The Autumn of the Patriarch

  THERE HE WAS, then, as if it had been he even though it might not be, lying on the banquet table in the ballroom with the feminine splendor of a dead pope amidst the flowers in which he would not have recognized himself in the display ceremony of his first death, more fearsome dead than alive, the velvet glove stuffed with cotton on a chest armored with false medals of imaginary victories in chocolate wars invented by his persistent adulators, the thunderous full-dress uniform and the patent leather boots and the single gold spur that we found in the building and the ten sad pips of general of the universe to which he was promoted at the final moment to give him a rank higher than that of death, so immediate and visible in his new posthumous identity that for the first time it was possible to believe in his real existence without any doubt whatsoever, although in reality no one looked less like him, no one was so much the opposite of him as that showcase corpse which was still cooking in the middle of the night on the slow fire of the tiny space of the little room where he was laid out with candles while in the cabinet room next door we were discussing the final bulletin with the news that no one dared believe word by word when we were awakened by the noise of the trucks loaded with troops in battle gear whose stealthy patrols had been occupying public buildings since before dawn, they took up prone positions under the arcades of the main commercial street, they hid in doorways, I saw them setting up tripod machine guns on the roofs of the viceregal district when I opened the balcony of my house at dawn looking for a place to put the bouquet of wet carnations I had just cut in the courtyard, beneath the balcony I saw a patrol of soldiers under the command of a lieutenant going from door to door ordering people to close the doors of the few shops that were beginning to open on the commercial street, today is a national holiday they shouted, orders from higher up, I threw them a carnation from the balcony and I asked what was going on with so many soldiers and so much noise of weapons everywhere and the officer caught the carnation in midair and replied to me just imagine girl we don't know ourselves either, the dead man must have come back to life, he said, dying with laughter, because nobody dared think such an earthshaking event could have happened, rather, on the contrary, we thought that after so many years of negligence he had picked up the reins of his authority again and was more alive than ever, once more dragging his great feet of an illusory monarch through the house of power where the globes of light had gone on again, we thought that he was the one who had put out the cows as they frisked about over the cracks in the paving on the main square where the blind man sitting in the shade of the dying palm trees mistook the hoofs for military boots and recited those lines of poetry about the happy warrior who came from afar in a conquest of death, he recited them with full voice and his hand outstretched toward the cows who climbed up to eat the balsam apple garlands on the bandstand with their habit of going up and down stairs to eat, they stayed on to live among the ruins of the muses crowned with wild camellias and the monkeys hanging from the lyres of the rubble of the National Theater, dying with thirst and with the clatter of broken pots of spikenards they went into the cool shadows of entranceways in the viceregal district and sank their burning snouts into the pools in inner courtyards and no one dared molest them because we recognized the congenital brand of the presidential iron which the females bore on their flanks and the males on their necks, they were untouchable, even the soldiers made way for them on the narrow turns of the commercial street which had lost its former clamor of an infernal Moorish bazaar, all that was left was a rubble pile of broken ship frames and pieces of rigging in the puddles of burning sludge where the public market had been when we still had the sea and the schooners lay aground among the vegetable stands, there were empty spaces where the Hindu bazaars had stood in his times of glory, because the Hindus had left, they didn't even say thank you to him general sir, and he shouted what the hell, confused by his last senile tantrums, let them go clean up Englishmen's shit, he shouted, they all left, in their place street vendors of Indian amulets and snakebite cures rose up, the frantic seedy jukebox bars with beds for rent in the rear which the soldiers wrecked with their rifle butts while the iron bells of the cathedral announced the mourning, everything had come to an end before he did, we had even extinguished the last breath of the hopeless hope that someday the repeated and always denied rumor that he had finally succumbed to some one of his many regal illnesses would be true, and yet we didn't believe it now that it was, and not because we really didn't believe it but because we no longer wanted it to be true, we had ended up not understanding what would become of us without him, what would become of our lives after him, I couldn't conceive of the world without the man who had made me happy at the age of twelve as no other man was ever to do again since those afternoons so long ago when we would come out of school at five o'clock and he would be lying in wait by the skylights of the stables for the girls in blue uniforms with sailors' collars and a single braid thinking mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado how pretty women look to me at my age, he would call to us, we would see his quivering eyes, the hand with the glove with torn fingers which tried to entice us with the candy rattle from Ambassador Forbes, they all ran off frightened, all except me, I stood alone on the street by the school when I knew that no one was watching me and I tried to reach the candy and he grabbed me by the wrists with a gentle tiger's claw and lifted me painlessly up into the air, took me through the skylight with such care that not a pleat in my dress was wrinkled and he laid me down on the hay that was scented with rancid urine trying to tell me something that wouldn't come out of his arid mouth because he was more frightened than I, he was trembling, you could see his heart beating under his jacket, he was pale, his eyes were full of tears as no other man ever had them in all of my life in exile, he touched me in silence, breathing unhurriedly, he tempted me with a male tenderness which I never found again, he made my little buds stand out on my breasts, he put his fingers underneath the edge of my panties, he smelled his fingers, he made me smell them, smell it, he told me, it's your smell, I didn't need Ambassador Baldrich's candy any more to climb through the stable skylight to live the happy hours of my puberty with that man of a healthy and sad heart who waited for me sitting in the hay with a bag containing things to eat, he used bread to soak up my first adolescent sauce, he would put things there before eating them, he gave them to me to eat, he put asparagus stalks into me to eat them marinated with the brine of my inner humors, delicious, he told me, you taste like a port, he dreamed about eating my kidneys boiled in their own ammonia stew, with the salt of your armpits, he dreamed, with your warm urine, he sliced me up from head to toe, he seasoned me with rock salt, hot pepper and laurel leaves and left me to boil on a hot fire in the incandescent fleeting mallow sunsets of our love with no future, he ate me from head to toe with the drive and the generosity of an old man which I never found again in so many hasty and greedy men who tried to make love to me without managing to for the rest of my life without him, he talked to me about himself during the slow digestions of love while we pushed away from us the snouts of the cows who were trying to lick us, he told me that not even he himself knew who he was, that he was up to his balls with general sir, he said it without bitterness, without any reason, as if talking to himself, floating in the continuous buzzing of an inner silence that could only be broken with shouts, no one was more gracious or wiser than he, no one more of a man, he had become the only reason for my life at the age of fourteen when two military men of the highest rank appeared at my parents' home with a suitcase bulging with solid gold doubloons and in the middle of the night they put me aboard a foreign ship along with my whole family and orders never to return to the national territory for years and years until the news burst in the world that he had died without having known that I had spent the rest of my life dying for him, I would go to bed with strangers off the street to see if I could find one better than he, I returned aged and embittered with this drove of sons by different fathers with the illusion that they were his, and on the other
hand he had forgotten her the second day he didn't see her climb in through the skylight of the milking stables, he replaced her with a different one every afternoon because by then he couldn't distinguish very well who was who among the troop of schoolgirls in identical uniforms who stuck out their tongues at him and shouted old soursop when he tried to entice them with candy from Ambassador Rumpelmayer, he called them without distinction, without ever wondering if today's had been the same one as yesterday's, he received them all equally, he thought of them all as the same one while he listened half-asleep in the hammock to the always identical arguments of Ambassador Streimberg who had given him an ear trumpet just like the one with the dog of his master's voice with an electrical amplifying device so that he could listen once more to the insistent plan to carry off our territorial waters as surety for the interest on the foreign debt and he repeated the same as always never in a million years my dear Stevenson, anything except the sea, he would disconnect the electric hearing aid so as not to continue listening to that loud voice of a metallic creature who seemed to be turning the record over to explain to him once more what had been explained to me so many times by my own experts without any dictionary tricks that we're down to our skins general sir, we had used up our last resources, bled by the age-old necessity of accepting loans in order to pay the interest on the foreign debt ever since the wars of independence and then other loans to pay the interest on back interest, always in return for something general sir, first the quinine and tobacco monopolies for the English, then the rubber and cocoa monopoly for the Dutch, then the concession for the upland railroad and river navigation to the Germans, and everything for the gringos through the secret agreements that he didn't find out about until after the sudden downfall and public death of Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra whom God keep roasting on an open flame in the cauldrons of his deep hell, we didn't have anything left general, but he had heard the same thing said by all of his treasury ministers ever since the difficult days when a moratorium was declared on the obligation contracted from the bankers of Hamburg, the German fleet had blockaded the port, an English warship had fired a warning shot that opened a breach in the cathedral tower, but he shouted I shit on London's king, better dead than sold down the river, he shouted, death to the Kaiser, saved at the last moment by the good offices of his domino companion Ambassador Charles W. Traxler whose government underwrote a guarantee of the European agreements in exchange for a right of lifetime exploitation of our subsoil and ever since then we've been the way we are owing everything down to the drawers we're wearing general sir, but he took the eternal five o'clock ambassador to the stairs and took leave of him with a pat on the shoulder, never in a million years my dear Baxter, I'd rather be dead than without a sea, overwhelmed by the desolation of that cemetery house where one could walk without running into anyone as if one were under water ever since the evil times of that Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra of my mistake who had cut off the heads of the whole human species except those he was supposed to cut off, those