I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  *1 Guaraní: Ohé…ohé…they say

     Our Lord was born on a long-ago day.

  *2 Declaration of guard Epifanio Bobadilla:

  …What are you doing, Your Worship Joséph María?, the witness testifies that he asked the accused. Nothing, sentinel. Tossing pets-de-nonne in the air. And the Indian girl who’s down there below, hidden in the gully? Er, she’s catching couilles-de-moine, that’s all. Back to your post, guard. I’m going to report you for having abandoned your picket. Don’t say a word to anyone about what you’ve seen and heard. You haven’t seen or heard anything. Understand, sentinel? Very well, Your Worship Don Joséph María. You’re dismissed, soldier. Tenshun! Fooorwaaard, maaarch!, Don Joséph María ordered me. Can’t you see that if you keep nosing around, the nun gets all embarrassed? She hides her ass. She doesn’t know how she can let fly with her little pets filled with north-wind. And the couilles-de-moine in Olegaria’s skirts are getting all dried out. Clear out of here, cop. Here’s a box* of candy for you and my regards to your sister, sworn witness Bobadilla declares that the accused said to him. At these words the militiaman withdrew, taking the box with him.

  * The deposition here reads caxeta. Cf. Spanish cajeta; Portuguese caixeta.

  One afternoon, on returning from my outing, astonishment stopped me dead in my tracks at the office door. Wearing my dress uniform, the black was sitting at my desk dictating, in strident tones, the most outlandish decrees to an invisible scribe. Completely drunk, he leafs through the dossiers piled up on the desk top, ripping entire pages out of them. I struggle to overcome the stupor that has turned me to stone, a stone of imagination, I mean to say indignation. The worst of it is that in the hallucination of my anger I see in that emaciated black a perfect portrait of myself! He is faultlessly imitating my own voice, my appearance, my gestures, down to the last detail! He gets to his feet. Removes from their secret hiding place the keys of the strongbox. Takes out the thick file containing the trial records of the Conspiracy of the year ’20. Starts tearing them apart. Tosses whole fistfuls of folios in the air, screaming insults at each of the sixty-eight traitors put to death. Terrible imprecations! The same ones I too hurl at them still, after twenty years.

  He has not heard me enter the room. Does not notice my presence. Finally catches sight of me. Despite his drunken state, he gives such a start that he hits the ceiling. The intoxication of his brazen pantomime sends him into an even madder frenzy. He does not pay the slightest heed to my insults, my threats. He leaps upon me. Rips off my riding coat, yanks off my shirt. Teases me with it like a bullfighter. Dances round me twanging a drunken magic spell. Corners me, backs me into the meteor, forcing me to play a role in the farce being staged by this monkey disguised as the Supreme Dictator of a Nation.

  One after the other, in a dizzying whirl, he transforms himself into each of the sixty-eight traitors put to death. It is they who insult me now, curse me, judge me, as I lie prostrate behind the great stone. Sixty-eight figures that blend into a single one in the vertiginous rhythm that electrifies the black’s movements. Sixty-eight representations of illustrious traitors, more faithful to their vanished images than the portraits painted by Alborno, the celebrated illustriographer of the famous. Sixty-eight voices from beyond the grave, commingled in a single shriek from the black. Guards!

  Stunned, terrified by the fierce battle that threatens, hussars, grenadiers, guards enter, crouching over, prepared to confront a legion of demons. They do not see me in the shadow. Only the black, in whom they see me, leaping about the room, the light glancing off the gold hilt of the dress sword, the big silver buckles of the Napoleonic patent-leather pumps.

  The supremic simian glimmers, from one end of the room to the other. Loud cries rend the air. The black bounds and rebounds from one wall to the other. Crashes into the ceiling, into the floor; into the walls once more, into the furniture, into the gun racks, into the flags, into the bars over the window. Finally falls motionless, doubled over in a knot on top of the aerolith, howling with stentorian laughter. Still screaming insults at me in the imitation of my own voice. Interjections, obscene exclamations. The crudest of provocations, learned in the most vulgar libertinism.

