* * *
—
A cry escaped me that resounded in the night. The Capricorn rose. He was about to leap upon me. I raised my short-barreled carbine and pointed it at him. He stopped in his tracks. He heaped insults on my head in his barbarous bandeirante dialect. The two-master luffed and went aground in the tuff of the riverbank. My word, what’s the matter, Excellency! I just heard you give a terrible shout! Nothing, Patiño. Perhaps I was dreaming I was going down the river. I had my hand in the water. Perhaps a piranha bit me. Nothing serious. Off with you. Don’t bother me when I’m writing by myself. Don’t come in when I don’t call you. But…Excellency! Your fingers are dripping blood! I’m going to summon the doctor immediately! Never mind. They won’t bleed much. It’s not worth bothering that old fool for such an old wound. Out with you.
In this part of the notebook, the handwriting in fact appears somewhat scrawled, covered with a reddish scum where the bookworms have feasted, leaving large holes.
When we awoke, the two-master was beached at a bend in the river that resembled a funnel of tall cliffs. Everyone was sleeping like the dead. The skipper, the crew sprawled out on the cargo, deader than the corpses of Igatimí. The sun leapt out from the other shore and settled down in its appointed place. Nailed to the noonday sky. The stench grew stronger. You will recognize it as a fetor, the Voice at my back said. At this moment I saw the jaguar, crouching in the brush of the cliff. I could foresee what was going to happen. In the shadow of the sails, raised as improvised awnings, the crew was still asleep in the suffocating heat of late afternoon. I attuned my will to that of the wild beast already tensed for the eight-meter leap downward. A thousandth of a second before the roaring, spotted meteor hurtled down upon the two-master, I plunged into the water. I fell onto an island of floating plants. From there, drifting gently, I saw the jaguar rip Don Engracia to pieces with its talons as he tried to get to his feet to confront the beast with his rifle. The weapon described a parabolic curve and landed in my hands. I aimed carefully, ceremoniously, unhurriedly. I held back for a moment to delight in the spectacle of the two-master turned into a sacrificial altar. I pressed the trigger. The powder flash outlined the figure of the jaguar in a ring of smoke and sulfur. Roars of pain made the waters tremble, the floating islands shiver, the shores of the river resound. The bloody head of the jaguar turned round, panting. Furious. Its eyes riveted on mine. A gaze untold ages old. Trying to transmit some message to me. I slowly aimed once again at the yellow pupil. The shot extinguished its burning gleam. I closed my eyes and felt I was being born. Rocked in the basket of the giant water lily, I felt I was being born of the muddy water, of the stinking mire. I emerged into the stench of the world. I awoke to the fetor of the universe. Bud of black silk floating on the crown-raft, armed with a smoking rifle, emerging at the dawn of a different time. Was I being born? I was being born. The true place lost forever, my first cries of a newborn babe wailed. Will I ever find it? You will find it, yes, in the very same place where it was lost, said the river’s rasping voice. A bottle was floating at my side. On the other side a dense shadow reigned. I lifted it. I saw the funnel of the wooded cliff burning in the zenithal brightness. I tilted the bottle up. I drank my own questions down in one swallow. Devil’s-milk. I sucked my own milk, from my frontal sinuses. I slowly rose to my feet, clutching the rifle.
* * *
—
I looked about. I saw the deserted two-master, heeled over on the riverbank, spilling out the foul smell of its cargo. The head of the jaguar threaded on the pike of the gaffsail boom. In the background, amid the dark foliage of the cliff, I saw two files of twinkling lights around what appeared to be a coffin. The boatswain came running down the slope. His silhouette, at once dark and transparent, halted before me, hesitating, not knowing how to begin: Sire…Your Worship’s father is asking for you!…Leave off such nonsense, bosun. In the first place, I don’t have a father. In the second, if you’re speaking of the one you call my father, aren’t they keeping watch over him up there? Yes, Sire. Don Engracia has just died. Well, I’ve just been born. As you see then, at this moment we have different business at hand. Your esteemed father keeps insisting that Your Worship come up to see him. I’ve already told you that there are no ties of kinship binding me to that man, living or dead. Moreover, if he insists on seeing me at all costs, let him climb out of that box for a while and come down here to see me. I’m not budging from here for any reason. Sire, Your Worship knows that only people with a limp negotiate downward slopes easily, but the master is already a completely helpless case and couldn’t take one step no matter how hard he tried. He wanted to bid Your Worship farewell, be reconciled with you, receive your pardon before he was laid in his grave. My pardon won’t protect him from the work the flies will do first, and then the worms. Sire, it’s a question of that old man’s soul. That crapulous old gaffer doesn’t have a soul, and if he does have one it’s through sheer carelessness on the part of the dispenser of souls. As far as I’m concerned, he can go to hell.