of the authors of the assassination of Leticia Nazareno and the child, the birds refused to sing in their cages no matter how many drops of Cantorina he put in their beaks, the girls in the school next door no longer sang their recess song about the petite painted bird perched on the green lemon limb, life had been going off for the impatient wait to be with you in the stables, my child, with your little palm-nut teats and your clam of a thing, he ate alone under the pansy bower, he floated in the quivering two o'clock heat pecking at his siesta sleep so as not to lose the thread of the television movie in which everything happened according to his orders and completely the opposite of life, because the all-worthy who knew everything never knew that ever since the times of Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra we had first installed an individual transmitter for the soap operas on the radio and then a closed-circuit television system so that only he would see the movies arranged to his taste in which no one died except the villains, love prevailed over death, life was a breath of fresh air, we made him happy with the trick as he had been so many afternoons of his old age with the girls in uniform who would have pleased him until his death if he had not had the bad luck to ask one of them what do they teach you in school and I told him the truth that they don't teach me anything sir, what I am is a waterfront whore, and he made her repeat it in case he hadn't understood well what he had read on my lips and I repeated it letter by letter that I'm not a student sir, I'm a waterfront whore, the sanitation service had bathed her in creolin and rinsed her off, they told her to put on this sailor suit and these nice-girl's stockings and go along this street every afternoon at five, not just me but all the whores of my age recruited and bathed by the sanitary police, all with the same uniform and the same men's shoes and these horsehair braids which look you can put on and take off like a comb, they told us don't be afraid he's a poor foolish old grandfather who isn't even going to lay you but will give you a doctor's examination with his finger and suck on your titties and put things to eat in your pussies, well, everything you do to me when I come, all we had to do was close our eyes in pleasure and say my love my love which is what you like, they told us that and they even made us rehearse and repeat everything from the beginning before they paid us, but I think it's too much of a drag all those ripe bananas in the twitty-twat and all those parboiled malangas up the behind for the four consumptive pesos we've got left after deducting the sanitation tax and the sergeant's commission, God damn it, it's not right to ruin all that food down below if a person doesn't have anything to eat up above, she said, wrapped in the lugubrious aura of the unfathomable old man who listened to the revelation without blinking as he thought mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado why do you send me this punishment, but he didn't give any sign that would reveal his desolation taking care rather in every kind of stealthy investigation until he discovered that the girls' school next door had in fact been closed for many years general sir, his own minister of education had provided the funds in an agreement with the archbishop primate and the heads of family association to construct a new three-story building on the shore where the princesses of families of great conceit were safe from the ambushes of the sunset seducer whose body of a beached shad face up on the banquet table began to stand out against the pale mallow of the moon-crater horizon of our first dawn without him, he was under the protection of everything among the snowy African lilies, free at last of his absolute power at the end of so many years of reciprocal captivity in which it was difficult to distinguish who was the victim of whom in that cemetery of living presidents which they had painted tomb-white inside and out without consulting me about it but rather they ordered him around without recognizing him don't come in here sir you'll dirty our whitewash, and he didn't go in, stay up on the second floor sir a scaffold might fall on you, and he stayed there, confused by the noise of the carpenters and the rage of the masons who shouted at him get away from here you old fool you'll get the mixture all shitty, and he got away, more obedient than a soldier during the harsh months of a renovation done without consulting him which opened new windows to the sea, more alone than ever under the fierce vigilance of an escort whose mission didn't seem to be to protect him but to watch over him, they ate half of his meal to avoid his being poisoned, they changed the hiding place of his honey, they put his gold spur on up where a fighting cock has his so it wouldn't bell-ring when he walked, God damn it, a whole string of cowboy tricks that would have made my comrade Saturno Santos die of laughter, he lived at the mercy of eleven flunkies in jacket and tie who spent the day doing Japanese acrobatics, they brought in an apparatus with green and red lights that went on and off when someone within a radius of two hundred feet was carrying a weapon, and we went through the streets like fugitives in seven identical cars which kept changing places, some getting ahead of others along the way so that even I didn't know which one I'm riding in, God damn it, a useless waste of gunpowder on buzzards because he'd pushed the blinds aside to see the streets after so many years of confinement and he
saw that no one was reacting to the stealthy passage of funereal limousines of the presidential caravan, he saw the cliffs of solar glass of the ministries that rose up higher than the towers of the cathedral and had cut off the colorful promontories of the Negro shacks on the harbor hills, he saw a patrol of soldiers erasing a sign recently painted with a broad brush on a wall and he asked what it had said and they answered eternal glory to the maker of the new nation although he knew it was a lie, of course, if not they wouldn't have been erasing it, God damn it, he saw an avenue with coconut palms six lanes wide with flower beds down to the sea where the bogs had been, he saw a suburb with villas replete with Roman porticoes and hotels with Amazonian gardens where the public market dump had been, he saw cars moving like tortoises along the serpentine labyrinths of the urban freeways, he saw the crowds dulled by the dog-days sun of high noon on the sun-baked sidewalk while on the opposite side there was no one but the unofficial collectors of the tax for the right to walk in the shade, but no one trembled that time with the omen of hidden power in the refrigerated coffin of a presidential limousine, no one recognized the disillusioned eyes, the anxious lips, the useless hand that kept giving undestined waves amidst the shouting of vendors of newspapers and amulets, the ice cream carts, the three-numbered lottery signs, the everyday clamor of the street world alien to the intimate tragedy of the solitary military man who was sighing with nostalgia thinking mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado what has happened to my city, where is the alley of misery of women without me who came out naked at dusk to buy blue corvinas and red snappers and exchange mother curses with the vegetable women while their clothes were drying on the balconies, where are the Hindus who shat by the doors of their stalls, where are their pale wives who soften death with songs of pity, where is the woman who was changed into a scorpion for having disobeyed her parents, where are the mercenaries' bars, their brooks of fermented urine, the everyday look of the pelicans around the corner, and, suddenly, alas, the waterfront, where is it because it used to be here, what happened to the smugglers' schooners, the iron scarp from the marines' landing, my smell of shit, mother, what was going on in the world that no one recognized the fugitive lover's hand in the oblivion as it left a wake of useless waves of the hand from the opened panes of the window of an inaugural train that whistled through fields planted with aromatic herbs where the swamps with strident malaria birds in the rice paddies had been, it passed along through the unlikely plains of blue grazing land frightening herds of cattle marked with the presidential brand and inside the railroad car of responses to my irrevocable fate padded with ecclesiastical plush he went along wondering where was my little old four-legged train, damn it, my boughs with anacondas and poisonous balsam apples, my uproar of monkeys, my birds of paradise, the whole nation with its dragon, mother, where is it all because there used to be stations here with taciturn Indian women in derbies who sold candy animals through the windows, they sold mashed potatoes, mother, they sold hens boiled in yellow lard under the arches of a sign made out of flowers eternal glory to the all-worthy that nobody knows where he is, but whenever he protested that that life of a fugitive was worse than being dead they answered no general sir it was peace within order, they told him, and he ended up accepting it, agreed, dazzled one more time by the personal fascination of Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra of my unmothering whom he had degraded and spat upon so many times in the rage of his sleeplessness but he would succumb again to his charms as soon as he entered the office with the light of day leading that dog with the look of human people whom he doesn't leave even to urinate and who has a person's name besides Lord Kochel, and once more he would accept his formulas with a meekness that rose up against himself, don't worry Nacho, he would give in, do your duty, so that Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra would go back once more with his powers intact to the torture he had set up less than five hundred yards from the presidential palace in the innocent colonial masonry building which had been the Dutch insane asylum, a house as large as yours general sir, hidden in an almond grove and surrounded by a field of wild violets, the first floor of which was reserved for the identification and registry services of the civil state and where in the rest of the building the most ingenious and barbarous machines of torture that the imagination could conceive of were installed, so terrible that he hadn't wanted to know about them but advised Saenz de la Barra you keep on doing your duty as best suits the interests of the nation with the only condition that I know nothing and I haven't seen anything and I've never been in that place, and Saenz de la Barra pledged his word of honor to serve you, general, and he had kept it, just as he followed his orders not to go back to martyrizing children under the age of five with electric wires on their testicles in order to force their parents to confess because he was afraid that the infamy might repeat itself during the insomnia of all those nights the same as during the days of the lottery, although it was impossible for him to forget about that workshop of horror because it was such a short distance from his bedroom and on nights of a quiet moon he would be awakened by the fleeting train music of Bruckner thunder dawns that brought on ruinous floods and left a desolation of tattered gowns of dead brides on the branches of the almond trees at the former Dutch lunatic asylum all so that the shrieks of terror and pain of those dying would not be heard on the street, and all of that without collecting a cent general sir, because Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra used his salary to buy the clothing of a prince, shirts of natural silk with his monogram on the chest, kid shoes, boxes of gardenias for his lapel, lotions from France with the family crest printed on the original label, but he didn't have a woman that anybody knew of and no one said he's a fairy and he doesn't have a single friend or a house of his own to live in, nothing general sir, the life of a saint, slaving away at the torture factory until fatigue made him drop onto the couch in the office where he slept as best he could but never at night and never more than three hours at a time, with no guard at the door, no weapon within reach, under the