  Over there!, I cry, pointing with my forefinger as I get up from the floor. There he is! Catch him this instant, you idiots! My orders come out in the black’s shrill voice. The guards can’t decide whose side they are on. Whether they’re for me, almost naked, black in the dark shadow, black with rage, or whether they’re for the black, tricked out in my uniform, drenched with sweat, gleaming atop the meteor. Over there!, the black cries in turn. Take him away, you clods, you louts! Get him out of here!

  They drag the two of us out. The black is still struggling with all his might. He bites an ear off one of the guards; rips off the thumb of another with his teeth. They knock him senseless with their rifle butts and drag him out, leaving a trail of blood, of vomit that reeks of cheap tavern brandy. The pieces of the full-dress uniform scattered all over the floor are still writhing in the last spasms of this dizzying nightmare. A shoe floats round and round through the air in search of the foot it has lost. It falls on top of the table, ending up as a paperweight.

  * * *

  —

  He denied all the charges brought against him. The bull-pizzle whips were able to drag no more than the strict minimum out of him. Bejarano, Patiño, the Guaykurú torturers worked him over conscientiously in the Truth Chamber. Half skinned alive, ashen, he brazened it out. I went to see him one night. I spied on him through a crack in his cell. A permanent mocking smile between his swollen black-and-blue lips. He stubbornly denied all his crimes. He even threatened to drag down many people with him if he talked; top-ranking people in Government, he said, superior officers, high officials to whom he had lent money. But the worst of all his crimes were his acts of ladronicide with the Indian woman.

  Declaration of the Indian Olegaria Paré:

  She swears that it is certain truth that she has had relations and communications with the manservant Joséph María Pilar, who solicited her personally to this end, not calling upon any third person, and began to make use of her services in the month of September of the year 1834. She also declares that she willingly provided these services for Señor Joséph María for the pleasure of pleasing him and out of no other interest…(rest of paragraph crossed out).

  Having rejected his first solicitations, she agreed of her own free will to do what Don Joséph María asked her to in the month of October, while His Excellency was in the aforementioned Barracks. Don Joséph María having indicated that the half Islands just off the shores of the little stream that runs past the aforesaid Barracks were to be the appointed place for their relations and communications, they met there until His Excellency came out and began to occupy himself once more with the military target drills that he was in the habit of holding. The two continued to meet in the vosky thickets of the half Islands, but she does not remember how many times.

  It was there that Señor Joséph María handed over to her some spools of blue and crimson ribbon two fingers wide and some fifteen varas long, and some papers of needles, though she does not remember how many spools, or how much the steel pieces weighed, or how many papers of needles. Except that in order to understand each other in an innocent language, as she says that Don Joséph María told her, and in order not to arouse suspicion, they called the arms “couilles de moine” and the reels of ribbon “pets de nonne,” though she does not remember how many of them he threw to her.

  She declares that these relations and communications went on until mid-Lent, when, sensing that she was pregnant, she stopped having them, that is to say those trysts and diversions between the two of them on the half Islands; this was at her own request, so that no one would discover that it was Don Joséph who was responsible. She says, however, that he himself came once to bring her 3 yards of brabant and 5 other yards of English
cloth, of which lengths of fabric she had a hoop skirt and a shirt or smock made for herself, though she does not remember who sewed them, and the girdle to hide what would be the fruit of her womb, articles that she herewith presents in devilution, very badly worn but nicely washed and ironed.

