I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  Juan Robertson put his hands between his legs. His body wrenched into an arc as he retched. The reek of beer filled the room. Even the dogs turned up their noses. Hero glanced all about, scowling. Sniffed in every direction. Judging from the salacious stench, Excellency, it would appear that we’ve been invaded by more than a hundred thousand devil-women! Possibly, Hero, possibly. I don’t smell a thing. I have a head cold. The pooch went over to the Englishman, who was arched over fighting his stomach cramps, his head drooping on his chest, his elbows digging into his groins. As consolation, Hero muttered without conviction: You’ll soon be better, Don Juan. It’s just an attack of moral colic. And he added in English so that I wouldn’t understand: Fucking awful business this, no, yes, sir? Dreamt all night of that bloody old hag Quin again….I ordered Pilar the black to throw some pellets of incense and liquidambar and another pint of brandy on the red-hot copper plate. The beautiful colors drove away the bad odors. Go to the kitchen, Pilar, and ask Santa to fix a tisane of flowers of fennel, mistletoe, white mauve, and yateí-ka’á. The bluish skulls of the Robertson brothers were dimly visible amid the aromatic smoke and the sparks. Hero and Sultan, half-asleep, disdainfully offered their backs to each other. Except that they flew into a rage when Candide and his manservant, the Tucumán mulatto Cacambo, arrived in Paraguay to fight for the Jesuits. This empire is a marvel!, Cacambo exclaimed excitedly, trying to trick his master. I know the way and I’ll take you there: the padres own everything and the peoples have nothing. It’s a masterpiece of reason and justice. Uncontainable joy. Sidereal optimism. Sultan was all confused. He thought he was in a Paraguay that had been disjesuited forever, and here were two suspect-looking foreigners taking off for that vanished kingdom with which some people dare compare mine. The clatter of their mounts’ galloping hoofs resounded in the shadow of the room. The entire kingdom as well. Brought back to life, intact, present. A giant honeybear-hive, an anthill three hundred leagues in diameter with a hundred fifty thousand Indians inside. The father provincial entered, his spurs striking sparks from the floor. He recognized Candide immediately. They embraced affectionately. Sultan and Hero, the pair of them one, maddened, enraged, attacked walls, doors, and windows, Bulgar-fashion, roaring louder than a hundred dragons and dog-serpents. Powerless in the face of this immense, iridescent soap bubble. Amid columns of green and gold marble, cages full of parakeets, hummingbirds, cardinals, colibris, all the winged creatures of the universe, Candide and the father provincial peacefully lunched on a table service of silver and gold. Songs held the senses suspended. Birds, cithers, harps, fifes, suspended in the music-air. Cacambo, resigned, was out in the splitting sun eating grains of maize from a little wooden bowl with Paraguayans squatting on their heels amid the cows, the dogs, the lilies of the field. Candide, what is optimism?, the mulatto from Tucumán shouted from a distance, a rifle shot away from the green marble bower. As far as I can tell, Candide answered him, it’s maintaining how well everything is going when everything is manifestly going very badly. Amid the wine fumes, the father’s face did not appear to register anything. Hero and Sultan flung themselves upon the tonsured general of the Theatines. Let’s put an end to this hurly-burly, I said to the Robertsons, busy chasing a colibri across the page for the fun of it. If you’ve begun reading the story to kill time, imagine that it’s lying dead now beneath the weight of such phantasmagorias; either that or the dogs kill us and gobble up our buttocks as well, leaving us only the credulous half of our rear ends, the incredulous half of life. Young Robertson placed the plumule of the colibri between the pages of the book and closed it. The two of them rose to their feet, feeling their backsides as an augury, and good night, Reverend Father Provincial, oh I beg your pardon, I mean Excellency.

  À propos of the “rat nursery” that El Supremo did in fact maintain for experimental purposes at his farm in Ybyray, let us look at another example of the method employed by Dr. Días de Ventura and Brother Bel-Asshole to vilify and defame him by distorting the facts. The fragments that follow have been extracted from the already-mentioned private correspondence between these two rabid enemies of the Perpetual Dictator.

  “Rev. Father and friend:

  “I am already moved, before the fact, by your future Proclamations of a Paraguayan to His Countrymen, in which with your admirable art of persuasion you will convince them that they must rebel and end this era of shame and sorrow before it is too late.

  “Perhaps in this monstruary of facts you may find a use for the Dictator’s latest mad idea, concerning which he is maintaining the strictest secrecy. Imitating the prisoners who tame rodents in the dungeons (so I have been informed confidentially), he has set up an immense rat nursery at his country house in Trinidad. He has there rounded up every species of rodent known in this country. He has posted two or three deafmute slaves to guard the nursery. José María Pilar, his little black valet, is the one who keeps watch on the watchmen. His trust in the little black and his innocence are perhaps, in the Dictator’s opinion, sufficient guarantee against any sort of perfidy. But it is out of the mouth of babes, slaves though they may be, that truths are forthcoming: those that on occasion take the form of symbols or parables.

