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Silence of three shadows. Three times silence in the shadowness of the study. They have been sitting there for a long time. It cannot be said that they are in good countenance. But in order to put a good face on things, the only recourse is to recall all the vexations of the past. My apologies, noble sirs. Your mercies’ patience must be sorely tried by these buffooneries. Forget them, I beg you. What we must remember is the good of our countries. We must reflect on what we have agreed upon. Weigh the justice of our pact, to the last grain. See to it that what has been said, written, covenanted, signed is fulfilled. You two in your country, through your government, backed by the sovereignty of the people in their honorable legislative assemblies. I in turn shall do the same here. Or better put, consider it done already, since my will represents and realizes by delegation the invincible will of a free, independent, and sovereign people.
The two shadows do not answer. The flight of a blowfly distracts them. Are you gentlemen with me or not? Yes, señor dean, we are here, Vicente Anastasio Echevarría says, straightening up on his seat again. I rise from mine. Take Benjamin Franklin, steel-engraved, down from the wall. The Porteño pettifogger gazes, frowning, at the inventor of the lightning rod. Manuel Belgrano opens his eyes. This, my friends, is the first democrat of these new worlds. The model that we must imitate. Forty years from now, our countries may have men like him. If and when, naturally, the great country of the north continues to produce men like Franklin. If it does, we may enjoy in the future the freedom for which we are not prepared today. By some misfortune, it may so happen that North America will not produce more men of the stamp of the inventor of the lightning rod and that in our countries the lightning bolt of anarchy will strike down our best men. It may so happen that they will invent the Big Prod up there and that down here we’ll all die of the croup, carbuncle, and tick, like the cattle in our fields. We must take care not to fall into the hands of master-butchers. Echevarría raised his hand full of grasping fingers: You are not very optimistic, señor dean. On the contrary, doctor, I replied. I am highly optimistic, but not amnesiac. A minimum of memory is indispensable in order to survive. The destruction of this faculty brings on idiocy, and we here in Paraguay do not drink the black cardamom coffee that brings Berber forgetfulness, but maté infusions and kidney-bean tea that help to preserve memory, and the good and bad memories within it. We have oftentimes seen the face of misfortune here. Now we want to see, forevermore, the face of fortune, even though it may cost us a fortune to see it. And so you see, I am clearly optimistic. True optimism is born of the center of sacrifice. Free of all selfish calculation, eh? Ah! He who sacrifices himself gives himself totally, and the sacrificer is the one who loses his life. Remember that, Doctor Echevarría. Franklin knew it. Thrifty spirit who husbanded his visionary energy, carefully hoarded his rigorous discipline down to the last cent. Faith, confidence, charity, hope, freedom. A peer of yours, among your equals, right, general? He did not listen to me very attentively, lost in the delicate central solitude of his thoughts. Compadre Benjamin was optimistic even about death, I said. At the age of twenty-three he had already composed his epitaph with words of the Office. I’ve copied it on the back. Read it, doctor. The pettifogging voice stammered:
The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer
(like the cover of an old book,
its contents torn out and stripped
of its lettering and gilding),
lies here, food for worms;
but the work shall not be lost,
for it will (as he believed)
appear once more in a new edition,
revised and corrected by the Author.
Would that we all might write our epitaphs with words as simple and wise, no? Although if I were to write mine I would not waste more than four letters:
I’m O.K.
General Belgrano smiled. I offered him the portrait, which he accepted with emotion. The copper discharge-wire of the minuscule lightning rod affixed to the very top of the engraving coiled round the feet of the pettifogger, hobbling him and volting him over. He rose to his feet, half-charred with wrath, thundering imprecations. I placed in his spidery fingers a manuscript history of Paraguay. Take it with you as a souvenir. Have it printed if you like, but don’t condense it, all right? The reality of this country is richer than what is bound together in these in-folios. The future is even more so. May we keep it safe from lightning.
The bushy-haired Don Benjamin, on the general’s chest, winked an eye at me. I raised my eyes to Belgrano’s face. I saw reflected in it, through dark images, the din of future disasters. I heard him sweating blood. Elephantine*3 agony of his Garden of Oblivion: Ay Patria mía! Muffled thunder of the infernal cavalcade that makes the American earth tremble. Murmurs of tongues tormenting the man who is vanquished. Mouths that create mudslides of false witness. I could see myself. Even though the years of your life were three thousand or ten times three thousand, no one lives any other life than the one he loses. The longest and the briefest span are equal. The present belongs to everyone. No one loses either past or future, for no one can be deprived of what he does not possess. The reason why, compadre Marcus Aurelius, according to you, we all keep finding ourselves buttoning up in another man’s house, at the wrong moment. I bet my last wisdom tooth against the gravedigger’s shovel that eternity doesn’t exist. What? Still not enough? All right then, I bet the false half of my skull. That’s piling it on a little thick! Come on, calm down. I keep getting all excited for nothing in these no-limits games, forgetting that every card’s a joker.
