I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  *1 This passage is composed of fragments taken from Azara (Description, p. 31), from Ruy Díaz de Guzmán (Argentina, LIII, c. XVI), and in particular from the Decree of the Marqués de Montes Claros, Governor and Captain-General of Peru, Tierra Firme, and Chile, “that the Stones of the Guayrá be sent, under heavy escort, to the Royal Treasury of Potosí,” April 1, 1613. Cod. Viriato Díaz-Pérez. (Compiler’s Note.)

  *2 You little shithead scholar!

  *3 Favorável: advantageous (Portuguese).

  *4 Combination of Portuguese gêlo and Spanish hielo.

  *5 So as to stage a last attack at dawn. This was to try to fool a parrot with a painted banana. To light a candle without a wick.

  *6 Bastardized form of Portuguese rapazinho: child, “kid.”

  *7 Help me, dead militiaman! Don’t let me die if you’re already dead!

  *8 If it’s true you’re in the Land of Fire. (País do Fogo = Hell.)

  *9 Yanaconas: name given to Indians who became personal servants of Spaniards in the colonial era (cf. note, p. 147). Their condition is referred to as the “yanaconato.”

  (Perpetual circular)

  What is good, what is certain despite everything, is that here the Revolution has not been lost. The country has come out ahead. The people-multitude has risen to occupy its rightful place. The useful animate objects of yesterday are the free peasants of today. They have their plots of land, patacoons in their pockets: patent remedies for all their ills, which have turned to goods. They no longer are obliged to hire themselves out, save to the State, their only employer, watching over them with just laws, equal for everyone. The land belongs to whoever works it, and each one receives what he needs. No more, but no less either.

  Of the seven cows and a bull brought by Juan de Salazar when he founded Asunción, there are today no less than ten million on the seventy-four patricial estancias; there are hundreds of collective farms. The entire country has a superabundance of wealth. The need to multiply has not become the need to demultiply. For every excess of goods fatally degenerates into evils, as experience attests. The prosperity of a State does not consist principally in the existence of a very large population so much as in the perfect relation between the people and its means. The day will come when Paraguayans will not be able to take a single step without treading on mountains of ounces of gold. That feline from Rio Grande do Sul, Correia da Cámara, who came here several times trying to swap chimeras with me in the name of the Empire, prophesied as much. Sometimes the prophecies of slick swindlers are truer than the predictions of visionaries who see only fantastic elements produced by the chronic illusion of Utopia. Cross out this rigmarole. Put: We Paraguayans are about to set foot on the oracle paved with ounces of gold predicted by that Portuguese-Brazilian.

  Our people, I have always said, will attain its rightful due some fine day; if not, time will see to it that it does. Let the rivers be opened to foreign trade; that is the one thing we lack in order for our riches to flood the globe. When the flag of the Republic is free to sail to the sea, foreigners will be permitted to come trade with us on equal terms.

  Only then will the question of the traffic of goods be settled, and more important still, the question of limits between States divided artificially in order to ensure the rule of the Colony. And behind it the sub-colonies and the sub-empires supported by the interests of the oligarchies. They too have enriched themselves, hand over fist, using patriotism as their cloak. Only when the Confederation of American States becomes a palpable reality and not merely the empty words of speeches and treaties will commerce, foreign relations be set in order, as best suits Paraguayans and their needs and interests. Not for the exclusive benefit of aliens, as was the case before the Perpetual Dictatorship.

  By its own effort Paraguay has created its foundation as Fatherland, Nation, Republic. The education you receive is national. As are the church, religion. Children learn in the Patrial Catechism that God is not a ghost, nor the saints a tribe of black superstitions with crowns of gilded tin. They sense that if God is something more than a very short word, he is in the earth they tread, in the air they breathe, in the goods earned in collective labor; not in their going about in Indian file begging in the streets, markets, villages, towns, cities, and deserts to see what chance may bring their way. Formed in the bosom of the earth, they think of it as their real mother. They treat their fellow citizens as brothers come forth from the same bosom. Hmmm. Strike out that image of the earth-mother. It’s a notion that those whoresons would never be able to get through their thick heads.

