* * *
—
Whoever you are, insolent corrector of my pen, you are beginning to annoy me. You don’t understand what I write. You don’t understand that the law is symbolic. Twisted minds are unable to grasp this. They interpret the symbols literally. And so you make mistakes and fill my margins with your scoffing self-importance. At least read me correctly. There are clear symbols/obscure symbols. I the Supreme play my passion cold-bloodedly…
* * *
—
you should drop that business of The Supreme, to yourself at least, in any case when you’re speaking not on the surface but the subface of your much-diminished person; and above all while you’re playing dice in your slippers.
* * *
—
…don’t interrupt me, I said. I the Supreme play my passion cold-bloodedly in all domains. The people-man, the multitude-populace clearly understood, within its one/multiple soul, the five-year epic of the capture of the meteor. The seditious, avaricious, vainglorious, toplofty, ungrateful, slanderous, strident, cruel, violent, puffed-up, ignorant—where do you find intelligent conspirators?—attacked me furiously. They called me mad for having ordered the demented-stone fallen from heaven to be brought here. Certain of them went so far as to maintain that I carried it on my shoulders in place of my head. Excess of insolent words! But they too were after my head, searching all about at random…
* * *
—
in the old days you used to cry out in favor of sedition, and now you are crying out against it …they attacked The Supreme as one single person without taking the trouble to distinguish between corporeal-Person/impersonal-Figure. The one can grow old, meet its end. The other is unceasing, without end. Emanation, immanation: magnetization of the sovereignty of the people, master of a hundred ages…
* * *
—
uneasiness of your genius. Too overwrought, what you say!
* * *
—
I circumcised the aerolith. The metallic clipping provided enough material to manufacture ten rifles in the State armories. The ringleaders of the conspiracy of 1820 were executed with them. Not one of them misfired. Since then it is these rifles that are used to put a period, a full stop to eversive blather. They finiquidate the infamous traitors to the Fatherland and the Government with a single shot. Because of their precision these rifles are still the very best ones I have. They don’t wear out or overheat. They can get off a hundred rounds in a row. Cosmic material does not change. Once it has gone dead, it remains as cold as it was initially, after having been subjected to the highest temperatures in the universe. If I could harvest aeroliths in the same way that the country produces a double annual harvest of maize or wheat, I would long since have resolved the problem of armaments. I would not be obliged to go about begging from traders and smugglers. Each grain of gunpowder I get out of them costs me its weight in gold. They’re no longer content these days to exchange arms for the country’s precious woods. They demand gold coins. Idiots!
The meteoric rifles, my secret weapon. They’re a bit on the heavy side. No use handing them out to weaklings. Each one of these rifles carries a charge of no less than twenty arrobas of cosmic metal. They require herculean riflemen. The only hitch is that after this meteor I was never able to hunt down another one. One of two possibilities: Either heaven is becoming more tight-fisted than Brazilian arms smugglers, or the capturing of a single meteor has abolished the unreality of chance by means of a representation at once real and symbolic. If this latter, I need no longer fear the ambushes of sheer happenstance. Then you—the one who is correcting my writings behind my back, hand that steals into the margins and between the lines of my most secret thoughts destined for the flames—are not right. You are dead wrong, and I am dead right: the rule over chance is going to enable my race to be truly invincible till the end of time.
This happened without taking place. At that moment, pacing along with the Arabian, face to the night sky, my mind was already made up. At that instant I saw the jaguar again. Crouching amid the brush of the ravine, readying himself to spring, like the first time, upon the two-masted schooner anchored in the wooded cove along the river. In the shadow of the sails the crewmen were groggily sleeping in the suffocating heat of the siesta. The Arabian was already galloping at full speed toward the scent of his home ground. The farm, the house, came to meet us.
I was not going to budge from there until I had the reins of power in my hands. Tree-lookout. Solitary retreat-chapel. Hermit linked to the fate of the country, I sequestered myself in my humble dwelling to await events. They would come looking for me there. I opened my door to peasants, the populace, the people-multitude, the people-people, declared to be in a state of semiclandestine assembly. The farm at Ybyray turned into a cabildo of real councilors. This did happen by taking place.
*1 Raza = race; azar = chance.
*2 Contracted form, frequent in Paraguay, of Pedro de Urdemalas, the archetypical trickster.
*3 A small coin worth very little.
