I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  I am sweating even under my fingernails. Tongue dry between my teeth. An errant going-and-coming, the attack. It spies on me, lies in wait for me.

  The herbalist observes me intently. Head hanging down because of that secret bone in the nape of the neck that prevents Paraguayans from holding it erect. Thinking that the demolition is taking its course. Complete rest! Sleep! Sleep, Sire! You know very well I can’t sleep, Estigarribia. Sleep is the concentration of inner heat. Mine no longer produces any evaporation. My thought is the waking dream of a hairy, corporeal material. Visions more real than reality itself. Perhaps the moment has arrived to choose a successor, appoint a designate! Is that all that comes to your mind? Is that the final homage you’re coming to pay your young patient? I’m only in the twenty-sixth year of my infirm-age.

  I can’t choose a designate, as you say. I didn’t choose myself. The majority of our fellow citizens elected me. I couldn’t elect myself all by myself. Could someone replace me in death? Well then, no one can replace me in life either. Even if I had a son he could not replace me, inherit my place. My dynasty begins and ends in me, in I-HE. The sovereignty, the power with which we find ourselves invested will return to the people to which they imperishably belong. As for my few personal assets, they are to be divided in the following manner: the farm at Ybyray to my two natural daughters residing in the Home for Orphan and Foundling Girls; from my uncollected emoluments, which amount to the sum of 36,564 silver pesos, 2 reales, a month’s pay to be given to the troops of the barracks, forts, border posts, and frontier customs, both in the Chaco and the Región Oriental. To my two old women servants 400 pesos, plus the maté vessel with the silver sipper to Santa; to Juana, who is so old now she’s as curved as a jug handle, my chamber pot, which is rightfully hers since she has handled it every day and night with more than selfless devotion during all the time that she has been in my service. To Señora Petrona Regalada, said to be my sister, 400 pesos, plus the wardrobe stored away in the trunk. The rest of my uncollected emoluments are to be distributed to schoolmasters, master and apprentice musicians, in the amount of one month’s pay each, not forgetting the little Indian musicians who play for all they’re worth in the barracks bands both in the Capital and in the interior. I wish those little Indians to be well dressed and fed: they are the ones who are the best, the most disciplined, thanks to their natural sense of rhythm. It is my wish that they be endowed with instruments as splendid as those of any white or half-breed. Those who have belonged to my escort since they were youngsters are to be provided with new fifes and drums, and if there are any reales left over, they are to be divided among those who must now be far advanced in years, with no way of meeting their needs by their own means. My guitar is to go to Maestro Modesto Servín, organist and choir director of Jaguarón, with the expression of my very warmest affection.

  I will all my optical and mechanical instruments and other laboratory equipment to the National Polytechnical Institute, and my entire collection of books to the Public Library. The remainder of any of my private papers that may have survived the fire are to be totally destroyed.

  But please know, Don Vicente, that despite the rumors going round, despite what you yourself predict and desire, I haven’t yet given you the pleasure of departing this life. Have you some idea at least of where I’ll end up when I die? No. You don’t know. In the place where things not yet born are.

  Céspedes Xeria, the vicar general, has also offered to hear my last confession and administer the sacraments. I have sent word to him that I shall make my last confession by myself. He who holds his tongue keeps his soul. Mind your tongue and keep your soul. And mind you don’t repeat what we’ve talked about here. Don’t allow rumors about my illness to circulate. A shoe has a sole and its tongue says nothing. Do likewise. Be tough as shoe leather and you’ll be around for a long time. Remember, Don Vicente, that you too in your green years were an ear of corn being eaten up by grubs, and that if you escaped with your life it was because I brought you into Government service by appointing you State apothecary. I can’t complain, I grant you, about the rectitude of your life since then. But don’t do with my life what you did with yours: going about telling everybody, in the streets, in the houses, about your youthful indiscretions, and above all the lamentable fact that that lively young creature who sucked all the sense out of you died in your arms. The excesses of her nymphomania would have done her in sooner or later, perhaps even sooner in the arms of some other lad better endowed than you. You maintain that you made your public confession in order to serve as an example to others. Nobody learns anything from inside somebody else’s head. One man’s madness is never the same as another’s. From now on, shut your door to the visitations of repentance.

