Yr. Grace, Magistrate of the First Vote, descendant of gentlemen of most ancient lineage and conquistadors of this Meridional America, as the reports on your genealogy read: of the men in this city the most conspicuous for your learning as for your zeal: you must know something about the prompters, the propagators of such absurd rumors. Tell me then, with all frankness, what you know about these specious stories. Looking him straight in the eye, I answered: If I didn’t know I’d tell you, you old Bourbonian. But since I know, I won’t tell you. That way we remain at peace. Nothing is changed. Neither delations nor delatations on this day of nothing and eve of much, for even though he who speaks is mad, he who listens should be sane. The ear-trumpet returned to the attack. As a worthy subject of our Sovereign you must do your part in maintaining order and harmony, public tranquillity in this province. Viceroy Cisneros has apprised me of the multitude of anonymous papers contrary to the cause of the King that are being sent from Buenos Aires to Asunción. A veritable deluge. I have ordered my adviser Somellera to investigate these subversive activities. May Yr. Grace in his capacity of Syndic-Procurator General help us.
The hint that he was dropping for me to become an informer rubbed my Eustachian tube the wrong way. I fell into a rage. I seized the ear-trumpet and stuck it in the governor’s hairy ear. Heaven turns a deaf ear to the braying of bald ass!, I thundered. The governor gave a self-satisfied laugh. He withdrew his hand from my belly where he had placed it, as though to press me to cough up secrets and to stimulate evacuation. He gave me a familiar pat on the back. I knew that Yr. Worship would understand. I had no doubt that your help would be of great importance to me, my learned friend. Continue to offer it to me in honor of our beloved Sovereign. He who seeks with faith always finds, I said just to be saying something. And he, not so much in answer to the proverb as to make himself master of the situation, spread his broad velvet wing: From this cape nobody escapes! The ear-trumpet fell to the floor and disappeared amid the crisscrossing cracks. For a good while the two of us crawled about underneath the table, butting horns, heads, backsides in a sort of tauromachy on all fours. Finally, debonair, devil-may-care Hero triumphantly lifted the dripping ear-trumpet out of the spittoon and handed it to his master with a sweeping veronica.
Thus ended my last private interview with Governor Velazco, who was already on the eve of being dumped into the lonely well of dismissal.
* * *
—
What’s that sound of a fanfare, Patiño? Your Excellency is returning from his afternoon outing. Hand me the spyglass. Throw the shutters wide open. Unfold all the tubes. Someone far in the distance is waving his arms. He’s calling, shouting for help. It must be that mosquito that’s stuck to the glass, Excellency. Clean it with the flannel cloth.
A sheet of quicksilver suddenly looms up. The bay, the port, the boats, thrown against the sky. The Ark of Paraguay in dry dock, almost ready to be launched. Who told you that the timbers were completely rotted? That is what the calkers, the shipwrights assured me, Sire; it’s been left out in the sun, the rain, droughts for twenty years now. You’re lying! The smell of hot tar, wafted this way on the north wind this very minute. The pounding of hammers. Tools ringing on the belly of the Ark. I am there directing the work, giving orders to my best shipfitters, Antonio Iturbe, Francisco Trujillo, the Italian Antonio de Lorenzo, the Indian craftsman Mateo Mboropí. I see the Ark, all red and blue. Its figurehead rends the clouds. It’s real now, definite! Third reconstruction of the Ark of Paraguay. Done over, brought back to life three times. Do you see it too, Patiño? Absolutely, Sire. Where do you see it? Where Your Excellency does. Perhaps you’re only trying to please me again, you base flatterer. If that were so, Excellency, the spyglass that Your Grace has before his eyes would be another base flatterer that shows you what doesn’t exist.
When I succeed in reestablishing free navigation, the Ark of Paraguay will carry the flag of the Republic to sea on its topmast. Holds filled to the brim with the country’s products. Look! It’s sliding down the ways! It’s afloat! It’s afloat, Sire! Repeat it with all your strength.
oooooaaaaaat, Siiiiiiire
I see the cannons on deck. When were they installed? The cannons are on the cliff, Sire; they’re the batteries defending the entrance to the port. But if the cannons aren’t on the bridge of the Ark, Patiño, then the Ark isn’t where it is either. No, Sire, the Ark is where Your Excellency sees it. Why has the sound of the work going on stopped all of a sudden? It was only the fanfare of the escort, Sire. That’s the trouble, my dear secretary. I hear a very great silence. Order the commandants of barracks that from tomorrow on all the bands are to play once more without stopping from sunup to sundown. Your order will be executed, Excellency.
