Through the workings of chance, the souvenir-pen (I prefer to call it memory-pen) ended up in my hands. The “little mother-of-pearl club” is in my possession, to do with as I please. The marvelous instrument belongs to me! I realize that to say this is to say a great deal. It seems incredible even to me, and there are many who will not believe it. But it is the absolute truth, even though it may give every appearance of being a lie. Anyone wishing to dispel his doubts has only to come to my house and ask me to show it to him. It is here on my table watching me continually with the nibbled tooth of the upper end, biting me with the memory-eye imbedded in the pen. It was given to me by Raimundo, nicknamed Loco-Solo,*10 great-great-great-grandson of one of El Supremo’s amanuenses. I practically wrested it away from my old grade-school classmate, whom I visited more or less assiduously in the hovel he lived in, on the Jaén near the Military Hospital, the former Hospital Barracks. In his last days, Raimundo never left his miserable dwelling except to go in search of the meager provisions he needed to stay alive, and most importantly the brandy and narcotic herbs that he consumed in great quantities. Every so often I would drop in with a few bottles of Aristócrata cane brandy and cans of corned beef. We would remain for hours in silence, not looking at each other, not moving, till night made our two shadows one. Raimundo knew my avid, my secret desire to possess his treasure. He pretended not to know it, but I knew that he knew, so that between the two of us there was frankly no secret. That is how things had been since the year 1932, when we first met each other in the República de Francia Primary School. Benchmates in the sixth grade. First boys’ section. I remember it very well because that year the city was full of band music and patriotic songs. The war with Bolivia broke out in the Chaco. The mobilization that took even dwarfs to the front began. To us the war was a never-ending fiesta. If only it would last for a lifetime! We played hooky and went down to the port to say goodbye to the recruits. Farewell, you future te’ongués (corpses)! Go and don’t ever come back, you poor dummies!, Raimundo shouted to them. Watch it, it’ll be our turn some day!, I said, digging my elbows in his ribs to shut him up. It’s already been our turn and we got screwed! Just look at how many wars there have been and we’ve been screwed every time. And here we are, still stuck in school with those fucking books! But they’re not going to ship me off to the Chaco, even though they come begging me on their knees! I’m going to take off for Africa! Why Africa, Loco-Solo? Because I want strong impressions, not that shitty little war with the Bolís. Balls on that!
When it came time for examinations that year, I helped him out on the written tests. I took the orals, the anals for him. The whole works. From the first subject to the last. The school was already a brothel. The schoolmistresses burning with patriotic ardor, furiously writing letters to their wartime adopted sons, and us cheating like mad on the exam. Without budging from his seat, Raimundo got a ten, whereas I, who’d worked my ass off for the two of us, came out with a three. As compensation, as a consolation prize, he showed me, for the first and only time, the fabulous pen that the great-great-great-grandson of Policarpo Patiño had “inherited” through a complicated tangle of little strokes of luck, above and beyond the right of an amanuetic dynasty: Here the thing is, he said. I barely managed to touch it. He immediately grabbed it out of my hands. I’ll buy it from you, Raimundo!, I almost shouted. Not even if I were mad!, Loco-Solo said. I’ll sell you what I dreamed last night if you like, but not this. Not even if I were dead! The tips of my fingers itched from the mere touch of the little mother-of-pearl club.