  And now, as to the subject of my illness, clam up, eh? Not a word. It’s my affair. Your life depends on it. Out of here. And don’t come back till I call you.

  * Juan Rengger and Marcelino Longchamp, physicians of Swiss origin, arrived in 1818 in Buenos Aires, where they struck up a friendship with the celebrated naturalist Amadeo Bonpland. Not forseeing his own future in Paraguay, the French savant advised his young Swiss friends to try their luck there in view of the uncertain political situation in the Plata at the time. The travelers found that the “Reign of Terror” depicted by certain observers was in reality an oasis of peace in its rigorous and rustic isolation. They were warmly received by El Supremo, who offered them every sort of facility for their scientific studies and the practice of their profession, despite the cruel experience he had had some years before with two other Europeans, the brothers Robertson, as will be seen. The Perpetual Dictator appointed the two Swiss doctors military physicians of barracks and prisons, in which they also acted as forensic specialists. Juan Rengger, whom El Supremo called “Juan Rengo” because his last name sounded like the Spanish for lame, rengo, and because he in fact had a bad leg, ended up becoming his personal physician. Suspecting that the Swiss were maintaining secret relations with his enemies of the “twenty golden families,” the Dictator’s friendship toward them eventually changed to a smoldering, growing hostility. They were obliged to abandon the country in 1825. Two years later, they published their Historical Essay on the Revolution in Paraguay, the first book written on the Perpetual Dictatorship. Translated into several languages, it was a great success abroad, but was banned in Paraguay by El Supremo, and violations very harshly punished since he considered it an insidious diatribe against his government and a “bunch of cock-and-bull stories.” The first part written in French and the second in German, this book by Rengger and Longchamp may be said to be the “classic” par excellence dealing with this historical period in Paraguayan life: an indispensable “key and lantern” for penetrating the mysterious reality of an era without parallel in the world of Latin America and the even more enigmatic personality of the man who forged the Paraguayan nation with an iron will through the almost mystical exercise of Absolute Power. (Compiler’s Note.)

  On the day following the installation of the Junta, ex Governor Velazco’s dog left Government House before his master. That realist-royalist pooch understood immediately what the Spaniards couldn’t get through their heads. More intelligent than the new contingent of Porteñistas. He decamped with the dignity of a royal chamberlain, his functions having been taken over by my dog Sultan, a sort of Jacobin sans-culotte with long hair and a short temper. Out with you, he barked, hastening Hero’s retreat. Booming, commanding voice. We’ll be back, Hero sputtered. Astride your granny’s Turkish saddle!, Sultan shot back. Saber between his teeth, he mounted guard at the palace door. I’ll have you hanged, you Spic dog! That will not be necessary, my esteemed plebeian peer. I’ve made the gallows already. The guillotine has already lopped off my head three times. I myself don’t remember it very clearly. I hope, citizen Sultan, that you don’t catch the mal-de-horror. The first thing to go is one’s memory. Do you see this length of sword planted in my back? I have no idea how long
it’s been there. Perhaps the English buried it in me when I fought at my master’s side during the reconquest of Buenos Aires. Or during the siege of Montevideo. I don’t know where. Out with you, you fraud! Out! Hero looked at him without resentment. You’re right, Sultan. Perhaps it’s all but a dream. He pulled the rusty sword from his bones. He thrust its shadow firmly in the ground after pushing down hard on it twice and went out limping. Outside there awaited him the immensity of the unknown. Poor Sultan! You don’t know how good one feels on finding oneself another. I’ve finally found someone like me, and that someone is myself. Heaven be praised! God is my Father and everybody else’s uncle. A thousand worse things could happen to me. Dying a non-Christian death, without the aid of confession, of the holy oils. What has happened to you is nothing in comparison with what hasn’t happened to you. But it’s of little use to you to be a Christian, Hero, if you don’t have a few clever tricks up your sleeve. Giddap! On your way, and skip the prophecies.

