I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  * * *

  —

  When I dictate to you, the words have a meaning; when you write them, another. So that we speak two different languages. One feels more at home in the company of a familiar dog than in that of a man speaking a language unknown to us. False language is much less sociable than silence. Even my dog Sultan took the secret of what he said to the grave with him. What I beg of you, my dear Sancho Pauncho, is that you not try, when I dictate to you, to artificialize the nature of the matter being dealt with, but rather to naturalize the artificiality of words. You are my ex-cretive secretary. You write what I dictate to you as though you yourself were speaking in my place in secret on the paper. I want there to be something of myself in the words that you write. I am not dictating a quanticle of claptrap to you. Mere bibble-babble. Amusing stories as false as dicers’ oaths. One of those potboilers in which the writer flaunts the sacred nature of literature. Pretended high priests of letters make pretentious ceremonies of their works. In them, the characters spin fabrications out of reality or out of language. They appear to be celebrating their Mass vested in supreme authority, but in reality they are filled with turbation in the face of the figures emerging from their hands, which it is their belief that they create. Hence their office becomes a vice. Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another. The I manifests itself only through the He. I do not speak to myself. I listen to myself through Him. I am trapped in a tree. The tree cries out after its own fashion. Who can know that I am crying out inside of it? I therefore demand of you the most absolute silence, the most absolute secrecy. For the very reason that it is not possible to communicate anything to anyone who is outside the tree. That person will hear the cry of the tree. He will not hear the other cry. Mine. Do you understand? No? All the better.

  The trouble is, Patiño, that that more and more pronounced lisp of your bridled tongue is making things worse. You cover all my folios with z’s. Your waning power of speech is leaving them increasingly voiceless. Ah, Patiño, if your memory, ignorant of what has not yet happened, could discover that ears function like eyes, and eyes like the tongue, projecting images at a distance, as images send forth sounds and audible silence, we would have no need to resort to the slowness of speech. And still less to the clumsiness of writing, which has already set us back millions of years.

  Possessed of the same organs, men speak and animals do not. Do you find that reasonable? Hence it is not spoken language that differentiates man from the animal, but rather, the possibility of forging a language to suit his needs. Could you invent a language in which the sign is identical to the object? Even the most abstract and indeterminate of objects. The infinite. A perfume. A dream. The Absolute. Could you find a way for all of this to be transmitted at the speed of light? No; you can’t. We can’t. The reason why you are de trop and at the same time de moins in this world in which fast talkers and charlatans abound, whereas there is a cruel lack of honest individuals. Do you understand me? To tell the truth, not much, not altogether, Excellency. Or better put, absolutely nothing whatsoever, Sire, for which I beg your most excellent pardon. It doesn’t matter. That’s enough of this foolishness for now. Let’s begin at the beginning. Put your hoofs in the basin. Soak your solipedal bunions. Put the bucket of Alejandro the barber, the helmet of Mambrino or Minerva, anything you like, on your head. Listen. Pay attention. We are going to scrutinize together the secret of writing. I am going to teach you the difficult art of scriptuary science, which is not, as you believe, the art of tracing flowery figures but of deflowering signs.

  Try by yourself first. Grasp the pen firmly. Raise your eyes. Concentrate on the plaster bust of Robespierre and wait for it to speak. Write. The bust isn’t saying anything to me, Sire. Ask the engraving of Napoleon a question. Still not a word, Excellency. What reason could Señor Napoleon have to speak to me? Concentrate on the aerolith; maybe it will say something to you. Stones speak. The thing is, Sire, at this hour of the afternoon my brain is so numb I only half hear my own memory. And if you can imagine, I even feel as though my hand is going to sleep! Give it to me. I’m going to wind it up tight again. Midnight. The stroke of twelve and all is well. Beneath the white cone of the candle the one thing to be seen is our two hands, each atop the other. In order that your fading memory may rest in peace as I instill in you the magic power of specters, I shall guide your hand as though I were the one writing. Close your eyes. You have the pen in your hand. Close your mind to any other thought. Do you feel the weight of it? Yes, Excellency! It’s terribly heavy! It’s not only the pen, Excellency; it’s also your hand…a real block of iron. Don’t think of the hand. Think only about the pen. The pen is cold-sharp-pointed metal. The paper a hot-passive surface. Squeeze. Squeeze harder. I’m squeezing your hand. Pushing. Pressing. Oppressing. Compressing. Pressing down. The pressure melts our hands. They are but one at this moment. I squeeze hard. Back-and-forth motion. Unbroken rhythm. Stronger and stronger. Deeper and deeper. There is nothing but this movement. Nothing outside it. The iron of the point scores the paper. Right/left. Up/down. You are writing beginning to write five thousand years ago. The first signs. Designs. Cretinographic up-and-down strokes. Islands with tall trees enveloped in clouds of smoke, in mist. The horn of a bull attacking in a cave. Squeeze. Go on. Put all the weight of your being onto the point of the pen. All your strength into each movement of each stroke. Mount it, straddle it, ride it like a stradiot. No, no! Don’t dismount yet! I beg your pardon, Sire, I can’t see but I feel that very strange letters are coming out. Don’t think it strange. The strangest thing of all is what comes most naturally. You are writing. To write is to disconnect the power of words from oneself. To so charge that power of the word that it gradually detaches itself from oneself with everything that is one’s very own and becomes that of another. The totally alien. You have just drowsily written: I THE SUPREME. Sire…you’re forcing my hand! I’ve ordered you to think of nothing at all