(Perpetual circular)*1
Those were the days when Manuel Belgrano came at the head of an army. A barrister, an intellectual, despite his profound belief in the cause of independence he came to carry out the orders of the Junta in Buenos Aires: round up Paraguay by force and pen it in with the other poor provinces. He came with those intentions, which in an initial ferment he must have been convinced were just. Belgrano came, heated by the wine of the impossible. As on other occasions, he also came accompanied by that legion of migrant scoundrels, the eternal partisans of annexation, which served then, which served later on, as scouts in the invasions of their Fatherland. Wine turned to vinegar.
Once he has entered Paraguayan territory, from the top of the Cerro de la Fantasma, also called by some the hill of Los Porteños, he writes to the phantom-Porteños of his Junta: I have arrived at this point with barely five hundred men, and find myself confronting an enemy numbering a good five thousand, according to some nine thousand. Since I crossed the Tebicuary not a single Paraguayan volunteer has presented himself, nor have I found any in their houses, as reports [from the renegade Paraguayan commandant José Espínola y Peña] assured us we would: this, together with the total lack of evidence of any movement in our favor thus far, and indeed quite to the contrary, their presenting themselves in such great numbers to oppose us, obliges the army under my command to state that its proper title is not that of an auxiliary force but that of an expedition to conquer Paraguay.
A communiqué in his own hand, the Tacitus of the Plata*2 records. As darkness is falling, the auxiliary-conquistador withdraws to his tent, and once he is alone with his secretary, the Spaniard Roca, he informs him in confidence of his objectives: The enemy are like flies, but in the position in which we find ourselves I am of the opinion that it would be committing a great error to beat any sort of retreat. The ones we saw this afternoon are for the most part lumpish louts; the majority have never heard the whistle of a bullet in their lives, and hence I am counting a great deal on the moral force that is in our favor. My mind is made up and I am only waiting now for the division that has remained in the rear guard to arrive so as to begin the attack.
On the following day a portable altar was erected at the top of this misleading Horeb. The chaplain of their army said the Mass for men of arms about to enter combat; according to the Tacitus, invaders and invaded were already so close, in body and in spirit, that the Paraguayan soldiers with their sombreros adorned with crosses and candles also knelt to hear it from the plain. Since it had been their belief that they were about to do battle with heretics, the Tacitus adds, citing the Despertador Teo-Filantrópico,*3 they marveled at the discovery that they were about to fight against brothers in religion. He should also have added that when the tohu-bohu of the cavalry charges began, the lumpish louts suddenly vanished from the backs of their mounts into thin air. These lat
ter continued to advance like a puff of breath with empty saddles, until the dim shapes suddenly reappeared on them, bearing takuara pikes, amid a savage outcry, breaking the enemy’s lines and eardrums, sweeping everything before them.
The Catholic shapes fight by slipping in and out among the ranks of the infernal legion. The invading troops’ parting shots backfire on them, as the vulgar saying goes. The leader of the invasion then sends word to his dis-government: Yr. Excy. cannot have a sufficiently clear idea of what is happening; even for me it is still obscure amid the smoke of the disaster. As Yr. Excy. saw it, we had been assured that I would encounter no opposition; that on the contrary the majority of the population of this province would submit to our troops. What I have found, however, are a people who defend country, religion, and what is most sacred to them with delirious enthusiasm. Thus it is that they have performed incredible labors in order to mount their attack on me, overcoming impossibilities that must be seen to be believed. Formidable swamplands, rivers in flood, immense impenetrable forests, the cannons of our artillery: all that has been nothing to them, for their enthusiasm, their fervor, and their love for their land has overcome and conquered all. What a surprise! For even women, children, oldsters, and all those who call themselves sons of Paraguay are ready to endure any and every hardship, to give all their goods, their very lives for the fatherland.
This said after two bloody battles in which he was totally defeated. The anti-Paraguayan legionnaires accompanying Belgrano and serving him as scouts, the Machaíns, the Cálcenas, the Echevarrías, the parasitical progeny of old Espínola y Peña, the Báezes and other dunderheaded annexionist adventurers, do not know how to explain to the abused-disabused Belgrano.
* * *
—
I have not come to destroy the rights of this province in one fell swoop, he declared as the Paraguayan horsemen were lassooing and hauling away the last cannons abandoned in the field by the invaders. I have not come to invade you, my compatriots; I have come to aid you, he protested beneath the white flag of surrender, on the shores of the Takuary. He gave his word that he would immediately leave the territory of the province and swore by the gospels never to take up arms against her again, a promise that he kept religiously. This must be said in his honor.
