The Autumn of the Patriarch, Page 3

  THAT WAS HOW they found him on the even of his autumn, when the corpse was really that of Patricio Aragonés, and that was how we found him again many years later during a moment of such uncertainty that no one could give in to the evidence that the senile body there gouged by vultures and infested with parasites from the depths of the sea was his. The hand turned into a figurine by putrefaction gave no indication that it had ever been held on the chest because of the rebuffs of an improbable maiden during the noisy times, nor had we found any trace of his life that could have led us to the unmistakable establishment of his identity. It didn’t seem strange to us, of course, that this should be so in our days, because even during his times of greatest glory there had been reasons to doubt his existence and his own henchmen had no exact notion of his age, for there were periods of confusion in which he seemed to be eighty years old at charity raffles, sixty at civil receptions and even under forty during the celebration of national holidays. Ambassador Palmerston, one of the last diplomats to present his credentials, told in his banned memoirs that it was impossible to conceive of old age as advanced as his or of a state of disorder and neglect as in that government house where he had to make his way through a dungheap of paper scraps and animal shit and the remains of the meals of dogs who slept in the halls, no one could give me any information about anything in tax bureaus or offices and I was forced to have recourse to the lepers and cripples who had already invaded the first part of the private quarters and who showed me the way to the reception room where the hens were pecking at the illusory wheat fields on the tapestries and a cow was pulling down the canvas with the portrait of an archbishop so she could eat it, and I realized at once that he was as deaf as a post not only because I would ask him about one thing and he would answer about another but also because it grieved him that the birds were not singing when in fact it was difficult to breathe with that uproar of birds which was like walking through the jungle at dawn, and he suddenly interrupted the ceremony of credentials with a lucid look and cupping his hand behind his ear he pointed out the window at the dusty plain where the sea had been and said in a voice to awaken the dead that I should listen to that troop of mules going along out there, listen my dear Stetson, it’s the sea coming back. It was hard to admit that that broken-down old man was the same messianic figure who during the beginnings of his regime would appear in towns when least expected with no other escort but a barefooted Guajiro Indian with a cane-cutting machete and a small entourage of congressmen and senators whom he had appointed himself with his finger according to the whims of his digestion, he informed himself about the crop figures and the state of health of the livestock and the behavior of the people, he would sit in a reed rocking chair in the shadow of the mango trees on the square fanning himself with the foreman’s hat he wore in those days, and even though he seemed to be dozing because of the heat he would not let a single detail go by without some explanation in his talks with the men and women he had called together using their names and surnames as if he had a written registry of inhabitants and statistics and problems of the whole nation inside his head, so he called me without opening his eyes, come here Jacinta Morales, he said to me, tell me what happened to the boy he had wrestled with himself and given a fall the year before so he would drink a bottle of castor oil, and you, Juan Prieto, he said to me, how is your breed bull that he had treated himself with prayers against sickness so the worms would drop out of his ears, and you Matilde Peralta, let’s see what you’re going to give me for bringing back that runaway husband of yours in one piece, there he is, pulled along with a rope around his neck and warned by him in person that he’d rot in the stocks the next time he tried to desert his legitimate spouse, and with the same sense of immediate governance he had ordered a butcher to cut off the hands of a cheating treasurer in a public spectacle and he would pick the tomatoes in a private garden and eat them with the air of a connoisseur in the presence of his agronomists saying that what this soil needs is a good dose of male donkey shit, it should be spread at government expense, he ordered, and he interrupted his civic stroll and shouted to me through the window breaking up with laughter aha Lorenza López how’s that sewing machine he had given me as a present twenty years earlier, and I answered him that it had already given up the ghost, general, you have to remember that things and people we’re not made to last a lifetime, but he answered just the opposite, the world is eternal, and then he set about dismantling the machine with a screwdriver and an oilcan indifferent to the official delegation that was waiting for him in the middle of the street, sometimes his desperation was evident from the bull snorts and even his face was daubed with motor oil, but after almost three hours the machine was sewing again as good as new, because in those days there was nothing contrary in everyday life no matter how insignificant which did not have as much importance for him as the gravest matter of state and he believed sincerely that it was possible to distribute happiness and bribe death with the wiles of a soldier. It was hard to admit that that aged person beyond repair was all that remained of a man whose power had been so great that once he asked what time is it and they had answered him whatever you command general sir, and it was true, for not only did he alter the time of day as best suited his business but he would change legal holidays in accordance with his plans to cover the whole country from holiday to holiday in the shadow of the barefoot Indian and the mournful-looking senators and with the crates of splendid cocks who faced the bravest there were in every village square, he booked the bets himself, he made the foundations of the cockpit shake with laughter because we all felt obliged to laugh when he gave off his strange snare-drum guffaws that rang out above the music and the rockets, we suffered when he was silent, we would break out in an ovation of relief when his birds struck ours with lightning ours having been so well trained to lose that not a single one let us down, except the cock of Dionisio Iguarán’s misfortune who struck down the gray one belonging to the power in an attack so clean and sure that he was the first to cross the ring and shake the winner’s hand, you’re a real man, he told him with a pleasant manner, thankful that someone had finally done him the favor of an innocuous defeat, how much do you want for that red one, he said, and Dionisio Iguarán answered him in a quavering voice it’s yours general, my great honor, and he went home to the applause of the excited people and the noise of the music and the petards showing everybody the six pedigreed cocks he had been given in exchange for the undefeated red one, but that night he locked himself up in his bedroom and drank a gourdful of cane liquor all by himself and hanged himself with the rope from his hammock, poor man, for he was not aware of the string of domestic disasters that his jubilant appearances brought on, nor the trail of undesired deaths he left behind, nor the eternal condemnation of comrades in misfortune whom he called by the wrong name in front of solicitous assassins who interpreted the mistake as a deliberate sign of disfavor, he walked all across the country with his strange armadillo step, his trail of strong sweat, his tardy stubble of a beard, he would appear without notice in some kitchen with that air of a useful grandfather which made the people of the house tremble with fear, he would take a drink of water from the bucket with the calabash dipper, he would eat out of the stewpot itself picking up the chunks with his fingers, too jovial, too simple, not suspecting that that house was marked forever with the stigma of his visit, and he did not act that way out of any political calculation or the need for love as was the case in other times but because it was his natural way of being when power was still not the shoreless bog of the fullness of his autumn but a feverish torrent that we saw gush out of its spring before our very eyes so that all he had to do was point at trees for them to bear fruit and at animals for them to grow and at men for them to prosper, and he had ordered them to take the rain away from places where it disturbed the harvest and take it to drought-stricken lands, and that was the way it had been, sir, I saw it, because his legend had begun much earlier than he believed himself master of all his pow
