Is that all, hound of Minerva? Not at all. It is probable that the image of the end will project the shadow of a cross on your darkened brain. Your tongue feels heavy, isn’t that so? You can still move it. You can move your tongue, your larynx, your vocal cords. But at times you’ll be unable to say the right words. You’ll see this very well before you even open your mouth. They’ll be different when they come out. Wrong, dissimilar, mutilated words; not the ones you saw and tried to pronounce. Later on, the little breath coming out of the cavern of your lungs, shaped by your tongue, flattened against your palate, and I won’t add broken up by your teeth because you no longer have any, will produce no sound at all.
For the moment, nothing but the first symptoms. Instead of saying trunk you pronounce trump; instead of saying to Patiño: What do the pupils of your eyes see?, you ask him: What do the nipples of your eyes see?—right, you old rascal? Instead of saying my tongue, it comes out the scissors I have in my mouth. Which is not at all incorrect. You cut phrases. You speak with a ball in your mouth. All balled up. Embolismatic. Embolophrastic. You introduce irrelevant, odd, badly formed, badly informed words into things that couldn’t be more simple and straightforward. You beat about the bush, giving yourself time to think of what you want to say, yet once said it will betray you. You alter the way sentences are formulated. You speak in infinitives and gerunds. Verbs that don’t verberate. Sentences full of pebbles. You skip syllables and words. You repeat syllables and words. You join together, you separate syllables and words. Arbitrarily. You yourself don’t know why. You interrupt the conversation at every turn. You stammer, you drawl out endings; a sort of echo of your desiccated ego. An involuntary spasm. You clear your throat, you gurgle, you burble for no reason. You won’t lubricate your larynx that way. You’ll only ruin it even more. A throat in flames. Swallowing your saliva a double torture: because you must swallow, because it’s your saliva. Its absorption increases your sensibility to the effects of this toxic.
Let’s conduct a little test. Say for example: Orpheus and Eurydice. Come on, open your mouth; utter the phrase. Nothing easier: Orifice and eurypygy. You see? Substitution. Invention of a word. Another phrase. Utter the supreme slogan. Come on, out with it. INDEPENDENCE OR DEATH! Very good; it came out correctly. With that sentence you have the benefit of constant repetition. The fundamental mechanism of language is repetition, and it is through repetition that changes in language come about.
You are rapidly losing the memory of speech however. You attribute to yourself sentences that you have read, that you have heard. You are more irritable than you used to be. Worse still, your ear too is beginning to deteriorate. You string words together incorrectly. You don’t hear well. Useless to try to goad it with your pen. Or even with a lance. There’s no point in it. You’re galloping toward verbal deafness, toward total muteness. The time will come when even your shirt collar won’t hear you. Don’t let it trouble you too much. These are still merely the beginning stages. Moreover, your comprehension remains and will remain intact.
It’s plain to see, poor Sultan, that being underground so long has de-celebrated you! The earth has swallowed you whole. It has left only the worst of you. Dog-dross. You always were ungrateful, unappreciative. You never manifested the slightest feeling of pleasure or gratitude no matter how hard I tried to cater to your whims, to satisfy your least desires. Many times you were clearly in a rage. Only against me. Cynically sarcastic. In your old age you couldn’t even lap up your soup; I myself spooned it down you. Your only thanks was to snap at me when you’d had enough. A most ungrateful cur. When sleep brought you to the thalamium, I could awaken you only by pushing and shoving you, making a great deal of noise. Then you fell into a sleep heavier than all the thalami and hypothalami that ever existed. All the pushing and shoving imaginable. All noises put together. What’s the meaning of all this sound and fury you’re coming out with against me from your posthumous poochly posture?
You’ll forget nouns first, then adjectives, and even interjections. In your tremendous explosions of anger, it may well be that, in the best of cases, you’ll still manage to articulate certain sentences, the ones you’ve used most frequently. For example, in the past you’ve often said: I want means being able to say I do not want. In a little while, when you try to force yourself to say NO, you will only be able to stutter, after many attempts, in a paroxysm of irritation: I can’t say NO!
