I the Supreme
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Praise for Augusto Roa Bastos’s
I THE SUPREME
“These passages reverberate with a fierce surrealism—peopled with dwarfs, women warriors and clairvoyant animals; studded with Borgesian images….A prodigious meditation not only on history and power, but also on the nature of language itself.”
—The New York Times
“The most magnificent work, most magnificently translated, to come from Spanish into English in almost a quarter of a century.”
—Commonweal
“[I the Supreme’s] breadth of vision and ambition make it important in any language.”
—New Statesman
“The novel’s true achievement is one of tone and voice. The language is a triumph almost as much for the translator as for the author: ebulliently resourceful, brilliant in its vitriol and vituperation, Rabelaisian in its extravagance.”
—Publishers Weekly
Augusto Roa Bastos
I THE SUPREME
Augusto Roa Bastos was born in 1917 and is widely considered to be one of Paraguay’s greatest novelists. Best known for his novels I the Supreme and Son of Man, he authored many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and Spain’s Cervantes Prize, Roa Bastos spent much of his life outside Paraguay, both as a foreign correspondent and in exile for his opposition to the ruling governments of his country. He died in 2005.
SECOND VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2018
Copyright © 1974 by Siglo XXI Editores, S. A.
Translation copyright © 1986 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Argentina as Yo el Supremo by Siglo Veintiuno Editores, S.A., Buenos Aires, in 1974. Copyright © 1974 by Siglo XXI Editores, S. A. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1986.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Name: Roa Bastos, Augusto, 1917–2005.
Title: I, the Supreme / by Augusto Roa Bastos; translated by Helen Lane.
Other titles: Yo, el Supremo (Novel). English.
Description: New York : Knopf, 1986. First edition.
Identifiers: LCCN 85045609
Subjects: Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez de, 1766–1840—Fiction. |
Dictators—Fiction. | Paraguay—Fiction.
Classification: PQ8259.R56 Y613 1986. DDC 863—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/85045609
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525564690
Ebook ISBN 9781984898142
Cover design by Perry De La Vega
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Appendix
Final Compiler’s Note
Guaraní Words Used in the Novel
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This translation would not have come into being had it not been for the light offered me by two who know the original languages far better than I: Augusto Roa Bastos and Iris Giménez.
Grateful thanks are also due Milagros Ezquerro for much way-pointing. It was her edition of Yo el Supremo that provided the text here used. With her kind permission, I have also used many of her notes and her Guaraní lexicon.
I also warmly thank Lee Goerner, the editor of I the Supreme at Alfred A. Knopf, for his enthusiasm, encouragement, and endurance.
And finally, this version of the story of the Supreme could not have been put before the reader without the generous help—in every sense—of Joan Palevsky, to whom it is dedicated.
Where was this found? Nailed to the door of the cathedral, Excellency. A patrol of grenadiers discovered it early this morning and brought it in to headquarters. Luckily no one had time to read it. I didn’t ask you that, and it’s a matter of no importance. Your Grace is right. The ink of pasquinades turns sour more quickly than milk. But it’s not a page from the Buenos Aires Gazette, nor is it one torn out of a book, Sire. What books would there be around here outside of my own! The aristocrats of the Twenty Families turned theirs into playing cards ages ago. Have the houses of the antipatriots searched. The dungeons, down in the dungeons, go have a look in the dungeons. The guilty party might very well be among those rats with tangled dangling locks and foot-long fingernails. Tighten the knots in those notorious forgers’ iron neckties. Peña and Molas especially. Bring me the letters in which Molas pays me homage during the First Consulate, and then later during the First Dictatorship. I want to reread the speech he delivered in the Assembly of the year ’14, proposing that I be elected Dictator. His handwriting is very different in the draft of the speech, in the instructions to the deputies, in the statement to the authorities years later in which he accuses one of his brothers of having stolen cattle from him at his estancia in Altos. I can repeat what those papers say, Excellency. I didn’t ask you to recite by heart the thousands of documents, dossiers, and decrees in the archives. I merely ordered you to bring me the file on Mariano Antonio Molas. Bring me the pamphlets by Manuel Pedro de Peña as well. Cantankerous sycophants! They boast of having been the Word of Independence. The rats! They didn’t even begin to understand it. They think they’re still masters of their words in the depths of their dungeons. But all they know how to do is squeal. They haven’t shut up to this day. They keep finding new ways of secreting their accursed poison. They get out pamphlets, pasquinade
s, lampoons, caricatures. I am an indispensable figure for slander. For all I care they can manufacture their paper from consecrated rags. Write it, print it with consecrated letters on a consecrated press. Go print your drivel on Mount Sinai if that will unshrivel your souls, you cacogenic latrinographers!