  In the month of June, she goes on to say, she again began to pass by the back end of Government House with a bundle of clothes like a washerwoman, so as to conceal her condition and her relations with Joséph María Pilar. From that time on, using the same means and artifices, from some little windows that open onto the street from the Warehouses, Don Joséph María Pilar continued to throw down to her to where she was hiding velow in a gully, more rolls of ribbons, some 3 dozen, of all different colors, and more lengths of cloth of various qualities, which she sold to individuals in the puvlic market. When questioned about the relationship between herself and the said individuals, she declares that none of them are personally known to her, though all of them were poor people who went to the Plasa, to whom she sold the goods in wholesale lots for whatever price they offered her. To another question put to her, she answers that she never tried to dispose of the merchandise that had been stolen in the houses of rich families since, being an Indian, the ladies of high society would have refused even to receive her. She says she handed the money over to Don Joséph María, who divided it among beggars in the streets and prisoners in jail so that they would have food, she recounted with tears in her eyes; she believes this to be true, since the following day the aforesaid Pilar had no more money left and she was obliged to go on selling things. Of the cash she handed over to him each time, she declares that he gave her 6 reales and 3 more for the unborne child and its food.

  On Monday the 13th of July, as she was on her way to the Puvlic Market to buy maize cakes, Don Joséph María approached her very furtively amid the crowd, telling her that the “farts” and the “balls” were raising a stink and that the smell had reached the Karaí-Guasú, because he’d had him beaten within an inch of his life. He told me it was necessary to be prepared for anything. She says she answered him that she was always prepared and would take the blame for everything upon her own head, and that she wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Then the accused gave her 3 handkerchiefs of English linen, 2 of them striped and 1 plain-colored, one shirt of ordinary Creole cloth with a lace jabot and an iridescent red-and-yellow striped scarf with gold-colored flowers, to be washed and ironed. A costume that the aforesaid Joséph María wore when the two of them went dancing at the black balls of Kambá-kua, Huguá-de-seda, or Campamento Loma, where they danced, in the words of the deponent, till they lost all feeling of their bodies, coming back at dawn almost without touching the ground.

  He also gave her a seven-strand silver ring and a mirror with a frame of the same metal, as the last present she said he said he could give her, since he didn’t have a Warning Angel, much less a Guardian Angel, but that he could feel in his bones the vaguest shadow of the fleeting idea that he was about to have his candle snuffed out very soon, and if that was how things turned out, the Indian woman says textually: “His Worship Don Joséph María, would continue to remember me under the ground and our baby too who would be born when he was already dead, which came to pass on Christmas Eve of the year just ended. Milord Don Joséph María also told me that if we wanted to see him all we had to do was look in the mirror, that we’d always find his face there, looking at us with great joy and tender devotion…(The last paragraph crossed out, almost illegible.)

  Today, the sixth of January, The Day of His Supreme Excellency, she declares that she has come to present herself, by her own free will and desision, without anyone ordering her to do so, to answer the charges of which, as we have already expressed ut supra, she claims that she alone is guilty.

  She is also coming to present in devilution to the State everything that the deseased gave to her; the dancing costume, nicely washed and ironed and perfumed with little branches of sweet vasil and jasmin; plus the mirror; minus the rest of the money which she says she had to spend on tolls in order to try to see the accused before his execution…(crossed out) . . . and the last real and a half, which she spent, the Indian woman says textually, to buy a candle which she placed last night in the covered galleries of his Excellency’s House since He no longer accepts any other gifts. I lighted my little candle amid the sea of candles gleaming on the floor of that place in vaster numbers than the stars in the sky, disappearing amid them the moment I placed it there, which was what I wanted, because I didn’t wish to seem too forward. I put my candle that cost me a real and a half among all the others, the greatest homage I could light to His Excellency, who watches over all of us now and in the hour, to the king Saint Gaspar his Patron, and also in memory of his ex Godson and ex Valet, milord Don Joséph María Pilar, who was what I loved most…(the end erased, illegible).