  nothing

  forget your memory. To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real. The unreal lies only in the bad use of the power of words in the bad use of writing. I don’t understand, Sire…Never mind. The pressure is enormous but you almost don’t feel it you don’t feel it eh what is it that you feel

  I feel that I’m not feeling

  weight that unloads itself of its weight. The stroking motion of the pen is more and more rapid. It penetrates to the very bottom. I feel, Sire…I feel my body to-and-froing in a hammock…Sire…the paper has gotten away from me! It’s turned the other way around! Go on writing wrong side to then. Grip the pen hard. Squeeze it as hard as though the life you don’t yet have were contained in it. Go on writing

  I’m going ooooon

  the paper voluptuously allows its tiniest cracks to be penetrated. It absorbs, sucks up the ink of each rasp of the pen that rends it. Passional process. It leads to a complete fusion of the ink and the paper. The dusky color of the ink blends with the whiteness of the sheet of paper. The lubricious pair lubricate each other mutually. Male/female. The two of them form the beast with two backs. This is the beginning of the principle of mixture. Ah ah don’t moan, you, don’t pant. No, Sire…I’m not fucking. Yes you’re fucking. This is representation. Literature. Representation of writing as representation. Scene one.

  Scene two:

  An aerolith falls from the sky of writing. The ovule of the point makes its mark in the place where it has fallen, where it has buried itself. Sudden embryo. It sprouts beneath the crust. Very small, it overflows itself. It designates its nothingness at the same time that it emerges from it. It materializes the hole of the zero. From the hole of the zero there comes forth sin-zerity.

  Scene three:

  The point. The little point is present, here and now. Set down on the paper. At the mercy of its internal forces. Pregnant with things. They endeavor to procreate themselves in
the inner palpitation. They break through the shell. They come out cheeping. They settle down on the white crust of the paper.

  Epilogue:

  The point. Seed of new ova. The circumference of its infinitesimal circle is a perpetual angle. The forms ascend in regular order. From the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, that is to say terrestrial. The next is the perpetual angular. Then the spiral origin-measure of circular forms. Consequently it is called the perpetual-circular: Nature coiled in a perpetual-spiral. Wheels that never stop turning. Axes that never break. So too with writing. Symmetrical negation of nature.

  Origin of writing: the Point. Small unit. Just as the units of written or spoken language are in turn small languages. Compadre Lucretius said so long before all his godchildren: The principle of all things is that their insides are formed of smaller insides. Bone of smaller bones. Blood of little drops of blood reduced to a single one. Gold of particles of gold. The earth of little contracted grains of sand. Water of drops. Fire of sparks come together. Nature works on the scale of the minimal. Writing as well.

  In like manner Absolute Power is made up of small powers. I can do by way of others what those others cannot do by themselves. I can say to others what I am unable to say to myself. Others are lenses through which we read within our own minds. The Supreme is Supreme by nature. He never reminds us of any others save the image of the State, of the Nation, of the people of the Fatherland.

  Come, come, unsaddle yourself from your drowsiness. From here on write alone. Haven’t you often boasted of remembering the letters and even the shape of the periods sitting on the mountains of paperwork in the twenty or thirty thousand files of the archive? I don’t know if your memorative eye is deceiving you, if your lorified tongue is lying. What is certain is that in the letters that look most alike, in the periods that are apparently the roundest, there is always some difference that allows one to compare them, to verify this novelty that appears amid the foliage of similarities. It would take me thirty thousand nights plus another thirty thousand to teach you the different forms of periods. And even then we would only have started. The commas, the hyphens, the diaereses, the brackets, the dashes, the quotation marks, the parentheses that are most alike are also different beneath the semblance of similarity. The hand of one and the same person is very different when written at midnight and at midday. It never says the same thing even though a given word is the same.