You will begin with pronouns. Do you know what it will be like for you not to be able to remember, not to be able to stammer I-HE anymore? Your suffering will soon be over. Eventually you will not even be able to remember to recall.
In addition to deafness you will suffer from verbal blindness. Pulvinar powder will clog your optical focuses with its fine sand. You will also lose your visual memory completely. When that happens, you will naturally go on seeing; but even though you haven’t budged from the place where you are, you will find yourself in a completely different place. You will no longer be able to conjure up from your memory anything known, and as for the unknown, how will you be able to recognize it?
Assailed, first of all, by idiotic sounds of a foreign language. A dead language that comes to life again for a moment on being cut into little pieces by your scissors-tongue. Then after that, unknown images. You will continue to see certain objects; you will not be able to see the letters of books, or what you write. This will not interfere, however, with your ability to copy, and even to imitate the letters of a strange script, though you will not thereby understand their meaning. I write, you will say, as though I had my eyes closed, though I know they’re really open. It will be a splendid experience for you. The last one. If you feel bored to death, you can play dominoes or cards with Patiño: and even beat him as often as you like.
Listen to me, Sultan…
* * *
—
I understand, I understand; you don’t need to tell me anything, ex supreme. Your whole story is perfectly clear to me. You want to write. Do so. You still have a bit of that—what humans call time—left. Your hand will go on writing until the end and even after the end, even though you now say: I know very well how the word is written, but when I try to write it with my right hand I don’t know how. Nothing simpler. Anyone who can no longer write with his right hand can do so with his left; anyone who can no longer write with his hands can do so with his feet. Even with your right arm paralyzed, your left leg swelling up more and more, you can go on writing. It doesn’t matter that you don’t see what you write. It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand it. Write. Follow the clew of thread through the horizontal-vertical labyrinth of the folios, which is not at all like the circumvolutions of your subterranean latomies. Your speech is so obscure that it seems to come straight out of the maze of those underground cells.
Listen to me, Sultan…
* * *
—
The test of recalled memories. I shall explain by way of an example. If you had lived in the age in which apparatuses for kinetic, visual, and verbal reproduction had been invented, you would not have had any difficulty. You would have been able to have these notes, the discourse of your memory, everything you copied from other authors imprinted on a quartz plaque, on a magnetic tape, on a filament of photoelectric cells one ten-thousandth of a hair thick, and leave it all there, completely forgotten. Then, when the machine chanced to be set in motion, you would have heard it again and recognized it as your thanks to certain properties. You would have gone on with it, or someone else would have; the chain would not have been broken. But that future of machines and apparatuses has not yet regressed to this uncivilized country, which you love and hate; for which you live, for which you are going to die.
What is written in the Book of Memories has to be read first; that is to say, it must evoke all the sounds corresponding to the memory of the word, and those sounds have to evoke the meaning that is not in the words, but rather, was united to them by the mind’
s movement and figure at a given moment, when the word was seen through the thing and the thing was understood through the word. Symptomal, you would say. Symptomatic.
This second reading, by an inverse movement, reveals what is veiled in the text itself, read first and written afterwards. Two texts, of which the absence of the first is necessarily the presence of the second. Because what you write now is already contained, anticipated in the readable text, the part that is its own invisible side.
Go on writing. It has no importance, in any event. When all is said and done, what is prodigious, fearful, unknown in the human being has never yet been put into words or books, and never will be. At least so long as the malediction of language does not disappear, in the way that irregular condemnations eventually evaporate. So go ahead and write. Bury yourself in letters.
Sultan, wait! Wait a minute!…
* * *
—
He’s collapsed again. He vanishes little by little. Waggishly stealing away. Nothing left but the bare skull lying on the ground. It too sinks from sight. Disappears.
Great fatigue. Merely from having embarked upon a long colloquy with the mad shadow of a dog.
