Fire in the Unnameable Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

blackened face, and when the ebony wood swung through his body Lhereux found himself uninjured and realized he was in trouble.
    The diaphanous illness that took hold of Grenadier Lhereux was as slow to take form and as mysterious as my father’s colon cancer. The grenadier realized that his time was limited and took to appealing to the President’s former obsession, the embalmed figure of Caroline Margarita Quincy, as he secretly hired looksees to find doubles of her image. He conducted a quick and thorough interview process because he felt the cobwebs of rumour shaking and saw another danger approaching. The woman who agreed to play the part for two thousand dollars a week looked exactly like Caroline Margarita at the age she abandoned her husband to join the Maroons, and danced like Salome for a few days. But because the President had conducted such thorough structural analysis of her bones and musculature in his youth, Anwar detected flaws in the seductress’s movements, differences in the bending of the wrist and the twisting of the spine that Caroline Margarita’s body could never have allowed, and the grenadier found himself humiliated by his efforts, gazing into the half-smiling face of his friend one day, a face that looked as though it had broken from a fever. Neither had time to recollect recent events because Xamid Sultan, the acting head of state, entered the chamber at that instant with three armed soldiers and a stack of papers.
    He bowed deeply and spoke in an official language that filled the air with camphor, and by that odour Anwar awoke to a funereal political ceremony: We are offering you the venerable seat of prime minister, sign here, which will allow you to retain leadership while recovering from the death of your beloved horse, and which will allowthe governing council as well as myself, Xamid Sultan, sign on this sheet, the opportunity to guide the country to the other side of this power vacuum.
    It was the moment Lhereux had feared and one for which he had tried through all means of trickery to prepare Anwar, but in vain, because the President signed every sheet without a word, without even reading a page. Xamid Sultan inhaled deeply and bowed again, the soldiers relaxed the poses they had maintained during those long anxious minutes, because to enter the chamber of the President was to make one’s way into a viper’s nest, with cold hidden slither. The enemies exhaled bitter breaths, their clothes breathing scared camphor, and retreated with Xamid Sultan.
    It took less than twenty-four hours for the scandal to echo throughout the governing order: the pages did not show Anwar’s signature, and, in fact, it could not be agreed whose writing they bore, most likely one of the other members of the governing council. Xamid Sultan, whose hold on Parliament was delicate, was eaten alive by wild accusations of you forged the signatures, while those who defended him took the wrong argumentative line; in this time of crisis one cannot but take such an executive turn as so-called forgery or perjury, since they could not argue the names bore zero resemblance to the famous scrawl they had grown up with and witnessed on all official documents since the start of their careers. He himself had not noticed anything unusual about the sheets as he had walked the vestibules toward the parliamentary hall, which, recall, as everyone knows, had been built right into the Presidential Palace, and it had only filled him with a giddy excitement he could remember from celebrating his mother’s second wedding with little capsicum firecrackers as a boy. He had not imagined the President would retain enough of his wiles following the strychnine loss of Dulcinea to effect such a feat as the slow-acting transformation of his signature. He had been certain he and the entire councilhad thoroughly constrained him to the bathroom, the dining chamber, and to the bedside company of Grenadier Lhereux, that old