I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  The only real organist Paraguay has ever known: Modesto Servín. Take him as an example, Céspedes. A genius! Never cost the state a single real. Eats his soul. Lives on that, gives to those more needy than himself all the maniocs and maizes of his farm, planted by his own hands. He could have been organist in the Basilica of Saint Peter’s. He preferred to be faithful to his Country, playing in the poor temple of an Indian village. Organist of Jaguarón. Elementary schoolteacher. Supreme sanctity. The place where he was born should be consecrated. Office abolished. Let whoever plays the organ do it out of pleasure, with art and out of love of art. Like Modesto Servín.

  Are there more ecclesiastic indignities and cardinal offices likely to unhinge their holders, Céspedes? There is that of verger, that of warden or procurator, that of treasurer, whose duty is to open and shut the church; to ring the bells, to safeguard all the liturgical objects; to care for the lamps and chalices; to provide the incense, lights, bread and wine and other things necessary to celebrate the rites. And then, Excellency, there is the dignity of beadle, whose duty is to chase dogs out of the church and sweep the House of the Lord on Saturdays and on the eve of feast days for which vigil is held. How much did the Bull of Establishment allot to the marshalcy of dogs? Twelve gold pounds, Excellency. Do you know, vicar, how much a schoolmaster earns? Six pesos, plus one cow per month. Do you know how much a soldier of the line earns? The same amount, plus his uniform and equipment. Order the beadles to work with the forces of law and order in the annual dog-hunt in the city, towns, and villages. They’re already doing that, Excellency. Since the Reform of the Church introduced by the Supreme Government, the beadles have been lending a hand in rounding up strays, and they are the ones who put to death the ever-increasing numbers of rabid ones. How much do you earn, Céspedes? The endowment and table of the bishop, since it is a vacant see, Sire. Plus those of archdeacon, precentor, and canon. Plus the whole and half livings to which I am entitled as dignitary of the Pontifical Habit and vicar apostolic responsible for the Administration of our Church. That strikes me as an outrage! From today on you will receive the pay of an army officer. All clergymen, whatever their offices and malefices may be, are to receive a salary equal to that of schoolmasters. Does that seem like a good idea to you, my dear vicar-provisional? You have spoken, Excellency. May your Supreme Will be obeyed. What news of the arrival of the new bishop? New bishop, Excellency? Don’t play dumb, Céspedes. Or is it that you’re afraid of losing your bacchant seat? It’s not that, Excellency; it’s simply that I have had no notice of the arrival of a new bishop. He’s not a new one but a very old one. The opulent churchman Manuel López y Espinoza, appointed by the pope in the year 1765. Impossible, Sire! Doctor Don Manuel López y Espinoza, named bishop of this Diocese in the year that Your Grace mentions, would be more than a hundred and fifty years old now. He must be dead long since. No, Céspedes. These Methusalemic bishops don’t die. Wasn’t Bishop Cárdenas a hundred and six when he passed on? López y Espinoza is taking his time getting here because he’s being transported in a litter from Upper Peru. He is being escorted by an army of familiars and slaves. He is bringing with him the vast estates he possessed in Trujillo, Cochabamba, Potosí and Chuquisaca. Cattle. Carts loaded with silver ingots. Opulentia opulentissima. The last I heard of him was that he and his slow-moving caravan had taken a detour and were proceeding via the Gran Chaco instead of the old road from Córdoba del Tucumán out of fear of the guerrillas in the North. I have been waiting all this time for him to arrive. For years now, trained Guaykurú Indians, army scouts, my best gaucho trackers have been patrolling all probable routes through the Chaco in search of him. I am certain that the gestatorial-migratorial chair will arrive in Asunción, even if there’s nothing sitting inside it but the petrified skeleton of López Espinoza. But that nullity of an old man doesn’t interest me. From this moment on, Céspedes, you may count on the miter, the crosier of the sesquicentenarian, if he is still alive. If he is not, see to it that the much-traveled skeleton is given Christian burial when it arrives on our shores. Any property that the episcopal patriarch may bring with him will be incorporated within the national patrimony; this plus the sums we have just saved on expenditures for church personnel will be sufficient in themselves to finance the great army I plan to create in order to defend the sovereignty of the Fatherland.

