The Orchids by Thomas H. Cook Page A

staring at me from the verandah.
    â€œÂ¿Qué pasa?” she asked.
    â€œNicht … nada.”
    â€œOí romper alguna cosa.”
    â€œUna copa. No es importante.”
    She watches me suspiciously. “Sí, Don Pedro.”
    I wave her from the door, then move down the stairs toward the greenhouse. Juan is inside, relentlessly fighting the demons that have come to destroy the orchids.
    â€œÂ¿Juan?”
    He turns toward me.
    I pull the pouch from my trousers and lift it toward him.
    He looks at me strangely.
    I tell him to take the pouch and to bury it under the orchids.
    He stares at me, perplexed. “¿Las orquídeas?”
    â€œSí.”
    Reluctantly he takes the pouch.
    I tell him to bury it now. “Ahora, favor.”
    â€œSí, Don Pedro,” Juan says. He eyes the pouch, feeling the edges of the chiseled glass beneath his fingers.
    I attempt to soothe his anxiety. “Para la enfermedad de las flores.” For the blight.
    Juan nods silently, somewhat relieved, but not entirely so. “Sí, Don Pedro.”
    â€œBien.”
    I walk out of the greenhouse and look toward the distant range of hills to the south. The pale orange cloud of dust billows up from the trees as Don Camillo’s spattered limousine speeds along those ancient trails the Indians once carved. In my mind I can see Don Camillo lounging in the back seat, squeezed in between his sleepless protectors, his mind squirming with visions of copper kingdoms in the provinces to the north.

B ACK IN MY OFFICE, I sweep the shards of glass from my desk into the wastebasket at my feet. I sit down and think of the nature of my imagined confession:
    Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
    How long has it been since your last confession?
    There has never been a last confession.
    What have you to confess, my son?
    I confess that I have made myself a vessel of the will. I confess that I have taken up the metaphor of stars.
    Yes, the metaphor of stars. For if the Leader had depended only upon himself, then his success would have been as limited as his person, and his person was supremely limited. I remember that when I saw him the first time in a small street café, I could not see this stooped, slight form hunched rather piggishly over his stein of lager as emblematic of the future. He had rounded shoulders that drooped pathetically under the weight of his military jacket; slick, black hair that poured across his smooth, undistinguished forehead like spilled ink; strange, Moorish eyes that protruded slightly from their oval sockets; a long broad nose, blunted at the end and set within flat, featureless cheeks that curved downward to form a small, trembling double chin; thin lips that arched neither up nor down but rested upon each other in a straight, severe slit, as if sliced by a straight razor; a close-cropped, squared, Chaplinesque mustache whose oddity seemed to blur the surrounding face.
    And so it could not have been the Leader. Not for me. By the millions, others trembled at his voice. By the millions, women wept at the sight of him. But not me, not Langhof, the stalwart boy. For me he was never more than a crude parody of what he thought himself to be, a posturing little hysteric who somehow managed to vitalize the inert mind-lessness that surrounded him. Never for a single moment did I think him to be anything but what he was.
    For me, it was the stars.
    The boy stood in the park, watching his blue-eyed inamorata rush from him with something of himself still dangling in her hand. For a moment he felt the wind blow through him, stirring leaves and ashes. Then he began to gather himself together. He was unwilling to go home, unwilling to eat his mother’s charred strudel or smell the raw meat on his recently acquired stepfather’s soiled shirt. So he began to walk, and the village that was his neighborhood began to appear to him as the city it really was — a swell of grime and noise, a raw