er, when he was still at the mercy of omens and the interpreters of his nightmares and he would suddenly cut short a trip he had just started because he had heard a bird sing above his head and he would change the date of a public appearance because his mother Bendición Alvarado had found an egg with two yolks, and he got rid of the retinue of solicitous senators and congressmen who went with him everywhere and delivered for him the speeches that he never dared deliver, he went without them because he saw himself in the big empty house of a bad dream surrounded by pale men in gray frock coats who were smiling and sticking him with butcher knives, they harried him with such fury that wherever he turned to look he found a blade ready to wound him in the face and eyes, he saw himself encircled like a wild beast by the silent smiling assassins who fought over the privilege of taking part in the sacrifice and enjoying his blood, but he did not feel rage or fear, rather an immense relief that grew deeper as his life trickled away, he felt himself weightless and pure, so he too smiled as they killed him, he smiled for them and for himself in the confines of the dream house whose whitewashed walls were being stained by my spattering blood, until someone who was a son of his in the dream gave him a stab in the groin through which the last bit of breath I had left escaped, and then he covered his face with the blanket soaked in his blood so that no one who had not been able to know him alive would know him dead and he collapsed shaken by such real death throes that he could not repress the urgency of telling it to my comrade the minister of health and the latter ended up by putting him in a state of consternation with the revelation that that death had already occurred once in the history of men general sir, he read him the story of the episode in one of the singed tomes of General Lautaro Muñoz, and it was identical, mother, so much so that in the course of its reading he remembered something that he had forgotten when he woke up and it was that while they were killing him all of a sudden and with no wind blowing all the windows in the presidential palace opened up and they were in fact the same number as the wounds in the dream, twenty-three, a terrifying coincidence which had its culmination that week with an attack on the senate and the supreme court by corsairs along with the cooperative indifference of the armed forces, the august home of our original patriotic forebears was burned to the ground and the flames could be seen until very late in the night from the presidential balcony, but he did not change his expression with the news general sir that they had not even spared the foundation stones, he promised us an exemplary punishment for the perpetrators of the attack who never appeared, he promised us that he would rebuild an exact replica of the house of our forebears but its blackened ruins remained down to our times, he did nothing to disguise the terrible exorcism of the bad dream but took advantage of the occasion to liquidate the legislative and judicial apparatus of the old republic, he heaped honors and fortune upon the senators and congressmen and magistrates whom he no longer needed to keep up the appearances of the beginning of his regime, he exiled them to happy and remote embassies and remained with no other retinue but the solitary shadow of the Indian with his machete who did not abandon him for an instant, who tasted his food and water, kept his distance, watched the door while he stayed in my house giving fuel to the story that he was my secret lover while in fact he visited me once or twice a month to consult me about the cards during those many years when he still thought himself mortal and had the virtue of doubt and knew how to make mistakes and trusted more in the deck of cards than in his rustic instincts, he still arrived as worried and as old as the first time he sat down opposite me and without saying a word stretched out to me those hands with palms as smooth and tight as the belly of a toad such as I had never seen or was ever to see again in my long life as an examiner of the destiny of others, he laid them both on the table at the same time almost like the mute begging of a hopeless case and he seemed so anxious to me and so without illusions that I was not so impressed by his arid palms as by his unalleviated melancholy, the weakness of his lips, his poor heart of an old man eaten by •doubt whose fate was not only hermetic in his hands but in all the means of inquiry that we knew in those times, for as soon as he cut the cards they became pools of murky water, the coffee grounds became muddy in the bottom of the cup he had drunk from, the keys to everything that had to do with his personal future, his happiness and the destiny of his acts had been erased, but on the other hand they were crystal clear as concerned the destiny of anyone who had anything to do with him, so we saw his mother Bendición Alvarado painting birds with foreign names at such an advanced age that she could barely distinguish the colors in an air rarefied by a pestilential vapor, poor mother, we saw our city devastated by a hurricane so terrible that it did not deserve its woman’s name, we saw a man with a green mask and a sword in his hand and he asked in anguish what part of the world he was in and the cards answered that every Tuesday he was closer to him than on other days of the week, and he said aha, and asked what color eyes he had, and the cards answered that one was the color of juice in the light and the other cane juice in the dark, and he said aha, and he asked what that man’s intentions were, and that was the last time I revealed to him the truth of the cards to the very end because I answered him that the green mask was that of perfidy and treason, and he said aha, with a stress of triumph, I already know who he is, God damn it, he exclaimed, and it was Colonel Narciso Miraval, one of his closest aides who two days later put a bullet in his ear with no explanation, poor man, and that was how the destiny of the nation was arranged and its history anticipated according to the predictions of the cards until he heard tell of a singular sibyl who deciphered death in the error-free waters of her basins and he went to seek her out in secret along mule trails and with no other witness than the angel of the machete all the way up to the settlement on the plains where she lived with a great-granddaughter who had three children and was about to bear another by a husband dead the month before, he found her crippled and half blind in the back of a bedroom almost in darkness, but when she asked him to put his hands over the basin the waters became illuminated with a soft and clear interior glow, and then he saw himself, exactly as he was, lying face down on the floor, wearing a denim uniform without insignia, the boots and the gold spur, and he asked what place that was, and the woman answered examining the sleeping waters that it was a room not much larger than this with something that can be seen here that looks like a desk and an electric fan and a window facing the sea and these white walls with pictures of horses and a flag with a dragon on it, and again he said aha because he had recognized without any doubt the office next to the reception room, and he asked if it was to be in a bad way or from a bad illness, and she answered him no, it was to be during his sleep and without pain, and he said aha, and he asked her trembling when it was to be and she answered him that he could sleep peacefully because it would not take place before you reach my age, which was 107, but also not after 125 years more, and he said aha, and then he murdered the sick old woman in the hammock so that no one else would know the circumstances of his death, he strangled her with the strap from his gold spur, without pain, without a sigh, like a master executioner, in spite of the fact that she was the only being in this world, human or animal, whom he did the honor of killing with his own hand in peace or in war, poor woman. Similar evocations from his fasti of infamy did not twist his conscience during the nights of his autumn, on the contrary they served him as exemplary fables of what should have been done and what had not been, above all when Manuela Sanchez evaporated into the shadows of the eclipse and he wanted to feel himself in the full bloom of his barbarity once more so he could pluck out the rage of deception which was cooking his innards, he would lie down in the hammock under the tinkle bells of the wind in the tamarinds to think about Manuela Sanchez with a rancor that disturbed his sleep while the forces of land, sea and air sought her without any trace even in the unknown confines of the saltpeter deserts, where the fuck have you hidden yourself, he wondered, where the fuck do you think you can hide where my arm can’t reac