On the eve of the Exodus that began in March of 1947, I went to visit Raimundo for the penultimate time. He was nothing but skin and bones now. In a little while they’re going to be able to make buttons out of you, I said to him jokingly. He looked at me with his bloodshot eyes of a man with his throat slit, blinking in the swollen pockets of his eyelids. Hee! Hee! That’s exactly what’s awaiting me in a very short while, he said, and then after a long silence: Look, Carpincho,*11 I know you all too well, and I know that you’re a heartless disheartened monster. Disarmingly unarmed. For a long while now, or to put it a better way, from all eternity and even a little while before, not only since the bench in the República de Francia School and our whoring around in the brothels of the Calle General Díaz, but even a while before being born. The only thing you want is the Pen of El Supremo. Your mouth is watering. You wet your head just thinking about it. It melts your brain and your hands tremble more than my hands of a drunkard, of an epileptic, of a taker of güembé powders and the cocaine that the nurses give me, that you yourself bring me. You’ve courted me, besieged me, helped me to die with a patience more stubborn than love. But love is only love. Your desire is something else. That desire, not of what I am but of what I have, has chained you to me. It has made a slave of you, a dog that comes to lick my hand, my feet, the floor of my shack. But there is no friendship, love, or affection between the two of us. Nothing more than that desire that doesn’t allow you to sleep, or live, or dream of anything but that. Day and night. I don’t envy you. You’re much worse than I am. Think for a minute, Carpincho. I was born slowly and I’ve also been a good while dying. What’s done is done. Through my own will. Some seek death and don’t find it. They want to die and death escapes them. They have the teeth of a lion but they’re like women. Women who don’t know they’re whores. You’re one of them. But much worse perhaps. Very bad times await you, Carpincho. You’re going to become a migrant, a traitor, a deserter. They’re going to declare you an infamous traitor to the country. The only recourse left you is to go on to the very end. Not stop halfway. Go on whittling the stick down to a point. He fell silent, panting, exhausted not so much perhaps by the effort to speak as by the effort to observe a silence that had now been broken. His lungs eaten away by phthisis made more noise than a cart full of stones. He dumped out a great clot of blood against the wall. In a dwarfs voice he went on: At least another century of bad luck is going to rain down on this country. You can smell it in the air already. Many people are going to die. Many people are going to go away and never come back, which is worse than dying. Though it doesn’t matter all that much because people are like plants in this country. You kick the dust and for every one that isn’t there any more five hundred others spring up in the same spot. What matters is something else…but at this moment I don’t remember, I forgot what I was going to tell you. I tried to interrupt him. He raised his hand: No. Carpincho, don’t worry about me. The soldiers are going to shut me up in the asylum because they say that besides setting a bad example here around their hospital, I stink up the place. Maybe so, but what about the whores in the brothels all over the neighborhood? I’m the only Angel of the Abyss around here. The Exterminating Lazarus. The families of the officers who were confined screamed to high heaven. They’ve sent letters to the president, the archbishop, the chief of police. But I’m not going to go to the asylum. They’re not going to take me to the asylum, not even over my dead body. Not even if I’m dead. I’m Loco-Solo. I’ll be Loco-Solo to the very end. They won’t shut me up in the asylum! I’d rather bury myself in the stream that carries away the used cotton swabs, the dirt and filth of the Military Hospital, the bloody rags of the whores, their aborted fetuses…Another gob of spit smoked as it hit the adobe bricks. I don’t know if I’m going to get through the night. I know I’m not going to make it through. Up there in the crawl space of my shack, just below the roof, inside a tin tube is the Pen. Grab it and go straight to the Devil with it. It’s not a gift. It’s a punishment. You waited a long time for the time of your perdition. I’m going to be free tonight. You’re never going to be free again. And now leave, Carpincho. Grab the Pen and clear out in a hurry. I don’t want to see you again. Oh, wait a sec. If you manage to write with the Pen, don’t read what you write. Look at the white, gray, or black figures that fall to the sides, between the lines and the words. You’ll see terrible things heaped up in bunches in the dark that will make even the t
rees rotted by the sun sweat and scream….Look at those things while the dogs in the countryside howl in the middle of the night. And if you’re a man erase with your blood the last word on the blackboard…What word, Raimundo?
