Ana enters with the glass of lemonade.
* Derived from payé, the priest and sorcerer of the ancient Guaranís: those who undo evil spells.
(Perpetual Circular)
In July of 1810 Governor Velazco readies himself to fire off his last cartridge of time. He will graze no more; the government is fresh out of greenery, of specie. A severe drought of dinars. The ruminants of the Cabildo advise him to convoke a congress in order to decide the fate of the province. In Buenos Aires Viceroy Cisneros has been overthrown by a junta of Creole patricians. Don Bernardo already sees himself meeting the same fate amid the deplorable ferment. He hurriedly takes refuge on a warship. He discovers that the gunboat has no guns. The river has run dry. He returns to the palace and calls together the members of the clergy, military leaders, magistrates, corporations, literary types, deeprooted-uprooted citydwellers. Naturally that “immense beast,” the plebs, is not admitted to the council. The conclave does not meet in the House of Government but in the obiscopal palace. A most notable circumstance that gives rise to notorious gossip. The bishop Pedro García Panés y Llorente has just arrived from the court of Joseph Napoleon. It is widely noted that he has indigestion from the surfeit of “specious rumors” that the governor has set before him as a welcome. The prelate has brought his own extravagant rumors from the other side of the pond. Moreover, the foxes of the First Junta in Buenos Aires have sent as the nuncio of the new system the oldest and most hated man in the province, the Paraguayan colonel of militias Espínola y Peña, who claims to have received orders to relieve the governor. A brilliant way of gaining adepts! And what a bad deal Revolution is for Paraguayans if it is going to consist of replacing Velazco with Espínola! The very image and likeness of what was to happen later.
Under these auspices the two hundred notables unite in the obispal hornet’s nest. Unwittingly, those grotesque puppets constituted the inaugural assembly of the Fatherland: bad sometimes brings good in its train. Rebellion was already leavening the dough about to be put in the oven; but not there, obviously. So if it please you, beloved fellow citizens, the Spanish spokesman for the governor without a voice and soon to be without a vote proclaims, let us recognize the Supreme Crown Regency Council here and now by acclamation, and meanwhile maintain fraternal relations with Buenos Ayres and other provinces of the Viceroyalty. But since the neighboring Empire of Portugal-Brazil is just waiting for the moment to swallow up this precious and prized province, the Saracen counselor adds, and has its troops on the shores of the Uruguay River, it behooves us to raise an army to defend ourselves. Let us show what we are and must be, avoiding being subjugated by anyone who is not our legitimate Sovereign. This was the argumentum Aquiles of the partisans of the Spaniards in that emergency, Julio César writes in his Commentaries.
Nequáquam!, I said: The Spanish government has seen its day on the Continent. The governor-intendant’s ear-trumpet squealed; the terrified rats of the congress squealed. The bishop latinized his mitral stupefaction. Leaning on his crosier, he pointed his pectoral cross at me with a trembling hand: Our Sovereign Monarch is still the Sovereign of the Spains and the Indies, including all its Islands and Terra Firma! Great hubbub of debarkation. I gave a sharp slap of my hand to quiet it down. Here in Paraguay, we’ve stowed the monarch in the ark!, I shouted. Here in Paraguay Terra Firma is the firm will of the people to make its land free, from this day forward and forever! The one question to decide is how we Paraguayans are to defend our sovereignty and independence against Spain, against Lima, against Buenos Aires, against Brazil, against any foreign power that attempts to subjugate us. On what authority are these rebellious pronouncements by the Syndic-Procurator General based?, an old country-rat squealed. I drew my two pistols. Here are my arguments: One against Fernando VII. Another against Buenos Aires. With my finger on the trigger I ordered the governor to call for a vote on my motion. He thought I had lost my mind. Ear-trumpet to his mouth, broken voice, he stammered: You promised to help me in the fight against subversives! That’s what I’m doing. The sources of subversion at present are those who support Spain and Buenos Aires. He stood there blinking. His bulging eyes went from his ear-trumpet to my pistols. I demand that my motion be put to a vote, right here, I stated, with another sharp slap of my hand on the table. Many of those present thought I had shot off a pistol. The most skittish of the lot dived for the floor. The bishop pulled his miter down to his chin. The governor began flailing about like a man drowning. The machine of his supporters began working. The hall was thrown into a tumult of cries of Long live the Regency Council! The ballot-well for the vote was brought. The Saracens tossed their papers into it, yelling at the top of their lungs: Long live the Institutional Restoration of the Province! The governor recovered his voice. At that moment, as José Tomás Isasi told me later, there burst into the hall, from a popular fiesta that was being held nearby, one black behind another black who was running after a little-girl masker disguised as a little-boy clown. The bizarre dumb show turned the whole fracas into confusion worse confounded. It seems that the black doing the chasing grabbed one of my pistols; the one meant for the king. He shot at the clown, who fled, shielding himself amid the big wigs, till he fell behind the governor’s chair.