h you so that you’ll know who gives the orders, the hat on his chest quivered with the drive of his heart, he lay there ecstatic with rage and paying no attention to his mother’s insistence as she tried to find out why you haven’t spoken a word since the afternoon of the eclipse, but he wouldn’t answer, he left, shit mother, he dragged his big orphan feet off bleeding drops of gall with his pride wounded by the irredeemable bitterness that all this trouble is happening to me because I’ve become such a horse’s ass, because I haven’t been the director of my destiny the way I was before, because I went into the house of a bitch with her mother’s permission and not the way he had gone into the cool and quiet ranch house of Francisca Linero in Vereda de los Santos Higuerones when it was still he in person and not Patricio Aragonés who showed the visible face of power, he had gone in without even touching the door knocker in accordance with the pleasure of his will to the rhythm of the tolling of eleven o’clock on the grandfather clock and I heard the metal of the gold spur from the courtyard terrace and knew that those pile-driver steps with all that authority on the brick floor could not belong to anyone else but him, I sensed him in the flesh before I saw him appear in the doorway of the inner terrace where the curlew was singing out eleven o’clock among the gold geraniums, a troupial disturbed by the fragrant acetone of the bunches of bananas hanging from the eaves, the light of the ominous August Tuesday was taking its ease among the new leaves of the plantain trees in the courtyard and the carcass of the young buck which my husband Poncio Daza had shot at dawn and hung by its hind legs to bleed beside the bunches of bananas tiger-striped by their inner honey, I saw him larger and more somber than in a dream his boots dirty with mud and his khaki jacket soaked with sweat and with no weapons on his belt but protected by the shadow of the barefoot Indian who stood motionless behind him his hand resting on the hilt of his machete, I saw the unavoidable eyes, the hand of a sleeping maiden that plucked a banana from the nearest bunch and ate it with anxiety his whole mouth making a swampy sound without taking his eyes off the provocative Francisca Linero who looked at him without knowing what to do in her modesty of a newly wed because he had come to give pleasure to his will and there was no power greater than his to stop him, I barely felt the fearful breathing of my husband who sat down beside me and we both remained motionless holding hands and our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another two steps from the door and tossing the peels over his shoulder into the courtyard without having blinked a single time after he had begun to look at me, and only after he had eaten the whole bunch and the bare stalk was left beside the dead buck did he make a signal to the barefoot Indian and ordered Poncio Daza to go with my comrade the one with the machete for a moment because he has some business and although I was dying with fear I maintained enough lucidity to realize that my only means of salvation was to let him do everything he wanted to with me on the dinner table, even more, I helped him find me among the lace of the petticoats after he left me gasping for breath with his ammonia smell and he tore off my drawers with a claw and looked for me with his fingers where I wasn’t while I thought in confusion oh Blessed Sacrament such shame, such misfortune, because that morning I hadn’t had time to wash myself being involved with the buck, so he finally did his will after so many months of siege, but he did it fast and poorly, as if he had been older than he was, or much younger, he was so upset that I scarcely noticed when he did his duty as best he could and broke into sobbing with the hot urine tears of a great and solitary orphan, weeping with such deep affliction that not only did I feel pity for him but for every man in the world and I began to rub his head with my fingertips and console him with don’t worry about it general, life is long, while the man with the machete took Poncio Daza into the banana groves and cut him up into such thin slices that it was impossible to put his body back together again after it had been scattered by the hogs, poor man, but there was no other way out, he said, because he would have been a mortal enemy for the rest of his life. They were images of his power which came to him from far away and increased the bitterness over how much the brine of his power had been watered down since it hadn’t even been of any use to conjure up the evil arts of an eclipse, he was shaken by a thread of black bile at the domino table across from the frozen realm of General Rodrigo de Aguilar who was the only man of arms in whom he had confided his life since uric acid had crystallized the joints of the angel with the machete, and yet he wondered if so much confidence and so much authority delegated to one single person might not have been the cause of his misfortune, if it wasn’t my lifetime comrade who had turned him into an ox by trying to shear him of his natural fleece of a backlands leader and convert him into a palace invalid incapable of thinking up an order that hadn’t already been carried out ahead of time, by the unhealthy invention of showing in public a face that wasn’t his when the barefoot Indian of the good old days had been sufficient and more than enough all by himself to open a path with blows from his machete through the crowds of people shouting make way you bastards here comes the man in charge without being able to distinguish in that thicket of ovations who were the real patriots and who were the tricky ones because we still hadn’t discovered that the shadiest ones were those who shout loudest long live the stud, God damn it, long live the general, and quite the opposite now the authority of his weapons wasn’t even of any use to him to find the death-breeding queen who had made a mockery out of the unbreakable encirclement of his senile appetites, God damn it, he threw the pieces on the floor, left games half finished for no visible reason depressed by the sudden revelation that everyone ended up finding his place in the world, everyone except him, conscious for the first time that his shirt was soaked in sweat at such an early hour, conscious of the carrion stench that rose up from the vapors of the sea and the soft flute whistle of his rupture twisted by the dampness of the heat, it’s the humid weather, he told himself without conviction at the window trying to decipher the strange state of the light of the motionless city where the only living beings seemed to be the flocks of vultures fleeing in fright from the cornices of the charity hospital and the blind man in the main square who sensed the trembling old man at the window of government house and made an urgent signal to him with his staff and shouted something that he couldn’t make out and which he interpreted as one more sign in that oppressive feeling that something was about to happen, and yet he repeated to himself for the second time at the end of a long Monday of dejection that it’s the humidity, he said that to himself and he fell asleep at once, lulled by the scratching of the drizzle on the frosted glass of the sleeping potion, but suddenly he awoke with a start, who’s there, he shouted, it was his own heart oppressed by the strange silence of the cocks at dawn, he felt that the ship of the universe had reached some port while he was asleep, he was floating in a soup of steam, the animals of earth and sky who had the faculty to glimpse death beyond the clumsy omens and best-founded sciences of men were mute with terror, there was no more air, time was changing direction, and as he got up he felt his heart swelling with every step and his eardrums bursting and some boiling matter was running out of his nose, it’s death, he thought, his tunic soaked with blood, before realizing no general sir, it was the hurricane, the most devastating of all those that had broken the ancient compact realm of the Caribbean up into a string of scattered islands, a catastrophe so stealthy that only he had detected it with his premonitory instinct long before the panic of dogs and hens began, and so quick that there was scarcely time to find a woman’s name for it in the disorder of terrified officials who came to me with the news that now yes it was true general sir, this country had gone to hell, but he ordered them to reinforce the doors and windows with long beams, they tied the sentries to their posts along the corridors, they locked up the hens and the cows in the offices on the first floor, they nailed everything down in place from the main square to the last border stone of his terrorized realm of glo