tense protection of Lord Kochel who was bursting his skin from the anxiety caused by eating the only thing they say he eats, that is, the hot guts of the beheaded people, making that boiling-pot sound to awaken him as soon as his look of a human person sensed through the walls that someone was approaching the office, no matter who it is general sir, that man doesn't even trust mirrors, he would make his decisions without consulting anyone after listening to the reports of his agents, nothing went on in the country and no exile in any part of the planet could so much as sigh without Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra's knowing about it immediately thanks to the threads of the invisible web of informers and bribery with which he had covered the whole orb of the earth, that's what he spent his money on general sir, because it wasn't true that the torturers received the salary of ministers as people said, on the contrary, they volunteered for nothing to show that they were capable of quartering their mothers and throwing the pieces to the pigs without any change in their voice, instead of letters of recommendation and certificates of good conduct, they offered testimony of atrocious antecedents so they would be given work under the guidance of French torturers who are rationalists general sir, and consequently are methodical in cruelty and resistant to compassion, they were the ones who made progress within order possible, they were the ones who anticipated conspiracies long before they started incubating in people's thoughts, the distracted customers who were enjoying the coolness of the fan blades in ice cream parlors, those reading the newspaper in Chinese lunchrooms, those who slept in the movies, those who gave their seats on the bus to ladies, those who had learned to be electricians and plumbers after having passed half a lifetime as nocturnal muggers and bandits of the byways, the casual boyfriends of servant girls, the whores on ocean liners and in international cocktail lounges, the promoters of tourist trips from Miami to the paradises of the Caribbean, the private secretary of the Belgian minister of foreign affairs, the tenured chambermaid of the fourth floor of the International Hotel in Moscow, and so many others that no
one knows to what far corner of the earth they reach, but you can sleep peacefully general sir, because the good patriots of the nation say that you know nothing, that all of this is going on without your consent, that if general sir knew it he would have sent Saenz de la Barra to push up daisies in the renegades' cemetery at the harbor fort, because every time they learned of a new act of barbarism they would sigh inside if the general only knew, if we could only make him know, if there were some way to see him and he ordered the one who had told him never to forget that the truth is I don't know anything, I haven't seen anything, I haven't talked about these things with anyone, and in that way he regained his calm, but so many sacks of severed heads kept arriving that it seemed inconceivable to him that Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra was daubing himself with blood up to his tonsure without some benefit from it because people are dumb bastards but not that dumb, nor did it seem reasonable to him that whole years could pass without the commanders of the three services protesting over their subordinate status, nor did they ask for a raise in salary, nothing, so he had made soundings on his own to try to establish the causes of military compliance, he wanted to find out why they weren't trying to rebel, why they accepted the authority of a civilian, and he had asked the most greedy of them if they didn't think it was time to trim the crest of the bloodthirsty upstart who was tarnishing the merits of the armed forces, but they answered him of course not general sir, it's nothing serious, and since then I no longer know who is who, or who is with whom or against whom in this snare of progress within order that's starting to smell to me like someone playing possum like that other time I don't care to recall with the poor children and the lottery, but Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra calmed his drives with his suave domination of a trainer of wild dogs, sleep in peace, general, he told him, the world is yours, he made him believe that everything was so simple and so clear that he left him again in the shadows of that no man's house which he would cover from one end to the other asking himself with great shouts who the hell am I because I feel as if the reflection in the mirrors is reversed, where the hell am I because it's going on eleven o'clock in the morning and there isn't a single hen even a stray one in this desert, remember the way it was before, he shouted, remember the uproar of the lepers and the cripples as they fought with the dogs over food, remember that slippery chute of animal shit on the stairs and that hullabaloo of patriots who wouldn't let me walk with their begging throw the salt of health on my body general sir, baptize my body to see if he can get rid of his diarrhea because they all said my laying on of hands had binding virtues more effective than green bananas, put your hand here to see if my palpitations die down because I don't feel like living any more with this eternal earth tremor, fix your eyes on the sea general sir to send the hurricanes away, look up to the skies to make eclipses repent, look down to the earth to drive off the plague because they said I was the all-worthy one who filled nature with respect and straightened the order of the universe and had taken Divine Providence down a peg, and I gave them what they asked of me and bought everything they wanted to sell me not because he was soft-hearted as his mother Bendicion Alvarado said but because a person needed an iron liver to refuse a favor to someone who was singing his praises, and now on the contrary there was no one to ask him for anything, no one to say to him at least good morning general sir, did you have a good night, he didn't even have the consolation of those nocturnal explosions that woke him up with a hail of broken glass and blew the doors off their hinges and sowed panic among the troops but which at least let him feel he was alive and not in this silence that buzzes inside my head and wakes me up with its noise, all I am now is a fright painted on the wall of this horror show where it was impossible for him to give an order that hadn't been carried out long before, he found his most intimate desires satisfied in the official newspaper which he still read in the hammock at siesta time from front to back including the advertisements, there was no impulse of his feelings or design of his will which did not appear in print in large letters with the photograph of the bridge he had not ordered built because he'd forgotten, the opening of the school to teach sweeping, the milk cow and the breadfruit tree with a photograph of him with other inaugural ribbons from the times of glory, and yet he couldn't find peace, he dragged his great feet of a senile elephant looking for something that hadn't been lost to him in his house of solitude, he found that someone before him had covered the cages with mourning cloths, someone had contemplated the sea from the windows and had counted the cows before him, everything was complete and in order, he went back to the bedroom with the candle when he recognized his own amplified voice in the quarters of the presidential guard and he looked in through the half-open window and saw a group of officers dozing in the smoke-filled room opposite the sad glow of the television screen and there he was on the screen thinner and trimmer, but it was me, mother, sitting in the office where he was to die with the coat of arms of the nation behind him and three pairs of gold eyeglasses on the desk, and he was reciting from memory an analysis of the nation's finances with the words of a sage that he never would have dared repeat, damn it, it was a more upsetting sight than that of his dead body among the flowers because now he was seeing himself alive and listening to himself speak with his own voice, I myself, mother, I who never had been able to bear the embarrassment of appearing on a balcony and had never overcome the shyness about speaking in public, and there he was, so genuine and mortal that he stood perplexed by the window thinking mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado how is this mystery possible, but Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra remained impassive facing one of the few explosions of rage that he permitted himself in the uncountable years of his regime, it's nothing, general, he said with his softest emphasis, we had to use this illicit recourse to keep the ship of progress within order from running aground, it was a divine inspiration, general, thanks to it we have succeeded in conjuring away the uncertainty of the people over a flesh and blood power who on the last Wednesday of every month rendered a soothing report on the acts of his government on the state radio and television, I assume all responsibility, general, I put this vase with six microphones in the shape of sunflowers here and they recorded the thoughts you had aloud, I was the one who asked the questions he answered during Friday audiences without suspecting that his innocent answers were the fragments of the monthly speech addressed to the nation, because he'd never used an image that wasn't his or a word that he wouldn't have said as you yourself can see with this record that Saenz de la Barra put on the desk beside these films and this letter in my own hand which I sign in your presence, general, so that you may decide my fate as you see fit, and he looked at him disconcertedly because suddenly he came to the realization that Saenz de la Barra was without the dog for the first time, defenseless, pale, and then he sighed, it's all right, Nacho, do your duty, he said, with an air of infinite fatigue, sitting back in the swivel chair with his gaze fixed on the accusing eyes of the portraits of the founding fathers, he was older than ever, gloomier and sadder, but with the same expression of unforeseeable designs that Saenz de la Barra was to recognize two weeks later when he entered the office again without an appointment almost dragging the dog by the leash and with the urgent news of an armed insurrection that only his intervention could stop, general, and finally he discovered the imperceptible crack he had been seeking for so many years in that obsidian wall of fascination, mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado of my revenge, he said to himself, this poor bastard is shitting in his pants with fear, but he didn't make a single gesture that would let his intentions show but wrapped Saenz de la Barra in a maternal aura, don't worry, Nacho, he sighed, we've got plenty of time to think without anyone's disturbing us where the hell was the truth in that bog of contradictory truths that seem less true than if they were lies, while Saenz de la Barra checked his pocket watch to see that it was going on 7 P.M., general, the commanders of the three branches were finishing dinner at their respective homes with their wives and children, so not even they co
