I wake up. And Ofelia is leaning over me, in her penitent’s dress, and Elmirita in hers, but pouting out her breasts in an automatic gesture very typical of her, forgetting the garment she is wearing. And now a new figure, a nun of Saint Vincent de Paul—but a real one this time—who injects my right arm with a needle. Her head-dress is starched, her collar is starched, her apron is starched; her blue dress, the blue of washed-out indigo, reminds me of the North American overalls worn by all the workmen in my country. Candles, such as they’ve lit in front of the Virgins in my room; candles, just lit and beginning to sweat their wax; little red candles of altar lamps, floating in a cup of oil. Candles that will soon be put around me. I see it in those faces, yellow in the light of so many candles, leaning over my hammock and looking at me with forced smiles, while a pharmaceutical smell pervades everything. I sleep. I wake. There are times when I wake and don’t know whether it’s day or night. An effort. To my right I hear ticking. What time is it? Quarter past six. Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s quarter past seven. More likely. Quarter past eight. This alarm clock would be a marvel of Swiss watchmaking but its hands are so slim that one can hardly see them. Quarter past nine. That’s not right either. My spectacles. Quarter past ten. That’s it. I think so, because—as I notice now—daylight is shining on the pieces of stuff the Mayorala has fixed up to muffle the light that pours into this attic from the skylight in the roof. I think about death, as I do whenever I wake. But I’m not afraid of death. I shall accept it bravely, although I’ve realised for some time that death is neither a struggle nor conflict—mere literature—but a surrender of arms, acceptance of defeat, dreamlike desire to outwit pain that is always possible, always menacing, with its accompaniment of hypodermic needles, its Saint Sebastian martyrdom—the body pierced again and again—the smell of drugs in the nostrils, dry saliva and the sinister arrival of cylinders of oxygen, heralding the end as certainly as the oils of extreme unction. All I ask is to sleep without physical suffering—although it annoys me to think of the gang of bastards over there who will rejoice to hear of my death. Anyway, if I want to figure in history I must utter some phrase when the end comes. A phrase. I remember reading one in the pink pages of Pequeño Larousse: “Acta est fabula.”
“What did he say?” asked the cholo Mendoza.
“Something about a fable,” said Ofelia. “Aesop? La Fontaine? Samaniego?”
“He also spoke of a certificate.”
“That’s easy to understand,” said the Mayorala. “He didn’t want to be buried without a death certificate. Catalepsy …” (That was the greatest fear of all country people over there.) “In my village they buried a man as dead, and as he wasn’t dead he woke in his coffin, and he managed to break the lid but he could only get one hand through the earth … And there was another case in La Verónica.”
It was Sunday. Ofelia closed her father’s eyes and covered him with a sheet that fell to the ground on both sides of the hammock like the tablecloth at a feast. Then she opened the drawer containing the Diamond from the Capitol.
“I’ll keep it; it’ll be safe. When they’ve re-established order in our unfortunate country, and the revolutionaries and Communists can’t get hold of this jewel, I’ll go myself and solemnly return it to its proper place at the foot of the statue of the Republic.”
Meanwhile, until this was possible, the diamond was dropped into the Infanta’s handbag, and there, amongst powder and lipsticks, it marked the zero point where all the roads in her distant country met. But now Ofelia seemed to be in a hurry:
“The cholo will see to the matter of the certificate. I don’t understand anything about it. And don’t announce his death until tomorrow. It’s the Day of the Drags today. I must go and get dressed.”
And soon there was an unusual noise of horses’ hooves and wheels in front of the main gate of the house. Elmirita looked out the window: there was something like a coach there, with a roof and windows, drawn by four horses, and people perched inside, very like the mule-drawn bus that, when she was a small child and there were no trains, made the journey from Nueva Córdoba to Palmar de Siquire.
“How old-fashioned these people are,” thought the zamba. And she saw Ofelia go out in a bright dress, open a white sunshade, and climb into the carriage. Whips were cracked and the horses trotted off amidst a great noise of laughter and jollity. One candle in a silver candlestick was burning on each side of the hammock where the body of the Head of State was resting. The nun from Saint Vincent de Paul was saying the rosary. Outside the little balls of the boy hero were turning gold in the sun.
“What indecency!” said Elmirita, shutting the window before proceeding to dress the dead man, whose corpse would be laid out downstairs in the great drawing room. On the back of a chair hung the last tailcoat he had ordered to be made on the eve of his illness: it was too big now for his thin body. But that would make it easier to get him into it—with the wide crimson band, which had been for so many long years the symbol of his Investiture and Power.
The creeper grows no higher than the trees that support it.
—DESCARTES, DISCOURSE ON METHOD
1972
… stop a little while longer and consider this chaos …
—DESCARTES
22
GREY WITH HEAVY RAIN, NOT A LITTLE SNOW AND years of neglect, the small pantheon with two doric columns still stood in the cemetery of Montparnasse, not far from the tomb of Porfirio Díaz, and close to those of Baudelaire and General Aupick. Anyone gazing into the interior through the black grille protecting a door with glass panes set in gold-coloured metal would see a simple altar on which stood an image of the Divine Shepherdess—a copy of the image worshipped in her Sanctuary at Nueva Córdoba. At her feet, under a mystic garland of roses and cherubs, was a marble ark supported on four jaguars, in which a little of the earth of the Sacred Soil of the Homeland was kept.
What perhaps some people didn’t know was that Ofelia, thinking that the Earth is all one and that the earth of the Earth is earth of the Earth everywhere—memento homo, quia pulvis est et in pulverem reverteris—had collected this sacred earth, guarded in perpetuity by the four symbolic jaguars, from a flower bed in the Luxembourg gardens.
Havana–Paris.
1971–1973
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