  “From high up in a tree lookout, the little black—I have it from most trustworthy sources—performs his assigned mission of observing and noting down point for point all the movements of the thousands of rodents. The Dictator frequently comes out to the estate in person to verify the data. According to the rumors that are circulating, based on the little black’s own accounts, the Great Man has turned the nursery into a strange laboratory. He there engages in experiments in crossbreeding and above all in observations of the crowd behavior of this impressive mass of sharp-toothed mammifers. Feeding at the ringing of a bell; maneuvers, as though the rodents were military troops; matings; even long periods of starvation during which the bell sounds the tocsin so frequently that it drives this multitude of rats and mice mad; all this, I tell you, Rev. Father, leads one to suspect that the diabolical Dictator tries out there, in that sort of rough draft in vivo, those methods of government of his through which he is bestializing our peasants.

  “The latest experiment goes beyond all the limits that a respectable person in his right mind can imagine. Imagine, Yr. Grace: something truly demoniacal! The Dictator has ordered the kit of a female cat to be shut up in absolute darkness from the very moment of its birth. For three years, the time that has passed since the Dictator assumed absolute power, the kit has been kept in total solitude and isolation, completely removed from contact with any other living species. The cat, now an adult, was removed in a leather sack from its place of hermetic confinement and taken to the nursery. There, beneath the blazing sun, the cat was let out of the bag and thrown in among the thousands of starving rodents as the little black rent the air of the siesta hour with earsplitting peals of the bell. Imagine, my friend, the scorching sunlight suddenly burning the eyes of the cat accustomed to utter darkness since its birth. The light blinds it at the very instant it first sees it! Well-fed in its nocturnal cave, it also fails to recognize the ancestral enemy species that surrounds it and attacks it fiercely, so that in the space of seconds it is reduced to tiny splinters of bone that are carried off in all directions in the midst of this frightful witches’ sabbath. Is this not, Rev. Father, something truly satanic?

  “The greatest strength of one who governs resides in the perfect knowledge of those he governs, the Dictator said in his inaugural speech. Are we Paraguayans, or at least our countrymen who have been unable to escape the hydrophobic dog, condemned to the fate of that poor cat born in a dungeon? May Yr. Grace use all this to sound salutary warnings in his Proclamations. Your devoted friend and humble servant Buenaventura Días de Ventura.” (Compiler’s Note.)

  *1 In his History of Eternity, Jorge Luis Borges, citing Leopoldo Lugones (The Jesuit Empire, 1904), notes that in the cosmogony of Guaraní tribes the moon was considered to be male and t
he sun female. In the same note he writes: “In the Germanic languages, which have grammatical gender, the sun is feminine and the moon masculine.”

  In another of his works Borges informs us: “For Nietzsche, the moon is a tomcat (Kater) that travels about on a carpet of stars and, also, a monk.” A limited, symmetrical mind would immediately ask itself: What about the sun? How did Nietzsche conceive of the sun? A she-cat sun? A nun-sun? What sort of carpets did he see her traveling on? El Supremo’s Notes hint that he solved the riddle propounded by Nietzsche. He settled the question once and for all by propounding a riddle of his own, having to do with historians, writers, and pests that infest libraries: “An insect ate words. It thought it was devouring the famous song of man and his firm foundation. But the larcenous bookworm learned nothing from having devoured words.” (Compiler’s Note.)

  *2 “The site of Doña Juana Esquivel’s house was absolutely splendid; the landscape that surrounded it was no less so. One saw magnificent woods of a rich and varied green; here the bare plain and there the dense brush; murmuring springs and brooks cooling the ground; orange groves, fields of cane and maize surrounded the white manor house.

  “Doña Juana Esquivel was one of the most extraordinary women I have ever met. In Paraguay, women are generally old at forty. Doña Juana, however, was eighty-four, and though her skin naturally was wrinkled and her hair snow-white, she still had a vivacious look in her eye, a ready laugh, and an active body and mind to testify to the truth of the dictum that there is an exception to every rule.

  “She lodged me like a prince. There is in the Spanish character, especially when enhanced as in this instance by South American abundance, such a magnificent conception of the word ‘hospitality’ that I allowed myself, through particular demonstrations of courtesy and reciprocal favors on my part, to comport myself in many respects in precisely the same manner as Doña Juana. In the first place, everything belonging to her house—servants, horses, food, the products of her estate—were all at my disposal. Then, if I happened to admire anything that she possessed—her favorite pony, rich filigree work, choice specimens of ñandutí, dried fruits, or a pair of splendid mules—they were conveyed to me in such a way that it made acceptance of them inevitable. Because I had remarked that it was very pretty, a gold snuffbox was brought to my room one morning by a slave, and because one day my eye had chanced to fall on it, a diamond ring was placed on my table with a note that made its acceptance imperative. Nothing was cooked in the house save what was known to be to my liking, and though I endeavored by every possible means to compensate her for her costly courtesy and at the same time to give her clear indications that I found her generosity quite overwhelming, my efforts proved to be entirely in vain.

