I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  Who can assure me that I am not at that moment in which to live is to wander about all alone? That instant at which, in fact, as my amanuensis has said, one dies and everything goes on without anything apparently having happened or changed. In the beginning I did not write; I only dictated. Then I forgot what I had dictated. Now I must dictate/write; note it down somewhere. That is the only way I have of proving that I still exist. But isn’t being buried in writing perhaps the most complete way of dying? No? Yes? Well then? No. A round no. Feeble will of senility. Old life burbling an old man’s thoughts. One writes when one can no longer act. Writing treacherous truths. Giving up the advantages of forgetting. Excavating the well that one is. Hauling up from the bottom what has been buried there for so long. Yes, but am I sure that I am hauling up what is or what isn’t? I don’t know, I don’t know. Doing in a titanic way what is insignificant is also a way of acting. Even if it’s in reverse. The only thing I’m certain of is that these Notes are addressed to no one. None of your made-up stories for the diversion of readers who pounce upon them like swarms of acridians. Nor Confessions (like compadre Jean-Jacques’), nor Intimate Memoirs (like those of illustrious whores or scholarly sodomites). This is a Balancing of Accounts. A plank stretched out over the edge of the abyss. My gouty leg drags itself out toward the end, to that point of balance at which plank, plank-walker, recounting and accounting, debts and debtors, facts and figures are swallowed up by the abyss. I salute you, welcome downward slope!

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  That idiot of a Patiño is always half-right. I didn’t receive La Andaluza. I granted her an audience but I did not receive her. Receive her, Your Grace, her associate Sarratea sends word to me. This celebrated lady trader is a charming person, who couldn’t be more devoted to you. She has a business proposal to make to Your Excellency that is certain to bring you lasting satisfaction, but one that can only be discussed in private because of the risks involved. Lying words of a Porteño, a liar like every other Porteño. He is trying to trick me by holding out the false promise of a huge contraband arms deal. He would have me believe that the shipment would include nothing less than all the arsenal stolen from Paraguay during the blockade of the river by pirates, plus the arms that the Paraguayan troops left behind when they went to defend Buenos Aires against invasion by the English. Even the cannons of the port, no less, and perhaps more besides.

  The burned smell of the plot could be sniffed from a long way off, even before there was any sign of smoke visible. At times I like to appear to be ingenuous. Is tomorrow so important that the celebrated lady trader cannot come today, since even yesterday would seem to have been a little on the late side, I sent word to the Porteño so as to pull the wool over his eyes. Immediately the green heron with white wings of twenty meters’ spread covered the seventy leagues from Villa del Pilar, where the boat had lain at anchor for two months awaiting my authorization. Gliding between the hills of Lambaré and Takumbú, it landed gently in the bay of the port, opposite Government House.

  The thin silhouette of the lady-captain at the helm first entered the study through the lens of the spyglass. She is there in the mirror with her back turned. Bulrush-body. Carbine-body. Long-barreled-musket-woman. Fingers tense on the trigger of will. It was then that I wrote, nihil in intellectu, that rhetorical exercise that I copy so as to punish myself twice over, by and for the shameful bad taste provoked by the fabulary visit of this real woman. Deianira brings me the tunic soaked in the blood of the river-centaur Nessos. Nessos: Neso: Seno: anagram for breast. Amphib(i)ological creatures, mythological ones. Do you all know how the story goes? You can find it in any portable dictionary of myths. If my own wasn’t devoured by the flames back then, you conscientious compiler-collector of ashes, consult pages 70 to 77; you’ll find a cross marked there: Hercules falls in love with Deianira, who is already promised to Aqueloos. He fights with the latter, who has taken the form of a serpent and then that of a bull. He tears off one of his horns, which will later be known as the Horn-of-Plenty. To lose one woman is always to find plenty more. Hercules, however, is led to perdition by his victory. He takes Deianira to the hill of Takumbú, which is really Tyrinth. Which is of no great importance, since in fables such as these certain names are no more real than others. The centaur Nessos now enters the scene. He knows the fordable sites of the river and offers to take Deianira across on his shoulders. But since all these masculo-feminine deities are treacherous, Nessos the river-centaur carries her off. Hercules shoots a poisoned arrow into the abductor. Realizing that he is dying, Nessos gives his tunic soaked in blood and poison to Deianira, who in turn gives it as a present to Hercules. Here things get very complicated. Raging passion, ruthless vengeance, rending grief. For what are fables made of save such trivial misfortunes? Clad in the tunic of Nessos, Hercules writhes in his death-agony. He still has enough strength left to fell great trees at the foot of the Cerro-Léon. He makes a pyramid, a pyre amid his wrath, to the measure of his rage. He orders Philoctetes, his Policarpo Patiño, to set fire to the tree trunks over which he has spread his lion’s skin, and lies down on it as though it were a bed, with his head resting on his club. The portable dictionary also says that Deianira killed herself in desperation. No; women, be they fabulary or not, do not kill themselves. They kill out of esperation. Between two moons they lose a lot of blood, but they don’t die.

