I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

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  Race that is mine…(that still sounds like a sermon, an edict, a proclamation. What’s the use of that, if nobody will read what I write; if the public crier will no longer announce my decrees to the sound of trumpet and drum?). Race of mine, listen nonetheless. Listen before my candle gutters out. Lend an ear to the story I shall tell you of my life. I shall tell you what I am about to tell you as a true thing.

  Having ruled out chance through an anachronism, one of the many I use in my battle against time, I am that fantastic personage whose name the washerwomen bandy back and forth as they pound the filth of bodies out of mountains of clothes. Blood or sweat: it makes no difference. Tears. Sacramental, excremental humors: all the same. I am that PERSONAGE and that NAME. Supreme incarnation of the race. You have elected me and have handed the government and the destiny of your lives over to me for life. I am the SUPREME PERSONAGE who watches over and protects your sleeping dream, your waking dream (there is no difference between the one and the other); who seeks the passage through the Red Sea amid persecution and entrapment by our enemies…How does that sound? Like real horseshit! Not even the most purblind one-eyed capon among the many cocks crowing at midnight trying to awaken the dawn ahead of time, or the most ignorant of those scribblers scratching about searching for the handwriting of the pasquinade in the Archive would believe a single word of what you’ve written. Even you yourself don’t believe it. Right, but I don’t give a hoot in hell.

  Stomach-turning stench. The sound of the candle-snuffer’s footfalls filters through the slits; his rheumy refrain keeps watch over me: The strooooke of tweeelve and all is weeeelllll. Though you’ve gooot the vaapors, I’m snuffing the taaaaapers!…Distant cries of the sentinels passing along the watchword: Indepeeendence oooor deeaaath!!! Ah, the custom that rusts the best habits and eats holes in what is most holy…(Go into this more deeply, if I can…)

  * Woe to the vanquished! (What the Gallic chieftain Brennus exclaimed as he threw his heavy sword into the scales in which the defeated Romans were weighing the tribute that would ensure the Gauls’ departure; Livy V, 48.)

  Detracing the path leading back through so many years, passing once again by way of low tricks and high treason, misfeasance and malfeasance, José Tomás Isasi, against his black ladronicide will, has gone back upriver against the current. I finally captured him. I was obliged to do so, otherwise he would have fled to the very end of the universe. Why did you betray my friendship? Silence of stone. Why did you rob the State? Silence of dust. Why did you betray your Country? Silence of gunpowder. They drag him out from the Truth Chamber to the middle of the Plaza where a bonfire has been lighted with the unusable barrels of powder he sent me. Symbol of his treachery. The useless yellow powder is at least serving now to burn the scoundrel alive. Tied to an iron stake, he is paying the supreme penalty that I dictated against him the very moment his infamous deed was discovered. I see him burning from my window. It is ten years now that I’ve been seeing him burning there. The smoke of his fried flesh forms above his head the figure of a furious gold monster that weeps and weeps, pleading for pardon. His tears have the appearance of drops of gold smelted from the fifty thousand doubloons he stole from the Coffer. The golden lament arouses no compassion in the crowd witnessing the execution. It feels debased, rather, merely listening to him, hearing and seeing those newly minted tears that the wind scatters dangling from the leaves of the trees murmuring plaintive peeps. No one—not even the children—makes the slightest move to go catch those plorant pluvial drops of shining black gold. A little river of gleaming black gold lava rolls toward Government House, leaks in under the doors. Its tongue licks the soles of my shoes. A detachment of grenadiers, hussars, and other guardsmen rushes in with buckets of water and cartloads of sand to act as firemen. In the wink of an eye they put out the eyes of the fire. They wash away the filth of gleaming black gold. They clean up the traces of lava. For a long time, beneath the clump of heavy patrial boots, invisible filaments of this black weeping continue to voice their plaint from the cracks in the floor. With saber tips, swabbing with mops, more scrubbing with swabs, lye, and soap they remove the last tearful remains.