om, the whole nation was anchored in place with the absolute order that with the first show of panic they would shoot twice in the air and the third time shoot to kill, and yet nothing could resist the passage of the tremendous blade of the spinning winds that cut a clean slice through the armored doors of the main entrance and carried off my cows into the air, but he did not realize it in the spell of the impact of where did it come from that roar of horizontal rain that scattered in its wake the volcanic grapeshot of the remains of balconies and beasts from the jungle and the bottom of the sea, nor was he lucid enough to think about the fearful proportions of the cataclysm but he walked about in the midst of the downpour wondering with an aftertaste of musk where can you be Manuela Sanchez of my bad saliva, God damn it, where can you have hidden yourself that this disaster of my vengeance hasn’t reached you? In the peaceful pool that came after the hurricane he found himself alone with his closest aides floating in a rowboat in the stew of destruction that had been the reception room, they rowed out the coach house door without bumping into anything through the stumps of the palm trees and the downed lampposts of the main square, they went into the dead lagoon of the cathedral and for an instant he suffered the clairvoyant spark that he had never been nor would he ever be the master of all his power, he was still mortified by the irony of that bitter certainty while the rowboat ran into spaces of densities that differed according to the changes in color of the light from the stained glass in solid gold trim and the clusters of emeralds over the main altar and the gravestones of viceroys buried alive and archbishops dead of disenchantment and the granite promontory of the empty mausoleum for the admiral of the ocean sea with the profile of the three caravels which he had had built in case he wanted his bones to rest among us, we went out through the canal of the presbytery toward an inner courtyard converted into a luminous aquarium in the tiled depths of which schools of mojarra fish wandered among the stalks of spikenards and sunflowers, we cut through the gloomy streams of the cloister of the convent of Biscayan nuns, we saw the abandoned cells, we saw the harpsichord adrift in the intimate pool of the music room, in the depths of the sleeping waters of the refectory we saw the whole community of virgins drowned in their dinner places at the long table with the food served on it, and he saw as he went out through a balcony the broad lakelike expanse under a radiant sky where the city had been and only then did he believe that the news was true general sir that this disaster had happened all over the world only to free me from the torment of Manuela Sanchez, God damn it, how wild God’s methods are when compared to ours, he thought smugly, contemplating the muddy swamp where the city had been and on whose limitless surface a world of drowned hens floated and all that rose up out of it were the steeples of the cathedral, the beacon of the lighthouse, the sun terraces of the stone and mortar mansions of the viceregal district, the scattered islands which had been the hills of the former slave port where the shipwrecked refugees from the cyclone were encamped, the last disbelieving survivors as we watched the silent passage of the row-boat painted with the colors of the flag through the sargasso of inert bodies of hens, we saw the sad eyes, the faded lips, the pensive hand which was making the sign of the cross in a blessing so that the rains would cease and the sun shine, and he gave life back to the drowned hens, and ordered the waters to recede and they receded. In the midst of the jubilant bell-ringing, the festival rockets, the music of celebration with which the laying of the first stone of reconstruction was laid, and in the midst of the shouts of the multitude crowded into the main square to glorify the most worthy one who had put the hurricane dragon to flight, someone took him by the arm to lead him out onto the balcony because now more than ever the people needed his words of comfort, and before he could get away he heard the unanimous clamor which got into his innards like the wind of an evil sea, long live the stud, because ever since the first days of his regime he understood the unprotected state of being seen by a whole city at the same time, his words turned to stone, he understood in a flash of mortal lucidity that he did not have the courage nor would he ever have it to appear at full length before the chasm of a crowd, so on the main square we only caught sight of the usual ephemeral image, the glimpse of an un-graspable old man dressed in denim who imparted a silent blessing from the presidential balcony and immediately disappeared, but that fleeting vision was enough for us to sustain the confidence that he was there, watching over our waking and sleeping hours under the historic tamarinds of the suburban mansion, he was absorbed in thought in the wicker rocking chair, with the glass of lemonade untouched in his hand listening to the sound of the kernels of corn that his mother Bendición Alvarado was drying out in the calabash gourd, watching her through the quiver of the three o’clock heat as she grabbed a barred rock hen and stuck it under her arm and twisted its neck with a kind of tenderness while she told me with a mother’s voice looking into my eyes you’re getting consumptive from so much thinking and not eating well, stay for dinner tonight, she begged him, trying to seduce him with the temptation of the strangled hen that she was holding with both hands so that it would not get away from her in its death throes, and he said all right, mother, I’ll stay, he rested until sundown with his eyes closed in the wicker rocking chair, not sleeping, lulled by the soft smell of the hen boiling in the pot, hanging on the course of our lives, for the only thing that gave us security on earth was the certainty that he was there, invulnerable to plague and hurricane, invulnerable to Manuela Sanchez’s trick, invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny, and he had reached that point, mother, he had sat down to rest at the end of an arduous trip on the last historic stone on the remote eastern frontier where the name and dates of the last soldier killed in defense of the integrity of the nation were carved, he had seen the dismal and glacial city of the neighboring country, he saw the eternal drizzle, the morning mist with the smell of soot, the men in full dress on electric streetcars, the aristocratic funerals in gothic hearses with white Percherons with plumes on their heads, the children sleeping on the steps of the cathedral wrapped in newspapers, God damn it, what strange people, he exclaimed, they look like poets, but they weren’t general sir, they’re the Goths who hold power, they told him, and he had returned from that trip exalted by the revelation that there is nothing to equal this wind of rotten guavas and this clamor of a marketplace and this deep feeling of mournfulness at dusk in this homeland of misery whose frontiers he was never to cross, and not because he was afraid of moving from the seat where he was sitting, as his enemies said, but because a man is like a tree in the woods, mother, like the animals in the woods who never leave their lairs except to eat, he said, evoking with the mortal lucidity of siesta time the soporific August Thursday of so many years ago when he dared confess that he knew the limits of his ambition, he had revealed it to a warrior from other lands and other times whom he had received alone in the hot shadows of his office, he was a withdrawn young man, troubled by haughtiness and always standing out from the rest with the stigma of solitude, and he had stood motionless in the doorway unable to decide to cross the threshold until his eyes grew accustomed to the half-light which was scented by a brazier of wisteria in all the heat and he was able to make him out sitting in the swivel chair with his fist motionless on the bare desk, so everyday and faded that there was nothing about him of his public image, without escort or weapons, his shirt soaked in the sweat of a mortal man and with salvia leaves stuck to his temples for his headache, and only when I was convinced of the incredible truth that this rusty old man was the same idol of our childhood, the purest incarnation of our dreams of glory, only then did he enter the office and introduce himself by name speaking with the clear firm voice of one who expects to be recognized because of his deeds, and
he shook my hand with a soft and miserly hand, the hand of a bishop, and he paid startling attention to the fabulous dream of the foreigner who wanted arms and assistance for a cause which is also yours, excellency, he wanted logistical support and political aid for a war without quarter which would wipe out once and for all every conservative regime from Alaska to Patagonia, and he felt so moved by his vehemence that he had asked him why are you mixed up in this mess, God damn it, why do you want to die, and the foreigner had answered him without a trace of modesty that there was no higher glory than dying for one’s country, excellency, and he replied smiling with pity don’t be a horse’s ass, boy, fatherland means staying alive, he told him, that’s what it is, he told him, and he opened the fist that he had resting on the desk and in the palm of his hand showed him this little glass ball which is something a person has or doesn’t have, but only the one who has it has it, boy, this is the nation, he said, while he sent him away with pats on the back and not giving him anything, not even the consolation of a promise, and he ordered the aide who closed the door that they were not to bother that man who has just left any more, don’t even waste your time keeping him under surveillance, he said, he’s got a fever in his quills, he’s no good for anything. We never heard that expression again until after the cyclone when he proclaimed a new amnesty for political prisoners and authorized the return of all exiles except men of letters, of course, them never, he said, they’ve got fever in their quills like thoroughbred roosters when they’re moulting so that they’re no good for anything except when they’re good for something, he said, worse than politicians, worse than priests, just imagine, but