  The Church of Paraguai, true Grain of mustard in these ymmensities, newly sprowted in such well water’d earth, is prospering splendydly, like a luxuryantly leafie Tree in whose branches Birds of Heaven of ev’ry colour and plumage have bilt most prescious nests without number, the first accounts shortly after the Establishment report with celestial delight. And look at how the mustard seed has grown since! Too many birds of prey amid its branches! Let us proceed in such a way that the luxuryantly leafie Tree will prune itself, so that the foliage drenched with love will be good for something else besides sheltering great birds of a feather flocking together. Period.

  Should God have permitted all these iniquities to be perpetrated? Eh? I am asking you who title yourself his minister. No, Excellency, the truth is that he ought not to have permitted them. What do you think God is? I think, Excellency, that, according to the Patrial Reformed Catechism, God the Just, God the Omnipotent, God the Wise is…Stop right there! I’ll tell you without all that amphibolosity: God is who is definitively. The demon, the contrary. That is the best definition of God that I’ve ever heard in my life, Excellency!

  Let us proceed now to a little examination. What is the first question of the Catechism? With pleasure, Excellency. The first question is: What is the Government of your Country? Answer: the Patrial Reformed. The second question, vicar-provisional. The second, Sire, is: What is meant by Patrial Reformed? Answer: That ruled by wise and just principles, founded on the nature and necessities of men and on the conditions of society. The third. The third question, Excellency, is…is…Yes! The third question is: How can our system be proved to be good? Answer: With positive facts…You’ve made a mistake, vicar-provisional. That’s the answer to the fifth question. The positive fact is that your memory is failing. You oblige me to lower your salary to the pay of a sublieutenant. Be more frugal and you’ll regain your memory. The joys of frugality cannot be bought for gold. True sanctity is not a sham. It is not the sort that is hidden beneath a tonsure the size of a silver real, established by the Erection as the monetary unit for stipends. If that is religion, let the devil come and tell us so! What a difference between the bad servants of religion and those who serve it in supreme poverty, in total renunciation! The latter see God in their neighbor, in their fellow. The poorer, the more long-suffering, the more vividly they see him. We had an example here. Padre Amancio González y Escobar, the founding father of the melodious villages of the Chaco. I do not have, sirs, any other goods save poverty, part of my religion, he wrote before he died. A brother lent me this bed. I owe this thin little mattress to the piety of an old woman. That earthen jar was made for me by an Indian. This box, by an honored neighbor. This table, this prie-dieu, by a leprous woodworker, a maker of instruments. I order that they be restored to their owners the poor, as I am giving back my life to the one to whom I owe it. Death will find no other spoils in my hut than those in the sack of my body. My soul alone belongs to God. This is what Father Amancio said in words and deeds. He evangelized the Indians in the same measure that the Indians evangelized him. That is the language that the melodious little curé of Emboscada spoke. Everyone understood it. Apostle’s language. You, Céspedes Xeria, are not a believer. Yet you speak as though you were one. In my own way, I have a certain faith in God, which you lack. For me there is no such thing as religious consolation. There exists only a religious way of thinking. For you there exist only reward and punishment, which have no meaning after death. Unless life can give a meaning to death in this world that has none. It has no meaning, or else it has one we don’t understand. For the meaning of the world is not necessarily that of our life. Our
civilization is not the first to deny the immortality of the soul. But it is doubtless the first one to deny the soul any importance. After the battle, one of the oldest Books in the world says, butterflies alight on the dead warriors and the sleeping victors. You, Céspedes Xeria, are not one of those butterflies. If the Church, if its servants want to be what they must be, they will be obliged one day to come out on the side of those who are nothing. Not only here in Paraguay. In all the places on earth peopled by human suffering. Christ wanted to win not only spiritual power. Temporal power as well. Overthrow the Sanhedrin. Destroy the sources of privileges. Smite the foreheads of the privileged. Otherwise the promise of heavenly bliss, so much wallpaper. Christ paid for breaking the Law on the cross. Pilate washed his hands of the broken china. On this initial failure, on these shards the false apostles descended from Judas erected the false Judeo-Christian religion. Two millennia of falsehoods. Pillage. Destruction. Vandalism. This the religion I must believe in? I know not this God of destruction and death. I must confess my sins to an unknown God? Do you want me to double over with laughter? No, Céspedes. Enough of your funereal jokes! Do you have anything more to say? Just that I came most humbly, Sire, to assure Your Grace of the gratitude and fidelity of the Paraguayan Church toward its Supreme Patron. With the advice and consent of my brothers in religion, I have permitted myself to bring for your examination the Funeral Oration that Father Manuel Antonio Pérez, our most brilliant Sacred Orator, will deliver at the last rites for Your Lordship…what I mean to say is, when the moment arrives, if it does arrive, and if Your Excellency deigns to approve it. That moment has come, Céspedes. And that moment has gone. Take the funeral pasquinade and pin it with four thumbtacks to the door of the cathedral. There the flies that win battles will be its most devoted and punctual readers. They will correct its punctuation and meaning. They will save the historians work. Ego te absolvo…(what follows torn, burned).

