The Orchids

IT IS MORNING NOW. I can smell the food my servants are preparing for El Presidente. Tomorrow the feast will be set on the tables beneath the striped tent, and should El Presidente come in Casamira’s guise he will taste a bit of everything. While the rest of us stand at our seats, he will circle the table, dipping his spoon into every bowl, turning the fruits and vegetables over his tongue, nipping at the spiced meats, sipping a single swallow of each juice and wine. Then, when he is satisfied, he will generously bid all to join him and the feast of his assumption can begin. When the meal is over, El Presidente will have the remaining food thrown to his dogs. They have been trained to fight for it, and for the next few minutes El Presidente will laugh and slap his belly while the dogs tear at each other’s throats.

In the world that calls itself developed, those born between clean sheets find beauty in portraits of naked women reclining drowsily on great burgundy pillows. They find beauty in misty lakes reflecting pastel skies. They find beauty in stern, immobile faces bordered by neatly trimmed Vandykes. In the deep placidity of the developed world, beauty finds expression in that sense of delicacy and restraint which is meant to pluck the chords of quiet contemplation.

But here in the Republic, the principles of aesthetics take on a more robust character. Here El Presidente, the arbiter of art, finds beauty in the frenzy of his dogs, finds something uplifting and sublime in the simplicity of their appetites and the purity of their violence.

On the day I fled the Camp, I did not expect to discover a new aesthetic principle. Under the illusion that by killing him I could kill the things for which he stood, I had shot Rausch in the throat. The guards around the ditch watched me in a state of profound confusion, but they did not move. I thrust the pistol in my coat pocket and quickly walked away. I went back to the Camp, much of which was burning by then, clambered up the stairs of the medical compound, and took the box of diamonds from the shelf in my room. I tucked them under my coat and ran outside. I saw Ludtz whimpering in the muddy snow and pulled him up by the arm and took him with me. I did not know where I intended us to go. We ran on and on, and as the Camp disappeared behind us, as the sound of the guns and the smell of the smoke dissolved with distance, we entered a field of inexpressible beauty. It was as if the Camp had fallen behind the curvature of the earth and we were left alone in the forest. The trees were etched black against the sky, leafless, their raw branches outlined with small, rounded banks of snow. It was a world of simple colors, a bleak, wintry landscape that might have been drawn by some dour Norwegian melancholic. I fell to the ground, dragging Ludtz with me, my boots plowing up two gullies in the snow. I remember that the barrel of my pistol still seemed warm, although it could not have been, and the crunch of the diamonds as they slid to the opposite side of the metal box sounded like a single shake of the maracas. To the moralistic imagination, these two figures, Ludtz and myself, might compose a perfect representation of the devastated soul: Here they sat, Joseph K., bereft even of his castle, and his partner, the absurd Dr. Ludtz, a panting Punch slouching against a tree, the bill of his torn cap dangling ludicrously at his ear. Here, then, the New Order in its ruin.

And yet, something in that moment was richer than anything I had ever known. During those few moments while we sat in the snow, I came as close as I have ever come to an epiphany. It was, I think now, the extreme silence of the place coming suddenly after such tumult, and its stark, relentless clarity coming after so many years of smoke and ash. For a moment I believed that it was in such a place that solemnity was born. And although this nonsensical and romantic notion could be quickly cast off, something still remained and rose within the midst of it: a reverence for the deeply serious. If there are moments in a life that may alter the categories by which we perceive life itself, then perhaps it is best that they be born out of this reverence; not a sudden revelation, nor a flash of insight, but only the weary working toward a precious value of grave and abiding seriousness, and a respect for the endless labor that is both its origin and its legacy, and that leads finally to the simple conviction that it is a moral responsibility to be wise.