I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  Sire, with your permission, let me say, in a manner of speaking, I feel that your words, however poorly copied they may be by these hands that the earth is going to swallow up, I feel that they copy what Your Grace dictates to me, letter by letter, word by word. You haven’t understood me. Open your good eye and close the bad one. Keep your ears open for the meaning of what I say to you: However much you may surpass animals in brute memory, in brute power of speech, you’ll never know anything if you don’t penetrate to the innermost depths of things. You don’t need a tongue for that; on the contrary, it gets in your way. For that reason, in addition to the basin in which you cool your feet so as to clear your brain, I’m going to have you gagged. If our enemies don’t hang you first, as they have kindly promised, I myself will make you stare straight into the sun when the minute of your hour is at hand. At the moment that its rays char your pupils, you will receive the order to pull your tongue out between your teeth with your fingers. You will then give yourself a punch in the jaw. Your tongue will fall to the ground, writhing like the tail of an iguana that’s been chopped in half. It will transmit your last salutation to the earth. You will feel that you’ve been freed of a useless weight. You will think: I am mute. Which is a silent way of saying: I am not. Only then will you have attained a little wisdom.

  I am now going to dictate to you a circular addressed to my faithful satraps. I want them too to savor the promise that their merits deserve.

  To Commissioners, Commanders of Garrisons

  and of Urban Militia,

  Appointed Magistrates, Administrators,

  Overseers, Revenue Agents, Tax Collectors

  and other authorities:

  The copy of the infamous pasquinade enclosed herewith is yet another testimony to the mounting outrages that are being committed by the agents of subversion. It is not merely one more of the multitude of pamphlets, libels, and every manner of attack being launched anonymously almost every day for some time now, in the mistaken belief that age, bad health, ailments contracted in the service of the Fatherland have left me prostrated. It is not merely one more of the scandalous diatribes and invectives of these convulsionarles.

  Take careful note, firstly, of one fact: not only have they dared to threaten with an ignominious death all those of us who together bear the heavy burden of Government. They have now dared to commit an even more perfidious act: forging my signature. Imitating the tone of Supreme Decrees. What is their aim in so doing? To enhance the effect of this iniquitous farce among ignorant people.

  Second fact: The anonymous pasquinade was found nailed to the door of the cathedral, a place heretofore respected by the agents of subversion. Third fact: The threats contained in this decretorial mockery clearly establish a scale of punishments in accordance with the hierarchy of Government. You, who are my arms, my hands, my limbs, are offered death by hanging and burial in pastures outside the walls with neither cross nor mark commemorating your names. I, the head of the Supreme Government, am bidden to condemn myself to decapitation. Exhibition atop a pike for three days as the center of popular festivities in the Plaza. And finally, the casting of my ashes into the river as the culmination of the great patronal fiesta.

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  Of what am I accused by these anonymous scribblers? Of having given this people a free, independent, sovereign Fatherland? What is more important: of having given it the sense of a Fatherland? Of having defended this Fatherland since its birth against the attacks of its enemies within and without? Is that what I am accused of?

  Their blood boils at the thought that I founded, once and for all, the cause of our political regeneration on the system of the general will. Their blood boils at the thought that I have restored the power of the People, in the city, in the towns, in the villages; that I have continued that movement, the first truly revolutionary one to burst forth on these Continents, even before the one unfolding in the immense Fatherland of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, even before the French Revolution.

  It is necessary to reflect on these great events, of which you surely have no knowledge, in order to appreciate the far-reaching importance, justice, and perpetuity of our Cause.

  Almost all of you are servants of long standing. The majority of you, however, have not had time to study in depth these questions of our history, since all your time has necessarily been devoted to your duties. I have preferred you to be loyal functionaries rather than cultivated men. Capable of carrying out my commands. I am not concerned with the sort of capabilities a man possesses. I require only that he be capable. My most manly men are only men.