General Manuel Belgrano looks at me with his very bright eyes. He shakes his head. Somewhat sadly. He takes a few steps toward me. We stretch out our hands in silence.
*1 Guayaka: pouch (Guaraní).
*2 In order that the shock may be more impetuous, let go of the bridles of your coursers. It is a maneuver whose success has oftentimes honored the Roman cavalry…The moment the order is heard, they unbridle their mounts, cut through the enemy troops, break all the lances, retrace their steps, and wreak terrible carnage.
This fragment from Livy can be found copied out in like manner in the Combat Manual for Cavalry Forces, among the numerous works on tactics and strategy also owed to El Supremo’s own hand. (Compiler’s Note.)
*3 Allusion to the disease that killed Belgrano, a malady resembling leprosy that turns the sufferer’s skin into a thick, wrinkled hide like an elephant’s.
Almost the moment he returned to Buenos Aires, the pettifogger Vicente Anastasio Echevarría made a deal under the table with the members of the Junta to sell the printing press of the Foundlings, the only one in existence at the time in the sluice of Buenos Aires. The first American edition of the Social Contract was printed there, in Mariano Moreno’s translation. A relic. That sly shyster of an Echevarría not only tried to sell the press; he also offered Moreno’s library, at what amounted to a clearance-sale price. All this confirmed my suspicions as to what tasty morsels it was that the pettifogger and the members of the Junta were nibbling on in their conciliabules; what the real motives had been behind his pressing hurry to return home.
My ex brother-in-law Larios Galván, secretary of the Junta, writes to him: We naturally accept the press for the agreed sum of 1800 pesos. In order to deliver the money to Yr. Excellency, kindly inform us if there is anything else to pay, and if the machine will arrive with all the necessary equipment. Please be kind enough also to send us a memorandum concerning the library of the late Doctor Don Mariano Moreno, informing us of the price, so as to be able to conclude its purchase. We will take at whatever price everything dealing with public law, politics, belles lettres, as well as curiosa, rare jewels for bibliomanes; above all those of great material value because of their beautifully crafted bindings in precious metals and materials. Cost will not be a consideration.
When I learned of
the plot, I put my foot down and stopped all negotiations. My obligation as syndic-procurator general was to block the shady press deal. I did so. Moreover, I also nipped the other deal in the bud, the one having to do with Don Mariano’s books, which he wouldn’t be reading anymore in any event. I dictated the cancellation of the whole fraudulent affair to that rogue of a Larios Galván: For the moment, we regret not being able to take the press and the books, but with the enlightenment we already have here, we have no need of more or better.
The lasso-and-bola contingent of the Junta, the areopagites of the Twenty Families cried out that this was a great loss for the country’s culture. It’s one for your purses and your knavish intentions!, I threw back in their faces. As long as I am able, and have the power, I shall not allow clandestine acts of larceny. My broom swept clean. Hens have slim pickings on a well-swept floor. But at that point they upped the ante. Having lost out on the Foundling Press, they founded the Exposed Gamblers’ Gaming House. With the remains of the wooden press of the Jesuitic settlements, the patrician gamesters found a way to set up a press to print playing cards. Those wretches gone to wrack and ruin brought from the town of Loreto, where it lay buried, the wrecked type that had been the ruin of the civilization of the Indians. They brought from Buenos Aires the master printer Apuleyo Perrofé. Very soon, and also very clandestinely, his first fine handiwork came rolling off the press and began to circulate. It soon flooded the country, which was left without books, almanacs, manuals of devotion. Apuleyo fed even the files of the archive of the Junta through the machine.
