I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  “A very tall catapult, at least a hundred meters high, advanced without a sound, propelled by its own automotive force, probably a steam engine. Powerful jets of water projected beneath this immense bulk of wood a veritable cushion of gaseous exhalation, making it lighter than a feather. That was the last thing I saw. At midday I fainted and was taken to my lodgings at the Customs House.” (Unpublished note of N. de Herrera.)

  I have few friends. In all truth, my heart is never open to the present friend but to the absent one. We embrace those who were and those who are not yet, no less than those who are absent. Among them, General Manuel Belgrano. There are nights when he comes to keep me company. He is arriving now, with no burden of cares, of memories. He enters with no need for me to open the door for him. I do not see him so much as feel his presence. He is here, present at my absence. There is not the slightest sound to announce him. He is simply here. I turn over on my side in thought. The general is here. Monstrously swollen, not so much from hydropsy as from suffering and sorrow. Floating half a span above the floor. Occupying half and a half of the non-room. My swollen leg the rest of the space. With no need to squeeze over to make room for each other we occupy in time a greater place than the limited one that space grants us in this life. Good evening, my dear general. He listens to me, answers me, after his fashion. The nebula-person stirs a little. Are you comfortable? He informs me that he is. He gives me to understand that, despite our dissimilarities, he feels at ease alongside me. What I appreciated most in men, he murmurs, wisdom, austerity, truth, sincerity, independence, patriotism…Come, general, all is accomplished now and compliments have no place here. But as you were remarking, our dissimilarities are not that great. Submerged in this darkness, we are indistinguishable. Among the non-living absolute equality reigns. Thus the weak and the strong are equal. As things have turned out, general, I would rather have lived the life of a field hand. Remember, Excellency, the general consoles me, citing Horace’s vain consolation: Non omnis moriar.*1 Ah, Latin quotations!, I think. Maxims not good for anything besides funeral orations. The thing is, no one ever manages to understand how our deeds survive us. Both those who firmly believe in the beyond, and those who, like us, believe only in this world here below. O altitudo!,*2 my guest said, and his words bounced off the stones…udo…udo…udo…When the echoes of the versicle had died away amid the buzzing of the flies, the silence of the depths returned to us. I only hope, general, that you did not end up in despair at the thought of your May, while I, despairing of our May that lacked all thought, bent my every effort to make a true revolution of it. Do you remember that you yourself advised me to do so in a letter? The memory carries great weight. The memory of works accomplished is weightier than the works themselves. Our egg-souls communicated with each other without need of a voice, of words, of writing, of treaties of peace and war, of commerce. Strong in our supreme weakness, we went to the very bottom of things. Wisdom without boundaries. Truth without limits, now that there are no longer limits or boundaries.

  To console himself for his defeats, he began writing his Memoirs. One notes in them how the revolutionary idea ferments, germinates, falls beneath the shadow of foreign economic domination. Belgrano, one of the first proponents of free trade in South America, says nothing of his participation in the schemes to found monarchies which, according to the learned Porteño doctors, were to further the cause of free trade. Fools beguiled by soap bubbles!

  I think I understood your thought, general. He does not answer, lost in the deepest of silences. Perhaps he is praying. I hunch up a little so as not to disturb his prayers. I am not about to ask him at this point what the reasons were behind his chimerical projects to restore monarchies in these wild lands. My immense guest hated anarchy as I did. Since the troublemakers, the blathering idiots, the cynical politicasters had not yet proclaimed any dogma, any form of government, confining themselves to splitting each other’s throats to win power, my friend General Belgrano was beguiled into seeking the center of unity in the principle of monarchical hierarchy. But while the so-called republicans of Buenos Aires wanted to place a queen or a foreign king on the throne, Belgrano aspired only to a modest constitutional monarchy. The monarchist re-publicans were negotiating with the Bourbonarian Carlota Joaquina. Any mercenary infante purveyed by the dominant powers of Europe would do. It was not by chance that the Rodríguez Peñas and the other Porteño monarchists held their secret meetings in the Vieytes soap factory. There are certain stains no soap can withstand. Yet what reproach can be leveled against you, my esteemed general? You did not attempt to set up a theocratic monarchy in the American world that had half liberated itself from monarchs and theocrats. You did not attempt to establish a Roman, Pampa, Ranquel, or Diaguita-Calchaquí papacy. You spoke only of placing a descendant of the Incas on the throne of the Creole monarchy, the brother of Tupac Amaru, an octogenarian who was wasting away in the dungeon of his imprisonment for life in Spain. Was this what your fellow citizens never forgave you, general?