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  Ah treacherous, clever, beautiful Deianira-Andaluza! Widow of that blunderer Goyeneche, emissary of the stupid Porteños. You’ve come safe into port! Do you think you’re going to strip me of my lion’s skin so that the fatal cloth will brush my body with its black magic of menstrual-menstrual blood? Keep your transparent present. They have bought your beauty, your boldness, my death by your hand for very little money, Amazon-of-the-river. Ah, if I could populate my country with women warriors like you, though without your traitorous nature, ones who would wage war on the enemy, the frontiers of Paraguay would extend to Asia Minor where dwelt the Amazons whom only Hercules could vanquish! But Hercules, a woman-chaser, was vanquished by women. I will not be tempted to lie with you.

  Since almost my earliest days I loved a deity whom I called Star-of-the-North. More than one velleity tried to take her place by assuming other forms to deceive me, but I was never fooled. One day in my youth I asked a spirit the question: Who is the Star-of-the-North? But spirits are mute. (In the margin): Except for Patiño, who believes he can talk with them, merely because I made the mistake of teaching him a few rudiments of occultism and judiciary astrology. They sufficed to make him take himself, with time, for a magus. Imago. Coleopter-butterfly. Grand-Sarcophage, he has painted skulls and phosphoreal tibias on his wings in darkest mourning…(margin torn). I copied the question, in Latin, on a piece of paper. My first pasquinade, neither slanderous nor amoral, but amored, enamored, bewitched, bedazzled. I placed the note under a stone, at the top of Takumbú. If only there had been a charlatan back then to answer that question!