I didn’t see any of that. If the traitor Isasi’s story was true, the entire mummery could only have been a trick contrived by the Spanish faction of the Cabildo to make sure the assembly came to nothing. Pantomime or not, I can only say that it turned out to be an excellent representation of what was being aired there.
I had left the avispal henhouse a moment before, clearing a way for myself through the flock of Spaniards flapping all over the hall. Scaring off the great bunch of brooders, capons, clerics, magistrates, inverted-transvested literary types, I went out into the street, as they remained behind making a great fuss over my two argumental pistols.
Their triumph was not to last long. I took the egg of Revolution with me in order that it might hatch at the right moment.
* * *
—
(Written in the margin. Unknown hand: By so doing, you were trying to imitate Descartes, who detested fresh eggs. He let them incubate beneath the ashes and drank down the embryonic substance. You wanted to do the same thing without being Descartes. You were not going to eat the Revolution every morning for breakfast with your maté. You turned this country into a lustral, expiatory egg that will hatch heaven only knows when, heaven only knows how, heaven only knows what. Embryo of what might have been the most prosperous country in the world. The best cock in all human legend.)
* * *
—
I mounted my horse. Rode off at a gallop. Breathed deeply of the smell of earth, of woodland warmed by the sun. The night was tenderly born from below. The martial drumroll of the bell-bird on the hillsides of Manorá brought a certain peace to my spirit. I loosed the reins of the horse, which quickened its pace as it headed homeward, matching it to the rhythm of my thoughts. One senses ideas coming as one senses disasters approaching. As I returned to my retreat at Ybyray I was reflecting on what had just happened; on the fact that even in the most trivial of occurrences chance enters the game. I understood then that it is only by ripping this sort of thread of chance out of the weft of events that the impossible can be made possible. I suddenly realized that to-be-able-to-do is to-be-able-to-enable. At that instant a shooting star traced a luminous streak across the firmament. Heaven only knows how many millions of years it had been wandering about the cosmos before winking out in a fraction of a second. I had read somewhere that falling stars, meteors, aeroliths, are the very picture of chance in the universe. The force of power lies then, I thought, in chasing down chance: re-trapping it. Discovering its laws; that is to say, the laws of oblivion. Chance exists only because oblivion exists. Subjecting it to the law of counter-oblivion. Tracing down counter-chance. Removing from the chaos of the improbable the constellation possessed of probity. A State revolving on the axi
s of its sovereignty. The sovereign power of the people, nucleus of energy for the organization of the Republic. In the political universe, States confederate or explode. Exactly like the galaxies in the cosmic universe.
First objective: erect hierarchy in the midst of anarchy. Paraguay is the center of Meridional America. Geographical, historical, social nucleus of the future integration of the independent States in this part of America. It is Paraguay’s destiny to be the political destiny of the American continent. The black-and-white Arabian neighed a bit, pricking up his ears at this possibility that the faithful beast accepted on faith. It may be that they will win out and rule over us, I said to him, but we must try to prevent it. He gave a loud snort. Don’t be afraid of your own shadow, my Thomas Moor. The day will come when you will be able to gallop in the sun without shadow or fear in this land of prophecies. He strode on, calmer now, nodding his head, bothered only a little by the metal bit that creaked between his back teeth.
