BEHEADING OF THE HEADS
("La Decapitazione Dei Capi")
Written by Italo Calvino. Translated by Ubaldo Stecconi & Carmina Ma. Veronica Ll. Bautista
I arrived in the capital on what looked like the eve of a festival. Stands were being erected in the squares, flags were being hoisted, ribbons and palm trees were being raised. Hammers were banging everywhere.
“Is it your national day?” I asked the bartender.
“No, it’s for our heads of government,” he said, pointing at a row of portraits behind him. “It’s for them.”
I imagined it was their inauguration after an election. “New leaders?” I asked.
I nearly had to shout my short sentences to cover the din of hammers, loudspeakers that were being tested, squeaking cranes that were erecting gallows. The bartender shook his head; they were not new leaders, they had been around some time.
“Do you commemorate the day they seized power?” I asked.
“In a sense,” a customer beside me explained. “We have this celebration regularly: when the day comes, there they go.”
“Pardon me?”
“They have to climb up to the stands.”
“Which stand? I’ve seen many, at all crossroads.”
“One stand for each; our government has many heads.”
“What will they do there? Do they speak?”
“Not really, no speeches.”
“So, what do they do when they stand there?”
“There is little for them to do. They wait for the preparations, then the ceremony is over in a couple of minutes.”
“And the people?”
“We watch.”
The bar was crowded. The carpenters and handymen who were unloading the stands’ fittings from their trucks (axes, stumps, baskets) would come in to drink a beer and quickly go. I would direct my questions to somebody but somebody else would invariably answer.
“In short, it is a sort of re-election. They get confirmed in their positions, in office.”
“Not at all,” they corrected me. “You didn’t get it. It’s actually the end of their terms in office; their time is over.”
“And so?”
“So when the head no longer rules, it rolls.”
“Hold on, why do they have to stand on the stands?”
“So that we can have a good look at how the head rolls, springs in the air, and ends up in the basket.”
I was beginning to understand, but I wasn’t sure yet. “You mean to say the heads of your heads of government? They roll in the baskets?”
They nodded. They clearly meant beheading; the beheading of the heads.
I had just gotten there, I had not read the papers, I did not know a thing.
“Tomorrow then, all of a sudden…”
“It’s the rule; when the time comes…” they were saying. “This time, it falls in mid-week. Holiday. Nobody works.”
An old man added gravely: “When fruits are ripe, harvest comes; when the time comes for the heads, it’s beheading. Would you let fruits rot on the tree?”
In the meantime, the carpenters were going on with their job: scaffolds were erected, heavy guillotines were being tested. Stumps were firmly fixed onto the stands for ax-beheading. They were placed close to convenient prie-dieux (a man lay his head on a stump to check that it was at the right distance). Something like butcher’s counters were installed on certain stands so that the blood could flow neatly into the drain. Oilcloth was spread on the floor; sponges were ready at hand to wipe it clean from the splatters. The men were working cheerfully: some were laughing and whistling.
“You look happy. Did you hate them? Were they bad leaders?”
“Not at all!” The clients in the bar were looking at each other, surprised. “These ones were good, I mean to say, not worse than many others. You know what they are like: leaders, bosses, chiefs…When you get to the post…”
“I have to say I quite liked these ones, though,” another client said.
“So did I. Yes,” others added. “I have nothing against them.”
“Aren’t you sorry that they will kill them, then?” I said.
“This is not the point. The moment you accept to be a leader, you already know the end of the story. No hope can die of old age!”
The others laughed. “That’s too easy! After your nice spell in power, you shake some hands and go back home, as if nothing happened.”
Another said: “Oh that would be something! In that case, everybody’d want to be a leader! Here I am, take me, I’m ready!”
“So would I. And I!” many said, laughing.
“I wouldn’t,” said a man with glasses. “Not like that, that would be meaningless.”
“True. What sort of leaders would those be?” other voices added. “You can do the job only if you know what lies ahead, otherwise…What nonsense!”
The man with glasses, apparently the best educated among them, began to explain that power over the others is one and the same thing with the latter’s right to put you on the stand eventually, and bring you down. What authority would a leader have if he were not surrounded by this expectation? If you could not read the expectation in his own eyes every single moment of his term in office? Civil institutions rest on this double edge of power; there has never been a civilization that did not adopt this system.
“Hmm, I can give you some examples…” I objected.
“Real civilization, I mean,” the man with glasses insisted. “I’m not referring to those barbaric period which stretched over peoples’ histories.”
The old man who had spoken earlier about fruits proclaimed: “The head rules as long as it stands on the neck.”
“What do you mean?” the others asked. “You mean to say that if a leader doesn’t have his head chopped off at the end of his term, he would rule for the rest of his life?”
“This is how things went,” the old man confirmed, “in those times when it wasn’t clear that the moment you accept to become a leader, you also accept your beheading. Those who had power would cling to it…”
At this point, I could have objected, I could have given examples; but nobody would have listened anyway.
“So what did they do?” others asked the old man.
“They had to behead their leaders against the leaders’ will, using force. Not even at regular times, but when the people really could not stand them any longer! This was before things were given some order. Now, the leaders accept it.”
“Of course they do,” cheered the others. “Can you imagine it if they didn’t?”
“Things are not as you say,” said the man with glasses. “It’s not that leaders are forced to accept their execution. If this is what you think, then you miss the point of our institutional system; you don’t get the real relationship between our heads and the rest of the population. Only leaders can be beheaded; therefore one cannot wish to be a leader without wishing the cut of the ax at the same time. You can become head only if you feel this calling; only if you feel that your head has already been chopped off the moment you get to your position of power.”
The crowd in the bar had gradually dispersed, they had all returned to their jobs. I realized that the man with glasses was talking only to me now.
“This is what power is all about,” he went on, “it is the expectation. All your power is nothing but the herald of the blade that hisses and neatly severs. All applause is nothing but the beginning of that final applause that hails the rolling of your head on the oilcloth on the stand.”
He took off his glasses, he wiped them with his handkerchief. I noticed that his eyes were filled with tears. He paid his beer and went out.
The bartender spoke close to my ear: “He’s one of them, look here.” He pulled a stack of pictures from under the counter. “Tomorrow, I’ll have to replace the pictures on the wall with these.” The portrait of the man with glasses was on top of the stack; it was an ugly blow-up of an ID photo. “He’s been elected to succeed those who are quitting the post. He’ll be in charge starting tomorrow. Now it’s his turn. If you ask me, they shouldn’t be told the day before. You’ve seen for yourself how he’s taking it. Tomorrow, he will watch the executions as if they were his own. They all do the same: at the beginning, they are disturbed, overwhelmed. The ‘calling’, what words he used!”
“And then?”
“Then he will learn to cope, like everybody else. They are so busy, they stop thinking about it until the day of the celebration comes for them, too. But then, who can read in the heart of a leader? They act as if they are not thinking about it.
“Another beer?”
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Stecconi, Ubaldo, ed. Daydreams & Nightmares: A Fearless Anthology of Italian Short Stories. Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1996. Print.
