Rausch laughed mockingly. “Do you? Well, let me tell you something, my friend. If we do not complete the task this time while we have the will to do so, and the machinery, then it will simply start again fifty, a hundred, two hundred years from now, with all the accompanying agony. We must clean the cesspool entirely this time. We must let it all collapse totally. Only then can the reconstruction begin.”
Langhof felt as if all his energy had been drained from him. “No more, Rausch,” he said.
Rausch stepped into the door, then turned back. “You are an interesting man, Langhof,” he said, “but weak, pitifully weak.” He stepped into the hallway and closed the door gently behind him.
Langhof turned from the door, walked to the window, and looked out.
Staring out into the thick, humid night of El Caliz, it is easy to understand what Langhof felt at that moment in his history. It was harder then, because he was in the midst of the swirl. The great gift of the survivor is his capacity to rethink horror from the vantage point of distance. Langhof, as he stared toward the raging furnace, watching flames shoot fifteen feet from the mouth of the chimney, could not imagine either himself or his circumstance. If some wily partisan had put a bullet through his head as he stood at the window, his life would have been better than it became, but his mind would have died, and his capacity to tumble through time, back and forth through time, like an eel caught in an eternal undertow, would have been lost.
Even this obvious fact, however, was far too elusive for our hero to grasp. Standing by the window, he could not even imagine a future for himself. No doubt certain escapes offered themselves. He could consult a religious text or write a poem or take morphine or blame his parents. He could perhaps in the future marry a pretty girl who understood him. But Langhof, by his very nature, was immune from these seductions. He did not have the final option of perfect blindness. And so he took the only option he actually had. He fell in love with nothingness. Nullity became his only pleasure. He applied an airbrush to his senses, and although he could not avoid the hideous data they brought to him through nose and ear and eye and hand, still he could elude the feelings that might otherwise have overwhelmed him. But in this he could not be selective. He had to avoid all feeling. He had to reduce the herds to a roiling, featureless mass. Because he could not bear one scream, he must shut out them all. In doing this, in allowing himself to be encased in a glass booth that separated him from both joy and suffering and that gave all life and history the lifeless quality of a photograph, he lost some of his illusions. He never again believed that timidity could suddenly be made courage or intent be made act. But at the same time, he embraced a larger and more debased illusion. He took upon himself the revery of the void, the romance of nihilism and absolute estrangement. And so, in the rapture of oblivion, Langhof acted his part within the Camp, held, as he was, within the grasp of his greatest illusion: that while we are, we can cease to be.
Part IV
GOOD TO SEE you again, Don Pedro.”
I had seen the tail of dust wind down the mountainside, soiling the morning air, as Don Camillo’s limousine moved toward my compound.
“I was not expecting another visit,” I tell him.
Don Camillo smiles. “No, I suppose not.”
“Would you care for refreshment?”
“No, not for me.”
I glance at the two bodyguards who stand beside his chair. They shake their heads. No refreshment, then.
“I hope nothing is wrong, Don Camillo.”
“Nothing serious,” Don Camillo says. He roots himself deeply into the chair. “So, I suppose you are wondering what brings me here so quickly after my last visit.”
“Yes.”
Don Camillo glances off the verandah toward the large tent that is spread across the ground. “Very nice, the national colors.”
“Dr. Ludtz’s idea, Don Camillo,” I tell him.
“Very apt. You Europeans are always so conscious of just the right touch.”
“We have planned fireworks …”
“No, no,” Don Camillo says quickly. “No fireworks, Don Pedro. It is too distracting for the guards.”
I nod. “As you wish.”
Don Camillo takes a gold cigarette case from the pocket of his white linen suit. “Cigarette, Don Pedro?”
“I don’t smoke.”
He takes a cigarette from the case. “I do.” He lights the cigarette, takes a deep inhalation, and blows a column of tumbling smoke toward my face. Just the right touch for mild intimidation.
“You were about to tell me the purpose of your visit, Don Camillo,” I remind him.
Don Camillo’s face hardens with mock seriousness. “You know, of course, about this trouble we’ve been having in the northern provinces.”
“We have spoken of it before,” I tell him. “I was not aware that it was very serious.”
“Serious? Well, no. But it’s growing, I’m afraid, Don Pedro, steadily growing.”
“I see.”
“It appears that two of the northern provinces have fallen completely to the rebels. Most distressful, as you can imagine.”
“Yes.”
“Most unfortunate,” Don Camillo says. “Don’t you think so, Don Pedro?”
“Of course.”
Don Camillo smiles with reptilian suspiciousness. “Of course, yes,” he says flatly. He takes another puff from his cigarette and leans back in his chair, his head cocked slightly toward the revolver in the belt of the guard who stands beside him. “You realize, don’t you, Don Pedro, that if El Presidente should be overthrown, your own position here in the Republic would be jeopardized?”
“Naturally.”
“Not only jeopardized, Doctor,” Don Camillo adds. He leans forward for emphasis. “Let’s speak plainly. They would crucify you, Dr. Langhof.”
It surprises me that Don Camillo thinks me capable of being moved by so common an allusion. “I know what the rebels would do,” I tell him. “I realize that my security is tied to El Presidente’s.”
Don Camillo smiles that thin, basilisk smile. Somewhere in the Republic there must be an academy that teaches these base, totalitarian facial expressions. In the Camp, there was nothing so ugly as a smile.
“Do you?” Don Camillo asks through his sneer.
“Do I what?”
“Do you perfectly realize how you are tied to El Presidente?”
Across the river I can hear a mynah bird cawing. I turn and glimpse its bright, orange beak through a fan of leaves.
“Do you perfectly understand, Dr. Langhof?” Don Camillo repeats.
I turn to face him. “Why do you doubt me, Don Camillo?”
“I doubt everyone,” Don Camillo tells me. “It is one of the rules of political life, as you must surely know, Doctor.”
I watch Don Camillo through a cloud of smoke. He insists upon a military aspect even to his civilian attire and festoons his chest with a display of ribbons and medallions. They tinkle slightly when he shifts in his seat. He has worn them to impress me with his capacity for terror. They represent his license to extract anything he wants from me, by any means he sees fit. It is the garment that legitimizes torture, that makes of it a civilized function. And so the man who wears the badge of state and then applies electrodes to his victim’s testicles does not do so as a base sadist slavering in his bedchamber, but as a cool and stately instrument of the civil will.
Don Camillo leans forward again, for emphasis; he is a man of limited gestures. “They are still hunting you, you know. That old man. Arnstein. The one who has tracked down so many others. He’s still looking. A phone call, and it would be all over for you, Dr. Langhof.”