I raised my head up toward the sky once again. I tried to read the book of Constellations in the light of their own lanterns. In this sphere-book that terrified Pascal, the greatest terror is that despite so much light dark chance still exists. In any event the most pensive of thinking reeds was unable to read it, not even with his ingenuous faith in God, that very short and very confused word that interposed itself between his thought and the universe: between what he knew and did not know. Tell me, compadre Blaise, you who were the first to dejesuit the Order without provincial fears, tell me, answer me this: Was what really frightened you in the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere not perhaps the infinite memory with which it is equipped? A memory whose laws the cosmos proclaims after having come forth from nothingness.
Memory without flaws. Unfailing. Absolute rigor. In the slight breeze pervaded with the scent of mint and patchouli, the voice of compadre Blaise said: Perhaps, perhaps. Thus the man who has returned to himself considers what he is in relation to what exists outside of himself. You, half-breed with two souls, feel lost in this remote corner of nature. Intoxicated by the wild aroma of an idea. You are now riding toward the monastery of your trinitarian domain. You believe you are free. You are riding astride an idea: freeing your country. But you also see yourself shut up in a tiny cell writing by the light of a candle alongside the meteor you captured and hold prisoner with you. Don’t make me say what I do not mean to say and did not say, my old Paraguayan compadrito. Learn to judge the earth, your earth, people, your people, yourself. At their proper worth. What is a man in the infinite? Much ado between two nothings. In the end, what is man within nature? Nothing, compared to the infinite; everything, compared to nothing: a middle term between nothing and everything. The beginning and the end of all things lies hidden from him in an impenetrable secret. Come, come, compadre Blaise, don’t be a defeatist! The Arabian is taking me to my farm. You are trying to lead me into the trap of the Word/God. THAT which, as you yourself say, overflows the sphere and hence cannot fit inside thought. Don’t be less intelligent than a horse. You were not when you spoke of concrete things such as Jesuits, animals, insects, dust, stones. You yourself made fun of Descartes as a philosopher. Vain and uncertain Descartes, you said. Is there anything more absurd than to maintain that inanimate bodies have humors, terrors, horrors? That insensible bodies, devoid of life and incapable of attaining it, have passions, which presuppose a soul? That the object of their horrors is the vacuum? What is there in emptiness that can terrify them? Is there anything more ridiculous? You, compadre, fell into this ridiculous error, but you were unable to forgive Descartes for having tried to do without God in his philosophy once He had given the world the initial kick in the ass. You are unable to forgive him for the fact that after that he kicked God out forever. Invented by the fear of men in the face of nothingness, do you think that invention takes care of everything? Mind you don’t leave this factor out of your calculations, you hear?
For the moment God does not occupy my mind. The question that preoccupies it is ruling over chance. Putting my daedal digit on the die, the die in the dicebox. Getting the country out of its labyrinth.
* * *
—
(In the margin. Unknown hand: You dug another one. The one of the underground prisons for those poor cats of the patriciate. But on top of that labyrinth you built another one, deeper and more complicated still: the labyrinth of your solitude. Playing dice with words: Your sole-étude. Your lone-age. Your long age. You filled this labyrinth of your horror of nothing, old misanthrope, with the emptiness of the absolute. Spongia solis…Is this the spin you gave the die so as to get the Revolution moving? Did you believe Revolution to be the mark of one-alone-entirely-on-his-own? One alone is always wrong; truth begins with two and more….)
* * *
—
Ah you impostor of a corrector! Raza is something more than azar,*1 more than letters turned around backwards in a game of anagrams. My race is the constellation that I must locate, measure, know down to its smallest secrets so as to be able to lead it. I form part of it. But I must also remain outside. Observe it at a distance. Feel its pulse from within. I clench the cursed cube in one fist.
