The Catalo-Gaul was of the same race as these talking-crocks. He came to my room every siesta, summer and winter, the only two seasons in Paraguay. Here he is now. Take off his shackles. The creaking of the chains made him self-absorbed, tense. He didn’t begin immediately, as though it cost him an effort to unhandcuff his tongue. Come on, talk, sing, tell a story! Let’s see if I can get to sleep, if you can put me to sleep. He came out with a murmur first; a certain very soft twang, half-closing his slate-green eyes. He generally started the session with one of the marquis’s lascivious deliria. Ordeals of a he-goat. The faunesque satyr attacks the sex of the universe. But the din of his battering-ram, the clamor of his orgasm, is no louder than the buzzing of a fly. The incommensurable fury of lust groans, cries out, insults, implores the barren divinities, in a fly’s voice. Rage of exhaustion. It appears to fill the heavens and fits in the palm of one hand. The tremendous volcano does not pour forth a single drop of its burning lava. The sails of dreams lie limp, without the breath of a breeze to swell them. Enough!
The prisoner changes theme, voice, intentions. Vast repertory. Encyclopedia of rapes, hyperbolic obscenities. He knows by heart not only these endless, mendacious, vain, profane stories, full of bad habits and vices, written by the marquis. Composed, moreover, with greater force than Holy Scripture as regards the signs, albeit weak and imponent as regards their object; so that they engender yet more avidity through the simulacrum of satiety. What is it that this turgid sodomite, this saturnal uranist is searching for? A she-God in whom to surfeit his sterile desperation? There was once, here in Paraguay, a mulatta named Erótida Blanco, belonging to the Blanco Encalada y Balmaceda de Ruy Díaz de Guzmán family. Capable of satisfying a whole regiment. Napoleon’s entire army perhaps; the infernal marquis in the Bastille. Certainly not! Erótida Blanco needed a virgin forest, a cordillera, so as to copulate with a thousand, with a hundred thousand shaggy fauns at once. Enough of these profanities!
In the cells of his memory, fortunately, other voices, other stories are stored away. The palato-nasal voice began to hum the dirges of the Genevan: Man, Great Man, Supreme Man, lock up your existence within you! Remain in the place that nature assigned you in the chain of beings, and nothing can force you out of it. Do not rebel against the goad of necessity. Your power and your freedom extend as far as your natural forces. No farther. Whatever you do, your real authority will never surpass your real powers. The voice of the French-Catalan is beginning more and more to resemble that of the Genevan. Long-drawn-out r’s in the philosophical tirades of the Contract, in the pedagogical harangues of the Emile. Nasals, panting-confidential in the prurient Confessions. Through the voice of Andreu-Legard, I see in compadre Rousseau an elderly child, a female male. Wasn’t it he himself who spoke of a dwarf with two voices?: one, artificial, an old man’s bass voice; the other piping, childlike. For that reason the dwarf always received visitors in his bed, so that they would not discover his double dolus, which is what I am doing at present underground.
* * *
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I suffered a great deal, Excellency, before and after the Ninth of Thermidor, which corresponds to your Twenty-seventh of July; or perhaps to your inconsolable Twentieth of September, when everything comes to a stop round about Your Excellency. That is by no means the end of Francia however. History does not end on September 20, 1840. It might be said, rather, to begin there.
In France the Directorate is established on October 27, 1795. In 1797, Napoleon triumphs at Rivoli. The Second Directorate begins. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. I get out, or am gotten out, of prison. I enroll as a private in the army of the Great Corsican. Palm trees are outlined against the skies of Egypt. Here too, against the burning blue Paraguayan sky. The great serpent of the Nile crawls at the feet of the pyramids. Here, the River-of-Crowns, at the foot of your chamber, Excellency. You’re not getting me to sleep, Legard. What do you want me to tell you? I’ve been hearing the same thing from you for ten years now. Your broken old man’s voice doesn’t make you any younger. Let’s see. Have a try with the cornucopia. Charles Legard clears his throat, tunes up his voice. To a rhythm of a habanera, such as are traditional in Bali, in Tanga-Nika, in the Spice Islands, he begins humming the Republican Calendar. Only then do I begin to grow a bit drowsy beneath a rain of garden produce, flowers, green vegetables, fruits of every sort, golden oranges, melodious melons, melonious melodies, seeds without equal, marvels of harvests. All the phases of the year, the months, the weeks, the days, the hours. All of nature with its genesic, elemental forces. The humanity of work and the work of sans-culotted humanity. Animals, stallions, mineral substances, asses and mares, horses and cows, winds and clouds, he-mules and she-mules, fire and birds, their fertilizing excrement, germinations, floreal, fructidoral, messidoral, prairial harvests descend upon me, like a fresh dew, from this horn of plenty fashioned by Fabre d’Églantine. The Festival of Virtue began to make me drop off to sleep on the seventeenth of September, a drowsy half-sleep that the Festival of Genius abruptly interrupted on the eighteenth. I sensed that I snored a bit during the Festival of Work, on the nineteenth. The Festival of Judgment, which coincided with my death or perhaps provoked it on the twentieth of September, roused me from my slumbers on the twenty-first, for the Festival of Recompense.