  Here in Paraguay, before the Perpetual Dictatorship, we had more than enough scriveners, doctors, cultivated men, but we did not have the cultivators of fields, the sowers and growers, the tillers of the soil we should have had and now have. Those cultivated cretins wanted to found the Areopagus of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. I put my foot down. They turned into penners of pasquins and pasquils. Those who were able to save their skins fled the country, disguised as blacks. Black slaves of the plantations of calumny. Once outside the country, they became worse still, renegades who regard Paraguay from a non-Paraguayan perspective. Those who did not manage to emigrate live in perpetual migration in the darkness of their lairs. Vainglorious, vicious, vice-ridden convulsionarles, these inept intellectuals have no place in our rural, peasant society. What meaning can their cerebral exploits have here? It is more useful to plant manioc or maize here than it is to stain paper with ink writing seditious libels; more fitting to pick pests off animals itching from the tick than to scratch pamphlets that are an outrage to the dignity of the Fatherland, the sovereignty of the Republic, the honor of the Government. The more cultivated they seek to be, the less they wish to be Paraguayans. Later on there will come those who pen more voluminous libels. They will call them History Books, novels, accounts of imaginary facts seasoned to suit the taste of the moment or their interests. Prophets of the past, they will recount in them their invented falsehoods, the story of what has not happened. Which would not be an altogether bad thing if their powers of imagination were at least passable. Historians and novelists will have their lies bound in leather and sell them at a handsome price. What interests them is not recounting the facts, but recounting that they are recounting them.

  For the present, posterity does not interest us. Posterity is not given as a gift to anyone. Someday it will come back looking for us. I bring into being only what I firmly command. I command only what is firmly within my power. But as Supreme Governor I am also your natural father. Your friend. Your companion. As someone who knows everything there is to know and more, I shall continue to instruct you as to what you must do in order to pursue your task. I shall give you orders, but also the knowledge that you lack as to the origin, the destiny of our Nation.

  There is always time to have more time.

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  When our Nation was still part of the colonies, or Kingdoms of the Indies as they were called in those days, a court official appointed to hear cases that came before the Audiencia of Charcas, the Oidor Fiscal José de Antequera y Castro, saw, on his arrival in Asunción, the millstone of misfortune that had been crushing Paraguay for more than two centuries. He didn’t mince words. The sovereignty of the Common Will is prior to any written law, the authority of the people is superior to that of the king himself, he declared in the Cabildo of Asunción. General stupefaction. Who is this young magistrate come down from the moon? Has the Audiencia become a lunatic asylum? We didn’t hear you very well, Señor Oidor.

  José de Antequera proceeded to stamp on the law, on the facts, in letters of fire, his decision as investigating magistrate: Peoples do not abdicate their sovereignty. The act of delegating it in no way implies that they will forbear to exercise it when governments impair the precepts of natural reason, the source of all laws. Only peoples who like oppression can be
oppressed. This people is not one of them. Its patience is not obedience. Nor can you hope, you high and mighty oppressors, that its patience will be eternal, like the bliss you promise it after death.

  The investigating magistrate did not come with the faith of the simple man who crosses himself with a sincere heart. He inquired, inspected, traced down everything. What he found revolted him. Absolutist corruption had in the end infested everything. The governors trafficked in their offices. The court allowed those who courted it to cut a wide swath, receiving in exchange their doubloons. Can I sell you the office of Perpetual Dictator? I see you hypocritically shaking your lowered heads. Well, Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda bought the government of Paraguay, for a handful of patacoons. With one kick of his foot Antequera expelled the crapulated Reyes, who went to complain to the viceroy of Buenos Aires. That’s how corrupt these Kingdoms of the Indies were.

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  The pack of oligarchs in the cities packed Indian meat into the encomiendas. An immense barracks of cassocks, that of the Jesuits. An empire within an empire, with more vassals than the king.