At the top of the cliff, within reach, the orange tree of the firing squads. Dry, twisted branches, the trunk nothing but a crust of ringworm.
Who is that sentry at the riverbank who’s hung his carbine from one of the branches? That’s the rifle, Sire, that’s been stuck in the tree for a long time now. That idiot has hung his jacket, his shirt, his tie there to dry. What’s the meaning of this act of indiscipline? Have him arrested. Tell the officer of the guard to put him in jail for a month on bread and water. He ought to take better care of his uniform. I can’t manage to make that insouciant sentry out, Sire. I can’t make out his clothes. That doesn’t prove they haven’t turned into a bunch of rags. Perhaps, Sire, the sentry is dressed in nothing but his birthday clothes. Give the order anyway.
(In the private notebook)
On the other side of the little Kará-Kará river, washerwomen are beating clothes on the shore. Youngsters are bathing naked. One of them looks this way. He raises his arm. He points to Government House. One of the women, crossing herself, pushes him in the water with a fillip of her finger. The black takes a ducking. The women are standing there motionless. Those people aren’t fooled. They see me riding the bayard. They are not fooled. They know that this I is not the Supreme, whom they love-fear. Their love-fear lets them know it, while at the same time it obliges them not to know that they know it. Their fear is the only wisdom they have. To be nothing. To know nothing. Obscure sunflowers, their sorrow projects its shadow over the water. What do they know of cross-bones, of crosswords, of cross-bearing crusades. Volumes and volumes of ignorance and knowledge come out of their mouths in spirals of smoke. They are puffing immense cigars as they wield their paddles and scrub mountains of clothes white. They have laughed for months over the figurehead of the Ark that Mateo Mboropí carved in the form of a dog-viper head. If a headwind blows into the mouth, the painted monster barks with howls interrupted by fits of hoarse coughing. They laughed for years at that figure they didn’t understand, at that lament they understood even less. Until nothing was left of the figurehead but a piece of jawbone.
They haven’t laughed for a long time now. They know less than before. Their fear is greater. The washerwomen toss the name of a fantastic personage back and forth, from one shore to the other. Then they sing. Their songs reach me here. They come to spy, like the carrier pigeons I sent to the army. I am going, I say, to see. I am going, I say, to hear. One afternoon I went down to the river. I asked a washerwoman what she was laughing at. Her laughter turned to vast disbelief. She looked into my eyes, blinking in the face of the unknown, as though I myself had gone back to my childhood. What is the fish born of?, I ask her. Of a tiny spine that swims in the water, the woman says. What is the monkey born of?, I ask her. Of a coconut that flies through the air, she says. And the coconut tree then? The coconut tree is born of the fish, the monkey, and the coconut. What about us then? What are we born of? Of the man and the woman who took refuge in a very tall coconut tree during the Flood. That’s what the Paí in the church says, Sire. But my mother was a top, on account of how sarakí she was, and my father the string that wound the top. When the two of them stopped moving I was born. That’s what they say. But there’s no way of knowing
because the one who’s born doesn’t know he’s being born and the one who dies doesn’t know he’s dying. Well put, I said and went off, leaving her laughing behind my back.
Had I been able to go down to the river this afternoon, I would have asked the washerwomen if they too saw the great flock of blind birds fall at five in the afternoon a month ago, three days after the storm. I would have asked them if they heard those birds that came from the north scream. Whatever for? They know nothing, they saw nothing, they heard nothing.
I’m not listening to the fanfare now. In seventeen minutes He will enter through that door. Then I will no longer be able to go on writing in secret.