I can’t offer you yours, Charles Legard. You sang badly. You didn’t get the best out of the Horn. Perhaps the resonances of your solos have scratched it, cracked it, ruined it, betrayed it. When I am about to drop off to sleep the tip of the horn tears the membrane of sleep. I open my eyes. I observe you. Your finger gesticulates to the sound of the barbarous strains of hunters, not of tillers of the soil. I sit up. I chase you out. Do you wish to leave the country? You have twenty-four hours to do so. If you are one minute late, only part of you will make the journey. Your head will be placed on a pike in the Plaza de Marte as a lesson to those who allow themselves to make mock of the Supreme Government and do their work badly. Your memory has been the end of you, Charles Andreu-Legard. Your good memory. Your terrible memory. Goodbye and good luck!
He left with the Rengger and Longchamp pair, along with other foolhardy Frenchmen I was keeping on tap in my prison cells. I let them go because I was tired of them; they could pipe their horns elsewhere. In my time outside of time, the Republican Calendar of France was no longer of any use to me. I let the Catalan-Frenchman go without regrets. I never had any further definitive news of this errant adventurer. Vague reports reached me that he went on the rocks in La Bajada; others, that he is teaching Guaraní in a University in France.
* * *
—
The story of the libertine marquis of the Bastille, later transferred to Charenton Asylum, the story of his stories as told by Legard, calls to mind that of another degenerate of sad renown: the laughable Marquis de Guarany. Yet another proof of the outrageous falsehoods, wicked tricks, and diabolical machinations that Europeans and Spaniards employ to deceive, to conceal their frauds, and attempt to diminish the dignity of these peoples, the majesty of this Republic. It was in that spirit that they thought up the monstrous, or rather the ridiculous hoax of the bogus Marquis de Guarany. It is a well-known fact in Europe and America that this Hispano-European adventurer, on turning up in Spain, passed himself off as an envoy sent by this Government to the monarch of that country. The imagination lacks the instinct of imitation, whereas the imitator totally lacks the instinct of imagination. Hence the fiction and the gross lie of the impostor were soon discovered. An authority no less than the Tribunal of Magistrates of the Bourbonic court found itself obliged to pass a death sentence against this insolent trickster, which in the end was to be carried out only if he attempted to escape from the exile to which he was condemned.
Great was the damage done, however, by this cunning adventurer, to the discredit of the name of this country and the prestige of its Government. This Catalan scoundrel, who had lived in South America but never set foot in this count
ry, claimed that his name was José Agustín Fort Yegros Cabot de Zuñiga Saavedra. Adorned with this glittering array of genteel names (the entire list of the illustrious founders of our fatherland!), he made his theatrical appearance at the Bourbonic court. He claimed he possessed an immense fortune and had donated more than two hundred thousand gold pesos to the Government of Paraguay. He arrived early in 1825, at the time when Simón Bolívar was still planning to attack Paraguay, believing that this other adventurer’s scheme was also going to succeed. They had both been doomed to failure from the beginning of time. They did not know this.