  A mute presence brings me out of my drowsiness. Makes me raise my eyelids. Even before seeing her, I know that it is she. María de los Angeles is there. Arms crossed on her breast. Head tilted slightly downward toward one shoulder, the left. Shock of ash-blond hair cascading to her waist. Standing straight and tall, without hauteur but also without false modesty; neither evidencing nor inspiring compassion. She gazes fixedly at me from an inaccessible distance. She lights up the old dead space. Were you present at your father’s execution in the plaza? She smiles. Only now has the ring of the iris (very slightly) changed color. On the paper the pupil is almost heron-blue. I learn everything in an instant that does not fit on the sheet of paper. José Tomás Isasi, a cattle dealer in Santa Fe, died poor and ill. He had fallen off his horse, and they buried him in the very spot where he fell. An old Indian woman took you in and brought you to Córdoba, and then later to Tucumán. I see you, a child still, keeping watch on the house in which your godfather Manuel Belgrano rested and prayed after his battles. The place where his agony began; the post station turned into his Garden of Oblivion. Amid the tatters of your tunic, I see a mark on your left shoulder. I know what it is. A trace left by life in the wilds. The weight of the lance, of the rifle. I can calculate the time that that woman’s shoulder has carried them. Scar on the neck. Stitches taken by the evil furies of life. To an old man such as I am, with no heat other than that of his desiccation, yearning for the beloved person is a waste of spirit. And it is of no avail to seek any more, because there isn’t any more anymore.

  I had her father executed because he stole the gold of the State. She is bringing me the price of redemption. Of my own redemption perhaps. I now know what help is. I know it only now. Why only now when there is no more now?

  You do not speak and I understand you. I write and you do not understand me. Even if I were able to get out of this hole, I could not be at your side. In another time we journeyed conjoined, one. An enormous horse, half white, half black, interposed between us his white half, his black half. We traveled along side by side but unable to join each other, in different ages. I journeyed through all those great remotenesses with only my own person at my side, without anybody. Alone. Without family. Alone. Without love. Without consolation. Alone. Without anybody. Alone in a strange country, the strangest one being that most my own. Alone. My trapped, lonely, alien country. Deserted. Alone. Full of my empty person. When I left that desert, I landed in one more deserted still. The wind flies between the two, with the smell of rain about to fall. Such wanting to be able to love! Receiving only fear, hence ending up longing for hatred as though it were love! The rain falls in torrents. Great solid drops. Lead curtain between two ages of the universe. Is it the Deluge? The Deluge. We go on. Forty days. Forty centuries. Forty millennia. Amid the huge leaves and the gentle giant monsters, two children play. They do not know each other. Have they ever seen each other? They do not remember. Adam and Eve? I don’t know, I don’t know….We have not yet learned to speak. But already we understand each other. We play amid the slow-moving peaceful monsters. You go about waking the black silk buds of the giant water lilies one by one. I kick at an angustifoliate pomegranate. I call you without naming you. You turn round and look. Within the passionfruit is something that moves. Living seed. What is it? What is it? We do not know the names of things, of creatures. That is when we know them best. Their names are themselves. Identical in form, in figure, in thought. They palpitate within us. They give off sparks, without and within. We see a tiny chick appear. Metallic plumage. A tiny little human head with little bird eyes. Our hands touch amid the soft down. We remove it from its prison. Colibri. Hummingbird. Picaflor. The original bird. Amid the original darkness Our First-Last-Last Father brought forth the hummingbird so as to ke
ep him company. When he had created the foundation of human language/ when he had created a tiny portion of love/ the Hummingbird refreshed his mouth/ the one who nourished Ñamanduí with the fruits of Paradise was the Hummingbird…Yes, yes, a trifling task accomplished by our First-Last-Last Father, laying down the foundations of language! Ah! He sweated hummingbird-drops! There you are! The celebrated phenomenon of human language! After that we too speak. Millions of years after, the fat scholastics idling on their asses and broom-skinny preachers straddling their pulpits were to say that we did not get language from a mere passionfruit but from an “extraordinary aid.” And now this extraordinary aid is of no help to me whatsoever. I hear you and understand you in memory. The rest, all lost. The huge black horse between the two.