  In the caliphate founded by Irala, four hundred survivors from among those who had come in search of El Dorado found not the Resplendent City but the site of sites. Here. And they built a new Paradise of Mohammed in the Neolithic maize field. Cross out Neolithic. It’s a word that isn’t used yet. Thousands of copper-colored women, the most beautiful houris in the world, at their complete service and pleasure. The Koran and the Bible conjoined in the halfmoon of the indigenous hammock.

  Antequera’s war-cry roused the partisans of a communal system—the Comuneros—to rebellion against the royalist-absolutists. Blasphemies. Lamentations. Rogations. Cabals in the Cabildo. Conspiracies. Libels, satires, pamphlets, caricatures, pasquils rehearsed in those days what is happening now. The Jesuits accused Antequera of wanting to become king of Paraguay under the title of José I. A short time before they had wanted to monarchize their Communist empire by crowning the Indian Nicolás Yapuguay king of Paraguay and emperor of the mamelucos, under the name of Nicolás I. I beg your pardon, Sire, I didn’t hear that part about the kings of Paraguay very well. It isn’t that you don’t hear. There are times when you don’t understand what you’re listening to. Ask Pilar the black to tell you the story. The kings of Paraguay were only fables, like Aesop’s, Patiño. Pilar the black will tell them to you. Sire, as you are well aware, José María Pilar the black is no more. That is to say, he still is, but in his grave. It doesn’t matter; tell him to tell you those fables. That’s precisely what they’re for. To be told underground and listened to astride a grave. He already told it, Sire, though in a different way, in the Truth Chamber beneath the lash. I took it to be mere bravado on the part of your former hand page and ex valet de chambre. Words sung out of tune wrung out of him by the pain. The examining magistrate himself, Don Abdón Bejarano, told me not to set down that discordant note in the record. What did the infamous black say? He declared, swore, forswore, Sire, that he was being punished and was going to be executed simply because he had wanted to be king of Paraguay under the name of José I. He said that with a grinning face and an impish devil’s heart amid his snot and tears. He added other cheeky remarks that at Don Abdón’s order I didn’t note down in the record either. Disfortunate avowals by one accursed who discalculated. Madness of right reason. Haven’t you yet learned, court secretary, that madness bares more truths than voluntary confession? Isn’t it true that that clever liar tried to suborn you by offering you the office of confidential clerk in his black monarchy? Heavens, no, Sire! Isn’t it true that he promised to make you consul of his Baratarian island? If that had been the case, Sire, he would have had to make Bejarano one too, and the two of us would have had to have bats in our barratry to accept. We’d have been co-confools, not co-consuls. Like Pompey and Caesar, like Your Excellency and the infamous traitor to the Fatherland the ex brigadier Fulgencio Yegros, who has already met the fate he deserved beneath the orange tree, along with the other co-conspirators.

  Isn’t it true that you too dream of becoming king of Paraguay someday? That would be taking chalk for cheese, Sire! You yourself always say that that would be worthwhile only if the people and the sovereign were one and the same person; but for that a person doesn’t need to be a king, just a good Supreme Governor, as Your Excellency is. Yet you can see that ever since Independence, here as in the rest of America, the virus of monarchy has been floating about in the air, as much as or more so than the croup or the carbuncle that attacks cattle. Valets, confidential clerks, doctors, the military, men of the cloth. They’ve all caught a bad case of the itch to be kings.