  I have nationalized everything here for everyone. Trees, plants for dyes, medicinal herbs, precious woods, minerals. I have even nationalized the maté bushes. I except the animals, the birds; they never abandon their native territories. Clouds come from the humidity of the earth, the water of the rivers, the respiration of plants. Clouds return in the form of rain, the dampness of the night dew. They come back to the earth, to the rivers, to the plants. Clouds, birds, animals, even inanimate creatures preach to us their fidelity to the soil. How does all that strike you, Patiño? Sire, your words are bringing tears to my eyes, and through the sweat of the eyes that tears are, I see dimly, but at the same time very clearly, everything that you are saying. Perhaps, Sire, because your words put inside one the truths that are outside…(There follows an irreproducible insult of El Supremo’s; the remainder of the folio is scorched.)

  (On a loose leaf)

  …snail, worm, slug, pebble, flowers, field butterflies. A great love above all for what is fixed, firmly rooted. Innumerable species of plants. Impossible to name them all. I have hunted monkeys, jaguars, foxes, deer, wild hogs. All sorts of predators. Fierce species or very gentle ones. I once hunted a specimen of the animal called a manticore, a gigantic red lion, with a human face and three rows of teeth, almost always invisible because the iridescence of its pelt blends with reflection of the light off the sand dunes. It breathes out through its nostrils the terror of lonely places. Its tail bristling with quills, it shoots them in every direction, swifter than arrows. They imbed themselves in the trees. Make drops of blood rain from the leaves. I downed the manticore in the Plinian expanse by shooting it with a narcotic dart. I let it go. When it awoke it returned to its secret dwelling. When I awoke, I found myself spattered with droplets of blood. These species do not emigrate; from the manticore to the white snail filleted with red, I have seen them all return freely to their wild haunts. I have seen birds fly so high, so far that they appeared to be motionless at the point of my keen sight. They vanished. Fell to the other side of the horizon. Moments later they dived down on me from every quarter of the compass. Ravens have done that to me. Also other varieties of volatiles, of aquatiles. But all, all, even the most erratile, return. Living things, like inanimate ones, have a great love of what is fixed, rooted, immutable. If stones had a way of moving about, they would go out for a little jaunt and then return to their places of origin in almost no time. The stone firmly planted by its weight, the plant by its roots. Tenacity of the act of remaining. Thought of staying permanently in the same place. I grieve for each one of those giant trees that I must order cut down so as to exchange them for gunpowder, ammunition, arms. Each blow of the ax falls on my trunk; its keening cry at being uprooted and dying cries out within me. The rafts go floating down the rivers, thousands of logs bound together. Let’s go!, I say to them. Don’t be idiots! You must fall so that the Fatherland may rise; you must go down the river so that the Fatherland may stay behind and make its way upstream again.

  (Perpetual circular)

  It is only migratile humans who do not have what is national in their blood. Going away, renouncing their heritage, the matter that gave birth to them, the medium that engendered them: what kind of business is that? Men are worse than vermin!

  Those migrants who exiled themselves, renouncing their lares, abandoning their land, I do not call my countrymen, nor do I
consider them as such. They turn into parasites of other States. They forswear their mother country and their mother tongue once they are abroad. They sell their words to the highest bidder. As men without a country, without a tongue to call their own, they vilify, defame, perpetrate pernicious fictions against their country. Plotting with the enemy, they hire out as spies, scouts, army clerks, informers. If they return, they do so hand in glove with the invader. They incite him, aid him in his conquests, in the subjugation of their own country. If only every last one of them could at least be traded for a grain of powder!

  Had it not been for my Government, they would have emigrated en masse. They were leaving in legions till I fulminated the edict: Either you stay, you migratory vipers, or you’ll leave your skin for the ants! Some of them escaped my grasp, the traitor José Tomás Isasi for one, who later sent as payment for his escape a few barrels of unusable yellow gunpowder, thus adding insult to the injury done the Government, the country, by his flight and his felonious larceny.