  Do you know what distinguishes daytime handwriting from nighttime? In a nocturnal hand there is obstinacy with indulgence. The proximity of sleep files the angles smooth. The spirals sprawl out more. The resistance from left to right, weaker. Delirium, intimate friend of the nocturnal hand. The curves sway less. The sperm of the ink dries more slowly. The movements are divergent. The strokes droop more. They tend to distend.

  Daytime handwriting, on the contrary, is firm. Rapid. It spares itself useless pollutions. The movement is convergent. The strokes tend upward. An accompaniment of freely undulating curves. Above all in the flourish following the signature. Hard-fought battle between the poles of the perpetual-circle. The positive pressure is a continuous approaching-of-the-limit. The trace suddenly overflows. Floods its banks. Its obstinacy is more rigid. The resistance from right to left stronger. The loops, the double twists and bends, the doubling back, the duplicity more obdurate. It flies through the air with the greatest of ease. But in the diurnal hand as in the nocturnal the lone word is of no use except for what is useless. Of what use are pasquinades? The most shameful perversion of the use of writing! What’s the point in the spiderwork that pasquinaders weave? They write. Copy. Scribble. Cohabit with the wicked word. Plunge down the slope of wickedness. Sudden full stop. Death blow to their logorrhea. The avalanche of words meeting with a sudden quiet, the wordmongers with a sudden quietus. Not the full stop of a dot of black ink; the tiny black hole produced by a rifle cartridge in the breast of the enemies of the Fatherland is what counts. It admits of no reply. It rings out. The end. Finis.

  You now understand why my handwriting changes according to the compass points. According to my humors. According to the drift of the winds, of events. Above all when I must discover, search out, punish treason. Yes, Excellency! I now understand with total clarity your illuminating words. What I want you to understand with even greater clarity, my illuminated amanuensis, is your duty to discover the author of the anonymous document. Where is the pasquinade? It’s right there underneath your hand, Sire. Take it. Study it in the light of the calligraphic cosmography I have just taught you. You’ll be able to tell at exactly what hour of the day or night that paper was scribbled. Take the magnifying glass. Follow the trail of the trace. At your service, Excellency.

  (In the private notebook)

  Patiño sneezes, thinking not of the science of writing but of the roiling storms in his stomach.

  I am now certain that I recognize the handwriting of the anonymous squib. Written with the contorted strength of a twisted mind. The cathedral pasquinade is too overwrought in its brevity! The same words express different meanings, as suits the mood of the person uttering them. Nobody says “my civil and military servants” save to call attention to the fact that they are servants, although the blasted bastards serve no purpose whatsoever. Nobody orders his dead body to be decapitated save someone who wants it to be someone else’s. Nobody signs I THE SUPREME to as gross a travesty as this, save someone who suffers from absolute insupremacy. Impunity? I don’t know, I don’t know….Nonetheless, no possibility is to be rejected. Um. Ah. Aha! Take a good look. Nocturnal hand, surely. The waves get weaker toward the bottom. The curves meet at sharp angles; they’re trying to discharge their energy earthward. The resistance to the right is stronger. Centripetal strokes, shaky, closed to the point of muteness.

  In other days I used to perform an experiment in letromancy with my two white ravens. It always gave good results. Trace a circle on the ground with a radius equal to a man’s foot. Same radius as the disc of the sun on the line of the Western horizon. Divide it into twenty-four equal sections. Draw a letter of the alphabet on each one. Place a kernel of maize on each letter. I then had them bring Tiberius and Caligula. Quick pecks by Tiberius, gobbling down the kernels of the letters constituting the augury. Caligula, blind in one eye, the kernels of the letters prophesying the opposite. Between the two they always arrive at the right answer. One or the other, alternately. The two of them together sometimes. They hit on the right answer every time. Much more precise, the instinct of my vultures, than the science of haruspices! Fed on Paraguayan maize, my vulture-graphologists write their predictions within a circle of earth. Unlike Caesar’s crows, they do not need to write them in the heavens of the Roman Empire.

  (In the margin, written in red ink)

  N.B.! Reread the Contr’Un Part One: Prefaces on voluntary servitude. The first draft is probably somewhere in the Spirit of the Laws or The Prince. The thesis: The power of intelligence is limited to the understanding of that which is accessible to the senses. When it is necessary to reason, the people can only fumble about in darkness. Especially these sorcerer’s apprentices. They water their malice with the filthy spray of their sneezes. My clerk in the soul branch the most dangerous one of all. Capable of stealthily lacing my orangeades and lemonades with arsenic or some other toxic substance. I’m going to grant him a new privilege. Proof of supreme confidence: From today on, he will be the official taster of my beverages.