The Paraguayan milicasters allowed themselves to be con-vinced. After Cerro Porteño and Takuary, words did what cannons could not. The defeated leader, in reality triumphant, headed back toward his homeland. The victorious army escorted him to the spot where he was to cross the Paraná, after having held long secret meetings with him. The dimwitted Creole leaders generously acceded to everything that the vanquished leader asked for without demanding any reparations whatsoever for the immense damage caused Paraguay by the so-called liberating expedition. Cavañas, the leader at Takuary and later an infamous conspirator, did not have the shadow of a notion in his head of what was happening or of what was about to happen. But there is no denying that he had a good idea of what would further his interests. The country’s principal purveyor of fine tobacco was not expecting special privileges from the royalists now, but from the Porteñistas leading the Unitarian cause.
The uniformed owners of great estates had good reasons to seek collusion with the Porteños. The real power was no longer royal. The Spaniards had distinguished themselves by their absence in that first patrial battle. The Spanish infantry disbanded shortly after the engagement began. Governor Velazco also fled from the headquarters at Paraguarí. In order to keep from being recognized, he hunted up a peasant and gave the man his brigadier’s uniform in exchange for his rags. He also made him a present of his eyeglasses and his gold cigar holder. Then he hid himself on the heights of the Cordillera of the Orange Trees. He left the Paraguayans to get along as best they could all by themselves.
For some time they saw the gleaming uniform, fearlessly exposed in places in the thick of combat, disappearing at times and reappearing at others as though to lend the troops courage. An enigma, as much for the enemy as for the Paraguayans. They finally managed to get him to take refuge behind the lines. They were amazed at the cleverness, the bold, completely unprecedented courage of the governor, who had left his mount behind and hidden himself so well in the guise of this bearded, dark-skinned man with callused hands and bare feet. The spectacles and gold cigar holder gleamed brightly beneath the broad-brimmed hat. Cavañas, Gracia, and Gamarra consulted him in the beginning, making signs asking him for orders. The mute presence answered them with motions of his head, showing them all the ins and outs of how to trounce the enemy. Only after the victory, when the governor reappeared to reassume command, disguised in the peasant’s clothes, did the leaders suspect the real motives of the imposture. Who are you?, Cavañas asks him. I’m the governor-intendant, commander-in-chief of these forces, Don Bernardo says haughtily, removing the broad-brimmed straw sombrero hiding his face. In person!, Gracia says with a smile. A most amusing trick, Your Grace! And where has Your Excellency been, Milord Governor?, Cavañas asks him again. At the very top of the Orange Trees, observing the evolutions of the battle. And where did you come from?, they ask the completely naked peasant, half dead with fear. I…the poor man murmurs covering his privates with his hands. I came…I just came to have myself a peek at all this pantomonium!
* * *
—
The thing is that it was not difficult for the Porteño leader to beguile that flock of milicaster-landowner-traders. Animula vagula conciliabula,*4 he goes round honey-wording, siren-singing in Paraguayan territory before crossing back over the Paraná, offering to negotiate in order to prove that he has not come to conquer the province, nor to subjugate it as Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, working hand in glove with the Jesuits, had done in days gone by. He protests that he has come with the one aim of promoting its happiness. He baits the hook with an already fried catfish; he tosses the line into the Takuary; he waits, pole in one hand, the gold key of free exchange glittering in the other. The virtue of the key is that it is aperitive; that of the hook that it hooks things. The Paraguayan chiefs, mouths wide open, were hooked. The tobacconist-chief catches sight of the nutritive fortune amid the reflections. This is good, really very good!, he comments to his acolytes. Why go on with this war if the South is our North Star? General bedazzlement. He chats endlessly with the defeated victor, who could well have been taken prisoner with every last one of his fleeting shapes. There were neither victors nor vanquished here!, Cavañas cries. Belgrano has hold of the victors by the gills of their greed. He gives proof of his magnanimity. He offers union, liberty, equality, fraternity to the Paraguayans; free trade of all the products of the province with the provinces of Buenos Aires. No more ports of entry, precise or imprecise. End of the Buenos Aires monopoly on commerce. Abolition of the tobacco monopoly. Gamarra hides the moon under his armpit. All of them eat the catfish that has turned into gleaming dorado. They all smoke the peacepipe together. The Paraguayan military leaders lick their chops, wet their fingers, and stroke the seams of their battle jackets, relishing the thought of the war taxes on tobacco and maté that can still be exacted. Over the fires of Takuary, Belgrano prophesies union and freedom. The Buenos Aires Junta will soon deprophetize him. Paraguayans and Porteños fraternize on the battlefields of Takuary still red with blood, our Julius Caesar writes. In Asunción the fear of the royalists grows. First the dispatches reporting the rout of the Bourbonic troops and the flight of the governor, and now the news of the armistice brought by messengers at full gallop. What is happening? Without waiting for an answer, the Spaniards flee from their houses in the dark of night, disguised as blacks, with nothing but the troves on their backs. They fill seventeen ships set to sail to Montevideo, where the royalists have taken a firm stand on orders from Viceroy Elío.