  On the other hand, numerous partisans of union, of the Porteñista cause remained in ambush here. Dead mosquitoes in the daytime. Buzzing culicids at night. Conspiring, prowling about, prying, spying. Sweating dryness. Chewing bitterness. Sucking the juice of their fingernails. Incubating malarial eggs in their pools of drivel. Deprogressing. Spawning the subhuman. Nits of contagion. Infection. Lift up a rotten cabbage head, a grainless ear of corn. Underneath is a grub in the form of a minuscule man. A fistula in the shape of a man. What are you doing here? It doesn’t answer. Doesn’t speak. Lacks a voice. Disguised absence. Not having been able to escape, they pretend for all they’re worth to be little dead creatures far removed from the human. Mouth sewn shut. One ridiculous hair like an antenna in the middle of a naked noggin. Eight false feet. Twelve blind eyes. At first a person thinks: Damn! Might this not be a cotton-louse weevil? The megacephalous Brazilian coleopteron that carries the germ of cattle carbuncle perhaps? Bandeiras of venomous larvae now! I grind it under my heel. It has now dissolved into a long thread of spittle. My shoe sole sticks fast in the poisonous glue. One of the bandeirante coleoptera once climbed up as far as the buckle of my shoe. I removed it with the tip of my cane. It left a trace like that of a corrosive acid on the metal. I had the spot bathed in a solution of extract of nicotine, black soap, phenic acid, and formic acid extracted from fierce Guaykurú ants. All in vain. The threads of rust were still there. Many of them join together, forming a slime. Teem and multiply in the pool of poison as though in their element. Form colonies. Speak a dialect of bandeirante Portuguese or a bastardized migratory Porteño. Once darkness falls, depending on the phase of the moon, they transform themselves into spiderwebs. I have watched them for entire nights at a time. They vanish with the sun’s first rays. The threads of slime have left the trail of their filth behind on doors, façades, corridors. A trail of drivel on the perjured paper of the cathedralic pasquinades…

  Don’t copy these last paragraphs into the draft of the circular. No, Sire, I haven’t copied them. When Your Grace dictates in circular form, order of the Perpetual Dictator, I write his words down in the Perpetual Circular. When Your Grace thinks out loud, in the voice of the Supreme Man, I note his words down in the Spiral Notebook. If, that is, I am able to, Excellency, what I mean to say is if I manage to net those words that caracole out of your mouth, mounting ever more swiftly upward. And on what do you base the opposition Supreme Dictator/Supreme Man? In what do you note the difference? In the tone, Sire. The tone of your word dictates downward or upward, let us say with your permission, depending on which direction the ergodic wind takes as it gusts forth from your mouth. It is only Your Eminence who knows a way of speaking that speaks volumes. The bird hears the worm wriggling underground. Your Eminence must hear me moving underneath all these papers in the same way. Your Excellency commands me. Directs me. Has taught me to write. Governs my hand. I can also slice you in two, you worm of a scribe! Perfectly true, Excellency. Most certainly. Absolute master of so doing at any moment, at Your Grace’s pleasure. In such a case, there will be two of us scribes to serve him. Even if, as you yourself, Sire, so often say, the amanuensis has no responsibility. Although Your Worship is also in the habit of turning the same truth the other way around and saying: Who can be proud of being a miserable scribbler? I always keep this well in mind, Sire. No, Patiño; what you ought to ask yourself at each and every moment is whether it is not the servant who is to blame for everything that goes wrong: from the one who polishes my shoes to the one who copies what I dictate. In any case, let us continue.

  The present well-being, the future progress of our country are the things that I wish to protect, to preserve; if such be possible, to promote even further. To this end, now that I judge the circumstances to be more suitable, I am taking measures, making preparations to free Paraguay from onerous servitude. Freeing mercantile traffic of the obstacles, confiscations, barbarous exactions with which the peoples of the Coast hinder the movement of Paraguayan vessels, arbitrarily claiming dominion over the river in order to grease their own palms, to further their depradations, their aim being to maintain this Republic in servile dependence, backwardness, discredit, ruin.

