I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  In Buenos Aires the Revolution is being made by the Girondins among the commercial bourgeoisie of the port. Its best and greatest efforts do not go beyond preserving the system of the viceroyalty, along with a handful of reforms that will tend to crystallize once again in a monarchical crown. A Creole one this time. Its most “enlightened” intellectuals are out of touch with the popular masses, as are the toplofty military chiefs who head the Junta.

  The general rose to his feet. He began to pace once more from one wall to the other. He shook his head. I do not agree with what you say, Sire. I am not a merchant. Nor are you. You love your people. I too love mine. We are unfortunately in the minority, general. It depends on us whether the majority of the people will side with us. Didn’t Cornelio Saavedra accuse Mariano Moreno of being an evil Robespierre who advocated exaggerated principles of liberty, impracticable theories of equality? He then segregated this sect of false Jacobins-in-a-lather who were trying to foment, according to Don Cornelio, a rabid democracy in perpetual ferment, destined to subvert religion, morality, and our traditional way of life. At this point Moreno was sent to go soak his head in the depths of the sea.

  Vicente Anastasio Echevarría was gravely taking notes. Instead of sipping he was blowing into the bombilla of the maté vessel that the little mulatto Pilar was serving him. No, not that way, doctor. Difficult to suck/breathe at the same time, isn’t it? His eyes rolled. He didn’t know what to say. Look, gentlemen, at times it pleases me to be naive, though not as naive as it would appear. I am absolutely certain that you have come to ask me to give Buenos Aires the rest of what has already been given it. He who gives and gives is left with nothing left. In such a situation, the one recourse left me is to lock the door from the inside. Keep the keys. Erect a chain of fortresses from Salto to Olimpo. Keep open only those loopholes that are in the country’s interest. This is what I shall do. It’s already done. Accomplished.

  It is my understanding however, señor dean, the pettifogger insists insidiously, that Your Excellency is merely one of the members of the Governing Junta of Paraguay. Here, señor jurisconsult, more than a Junta on parade we have a Revolution on the march. I am the Director of the Revolution. Traitorous Thermidorian coups threaten us at every step of the way. An iron hand is needed to conjure them. Hence you needn’t waste your time with figureheads. If my words do not suffice to bare the facts to you, events will bear me out. Victorious on the battlefield, my dear friends, Paraguay does not decline to sign an accord. But it refuses to be defeated by a treaty. The Junta, the entire Cabildo as one applauds my words. By offering you the bases of a Confederation, I am opening doors to you that can lead to a solution at once nationalist and Americanist. Equable. Fraternal. In the general interest. This is to speak of the future in the most concrete terms possible. Let us not cast dice to determine our destiny. Let us share it equitably, and not waste our time in equitation competitions. Let us not accept the iniquity of inequity. Let us all put our money into a kitty without its turning into a sackful of cats. Let us seek as one the best path. It is quite sad enough to see ourselves reduced to bottling up our accords-disaccords in words, notes, documents, counter-documents. Locking up facts of nature within signs against nature. Papers can be torn up. Can be read between the lines, and even between the lines between the lines. Millions of meanings. They can be forgotten. Falsified. Stolen. Trampled on. Not facts. They are there. They speak louder than words. Let us bend our every effort to shaping the Confederation. But I see no other possibility of establishing it save through a truly popular and revolutionary process.

