I take the glass and begin to pour another for him.
“No, no … with great thanks … enough.”
“The fever should break tonight, Doctor,” I tell him. “By morning the worst should be over.” In the Camp, I once helped Dr. Ludtz string a line of aspirin in the air. Those with a certain temperature were allowed to lick it once; those with a slightly higher fever were allowed to lick it twice; those with an even higher fever were sent to another ward and given phenol.
“It is …” Dr. Ludtz begins, then breaks off and coughs slightly into his fist. “It is worse.”
“Well, that always happens before it gets better. You know that, Dr. Ludtz.”
Dr. Ludtz nods very slightly, his eyes closing as he does so.
“Is there anything I can get for you?”
“The rebels … are they …”
“Nowhere near us, Dr. Ludtz. Really, you shouldn’t even bother with such matters. The Federales have the situation well in hand.”
Dr. Ludtz is not convinced.
I smile. “Do you really think El Presidente would permit such a ridiculous rabble to overthrow him?”
“It has happened … other places.”
“But not here, I assure you. Never here.”
As the enemy troops approached the Camp, I remember him scurrying back and forth, hurling stacks of paper into a large ashcan. It was raining and there was no gasoline to keep the fire burning, so the papers began to smolder rather than to burn. Dr. Ludtz became frantic, scooping up huge armfuls of medical files and ripping at them furiously as he squatted in the mud, sobbing with terror, the visor of his cap singed and smoking.
“I hope … you’re right,” Dr. Ludtz says. He seems to need all his strength to breathe, gulping the air down as if it has turned liquid.
“You need to rest, Doctor,” I tell him. “Tomorrow morning you may wake up completely relieved.
“Friday … El Presidente,” Dr. Ludtz says.
“Yes. But don’t worry. He’ll understand if you’re ill.”
“El Presidente …” Dr. Ludtz breathes.
I get up quickly. “Please now, Doctor, you can’t expect to improve if you don’t relax. Get some rest. Sleep well. And perhaps you’ll be quite fit by the time El Presidente arrives.”
Dr. Ludtz lifts his fingers from his chest. “Thank you … good of you … I …”
“No more, Doctor,” I insist. “Sleep, that’s what you need. Build up your strength. I’ll be by to see you sometime tomorrow.”
I ease myself toward him and squeeze his hand softly. “Good night, Dr. Ludtz.”
“Yes … good night … thank you.”
On that last day in the Camp, he had almost lost control of himself. Coming back from the pit, I heard him whimpering through the billowing smoke, through the heavy rumble of the enemy guns a few kilometers away. He sat, bespattered with mud, one sleeve of his uniform torn and drooping down toward his elbow, exposing a bloody arm. By then he had ceased ripping at the papers, but had deposited a pile of them in front of him, taking one sheet from the top, tearing it into slivers, then shoving the slivers into his mouth, where he chewed slowly, like a cow eating daisies. I could hear some of the prisoners battering against the doors of the empty supply houses. I ran over to Ludtz and shouted his name. But he did not look up. So I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet, dragging him with me out of the Camp — I think now, as a souvenir.
Part V
FROM MY VERANDAH, at night, I can see only what is purposefully illuminated: Dr. Ludtz’s cottage, the nursery, and to the left, a few lights still burning in the village of El Caliz. El Presidente can see much more from the balcony of his palace. He can see the gardens and the reflecting pools, the cobblestone walks bordered on either side with potted palms, the marble steps that lead to the great mahogany doors of the palace itself. And beyond the pale orange stucco walls of the palace he can see the wide boulevard of administration buildings, their façades made brilliant by klieg lights buried in their lawns: the Department of Justice, with its Doric columns rising toward lofty entablatures; the Museum of the Republic, with its tiled roof and high gables, a Tudor contrivance set in the tropics; the Ministry of Finance, with its Egyptian design, ornate as the Temple of Horus, a huge façade of vast, teeming multicolored murals where scenes slide invisibly into other scenes, colors into other colors, a pulsing, indecipherable panorama perfectly representative of the intricate circularities of money, the veiled, impenetrable calligraphy of man’s worldly goods. And then, should El Presidente’s eyes move upward, he will see the lights of the capital city: first the tall, airless structures of the professional classes; then the shaded streets of the middle classes; and finally, sweeping out in all directions, the great teeming slums of splintered wood and rusting tin, the moiling, wasted afterbirth of underdevelopment.
When the Athenian painter Parrhasius wished to do a work of art based on the suffering of Prometheus, he first had an old man brought to him and tortured in his presence so that he could observe the changing face of agony. El Presidente, in the egocentrism of his art, has created the Republic. But it was the Camp that brought to greatest fruition this process by which man is made idea. In the locked gas chambers adjoining the crematoria, human flesh piled itself into a pyramid of Darwinian simplicity: babies and small children on the bottom; next, the old and sick; next, the small of frame, mostly women; then men of medium build; and piled on top of them, their fingers clawing at the ceiling, the strongest representatives of physique. Here the real became surreal, and all merged into a landscape whose perfect epigram was Hier ist kein Warum — “Here there is no why.”
Langhof, our hero, saw all of this and continued to eat and sleep and evacuate his bowels. In a single month he saw more horror than El Presidente could create in a thousand years with his limited technology: women hung by the heels and slit open like pigs, their intestines dangling in their faces; old men fried on electric wire, blue smoke rising from their ears; the cheeks of young girls eaten through with noma; piles of rotting bodies that made a catacomb for rats. Subtlety would veil the horror; rhetoric would turn it into style. And yet, Langhof did see these things, and at the point where one can no longer look, it is there one must look on. Langhof looked, and did not stop looking. Why?
Perhaps here in the Republic it is possible to know. I can sit in perfect silence through the night and think only of this question. Here there is no distraction from the process of examination. But beyond the railing upon which I lean, my eyes moving up and down the river, there are a billion alternatives to thought, a million modes of hallucination, each no more than a small particle of that hot mist that rose above the primordial pit. But here on the verandah there are no plaster statues of dead saints, no sweaty tools of bowed labor, no applications for advancement, no familial distress. Free of all these encumbrances to thought, it is perhaps possible for me to use fully the powers that I possess. And so I have come to think that what remained in our hero — weak, pathetic, destitute, and yet abiding still — was a sense of inquiry. Ridiculous as it may seem, even through the long period of his somnambulance Langhof had never failed to observe the Camp through the gentle curve of a question mark. That much of science was still left to him, and the brief exchange with Ginzburg had served to rouse it further. Ginzburg’s absurdity, his surrealism, touched a dormant chamber in Langhof’s mind. And so, like a fairy child following a trail of bread crumbs through the forest, he pursued the dancing comic who had disappeared behind the door of the medical compound.