  * Macaronic Latin: in the buff.

  (In the private notebook)

  Far worse, more contemptible, the civil/military functionaries. Hence on this point, at least, that worthless decretory document is more or less right to propose the gibbet for all of them. It has just reminded me of something I ought to have done without delay.

  In thirty years my venal Sanchos Panzas have caused me more trouble than all my enemies within and without put together. It sufficed to send them out with precise measures that would move the Revolution ahead on its orbit for those scullions to turn all my orders topsy-turvy. All my plans. They made the country advance backwards, treading on the feet of the retrograde counterrevolution. Are these the leaders I begat, the patriots I nurtured? I should have done with them what I did with the traitor of the first hour.

  Revolution-that-is-revolutionary does not devour its true children. It destroys its bastards. Bunch of troublemakers! I tolerated them. I wanted to rehabilitate them, make worthy functionaries of them. I nested crows that hatched into heirs. Weren’t they laughing behind my back as they made me their most miserable of accomplices? They have turned each department of the country into a satrapy where they act and rule like real despots. Buried up to the crown of their heads in corruption, they have counterbanded my power with their flabby counterpower of abjections, obsequiosities, lies. They have counterbanded my orders with their disorders. They have worn my fingernails down to nothing with their piles of files. They laugh up their sleeves at the old madman deluded by the belief that he is capable of governing the country with nothing but words, orders, words, orders, words.

  No need to keep these perfidious people. No need of an intermediary counterpower between Nation/Supreme Head. No competitors. Jealous of my authority, their one aim is to undermine it so as to enhance their own. The more I divide my power, the more I shall weaken it, and since I wish only to do good, I wish nothing to stand in my way, not even the worst of evils. Will I resign myself, now that I can barely move, to being the subaltern of a hundred despots of my Nation? Become a useless personage, my uselessness has given my people a hundred masters. As a consequence, it has fallen victim to a hundred different passions instead of being governed by the sole obsession of a Supreme Chief: protecting the common welfare, the freedom, the independence, the sovereignty of the Nation.

  * * *

  —

  I shall hack with my ax and cut down this jungle of parasitic plants. I haven’t too much time. But neither do I lack it. I work myself into a rage. I must contain it. My handwriting trembles from having been held back. It makes my arm ache. I discharge my word-orders onto the paper. I cross out. I blot out. I hunch over, erasing every last trace of the secret.

  I shall not command the sun to stand still. It suffices to have one more day at my disposal. A single antinatural day in which nature itself would appear to have perverted itself by coupling the longest day with the longest night. Enough! I don’t need more than that to destroy these vermin Chiefs, magistrates, functionaries, bah! The best of them is still the worst. The same ones who, by progressing ever upward, might have placed themselves at the head of the Republic, have instead fallen lower and lower and ended up in a fistula.

  The circumstances once carefully weighed, everything concurs to assure me that I am going to be re-present at things. Not re-present them. Without haste. Fall on these loathsome pests all of a sudden, with the speed of lightning. Fulminate them. Questions to consider immediately: Exterminate the plague; not just chase it away by raising a din the way one drives off locusts. Work with a delicate touch. If I milk the cow gently I’ll get butter. If I blow my nose hard I’ll get blood. The barbarians will be scared off. For now trim candles without putting them out. Bring things closer to fruition by gathering all those rotten apples together under the orange tree. Bring everything that’s hidden to light. Quidquid latet apparebit.* Give chase where there’s no trace. I’m going to begin with the double-dealer closest at hand: my amanuensis and confidential clerk, who’s been weaving his plots and intrigues so as to throw his lot in with the provisory fatuous government and stage a rebellion as soon as he can. Just a little touch of voltaic current in the anuran actuary’s sensitive areas.