  Old, mangy, filled with a strange happiness, he soon adjusted to his new egalitarian life. Neither ups nor downs. He who has two has one. He who has one has none, he said to himself. He did not lie down atop the tombs of the royalists hanged in the conspiracy that had hatched in order to teach realists a lesson. He took to wandering about the streets, the marketplaces, the public squares. He would tell stories he made up for whatever small change people would give him. Enough so that he always had leftovers left over. He never lacked guts. Which for a street-corner storyteller turned out to be food for his fables. He ended up as a guide for blind Paí Mbatú, an ex curé of ex sound mind, though still a right clever rascal, who also lived in the marketplaces on public charity.

  Fascinated by the talents of the ex canine of royalist persuasion, the brothers Robertson bought him for five ounces of gold.* Paí Mbatú refused to seal the bargain with the stingy Englishmen for less. For perhaps the first time on the soil of the New World, a half-mad Creole imposed his conditions on two subjects of the greatest empire on earth. They asked my permission to bring him to the English classes. One dog more or less won’t matter around here. Bring him. That was how Hero returned to Government House, thereby fulfilling his promise. Which was not at all to Sultan’s liking, for he felt displaced by the intruder during our evenings. The stories of the Thousand and One Nights, the tales of Chaucer, the fanciful embroideries of the English deans transported him to regions out of this world. Each time he heard words such as king, emperor, or guillotine, Hero gave an alarmed growl. Illiterate, plebeian, Sultan, scornfully turned his back on him. Habit, more than memory, took him afar to do his barking, making the rounds of all the barracks, one by one, and out to the very last guard post of the city.

  Not everything is a question of memory. Instinct is a surer guide in the realm of the indistinct.

  * Juan Parish Robertson arrived in Río de la Plata in 1809, in the group of British merchants who had come to Buenos Aires shortly after the Invasions that opened its port to free trade. He was then seventeen years old. He took up lodgings in the house of a well-known family. Madame O’Gorman was one of his principal protectresses. The young Scottish entrepreneur frequented forthwith the most prestigious circles, managing to become friends with Viceroy Liniers. He was present at the May Revolution “as at a picturesque staging of the desires for freedom of the Porteño patriots,” he states in one of his Letters. Three years later his brother Roberto joined him. They undertook together what was for them the “great adventure of Paraguay.” The Robertsons repeated their exploits in Asunción, with even greater success, in every domain, than in Buenos Aires. They could count here on the protection of El Supremo, who praised them to the skies but ended up expelling them in 1815. The Robertsons boast in their books of having been the first British subjects to come to know Paraguay, after having penetrated the “Chinese wall” of its isolation, concerning which they put forward a novel interpretation. (Compiler’s Note.)

  The two green men with red hair arrive at the usual hour. Hero the dog is with them. Sultan goes to the door to receive them. Come into the study, gentlemen. Distinct coolness toward the street jongleur. A certain fear makes him shrink at the sight of the sans-culotte cancerberus. Have a seat wherever you like, gentlemen. He points to the armchairs. You there, over in the corner, he mutters over his shoulder to Hero. Have you taken a bath by any chance? Oh yes, in rose water, Señor Sultan! Have you brought any fleas with you? Oh no, Most Excellent Señor Dog! I never take them out. They have weak lungs, the poor little things. I’m afraid they’ll catch cold. They might catch distemper, tonsilitis, heaven knows what. The climate in Asunción is most unhealthy. It is full of germs. I bathe them in my own bathwater. I shut them up in a little Chinese lacquer box that was specially made for the little creatures and brought to me from Buenos Aires by Don Robertson, and it’s bye, babies, bye, I’m off to spend the evening at The Supreme’s. They’re very obedient. They’ve learned perfect manners. Isn’t that so, Don Juan? I intend to make them the best-trained trick fleas in the city. Into the corner with you! Nobody asked you anything! Hero curled up in a ball against the great bulk of the aerolith. Age-old, a century young, he begins to sniff in the stone the odor of the cosmos, wrinkling his nose slightly.