  “I was hence of a mind to abandon this overhospitable mansion when an incident occurred. Unbelievable, yet absolutely true. It changed my subsequent relations with this singular woman, and placed them on a better footing.

  “I was very fond of the mournful airs sung by Paraguayans to the accompaniment of a guitar. Doña Juana knew this, and to my vast surprise, on returning from the city one afternoon, I found her trying, under the direction of a guitarist, to sing, in her cracked voice, a plaintive love-lament and accompany it on the guitar with her dark, bony, wrinkled fingers. What else could that dirge have been? What could I have done in the face of that spectacle offered me by a woman in her dotage save to give a hint of a mocking smile, thereby risking offending the lady’s sensibilities? ‘For the love of God,’ I said, ‘fourteen years after you should, by every natural law, be in your grave, how can you turn yourself into an object of ridicule for your enemies or an object of pity for your friends?’

  “The exclamation, I confess, even though addressed to a lady eighty-four years old, was not gallant, for where age is concerned, what woman can bear a reproach of this sort?

  “It was immediately apparent that Doña Juana possessed all the weakness of her sex in this regard. She flung the guitar to the floor. She brusquely ordered the singing teacher to leave the house, threw the servants out of the room, and immediately, with a sort of fierceness I did not believe her capable of, she stunned me with the following words: ‘Señor Don Juan, I was not expecting such an insult from the man I love,’ placing extraordinary stress on the last word. ‘Yes’—she went on—‘I was ready, as I still am, to offer my hand and my fortune to you. Why would I have learned to sing and play the guitar if not to give you pleasure? Why have I studied, what have I thought of, for whom have I lived in the last three months save for you? And is this the recompense I receive?’

  “The very elderly lady’s show of emotion at this point was a curious combination of pathetically impassioned suffering and ridiculousness as, dissolving into tears and sobbing with indignation, she gave vent to her feelings. The spectacle was a novelty that took me by surprise and alarmed me more than a little on the poor old lady’s account. I therefore left the room and sent her servants to her, telling them that their mistress was seriously ill; and after hearing that it was all over, I went to bed, not knowing whether to feel pity or to smile at the tender passion that a young man of twenty had awakened in a lady of eighty-four. I hope that the story of this amorous adventure will not be attributed to a sense of vanity. I recount it simply as an example of the well-known aberrations of that most ardent and most capricious of all the gods: Cupid. There is no age beyond reach of his darts. Octogenarian and green youth alike are his victims; and his caprioles tend to be all the more extravagant when outward circumstance—age, habits, decrepitude—have conspired to make the notion of his access to the heart incredible and absurd.” (Ibid.)

  Shut up in my last-quarter, I rubbed the skull with a flannel cloth at night. Only later, much later, did it begin to take on a faint shine. It gave off a sort of rose-colored sweat from the heat of all the friction. I’m the one that’s doing the rubbing, but you’re the one that’s doing the sweating, I said to it. I kept rubbing, in complete darkness. Night after night for nine moons. Only then did it begin to give off minute sparks. It’s beginning to think already! Light-heat. Everything known. Everything white. Heart panting in my mouth. All white/all black. Tremendous tremulous happiness! Things typical of a child flying solo-to-solo. Or rather: things typical of a child still unborn incubating in the cube of a cranium. Any receptacle will do, even the dead head of one who has gone down the drain and ended up in a coffin, victim of an unexpected illness or a long-awaited old age. Better still, one who has simply remained buried underground. But I was a non-born, lying hidden by my own will within the six walls of a cranium. The memories of the adult man that I had been weighed heavily on the child that was not yet, freighting him with leftover fears. Fear not!, I said to him to raise his spirits. It is men of profound culture who bury themselves the deepest. They yearn to return to the nature they have betrayed. To return, out of fear of death, to the state that most resembles death. Something like forced confinement in a prison, a dungeon, a police station, a penal colony, a concentration camp. I didn’t think all of this then, in the stifling shadow of the garret. I imagined it, I will imagine it later.

  Being born is my real idea…(burned, the rest illegible).

  * * *

  —

  How long can a man lie in the earth before he rots? That depends, if he’s not rotten before he dies he’ll last some eight or nine year. And if he’s a good Christian and dies the day of his death rightly and properly, he may hold up till Judgment Day, maybe. Be raised from the dead by God’s voice alone. Ever’body knows that, little Jo. My name isn’t Jo. Yes, child. From taitá Adam to Our Lord Jesus Christ, that’s what it’s always been. Joshua. Or Adam. Or Christ. Can a man lengthen his life, machú Hermogena Encarnación? If he’s not guilty of his own death, he doesn’t shorten his own life. A man begins to grow old the day he’s born, little Jo. His old age keeps forever creeping backwards there in front of him. But where you ever seen anybody alive what doesn’t s
horten his life voluntarily? Don’t nobody know how to desert this miserable lot.