sense he had already known the Camp, but had chosen to dismiss that knowledge. As his sensibility slowly emerged, his mind began to comb the scattered litter of his past. He believed that it was all there to be discovered within himself. If he could locate his person, he could locate the world.

There are times when I think of this and then go walking in the darkness beside the river. I see our hero slumped on his bed, his mind teeming with schemes of self-analysis, dreaming that by discovering himself he can discover the Camp. And I think that if it would not rouse the monkeys or cauterize my soul, I would heave my head back and laugh with such thunderous contempt that it would shake the drowsing vipers from their vines.