Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
José-André Lacour
From Death in That Garden (1954)
Translated by Humphrey Hare
Looking glasses are like Spanish inns: you find in them what you bring to them. In general, Captain Corazon brought to it a dashing musical-comedy officer who succeeded in all he undertook in life, both with women and in war, and who had attained the rank of general, though only twenty-four. Or again, he was a togaed Caesar or a Genghis Khan, personally decapitating subordinates. As he could not spend his whole life in this solitary pleasure, he often endeavored to transplant this beyond-the-looking-glass world into reality, frenziedly trying to impose on others, and on his men in particular, the part he was playing on a given day. Since he was never certain of having succeeded (for, indeed, it is only in solitude that it is possible to triumph over the universe without encountering resistance), he had a panic fear of what people might be saying of him and, confusing his own person almost unconsciously with higher authority, the derision he might be arousing with a crime against the State, he had organized a system of informers wherever he had served.
***
The captain had continued his discourse. And the whole time he was talking, Tormay had wondered who Bolivarolette was impersonating that evening. Robespierre perhaps? Robespierre rousing the Constituent Assembly by depicting the danger in which the country stood? Or Churchill in the House of Commons, in 1940, announcing blood, toil, tears and sweat? But perhaps he was impersonating no one but the general he believed himself to be, that Great Imaginary Soldier whose luster and heroism he was miming and whose historic gestures he no doubt rehearsed in the moth-eaten looking glass. In the cunningly timed pause that followed on a number of ridiculous remarks concerning “the restoration of the situation,” “the making of an example,” “the rumors to be scotched” and “the leaders of the riot to be suppressed,” Corazon demanded Bolivano’s head.
***
“Really, Father,” he cried, as if he were sounding a tocsin against himself, “you know what soldiers are!”
The old priest nodded, as if impersonal labels enabled him to see more clearly; it was enough to say “soldiers” or “police” rather than “men,” to get him to admit, on occasion, the ferocity of the species…
Source