From Badajoz he sent word to the court announcing that he was the bearer of a supposed commission from this Government, so important that if he were given the means he could ensure the Mother Country of the recovery of her former colonies. He demanded to deal directly with the king. The pretended powers with which he was invested allowed him, so the impostor affirmed, to stipulate in my name the following conditions: (1) Establishment in Paraguay of a government representing Spain; (2) Approval of the perfected Jesuit system holding sway (cursed wretches!) in this country already sufficiently exploited by more than a century of rule by cassocks; (3) That he, as supreme representative of the Perpetual Dictator, in his capacity as eldest-born of the House of Guarany and colonel of the Voluntary Legion of Paraguay, be placed at the head of the monarchical government of Spain with the title of viceroy; and (4) That if the king accepted these conditions, he would hand over to him twelve million duros from the public treasury of Paraguay.
Among the fictitious documents the scoundrel presented were the Declaration of Independence of Paraguay, and his appointment as supreme representative and ambassador, bearing my forged signature beneath the escutcheon with a fleur-de-lys, the Bourbonic emblem, rather than that with the palm, the olive, and the star which are those of the Republic. He cleverly saw to it that his retinue included a Yegros and a certain Brother Botelho, an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Proto-Medicine of Paraguay whom the rascal proposed as chargé d’affaires. It was all a tissue of falsehoods and falsifications. Still not satisfied even with all that, he claimed into the bargain that I had been thrown out of the Government by the Legion he commanded and been sent into exile, rowing a boat in perpetuity up and down the marshlands of Villa del Pilar de Ñeembukú.
When his villainy was discovered, the president of the Tribunal of Magistrates of Madrid decreed that he be given two hundred lashes and paraded through the streets on a donkey. The king, taken in by this farceur yet still hoping for some unforeseen turn of the cards, commuted his sentence to ten years in prison. Then another New World scoundrel, Pazos Kanki, took it upon himself to spread the story of the Spaniard’s bold trick that hadn’t come off. The more idiotic stories are, the more readily they are believed. The legend of the Marquis de Guarany spread throughout Europe. It crossed over to the New World. There are people who still believe it and write about it. Idiocy has no limits, above all when it goes stumbling about through the narrow corridors of the human mind.
(Perpetual circular)
The pasquinaders consider it beneath my dignity to watch tirelessly as I do over the dignity of the Republic in order to safeguard it against those eager to wreak its downfall. Foreign states. Rapacious governments, insatiable grabbers of what belongs to others. Their perfidy and bad faith have long been well known to me. It matters not whether they call themselves the Empire of Portugal or of Brazil, with their marauding hordes of mamelucos, of bands of Paulista bandeirantes whom I contained and prevented from continuing their banditing brigandage in the territories of the Fatherland. Certain of you were witnesses, you will remember, you will doubtless have heard, how the invaders struck like lightning, burning down towns, robbing people, stealing cattle. Thousands of natives were carried off as prisoners. Concerning the relations of our Republic with the Empire; concerning its underhanded machinations, snares, ruses, and wicked deeds, before and after our Independence, I will instruct you in greater detail as I return periodically to this circular.
The Pantagruelian empire of insatiable voracity dreams of devouring Paraguay as if it were a tender lamb. It will swallow up the entire Continent some day if we don’t watch out. It has already robbed us of thousands of square leagues of territory, the headwaters of our rivers, the falls of our streams, the heights of our sierras lopped off with the jagged saw of boundary treaties. Thus were kings and viceroys of Spain gulled by bad governors whose women led them around by their trousers fly and whose deals both over and under the table led them around by their pursestrings. The empire of the slave-trading bandeiras invented the system of boundary markers that slither about from place to place like an immense writhing boa.
Another scapegrace-scapegoat enemy: the Banda Oriental.*1 Its bands of outlaws were the ones who helped make the shipping blockade even tighter. I have one of its principal corporals here, in safe keeping. José Gervasio Artigas, who insisted on being called the Protector of Free Peoples, threatened each day to invade Paraguay. To bring it down in fire and blood. To carry off my head at the end of a pike. When Artigas, betrayed in his turn by his lieutenant Ramírez, who rose up against him with his troops and his money, had lost everything, even the clothes on his back, he sought refuge in Paraguay. My alternative extortioner, my sworn enemy, the promoter of conspiracies against my government had the audacity to beg me for asylum. I accorded him humanitarian treatment. In a situation such as mine, the most magnanimous of governors would have turned a deaf ear to the pleas of this barbarian whose merits were such that he deserved not compassion but chastisement. I burst with generosity. Not only did I admit him and the remainder of his men. I also spent, with a liberal hand, hundreds of pesos to help him, maintain him, clothe him, for he arrived naked, with no other garment or equipment save a red coat and an empty knapsack. None of the miserable, addle-brained rebels who had placed their greatest hopes of advantages and advancements in him offered him the least charity. I gave him what he requested of me in the letter he wrote me from the gateway of San Miguel, already inside our borders.