let the others come back without distinction of color so that the rebuilding of the nation can be the task of all, so that nobody would be left without proof that he was once more the master of all his power with the fierce support of armed forces that had become once more the same as before since he had distributed the shipments of food and medicine and the material for public relief from foreign aid among the members of the high command, ever since the families of his ministers had Sunday outings at the beach with the Red Cross portable hospitals and field tents, they sold the shipments of blood plasma, the tons of powdered milk to the ministry of health and the ministry of health resold them to charity hospitals, the officers of the general staff gave up their ambitions in return for public works contracts and rehabilitation programs with the emergency loan granted by Ambassador Warren in exchange for unlimited fishing rights for vessels of his nation within our territorial waters, what the hell, only the one who has it has it, he said to himself, remembering the colored marble he had shown that poor dreamer who was never heard of again, so exalted with the reconstruction work that with his own voice and in person he worked on even the tiniest details as in the original days of his power, sloshing through the swamps in the streets with a hat and a pair of duck-hunter’s boots so that a city different from the one he had conceived for his glory in his dreams of a solitary drowned man should be built, he ordered his engineers get rid of these houses here for me and put them over there where they won’t be in the way, make that tower six feet taller so that people will be able to see the ships on the high seas, they raised it, reverse the course of this river for me, they reversed it, without any mistakes, without any signs of discouragement, and he went about so befogged with that feverish restoration, so absorbed in his task, and so far removed from other minor matters of state that he ran smack into reality when an absent-minded aide mentioned by mistake the problem of the children and he asked from his cloud what children, the children general sir, but which ones, God damn it, because up till then they had hidden from him the fact that the army was keeping in secret custody the children who picked the lottery numbers for fear they would tell why the presidential ticket always won, they told the parents who complained that it wasn’t true while they made up a better answer, they told them they were rumors spread by traitors, lies of the opposition, and those who demonstrated in front of the barracks were repulsed with mortar fire and there was a public slaughter that we had also hidden from him so that you wouldn’t be bothered general sir, because the fact was that the children were locked up in the dungeons of the harbor fort under the best of conditions, in excellent spirits and very good health, but the trouble is that now we don’t know what to do with them general sir, and there were around two thousand of them. The infallible method for winning the lottery had occurred to him without his looking for it, observing the inlaid numbers on billiard balls, and it had been such a simple and dazzling idea that he himself couldn’t believe it when he saw the anxious crowd that had overflowed the main square since noontime taking out their numbers in anticipation of the miracle under the broiling sun with a clamor of gratitude and signs painted with glory to the magnanimous one who distributes happiness, anachronistic wheels of fortune and faded animal lotteries, the rubble of other worlds and other times that pillaged in the realm of fortune in an attempt to thrive on the crumbs of so many illusions, they opened the balcony at three o’clock, they brought up the three children under the age of seven chosen at random by the crowd itself so that there would be no doubt concerning the honesty of the method, they gave each child a bag of a different color after showing trust-worthy witnesses that there were ten billiard balls numbered from one to zero inside each bag, your attention, ladies and gentlemen, the throng held its breath, each child with his eyes blindfolded will take a ball from each bag, first the child with the blue bag, then the one with the red, and last the one with the yellow, one after the other the three children put their hands into their bags, felt at the bottom nine balls that were just alike and one that was ice-cold, and following the orders we had given them in secret they chose the ice-cold ball, showed it to the crowd, sang it out, and in that way they drew out the three balls that had been kept on ice for several days with the three numbers of the ticket he had reserved for himself, but we never thought about the children’s telling it general sir, it occurred to us so late that there was nothing else to do but hide them three by three, and then five by five, and then twenty by twenty, just imagine general sir, so pulling on the thread of the plot he ended up discovering that all of the officers in the high command of the land, sea and air forces were implicated in the miraculous bounty of the national lottery, he found out that the first children went up on the balcony with the consent of their parents and even trained by them in the illusory science of telling the numbers inlaid in ivory by touch, but that the following ones were brought up by force because the rumor had spread that once the children went up they didn’t come back down, their parents hid them, they buried them alive while the raiding parties that sought them in the middle of the night passed, the emergency forces did not cordon off the main square to control the public delirium as they had told him, but to hold at bay the crowds that they herded like a drove of cattle with threats of death, the diplomats who had asked for an audience to mediate the conflict ran into the absurd tale that the functionaries themselves told them that the legend of his strange illnesses was true, that he couldn’t receive them because toads had proliferated in his belly, that he could only sleep standing up so as not to injure himself with the iguana crest that was growing along his spine, they had hidden the messages of protest and entreaties from all over the world from him, they had kept secret from him a telegram from the Supreme Pontiff in which our apostolic anguish over the fate of the innocents was expressed, there was no room in jail for any more rebellious parents general sir, there were no more children for the Monday drawing, God damn it, what kind of a mess have we got into. In spite of all, he did not measure the true depth of the abyss until he saw the children like cattle in a slaughterhouse in the inner courtyard of the harbor fort, he saw them come out of the dungeons like a stampede of goats blinded by the brilliance of the sun after so many months of nocturnal terror, they were confused in the light, there were so many at the same time that he didn’t see them as two thousand separate children but as a huge shapeless anima
l that was giving off an impersonal stench of sun-baked skin and making a noise of deep waters and its multiple nature saved it from destruction, because it was impossible to do away with such a quantity of life without leaving a trace of horror that would travel around the world, God damn it, there was nothing to do, and with that conviction he called together the high command, fourteen trembling commandants who were never so to be feared because they had never been so frightened, he took his time scrutinizing the eyes of each one, one by one, and then he saw that he was alone against them all, so he kept his head erect, hardened his voice, exhorted them to unity now more than ever for the good name and honor of the armed forces, absolved them of all blame pounding his fist on the table so that they would not see the tremor of uncertainty and ordered them as a consequence to continue at their posts fulfilling their duties with the same zeal and the same authority as they had always done, because my supreme and irrevocable decision is that nothing has happened, meeting adjourned, I will answer for it. As a simple means of precaution he took the children out of the harbor fort and sent them in nocturnal boxcars to the least-inhabited regions of the country while he confronted the storm unleashed by the official and solemn declaration that it was not true, not only were there no children in the power of the authorities but there was not a single prisoner of any type in the jails, the rumor of the mass kidnapping was an infamous lie on the part of traitors to get people stirred up, the doors of the nation were open so that the truth could be established, let people come and look for it, they came, a commission from the League of Nations came and overturned the most hidden stones in the country and questioned all the people they wanted to and how they wanted to with such minute detail that Bendición Alvarado was to ask who were those intruders dressed like spiritualists who came into her house looking for two thousand children under the beds, in her sewing basket, in her paintbrush jars, and who finally bore public witness to the fact that they had found the