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  Where were we? In the communal latrines, Sire. I see your mind is listening to your gut rumbling again. What I was asking you was where the last paragraph left off, you ass. I’ll read you, Sire: They accused Antequera of wanting to become king of Paraguay under the title of José I. No, no, no! That isn’t what I said at all. As usual, you’ve mixed up what I dictated. Write slowly. Don’t hurry. Pretend you have eight more days of your life left to live. Eight days could well be eighty years. There’s nothing like putting off solving problems as long as possible. Better still if you have only an hour left. Then that hour has the advantage of being at once brief and endless. If a person has one good hour he hasn’t had all bad ones. More gets done in that hour than in a century. The man condemned to death is fortunate; he at least has the certainty of knowing the exact hour of his death. When you’re in that situation you’ll know it. Your passion for hurrying stems from your belief that you’re always present at the present. He who proclaims himself his own contemporary is misinformed. Are you beginning to understand, Patiño? To tell you the whole truth, not much, Sire. As I write what you dictate to me I don’t grasp the meaning of the words. Occupied as I am in carefully forming the letters in the clearest and most uniform manner possible, what they say escapes me. Whenever I try to understand what I’m listening to, the line comes out all crooked. I misplace the words, the sentences. I write backwards. You, Sire, always go straight on. If I make the slightest slip, I fall into a panic, I freeze. Drops fall. Lagoons form on the paper. Then in all justice Your Grace loses his temper. It’s necessary to begin all over again. Whereas if I read the text once it’s signed by Your Excellency and sand has been sprinkled on the ink, it always seems clearer than day itself.

  Hand me the book by that Theatine, Father Lozano. Nothing better to bring out the truth of the facts than to compare them with the lies of the imagination. This other tonsured thimblerigger had a really treacherous one. José de Antequera’s most pertinacious calumniator. His History of the Revolutions of Paraguay, against the Comunero movement, against its leader. The latter was in no position to defend himself from such wicked trickery since he’d been murdered twice. Padre Pedro Lozano tried to assassinate him a third time by making a compilation of all the forgeries, frauds, and fakeries perpetrated against the Comunero leader. Just as anonymous pamphleteers are doing and will continue to do against me. One or another of those émigré scribble-scrabblers will doubtless take advantage of the impunity of distance and be so bold as to cynically affix his signature at the bottom of such clever chicaneries.

  Bring me the book. It isn’t here, Sire. You left it locked up in the Hospital Barracks. Well then, have them put it on bread and water, and give it a purge every day till it dies or flushes all its lies down the drain. Paí Lozano isn’t here, Sire. He never was, as far as I know. I asked you to get me the Revolutions of Paraguay. They’re in the Hospital Barracks, Sire. The History, you wretch! It’s in the Hospital, Sire, kept under lock and key in the cupboard. You left it there at the time of your confinement.

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  We’re still at the first crisis in the life of the Colony. A century ago now, José de Antequera comes our way, joins the fray, and there’s the devil to pay when he w
on’t surrender. The governor of Buenos Aires, the illustrious field marshal Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, invades Paraguay with a hundred thousand Indians from Misiones. Receding chin, curly hair, he places himself at the head of the repressive expedition. Five years of battles. Colossal butchery. History has not seen a bloodier struggle since the days of Fernando III, the Saint, and of Alfonso X, the Wise. With a delay of centuries, the Middle Ages arrives on the scene to wreak havoc on the forests, the men, the rights of the province of Paraguay.

  In the great brawl, everyone has his eye on the mighty solar wheel minted of solid gold, the size of a cartwheel. The Saracens of Buenos Aires, the fathers of the Jesuit empire, those Goths the Hispano-Creole land grantees decapitate, disembowel the rebellion. Antequera is taken to Lima. As is Juan de Mena, his principal adjutant in Asunción. As they are being led to the scaffold astride mules, they are killed by a volley from harquebuses before the mutinous populace can free them. To make certain that they are dead, their corpses are thrown on the platform of the scaffold and the executioner chops off their heads. The first two heads to roll for American independence. A historian’s vocal flourish. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I learned from that to trust the witness of no one’s eyes or ears, mine included. A hundred years in a day. A day before the century was out I closed the ring on that uprising by proclaiming in my turn in these colonies that Spanish power had reached its end. Not only the royal Bourbon rights. Likewise those usurped by the head of the viceroyalty, where monarchical despotism had been replaced by Creole despotism disguised as revolution. Which turned out to be twice as bad.