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  In any event I needed that fantasy, regardless of whether or not arms-smuggling entered into it. Standing motionless in front of the table, she casts a curious eye on the papers, the little gun rack with fifty of the rifles that she has sold me on numerous occasions, not to mention Carlón*10 wine, flour, hardtack, hardware, ant-contraband that gets through the blockade of the river. She runs her hand over the meteor as she looks around out of the corner of her eye. A gentle caress of the jeopard-hawk of the cosmos. Chance-stone chained in a corner of the room giving off invisible light, a warning of minor hazards: this woman with the svelte body bare-ly trembling. She does not hide the clear intentions in the darkest corner of her mind. First-last of the Admirable Admiralasses to make an audacious attempt on my love-life. Welcome, captainess of La Paloma del Plata! Deianira-Andaluza, traffickress in arms, specious spices, lovers. Malicious gossips say that at the hour when the Mohammedan touches his fo
rehead to the ground in prayer, the entire crew of your boat, personally chosen by you, goes to bed with you, one at a time. The meteor strips you naked as you caress it. The habit of command, of copulation. You have brought no arms for my army. Nothing but your red rag. A lure for the blunderbuss shot you intend to fire point-blank at me the moment you see me appear in the door. You draw your hand back toward your waist. The Peruvian buttons of your blouse light up the slit. I take a step backward to let the sparkling gleam past. You turn your face toward the mirror looking for me/looking for yourself. You tuck in the bluish curl peeking out of your pirate turban. You are rounding the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. You lean over the sextant. You look for the rectilinear spherical coordinates; where, how to get a fix on the point that has flown off leaving you without a place in the space of the impossible; or worse still, leaving you adrift in that nonexistent space where you coexist with all possible species. A common place that blots out common sense, cancels out the very fact that you are here leaning over the sextant hoping I will receive you, searching for the right tack, the opportune moment to make me fall into the commonplace of a phrase in your stead. The easiest thing in the world; the most infallible way of making something disappear: people, animals, animate-inanimate objects. Allow me an aside between brackets: [In a drama of antiquity, I do not recall at the moment which one, there is a passage in which a conspirator-usurper is speaking with the men that he is about to send out to kill the king. The mercenaries claim that they are men, and he answers that they only go in the catalogue for men.] You are not a woman either; a specious specimen of your kind. An errant emissary of the feminine, tacking against the tide of the possible. You are no longer navigating the Paraguay River, nor cleaving the strait beneath the Magellanic Clouds. You are sailing behind things, unable to escape from a spaceless space. In contrast to the brightness of the Magellanic Nubeculae, the dark circles under your eyes have grown larger: Two coalsacks beneath the fire of your eyes rain soot down on your impersonal-person. At times they make you invisible. Ouf. No. I know that I am not writing what I want to. Let’s try another tack. You have entered a dark cavern that reaches to the very center of the earth. You begin, without a word, to move about in my silenciarium. You finger, you sniff, you inspect everything. You examine the tubes, caressing/sighing. Careful there! Don’t harbor false hopes, Deianira, Andaluza: Hercules has already flung himself into the flames, enveloped in the tunic. Don’t start measuring my trousers’ fly with my theodolite. That apparatus served me to rebuild the City that in three centuries your ancestors left more choked with filth than Augeas’ stables. I demarcated, disinfected the country by cutting off with a single stroke the seven heads of the Lernoses, which could not grow back double here. The one Double is the Supreme. But you do not understand the expression be-two. You sidle up to the telescope. You remove the guantilope scrotum. You peer through the lens: You see the Southern Cross, inverted; at the same time, the mete-or, from the reverse. The needle of the compass is riveted on the stone’s magnetic north. You raise the tube to its most inclined angle. If the coalsacks had not darkened the sky, you might have been able to glimpse the space, completely empty of stars, between Scorpio and Ophiucus: true hole through which our gaze can penetrate to the farthest corner of the Universe. On the table the seven watches pulse with a single beat that I synchronize each day as I wind them seventy times seven times. You are unable to cross that pulsing line, no matter how hard you push with your shoulder, with your shadow, against the spaceless space that contains you and all the other miserable species, female-phoenix of dampness. Memento homo. Nepento mulier. You feel pressed for time now. Useless for you to move the iron gnomon marking the hours on the sundial; on the face of the Acaz clock*11 the shadow moves backward. Gripping the tiller, elbow bowspritted, you advance toward the table, turning into the wind which fills the edges around the door behind which I observe you. Your breathing makes the pennants flutter, your breasts quiver rhythmically, the waves of papers stir. You pick up Sarratea’s letter. You toss it into the wastebasket. You shake your head to free yourself from distraction. You are under orders to kill me and you are diverting me: writing-describing what cannot happen, stubborn errand-runner, boatman of justice. Hurry up! Ah, yes, all right. You have finally decided on an end that will have no beginning. You carelessly scrawl a few words. Aha! You write first and act afterwards. You gather the ashes together first and then light the fire; well, everyone has his own way of going about things. You straighten up. You face the door. You plunge your hand amid the blouse folds. So violently that a little button pops out. It rolls along the floor and under the door, landing alongside my shoes. I pick it up. It is warm. I put it in my pocket…(torn). You remove something from your bosom. Throw. Something bounces off the planisphere, between the constellations of the Altar and the Royal Peacock. The air in the study grows stifling. Acid odor of a musk cat. The unmistakable, immemorial odor of woman. Carnal smell of sex. Lustful, sensual, lubricious, libidinous, salacious, voluptuous, dishonest, shameless, lascivious, fornicatory. Its effluvia expand, fill the room. Penetrate the smallest interstices. Make the heaviest objects sway to and fro as on a tide. The furniture, the arms. Even the meteorite seems to float and bob in the terrible stench. It must be invading the entire city. I am paralyzed with nausea. Retching, on the point of vomiting. With a supreme effort, I contain myself. It is not merely that I smell this female odor, that I have suddenly remembered it. I see it. Fiercer than a phantom that attacks us in broad daylight, leaping back and forth, to the end of those first days, burned up, forgotten, in the brothels of the Lower Town. The smell is here now. Female-Samson, she has embraced the pillars of my temperate temple. She coils her thousands of arms round the wooden columns of my unimpregnable eremitorium-erectorium. Trying to topple it. She looks at me blindly, sniffs at me, invisible. Trying to topple me. Sultan enters. Goes over to La Andaluza. Begins to sniff her from the heelbones up. The backs of her knees, her lupanarian crotch, the curve of her buttocks. The old sans-culotte dog also hangs back. He who shatters members, Desire, age-old desire flashes in his gummy eyes. He whines a little, on the verge of capitulation. But a moment later he withdraws his muzzle from those soft valleys. Lips dripping with frothy spittle. He hurls crude insults at her: “Treacherous woman! May you die of man-hunger! May you have no other roof than the firmament. No other bed than the deck of your boat. May you live amid perpetual alarms even though you bring us no more arms. May the head of your dead husband press against your thighs, a chastity chinstrap to bridle your fatal female furor. Out of here! Away with you, whore!” Eh, eh, eh. What’s all that, Sultan? What’s the meaning of this uncivil language of a Carbonarist dog? That’s no way to treat ladies! Is that all that’s to be expected of you, you cantankerous, misogynous old dog! Sultan hangs his head and goes off growling insults not to be repeated. Let’s not overdo the note of lewd vulgarity here. I tend to repeat myself in this sort of excess as well. Somewhat deliberately, I expect. I exaggerate minutiae. Words are dirty by nature. Filth, excrementicity, base and ignoble thoughts exist in the mind of terati, of literati; not in words that are speakable. I apply the strategy of repetition to these notes. I have told myself: The only thing that cancels itself out is what is endlessly repeated down to the last detail. Besides, what a bunch of shit! I do and write whatever I please and however I please, since I’m writing only for myself. Why all this mirror business, all these stiff, starchy hieroglyphic texts then? Literatology of antiphonies and counterantiphonies. Of front sides and backsides. Copulation of male and female metaphors. By the horns of my crescent cock, Sultan was quite right to throw out La Andaluza, that whore!