jails closed down, the nation in peace, everything in place, and they had not found any indication to confirm the public suspicion that there had been or might have been a violation by intent or by action or by omission of the principles of human rights, rest easy, general, they left, he waved goodbye to them from the window with a handkerchief with embroidered edges and with the feeling of relief over something that was finished for good, goodbye, you horse’s asses, smooth sailing and a prosperous trip, he sighed, the trouble’s over, but General Rodrigo de Aguilar reminded him no, the trouble wasn’t over because the children were still left general sir, and he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, God damn it, he’d forgotten completely, what’ll we do with the children. Trying to free himself from that evil thought while a drastic formula was taking shape in his mind he had them take the children out of their hiding place in the jungle and carry them off in the opposite direction to the provinces of perpetual rain where there were no treasonous winds to spread their voices, where the animals of the earth rotted away as they walked and lilies grew on words and octopuses swam among the trees, he ordered them taken to the Andean grottoes of perpetual mists so that no one would find out where they were, for them to be transferred from the shady Novembers of putrefaction to the Februaries of horizontal days so that no one would know when they were, he sent them quinine tablets and wool blankets when he found out they were shivering with fever because for days and days they had been hidden in rice paddies with mud up to their necks so that the Red Cross airplanes wouldn’t discover them, he had the light of the sun tinted red along with the glow of the stars to cure them of scarlet fever, he had them fumigated from the air with insecticides so that fat banana lice would not devour them, he sent them showers of candy and snowstorms of ice cream from airplanes and parachutes with loads of Christmas toys to keep them happy while a magical solution could occur to him, and in that way he was getting out of the reach of their evil memory, he forgot about them, he sank into the desolate swamp of the uncountable nights all the same of his domestic insomnia, he heard the metal blows strike nine o’clock, he took down the hens who were sleeping on the cornices of government house and took them to the chicken coop, he had not finished counting the creatures sleeping in the scaffolding when a mulatto servant girl came in to collect the eggs, he sensed the sunlight of her age, heard the sound of her bodice, he jumped on top of her, be careful general, she murmured trembling, you’ll break the eggs, let them break, God damn it, he said, he threw her down with a cuff without undressing her or getting undressed himself disturbed by the anxiety to flee this Tuesday with its green-shit snow, sleeping creatures, he slipped, he fell into the illusory vertigo of a precipice cut by livid stripes of evasion and outpourings of sweat and the sighs of a wild woman and deceitful threats of oblivion, on the fallen woman he was leaving the curve of the urgent tinkle of the shooting star that was his gold spur, the trace of saltpeter from his wheeze of an urgent spouse, his dog whine, his terror of existing through the flash and the silent thunder of the instantaneous explosion of the deep spark, but at the bottom of the precipice there was the shitted slime again, the hens’ insomniac sleep, the affliction of the mulatto girl who got up with her dress all smeared by the yellow molasses of the yolks lamenting now you see what I told you general, the eggs broke, and he muttered trying to tame the rage of another love without love, write down how many they were, he told her, I’ll take it out of your wages, he left, it was ten o’clock, he examined one by one the gums of the cows in the stables, he saw one of his women quartered by pain on the floor of her hut and he saw the midwife who took from out of her insides a steaming baby with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, it was a boy, what name shall we give him general sir, whatever you feel like, he answered, it was eleven o’clock, as on every night during his regime he counted the sentries, checked the locks, covered the birdcages, put out the lights, it was twelve o’clock, the nation was at peace, the world was asleep, he went to his bedroom through the darkened building across the strips of light from the fleeting dawns of the beacon turns, he hung up the lamp for leaving on the run, he put up the three bars, ran the three bolts, closed the three locks, sat down on the portable latrine, and while he was passing his meager urine he caressed the inclement child of a herniated testicle until the twist was straightened out, it fell asleep in his hand, the pain ceased, but it returned immediately with a lightning flash of panic when in through the window there came the lash of a wind from beyond the confines of the saltpeter deserts which scattered about the bedroom the sawdust of a song about tender-aged throngs who were asking about a gentleman who went to war who were sighing what pain what grief who climbed up onto a tower to see if he was coming who saw him coming back that he came back that well in a velvet box what pain what mourning, and it was a chorus of such numerous and distant voices that he could have gone to sleep with the illusion that the stars were singing, but he got up irate, that’s enough, God damn it, he shouted, either them or me, he shouted, and it was them, because before dawn he ordered them to put the children in a barge loaded with cement, take them singing to the limits of the territorial waters, blow them up with a dynamite charge without giving them time to suffer as they kept on singing, and when the three officers who carried out the crime came to attention before him with news general sir that his order had been carried out, he promoted them two grades and decorated them with the medal of loyalty, but then he had them shot without honors as common criminals because there were orders that can be given but which cannot be carried out, God damn it, poor children. Experiences as harsh as that confirmed his very ancient certainty that the most feared enemy is within oneself in the confidence of the heart, that the very men he was arming and raising up so that they would support his regime will end up sooner or later spitting in the hand that feeds them, he wiped them out with one stroke, he took others out of nowhere, raised them to the highest ranks pointing at them according to the impulse of his inspiration, you to captain, you to colonel, you to general, and all the rest to lieutenant, what th
e hell, he watched them grow in their uniforms until they burst the seams, he lost sight of them, and a casual event like the discovery of two thousand sequestered children permitted him to discover that it was not just one man who had failed him but the whole supreme command of the armed forces who are only good for making me use up more milk and in times of trouble they shit in the plate they’ve just eaten out of, God damn it, I made them rich, he had won bread and respect for them, and yet he didn’t have a moment’s rest trying to keep clear of their ambition, he kept the most dangerous closest by to keep a better eye on them, the least bold he sent to frontier garrisons, because of them he had accepted the occupation by the marines, mother, not to fight yellow fever as Ambassador Thompson had written in the official communiqué, nor to protect him from public unrest, as the exiled politicians said, but to show our military men how to be decent people, and that’s how it was, mother, to each his own, they taught them to walk with shoes on, to wipe themselves with paper, to use condoms, they were the ones who taught me the secret of maintaining parallel services to stir up distractive rivalries among the military, they invented for me the office of state security, the general investigation agency, the national department of public order, and so many other messes that I couldn’t even remember them myself, identical organisms that he made look different in order to rule with more relaxation in the midst of the storm making them believe that some were being watched by others, mixing beach sand in with the gunpowder in the barracks and confusing the truth of his intentions with images of the opposite truth, and yet there were uprisings, he would storm into the barracks chewing the froth of his bile, shouting get out of the way you bastards here comes the one who gives the orders to the fright of the officers who were holding target practice with pictures of me, disarm them, he ordered without stopping but with so much authority that they disarmed themselves, take off those men’s clothes you’re wearing, he ordered, they took them off, the San Jerónimo base is in revolt general sir, he went in through the main gate dragging his huge feet of an old man in pain through a double file of mutinous guards who rendered him the honors of general supreme chief, he appeared in the post of the rebel command, without escort, without a weapon, but shouting with an explosion of power get down flat on the floor because the