He spoke no more. He turned his back encrusted with dry sores from writhing about on the earthen floor in the attacks of convulsions, the violent hallucinatory spasms brought on by the coca and the drugs. Raimundo’s spectral silhouette was gradually reduced to that bent back of his that was looking at me. But I was the one contemplating my own back. Beneath the worn skin like tree bark crisscrossed with inscriptions and lines scratched out, the vertebras deformed by arthritis were pointing their parrot beaks at me. Was that spine, whiter and whiter in the darkness, which was my own spine and was sticking me in the eyes, going to start sweating and screaming? I heard myself breathe at half throttle. From the other side, the death rattle grew louder and louder with that sound of dry leaves that the threat of a storm wrests from the dead calm of summer.
Only much later did I happen to learn that Raimundo died that night, as he had foreseen. His whole life long, or at least as long as I knew him, he had cultivated a taste for his own death along with his fear of death. They found him after he had been dead for several days. His body was blocking the door, which in life he had never locked since there was no bolt or key. That corpse of a man like the dead body of a bird was so light that the wind alone blew one leaf open. The smell of Loco-Solo came out through the opening, since that was all that could come out of him now; it spread the news that he had now interned himself in his own Asylum. Taken his place in the tales of the hospital quarter. Cured in absentia. Transformed into that double sobriquet that became the name for all time of the fatally misleading legend of a man.
Some say they buried him in the cemetery of the Military Hospital, which seems unlikely given the rigid rules of the military. Others say the corpse was thrown into the river. This seems more natural somehow, being in accordance with Loco-Solo’s own wishes. There would not have been any great difference between the two ceremonies, however. (Compiler’s Note.)
As I write it projects its gaze between parentheses. Raises it to another power. Intervention of all the angles of the universe. Interversion of all perspectives concentrated in a sole locus. I write and the tissue of words is already crossed by the chain of the visible. Damn it! I’m not talking of the Word nor of the Holy Spirit transverberated! That’s not what I mean at all! Not at all! Writing within language makes every object, present, absent, or future, impossible. These notes, these spasmodic notations, this discourse which refuses to discur, this visible-speaking artificially fixed in the pen; more precisely, this crystal of aqua micans imbedded in my memory-penholder offers the roundedness of a scene visible from all points of the sphere. Machine encrusted in a scriptorial instrument allowing things outside of language to be seen. By me. Only by me. Since the visible-speaking will be destroyed by what is written. The sap of the secret will go up in smoke, leaving not a rack behind. No matter that the little migratory mother-of-pearl club will go on reflecting the sunny beaches of the shipyards on the shore of the river where the Ark of Paraguay is being constructed. It captures the shouts, the sounds, the voices of the shipfitters, the craftsmen, the oily gleam of the sweat of the black workers. Their untranslatable expressions, their interjections, their vulgar exclamations. Sudden silence. Inaudible sound that palpitates. What meaning can plays-on-words have in the face of that? Saying, for example: Paradise is a lofty, flowering, well-peopled dwelling place where the just become choruses of castrati. Or, the cock of winter stamps its feet angrily when dawn is late. Or as Bertoni, the expert on Indians, states, the belief that the son descended exclusively from the father and merely passed through the body of the mother, transformed the mestizo into a terrible enemy. Or, the people are brutalized by means of their own memory.
To say, to write something has no meaning whatsoever. Straining your guts does. The crudest little fart of the humblest mulatto who works in the shipyards, in the granite quarries, in the lime mines, in the gunpowder factory has more meaning than scriptorial, literary language. There, that, a gesture, the movement of an eye, spitting in the palms of the hands before grabbing the adze again: that means something very concrete, very real! What meaning can writing have, on the other hand, when by definition it does not have the same sense as the everyday speech of ordinary people?