* * *
—
When at the beginning of the Perpetual Dictatorship I saw the aerolith fall a hundred leagues away from Asunción, I ordered that it be taken captive. Nobody understood then, nobody will ever understand the meaning of this capture of the migrant meteor. Runaway-renegade from the cosmos. I ordered it brought in as a prisoner. For months a small army dragged it over the plains of the Chaco. They had to dig down more than a hundred varas before they found it. Its magnetic field extended all around it. Impassable barrier on the only route, that of the Northern Chaco, offering any probability of its sneaking out of the country. It was via that route that the French merchant Escoffier, shut up for years in prison with other foreign swindlers, tried to make his escape. Accompanied by a number of freed black slaves, he crossed the river and entered the Gran Chaco. A black slave woman who was pregnant tried to follow them so as not to be separated from her lover. Bitten by snakes, wounded by Indian arrows, sick from fevers, the blacks died one by one until only Escoffier and the slave woman were left. The field of attraction of the meteor sucked them to the trench where some hundred sappers were excavating. The Frenchman was left no other recourse than to begin working with the others as long as his strength held out. Then he was shot to death and thrown into the hole. The slave woman gave birth to a son and went on cooking for the sappers. I might have left the meteor there in that spot; it would have been a good lookout post in that wasteland. But I preferred to have it in a good safe place. It was no easy task. It cost me more than a hundred men to transport it, what with the continual struggle against savage tribes, the elements, predators, the terrible mystery of chance that refused to be reduced. Unheard-of cleverness and ferocity. Only when the slave and her son took their place at the head of the caravan did the stone appear to give in and allow itself to be led through deserts and swamps. The slave woman was bitten by a snake and died. The stone balked again, until the son of the slave, who had become the men’s mascot, began to crawl and walk about by himself, the half milk-brother of the stone. They aerobaptized him Tito. He would eventually have become my best tracker, but he too disappeared from the camp one night, kidnapped perhaps by the Payaguás. The stone’s passage down the river lasted longer than Ulysses’ travels in Homer’s sea. Longer than it took Perurimá*2 to get out of the swamp that he jumped into to look for the carlos cuarto*3 that Pedro Urdemales had told him was floating on the mud. The journey lasted longer than all these fables. There was no boat or raft capable of bearing a load of ten thousand arrobas of cosmic metal. It sank entire flotillas. Another hundred men drowned during the interminable passage. The tricks and ruses that the meteor had resorted to in order not to go any farther began all over again. Hundreds of female slaves with small boys were sent; but the sense of sme
ll of the stubborn dog of the cosmos was extremely keen; its breed, indecipherable; its laws nearly as inflexible as mine, and I was not disposed to allow that great stone to have its way, to use whims and caprices to get the better of me. In the end, the lowest water level of the Paraguay River in a hundred years allowed the troops of the line to drag it along on specially made gun carriages drawn by a thousand pair of oxen and by more than a thousand soldiers chosen from among the best swimmers in the army. It is here. Chance-meteor in chains, bound to my chair.
* * *
—
(Unknown hand: Did you believe that you were thereby doing away with chance? You are admittedly able to keep five hundred traitorous fat oligarchs prisoner in dungeons; every last one of the antipatriots and counterrevolutionaries. You could almost state with certainty that the Revolution is safe from conspiracies. Would you say the same as regards those infinite myriads of aeroliths streaking through the universe in all directions? Through them chance dictates its laws annulling the vertex-quality of your Absolute Power. You write the two words with capitals to give yourself a greater sense of security. The only thing they reveal is your insecurity. Cavernous fear. You have contented yourself with little. Your horror of emptiness, your agoraphobia cloaked in black to allow you to become one with the darkness has withered your reason. Gnawed away your mind. Rusted your will. Your omnipotent power, worth less than scrap iron. One aerolith does not make a sovereign. It is here; granted. But you are shut up here with it. Prisoner. Gouty rat poisoned by its own venom. Suffocating to death. Old age, infirm-age, that infirmity that even the gods do not recover from, has you by the nape of the neck.)
I the Supreme Page 14