  Through your silence, I contemplate the beginning of your agony, nailed to your cross at the Cruz Alta relay post for fourteen long station-months, even before the viacrucis of your pilgrimage began. You were spared neither afflictions, hardships, nor humiliations. You wanted to reach Buenos Aires to die. I’ll never make it now!, you complain. I have no way of getting around. You summon the master of the relay station. He answers with deathly insolence: If the general wishes to speak to me, let him come to my room. It is the same distance from his to mine. Despite everything, you were able to drag yourself about even as you were dying and reach your native city, which had so many times thrust you from its bosom and plunged you into a life of the worst sacrifices. You arrived on the very day that Buenos Aires, in the grip of anarchy, had three governors because it lacked one, and you, general, dying, dying, with that Ay patria mía! on your lips, your body hideously swollen, and that immense heart that left the surgeons who performed the autopsy thunderstruck. That heart—one of them said—does not belong to this body! You, distant, silent. Through your silence, my esteemed general, I see the cut marble slab of a commode covering your body, your memory, your works.

  My fate has turned out to be precisely the opposite. All I have had to do to occupy my time is flop about in my sewer-hole. Betrayed by those who fear me most and are the most abject and disloyal. In my case they offer me funeral rites first. Then they bury me. After that they dig me up again. They throw my ashes into the river, some people claim; others, that one of my craniums is kept in his house by a traitorous triumvir, and then later brought to Buenos Aires. My second cranium remains in Asunción, according to those who think they know all the answers. All this many years later. As for you, general, just a month after your death, as in ancient Greece and Rome, your friends meet for a funeral banquet. In the hall hung with flags, your portrait crowned with laurel is seated at the head of the table. As the guests enter, the Tacit Brigadier records, the sad and solemn music of a hymn composed for the occasion is heard, and all intone the antiphone, evoking your Manes. Amid this horrible dirge, published later by The Theophilanthropic Awakener,*3 the inextinguishable cry of Ay Patria mía! continues to resound. But that cry from the depths, altitudo…udo…udo!, was heard neither by the Tacit Brigadier nor by the Porteño patricians as they overturned their wine goblets on the memorial flowers.

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  As for me, I see the past now confused with the future. The false half of my skull kept by my enemies for thirty years in a box of noodles, amid the junk piled in an attic.

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  As will be seen in the Appendix, this prediction of El Supremo’s was also fulfilled down to the last detail. (Compiler’s Note.)

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  The remains of the cranium, id est, will not be mine. But then, what skull hammered to pieces by the enemies of the fatherland; what particle of thought, what people, living or dea
d, will there be left in the country who do not henceforward bear my mark? The red-hot brand of I-HE. Entire. Inextinguishable. Left behind in the protracted nothingness of the race to whom destiny has offered suffering as diversion, non-lived life as life, unreality as reality. Our mark will remain on it.

  *1 I shall not wholly die (Odes, III, 30).

  *2 O heights sublime!

  *3 El Supremo’s nickname for Mitre, the “Tacit Brigadier,” founder of a Buenos Aires newspaper.