one who can do everything has arrived, on the floor, you bastards, nineteen officers of the general staff fell to the floor, face down, he paraded them eating dirt through the coastal villages so that the people could see how much a military man without a uniform is worth, sons of bitches, he heard over the other shouts in the aroused barracks his own irrevocable orders for the organizers of the revolt to be shot in the back, they displayed their corpses hanging by the heels in sun and dew so that nobody would fail to know how those who spit on God end up, tricky bastards, but the trouble didn’t end with those bloody purges because with the least bit of carelessness he would find himself once more under the menace of that tentacular parasite he thought he had pulled out by the roots and which was proliferating again in the north winds of his power, in the shadow of the obligatory privileges and the crumbs of authority and the confidence of interest that he had to concede to the bravest officers even against his own will because it was impossible for him to maintain himself without them but also with them, condemned forever to live breathing the same air which asphyxiated him, God damn it, it wasn’t fair, as it wasn’t possible either to live with the perpetual surprise of the pureness of my comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar who had come into my office with the face of a dead man anxious to know what had happened to those two thousand children of my first prize because everybody says we drowned them in the sea, and he said without changing expression not to believe rumors spread by traitors, old friend, the children are growing up in God’s peace, he told him, every night I can hear them singing over there, he said, pointing with a broad sweep of his hand to an indefinite place somewhere in the universe, and he left Ambassador Evans himself wrapped in an aura of uncertainty when he replied to him impassively I don’t know what children you’re talking about since your own country’s delegate to the League of Nations has made a public statement that the children in the schools are all there and in good health, what the hell, the mess is over, and yet he could not stop them from waking him up in the middle of the night with the news general sir that the two largest garrisons in the country were in revolt and also the Conde barracks two blocks away from the presidential palace, an insurrection of the most dangerous kind led by General Bonivento Barboza who had dug himself in with fifteen hundred very well armed and well supplied troops with materiel obtained as contraband through consuls sympathetic to the opposition politicians, so things are in no shape for licking one’s fingers general sir, now we really are fucked up. In other times that volcanic subversion would have been a stimulant for his passion for risks, but he knew better than anyone what the real weight of his age was, that he barely had enough will to resist the ravages of his secret world, that on winter nights he could not get to sleep without first placating the herniated testicle in the hollow of his hand with a coo of tenderness of sleep my sweet to the child of painful whistles, that his spirits were slipping away as he sat on the toilet pushing out his soul drop by drop as through a filter thickened by the mold of so many nights of solitary urination, that his memory was unraveling, that he was not really sure he knew who was who, or from whom, at the mercy of an inescapable fate in that pitiful house which for some time he would have liked to exchange for another, far away from here, in some Indian settlement where no one would know that he had been the only president of the nation for so many and such long years that not even he himself had counted them, and still, when General Rodrigo de Aguilar offered himself as a mediator to negotiate a decorous compromise with the subversion he did not find himself in the presence of the dotty old man who would fall asleep at audiences but with the bison of old who without thinking about it for one instant answered not on your life, that he wasn’t leaving, although it wasn’t a question of leaving or not leaving but that everything is against us general sir, even the church, but he said no, the church is with the one in charge, he said, the generals of the high command having been meeting for forty-eight hours now already had not been able to reach an agreement, it doesn’t matter he said, you’ll see what they decide when they find out who pays them the most, the leaders of the civilian opposition have finally shown their faces and were conspiring openly in the street, all the better, he said, hang one from each lamppost on the main square so they’ll know who the one is who can do anything, there’s no way general sir, the people are with them, that’s a lie, he said, the people are with me, so they won’t get me out of here except dead, he decided, pounding the table with his rough maiden’s hand as he only did in final decisions, and he slept until milking time when he found the reception room a shambles, because the insurrectionists in the Conde barracks had catapulted rocks which had not left one window intact in the eastern gallery and tallow balls which came in through the broken windows and kept the inhabitants of the building in a state of panic all through the night, if you could have seen general sir, we haven’t closed an eye running back and forth with blankets and buckets of water to put out the puddles of fire that were lighting up in the least expected corner, but he scarcely paid any attention, I already told you not to pay them any heed, he said, dragging his graveyard feet along the corridors of ashes and scraps of carpets and singed tapestries, but they’re going to keep it up, they told him, they had sent word that the flaming balls were just a warning, that the explosions will come after general sir, but he crossed the garden without paying attention to anyone, in the last shadows he breathed in the sound of the newborn roses, the disorders of the cocks in the sea wind, what shall we do general, I already told you not to pay any attention to them, God damn it, and as on every day at that hour he went to oversee the milking, so as on every day at that hour the insurrectionists in the Conde barracks saw the mule cart with the six barrels of milk from the presidenti
al stable appear, and in the driver’s seat there was the same lifetime carter with the oral message that the general sends you this milk even though you keep on spitting in the hand that feeds you, he shouted it out with such innocence that General Bonivento Barboza gave the order to accept it on the condition that the carter taste it first so that they could be sure it wasn’t poisoned, and then they opened the iron gates and the fifteen hundred rebels looking down from the inside balconies saw the cart drive in to the center of the paved courtyard, they saw the orderly climb up onto the driver’s seat with a pitcher and a ladle to give the carter the milk to taste, they saw him uncork the first barrel, they saw him floating in the ephemeral backwash of a dazzling explosion and they saw nothing else to the end of time in the volcanic heat of the mournful yellow mortar building in which no flower ever grew, whose ruins remained suspended for an instant in the air from the tremendous explosion of the six barrels of dynamite. That’s that, he sighed in the presidential palace, shaken by the seismic wind that blew down four more houses around the barracks and broke the wedding crystal in cupboards all the way to the outskirts of the city, that’s that, he sighed, when the garbage trucks removed from the courtyards of the harbor fort the corpses of eighteen officers who had been shot in double rows in order to save ammunition, that’s that, he sighed when General Rodrigo de Aguilar came to attention before him with the news general sir that once again there was no more room in the jails for political prisoners, that’s that, he sighed, when the bells began to peal in celebration, the festival rockets, the music of glory that announced the advent of another hundred years of peace, that’s that, God damn it, the mess is over, he said, and he was so convinced, so careless about himself, so negligent about his personal safety that one morning he was crossing the courtyard on his way back from the milking and his instinct failed him as he did not see in time the bogus leper who rose up out of the rosebushes to cut off his path in the slow October drizzle and only too late did he see the sudden glimmer of the flourished revolver, the trembling index finger that began to squeeze the trigger when he shouted with his arms opened wide offering him his chest, I dare you you bastard, I dare you, dazzled by the surprise that his time had come contrary to the clearest forecasts of the basins, shoot if you’ve got any balls, he shouted, in the imperceptible instant of hesitation in which a pale star lighted up in the eyes of the attacker, his lips withered, his will trembled, and then he let go with both fists as hammers on his eardrums, he dropped him, he moved him on the ground with a pile-driver kick on the jaw, from another world he heard the uproar of the guard who came running to