  You’ve arrived today of all days, May 12, your birthday. I’ve nothing left to give you. Come over here to the table. Take this toy left over from the ones distributed last year. It represents the days of the week revolving on a wheel. It changes color and sound according to the day. In the dark, certain timbres allow one to imagine the figure and color of each day. I think the spring jammed on a Tenebrio Obscuras Sunday. Trujillo the gunsmith came to try to repair it. He said: “I’ve no power against the evil eye!” Master Alejandro came. The barber worked on it for a good while with his razor. All of a sudden he cried out and drew back: Terrible, what I’ve seen! Patiño came. He picked up the day-clock, sat down at his three-legged table, put his feet in the basin. He spent a long time picking at the nasal fossae of the clock with his pen, but it continued to lie there in a dead faint. He couldn’t even get the hands to go round. All Patiño can do is make the treadmill of the writing desk go round and round, turn the handle of the perpetual-circular. This toy is bewitched, Sire!, he shouted. Bewitched, my eye! It’s those mischief-makers who are bewitched. The senile darkness they find themselves in makes them more fearful than children. Each one sees in it what he is inside. Don’t blame that innocent thing! They didn’t understand. They fled, hagridden by their fear. I’m not going to take the time to wind clocks anymore. Here, take it. Maybe you can fix it. She calmly leaves it lying where it was. She doesn’t want it. Perhaps time goes by in a different way for her. A person’s life goes round seven times, I say to her. Yes, but life isn’t something one has, I hear her say without moving her lips. It’s not a child. What can I give you? That rifle perhaps…Among the rifles manufactured from meteoric material is the rifle I grabbed when I was born. That one, that one! Take it. Can you carry it? She can! In the stories they tell in books things like this don’t happen. She carefully inspects the rifle. She doesn’t seem at all satisfied. She picks up the broken musical clock. She sets it. She makes it strike the hour. Twelve strokes. Sunday noon. Color indigo blue. I ask you if you’re thinking of staying in the Fatherland. You’re the one migrant who’s come back. I’m glad you’ve stopped trailing along as a guerrilla-fighter in the wake of second-rate Attilas of the Disunited Provinces, the Ramírezes, the Bustoses, the Disgustoses, the Lόpezes and other such shady characters. The only thing they know how to do is slit each other’s throats. Thread each other’s heads on pikes. Hand in glove with the native-born ne’er-do-wells, Pancho Ramírez tries to invade us. He ends up with his head in a cage. Facundo Quiroga, the Tiger of the Plains, also blusters behind the smokescreen of a supposed invasion. They will smash that blowhard’s jaw with a pistol butt in a lordling’s coach. We are the only ones who made the Revolution and gained Liberation. The Paraguayans are the only ones who understand, our worst enemies said. What? You say not? You’ll see. We have here the only free and sovereign Country in South America; the only truly revolutionary Revolution. I see you don’t look very convinced. To see the things of this world clearly, you must look at them wrong side to. And then right them. So that’s why you’ve come? Ah, I see. Here I should write that I give a laugh that has an edge of sarcasm. Simply to hide my hesitant stammer. I’m asking you if you would like to do some useful work. This is the price of redemption that you must pay. You are guilty of nothing. I cannot legally condemn you, hand down a death sentence that would be valid. Paying the penalty provided by law, an execution, a hanging: I cannot hand down such trifling verdicts against you. I approve, accept, value this proof that you are a person of few words, of great will. When she moved her hand, consummate slowness, a motion just barely perceptible, I thought she was about to shoot the rifle of my birth at my non-person. Not that I hesitated. Just the slightest twinge of sadness. It’s simply that I must test you a bit first, I say to her, my eyes seeking hers. Great will, the best of intentions are worth nothing if not carried out. You must begin from the bottom up; sometimes what is lowest is highest. The end of things depends on their beginning. There are no hierarchies save for that based on the quality of the results. Do you accept? Then you are named directress of the House of Orphan and Foundling Girls. It hasn’t been a working institution since Jesusa Bocanegra died in 1617. Despite being a nun, and a poor horsewoman besides, Bocanegra was the first guerrilla-fighter of education in these parts. Proceed immediately to reorganize the House. Make it fulfill its function. You’ll find some orphan girls of mine around the place. If they’re still there, that is, and haven’t gone wrong by making bad marriages and all those sad things that happen to women born to be subdued.

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  When I left the Hospital Barracks, Patiño brought me the news that the House of Orphan and Foundling Girls was turning into a big brothel. Even the worst whores who were serving sentences in the prisons have been taken, Sire, to that House of ill fame where they are enjoying the good life. It looks like a barracks-house, it’s so full at night of city guards, grenadiers, hussars. They whoop it up with the girls in cueribus.* Much worse than Indian girls. I sent an inspector, Excellency. They practically kicked him out bodily. They say a really tough female, one that nobody knows, at least one that nobody’s seen yet, is the person in charge of this company of strumpets, if I may so put it, Sire. They’ve nailed up their Licence over the door, on a paper with your very own signature, Sire. What I mean, what I suspect, Sire, is that it may just be another mock decree like the one they posted on the door of the cathedral. I’ve had sent spies round, Sire. Get them out of there. What’s that, Excellency? Don’t you approve of our keeping watch on the House? Get your spies out of there, you scoundrel!

  * Macaronic Latin: in the raw.