uld suspect his plans, they will leave dressed in civilian clothes without an escort through the service entrance where a taxi called by phone awaits them to trick the vigilance of our men, they won't see any, of course, but there they are, general, the drivers, but he said aha, he smiled, don't worry so much, Nacho, explain to me instead how we have lived up till now with our skins intact since according to your figures of severed heads we've had more enemies than we had soldiers, but Saenz de la Barra was only sustained by the tiny throb of his pocket watch, there were less than three hours left, general, the commander of the land forces was on his way at that moment to the Conde barracks, the commander of the naval forces to the harbor fort, the commander of the air forces to the San Jeronimo base, it was still possible to arrest them because a state security van loaded with vegetables was following them at a short distance, but he didn't change his expression, he felt that the growing anxiety of Saenz de la Barra was freeing him from the punishment of a servitude that had been more implacable than his appetite for power, calm down, Nacho, he said, explain to me rather why you haven't bought a mansion as big as an ocean liner, why you work like a mule since money doesn't matter to you, why you live like a monk when the tightest women get all loosened up with the thought of getting into your bedroom, you're more of a priest than any priest, Nacho, but Saenz de la Barra was suffocating in a cold sweat that he was unable to hide with his matchless dignity in that crematory oven of an office, it was eleven o'clock, it's too late now, he said, a coded message began to circulate at that time over the telegraph wires to the various garrisons of the country, the rebel commanders were pinning decorations onto their parade uniforms for the official portrait of the new government junta while their aides were transmitting the final orders of a war without enemies whose only battles were reduced to the control of the centers of communication and public services, but he didn't even blink at the eager throbbing of Lord Kochel who had stood up with a thread of drivel that looked like an endless tear, don't be afraid, Nacho, explain to me rather why you are so afraid of death, and Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra with one tug pulled off the celluloid collar softened by sweat and his baritone face was soulless, it's quite natural, he answered, a fear of death is the ember of happiness, that's why you don't feel it, general, and he stood up counting out of pure habit the bells of the cathedral, it's twelve o'clock, he said, you haven't got anyone left in the world, general, I was the last one, but he didn't move in the big chair until he perceived the underground thunder of the tanks on the main square, and then he smiled, don't be mistaken, Nacho, I still have the people, he said, the poor people as always who before dawn took to the streets instigated by the unpredictable old man who over the state radio and television addressed all patriots of the nation without distinction of any kind and with the most vivid historical emotion to announce that the commanders of the three branches of the service inspired by the unchanging ideals of the regime, under my personal direction and interpreting as always the will of the sovereign people had put an end on this glorious midnight to the apparatus of terror of a bloodthirsty civilian who had been punished by the blind justice of the mob, for there was Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, beaten to a pulp, hanging by his feet from a lamppost on the main square with his own genitals stuck in his mouth, just as you had foreseen general sir when you gave us orders to cordon off the streets to the embassies to stop him from seeking asylum, the people had stoned him general sir, but first we had to riddle with bullets the butcher dog who sucked the guts out of four civilians and left seven of our soldiers badly wounded when the people attacked his living quarters and threw out of the window two hundred brocade vests with the price tags still on them, they threw out some three thousand pairs of Italian boots that had never been worn, three thousand general sir, that's what the government money was being spent on, and I don't know how many boxes of buttonhole gardenias and all the Bruckner records with their respective conductor's scores annotated in his own hand, and they also freed the prisoners in the dungeons and set fire to the torture chambers in the old Dutch insane asylum with shouts of long live the general, long live the stud who finally discovered the truth, because they all say that you didn't know anything general sir, that they kept you in limbo abusing your good heart, and even at this moment they're hunting the state security torturers down like rats since we left them without military protection in accordance with your orders so the people can relieve themselves of so much pent-up rage and so much terror, and he approved, agreed, moved by the bells of jubilation and the music of freedom and the shouts of gratitude from the crowds massed on the main square with large signs saying God keep the magnificent one who redeemed us from the shadows of terror and in that fleeting replica of the times of glory he had the cadet officers who had helped him take off his own chains of a galley slave of power gather in the courtyard and pointing to us according to the impulses of his inspiration he used us to fill in the last high command of his decrepit regime in replacement of the authors of the death of Leticia Nazareno and the child who were captured in their bedclothes when they tried to find asylum in foreign embassies, but he barely recognized them, he'd forgotten their names, he searched in his heart for the burden of hatred he'd tried to keep alive until his death and all he found were the ashes of a wounded pride which was no longer worth maintaining, get them away from here, he ordered, they put them on the first ship to weigh anchor for a place where no one would ever remember them again, poor bastards, he presided over the first cabinet meeting of the new government with the clear impression that those exemplaries chosen from a new generation of a new century were once again the usual civilian ministers with dusty frock coats and weak guts, except that these were more avid for honors than power, more jittery and servile and more useless than all the previous ones in the face of a foreign debt more costly than anything that could be sold in his ravished realm of gloom, because there was nothing to do general sir, the last train on the upland barrens had fallen down an orchid-covered precipice, leopards were sleeping on the velvet seats, the carcasses of the paddle-wheelers were sunk in the swamps of the rice paddies, the news was rotting in the mailbags, the pairs of manatees tricked by the illusion that they were engendering mermaids among the shadowy irises of the round mirrors in the presidential stateroom, and only he was unaware of it, naturally, he had believed in progress within order because at that time the only contact he had with real life was the reading of the government newspaper which they printed only for you general sir, a whole edition of one single copy with the news you liked to read, with the photographs you expected to find, with advertisements that made him dream of a world different from the one they had given him for his siesta, until I myself was able to ascertain with these incredulous eyes of mine that behind the solar glass windows of the ministries still intact were the colors of the Negro shacks on the harbor hills, they had built the palm-lined avenues to the sea so that I wouldn't notice that behind the Roman villas with identical porticoes the miserable slums devastated by one of our many hurricanes were still there, they had sown aromatic herbs on both sides of the railroad tracks so that from the presidential car the world seemed magnified by the venal waters his mother of my insides Bendicion Alvarado used for painting orioles, and they were not deceiving him in order to please him as had been done in the later years of his times of glory by General Rodrigo de Aguilar, or to keep useless annoyances from him as Leticia Nazareno used to do more out of pity than love, but to keep him the captive of his own power in the senile backwater of the hammock under the ceiba tree in the courtyard where at the end of his years even the schoolgirl chorus of the petite painted bird perched on a green lemon limb wasn't to be real, what a mess, and yet the trick didn't affect him but rather he tried to reconcile himself with reality through the recovery by decree of the quinine monopoly and that of other potions essential to the wellbeing of the state, but truth came back to surprise him with the news that the world was changing and life was going on behind the back of his power, beca
use there wasn't any more quinine, general, there's no more cocoa, there's no more indigo, general, there wasn't anything, except his personal fortune which was uncountable and sterile and threatened by idleness, and still he wasn't upset by such dire news but sent a message of challenge to old Ambassador Roxbury in hopes they might find some formula of relief over the domino table, but the ambassador answered him in his own style of never in a million years, your excellency, this country isn't worth a plug nickel, except for the sea, of course, which was diaphanous and succulent and all it needed was a flame underneath to cook the great clam chowder of the universe in its own crater, so think about it, your excellency, we'll accept it on account for the interest of that debt which is in arrears and which won't be paid off even with a hundred generations of leaders as diligent as your excellency, but he didn't even take him seriously that first time, he accompanied him to the stairs thinking mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado look at these gringo barbarians, how is it possible that they can only think of the sea as food, he sent him off with the usual pat on the shoulder and he was alone with himself again feeling around among the wisps of illusory mist on the barren plains of power, because the crowds had abandoned the main square, they took away the repetitious placards and put away the rented signs for other identical celebrations in the future as soon as the stimulus of things to eat and drink that the troops distributed during breaks in the ovations was exhausted, they had left the salons deserted and sad again in spite of his order not to close the main doors at any hour so that anyone who wants to can come in, as before, when this wasn't a house of the dead but a palace for the neighborhood, and yet the only ones who stayed were the lepers general sir, the blind men and the cripples who had remained for years and years in front of the building just as Demetrius Aldous had seen them gilding themselves in the sun by the gates of Jerusalem, destroyed and invincible, certain that sooner or later they would come in again to receive from his hands the salt of health because he was to survive all the reverses of adversity and the most inclement passions and the worst attacks of oblivion, because he was eternal, and so it was, he found them again on his way back from the milking as they boiled cans of kitchen leftovers on the brick fireplaces improvised in the courtyard, he saw them stretched out with their arms crossed on the mats devastated by the sweat of their ulcers in the fragrant shadows of the rose beds, he had a common fireplace built for them, he bought them new mats, and he had a palm-branch shelter built for them in the rear of the courtyard so that they wouldn't have to take shelter inside the building, but four days didn't pass without his finding a pair of lepers sleeping on the Oriental rugs in the ballroom or a blind man lost in the offices or a cripple broken on the stairs, he had the doors closed so that they wouldn't leave a trail of open sores on the walls or stink up the air of the building with the smell of the carbolic acid with which the sanitary services fumigated them although no sooner did he get them out of one place than they appeared in another, tenacious, indestructible, clinging to their old fierce hope when nobody hoped for anything any more from that useless old man who had written reminders in the cracks in the wall and felt his way along like a sleepwalker through the winds he found in the misty swamps of memory, he spent hours of insomnia in the hammock wondering how the hell am I going to get around the new ambassador Fischer who proposed to me to disclose the existence of a plague of yellow fever in order to justify a landing of marines in accordance with the mutual assistance treaty for as many years as would be necessary to bring new breath into the dying nation, and he replied immediately never in a million years, fascinated by the evidence that he was living in the origins of his regime when he had taken advantage of the same solution to assume the exceptional powers of martial law in the face of a serious threat of civil uprising, he had declared a state of plague by decree, he planted the yellow flag on the pole of the lighthouse, he closed the port, Sundays were suppressed, it was forbidden to weep for the dead in public and to play music that would