Five times every hundred years there is a month, the shortest one in the year, in which the moon prevaricates. The past February was one without a moon. Then the storm in August, the one that threw me from my horse on the afternoon of my last outing. Lying on my back in the rain, I fought desperately to free myself from the mud sucking me down. The rain firing at my face. Not an ordinary rain falling from above. A more than solid downpour, heavy, ice-cold. Drops of melted lead, burning-hot and freezing at the same time. A deluge of drops fired in all directions. Great gouts of fire and frost, making my bones rattle, making me retch. Beneath this cataract, the bay, stained with sudden streaks of white from the flashes of lightning, started off again, fearless as ever. Sitting astride it, cape whipping in the wind, erect as always, HE, taking off with his back turned to me, and at the same time fallen in the mudhole, vomiting, dragging me along, screaming out orders, entreaties, yapping like a beaten dog, crushed by the block of water. After struggling with more ardor and heroism than the most hard-shelled diehard, I managed to turn over on my belly and went on fighting tooth and nail in the quaking bog. I was finally able to sit up, weighted down with mud and despair. I roamed through the city all night long, leaning on a tree branch I picked up at random. I did not dare prowl around in the vicinity of Government House out of fear of my own guards. I wandered about the most deserted spots, making my way along like a blind man, in circles that kept leading me back to the same blind alley, the same crossroads. A beggar, the Supreme Mendicant, the One Great Alms-Seeker. Alone. Carrying my empty person on my back. Alone, without a family, without a home, in a strange land. Alone. Born old, feeling that I could die no more. Condemned to unlive my life till my last breath. Alone. Without a family. Alone, old, sick, without a family, without even a dog to turn to. Enough of this, damn it! You keep on whining like a dog. If you’re only a shadow now, at least learn to behave like a man. The rain had stopped completely. Complete darkness. Complete silence in the alleyway. Then I said to myself: the only way out of the blind alley is the alley itself. I went on, leaning on the branch. A night patrol came my way: Halt! Who goes there! Nooobody!, I answered, though no sound came out. Passwoooord!, they demanded, amid the clack of rifle bolts. The Fatherland!, I made my voice resound inside those bodies soaked with rain and patriotism. Where do you live?, the corporal asked insistently. No fixed abode!, I said. What’s brought you out at this hour, you old rascal? I got lost in the storm, my sons. Don’t you know it’s forbidden to be abroad after curfew? Yes, yes, I know. I gave that order myself. They did not understand. They heaped insults upon me. Yes, yes, my sons, I know very well that it is forbidden to go out after curfew. But there are too many curs barking, not just a few. This old gaffer’s either crazy or crocked, the corporal said. Let him go. Go on, old-timer, go sleep off your hangover in a ditch somewhere if you don’t have a home! And don’t let us find you around here again!
I walked toward a flickering light that appeared at the other end of the alleyway. It wasn’t yet the first light of dawn. I saw that it was Orrego’s general store. He was just opening the place. I hesitated whether to go in. Finally I decided I would. Who would recognize me in the state I’m in? Spies are so stupid. I gestured that I wanted a brandy. Well, compadre, you’re wetter than a puddle of dog piss! The rain’s rusted your horns, has it, chief! He tried to get a conversation going. I drew my sleeve across my gullet in a slicing motion. Yep, compadre, looks like you’ve lost your voice for sure! I threw him a carlos cuatro cuarto, which fell on the floor amid the sacks and crates. He got down on his knees, arse in the air, to look for it. Where the devil has that fuckin’ quarter gone anyway! I went out, leaving the spy still heaping insults on the sovereign defeated at Trafalgar, now only a piddling coin.
* * *
—
The following afternoon, from the roof terrace of the Hospital Barracks, through the spyglass aimed toward the Chaco, I saw a strange-shaped cloud approaching. Swirls and shudders as it came roaring in. Another storm!, imagination tolled in my bones. Locusts! I thought of the double harvest of the year pillaged by the plague. The whole country on a war footing once again. Wooden rattles, drums, battle cries deafening the air from one end of the country to the other. The cloud stopped dead on the horizon. Seemed to move backwards. Disappear. Vanish amid the reflections of the setting sun. A fancy trick of the imagination, a binocular illusion. A phenomenon of refraction, who knows how or why. By the time I realized what it was, a skirl of madly drifting swallows was falling. Blind birds. The bullets of rain from the cloudburst had put their eyes out. I was able to escape because as I fell from the horse I had pulled my bicorne down over my face. It was not enough. I got out the steel breastplate I was wearing underneath my clothes. I was able to withstand the hail of freezing melted lead; the swallows were not. They were bringing their summer with them from the north. The Deluge waylaid them. Settled accounts with them. The roof terrace was immediately covered with little eyeless birds looking at me through the drops of blood in their empty eye sockets. They fluttered for a moment and then keeled over dead. I strode rapidly across the creaking, cheeping little bones, as one walks over heaps of dry alfalfa. I deduced that the storm had extended over a vast area. That whole great flock had come from the farthest borders of the country to die at my feet.