Perrofé’s impressions were very nearly perfect. The most famous cardsharps of the era were unable to tell the faces from the backs of the cards, just as a person can’t tell one egg from another. Dissimilarity creeps into man’s works all by itself. No art can arrive at a perfect resemblance. Similarity is always less perfect than difference. It is as if nature made it a rule not to repeat its works, making them different each time. Perrofé, however, made his at once alike and different. He knew how to gloss, polish, and color the backs and even the faces of his cards so carefully that the most consummate gamester was always fooled as he saw them slip and slide in and out of the hands of his adversaries in the deal. Apuleyo’s decks of cards fooled even me. With the same perfection he composed and illuminated in miniature Bishop Panés’s Breviary; a book which at his death passed into the possession of the State; it is now among my rarest curiosa. It is so curious, Sire, that the last time I saw it it was completely blank. It is not rare for books to turn white with age, Patiño; especially if they are Books of Hours. The letters grow weary, become blurred, disappear. It’s the same with them as with mercury, eh? You know that, eh, don’t you? The more it is worked together, compressed, divided, the more it slips away and scatters all about. The same thing happens with all things. Subdividing them into subtleties accomplishes only one thing. It multiplies the difficulties. Increases the uncertainties. Augments the contention. Everything divided indefinitely becomes confused and is finally reduced to dust. That is what that accursed Apuleyo Perrofé did. Only after years of searching and raids was the Government able to put its finger on the clandestine press. I can still see the moment, Sire, when the hangman pushed Perrofé, with his neck in the noose, off into the air with a kick in the rear. A midget of a man, rounder than a butterball, the body of the master printer swayed back and forth till it almost burst inside his clothes full of bright-colored mends and patches. In the strong wind sweeping the plaza, the hanged man soon began to deflate. Coveys of cards came sailing out of his particolored clothes and soon filled the entire city. People immediately thought of the hundred thousand butterflies that are traditionally let loose every year in homage to your Excellency, on the auspicious anniversary of your birth. But in the silence that followed, since no one heard cannon salvos, nor sounds of the hundred bands of musicians from the barracks, nor the din of street bands of blacks, coloreds, and mulattoes, the populace finally realized that it was not the day of the Three Magi. The execution of the criminal magus, maker of cards, was ended. They cut down the corpse. All they found was the empty sack of clothes, burst open at the bottom, out of which there had poured the rain of cards, images of saints, pictures of naked women, first communion cards. Despite this exemplary punishment, despite the fact that the security forces had outdone themselves in the exercise of vigilance, Most Excellent Sire, there has been more gambling than ever since then in Asunción, in all the cities, towns, villages, garrisons, outposts; even in the most remote guard house and the most wretched hut in the country, even in the Indian camps there is gaming, Sire. It is useless to send the forces of the law and order to clean out the wicked gamblers. The next minute they’re right back at the cards, playing for all they’re worth as though nothing had happened. Even the guards are starting to try their luck in the gaming dens. When I was talking with Minister Benítez one time before he too fell in disgrace, he told me that if he had been First Magistrate, he would not have prohibited gambling or ordered Perrofé hanged. What I would have done had I been El Supremo, he said to me, would have been to legalize gambling and name Apuleyo Perrofé administrator general of the State Gambling Enterprise. A sort of vast patrial gambling den, covering the entire country through the intermediary of agencies and branches of the Internal Revenue Service installed in the tax collectors’ offices and even in barber shops, Benítez said. There are already patrial farms and estates, but the tax on gambling would have produced much more wealth than all of them put together; more than the sales tax, tithes, the state monopoly, the fructuary contribution; more than stamped paper, import and export tariffs, taxes on salaries and emollients, and the war tax. A fructuary tax on gambling, ex Benítez said, would have constituted the major source of revenue for the coffers of the State, for the well-being and prosperity of the people. It would have turned a collective vice into a superior civic virtue by turning the secret plague of gaming back into a multitude of public services, by making of it the purest source of National Savings. The passion for gambling, the ex minister went on enthusiastically, is the one thing that does not die in man’s heart. That’s what he said, Sire. Gambling isn’t like fire, he said. It’s not the son of two pieces of wood who, the moment he’s born, devours his father and mother, as among the tribes nor, as among Christians, the fire born from tinder and flint, or from a mere match head; the fire that serves to make the stew for supper, to burn off and fertilize the fields, to burn away scrub in the forest….And also, Patiño, to cremate our corpses, the fate that awaits us in the pasquinade. My, Excellency, that was something that escaped Benítez! We’re not going to escape the fire, Patiño. It’s not by sneezing all over the place the way you’re doing now that you’re going to put out the fire that is to consume us later. I beg your pardon, Most Excellent Sire. I can’t stop sneezing. It must be my way of raining. Especially in August, which is a month of rains and head colds. What Benítez added, Sire, is that neither fire nor gambling should be forbidden. Their utility lies within their very nature, and their own prohibition as well. The first thing that everybody learns about fire is that it mustn’t be played with, he said. The last, that it’s used for cooking food. That’s all well and good, ex minister Benítez said, but to stop games of chance would be playing with fire, and besides, they’re more useful than fire because they bring the poor man money. Hence gaming cannot be prohibited. It would be a cruelty….
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