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  As we ride on horseback along the King’s Highway and through the lower town, the inhabitants of the city throng into the streets cheering. General Belgrano smiles and waves, enveloped in the halo of his image. A living saint in a general’s uniform. We ride through the streets of Asunción, not amid a hostile multitude of sons of Jews, but a people of fervent devotees; the sons of this red South American Jerusalem: our Earthly Jerusalem of Asunción. Echevarría, ill at ease, his pettifogger’s soul making the varices of his tongue burn: Without the axis of a center of order such as Buenos Aires, and without a proper fixed orbit, that constellation of free and independent States that you proposed, señor dean, will be stillborn and formless. Look, illustrious doctor, neither you nor I must oppose what is inscribed in the nature of things. Look, contemplate this simple people, eager like all peoples for liberty, for happiness; just see how it is beginning to stir in the heat of its fervor! Those real beings, those possible beings are questioning us, acclaiming us, clamoring for us, imposing their innocent mandate upon us: we who are still probable beings, with as yet no fathers or mothers, mounted proudly on our ideas which are dead ideas if we do not lead them along the path to becoming realities. Those beings are alive. They are applauding us but they are also judging us. Awaiting their turn. Coming round the circle once again. Look, doctor, contemplate those black, callused hands! They are waving, turned completely white by the bright blazing sun! They want to make of us their Roman candles. They are trying to set us off with their fervor. In the light we cast but a shadow, give off only smoke. I don’t quite understand what you mean, señor dean. You needn’t understand me, Doctor Echevarría. Understand them. As General Belgrano already has.

  We are shouting to each other amid the tumult without hearing each other’s words, merely seeing their emptiness shape our mouths. I am accustomed to not having doctors understand me, Doctor Echevarría. Your Tacitus will say that this doctrine of Confederation is destined to be exploited in a sinister fashion in the wilds of Paraguay by the most barbarous of tyrants. He maligns me. He maligns the two of you, speaking of your total blindness, of your total deafness. That word, set down in a treaty, taking on visible form, your Tacitus says, was soon to arouse all the people of Río de la Plata, furnishing a basis for anarchy and a banner to the political and social dissolution that will compromise the success of the revolution and annihilate social forces, even though it is later changed into the constitutional form synthesizing the elements of organic life of our peoples. Your Tacitus with his faulty syntax recognizes it and denies it at the same time, having learned his lessons under English colonial tutelage. This is not the cloth we ought to be cutting to make the coat that will fit all of us well. If such a thing comes about, such a coat, despite what Tacitus the Brigand says, will pass from hand to hand, turned into a magician’s bag of tricks and in the end nothing but a bloody, stinking rag. Your image of the coat, señor dean, is very graphic. But like every image, illusory, deceiving. We are not dealing in images or in coats, but in political realities. We are not tailors. We are men of ideas. We must govern and establish laws, as the wise legislators of antiquity realized. Excuse me, doctor, but the congress of Buenos Aires or of Tucumán wouldn’t dream of meeting in antiquity. You wouldn’t want the Confederation to age two thousand years even before it was born. Nowadays, señor jurisconsult, in this sack of cats of our colonized provinces, we “enlightened” intellectuals, as you proclaim, must first establish institutions in order that they in turn may make laws, may educate men to be men and not jackals snatching what belongs to others. Apply your art of persuasion, your clever mind, your knowledge of men, of things, not to impugn our motives but to oppugn the intrigues in which the enemies of our independence are seeking to trap us. It is not giving our people the honor due them to consider them born for endless subjugation and slavery. Take a good look at this people that is acclaiming us, that believes in us still. Do you believe that they are fervently pleading with us to turn them back into slaves for a minority of the privileged to exploit for their own private benefit, as their foreign masters have always done heretofore?

  I rejoined General Belgrano at a gallop, for he was dangerously skirting the edge of the cliffs of La Chacarita, where once upon a time the huts of the parish of San Blas had perched. Stay away from there, general! That’s treacherous ground! Because of the da
nger of landslides! Don’t worry!, he answered me, galloping across the precipice. I know when I’m on firm ground and when I’m on ground that will give way! Naturally. The general is right. When he came to Paraguay the first time he was obliged to form his army from levies on the people-multitude. Living beings. Powerful. Profound natural wisdom. Alike everywhere under like conditions and like destinies. From among these people were conscripted the men who went to Buenos Aires to help combat the English invasions, shortly before you came to invade us, general. That is true, my esteemed dean. The Paraguayans lost their men, their arms, their limbs, their courage, their lives on the battlefield in that first patriotic crusade against foreigners. Then my troops too came to Paraguay on an auxiliary mission. When they realized that the Paraguayans did not realize that the expedition wasn’t against them but against the Spanish power that still reigned in these parts, my soldiers preferred defeat with honor to the false glory of continuing to shed the blood of brothers.