Artigas’s letter was sincere.*2 He was not lying when he spoke of the war against Spaniards, Brazilian-Portuguese, and Porteños. I did not fail to take this into account. If deviations in the defense of a just cause condemn many, the principles, the visionary aims of that cause contribute to redeeming, if only partially, the errant whose errors do not stem from arrogance. Plunged headlong into such anguish, such workings of fate, Artigas was a sobering example for the dupes, the rebels, those souls whose depraved ambition was to subjugate Paraguayans and impose their laws on them, to wrest away their riches, and finally to take enslaved people into their service and their manufactories, so as then to laugh at Paraguay and make scornful mock of Paraguayans from the lofty heights of their pride.
I sent a detachment of twenty hussars under the command of an officer to meet Artigas. I granted him humanitarian, Christian treatment, in the true sense of the word. Granting exile to a leader in the depths of misfortune who has offered his surrender is an act not only of humanity but also one honoring the Republic. I had lodgings made ready for him in the convent of La Merced and ordered that he engage in spiritual exercises and make confession each day. I respect the opinion of others, and even though it is quite true that priests are good for next to nothing, they can at least serve to sound the sinful cares that weigh on foreigners’ souls. I then granted the Oriental leader the plot of woodland he asked me for in order to go on living: not a laurel wood but one of the best plots of public land, in Villa del Kuruguaty, on which to build his house and lay out his farm, far out of his enemies’ reach.
Artigas’s treacherous and perfidious lieutenant insistently demanded that I hand him over to be publicly tried by the federated provinces on the charges that should rightfully be brought against him, the cynical brigand wrote me, seeing in Artigas the cause and origin of all the ills of South America. As I did not answer any of his notes, he threatened to
invade Paraguay if I didn’t turn his ex leader over to him. Very well then, I said, let the Supreme Savage of Entre Ríos come. He never made it. His head ended up in the cage that fate had readied for him.
Eighty leagues north of Asunción, entirely unaware of the dangers he is running, the ex Supreme Protector of the Banda Oriental works the earth that he swore to turn into untilled soil, a heap of ruins. Just look at him watering it with the sweat of his brow, rather than with the blood of its inhabitants. Today he fervently assures me of his eternal gratitude and loyalty. He praises me as the best and most just of men. The opposite of that most perverse bunch of Porteño leaders, the Rivadavias, the Alveare, the Puigrredones.
The Hydra of the Plata is in fact the only one still stubbornly bent on taking over Paraguay. Destroying it, mutilating it, cutting it off, since it has not succeeded in annexing it to the group of poor provinces being squeezed to death in its tentacles.
Period for today. It will take those saphead satraps months to read the installments of the circular if they’re crammed too full of facts. They’ll have an excuse now to abandon their assigned tasks altogether and devote all their time to working corks out of bottle necks.
*1 The Eastern Shore (of the Uruguay River). Long a bone of contention of the powers in the Plata region, it finally achieved its independence as the Republic of Uruguay.
*2 “Disillusioned by the defections and acts of ingratitude of which I have been the victim, I ask you only for a wildwood where I may live. I will thus count among my laurels my having been wise enough to choose for my safe refuge the best and finest part of this Continent, the First Republic of the South, Paraguay. An ambition identical to your own, Most Excellent Sire, that of forging the independence of my country, was the cause that led me to rebel, to endure bloody battles against Spanish power, and then against Portuguese and Porteños endeavoring to subject us to a more iniquitous slavery still. A battle without respite that has cost many a long year of hardships and sacrifices. Despite everything, I would have continued to defend my patriotic aims had the seeds of anarchy not fallen on the hearts of the men under my command. They betrayed me because I refused to sell the rich patrimony of my countrymen at a sacrifice price.” (Letter from General Artigas to El Supremo, seeking asylum, September, 1820.)
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