The Orchids

WHEN RAIN COMES to the Kalahari it turns the desert lush, and seeds that have not sprouted for decades suddenly come alive, turning the desert radiant and bountiful. But here in El Caliz, the jungle foliage is so rich the rains cannot increase it. Here, we are strangled by our luxuriance, so that the rain only serves to make the landscape more torturous and malignant, only serves to accelerate the rot that — after fresh rain — fills the air with the odor of decay.

El Presidente is the undisputed lord of this pullulating kingdom. He is due to visit me soon to collect his annual tribute. His silvery helicopter, festooned with the nation’s gaudy red and orange flag, will soar over the far ridges, then dip down toward the compound and hover over the river, whipping the water into a frenzy. It is El Presidente’s pride to come with the sound of locust and dive with the force of storm. He will be sitting in the red velvet throne-chair that he has had installed in his craft. The peasants will be swept up in his grandeur, for in his towering opulence and waste he uplifts their lives by permitting them to cast their eyes on something splendid and unrestrained. And after he has collected his diamond, he will rise again in his chariot of the air, the winds ripping through the trees, terrorizing the monkeys; and the peasants will gaze after him, stupefied, their eyes blinking against the harsh light. For El Presidente has a standing order that his craft must always rise toward the sun.

I have seen them come and go, seen them all. I have sat upon my verandah, sipping vodka laced with lime, and watched the long, strutting parade of bejeweled potentates who have marched through the history of the Republic. They are nothing more than dung-crusted scrappings from the monument of him who came before them, the little orphaned paperhanger with the big ideas.

He, the Leader, refused, even in his last hours, to confess. For him, there was no reason for penitence. He had nothing to confess but the weakness and timidity of his race. In the dank, burrowed solitude of his bunker, he issued a call to arms, reiterated the pillars of his certain faith, all those fiery ideas with which he had hoped to transform the world, and then, bowing courteously before the eyes of his adoring secretary, he took his leave.

You may be sure that El Presidente will not leave the world so remarkably unbowed. And even should he wish to dictate some final message to mankind, he would have to do it in a motley, disorganized fashion, for there are no professional secretaries here in the Republic to record his lachrymose pronouncements. Indeed, there is little paperwork at all in the Republic. And although the file cabinets no doubt bulge in the Ministry of Police, those other great engines of government are here reduced to the pieties of the clergy and the rhetoric of the state. Here all is fever, usurpation, and combustible religion. That in the midst of so much richness, presided over by so much squalor, there is no one to be found to scratch one’s thoughts across a page as they are dictated presents itself as one of the contradictions of underdevelopment.

And so, those who wish the lineaments of immortality here in the Republic are reduced to the machinery of transcription, a little purring disc spooling up yards of slick brown tape. El Presidente, in his last hours, must rely upon imported gadgetry to deify himself. The Leader, in his relentless stolidity, in his raging appetite for esteem, would have cringed at such indignity.

And yet, it is difficult to know at what point the search for dignity descends into the vulgar. It can be said of my father that he had a certain bearing that was not without dignity. He was a tall, stately man who all his life affected a benign but studiously military carriage. The walls of our small provincial house, the walls inside which I came of age, were adorned with large paintings of heroic and mythological events. Suffering Prometheus hung upon his mountain fiercely defying black hordes of rapacious birds. Icarus soared above a little globe of earth, his wings melting forlornly at his sides. My father walked confidently among these icons of tortured heroism, but there were times when his eyes seemed to take on a latent ferocity, a bewildered rebellion against the unremitting mediocrity of bourgeois life. In the arc of his belly and the flaccid droop of his jowls, he sensed the insult of his body. He dreamed of the hard muscularity of his Teutonic gods and in his victimized imagination saw himself as a trim, steel cylinder of righteousness and knight-errantry. Once, during a Wagnerian excess at the opera house, I looked up and saw that he was panting. In this, even the boy I was could sense the grunt of his desire. In his pained and inescapable lowliness, he wished to clothe himself in immortal light, to rise above the petty annoyances and insufferable trivialities of his legal practice, the incessant bickerings of his disordered marriage, the pinched and carping contrivances of the bureaucratic state. He seemed always charged and ready for explosion. In the mute bitterness with which he endured his frustration one could sense the last strivings of his romance. Once released, his volcanic resentfulness could certainly have been channeled into special and cathartic action.

“Peter! Peter!” It was my father calling. I could hear him in the little foyer down the hall. I opened the door of my room and saw him standing in the distance, his bald pate slick and shiny under the frosted lampshade that hung above him.

“Yes, Father.” I remember my child’s voice as weak and thready, a sound that must have grated horribly on my father’s robust ear.

He stretched out his hand. “Come.”

I walked forward and took his hand. He led me out into the street and down the small alleyway toward the little park near the center of our village. The sky overhead was pewter gray, flat and monotonous as a sheet of smudged paper. Perhaps it might rain, I told my father, perhaps I should get my boots. He tightened his grip on my hand and quickened his pace.