*1 In 1538, fighting against the squalls of Magellan, the Genoese pilot León Pancaldo was obliged to turn back from the Strait of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. His ship, the Santa María, had its holds full of a fabulous cargo of goods destined for the newly wealthy conquistadors of Peru. Bad luck continued to dog him. He arrived in Buenos Aires when very ill winds were blowing. Dying of hunger, the members of the expedition headed by the First Adelantado had ended up eating each other. Under the governorship of Domingo Martínez de Irala in Paraguay, the remains of the deserted city were concentrated in Asunción, thereby making it the “shelter and support of the Conquest.” Pancaldo’s magnificent treasures were also transported to this city, thereby permitting the conquistadors to furnish and adorn their rustic seraglios with exquisite pieces worthy of true caliphs. From 1541 to the Revolution (and even long afterward) there was traffic in León Pancaldo’s merchandise in Asunción; thus Spaniards who barely had strings for their bows possessed daggers with beautifully worked handles, opulent fox-fur jackets, velvet doublets and hose. In humble straw huts it was not rare to find, alongside indigenous aópoí (very primitive cotton cloth), precious fabrics, satin curtains, pomegranate cushions, inlaid chests and credenzas, dressing tables with cut-glass mirrors, beds with baldaquins and curtains embroidered in gold thread; chaises longues, footstools, and ottomans of very fine tapestry, indiscriminately mingled with rough benches and stools carved by the natives for their masters. This situation long obtained among Creoles and mestizos, the sons of the earth.
The shipment of furniture and goods that Pedro de Somellera took with him from Asunción doubtless had its origin in the traffic in Pancaldo’s treasure to which the perpetual-circular refers. One of those authors of fictionized history who proliferate in Paraguay, where history itself is a museum piece or something stored away in an archive, took it upon himself to reconstruct the inventory of what was taken out of Paraguay by Don Pedro. It is an impressive catalogue. It would have taken an entire fleet to transport the shipment, not just one small sloop that set sail with its waterline below the surface in those days when the river had very nearly run dry. The inventory would have it, moreover, that Don Pedro stuffed his monkeys, dogs, pigs and other animals full of gold and silver coins before his departure; taking such specie out of the country was rigorously prohibited and severely punished at the time. (Compiler’s Note).
*2 “His appearance was imposing. Enveloped in his black cape with a scarlet lining, his eyes flashing, his silhouette standing out against the clouds, he was the very image of an avenging Archangel; his voice resounded more powerfully than the trumpet’s blare,” a witness of the period, the Hispanophile colonel José Antonio Zavala y Delgadillo writes in his Journal of Memorable Events.
*3 “At this time he acts in a conciliatory manner. He wishes to inspire general confidence, to be the man of order, to attract the goodwill of the pro-Spanish faction. He even changes his ways. He becomes amiable, affable. He is visited in his office by many ladies of the aristocracy, among them Señoras Clara Machaín de Iturburu and Petrona Zavala de Machaín, whose husbands are also in prison, to ask him to expedite their trial. He listens to them most courteously, grants their request, and bids them farewell ‘with great consolation,’ according to what Petronita’s father reports in his Journal of Memorable Events. The unsociable attorney has become very civilized. Power changes men so much! He does not even notice that the youngest of his lady visitors is his old love. Has he forgotten? Has he forgiven?” (Commentary of Julio César.)
“After an unfortu
nate love affair with Clara Petrona, the daughter of Colonel Zavala y Delgadillo, who rejected his suit out of hand, he is not known to have had other love affairs or courtships. Affections occupied little space in the frigid soul of this man, absorbed in accomplishing one fundamental purpose. To penetrate it one needs a ladder and a lantern.” (Commentary of Justo Pastor Benítez.)
“Strange universe, that of this man who is said to have possessed an obdurate heart, like that of Quintus Fixlein, completely untouched by the flames of passion, for the only seductions to which he yielded were his occupations. Others firmly maintain, however, that it was endlessly set on fire and was sensible to those Andalusian eyes that still gleam brightly unto the tenth or twelfth generation. The thought comes to mind that in such cases it must have burned like anthracite, as it is said that his eyes gleamed in his face of an urubú.* There are vague rumors to this effect.
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