make them be remembered and he made use of the armed forces to police the enforcement of the decree and to dispose of those infested according to his will, so that troops with sanitary armbands held public executions of people of the most diverse stations in life, they would mark a red circle on the doors of houses suspected of nonconformity with the regime, they put a branding iron to the foreheads of the lesser lawbreakers, dikes and fags while a sanitary mission urgently summoned from his government by Ambassador Mitchell took charge of keeping the contagion from the occupants of the presidential palace, they gathered up the runt poo from the floor to analyze it with magnifying glasses, they threw disinfectant tablets into the water jars, they fed water worms to animals in their scientific laboratories, and dying of laughter he told them through an interpreter don't be such horses' asses, misters, the only plague here is you people, but they insisted there was, that they had superior orders that there was, they prepared a syrup with preventive powers, thick and green, with which they varnished visitors' bodies all over without distinction of credentials from the most ordinary to the most illustrious, they obliged them to keep their distance in audiences, they standing in the doorway and he sitting at the end of the room where their voices but not their breath could reach him, parleying in shouts with highborn naked people who gesticulated with one hand, your excellency, and with the other covered their bedaubed little dove, and all that to guard from contagion the one who had conceived in the enervation of wakefulness the most banal details of the false calamity, who had invented earth-born lies and spread apocalyptic predictions in accordance with his belief that the less the people understand the more afraid they'll be, and who scarcely blinked when one of his aides, pale with fright, came to attention before him with the news general sir that the plague is causing tremendous casualties among the civilian population, so that through the foggy windows of the presidential carriage he had seen time stopped by his orders on the abandoned streets, he saw the awe-struck look of the yellow flags, he saw the closed doors even on houses where the red circle had been omitted, he saw the gorged buzzards on the balconies, and he saw the dead, the dead, the dead, there were so many everywhere that it was impossible to count them in the clay pits, piled up in the sun on terraces, stretched out over the vegetables in the market, flesh and blood dead people general sir, who knows how many, because there were many more than he would have wanted to see among the hosts of his enemies thrown out like dead dogs in garbage bins, and above the rotting of the bodies and the familiar fetid smell of the streets he recognized the mangy smell of the plague, but he didn't react, he gave in to no entreaties until he felt himself absolute master of all his power again, and only when there didn't seem to be any means human or divine to put an end to the dying did we see appear on the streets a carriage without insignias in which no one perceived at first the icy wind of the majesty of power, but in the interior of funereal plush we saw the lethal eyes, the quivering lips, the nuptial glove which went along throwing handfuls of salt into the doorways, we saw the train painted with the colors of the flag clawing its way up through the gardenias and terrified leopards to the heights of mist of the most precipitous provinces, we saw the hazy eyes through the windows of the solitary railroad car, the afflicted face, the haughty maiden's hand that went along leaving a trail of salt across the mournful barrens of his childhood, we saw the steamboat with its wooden paddle wheel and rolls of mazurkas in chimerical pianolas that bumped its way along among reefs and sandbars and the ruins of the catastrophes caused in the jungle by the dragon's springtime strolls, we saw the sunset eyes in the window of the presidential stateroom, we saw the pale lips, the hand without origin which threw handfuls of salt into villages deadened by the heat, and those who ate that salt and licked the ground where it had been recovered their health immediately and were immunized for a long time against evil omens and the rash of illusions, so that he was not to be surprised in the twilight of his autumn when they proposed to him a new disembarkation regime sustained by the same lie of a political
epidemic of yellow fever but he stood up to the arguments of the sterile ministers who shouted bring back the marines, general, bring them back with their machines for fumigating plague-ridden people in exchange for whatever they want, let them come back with their white hospitals, their blue lawns, their spinning sprinklers, those people who ended their leap years with two centuries of good health, but he pounded on the table and decided no, under his supreme responsibility until the blunt Ambassador MacQueen answered him that conditions don't warrant any more discussion, your excellency, the regime wasn't being sustained by hope or conformity or even by terror, but by the pure inertia of an ancient and irreparable disillusion, go out into the street and look truth in the face, your excellency, we're on the final curve, either the marines land or we take the sea, there's no other way, your excellency, there was no other way, mother, so they took away the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing's nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons, in spite of the fact that he had appealed to the most audacious registers of his age-old cunning trying to promote a national convulsion of protest against the despoilment, but nobody paid any attention general sir, they refused to take to the streets either by persuasion or by force because we thought it was a new maneuver on his part like so many others to satiate even beyond all limits his irrepressible passion to endure, we thought just so long as something happens even if they carry off the sea, God damn it, even though they carry off the whole nation along with its dragon, we thought, unmoved by the seductive arts of the military men who appeared in our houses disguised as civilians and begged us in the name of the nation to rush into the streets shouting out with the gringos to stop the implementation of the theft, they incited us to sack and burn the stores and mansions of foreigners, they offered us ready cash to go out and protest under the protection of the troops who were solidly behind the people in opposition to the act of aggression, but no one went out general sir, because nobody had forgotten that one other time they had told us the same thing on their word of honor as soldiers and still they shot them down in a massacre under the pretext that agitators had infiltrated and opened fire against the troops, so this time we can't even count on the people general sir, and I had to bear the weight of this punishment alone, I had to sign alone thinking mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado no one knows better than you that it's better to be left without the sea than to allow a landing of marines, remember that they were the ones who thought up the orders they made me sign, they turned our artists into fairies, they brought the Bible and syphilis, they made people believe that life was easy, mother, that everything is gotten with money, that blacks carry a contagion, they tried to convince our soldiers that the nation is a business and that the sense of honor is a bother invented by the government so that soldiers would fight for free, and it was to avoid the repetition of all those ills that I granted them the right to make use of our territorial waters in the way they considered best for the interests of humanity and peace among peoples, with the understanding that said cession not only included the physical waters visible from the window of his bedroom to the horizon but everything that is understood by sea in the broadest sense, or, the flora and fauna belonging to said waters, its system of winds, the inconstancy of its millibars, everything, but I could never have imagined that they would be capable of doing what they did to carry off the numbered locks of my old checkerboard sea with gigantic suction dredges and in its torn crater we saw appear the instantaneous sparkle of the submerged remains of the very ancient city of Santa Maria de Darien laid low by the whirlwind, we saw the flagship of the first admiral of the ocean sea just as I had seen it from my window, mother, it was identical, trapped by a clump of goose barnacles that the teeth of the dredges had pulled out by the roots before he had time to order an homage worthy of the historic importance of that wreck, they carried off everything that had been the reasons for my wars and the motive of his power and left behind only the deserted plain of harsh lunar dust that he saw as he passed by the windows with a heavy heart crying out mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado illuminate me with your wisest lights, because on those twilight nights he would be awakened by the fright that the dead of the nation were standing up in their tombs asking him for an accounting of the sea, he felt their scratching on the walls, he heard their unburied voices, the horror of the posthumous looks that spied through keyholes on the trail of his great feet of a dying saurian in the steaming bog of the last fens of salvation in the shadowy house, he would walk ceaselessly through the cross currents of the tardy trade winds and the false mistrals from the wind machine that Ambassador Eberhart had given him so that he would not think so much about that bad piece of business with the sea, on the top of the reefs he saw the solitary light from the rest home for refugee dictators who sleep like sitting oxen while I suffer, evil-born bastards, he remembered the farewell snoring of his mother Bendicion Alvarado in the suburban mansion, her good birdwoman's sleep in the room lighted by the vigil of the oregano, if he were only her, he sighed, happy sleeping mother who never let herself be frightened by the plague, or let herself be intimidated by love or let herself be scared by death, and on the contrary he was so wrought up that even the flashes of the lighthouse without a sea coming at intervals through the windows seemed to him to have been befouled by the dead, he fled in terror from the fantastic starlike firefly that fumigated in its orbit of a spinning nightmare the fearsome outpouring of the luminous dust of the marrow of the dead, put it out, he shouted, they put it out, he ordered the building caulked inside and out so that even the slightest wisp of death's nocturnal mangy air would not creep in through cracks in doors and windows, not even concealed in other fragrances, he remained in the dark feeling his way, breathing with difficulty in the airless heat, feeling himself pass by dark mirrors, walking from fear, until he heard a troop of hoofs in the crater of the sea and it was the moon rising with its decrepit snows, frightening, take it away, he shouted, put out the stars, damn it, by order of God, but nobody ran to him in the former offices, the blind men on the stairs, the lepers pearled with dew who rose up as he passed the stubble of the first rosebushes to implore the salt of health from his hands, and that was when it happened, disbelievers all over the world, shitty idolaters, it came to pass that he touched our heads as he went by, one by one, he touched each one of us on the place of our defects with a smooth and wise hand that was the hand of truth, and the instant he touched us we recovered the health of our bodies and the repose of our souls and we recovered the strength and will to live, and we saw the blind men dazzled by the glow of the roses, we saw the cripples jumping on the stairways and we saw this my own skin of a newborn child which I go about exhibiting in carnivals all over the world so that everyone will know about the miracle and this fragrance of premature lilies from the scars of my sores which I go spreading over the face of the earth for the derision of the unfaithful and as a lesson for libertines, they shouted it in cities and on byways, at dances and parades, trying to infuse in the crowds the terror of the miracle, but nobody thought it was true, we thought it was just one more of the many aulic messages they sent to villages with an entourage of old quacks to try to convince us of the last thing we needed to believe that he had given skin back to lepers, sight to the blind, agility to cripples, we thought that it was the last resort of the regime to call attention to an improbable president whose personal guard was reduced to a patrol of recruits against the unanimous advice of the cabinet who had insisted no general sir, tighter protection was necessary, at least a unit of riflemen general sir, but he had insisted that no one had any need or desire to kill me, you people are the only ones, my useless ministers, my lazy commanders, except that you don't dare and never will dare kill me because you know that afterward you'll have to kill each other, so that all that was left was the guard of