* * *
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Hum. Ah! Funeral orations, pamphlets condemning me to be burned at the stake. Bah! They’re daring to parody my Supreme Decrees now. They imitate my language, my handwriting, trying to infiltrate by way of it; to get to me from their lairs. Shut my mouth with the voice that thundered against them. Bury me in words, in effigy. An old trick of tribal witch doctors. Post more guards to watch over those who labor under the delusion that they can replace me once I’m dead. Where is the file of anonymous libels? It’s right there, Excellency, by your hand.
It is not wholly unlikely that those two sly scribble-scrabblers Molas and de la Peña were the ones who dictated this squib. The joke is altogether in the style of those two infamous Porteñista partisans, out to further the cause of Buenos Aires. If it is their doing, I shall immolate Molas, pen Peña in for life. One of their ignoble blind tools could well have learned it by heart. A second one written it down. A third goes and pins it to the door of the cathedral with four thumbtacks. The guards themselves are the worst traitors. Your Worship is more than right. In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie. I’m not asking you to flatter me, Patiño. I’m ordering you to seek and find the author of the pasquinade. The law is a bottomless pit, but I expect you to be able to discover a hair in that hole. Search the souls of Peña and Molas. Sire, they can’t be the ones. They’ve been confined to utter darkness for years now. And so? After Molas’s last Outcry was intercepted, Excellency, I ordered the skylights, the cracks in the doors, the chinks in the walls and ceiling filled in with stone and mortar. You know that the prisoners continually train rats to carry their clandestine communications. And even to bring them food. You’ll remember that that was how the ones from Santa Fe stole my ravens’ rations for months. I also ordered all the holes and runways of the ants, the culverts of the crickets, the sigh holes of the crannies plugged up. No darker darkness possible, Sire. They don’t have anything to write with. Are you forgetting memory, you of all people, you memorious lout? They may not have even a pencil stub, a little end of charcoal. They may not have light or air. But they have a memory. A memory just like yours. The memory of an archive-cockroach, three hundred million years older than homo sapiens. The memory of the fish, of the frog, of the parrot that always cleans its beak on the same side. Which doesn’t mean they’re intelligent. Quite the contrary. Can you state categorically that the scalded cat that flees even cold water is possessed of a good memory? No, merely that it’s a cat that’s afraid. The scalding has penetrated its memory. Memory doesn’t recall the fear. It has become fear itself.
* * *
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Do you know what memory is? The stomach of the soul, someone wrongly called it. Though nobody is ever the first to give things a name. There is nothing but an infinity of repeaters. The only things ever invented are new errors. The memory of one person alone is useless.
Stomach of the soul. That’s too clever by half! What sort of soul could those pitiless, inhuman slanderers have? The quadruple stomachs of quadrupeds. Ruminant stomachs. That’s where the perfidy of those successive incurable scoundrels ferments. That’s where they cook up their potfuls of infamies. What sort of memory do they need to remember all the lies they’ve cranked out with the one aim of defaming me, of slandering the Government? A memory of cud-chewers. A ruminant’s memory. Ingestive-digestive. Repetitive. Disfigurative. Sulliative. They prophesied that they would turn this country into the new Athens. The Areopagus of the sciences, the letters, the arts of this Continent. What they were really out to do with their chimeras was to hand Paraguay over to the highest bidder. The areopagites came within a hair of doing just that. I managed to get rid of them. I picked them off one by one. I put them in their rightful place. Off with you, areopagites! To jail with the lot of you, blockheads!
The worst offender, Manuel Pedro de Peña, parakeet number one of the patriciate, I disblazoned. Cured of his cock-a-hoop habits. Took him down off his heraldic perch. Caged him in a prison cell. He there learned to recite by heart, without a single mistake, the hundred thousand words in the Royal Academy dictionary, from A to Z. That’s how he exercises his memory in the cemetery of words. I wouldn’t want the enamel, the metal of his word-pipes to rust. Dr. Mariano Antonio Molas, Attorney Molas, or to put a fine point on it, Molas the pen-pusher, recites nonstop, even in his dreams, bits and pieces of a description of what he calls the Former Province of Paraguay. For these last surviving areopagites, the Fatherland continues to be the former province. They make no mention whatsoever, not even in the decorous euphemisms to which their colonized tongues were accustomed, to the Giant Province of the Indies, the one that in the last analysis was grandmother, mother, aunt, poor relation of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, which grew rich at her expense.