* * *
—
The death’s-head face watches me intently. It mimics my movements as I fight for breath. I dig my nails into my Adam’s apple, clutch my trachea pumping emptiness. The mummy-faced specter does the same. It coughs. Its rude laughter hits me inside the top of my skull. It will go on watching me even though I manage to pay no attention to it. To ignore it. To shrug my shoulders. It shrugs its shoulders. I close my eyes. It closes its eyes. I pretend it isn’t there. No; it hasn’t gone away. It is watching me. Destroy it by hurling the inkwell at it. I grab the inkwell. It grabs the inkwell. Worse still if I manage to get there first. The skeletal old man would be pinned to the spot, multiplied, dancing in all the fragments of the mirror, of the circle of glass clouded with sweat. It wheels around toward the window bars. I lose sight of it. Out of the corner of my eye I see that it sees me. Monsters. Chimerical beasts. Being not of this world. They live clandestinely inside one. Sometimes they come out, standing slightly apart the better to spy on us. The better to cast their spell over us.
* * *
—
What do you see in that mirror? Nothing in particular, Excellency. Take a good look. Well, Sire, if I must tell you what I see, the same thing as always. The portrait of Señor Napoleon on the left. What else? The portrait of your compadre Franklin on the right. What else? The table full of papers. What else? The clipped-off tip of the aerolith with the candlestick on top. Don’t you see my face? No, Sire; only the debt’s head. What debt’s head? I mean the death’s head that Your Excellency has always had on the table underneath the piece of red flannel. Turn around. Look at me. Raise your head, raise those creeping eyes. When are you going to learn to look at what’s right before your eyes? What do I look like to you? I always see Your Excellency in his dress uniform, his blue frock coat, his white cashmere breeches. Since he has just returned from his afternoon outing, he has on his cinnamon-colored riding pants, somewhat damp in the crotch from the horse’s sweat. Tricorne. Patent leather pumps with gold buckles…I never wore gold buckles or anything else made of gold. Begging your pardon, Excellency, but everyone saw you and described you as looking like that, in that attire. Don Juan Robertson, for example, painted that image of Your Eminence. That’s why I ordered you to burn the grotesque portrait painted by the Englishman in which he showed me in a very strange guise, a confused mixture of a monkey and a sulky girl, sucking on the immense sipper of a maté vessel that wasn’t at all Paraguayan: and worse still, against a background representing a Hindustani or Tibetan landscape that in no way resembled our open countryside. I burned that portrait with my own hands, Excellency, and in its place I put up again, at your order, the portrait of Señor Napoleon, whose majestative figure is so like your own. I burned the portrait painted by the Englishman, but the papers we confiscated from him still exist. In them too Your Grace’s likeness is portrayed. What likeness? The mien of our First Magistrate which the gringo comtemplated at the time of his first meeting with Your Worship on the farm at Ybyray. I turned round, the anglomane says word for word, and saw a gentleman dressed in black with a scarlet cape thrown over his shoulders. In one hand he was holding a maté-vessel of silver with a gold sipper of outsized dimensions, and in the other a cigar. He was carrying under his arm a book bound in cowhide with fittings of those same metals. A black youngster was standing waiting with folded arms alongside the gentleman. The face of the unknown…you see, Excellency, the gall of that gringo. Calling Your Mercy The Unknown! Go on, you knave, and kindly spare me your comments. The face of the unknown man was somber and his extremely piercing black eyes riveted themselves upon one with unswerving fixity. His jet-black hair combed back bared a proud forehead, and falling in natural curls round his shoulders, gave him an air at once dignified and imposing, a mixture of ferocity and kindliness; an air that drew one’s attention and commanded respect. I glimpsed large gold buckles on his shoes. I repeat that I never wore gold buckles on my shoes or anything made of gold on any part of my dress. Another foreigner, Excellency, Don Juan Rengo, also saw you dressed in this fashion when with his companion and colleague Don Marcelino Lonchán, they arrived in this city on July 30, 1819, four years after the expulsion of the anglomanes. A striking figure, that of the Supreme Dictator!, the Swiss surgeons write in Chapter VI, page 56 of their book: That day he was wearing his regulation costume, a blue jacket with gold braid, a mordoré cape over his shoulders, the uniform of a Spanish brigadier…I never wore the uniform of a Spanish brigadier! I would sooner have worn beggar’s rags. I myself designed the attire suitable for the Supreme Dictator. You are more than right, Excellency. Those outlandishers, the dirty Swiss and the devilish Anglers, were very ignorant men. They failed to realize that the uniform of our Supreme was a uniform supreme and unique in this world. They saw only the mordoré cape, the waistcoat, breeches and hose of white silk, the patent-leather pumps with great gold buckles…Poor devils! They see in the buckles of my shoes the insignia of my power. They can raise their sights no higher. They see in those buckles marvelous things: Mercury’s gold caduceus, Aladdin’s lamp. They could likewise paint me with the plumes of the Bird-that-never-alights, enveloped in the cape of the Maccabee, scratching the floor with the gold spurs of the Grand Vizier. Most assuredly, Most Excellent Sire! That is what those outlandishers saw. How do you see me, I’m asking you. I, Sire, see hanging from your shoulder the black cape with the bright-red lining…No, you clod. What’s hanging from my shoulder is my bathrobe for the slumber of eternity fallen to tatters, the ragged bathrobe that no longer hides the nakedness of my bones.