  I prevented the successive invasions meant to subject our people to blood and fire. That of Bolívar, from the west, by way of Pilcomayo. That of the Portuguese-Brazilian empire, from the east, via the old depredatory routes of the bandit bandeirantes. From the south, the constant incursions of the Porteños; the most infamous of all the one planned by the infamous Puigrredón, who recognizes our country to be the richest prize in all of America, and wanted to come not only to seize our territory but also to clean out, purely and simply, all the gold in our coffers.

  Rough draft in Pueyrredón’s hand. Project to pacify Santa Fe, dominate Entre Ríos and Corrientes, and subjugate Paraguay:

  (Documents of Pueyrredón III, 281.)

  Two years before, early in 1815, another Porteño sharper, General Alvear, Supreme Dictator of the sharks of the port, endeavors to renew relations with our Republic. On what terms? On those of a cheating, conniving, rag-picking profiteer! He writes to me trying to trick me into believing that if Buenos Aires succumbs, Paraguay will not be able to be free. He tries to intimidate me with the trumped-up story of another European invasion. He offers me, as a consequence, an interchange not of free trade and friendship, but a slaver’s deal: twenty-five rifles in exchange for every hundred Paraguayan recruits for his army. I do not know of, nor have I ever read of, such baseness even among the most wicked and cynical rulers of American history.

  Still others seek to invade Paraguay. Emigré Paraguayans plead with General Dorrego to do so. Perfidy of migrants. And before and after Dorrego, others. Arrogant capons: Artigas, Ramírez, Facundo Quiroga. Jaguars of the plains, wildcats, roaring, mewing, hissing, sighing to come to sack us. They all ended up buried, banished; one of them in our own land.

  Simón Bolívar also seeks to invade us. The Liberator of half a Continent makes ready to attack Paraguay and subjugate the one country in all of America that is free and sovereign! On the pretext of coming to liberate his friend Bonpland he plans an invasion by way of the Bermejo River. Woe to him had he set foot on Paraguayan soil! The red waters of the Bermejo would have lived up to their name. He first writes me an artful letter, concealing amid flowery flattery and duplicity the thorn of a pompous ultimatum.* I didn’t even take the trouble to answer it. Let him come, I tell those who are frightened by the rodomontades of the liberticide liberator. If he contrives to arrive, I will allow him to cross the frontier just so that I can make him my orderly and head groom. In the face of my silence he writes to his spy in Buenos Aires, Dean Grimorio Funes, asking him to pave the way for his entering this country, “to liberate it from the talons of a rebel and restore it to Rio de la Plata as a province,” Don Simón proposes. The funereal dean’s intrigues and plots meet with little success. Why should this gloomy meddleman expect any at all! He gives
signs of being very disappointed when Buenos Aires proves reluctant to undertake “the taming of this wild beast”—meaning me. What Bolívar has in mind is not only setting his booted foot in Paraguay. Not content with having tripped up San Martín in Guayaquil, he intends to trample all over the Río de la Plata as well.

  At the conference he holds in Potosí with the Porteño foxes Alvear and Díaz Vélez, Don Simón again sets forth his “redemptionist” aims, on October 8, 1825. I am going to set before you, he says, a neutral idea. Some neutral idea! Gentlemen, he says to them, I have had my scouts reconnoiter the entire length of the Pilcomayo, all the way down to its mouth, so as to have intelligence of the best route for entering Paraguay, with a view to betaking myself to that Province, to bringing down that tyrant. I can have him in my pocket in three days. What do you think? No deal, the silver foxes of the Plata say. We’ve been trying to do exactly that for ten years now. That wild hen is putting up a fierce resistance. It lays its golden eggs in its hermetic henhouse that it has turned into an impregnable bastion, and there is no way for us to gobble up either the hen or the eggs. Of course not, you stupid vulpeculae. I’ve outfoxed you by eating them half-hatched every morning for breakfast.