  The conversation was becoming weighty. Freed of gravity, horsemen ought to be sparing of words. Saddles do not permit highflown disquisitions. Except on steeds such as mine, fed on the clovercarburant and aeromobile alfalfa that I cultivate on my experimental farms. Above all the black-and-white and the bayard, the heartiest eaters, on which Belgrano and I were mounted. A night of feeding on this forage produces, in the process of digestion, enough volatile gas for a flight of several hours. Aristotle derived animals from air. Leonardo made contrivances that flew, stealing from the birds the secret of propulsion and the plan of their wings. Julius Caesar fed his horses on seaweed, thereby imbuing them with Neptunian vigor. Basing myself on the principle that heat is simply a levitating substance more subtle than smoke, source of energy of matter, I outdid the Stagirite and the Florentine: instead of making mechanical and aerodynamic devices, I contrived the idea of cultivating thermic pastures. Magically useful food/thought. Factories of natural forces of incalculable possibilities for the perfecting of animals and the progress of human genetics. Construction of the super-race by means of nutrition. Alpha and Omega of living beings. Here you have the Eldorado of our miserable real condition. Don’t you think, general, that the plankton stored up in the oceans could be the solution? Inexhaustible nurseries of energy! I am not acquainted with the sea, but I know that that is possible. You people are on its shores and should begin these experiments. In secret, since otherwise they might bring on a war with cattlemen and butchers, arouse an even more inexhaustible craving on the part of the avaricious merchants of the port for their pound of flesh.

  We were now galloping amid the clouds on our montgolfier mounts. The red map of the city looked an even brighter red from on high. The green of the groves more green. The palm trees more feathery and graceful, dwarfs, tiny little dwarfs. The shadows of the ravines darker. The setting sun spread liquid fire over the bay, over the houses crowded together on the hillsides. Oh, what a beautiful landscape!, Belgrano exclaimed, breathing in deeply. He raised up a little in his saddle. What has happened to Echevarría? I was unable to hide my smile of satisfaction. I could see the meddlesome secretary riding along among the gullies formed by torrents and floodwaters. Look at him down there, general! At the very bottom of the Bajo. Lost in the depths of the Lower Town! How too bad for Don Vicente Anastasio!, he said pityingly. Missing this spectacle! Really bad luck, general. Your secretary is riding Fulgencio Yegros’s nag, one that’s only good for riding at the ring and sprint races on the straight and level.

  Let’s take our aerostatic Bucephali down. What do we do? Do we prick them somewhere? Do they have some sort of escape valve? No, general. Everything happens naturally. Your terror is groundless. They’re thermic beings. When their gas gives out, the horses touch down again on terra firma. It all happens very naturally. The twilights in the west are incomparable at this season of the year. Look, general.

  Free for once of the presence of the shyster secretary, I began harping once more on my pet subject: What happened to the viceroyalty twice in a row would happen to Paraguay only once. During my lifetime at least. Belgrano blinked, not understanding. The English, my dear general, invaded the Plata in a typical pirate expedition in order to get their hands on the flood of tax revenues from Chile and Peru that had poured into the port of Buenos Aires. Isn’t that so? That’s how it was, señor dean. Some five million silver patacoons, more or less, isn’t that right? More or less, yes. The viceroy ordered the treasure to be transferred elsewhere and hidden. The money fell into the hands of English pirates. It was shared equally among commodores, generals, brigadiers. The remainder was sent to his Britannic majesty. Angel-Saxon probity. Leaders and officers of the invaders are lodged in mansions of the respectable classes. Freedom of worship and of trade with the pirate country begins. The patriciate takes a great fancy to the scented soap that comes from London. Meager compensation for the Porteños. Naturally the tide of fragrant lather never reaches the rabble inland. Blacks, mulattoes, and gauchos smell nothing but the growing ferment of their discontent.

  The pillaging operation became a political undertaking. In view of the ease with which a handful of determined men, without exaggerated scruples, laid their hands on such rich booty, the English undoubtedly thought they could replace the Spaniards as the governing power in the Colony, even though their rule would have to be disguised under the name of “protected independence.”