How is the investigation of the cathedral pasquinade going? Have you identified the Hand? No, Excellency, thus far we haven’t had any luck. Not so much as the tip of a hair in all the tons of paperwork in the Archive, even though we’ve now gone over every last folio, every last folicule with a fine-toothed comb. Stop searching. It’s no longer important. I only wanted to add, begging your pardon, Excellency, that perhaps you didn’t find the guilty party in the files and dossiers of the Archive because most of the signers of those papers are already dead or in prison, which is more or less the same thing. I couldn’t be sure though, so I sent the scribes under heavy guard to repopulate the Tevegó penal colony. That way we’ll kill two birds with one stone, I thought; or rather, we’ll be taking steps to avoid two evils. On the one hand, we’ll keep those scoundrels from continuing to lend a hand to the band of pasquinading guerrilla-fighters. And on the other, we’ll put an end to the witchcraft at Tevegó, and I have a notion that the only way to bring new life, if I may so put it, to the penal colony is by bringing prisoners in to replace the ones who evaporated into stone. Because this morning, Excellency, as I was coming to the Palace, I was once again witness to a very strange happening. What, you knave, are you starting another of your Scheherazadished stories so as to waste my time and delay your sentence? No, Most Excellent Sire. God keep me from vainly petarding your patience with tittle-tattle, fiddle-faddle, rumors and other such idle díceres. I’ve said a thousand times that one doesn’t say díceres, but decires.
The word comes from the Latin dicere, but in our language it’s said backwards. Yes, Sire, I won’t let it happen again. But as it happens, something’s happened that has no likes of which and has never been seen before. Reel off your story and be done with it. I’m beginning, Sire, and may God and Your Excellency aid me. It’s not a simple matter. I don’t even know where to begin. Begin: that way you’ll at least know where to end.
The time Your Excellency fell off the horse during the storm, and we’re a month away from that evil day now, it so happened that while Your Grace was confined in the Barracks Hospital, two men, a woman, and a child entered the city. They came, or so it would appear, to seek alms. That’s what they said when a deposition was taken from them. That in itself was already odd, seeing that there are no more beggars, mendicants, or alms-seekers since Your Excellency took over the reins of the Supreme Government. Where are you from?, was the first thing I asked them. Then I remembered what Your Worship always says about all things going back to their image. But I could recall no known image of that thing or people I saw there before me. Where are you from?, I asked them again, feeling my head reel a bit from the terrible smell they were giving off. They had no idea, or else they didn’t want to tell me. They just bobbed their heads up and down, gesturing like deafmutes. Were they mute? Weren’t they? Were they deaf? Weren’t they? I couldn’t be sure, so I asked them: Are you from Tevegó by any chance? They didn’t say a word. One of them, the one who piped up then and said he was the father, began to scratch himself hard, all over. You people know that the punishment for begging is twenty-five lashes. We don’t know anything, sir, the man who piped up and said he was the uncle answered. We don’t have anything, the woman who piped up and said she was the child’s aunt murmured, and then, pointing to it: We don’t have anything but this to earn us a living, and the only other thing we have is empty bellies because we haven’t eaten even one wretched mouthful of manioc in three days. Nobody will give us anything. They’re afraid of us, they shut their doors in our faces, they run from us, they set their dogs on us, they throw stones at us, the big people and the little ones, as though we had Saint Lazarus’s complaint, or worse, a much worse complaint, sir.
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