His bulging eyes seemed to be held in place by thick-framed glasses. He rested his cigar on a ceramic plate. Still writing, without looking up, he asked, ‘What would you think of someone who recites beautiful poems and sings melancholy songs before committing a crime? Does this affect the poems they recite and the songs they sing?’
‘I don’t see why it should,’ answered Gabriel.
‘You don’t see why it should? Well, think about it. And tomorrow we’ll talk. You know? A friend of mine, the argonautic painter, wants high literature from me. I’m currently tied up with the implications.’ He coughed. ‘Actually I just scrawl, it’s poor Catia who does the writing. One day, there should be a tribute to the heroines of typing. Now help me bring a bit of order to this apocalypse. Put those planets back in the wastepaper basket and then pour me two glass-dilating fingers from the bottle. Make it three.’
Some time later, Gabriel Samos would know that what Dr Montevideo was writing was A Dramatic History of Culture. Being the first to arrive at the academy, he’d often find Catia immersed in the work of typing up the doctor’s notes. He liked to act as Green Door Messenger between the classroom where Catia held sway and the doctor’s sea-bed. He felt comfortable in the mezzanine and, though he abandoned his classes for much of the course, he didn’t stop visiting the Tachygraphic Rose to see Catia, of course, and to climb the stairs to the cabin, to experience this strange ascent to the depths of the sea. He came back the following summer, in the middle of June 1963, with renewed anxiety. The transcription of the doctor’s notes meant Catia was busier than ever and even devoted some class time to her labour. She typed with astonishing speed, without apparent effort. Her hands transformed the heavy Hispano-Olivetti into a fantastic machine. Her face had also changed. She typed the same or more quickly, but with a sense of urgency. Gabriel approached the corner where she worked one day to ask her something. She carried on typing. Said, ‘Just a moment!’ He looked for the sake of looking. Peered over her shoulder. He liked to see how the words appeared. As if they’d been excavated rather than printed. As Catia’s fingers galloped along, possessing the machine, he tapped his fingers against his thighs, keeping time. A reflex action. Except that now his fingers moved nervously like the Stanley compass needle. He read on the excavated page:
Who was this German jurist Spain paid tribute to in 1962? He was something more than a jurist. He was once considered the Kronjurist, the Third Reich’s ‘official jurist’. The architect. .
‘Yes, Gabriel, what is it?’
The lawyer Paúl Santos described Dr Montevideo’s classes of advanced stenography as a chair of humanism. The man who resembled Monty Clift was, needless to say, his most attentive pupil. And more and more openly drawn to Catia. They — Stringer, Gabriel and the other pupils — were also admirers, but it was enough for them if she’d straighten their elbows. Sometimes they’d do it deliberately, get out of shape, so that she’d come and correct their posture.
‘What’s your job?’
‘I’m a lawyer, Mr Montevideo. A lawyer.’
‘A lawyer, eh? A man of law. That’s good. A good lawyer has to be a good writer. Use words with the utmost propriety. Like a doctor. A good doctor is the one who puts together a story that will convince his patient. As for a pathologist, he has to be even more precise, since he has to convince a corpse, not a patient. High praise of a text is that it’s as precise as a forensic report. Some writers aspire to this, to forensic precision. I’ve known pathologists, however, who were very competent in their field, but dissatisfied with their scientific language and envious of the precision of poetry. “Meadows sweet where flames are under.” What do you think? “A Song of Opposites” by Mr Keats. Now isn’t that an example of extraordinary precision concerning human beings? A good prosecutor should also be a good writer. And a judge. A judge has to rearrange all the pieces and construct a credible story for the future as well. Not make a mockery of justice. It sounds as if it’s asking too much. But it isn’t.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘For justice today, it’s enough not to be unjust. Not as difficult as they make it out to be. You just have to let conscience do its thing. “Conscience is the mental activity of esteeming the good.” Xohán Vicente Viqueira, yes siree! But there’s something else very important. The police report. Which could be described as materia prima. The point of origin. The policeman who produces that report really does have to be a good writer. He’s the one who investigates. The sniffer dog who follows the trail. Selects clues. Everything a policeman writes is politically committed literature. Don’t you think so, Mr Santos?’
He knew he’d been detected. Peered through the doctor’s thick lenses like a corpse trying to return the pathologist’s searching gaze.
‘I quite agree, Dr Montevideo.’
‘Can I help?’ asked Gabriel.
‘Do you like western novels?’
Before alighting on the keys, his fingers trembled like the Stanley compass needle. After that, it was plain sailing.
‘A Sacred Feast’
Madrid, 21 March 1962
IT TOOK PLACE in the main auditorium of number 1 Marina Española Square, central headquarters of the only party, known as the National Movement. ‘Large turnout,’ it said in the newspaper reports. In the presence of ministers and numerous representatives of the regime, together with members of the judiciary and ecclesiastical hierarchy, the then director of the Institute of Political Studies, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, welcomed Carl Schmitt as an honorary member. The first time such an award had been made in this centre which was conceived as a factory of ideas during the dictatorship. Created in 1939, after Franco’s victory and Hitler’s rise to power, the Institute always gave Schmitt preferential treatment, as an intellectual, publishing his texts and commentaries on his works.
Who was this German jurist Spain paid tribute to in 1962? He was something more than a jurist. He was once considered the Kronjurist, the Third Reich’s ‘official jurist’. The architect of Nazi legality. The proponent of ‘a state of emergency’, for whom, after Hobbes, ‘auctoritas non veritas facit legem’. Authority, not truth, makes law. The deviser of Decisionism, by which the ‘providential’ nature of absolute power was brought up to date, so that the monarch was now the Caudillo or the Führer. In practice, a futuristic formulation of tyranny for the masses. Unlike other periods, when the mark of a tyrant was his obscene contempt for the law, Schmitt’s great conjuring trick was to transform the tyrant into Supreme Judge, the maker of law, the one who imprints the law with his footsteps.
After the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, Carl Schmitt spent a brief period in the internment camp of Berlin Lichterfelde-Süd and in Nuremberg as a defendant and witness, proceedings he managed to slip away from with customary ease. Regarding this experience, he wrote Ex Captivitate Salus, which contains a single show of repentance in the use of Macrobius’ Latin phrase ‘Non possum scribere in eum qui potest proscribere’. I cannot write against one who has the power to proscribe. An equivocal statement in a master of oblique expression. A surprising device in someone who read Melville and knew the scrivener Bartleby’s response when asked to do something that went against his conscience, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Some were brave enough to say no. In the legal field, the courageous Hans Kelsen, for example, who had an argument with Schmitt about parliamentary democracy and, having been proscribed, branded ‘an enemy’, carried on defending freedom while in exile. Some at least resisted the crushing totalitarian machine in silence. Schmitt did not. On the contrary, his contribution to the rise of Nazism was enthusiastic and systematic during the crucial period 1933–1936. Before that, he had helped to undermine the Weimar Republic by proposing an abuse of presidential power that foreshadowed modern forms of dictatorship.