  Meanwhile the coffers with the patacoons for the archons’ annuities were paraded through the streets of London. Pomp and circumstance. A delirious multitude, very different from the one cheering you down there. The chariots transporting the product of the plundering are drawn by picturesquely adorned horses. They bear banners and inscriptions in gold letters: TREASURE! BUENOS AYRES!! VICTORY!!! Do you see them? Here they come, amid a fanfare of bagpipes and drums!*2

  If we deal with South Americans as merchants and not as enemies, we will reinforce localist tendencies; in this way we will end up with all of them in our pocket, the ruling powers of the British Empire thought/adopted as their policy, thereby setting their descendants in New England a brilliant example. Despite all this, despite the May Revolution, despite all the feelings of spite, the New Governing Junta promised not only to give the English protection. It would do much more. Thus the “indirect domination” of Río de la Plata, or “protected independence,” was abundantly assured in the hands of the new masters. Isn’t that true, general? Belgrano had swallowed a bit of coarse-grained cloud that made him cough. I know, my dear general, that you did not attempt to cover up all these facts, but instead openly resisted them. I also know that you went to the Banda Oriental in repudiation of the invaders. Your sense of honor refused this dishonor. Through a friend I have there, in the Chapel of Mercedes, on the Uruguay River, I know that you suffered in those days. I also know that during the brutal acts of savagery on the part of the British you did not remain idle, as befitted your patriotism. Later on they forced you to come here.

  I in my turn was witness of the events/counterevents that brought about your expedition. After my retreat to my farm in Ybyray I observed them intently, as you did after yours to Mercedes. Nonetheless, I was more fortunate than you. Thrice over: fortunate that your penetration of our borders ended in a more than prompt withdrawal; fortunate that I am now your friend; fortunate that I am galloping with you through the blue of this Paraguayan sky. The honorable head of a mission of peace, you, general, have come to propose to Paraguay not the aberration of a “protected independence” but an egalitarian, fraternal treaty. An addicted reader of Montesquieu, of Rousseau, as I am, we can readily agree in principle to model the project to attain the freedom of our peoples on the ideas of these masters. You, general, are one of the very few Catholics to whom the Pope gave license, in the most liberal terms, to read any and all manner of condemned books, even those that are heretical, with the exception of those on judicial astrology, obscene works, libertine literature. I will not say that the Contract and other avant-ga
rde books contain all the wisdom we are lacking in order to proceed with infallible judgment and wisdom. It is quite enough if we arrive at a meeting of minds as regards the principal ideas. Points of departure in the struggle for the independence, freedom, and prosperity of our countries. It is in this spirit that I am drawing up the draft of the treaty that we are to sign tomorrow.

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  The long caravan of those carrying their children in their arms slowly files past the holy water font for the ceremony of baptism at which General Belgrano is acting as general godfather. They have collectively asked him to do so. He has accepted the imposition with his usual natural goodness, and now the procession of parents, both legitimate and natural, has reached him. They deposit in his arms thousands of offspring that, by virtue of the waters, become godchildren of the general and their fathers and/or mothers compadres and comadres. He has been standing alongside the font, in the atrium, for hours now. The cathedral, leaning like a latter-day tower of Pisa, threatens to topple over at any moment. The mother church creaks, groans threateningly through the countermouths of its cracks and crannies. Nothing daunted, Belgrano goes on holding the babies over the round Jordan. The first one was María de los Angeles, just born. José Tomás Isasi and his wife shed tears over their little bundle from heaven kicking amid yards of lace.

  On the stage set up below the Cabildo, a performance of Phèdre*3 is given. Petrona Zabala is admirable in the role of the daughter of the king of Crete and of Pasiphaë. It is as though she is the wife of Theseus in person, incestuously enamored of her stepson Hipólito Sánchez. In the scene in which, overcome with remorse, she hangs herself on Mount Venus with her own girdle of a virgin queen, the verisimilitude of the real borders on hallucination. From the top of the cliffs, seated beneath the orange tree, we contemplate that slender, endless body. Spectral whiteness oscillating on the black mirror of the water amid the gleaming torches. Hair ruffled by the wind veiling her face.