  The vicar general enters, mounted on a roll of paper. What’s up, Céspedes? I am most concerned about your health, Excellency. It’s not a matter that concerns you for the moment. The time will come soon enough when you’ll be obliged to take the trouble to recite a little responsum for me. I thought that perhaps Your Grace might like to have a priest summoned. You’ve already proposed that to me. Didn’t you receive the reply I sent you through the protophysician? What’s the meaning of your coming here like this, Céspedes, disobeying my orders? He tucks the roll under his arm. He begins to knead his hands together. Slow contradanse around the bed. The sacrament of confession, Sire, as Your Worship knows…A priest…No, Céspedes, I don’t need an interpreter to translate my soul into divine dialect. I lunch with God out of the same dish. Not like the lot of you rascals, on sumptuous plates that the devil then licks clean. The vicar tripped over the meteor. Sparks came out his ears. Wait a minute, Céspedes. Perhaps you’re right. It may be that the moment has arrived for a private settling of accounts of my public affairs with the Church. Thank God, Excellency, that Your Lordship has decided to receive the sacrament of confession! No, my dear Céspedes Xeria, I’m talking neither about sacraments nor about secretements. Nothing to confess or hide as regards my double Person. That flock of follicules with or without tonsure will take care of that. As for my conduct with respect to the Church, hasn’t it been generous, magnanimous, archicharitable? Add whatever superlatives you like to that. Isn’t that true, vicar? That is true, Excellency. There will never be words enough to praise the Paternal Trust exercised by the Gov
ernment by nationalizing the Catholic Church, thereby converting it from Roman to Paraguayan. I allowed the Church complete freedom to govern itself, on the basis of the Patrial Reformed Catechism. As your paternity well knows. Ever since I placed you at the head of the Church as vicar general, when Bishop Panés lost his reason twenty years ago, you have been managing the altar industry at your discretion. Which is only proper, since according to the apostle, those who serve at altars are to draw their sustenance therefrom. What is not proper is that the servants of the altar draw from this industry a hundred times more than their sustenance, as your paternity also knows very well. What Your Excellency has said is the pure and simple truth. My gratitude for his magnanimity will be eternal…Never mind all that, Céspedes. Go summon the court clerk and come back. I want these confessions between Patron and Pastor to be a legally documented act, without any secrecy. That ought to be the essence of the sacrament of confession. Sanctified not by secrecy but by public note and record. Sin and fault are never reducible to a matter of private conscience or lack of conscience. They always affect one’s neighbor, even the one most remote. I have therefore decided that this settlement of accounts in extremis is to be proclaimed and disseminated at my death from all the pulpits of the capital, the towns, and the villages of the Republic.

  What are my sins? What fault is mine? My clandestine calumniators from within and without accuse me of having turned the Nation into a doghouse stricken with hydrophobia. They defame me for having ordered the principal figures of the country beheaded, hanged, shot. Is that true, vicar? No, Excellency, it is evident to me that that is absolutely untrue. How many executions have taken place, Patiño, under my Reign of Terror? As a consequence of the Great Conspiracy of the year ’20, sixty-eight conspirators were sent to the foot of the orange tree, Excellency. How long did the trial of those infamous traitors to the Fatherland last? As long as was necessary in order not to rush to judgment. They were granted the right to defend themselves. In the end every recourse was exhausted. It might be said that the case was never closed. It is still open. Not all the guilty parties were sentenced to death and executed. Some of them managed to save their skins. That was how it came about that fifteen years went by after his death before it was discovered that the first traitor to his Country, at Paraguary and Takuary, Manuel Atanasio Cavañas, was involved in the plot, and was condemned like the others. Because, my dear vicar, here no guilty party, alive or dead, escapes Justice. So then, tell me, vicar, answer me if you can; I am asking you, reflect, answer in your own heart: Less than a hundred executions of thieves, common criminals, and traitors found guilty of lèse-Patrie—is that an atrocity? What would you have to say to me, by comparison, of the vandalage of bandits who make the earth of the entire American continent tremble with their infernal cavalcade? They pillage, cut off heads, at full tilt and with impunity. When they have finished off the defenseless populace, they decapitate each other. Each one ties the head of his adversary to the halter of his mount as his own is already flying off his shoulders from the mighty saber slash that will leave it tied to the halter of another saddle. Headless horsemen galloping in pools of blood. Stressing the subtle exceptions and the limit cases, I might say that they have become accustomed to living and killing without a head. But then why would they need one, why would they want one if their horses think for them?