At the park he sat down and positioned me in front of him, standing at attention like a little toy soldier. To my right I could glimpse the brick-and-wrought-iron stand where the military bands played marches in the spring.

“Peter, look at me.”

I looked at him. He was a perfect representation of the stolid, provincial burgher, dressed in a suit and white shirt buttoned to the top, his shoes carefully laced and double-knotted. He had a pink, plump face with cheeks so flushed they looked purposefully rouged. His eyes bulged slightly behind his neat, black-framed glasses.

“Peter,” he said, “the war is lost.”

I was nine years old. What could such a statement mean to me? For children who are not actually devastated by it, war is no more than a merciful interruption of routine. In the schools there had been drives for steel and tin and clothing, each of which added a certain tension to the day, made it pass more quickly than usual.

“Do you understand me?”

What was I to understand? What does a child know of defeat, of humiliation, of devastated pride? We knew that in France since 1914 something mighty had been going on. But what, in the end, did it have to do with us? How could something so far away bring such sorrow to my father’s face?

I said nothing. It was getting dark, the trees turning black against the sky.

“We have been defeated,” my father said. He shook my shoulders slightly. “Defeated, do you understand?”

“Yes, Father,” I said in a low voice.

His face seemed to shrink back as he looked at me. I know now that what he wanted — what he always wanted — was for me to join him in his fantasy, to play Lohengrin in his Parsifal. “Is that all you have to say?” he demanded.

“Defeated,” I repeated. I could feel the air of evening turning cool.

My father delicately removed his glasses and wiped his eyes with a folded handkerchief. Even in grief, he was obsessively fastidious. “It’s not our fault,” he said, replacing his glasses. “You must remember that.”

“Not our fault,” I said.

“Yes,” my father said. He drew a deep, painful breath that seemed to expand his bulk from within, as if something were blowing up inside him. “It’s important that you remember that it was not our fault.”

“Yes, Father,” the little brigadier said.

My father placed both his large hands on my shoulders and pressed down. “I will not have you growing up defeated, do you understand?”

I nodded. A small breeze blew a strand of hair across my forehead. He quickly swept it back.

“We are never to feel defeated,” my father said. His voice was restrained, but there was an undiscoverable ferment behind his eyes, a crazed unrest.

“I won’t, Father,” I said.

He touched the side of his head with his index finger. “We must keep this in our minds.”

I imitated his gesture. “In our minds.”

“It is important.”

“Yes,” I said.

My father watched me suspiciously, his lower lip trembling. All his life, he was a creature of unfathomable loneliness.

I stood quietly in front of him and probably would have stood there through the night if he had wanted, but suddenly the smell of sugar cookies surrounded me, lifting my spirits. I smiled.

My father frowned. “What is it?”

I stiffened my back reflexively. “Nothing, Father.”

“That smile, what was that for?”

“Nothing.”

My father squeezed my shoulders. “Answer me!”

I could not.

My father stood up instantly and stared down at me with intense disapproval. “How can you smile after what I’ve told you?” he said angrily.

“I was not smiling,” I said quickly. The very idea of sugar cookies became nauseating.

My father glared at me, then raised his hand and slapped my face. I could hear the sound of the blow ringing through the park.

“You dishonor me!” he cried.

“No, Father.”

“You dishonor me!”

I lowered my head.

He took my chin in his hand and lifted it up. “You are like your mother,” he said. His face showed his disgust.

“I’m sorry, Father,” I said desperately.

“Like your mother. Stupid. Stupid.”

For a moment I saw myself positioned in his sense of the Chain of Being, a vile, crawling thing that sickened him unspeakably.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” I whined. “I didn’t mean to smile. It was the sugar cookies.”

My father’s face hardened. “Sugar cookies?”

“Yes.”

“Sugar cookies? What are you talking about?”

“From the bakery on Telemannstrasse,” I explained. “They are making them. They smell sweet.”

“How can you think of such things?”

“It was just the smell,” I said, trembling. “I didn’t mean to smile.”

My father dropped to the bench, his shoulders slumping forward. “Sugar cookies,” he muttered.

Then I saw defeat. Not in France, but in him. “Father, I’m sorry,” I said weakly.

My father’s head bent forward. I could almost see my face reflected in the sleek smoothness of his skull.

“I didn’t mean to smile, Father,” I said again.

He looked at me. “You must learn to care about things, Peter. Do you think the world is sweet? Do you think it is made of sugar cookies?”

“No, Father,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

My father shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said wearily. And then, in a low voice, almost to himself, “They will come here. We are at their mercy now.”

“Who?”

“The enemy.”

In my childishness I could not even be sure exactly who the enemy was.

“It’ll be all right, Father,” I said.

“I don’t know what will happen now,” my father said without looking up.

“Nothing will happen. It will be all right,” I said. I felt the urge to touch his shoulders, but I was afraid to do it.

“They will come here,” my father said. “The enemy.”

And then in my imagination I saw them, the enemy. They were not people at all, but great, woolly monsters. In my mind I saw them clawing up the pavement of the Unter den Linden and scratching their matted, filthy behinds on the lofty archway of the Brandenburg Gate.