Bernardo de Velazco, having returned in his underclothes following his flight, was unable to prevent the armistice, much less the agreement of the Paraguayan leaders with Belgrano, captivated by his winning ways
on the banks of the Takuary.
The arrival of the governor in the Paraguayan camp, Belgrano writes in his memoirs, did not have as its object putting an end to disagreements, but rather preventing the revolutionary germ from spreading. Keeping Cavañas from carrying out his salutary intentions. Likewise those of his camp, the Yegroses and the finest flower of Paraguayans. Belgrano should have been more precise: the camp of the tobacco merchants, the maté traders, and the estancia owners in uniform.
(In the private notebook)
Signing this armistice, so contrary to the aims of the annexionist invasion and the interests of Buenos Aires, was to prod a sore spot, the Tacitus of the Plata will say later on. Our sorest spot of all, Tacitus-Brigadier. You too will invade our country; and then you will begin quietly translating the Divine Comedy by invading Alighieri’s Avernal circles.
You stubbornly insist, pounding the tip of your generalissimo’s baton on the loose tiles of History; you are adamant that Belgrano was the real author of the Revolution of Paraguay, tossed like a torch into the Paraguayan camp. Those are your textual words. We could all have been burned to death, Tacitus-Brigadier! From May 25, 1810, on, you say, an era in which printing began to be widespread, it was easier for me to follow the march of events, consulting periodicals and the multitude of broadsheets that saw print at the time, using correlative manuscripts that I have been able to obtain to elucidate these pieces of evidence. But very shortly events grow more complicated; the press does not suffice to reflect the course of the revolution day by day, and secrecy begins necessarily to become a rule of government; but as always happens, as mystery becomes more indispensable it becomes imperative to write everything down in order to communicate, and hence the day comes when posterity finds itself in possession of even the most deeply hidden thoughts of the men of the past and can study that past better than if it had them there before its very eyes. That is what happened with me from the moment when, seeking a more trustworthy guide than the periodical press, I dug deeper into the archives of war and government, after the year ’10. The first fact that I needed to throw light on was Belgrano’s expedition to Paraguay, concerning which there existed very little published material worth consulting, almost all of those who had spoken of it having committed the grossest of errors…Ah, Tacit-Brigadier! You consider mystery to be indispensable as a rule of government. You and your capons cooked up the Triple Alliance against Paraguay in the dead of night, between midnight and cockcrow. You place all your faith in scraps of paper. In writing. In bad faith. You are one of those who believe, an honorable man who came after you will say, that when they find a metaphor, a comparison, however bad, they have found an idea, a truth. You speak, as Idrebal*5 rightly characterizes you, in similes, that puerile recourse of those who do not have a mind of their own and know no way of defining the indefinite except by comparing it with what is already defined. Your weapon is the sentence, not the sword. Your historical disquisitions on the Revolution are cosmoramas, not discourses. This brought you credit, money, titles, power, this wise man says in passing judgment upon you. I can be still more indulgent toward you, for as I write this you are a mere youngster. You could scarcely have been present when Belgrano flung the “torch of Liberating Revolution” into the Paraguayan camp; in any event you would have said “firebrand of liberticide counterrevolution” since it fell into the hands of the Cavañases, the Gracias, the Gamarras, and the Yegroses; your rhetoric of Chief-Archivist would then have been a little closer to the reality and nature of those facts that you are trying to narrate with your broad-brimmed English fedora pulled down over your eyes. This allows you to state with British phlegm, repeating that clever rascal Somellera, that the only real and immediate cause of the Paraguayan revolution was the inoculation that the Paraguayans received at Takuary. Decidedly, Tacitus-Brigadier, you give every appearance of being a veterinarian of the remount cavalry, a penpushing quartermaster clerk. If you grant that Cerrito Porteño and Takuary were the sites of the revolutionary inoculation in Paraguay, you must also grant, as a sincere liar, that it was an artificial insemination, and that those who were really inseminated were the invaders. Beginning with the Comuneros, Paraguayan studs have generously donated their sperm, and not to make candles with. In our country it’s the women who make candles. What we do with our sperm is another story.
I the Supreme Page 15
