Reasons of State Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Für Elise” upstairs.
    “She gets better every day,” said my secretary, with his glass in mid-air.
    “Such smoothness and feeling …”
    Today “Für Elise,” coming so sweetly from my daughter’s rooms, although she always made a mistake in the samebar, reminded me of how it had always been played by Doña Hermenegilda, her unselfish and devoted mother—who always made the same mistake in the same bar—and how,
over there
, in those days at Surgidero de la Verónica—days of youthful hopes and torment, sturm und drang, escapades and brawls—after treating me to some waltz by Juventino Rosas or Lerdo de Tejada, she would move on to her classical repertory by the Deaf Master (“Für Elise” and the beginning—she never got past the beginning—of the
Moonlight Sonata
), Theodore Lack’s
Idilio
, and various pieces by Godard and Chaminade included in the album called
Music for the Home
. I sighed to think that it was now three years ago that we gave her a queen’s funeral, with her urn under a canopy, and a procession of ministers, generals, ambassadors, and grandees, with a military band reinforced by three others brought from the provinces—a hundred and forty performers in all—playing the Funeral March from the
Eroica
symphony, and—inevitably—Chopin’s. Our archbishop had delivered a funeral oration (considerably inspired, at my suggestion, by what Bossuet said in memory of Henriette de France: “She who reigns in heaven …” etc., etc.), adding that the merits of the dead woman were so exceptional and outstanding that her canonisation could well be contemplated. Doña Hermenegilda was married and the mother of children, of course—Ofelia, Ariel, Marcus Antonius, and Radames—but the Archbishop reminded his listeners of the blessed conjugal virtues of Saint Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, and of Monica, mother of Augustine. Naturally, the appropriate words having been said, I didn’t think it vital to send up any prayers to the high authority of the Vatican, especially since my wife and I had lived in concubinage for many years before the unforeseeable and agitating vagaries of politics led me to where I now am. The important thing was that my Hermenegilda’sportrait, made at Dresden in full colour by the initiative of our minister of education, was an object of worship throughout the length and breadth of the land. It was said that the flesh of the dead woman had defied the onslaught of worms, and that her face had retained the serene and kindly smile of her last moments. Women used to say that her portrait miraculously cured colic and the pains of childbirth, and that promises made to her by girls who wanted a husband were more effective than the hitherto common practice of putting the bust of Saint Anthony upside down in a well.
    I have just finished putting a gardenia in my buttonhole when Sylvestre announces that the Distinguished Academician has come to see me—a recently elected academician, I do not know how he got himself received under the Dome, since a few years ago he decribed the Forty Immortals as “green-clad mummies in cocked hats, the anachronistic midwives of a dictionary intended to increase our understanding of the evolution of the language—a sort of
Petit Larousse
for domestic use.” (Once elected, however—“
J’ai accepté pour m’amuser
”—he took the trouble to have the hilt of his sword designed by his famous friend Maxence, who had abandoned pictorial creation for silversmith’s work, and succeeded in incorporating the spirit of the Bible and mediaeval legends with a style combining the aesthetics of the scenic railway at the Magic City with a subtle flavour of Pre-Raphaelitism—too much for my taste.)
    Peralta hid the bottle of Santa Inés and we greeted this witty and polished man, who is now sitting in a ray of sunlight, full of ascending motes of dust, which picks out the red ribbon of his Legion of Honour. Upstairs, Ofelia is trying