(In the private notebook)
The little black has floated back up to the surface, spitting out mouthfuls of water. He bares his gleaming white teeth to the air. Great racket among the flock of kids. The comadres go back to beating the clothes and gossiping among themselves. Identical, the little black and the slave José María Pilar. He was doubtless his same age when I bought him, along with the two old slaves, Santa and Ana. I paid much less for them in view of their advanced age and the running sores it brought on. The old women mended and are alive. They are faithful to me in life and death. Pilar the black, on the other hand, was unfaithful to me. I was obliged to send him to the orange tree to cure him of his ladronicidal ills. Gunpowder is always a good remedy for those whose ills are irremediable.
I, here, become a specter. Between black and white. Between grayness and nothingness, seeing myself double in the trickery of the mirror. Those who occupied themselves with the outward appearance of my person in order to revile me or exalt me never managed to agree on the description of my attire. Less still on that of my physical features. Not surprising, when I don’t even recognize myself in the half-breed specter looking at me! They were all held spellbound by the nonexistent gold buckles, which were just plain silver. The last pair I wore, before gout swelled my feet, I gave to the freed slave Macario, my godchild, son of my traitorous valet de chambre José María Pilar. The latter’s posthumous desire was that the child be baptized Macario. I placed him in the care of the slave women. He crawled about among the ashes. I gave him the buckles to play with. Macario disappeared as a child. Vanished. More completely than if the earth had swallowed him up. He disappeared in one of those ignoble cheap novels that migrant scribes publish abroad. Macario was abducted from re
ality, stripped of his good nature so as to turn him into another traitor in the unreality of the written word.
* * *
—
The sun goes down after one last explosion that sets the bay on fire. Black, the branches of the orange tree. I continue to see it through the screen of my hand. Its branches are indistinguishable from my phalanges. Sad thoughts have dried it up more quickly than my bones. Clever caricature. Stepmother-nature, more cunning than the most cunning pasquinaders. Your imagination does not need the instinct of imitation. Even when you imitate you create something new. Shut up in this hole, I can but copy you. In the open air, the orange tree imitates my bony hand. I have more than met my match; I am unable to transplant it to these folios and occupy its place on the cliff edge. The little black is making water against the trunk; perhaps he will contrive to revive it. All I can do is write; that is to say, deny what is alive. Kill what is dead even deader. I, orange-tree-squatting-on-my-haunches. Skimmed of my scum as I lie on my pallet. Soaked in my own sweats-urines. Plucked clean of all my feathers, my quill falls.
Standing in the doorway, full of eyes, HE is watching me. His gaze is projected in all directions. He claps his hands. One of the women slaves comes running. Bring something to drink, HE orders. Ana looks at me with the eyes of a blind woman. I have not spoken. HE says: Bring the Doctor a nice cold lemonade. Mocking voice. Powerful. Fills the room. Falls on my fever. Rains down inside me. Great drops of molten lead. I turn around in the shadow streaked by lightning. I see him go off, erect, amid the storm that parts in two as he passes. Outside, night is again extinguishing the blaze of late afternoon.
I the Supreme Page 13