  Ten pounds of brandy are heating in a caldron on the fire. Pilar the black perfumes the room with incense. He sprinkles powdered varnish on the clouds of steam. Sultan opens the door to the aqueduct and lets me in. I enter with a sheet of red-hot copper, and the room glows with celestial lights. Multicolored sparks. Objects levitate a palm’s breadth in the air, surrounded by an ethereal halo. Good evening, gentlemen. Don’t get up. The two men turn red; their hair, green. They glide gently in their armchairs to the floor. Their foremouths move in relief. Good evening, Excellency! Time stands still for a moment in the tail of the dogs. Bring the beer, Pilar. Here he is, back already from the cellar with the demijohn. He pours the foaming liquid into the glasses. What’s certain is that, between the conjugation of English verbs and my groping and fumbling efforts to translate Chaucer, Swift, or Donne, the Robertsons came around for five years to drink my invidious fermented brew. I wasn’t going to uncork a fresh demijohn each week in honor of those perfidious green-go-homes. The letter from Alvear, head of the Buenos Aires government in those days, was the drop that made the swill run over. Up to that point they’d drunk it. Juan Robertson brought the shipment of beer himself on one of his voyages. It cost me good patacoons. I never get gifts from anyone. They downed the beer without ever being able to finish it, since its volume kept increasing with the foam from the fermentation. Isn’t there some way at least to put a lid on the tankards till the next lesson, Excellency?, Guillermo, the younger and craftier of the two, belched, laughing fit to kill and spitting out a couple of live flies. No, Mister William, here in this country even the most humble remains are precious to us. We’re very poor, hence we can’t give up even our pride. But, sir, to drink this is to snatch up Hades itself and drink it to someone’s health, the younger of the Robertsons said in English with a hearty guffaw. Pe kuarú haguä ara-kañymbapevé, peë pytaguá, I joked in turn. What’s that, Excellency? As you can see, our Guaraní still isn’t very good. Very simple, sirs: May you piss my beer till the end of time, you greedy fools. Ah, ha, ha, hooo…Your Excellency! Always joking! After razing hell and drinking it to the health of someone they were fond of, the two merchants might well go on pissing my beer till Judgment Day. Tankard in hand, Juan Robertson hummed to himself his favorite little ditty:

  There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

  Rough-hew them how we will!

  Between sips of the pestilential bubbles, Juan Robertson kept gurgling this pet refrain of his over and over. Acid bubbles of vaticination. Does a person’s voice dream of what is possible and real? Does it dream without the dreamer’s dreaming? Things have happened to me, long after they were sung about, without my having noticed the warning. The secret hides its knowledge. Without knowing it, J
uan Robertson was humming what was going to happen to him at La Bajada. But I always sense something real, in the realm of the visible or audible, in an individual who sits leaning to starboard with half his backside in the air, the position the Englishman briefly assumed from time to time back then, the very one that I am in at this moment without being able to change it. His mind elsewhere, absent, Juan Robertson was bleating that idiotic prelude to himself, apparently lost in his calculations of profits and losses. That wasn’t what he was doing. Yet that was it exactly. Calculations of profits and losses in the Book of his Fate. Better that way. Negative balances in the Credits are clearer than positive balances in the Debits.