rookies for an extinguished house where the cows wandered with no law or order from the first vestibule to the hearing room, they had eaten the flowered lawns on the tapestries general sir, they had eaten the files, but he didn't hear them, he had seen the first cow come up one October afternoon when it was impossible to stay outside because of the fury of the cloudburst, he had tried to chase it away with his hands, cow, cow, remembering suddenly that cow was written with a c, he had seen it another time eating the lampshades at a moment in life when he was beginning to understand that it wasn't worthwhile moving toward the stairs to chase a cow away, he had found two of them in the ballroom exasperated by the hens who were flying up to peck at the ticks on their backs, so that on recent nights when we saw lights that looked like navigational signals and we heard a disaster of large-animal hoofs behind the fortified walls it was because he was going about with a candle fighting with the cows over a place to sleep while outside his public life went on without him, every day in the newspapers of the regime we saw his fictionalized photographs at civil and military audiences in which they showed him to us with a different uniform according to the character of the occasion, every year for so many years on the major holidays of the nation's anniversaries we would hear the repeated harangues on the radio, he was present in our lives as we left home, as we went to church, as we ate and as we slept, when it was public knowledge that he could barely make his way along with his rustic hiker's boots in the decrepit building whose service had been reduced at that time to three or four orderlies who fed him and kept the honey hiding places well supplied and chased away the cows who had made a shambles of the general staff of porcelain marshals in the forbidden office where he was to die according to the prognostications of oracles that he himself had forgotten, they stood hanging on his whimsical orders until he hung the lamp on the door and they heard the noise of the three locks, the three bolts, the three bars of the bedroom rarefied by the lack of sea, and then they would withdraw to their quarters on the ground floor convinced that he was at the mercy of his dreams of a solitary drowned man until dawn, but he would awaken with unforeseen starts, he would browse through his insomnia, dragging his great feet of an apparition through the immense building in darkness disturbed only by the patient digestion of the cows and the obtuse breathing of the hens roosting on the viceroys' coatracks, he heard moon winds in the darkness, he felt the steps of time in the darkness, he saw his mother Bendicion Alvarado sweeping in the darkness with the broom of green branches with which she had swept away the leaf storm of the illustrious singed heroes of Cornelius Nepos in the original, the immemorial rhetoric of Livius Andronicus and Cecilius Stratus who were reduced to office trash on the night of blood when he entered the ownerless house of power for the first time while outside the last suicide barricades of the distinguished Latinist General Lautaro Munoz whom God keep in his holy kingdom were resisting, they had crossed the courtyard under the glow of the city in flames, leaping over the dead hulks of the personal bodyguard of the illustrious president, he shaking from the heat of tertian fever and his mother Bendicion Alvarado with no other arm but the broom of green branches, they went up the stairs stumbling in the darkness over the horses of the splendid presidential squiry who were still bleeding from the first vestibule to the hearing room, it was difficult to breathe inside the closed building because of the sour gunpowder smell of the dead horses, along the corridors we saw prints of bare feet stained with horse blood, we saw the marks of palms stained with horse blood on the walls, and in the pool of blood in the hearing room we saw the drained body of a beautiful Florentine woman in an evening gown with a saber thrust through her heart, and she was the wife of the president, and beside her we saw the corpse of a little girl who looked like a toy windup ballerina with a pistol shot in her forehead, and she was his nine-year-old daughter, and they saw the corpse of the Garibaldian Caesar who was President Lautaro Munoz, the ablest and most capable of the fourteen federalist generals who had succeeded to power through successive coups during eleven years of bloody rivalries but also the only one who dared say no in his own tongue to the English consul, and there he was stretched out like a mullet, barefoot, suffering the punishment for his daring with his skull pierced by a pistol shot he had given himself in the palate after having killed his wife and daughter and his forty-two Andalusian horses so that they wouldn't fall into the hands of the punitive expedition of the British fleet, and that was when Commander Kitchener told me pointing to the body you see, general, that's what happens to those who raise their hands against their fathers, don't forget it when you're in your own kingdom, he told him, although he already was after so many nights of insomnia from waiting, so many postponed rages, so many digested humiliations, there he was, mother, proclaimed supreme commander of the three branches of the armed forces and president of the republic for such a time as was necessary for the reestablishment of order and the economic balance of the nation, it had been unanimously resolved by the last field commanders of the federation in agreement with the senate and chamber of deputies in joint session and the backing of the British fleet from my so many and so difficult nights of domino with Consul Macdonall, except that neither I nor anybody else believed it at the beginning, naturally, who could have believed it in the tumult of that frightening night since Bendicion Alvarado herself still didn't believe on her bed of putrefaction when she evoked the memory of the son who couldn't find where to begin to govern in that disorder, they couldn't find a piece of grass to cook or to use to warm up that immense unfurnished house in which nothing of value was left except the moth-eaten oil paintings of viceroys and archbishops from the dead grandeur of Spain, everything else had been carried off little by little by previous presidents for their private domains, they didn't even leave a trace of the wallpaper with heroic episodes on the walls, the bedrooms were full of barracks trash, everywhere there were forgotten traces of historic massacres and slogans written with a bloody finger by illusory presidents who lasted one night, but there wasn't even a mat to lie down on to sweat out a fever, so his mother Bendicion Alvarado pulled down a curtain to wrap me in and left him lying in a corner of the main stairway while with the broom of green branches she swept out the presidential quarters that the English were finishing sacking, she swept the whole floor defending herself with broom blows from this pack of filibusters who were trying to rape her from behind doors, and a short while before dawn she sat down to rest beside her son who was done in by chills, wrapped in the velvet curtain, the sweat pouring off him on the last step of the devastated main stairway while she tried to bring his fever down with her easy calculations of don't let this disorder get you down, son, it's only a matter of buying a few leather stools the cheapest you can find and they'll be painted with flowers and animals, I'll paint them myself, she said, it's only a matter of buying some hammocks for when visitors come, those especially, hammocks, because in a house like this there must be a lot of unannounced visitors at all hours, she said, we'll buy a church table to eat on, we'll buy iron utensils and pewter plates so they can suffer the bad life of soldiers, we'll buy a decent jug for drinking water and a charcoal stove and that's it, after all it's the government's money, she said to console him, but he wasn't listening to her, depressed by the first mallow light of dawn which was lighting up the hidden side of truth in living flesh, conscious of being nothing but a pitiful old man who was shaking with fever sitting on the stairs thinking without love mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado so that was the whole mess, damn it, so power was that house of castaways, that human smell of burned horses, that desolate dawn of another twelfth of August just like all the others was the date of power, mother, what kind of a mess have we got ourselves into, suffering the original upset, the atavistic fear of the new century of darkness that was rising up in the world without his permission, the cocks were crowing at sea, the English were singing in English gathering up the dead from the courtyard when his mother Bendicion Alvarado ended her merry accounting with the remnant of relief of
I'm not frightened by the things we have to buy and the chores we have to do, what frightens me is the number of sheets to be washed in this house, and then it was he who leaned on the strength of his disillusionment to try to console her with sleep easy, mother, in this country no president lasts long, he told her, and not only did he believe it then but he kept on believing it for every instant of his very long life of a sedentary despot, all the more as life convinced him more and more that the long years of power don't bring any two days that are just alike, that there would always be a hidden intention in the proposals of a prime minister when he released the dazzling display of truth in the routine Wednesday report, and he would only smile, don't tell me the truth, counselor, because we'll run the risk that it will be believed, thwarting with that single phrase a whole laborious strategy of the cabinet to try to get him to sign without asking questions, for he had never seemed more lucid to me than during the time of the rumors that he urinated in his pants during official visits without noticing it, he seemed more severe as he sank into the backwaters of decrepitude with the slippers of a terminal case and the eyeglasses with only one temple which was tied on with a piece of thread and his manner had become more intense and his instinct more certain in putting aside what was inopportune and signing what was needed without reading it, God damn it, because when all's said and done nobody pays any attention to me, he smiled, see how I ordered them to put up a barrier in the vestibule so the cows wouldn't climb up the stairs, and there it was again, so boss, so boss, it had stuck its head through the office window and was eating the paper flowers on the altar of the nation, but he limited himself to smiling you see what I'm talking about, counselor, what's got this country all fucked up is the fact that no one has ever paid any attention to me, he said, and he said it with a clearness of judgment that seemed impossible at his age, even so Ambassador Kippling said in his suppressed memoirs that around that time he had found him in a pitiful state of senile unawareness which did not even permit him to take care of himself in the most childish acts, he told how he found him soaked in an incessant and salty matter which flowed from his skin, that he had acquired the huge size of a drowned man and he had opened his shirt to show me the tight and lucid body of a dry-land drowned man in whose cracks and crannies