  My private physician, the only one who has access to my chamber, my life in his hands, has been able to do no more to strengthen my bad health. Bonpland’s remedies, on the other hand, at a distance of more than a hundred leagues, did me some good, though at the cost of certain political troubles he also caused me. As a show of my will, I allowed him to leave only after the high and haughty of this earth ceased to importune me, demanding his liberation. I preferred to have the dysenteric flux rather than have the sages, the statesmen of the world, Napoleon himself, whoever, Alexander of Macedonia, the Seven Sages of Greece believe that they could divert my course. Didn’t Simón Bolívar threaten to invade Paraguay, as Father Pérez recalled at my funeral services, in order to liberate his French friend, thereby destroying a free American people? Liberate the Frenchy naturalist from what, if here in this country he enjoyed greater freedom than anywhere and enjoyed a prosperity the equal of, or greater than, that of any of its citizens once he learned to obey its laws and respect its sovereignty? Wasn’t it Amadeo Bonpland himself who declared that he did not want to leave Paraguay, where he had found the Lost Paradise? Did they want to free him or to yank him out of the First Garden? What sort of devilment were these demands on the part of the powerful of this world, who took this poor man rich in felicity and peace here as the pretext for their devilry? The dignity of a head of state must rise above his diarrheas. I let Bonpland go, against his will, only when they left off pestering me and when it so pleased me. I let him go and again fell into the hands of the protophysician and his insipid eggnogs.

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  Tell me, Patiño, what would you think of a great man who, being a friend of the great men of this world, who, being himself one of the most highly esteemed scholars in the world, suddenly settles down in the most secluded part of our wilds on the pretext of gathering and classifying plants? What would you say of such a distinguished man, dripping with medals, who decides to set up shop on the very borders of the country? I would say, Sire, that with all those medals clanking, he’s not going to go one step without people for miles around hearing him. But he came very silently and secretly, the Frenchy, and began to compete with the Paraguayan State. As he tried to set himself up smuggling maté, mendaciously maintaining it was mint and other such medicinal herbs, not to mention coca, the Great Man kept his eyecup trained this way, watching everything that went on here. Hand in glove with the worst enemies of the country. Conniving with Artigas, the big corporal of bandits and brigands, who is here now as a free Paraguayan present, a title and status vastly superior to that of Protector of the Banda Oriental. Conniving with the protector’s lieutenant, Pancho Ramírez, the wicked traitor from Entre Ríos, who at the end of his incursions left his madbrained buzzard’s head in a cage. Conniving with Artigas’s other lieutenant, the renegade Indian caudillo Nicolás Aripi. Conniving with all this petty vermin, the great traveler began to pillage our property. Why? What for? Wouldn’t you have said that such a great man was a schemer of the lowest sort, a common spy, any way you looked at him? Yes, of course, Sire, no doubt about it! A dastardly and despicable spy who should have ended up roasting on a spit! Not so fast, my delicate anthropophagous secretary. All I did was send a corps of five hundred men to rout that horde of interloping Indians, thieves, and troublemakers of the accursed Aripi, who’d turned into both a bodyguard and a boss (as always happens with scoundrels who act as secretaries). When the espiocolony was destroyed and the gang of thugs captured, the savant was wounded in the head and also fell prisoner. Through the stupidity and clumsiness of my soldiers, the only one who managed to escape was the ignorant and accursed Indian. I ordered that the prisoner be treated with the greatest consideration; likewise the fourteen little Indian girls and the horde of blacks captured with him. I confined the savant to the best lands in the settlement of Santa María, where the captors themselves helped him build the colony. What do you say to that? I merely repeat now, Sire, what I have said again and again since the days when these things happened: that Your Grace is the kindest of Men and the most generous of Governors. And all the more so in the case of that dirty spy! You can swallow your former, and false, indignation now. What would you say if that dirty spy, having been cut down to size, begins to remedy my ills without asking me for anything in return? That he’s a saintly man, Sire. Though on second thought, Excellency, not all that saintly, since he’s not doing what he’s doing because he wants to but because he’s obliged to. Naturally you think that the learned prisoner recently come from Napoleon’s court to these wilds was in a position to sever the thread of my life with his concoctions. Naturally, Majesty …I mean Excellency. Would you do such a thing, my spiritual-minded secretary? Not I, Sire! God save and keep this loyal servant! Such things shouldn’t be done helter-skelter, Patiño. When my eye itches, I look for eyewash, not a spine of coconut palm. In your case, it’s your rear that itches. Don’t think you can stop the itching by rubbing it on my seat. What you’ll end up with is a noose round your neck. It’s already happened. It was written. Fulfilled.