  So what? You had him executed just for that? The black wanted to live freely the thirty gold pieces’ worth of freedom you bought for him. He found everything good in what you call everything evil; from the line round his middle downward. Do you consider that the waterline of what you keep pompously referring to as the arguments of Universal Reason? Adam didn’t have a navel. You, ex supreme, have lost yours. Don’t you remember your rakehell life as a gambler, a vihuela-player, and a woman-chaser? The black too liked to fool around with Olegaria the Indian girl in the half-islands in the stream. He flitted joyously about amid the smell of fried food, maize cakes, oranges, sweat, stink, the cries of pleasure of the market-women of the plaza. He pinched their buttocks, their breasts. He poked his proboscis-hand under the skirts of the youngest and prettiest chicks, just to suck in the acid aroma of woman-pollen, without which we come back again to Ecclesiastes. Back to what happened to me. To ignominy. To wretchedness. I grew old at your side. I left this world with a good half of my rump gone, lost warming your gouty leg, and my tail rubbed hairless from scraping to your Absolute Power for a quarter of a century.

  Pilar the black was the only free being who lived at your side. The very next day you demanded and received reimbursement for the thirty ounces of gold that his manumission had cost you. I ordered him executed because his corruption was irremediable. I understand, ex master, old supreme shadow. You ordered the death of the man corrupted by nature only because you were unable to understand what a corrupt nature is. Listen to me, Sultan: I’ll have none of the captious language of men of the cloth. Don’t be an ingrate. When you eat, share your food with dogs even though they bite you, the great Zoroaster said. You were the only one with whom I was not afraid to put this precept into practice. We can almost say that we ate out of the same dish. But now neither you nor I can bite. Have you too passed over to the enemy now that you’re dead? No, ex supreme. I’m too old a dog to betray my canine nature. You, the one who hounded the pasquinaders, were the worst of them, bound to voluntary servitude. You don’t want to admit it because it’s an ex dog that’s singing you this tune, and you, after all, are only an ex man. From having doggedly observed you, I found out in the end that what you didn’t know about yourself was that part of your nature that your old fear kept you from knowing. Listen to me, Sultan. Without anger. Without scorn. You will admit that I was never cruel for the sheer pleasure of it. Atrocities are not atrocious because and only because they are atrocities. You will grant me at least the belief that I always obeyed the great principle of Justice: prevent crime rather than punish it. All that is needed to execute a guilty man is a firing squad or a hangman. To prevent there being guilty men requires great astuteness. Implacable rigor in order to do away with rigor. If there is still some fool around who wants to dig his own grave, let him dig away. He made it, he’ll enjoy lying in it. The black. Rubbed out. The same way one rubs out an abusive word. The malefactor alone, the word alone, mean nothing. No risk. Rubbed out. Erased. Obliter-oblivionated. Silence is now my manner of speaking. If they understood my silence-speech, they could vanquish me in turn.
Impenetrable system of defense. That’s what you think, supreme carrion. All you’re doing is getting yourself all tangled up in words. Like that man who fornicated with the three girls he’d had by his mother, among whom there was one girl who married his son, so that when he fornicated with her, he was fornicating with his sister, his daughter, and his daughter-in-law, and obliging his son to fornicate with his sister and his mother-in-law…(the remainder of the folio burned).

  In a little while you won’t be able to read aloud.

  What will happen after the first ictus? Or in more vulgar terms, after the first attack of apoplexy, what will happen to you? It’s possible that you’ll lose the use of words. Lose the faculty of speech? Bah, it’s not a bad thing to lose what’s bad. No; you won’t lose the faculty of speech properly speaking, but rather the memory of words. Memory pure and simple, you probably mean; that’s what I have Patiño for. No; I mean the memory of the movements of language, those that make use of words to say something. Verbal memory, digging itself orbitary fossae in the Isthmus-of-the-Fauces. Wolf-thought, crouching on the Island-of-Lobules amid temporals, parietals, occipitals, dry rains on the torrid zones of Capricorn. Those arid craters plunged in double darkness will not produce even half a half-harvest of seven words. You will not be able to hum a single measure of the Song of Roland, as was your habit when you aimed your telescope at the equinoctial heavens. You will hide the moon under your armpit, trying to shield it from the dogs that Silvius the shepherd sics on with whistles. You will end up throwing it down the drain of Broca’s brain area.