In Letter XLVIII, Guillermo P. Robertson gives the following account of this episode:
“Many years before being a public figure, El Supremo quarreled with his father over a trivial matter. They did not see or speak to each other for years. Finally, the father lay on his deathbed, and before giving his great and final account of himself, he was eager to make his peace with his son. He sent word to him to this effect, but his son refused to see him. The old man’s illness was aggravated by his son’s obduracy; indeed, it horrified him to leave the world without having secured a reconciliation and mutual pardon. He protested that the salvation of his soul was gravely endangered if he died in such a state. Once again, a few hours before breathing his last, he persuaded certain relatives to approach the rebellious son and implore him to receive and give benediction and pardon. The latter remained inflexible in his rancor, and answered in the negative. They told him that his father believed that his soul would not reach heaven if he did not depart at peace with his firstborn. Human nature shudders in horror at the reply:—Well then, tell the old man he can go to hell.
“The venerable old man died in delirium, calling to his son with heartrending moans that history has preserved.”
Basing himself on the works of the Robertsons and on other accounts, Thomas Carlyle describes the scene with less bathos. In the face of the old man’s plea for reconciliation, since he cannot resign himself to dying without seeing his son and granting him mutual pardon for fear that he will not be able to enter heaven if this does not come about, Carlyle has El Supremo merely say: “Tell him that my many occupations do not permit me to go, and above all, it is pointless.”
Further testimony, which cannot be suspected of indulgence or of temporizing on the subject of the rupture, is forthcoming from the correspondence of Brother Bel-Asshole and Doctor Buenaventura Díaz de Ventura. The latter was El Supremo’s predecessor in the office of syndic-procurator general, who later settled in Buenos Aires and became an influential figure in Porteño political affairs; Brother Mariano was the author of the fierce libel launched, under the title of Proclamation of a Paraguayan to His Countrymen, against the Perpetual Dictator shortly after his being so named. Both could not help but tell lies like truth (though as the indicted party was in the habit of saying, any contemporary reference is suspect).
Reduced to the essential, the counterpoint of the letters runs:
“Following his return from Cordoba he hung up the full habits to which he was entitled as a Cleric of Minor Orders and First Tonsure, and embarked upon a life even more licentious and dissolute than the one he had led in Cordoba. Because of this he broke with his father, at the time Administrator of Temporalities of the Indian Settlement of Jaguarón, and refused to have any further dealings with him.
“Years before the bad son took over the Supreme Government, the old man, being close to death, wished to be reconciled with his firstb
orn. He sent certain kinsmen to him with the plea that he be at his side in his agony in order to give him his last benediction. The answer was a most resounding and pitiless negative.
“The old man despaired, calling to his son and begging his pardon. In his deathbed delirium, however, he was doubtless the victim of a delusion when he saw his son appear in the room, enveloped in his red cape, and approach his bed.
“The poor man died crying out Vade retro Satanás, and cursing him with his last dying breath.
“However, at the time of these sad events, our future Dictator was constantly tormented by the bitterness caused him by the continual allusions to his bastard origin. Through trickery he contrived to come by a false genealogical record. From that time on, in the Cabildo, in all public offices, in the sinecures and benefices that were the rungs on the ladder leading to Supreme Power, he will always begin his representations with the sacramental words: I, Councilman of the First Vote, Syndic-Procurator General, native of this City of Asunción, descendant of the earliest hidalgos and conquerors of this Meridional America. He believed that he was thereby safeguarding himself against more contumely arising from his condition as the son of a foreigner, a parvenu, a Paulista mameluco; above all, against what for him was the terribly insulting and degrading word mulatto, whose burning brand seared his soul beneath the stigma of his dark skin.”
“What cannot be doubted, Rev. Father, is that the break with his father dates from that period of depravity and vices. The versions of various witnesses have passed on this fact with a certain superstitious aversion which has made of it something ambiguous and equivocal. The truth, however, would appear to be that, on having been sternly reproached by the father for his abominable conduct and severely rebuked for other no less vile and filthy acts, the brute, poisoned by his moral vices, cuffed him pitilessly, and in a most cowardly fashion, since he was a man in the prime of life and the other a very old man.
“There are any number of witnesses who maintain that only the intercession of neighbors prevented him from beating him to death. Had this happened, our Dictator’s career would have been off to a good start with this act of parricide.”
“No, my friend Ventura; do not allow yourself to be carried away by your righteous indignation. That ‘superstitious aversion’ of witnesses who reported the incident between father and son is not based on an ambiguous or equivocal fact. Let the truth be told, especially between the two of us, even though it behooves us to let sleeping dogs lie for the moment, since it might be counterproductive to spread it too far abroad. I will reveal it to you, but keep it to yourself with the reserve that gives you your reputation for prudence and circumspection.
“The rupture between Don Engracia, at the time Administrator of the Temporalities of Jaguarón, and his irascible son was due to the excesses and orgies to which Don Engracia himself gave himself over from the very beginning, together with his son Pedro, who at the time already evidenced clear signs of madness, in that Indian settlement.
“The abuses of the Captain of Artillery of the King’s Militias grew worse and worse once he had become Administrator, if we are to judge from the terrible charges brought against him by the inhabitants of the settlement of Jaguarón in a memorandum presented directly to the viceroy by the cacique Juan Pedro Motatí, the corregidor of the aforementioned settlement.”