  There are those who speak of the hair, bones, teeth of the earth. It is a great animal. It bears us on its back. Some for a fair time, others less. One day it gets tired, rolls us off, and eats us. Other men, double-men, come out of its insides. The First-Grandfather of the Indians of the forest, according to the dream told and sung in their traditions, made his way out of the bowels of the earth by raking it with his fingernails. Ant-bears came out of the earth that devours men in search of the Land-without-Evil. They came out looking for honey. Some of them turned into honey-bears. Others into white jaguars. These latter eat honey and honey-eaters. But, to the earth, red hair, bones, teeth, couldn’t matter less. Mere baubles. She always ends up eating those who come into and those who come out of her inside. She’s down there waiting. Absolutely true, Sire!

  (Written at dawn. Last quarter.)

  I arrived at Santa María that night disguised as a peasant. I had my men wait a league away, hidden in the forest. Covered by my straw sombrero, I took my place in the line of sick people waiting in front of the hut on the side of the hill. I found myself between a paralytic and a leper lying on the ground; the one with his sores and a sombrero crowned with candles as a sign of his disease; the other, buried media res in total immobility. I lay down too, pretending to be asleep, my face glued to the bare dirt with the smell of many passing illnesses. I let them past. When I opened my eyes I found myself before a rosy-cheeked, chubby, robust little man. Gray, nearly platinum locks. Very fine hair, sweeping his shoulders. His voice, exactly like him, said: Don’t take off your sombrero. Don’t uncover yourself. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t ascultate me. He didn’t ask about my illnesses. Immediately, without speaking, without asking, he knew more about me than I knew and could tell him myself. Take this. He held out a handful of bulbs and roots. They appeared to be moistened with a very sticky resin. Have them boiled and set the infusion out to cool for three nights in a row. He took out a little pouch like the one I use for snuff. Opened it. Inside a very fine powder gleamed with the greenish luminosity of fireflies. Put this in the infusion. You’ll have your Corvisart tisane. My breath nearly taken away, I stowed the bulbs and the little box in my pilgrim’s sack. I made a move to take out some coins. He put his hand over mine. No, he said, my patients don’t pay. Did he know me? Did he pretend not to know me? Life is a mystery. He didn’t recognize me by sight. Perhaps, perhaps not. What he respected was the secret told without words, in
the shade of the sombrero that concealed my shadow. I made my way outside, reeling for sheer joy, stumbling over the dim shapes lying on the ground. A multitude in the dark resembling a moaning mass of bodies strewn all over a battlefield after a bloody combat. I made my way along, stepping on hands, feet, heads that raised up and insulted me with the tremendous rancor of the ill. But these insults merely made me happier still. Health does not know the language of choler. I was taking my salvation away with me in my pocket.

  I drank the tisane for three days. For three years my body pissed away all its ills.

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  Without the least nostalgia for Malmaison, for the pomp of the Napoleonic court, oblivious to his own renown, Don Amadeo continued to enjoy his paradisiac corner in the Paraguayan countryside, feeling more and more at home. Protected, cherished, venerated. As armies were mobilized, conspiracies hatched, letters exchanged, as emissaries from all over the world, scientists of unquestioned prestige, and dubious political ruffians seeking to enlist him in the service of their interests were marshaling their forces, compadre Amadeo sent me simples for my complaints: the sticky bulbs and the phosphoric Corvisart powder.

  Grandsire was different. He came in search of Bonpland. Saw. Was convinced. He said with utmost clarity what he had to say without straying too far from the truth. On the other side of the ocean, the most conspicuous men of science of the era awaited his reports. From afar, they all continued to see in Bonpland the Bonpland that was no more. Humboldt, the Bonpland who saved him from crocodiles when their boats sank on the Orinoco, or in the snows of the Chimborazo, or searching for his companion in the depths of the equatorial jungle in the darkest hours of the night. The others, with their royal-peacock eyes, the learned courtier of Malmaison and Navarre, Josephine’s landscape artist. The most eagle-eyed, the golden eagle of science, the naturalist, who after traveling with Humboldt more than nine thousand leagues, from one end of the continent to the other, came back to Paris with a collection of sixty thousand plants and some ten thousand unknown species. Humboldt and Bonpland, the Castor and Pollux of Nature, were never to meet again beneath equinoctial constellations.