parasites from the reefs at the bottom of the sea were proliferating, he had a ship remora on his back, polyps and microscopic crustaceans in his armpits, but he was convinced that those sproutings from reefs were only the first symptoms of the spontaneous return of the sea that you people carried off, my dear Johnson, because seas are like cats, he said, they always come home, convinced that the rows of goose barnacles in his crotch were the secret announcement of a happy dawn in which he was going to open his bedroom window and would see again the three caravels of the admiral of the ocean sea who had grown weary of searching the whole world over to see if what they had told him was true who had smooth hands like his and like those of so many other great men of history, he had ordered him brought before him, by force if necessary, when other navigators told him they had seen him mapping the innumerable islands of the neighboring seas changing their old names of military men to the names of kings and saints while he sought in native science the only thing that really interested him which was to discover some masterful hair-restorer for his incipient baldness, we had lost all hope of finding him again when he recognized him from the presidential limousine disguised in a brown habit with the cord of Saint Francis around his waist swinging a penitent's rattle among the Sunday crowds at the public market and sunken into such a state of moral penury that it was impossible to believe that he was the same one we had seen enter the audience room in his crimson uniform and gold spurs and with the solemn gait of a sea dog on dry land, but when they tried to get him into the limousine on his orders we couldn't find a trace general sir, the earth had swallowed him up, they said he had become a Moslem, that he had died of pellagra in Senegal, and had been buried in three different tombs in three different cities in the world although he really wasn't in any of them, condemned to wander from sepulcher to sepulcher until the end of time because of the twisted fate of his expeditions, because that man was a fraud general sir, he was a worse jinx than gold, but he never believed it, he kept on hoping that he would return during the last extremes of his old age when the minister of health used pincers to pull out the ox ticks he found on his body and he insisted that they weren't ticks, doctor, it's the sea coming back, he said, so sure of his judgment that the minister of health had thought many times that he wasn't as deaf as he made one believe in public or as unraveled as he seemed to be during uncomfortable audiences, although a thorough examination had revealed that his arteries had turned to glass, he had beach-sand sediment in his kidneys, and his heart was cracked from a lack of love, so the old physician took refuge behind the shield of old comradeship to tell him that it's time now to hand over the tools general sir, at least decide in whose hands you're going to leave us, he told him, save us from being orphaned, but he asked him with surprise who told him I'm thinking about dying, my dear doctor, let other people die, God damn it, and he finished in a joking vein that two nights ago I saw myself on television and I looked better than ever, like a fighting bull, he said, dying with laughter, because he had seen himself in a fog, nodding with sleep in front of the screen, and with his head wrapped in a wet towel in accordance with the habits of his more recent nights of solitude, he was really more resolute than a fighting bull before the charms of the wife of the ambassador of France, or maybe Turkey, or Sweden, what the hell, they were all so much alike that he couldn't tell them apart and so much time had passed that he couldn't remember himself among them with his dress uniform and a glass of champagne untouched in his hand during the festivities for the anniversary of August 12, or at the commemoration of the victory of January 14, or the rebirth of March 13, how should I know, because in the rigmarole of historic dates of the regime he had ended up not knowing which was when or what corresponded to what nor did he get any use from the little rolled pieces of paper that with so much good spirit and so much care he had hidden in the cracks in the walls because he had ended up forgetting what it was he was supposed to remember, he would find them by chance in the hiding places for the honey and he had read one time that April 17 was the birthday of Dr. Marcos de Leon, we have to send him a tiger as a gift, he had read, written in his own hand, without the slightest idea of who he was, feeling that there was no punishment more humiliating or less deserved for a man than betrayal by his own body, he had begun to glimpse it long before the immemorial times of Jose Ignacio Saenz de la Barra when he became aware that he only knew who was who in group audiences, a man like me who had been capable of calling the whole population of the most remote village in his realm of gloom by their first and last names, and yet he had reached the opposite extreme, from the carriage he saw among the crowd a boy he knew and he had been so surprised at not remembering where he had seen him before that he had him arrested by the escort while I tried to remember, a poor man from the country who spent twenty-two years in a jail cell repeating the truth established on the first day in the court transcript, that his name was Braulio Linares Moscote, that he was the illegitimate but recognized son of Marcos Linares, a fresh-water sailor, and Delfina Moscote, a breeder of jaguar hounds, both with an established domicile in Rosal del Virrey, that he was in the capital of this country for the first time because his mother had sent him to sell two dogs at the March poetry festival, that he had arrived on a rented donkey with no other clothes except those he was wearing at dawn on the same Thursday they had arrested him, that he was at a stand in the public market drinking a mug of black coffee as he asked the girls behind the counter if they knew of anyone who wanted to buy two cross-bred dogs for hunting jaguars, that they had answered no when the bustle of drums began, cornets, rockets, people shouting here comes the man, there he comes, that he had asked who was the man and they had answered him who else could it be, the one who gives the orders, that he pu
t the dogs in a crate so that the counter girls could do him the favor of watching them for me until I get back, that he climbed up on a window ledge to be able to see over the crowd and he saw the escort of horses with gold caparisons and feathered crests, he saw the carriage with the dragon of the nation, the greeting by a hand with a cloth glove, the pale visage, the taciturn unsmiling lips of the man who gave the orders, the sad eyes that found him suddenly like a needle in a pile of needles, the finger that pointed him out, that one, the one up on the window sill, arrest him while I remember where I've seen him, he ordered, so they grabbed me and hit me, beat me with the flats of their sabers, roasted me on a grill so that I would confess where the man who gave the orders had seen me before, but they had been unable to drag any other truth out of him except the only one there was in the horror chamber of the harbor fort and he repeated it with such conviction and such personal courage that he ended up admitting he had been mistaken, but now there was no way out, he said, because they had treated him so badly that if he hadn't been an enemy he is now, poor man, so he rotted away alive in the dungeon while I wandered about this house of shadows thinking mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado of my good times, be with me, look at what I am without the shelter of your mantle, shouting to himself that it wasn't worth the trouble having lived so many splendid days of glory if he couldn't evoke them to seek solace in them and feed himself on them and continue surviving because of them in the bog of old age because even the most intense grief and the happiest moments of his great times had slipped away irrevocably through the loopholes of memory in spite of his naive attempts to impede it with little plugs of rolled-up paper, he was punished by never knowing who this Francisca Linero aged ninety-six was, the one he had ordered buried with the honors of a queen in accordance with another note written in his own hand, condemned to govern blindly with eleven pairs of useless spectacles hidden in the desk drawer to hide the fact that he was really conversing with specters whose voices he couldn't even decipher, whose identities he guessed by instinctive signs, sunken in a state of abandonment whose greatest risk had become evident to him in an audience with his minister of war in which he had the bad luck to have sneezed once and the minister of war said your health general sir and he had sneezed again and the minister of war again said your health general sir, but after nine consecutive sneezes I didn't say your health general sir again but I felt terrified by the threat of that face twisted in a stupor, I saw the eyes sunken in tears that spat on me without pity from the quicksand of his throes, I saw the tongue of a hanged man on the decrepit beast who was dying in my arms without any witness of my innocence, without anyone, and then the only thing that occurred to me was to get out of the office before it was too late, but he stopped me with an authoritative wave between two sneezes not to be a coward Brigadier General Rosendo Sacristan, stay where you are, God damn it, I'm not such a damned fool as to die in front of you, he shouted, and that's how it was, because he kept on sneezing up to the edge of death, floating in a space of unconsciousness peopled by fireflies at midday but clinging to the certainty that his mother Bendicion Alvarado would not give him the shame of dying from a sneezing attack in the presence of an inferior, never in a million years, better dead than humiliated, better to live among the cows than among men capable of letting a person die without-honor, God damn it, for he hadn't gone back to arguing about God with the apostolic nuncio so that he wouldn't notice that he was drinking his chocolate with a spoon, nor back to playing dominoes for fear that someone would dare lose to him out of pity, he didn't want to see anyone, mother, so that no one would discover that in spite of the close vigilance of his personal conduct, in spite of his impression of not dragging his flat feet which after all he had always dragged, in spite of the shame of his years he felt himself on the edge of the abyss of grief of the last dictators in disgrace whom he maintained more prisoners than protected in the house on the cliff so that they wouldn't contaminate the world with the plague of their indignity, he suffered it alone on that evil morning when he had fallen asleep in the pool in the private courtyard while he was taking his bath of medicinal waters, he was dreaming about you, mother, he was dreaming that it was you who made the cicadas who were bursting from so much buzzing over my head among the flowering almond boughs of real life, he dreamed it was you who painted with your brushes the colored voices of the orioles when he awoke startled by the unforeseen belch of his insides in the bottom of the water, mother, he awoke congested with rage in the perverted pool of my shame where the aromatic lotuses of oregano and mallow floated, where the fresh blossoms from the orange tree floated, where the hicatee turtles floated aroused by the novelty of the gold and tender flow of rabbit droppings from general sir in the fragrant waters, what a mess, but he survived that and so many other infamies of old age and had reduced his service personnel to the minimum in order to face them without witnesses, no one was to see him drifting through the no man's house for days and nights on end with his head wrapped in rags soaked in liniment moaning with despair against the walls, surfeited with pain, maddened by the unbearable headache of which he never spoke even to his personal physician because he knew that it was only just one more of the so many useless pains of decrepitude, he would feel it arrive like a thunderclap of stones long before the heavy storm clouds appeared in the sky and he ordered nobody to