  Let’s be fair, eh, Patiño? Doesn’t it seem to you that the pasquinade is right after all? What’s that, Excellency? When you’re not sneezing you’re sleeping. I wasn’t sleeping, Sire. I merely had my eyes closed. That way, besides hearing, I see your words. I was thinking of those words you dictated to me the other day when you said that, living or dying, man is not immediately aware of his death: that he always dies in the person of another while the earth lies waiting below. That is not exactly what I dictated to you, but it’s exactly what is going to happen to you within not much more than very little time. I’ve asked you if it doesn’t seem to you that the pasquinade is right. It doesn’t seem to me that a pasquinade can be right, Sire. Especially if it’s against the Superior Government. Doesn’t it seem to you that I ought to have sent to the gallows all those who say they’re serving the Fatherland when the only thing they’re doing is robbing it at will? What do you think, my trust-unworthy scribe? You already know, Excellency. You don’t know that I know. But I know that you don’t know everything that should be of importance to you. If thieving rascals knew the advantages of honesty they’d be clever enough rascals to turn honest before it’s too late. What’s frightening you so? Are you one of them? I’m merely your humble servant, Excellency. You’re trembling all over. Your aquatile feet are making the basin rattle below its waterline. Your teeth are chattering. Or have you too suddenly been seized with the convulsions of epilepsy? I’ll promote you posthumously to epileptenant of death-on-your-feet, or rather, of death-left-hanging. Don’t try to hide your fear. However hard you try to temper it, alter it, cut it down to size, it will always be bigger than you. Only the person who has lost it is master of his fear.

  Steadying your magnifying glass in the lance-rest, you delve more deeply into the pamphletary writing. You would like to be
able to bury yourself in it, right?; find a substitute; see that someone who must die for you. I know, my poor Patiño. To die, ah to die, a very cruel dream even for a dog. Even more so for those who, like you, earn their living through the death of others. You’re monstrously fat. You’re nothing but a ball of suet. My presumptive sister Petrona Regalada could make more than a thousand candles for the church with your vile body. And as many lowly candles for the city lighting. Give my sister the candle-maker a regal gift: your corpse. She will turn it into candles for your own wake. That way, after your death at least, you’ll be the most enlightened confidential clerk I’ve ever had in my service. Offer that lump of fat that is your person. But do it legally, in a public document, before witnesses. You’re one of those who lay traps even after they’re dead. I don’t know how they’ll contrive to hang you when your turn comes. They’re going to have to hoist you up with a crank. The ropes of your hammock will suffice for you. You stole a march on the executioner by hanging yourself so as not to have to render an accounting of your betrayals and ladronicides. That heavy thing you carried in your mouth, treason-adulation, made the work of the noose easier. Your haste did not allow you time to write little farewell verses with a bit of charcoal on the walls of your cell, doggerel of the sort that certain scribes claim my relative Fulgencio Yegros wrote before his execution. The shining knight of the lasso and bola, ex president of the First Junta and subsequent conspirator-traitor, could barely write his own name. You were able to imitate the insult-apostrophe that the Cavallero-Bayard scrawled with his index finger dipped in his own blood. He opened his veins with the buckle of his belt, which he then used to hang himself, according to the lies still taught in the public schools a century and a half later. Not to honor him, despite his being a traitor and conspirator, but to denigrate me. Repeat it. Come on! Bray out that fiction that’s taught in the schools today. I know full well that suicide is contrary to the laws of God and man, but the thirst for blood of the tyrant of my country will not be quenched with mine…Sire, Your Worship is not a tyrant! There are several versions of that posthumous hoax. You may choose whatever one you please. Invent an even more elaborate one before you lose your memory in the noose. Sweat or tears dripping onto the promontory of your belly. You are giving yourself over to the devil and all his kind. The pope already said so. So many demons assailing a single individual, more contemptible than all of them put together.