  * * *

  —

  Prodigious imagination, Excellency! In the open mouth of the younger of the Robertsons there formed an immense balloon of foam that could not decide whether to go up or down. He punctured it with the nail of his little finger. Once his voice was uncorked, he went on burbling enthusiastically about the canine jongleur. Hero’s memory is amazing! Last night he said: I’m going to compose a little thirty-page novella. It doesn’t need to be any longer than that to describe episodes of the most incontestable utility since they are born of the soul of a renegade to his class, or rather of a convert….I must reflect a bit on this difference that condemns me or exalts me, depending on the mirror….

  Hero gulped down the rest of the tankard, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, the uncouth creature. I ordered Pilar the black to fill our glasses again. Hero was again straining my incredulity with his guttural gypsy cant. As in a congress of Babelic polyglots, the Anglomane was translating in fits and starts what Hero was growling. His red mustache full of foam was marking to a hair the cadence of his phrases: He is speaking of Nit…Mother of Mothers, who is at once male and female. Scarab, vulture, in her female part. Woman of the black sphere, who has her double in the man with the head of a pelican…The Hispanic dog’s chant, translated by the Scottish merchant, reminded me of Leonardo’s bestiary: The pelican loves its offspring. If it comes back to the nest and finds that they have been bitten by serpents, it tears its breast open with its beak. It washes them in its blood. It restores them to life. Is it not I who am the Supreme Pelican in Paraguay? Hero interrupts himself, gives me a sarcastic look through his cataracts: Your Excellency loves his offspring the way the mother-pelican does; she caresses them so fervently she kills them. Let us hope that your blood of a father-pelican will bring them back to life on the third day. Should that come to pass, Most Illustrious Sire, your pelican image will be celebrated by patriotic analists. The eunuchs of the Eucharist will have it embroidered on their capon-copes. The Old Ones will trap it in mirrors. I did not deem it the proper moment to answer the dog’s beastly sarcasms. I had the impression that the others had not heard. Juan Parish went on translating:…Mother of the black sphere has her double in the sky, likewise a lamb vulture, at once male and female…Where did you get that from? It doesn’t matter where I got it from! Perhaps from the Canticles of Alfonso the Wise, king of Castile and León, who, incidentally, offers in his Siete Partidas an excellent definition of a tyrant: that is to say, that man who chooses to act pro bono suo, thereby turning a rule that was a right into a wrong. That man is to be deemed a tirant, the wise king said, who, using the progress, wellbeing, and prosperitie of those he governs as a praetext, replaces the cultus of his people by that of his owne person, becoming thereby a fereful and fallacious pelican. His diabolical cunning turns those very men he doth claim to liberate into slaves. He transforms them into fishes. He stuffs them into the reddish pouch that hangs beneath his insatiable beak. He spits out only the prickles of the sort that grow on thistles, cacti, every manner of spiny species. But what is worst about tirants is that they are weary of the people, and hide their cynicism behind shamed apologies for their nation. In the face of the innocence of their vassals they feal guilty, and endeavour to corrupt one and all with their own leprosie…It’s plain to see that street life has taught you a great deal, Hero, but for the moment I’m not asking you to recite your little tyrannicidal fables. Don’t play Tupac Amaru here. You’ll end up quartered. I’m asking you about that fable of the lamb vulture, the one that’s at once male and female. I want to know where you got it from. What does it matter? I could have gotten it from the books of the Cabala, from the Koran, from the Bible, from the Gentiloquio of the Marqués de Santillana, from the draft that creeps in around the edges of the doors. Language is the same everywhere. As are fables. There is no fixed point allowing us to judge. It seems to me that they did not come from men’s written words, but from their spoken ones, which preceded writing. But that is of little moment, since it is less important to know the origin of things than it is to know their end. Everything exists through symbols. One merely changes fantasies. Our two eyes engender a single vision. A single book, all books. But each thing gives off a certain effluvium at once like and unlike all others. An exhalation, a breath of its own. Those who know most, see most, are always the blind. Those with the sweetest voices, the mute. Those with the keenest hearing, the deaf. Homer! O mere repeater of other blind men and deafmutes! Man’s principal malady is his insatiable curiosity regarding things he cannot know.