Бруно Травен: Aslan Norval

“Just give them to me and put my bathrobe on that armchair over there.”

In her pajamas, Aslan stretched out on the chaise longue, hanging her head over the edge.

“Lita, come here to brush my hair and sing a Mexican ranchera for me. I feel romantic and melancholic at the same time. I don’t know what is going on with me today.”

“Same here, señora. It happens to me quite often. Then I go lie down in my bed and cry for a whole hour and don’t know why. Then I cry myself to sleep and the next day, I am refreshed and happy as never before so that I could dance around like crazy all morning. That’s how it is with all of us women, señora. We don’t even understand ourselves. How can someone else understand us then? And least of all a man!”

“Are all twenty-year-old Mexican girls as smart as you?”

“My mother always said I was the stupidest of all the girls born in Mexico. All the other Mexican girls are much smarter than I am.”

“Then God protect me from Mexican women. And if you ask me, Lita, I don’t agree, at least with what your mother said.”

Aslan pulled Lita’s head close and kissed her on the cheek she had slapped. “There. Lita, it’s all good now.”

“I never hold a grudge, señora. And least of all do I hold a grudge about a bofetada , a slap in the face. My mother slapped me half a dozen times every day and I was never angry. Stuff like that remains in the family, as my mother always said.”

While Lita was talking away, she brushed Aslan’s hair and began to sing.

“What is this beautiful song called, Lita?”

“‘Reina de Mi Jacal.’ ‘Queen of My Poor Hut.’”

She had finished singing the rancheras and dressing the hair.

Aslan sat up, stretched her arms, yawned blissfully, and as she walked toward her bedroom she said: “Lita, I just realized that I haven’t had any dinner. Run and get me two sandwiches, a bowl of fruit, a large glass of porter, and a little glass of sherry. I need something stimulating. Anyways, it was a turbulent evening. What do you think, Lita?”

“If you ask me, señora, I would say it was a typical family evening without incident.”

“Maybe. I guess it depends from which perspective you look at it. In any case, from my vantage point, and especially from my bottom’s perspective, it is not possible to say that this evening featured regular entertainment.”

“Well, if you see it that way, señora, I guess it must be true.”

“Now, run. If you come back and find me as a beautiful corpse, tell the world that I died of terrible starvation, because Lita did not bring me food fast enough.”

“ Voy volando , señora. I am flying,” Lita answered, and rushed out.

The two most powerful nations in the world, which had emerged as the only remaining large world powers, now seemed willing to destroy each other without pity in order to achieve supremacy. They had entered a competition of which nation could bomb and destroy the moon first, so that the other could not use it as a base for an all-out attack on earth. Nobody considered even for a minute that innocent life-forms could exist on the moon, and that they would be murdered ruthlessly. What do we care about such details as long as we can bomb the moon, Mars, and Venus to show the universe for once what crackerjacks we are, goddamn it! However, immensely large areas on earth were largely unexplored. Without a doubt they could offer hundreds of thousands of people better dwellings and living conditions. No one had explored the core of the earth. No one had discovered a cure for cancer, for arteriosclerosis, or for inexplicable heart attacks. However, time, energy, and money were available in amounts we can hardly imagine, and the battle for space began. One of those superpowers owned twenty-two satellites already. They were racing with incredible speed around earth, to shoot down the good Lord, our savior who was crowned with thorns, the Lord of Peace. They were making the existence of the bearded saints and the little angels quite a bit less comfortable.

Although one of the two superpowers could send fewer Sputniks into orbit than the other one, it owned one satellite big enough that you could see it with your bare eyes in good weather. The competing nation had almost managed to get within reach of the moon. The other nation immediately counterbalanced this feat by adding a new planet to the solar system, as a late Christmas present so to speak: “Peace on earth and goodwill to man.”

Admittedly, these human-made celestial bodies, which devoured billions of the hard-earned dollars of hardworking and tireless workers, had relatively little economic value. Their value was mainly political.

The obsession with discovering new weapons, a thousand times more destructive than those stored in unbelievable numbers, had become a veritable human illness. Instead of building new schools, new hospitals, cheaper housing, new railways, new power plants and irrigation systems, and instead of ending the bitter poverty of millions of people, they were manufacturing two thousand new hydrogen bombs every month as well as ten dozen rocket launchers that could travel nine thousand miles in six and a half minutes and decimate a million people to ash and rubble in half a second.

The results of this sinister arms race filled the pages of newspapers every day. They talked about “new triumphs” to convince even the last skeptic of humanity’s impending complete destruction. In such circumstances, of course, people forgot everything that was of use to them. They were mollified by descriptions of “great scientific achievements” by certain scholars who did not fulfill their duty of serving humanity, but who, on the contrary, used their knowledge and experience to destroy human beings.

Therefore, people forgot the big project of building a shipping route between the Atlantic and the Pacific across American soil. All the necessary money was needed elsewhere. And the situation was the same for both superpowers. And as far as our nation is concerned, we did not stop squandering billions of hard, good American dollars. Those members of the Senate and of Congress who tried to stop the waste by limiting the requested amounts to a minimum and by redirecting the funds toward where they were truly useful were in the minority. Members of certain circles accused them of an anti-American ideology, which came close to an accusation of treason.

America was giving away billions to countries that could not put their debt-ridden budgets in order due to political corruption, the criminal ineptitude of their governments, and hopeless colonial wars. Let the rich American uncle take care of you even if he is incredibly dumb and an idiot; he does not know what to do with his billions anyway.

The American government had wasted more than sixty-five thousand million dollars since World War II by claiming that this was the only way to save economically weak nations from the claws of Bolshevist super-imperialism. They tried to stop the spread of Bolshevism using dollars instead of perfectly sound Western ideology and culture. The might of money against the power of ideas. That’s also a battle.

They threw billions of dollars at dictators who used brutal police and military power to deny their citizens their human rights. No nation was as interested in Sputniks, Luniks, and intercontinental rockets as the American people. However, their interest waned quickly, especially because an unexpected invention or discovery can excite Americans in an almost unsettling manner. The only accomplishments and innovations that took root and remained present in the consciousness of Americans were those that credibly promised to serve a lasting, visible, general purpose.