his shouts, he passed through the blue explosion of the continuous thunder of the five explosions of the false leper writhing in a pool of blood having shot himself in the stomach with the five bullets in his revolver so that he would not be taken alive by the fearsome interrogators of the presidential guard, he heard over the other shouts in the aroused building his own terminating orders that the body be quartered as a lesson, they sliced it up, they displayed the head smeared with rock salt in the main square, the right leg in the eastern confines of Santa Maria del Altar, the left one in the limitless saltpeter deserts of the west, one arm on the plains, the other in the jungle, the pieces of torso fried in hog fat and exposed to sun and dew until all that was left was naked bone as chancy and difficult as things were in this nigger whorehouse so that there would be no one who didn’t know how those who raised their hands against their father ended up, and still green with rage he went among the rosebushes that the presidential guard had cleaned of lepers at bayonet point to see if at last they would show their faces, sneaky bastards, he went up to the main floor kicking aside the cripples to see if at last they would learn who it was who put their mothers to birth, sons of bitches, he went along the corridors shouting for them to get out of the way, God damn it, here comes the one who gives the orders in the midst of the panic of office workers and the persistent adulators who proclaimed him the eternal one, all through the house he left the rocky trail of his blacksmith-oven wheeze, he disappeared into the hearing room like a fugitive lightning flash toward the private quarters, he went into the bedroom, shut the three crossbars, the three bolts, the three locks, and with his fingertips he took off the pants he was wearing that were soaked in shit. He did not find a moment of rest as he sniffed round about to find the hidden enemy who had armed the bogus leper, for he felt that there was someone within reach of his hand, someone that close to his life who knew the hiding place of his honey, who had his eye at the keyholes and his ears at the walls every minute and everywhere just like my pictures, a voluble presence who whistled in the January trade winds and he recognized him in the jasmine embers on hot nights, one who had pursued him months on end in the fright of his insomnia dragging his fearful ghostly feet through the most hidden rooms of the darkened building, until one night at dominoes he saw the omen materialize in a pensive hand that finished the game with the double five, and it was as if an inner voice had revealed that that hand was the hand of treason, God damn it, it’s him, he said to himself perplexed, and then he raised his eyes through the flow of light from the lamp hanging over the center of the table and met the handsome artilleryman’s eyes of my soul comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar, what a mess, his strong right arm, his sacred accomplice, it wasn’t possible, he thought, all the more pained as he deciphered more deeply the weave of the false truths with which they had diverted his attention for so many years in order to hide the brutal truth that my lifetime comrade was in the service of politicians of fortune whom for convenience’ sake he had taken from the darkest corners of the federalist war and had made them rich and had heaped fabulous privileges upon them, he had let himself be used by them, he had tolerated the fact that they were using him to rise up to a point that the old aristocracy swept away by the irresistible breath of the liberal whirlwind had never dreamed of and they still wanted more, God damn it, they wanted the place of the elect of God that he had reserved for himself, they wanted to be me, motherfuckers, with the way lighted by the glacial lucidity and the infinite prudence of the man who had managed to accumulate the most confidence and authority in his regime by taking advantage of the privileges of being the only person from whom he accepted papers to sign, he had him read aloud the executive orders and ministerial laws that only I could put through, he pointed out the amendments, he signed with his thumbprint and underneath he stamped it with the ring which he then put away in a strongbox whose combination only he knew, to your health, comrade, he always said to him when he handed him the signed papers, here’s something to wipe yourself with, he told him laughing, and that was how General Rodrigo de Aguilar had succeeded in establishing another system of power within the power as widespread and as fruitful as mine, and not content with that in the shadows he had set up the mutiny of the Conde barracks with the complicity and unreserved assistance of Ambassador Norton, his buddy in matters of Dutch whores, his fencing master, the one who had smuggled in the ammunition in barrels of Norwegian cod under the protection of diplomatic immunity while he would use balm on me at the domino table with the incense candles saying there was no government more friendly, or just and exemplary than mine, and they were also the ones who had put the revolver in the hand of the false leper along with fifty thousand pesos in bills cut in half which we found buried at the attacker’s home, and the other half of which was to be turned over after the crime by my own lifetime comrade, mother, what a bitter mess, and still they didn’t resign themselves to failure but had ended up conceiving the perfect coup without shedding a drop of blood, not even yours general sir, because General Rodrigo de Aguilar had collected the most unimpeachable evidence that I spent my sleepless nights conversing with vases and oil paintings of patriots and archbishops in the darkened building, that I took the cows’ temperature with a thermometer and gave them phenacetin to eat in order to bring down their fever, that I had had a tomb built for an admiral of the ocean sea who did not exist except in my feverish imagination when
I myself with my own blessed eyes had seen the three caravels anchored across the harbor from my window, that I had squandered public funds on the irrepressible addiction of buying ingenious inventions and had even tried to get the astronomers to upset the solar system in order to please a beauty queen who had only existed in the visions of his delirium, and that during an attack of senile dementia had ordered two thousand children put on a barge loaded with cement that was dynamited at sea, mother, just imagine, what sons of bitches, and it was on the basis of that solemn testimony that General Rodrigo de Aguilar and the high command of the presidential guard in plenary session had decided to intern him in the asylum for illustrious old men on the reefs at midnight of March first next during the annual banquet in honor of the Holy Guardian Angel, the patron saint of bodyguards, or within three days general sir, just imagine, but in spite of the imminence and scope of the conspiracy he showed no sign that might have aroused the suspicion that he had uncovered it, but at the appointed hour as every year he received his personal guard as guests and had them sit at the banquet table for aperitifs until General Rodrigo de Aguilar arrived to make the toast of honor, he chatted with them, laughed with them, one after the other, the officers furtively looked at their watches, put them to their ears, wound them, it was five minutes to twelve and General Rodrigo de Aguilar hadn’t arrived, it was as hot as a ship’s boiler and there was a perfume of flowers, it smelled of gladioli and tulips, it smelled of live roses in the closed room, somebody opened a window, we breathe, we look at our watches, we feel a soft sea breeze with the smell of the delicate stew of a wedding feast, they were all sweating except him, we were all suffering from the drowsiness of the moment under the firm glow of the age-old animal who blinked with open eyes in a space of his own reserved in another age of the world, health, he said, the hand with no appeal like a languid lily raised again the glass with which he had toasted all evening without drinking, the visceral sound of watch works in the silence of a final abyss, it was twelve o’clock but General Rodrigo de Aguilar was not arriving, someone started to get up, please, he said, he turned him to stone with the fatal look of nobody move, nobody breathe, nobody live without my permission until twelve o’clock finished chiming, and then the curtains parted and the distinguished Major General Rodrigo de Aguilar entered on a silver tray stretched out full length on a garnish of cauliflower and laurel leaves, steeped with spices, oven brown, embellished with the uniform of five golden almonds for solemn occasions and the limitless loops for valor on the sleeve of his right arm, fourteen pounds of medals on his chest and a sprig of parsley in his mouth, ready to be served at a banquet of comrades by the official carvers to the petrified horror of the guests as without breathing we witness the exquisite ceremony of carving and serving, and when every plate held an equal portion of minister of defense stuffed with pine nuts and aromatic herbs, he gave the order to begin, eat hearty gentlemen.