bother me as soon as he felt the tourniquet tighten on his temples, nobody come into this building no matter what happens, he ordered, when he felt the bones of his skull creak with the second turn of the tourniquet, not even God if he comes, he ordered, not even if I die, God damn it, blind with that pitiless pain which did not even give him an instant of respite to think until the end of the centuries of desperation when the blessing of the rains fell, and then he would call us and we would find him newborn with the little table ready for dinner opposite the mute television screen, we served him roast meat, beans with fatback, coconut rice, slices of fried plantains, a dinner inconceivable for his age which he let grow cold without even tasting it as he watched the same emergency film on television, aware that the government was trying to hide something from him since they had repeated the same closed-circuit program without noticing that the film was backward, God damn it, he said, trying to forget what they wanted to hide from him, if it were something worse he would have known it by now, he said, snorting over the dinner he had been served, until it struck eight on the cathedral clock and he arose with the untouched plate and threw the meal down the toilet as every night at that time for so many years to hide the humiliation that his stomach rejected everything, to while away with the legends of his times of glory the rancor that he felt toward himself every time he fell into some detestable act of the carelessness of an old man, to forget that he was only alive, that it was he and no one else who wrote on the walls of the toilets long live the general, long live the stud, and that he had sneaked out a healer's potion to do it as many times as he wanted and in one single night and even three times each time with three different women and he paid for that senile ingenuousness with tears more from rage than grief clinging to the chain of the toilet weeping mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado of my heart, despise me, purify me with your waters of fire, fulfilling with pride the punishment of his naivete because he knew only too well that what he lacked then and had always lacked in bed was not honor but love, he needed women less arid than those who served my comrade the foreign minister so that he would not lose the good habit since they closed the school next door, fleshy boneless women for you alone general sir, sent by plane with official exemption from customs from the shopwindows of Amsterdam, the film festivals of Budapest, the sea of Italy general sir, look at what a marvel, the most beautiful in the whole world whom he would find sitting with singing-teacher decorum in the shadows of the office, they got undressed like artists, they lay down on the felt couch with the strips of their bathing suits printed like a photographic negative on their warm golden honey skin, lying beside the enormous concrete ox who refused to take off
his military uniform while I tried to encourage him with my most loving means until he wearied of suffering the pressures of that hallucinating beauty of a dead fish, and he told her it was all right, child, go become a nun, so depressed by his own indolence that that night at the stroke of eight he surprised one of the women in charge of the soldiers' laundry and threw her down with his claws on top of the laundry tubs in spite of the fact that she tried to get away with the frightened excuse that I can't today general, believe me, it's vampire time, but he turned her face down on the laundry table and planted her from behind with a biblical drive that the poor woman felt in her soul with the crunch of death and she panted so big general, you must have studied to be a donkey, and he felt more relieved with that moan of pain than with the most frenetic dithyrambs of his official adulators and he assigned the washerwoman a lifetime pension for the education of her children, he sang again after so many years when he gave the cows their fodder in the milking stalls, bright January moon, he sang, without thinking about death, because not even on the last night of his life would he allow himself the weakness of thinking about anything that didn't make common sense, he counted the cows twice again while he sang you are the light of my darkened path, you are my northern star, and he discovered that four were missing, he went back into the building counting along the way the hens sleeping on the viceroys' coatracks, covering the cages with the sleeping birds which he counted as he put the cloth covers over them forty-eight, he set fire to the droppings scattered by the cows during the day from the vestibule to the audience room, he remembered a remote childhood which for the first time was his own image shivering on the icy barrens and the image of his mother Bendicion Alvarado who stole the innards of a ram away from the garbage-heap buzzards for lunch, it had struck eleven when he covered the whole building again in the opposite direction lighting his way with the lamp as he put out the lights down to the vestibule, he saw himself one by one fourteen generals walking with a lamp repeated in the dark mirrors, he saw a cow collapsed on her back in the rear of the mirror in the music room, so boss, so boss, he said, she was dead, what a mess, he went through the sleeping quarters of the guard to tell them that there was a dead cow inside a mirror, he ordered them to take it out early tomorrow, without fail, before the building fills up with vultures, he ordered, inspecting with the light the former offices on the ground floor in search of the other lost cows, there were three of them, he looked for them in the toilets, under the tables, inside every mirror, he went up to the main floor searching the rooms room by room and all he found was a hen lying under the pink embroidered mosquito netting of a novice from other times whose name he had forgotten, he took his spoonful of honey before going to bed, he put the bottle back in the hiding place where there was one of his little pieces of paper with the date of some birthday of the famous poet Ruben Dario whom God keep on the highest seat in his kingdom, he rolled the piece of paper up again and left it in its place while he recited from memory the well-aimed prayer of our father and celestial lyrophorous master who keepeth afloat airplanes in the heavens and liners on the seas, dragging his great feet of a hopeless insomniac through the last fleeting dawns of green sunrises from the turns of the lighthouse, he heard the winds sorrowing for the sea that had gone away, he heard the lively music of a wedding party that was about to die struck from behind by some carelessness of God, he found a strayed cow and he cut off its path without touching it, so boss, so boss, he went back to his bedroom, seeing as he passed by the windows the block of lights of the city without a sea in every window, he smelled the hot vapor of the mystery of its insides, the secret of its unanimous breathing, he contemplated it twenty-three times without stopping and he suffered forever as ever the uncertainty of the vast and inscrutable ocean of people sleeping with their hands on their hearts, he knew himself to be hated by those who loved him most, he felt himself illuminated by the candles of saints, he heard his name invoked to straighten the fortunes of women in childbirth and to change the destiny of those dying, he felt his memory exalted by the same ones who cursed his mother when they saw the taciturn eyes, the sad lips, the hand of a pensive bride behind the panes of transparent steel in the remote times of the somnambulant limousine and we would kiss the mark of his boot in the mud and we sent him fetishes for an evil death on hot nights when from our courtyards we saw the wandering lights in the soulless windows of government house, no one loves us, he sighed, looking into the old bedroom of the lifeless birdwoman painter of orioles his mother Bendicion Alvarado her body strewn with sawdust, have a good death mother, he said to her, a very good death son, she answered him in the crypt, it was exactly twelve o'clock when he hung the lamp on the doorway wounded inside by the fatal twisting of the tenuous whistles of the hernia, there was no space in the world except that of his pain, he ran the three bolts of the bedroom for the last time, closed the three locks, the three bars, he suffered the final holocaust of his scant micturition in the portable latrine, he stretched out on the bare floor in the pants of rough burlap which he wore at home ever since he had put an end to audiences, the striped shirt without the artificial collar, and the slippers of an invalid, he lay face down with his right arm doubled under his head as a pillow and he fell asleep immediately, but at ten minutes after two he awoke with his mind aground and his clothes soaked in the pale and warm sweat of the eye of a cyclone, who's there, he asked shaken by the certainty that someone had called him in his sleep by a name that was not his, Nicanor, and once again, Nicanor, someone who was able to get into his room without taking down the bars because he came and went as he wished going through the walls, and then he saw her, it was death general sir, his, dressed in a penitent's tunic of pita fiber cloth, with a long-poled hook in her hand and her skull sown with the tufts of sepulchral algae and flowers of the earth in the fissures of her bones and her eyes archaic and startled in the fleshless sockets, and only when he saw her full length did he understand that she had called him Nicanor Nicanor which is the name by which death knows all of us men at the moment of death, but he said no, death, it still wasn't his time, it was to be during his sleep in the shadows of the office as it had always been announced in the premonitory waters of the basins, but she replied no, general, it's been here, barefoot and with the beggar's clothes you're wearing, although those who found the body were to say that it was on the floor of the office with the denim uniform without insignia and the gold spur on the left heel so as not to go against the auguries of their Pythians, it had been when he least wanted it, when after so many long years of sterile illusions he had begun to glimpse that one doesn't live, God damn it, he lives through, he survives, one learns too late that even the broadest and most useful of lives only reach the point of learning how to live, he had learned of his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands and in the invisible code of the cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power, he had made himself victim of his own sect to be immolated on the flames of that infinite holocaust, he had fed on fallacy and crime, he had flourished in impiety and dishonor and he had put himself above his feverish avarice and his congenital fear only to keep until the end of time the little glass ball in his hand without knowing that it was an endless vice the satiety of which generated its own appetite until the end of all times general sir, he had known since his beginnings that they deceived him in order to please him, that they collected from him by fawning on him, that they recruited by force of arms the dense crowds along his route with shouts of jubilation and venal signs of eternal life to the magnificent one who is more ancient than his age, but he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of
yellow leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his power, that he was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to decipher the seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting even too late that the only livable life was one of show, the one we saw from this side which wasn't his general sir, this poor people's side with the trail of yellow leaves of our uncountable years of misfortune and our ungraspable instants of happiness, where love was contaminated by the seeds of death but was all love general sir, where you yourself were only an uncertain vision of pitiful eyes through the dusty peepholes of the window of a train, only the tremor of some taciturn lips, the fugitive wave of a velvet glove on the no man's hand of an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn't any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.