(Memorandum of the cacique Motatí)
It is not surprising that the Indians suffer such grievous servitude, when the agent who is fanning the flames of their wrath is of an insatiable greed, burdened with offspring and debts, devoid of assets capable of remedying his situation. When he took on the mission of governing Indians he was filled with ambition, crushing them with an intolerable burden of work, stripping them of the few personal goods they had, and contemplating them in a state that merits tears.
“Who could think, sire, that these acts of violence would extend to stealing from us our daughters and wives, committing with them the most horrendous crime of which human evil-mindedness can conceive.
“For all these reasons, we beg Yr. Excy. to deign to send an individual of absolute integrity, such as these dire misfortunes call for, in order that he may confirm in the realm of facts this secret Report which we humbly place before your exalted justification; may the Administrator be declared a criminal offender and be given exemplary punishment, as provided by the laws, in view of the great inhumanity he has manifested by his vile and heinous deeds, removing him meanwhile from the office that he holds….”
“It is probable that the accusations of the cacique Motatí were somewhat exaggerated. The picture he painted of the desolation of his people as a consequence of the presumed extortions, cruelties, and excesses of the administrator may well be a bit overdone.
“Veridical things? Calumnies? Who can say!
“Around the same time, the predecessor of my relative by marriage, whom the latter came to replace, the priest Gaspar Cáceres, an old man already near death, nonetheless still had the strength to level furious accusations against the captain-administrator.
“In his own hand he wrote…Pardon me, Father: a dying man writing in his own hand? Well, my friend Buenaventura, it’s more than likely that he penned the accusations a little while before, when the whole affair began to get very murky. As Father Cáceres denounced: His violent acts are such that the caciques of the settlement emigrate en masse to the neighboring provinces with their wives and children. The town of Yaguarón has been left with no other inhabitants save oldsters, invalids, and those natives whom the administrator forces, with whip and rifle, to work on his lands, as in the old regime of the yanaconato*9 and the encomiendas. The fear and hatred that he inspired in that town were the only works he left behind him, the ex administrator affirmed on his deathbed, in his own hand or else dictating these incendiary remarks to some familiar.
“There is no doubt about it, Brother Mariano: the ailing ex administrator, having been removed from that canonship, was deeply resentful of the energetic spirit of enterprise of the captain-administrator of Temporalidades. The cankerous rancor, the spite of dying men is very often terrible.
“What is certain, my dear doctor and friend, is that several years later, when the captain was again serving in the militias of the Province, the file on the emigration en masse of the natives, headed by their caciques, among them one by the name of Azucapé (Flat-Nose), the most rebellious and willful of them all, had not yet been closed. The Administrator might well have ordered him hanged had he not made his timely escape.
“The cause of the rupture between father and son should be sought in these events. It is evident to me that my nephew’s abandonment of his ecclesiastical career and his sudden wallowing in a life of depravity and vice, were posterior to this break; in all likelihood its corollary and consequence.
“Up until that time he led a monkish life, someone who presumes himself to be well informed conjectures. But are austere habits, clothed in the dignity of monk’s robes, of any use?, he must often have asked himself. Why make so great a sacrifice for the honor of a name, the target of terrible attacks, when there in Jaguarón his father and brothers Pedro and Juan Ignacio were dragging in the mud not only the name but the tradition of the entire family in vacanals with Indian girls and mulattas?
“He changes radically. Thus, while the oppressed natives abandon their ancestral heritage, the ex Cleric of Minor Orders of Córdoba plunges from dark to dawn into the excesses of an unbridled libertinage.
“He turns into a mad devotee of Venus. He seeks frivolous love affairs, carefree amorous adventures, wanton women. He spends his nights endlessly carousing. He wanders with bands of merrymakers all over the outskirts of the city, giving serenades, taking part in vulgar suburban balls. He is a bright light at these revels because he plays the guitar admirably and is a good singer.
“Above all he loves to gamble. On many occasions dawn finds him dea
ling a hand of monte bank or truque, in which he loses with the same ease with which he wins the lucrative lawsuits for which he has become famous, having never lost a single one since his admittance into the confraternity of the bar.” (Compiler’s Note.)
Bury him once and for all, as deeply as you can. Then bring the men. We are going to free the two-master from its mudhole and return immediately to Asunción. The boatswain went off. Fleeting reflection amid the reflections climbing up the ravine. At the top of the cliff, in the white shadow of midday, the glints from the candles shimmer with a beautiful, dazzling, many-colored light. Effects of perspective and refraction, the aerial vigil amid the trees creates an agreeable spectacle whose crowning touch is the six great tapers reaching almost to the clouds.
The sails of the two-master gently swelled and tautened with the north wind that began to blow, and the boat continued on downriver in the dusk. The capric voice began all over again its recital of its labors as captain of the king’s militias. The silhouette propped up against the mainmast appeared to be more erect than in the thirty days just past. Its voice clearer. The reddish light of the little navigation lamp afforded a glimpse of a more healthy-looking countenance. The majority of the crew, sitting round about, nodded drowsily as they listened to the lilting voice reeling off the endless story. Only a few Indian rowers helped the wind along with their long takuaras, pushing the two-master along the canal path. In seven days, exactly, we described our precisely designated destination, the port of Santa Fe.
I the Supreme Page 40