It is not only the patricians and vernacular areopagites who use and abuse their ruminating memory here. The foreign marsupials who stole from the country and buried the memory of their ladronicides in the stomach of their souls do so as well. There’s the Frenchman Pedro Martell. After twenty years in prison and as many more of madness he still thinks of nothing but his chest full of gold pieces. Every night he furtively removes the chest from the hole he’s dug underneath his hammock with his fingernails; he counts yet again the gleaming coins, one by one, proves them with his toothless gums, puts them back in his chest, and buries it in the hole again. He then stretches out in his hammock and sleeps in bliss above his imaginary treasure. Who could feel better protected than he? This was the sort of life lived in the cellars for many years by another Frenchman, Charles Andreu-Legard, ex prisoner of the Bastille, chewing over his memories in my republican bastille. Can it be said that those didelphians know what memory is? Neither you nor they know. Those who do know have no memory. Those with prodigious memories are almost always mentally retarded imbeciles. Besides being scoundrels and very clever tricksters. Or something even worse. They use their memory to harm others, but have no idea how to do so for their own good. No comparison with the scalded cat. Parrot-memory, cow-memory, ass-memory. Not sense-memory, judgment-memory, possessed of a lusty imagination capable of engendering events in and of itself. The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.
* * *
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The cow that my presumptive sister Petrona Regalada is allowed to keep in the yard of her house became infested with ticks. I ordered that she treat it the way this and other diseases are combated on the patrial estancias: by killing the animal. I have only one cow, Sire, and it does not belong to me but to my little catechism school. It gives just one glass of milk for the twenty little ones who come for instruction. You’ll be left, señora, without the cow, and your pupils won’t be able to drink even the milk of the Holy Spirit that you extract for their benefit as you dip candles. Goodbye cow, catechumens, catechesis. The ticks will devour not only the cow. They’ll devour you. They’ll invade the city, which already has enough to contend with, what with its plague of thugs and stray dogs. Don’t you hear their rabid howls mounting, louder and louder, on every hand? Sacrifice the cow, señora.
I saw from her eyes that she wasn’t about to do so. I ordered a soldier to butcher the sick animal with his bayonet and bury it. My supposed sister, the ex widow of Larios Galván, came to present a complaint. Her mind completely unhinged, the old woman swore that, even though it was dead, the cow was still mooing in muffled tones underground. I ordered the pair of Swiss forensic physicians to do an autopsy on the animal. They found in its bowels a bezoar stone the size of a grapefruit. The old woman now maintains that the hairy stone is an an
tidote for any poison. It cures illnesses, Sire. Especially milk fever. It tells the meaning of dreams. It foretells deaths, she says enthusiastically. She swears, moreover, that she heard the stone murmur inaudible words. Ah madness, memory in reverse that forgets its way as it retraces its path. How could anyone with an iota of good sense believe such insane things?
Begging Your Excellency’s pardon, I take the liberty of saying that I too heard those words. So did the grenadier who killed the cow. Come, come, Patiño, don’t you start raving too! Excuse me, Sire, with your permission I must tell you that I heard those moos-that-were-words, like human words. Voices very far away, a bit hoarse as if from a cold, gurgling words. The remains of some unknown language that doesn’t want to die completely, Excellency. You’re too stupid to go mad, secretary. Human madness is ordinarily extremely clever. A chameleon of sanity. When you think it’s cured, it’s because it’s worse. It has merely transformed itself into another still more subtle madness. Hence, like old Petrona Regalada, you hear those nonexistent voices coming from a carcass. What language, may I ask, might that excremental ball petrified in the stomach of a cow remember? With your permission, it’s saying something, Your Grace. Maybe in Latin or in some other unknown tongue. Doesn’t Your Worship believe that there might be such a thing as an ear for which all men and animals speak the same language? The last time Señora Petrona Regalada allowed me to listen to her stone, I heard it murmur something like…king of the world….Of course, you scoundrel! I should have thought of that! How could that stone that addled the widow’s brain be anything else but royalist? That’s the last straw! Not only do those filthy Spaniards pin pasquinades on the cathedral door; they also put a stone of contagion in the belly of cows!