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  In reality, I could throw out the whole of this little romantic interlude. In any event, I shall revise and correct it, working my way backwards. What is true and certain is that Deianira the Andalusian took off in a gust of wind. Breath of air-blot-woman swiftly disappearing; slowly turning back into La Anda
luza-the-reed, followed by the eyes of Pilar the black. My valet de chambre, the indiscreet rascal, has also been spying on the scene from behind another door opened just a crack. Paler than a dead man, if the mortal pallor of a black is discernible. Vastly upset, my hand page has drifted off like a puff of smoke in the direction of the kitchen. He returns in a few moments with the maté. Water boiled for two hours, I notice at the first sip from the gourd. Did you see a woman leave the study? No, Master. I saw no one enter or leave. I’ve been in the kitchen all this time, preparing the maté, awaiting your orders. Go ask the guard on duty. He’s back already. That scrofula can pass through several different places at the same time. Sire, none of the guards or sentinels has seen a woman enter or leave Government House while Your Grace was busy working till just a moment ago.

  The rough draft of the romance in which I wish to call to mind what happened continues as follows: I fished about for the button in my pockets; all I found was an old clipped silver coin worth half a real. I went into the study. On the table the paper the woman has written on is waiting for me. In big letters, the note sings out: REGARDS FROM THE STAR-OF-THE-NORTH! I rush over to the window with the spyglass; I peer at every last corner of the port. Not a single trace of the green boat on the sheet of quicksilver of the bay. Between the Ark of Paraguay, under construction for more than twenty years, the great river rafts and other craft rotting in the sun, nothing but trembling reflections from the water. The note on the table has also disappeared. Perhaps I crumpled it up in a rage and threw it into the wastebasket. Perhaps, perhaps. How do I know? I find in its place, between two dossiers and the constellations, a fossil amaranth flower; so it is possible to go on writing something or other, for example: flower-symbol of immortality. Like stones tossed at random, idiotic phrases don’t go back to where they came from. They emerge from the abyss of non-expression and know no peace till they have hurled us into it, whereupon they remain mistresses of a cadaverous reality. I know those little pebble-phrases on the order of: Nothing is more real than nothingness; or, Memory, stomach of the soul; or, I scorn this dust that I am made of and that speaks to you. They appear to be harmless. But once they are sent rolling down the slope of written words they can infest an entire language. Make it so ill it becomes absolutely mute. Leave speakers without a tongue. Make them crawl about on all fours again. Petrify them within the limit marking the most extreme degradation, a bourn from which there is no return. Monolith of vague human shape. Sown on stony ground. Hieroglyphs themselves. The stones of Tevegó. Those stones!