I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  In the beginning I thought they were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the law. The child looked more or less normal. It’s true that its two feet were very misshapen and its legs badly bowed. But it walked like other little ones its age. Albino hair, so white you almost couldn’t see it in the sunlight. Sightless eyes, apparently, even though sight isn’t born unless there are eyes to see. But it’s certain they could see, because when the aunt-machú bent down to quiet the little one’s whimpering it grabbed her by the breast. Put them in the guardhouse and take care of them, I ordered the soldiers.

  The child dropped to the ground and began crawling, whining in a very worn-out, very old voice, that didn’t sound like a child but like a frightened iguana or some other creature of the wilds. I went over to it and put my plug of chewing tobacco in its mouth. It chewed for a moment and then spat it out, along with a mouthful of black juice. Nákore!,*1 it said. It went on howling, louder and louder. The aunt-machú knelt down and suckled it again. How old is it?, I asked. It’ll be two, cabal-eté,*2 on our Karaí-Guasú’s next birthday, the father said. It was born on the same Day of the Three Kings, the uncle said.

  A guard came and tried to pick it up in his arms. He couldn’t. It weighs more than a five-arroba stone, he said, trying to pick up his cap, which had fallen on the child’s head. He pulled on the cap with all his strength and couldn’t get it off. Another guard came, and he couldn’t lift it either. It must weigh a good ten arrobas, he said. Even between all five guards they couldn’t lift the child up off the ground, and it was now screaming and howling loud enough for two. What with their pulling and tugging, the guards had yanked all its clothes off. And then we suddenly saw what kind of a creature that child was. Just under its little tit it was attached to another one, a boy-child, with no head and a behind that had no opening. The rest of the body, complete. Except that one arm was shorter than the other. It was broken when it was born, the aunt said from where she was sitting on the ground. The two creatures were joined front to front, as though the smaller little boy were trying to embrace the bigger little girl. The place where they were joined together to form a pair looked to measure less than the distance between the tip of a thumb and the tip of a forefinger, so that if you raised up the imperfect little boy you could have seen the navel of the other one. Its arms, thighs and legs, which weren’t joined to the little girl, hung about halfway down her.

  The aunt told us that the little boy without organs did his business through the little girl’s tracts, so the two of them ate and lived on the same thing. When I asked them where the mother was, they said they didn’t know. The father merely explained vaguely how the mother had disappeared the day the double creature was born. Or rather, he said, correcting his statement, when I came back from the fields at nightfall, the double creature was there but the mother had disappeared. With my brother and sister, who continues to suckle the two of them and always has enough milk for both, we went to see a healer in Lambaré, the Payaguá Payé who raises wild hogs. He told us we should come to see our Karaí Guasú, because somewhere one day these twins against nature were going to be seers and could be useful to the Supreme Government by providing it with favorable predictions for preserving the unity of its laws and the different parts of our State.

  I still thought they were just trying to get out of the flogging meted out to beggars. They might well be people trained by the pasquinaders or by people belonging to the Twenty Golden Families to try Your Excellency’s patience. Do you think, I said to them, that even if your cock-and-bull story were true and the likes of these two creatures joined together turned out to be the best seers in the world, our Supreme Dictator would be willing to beg for predictions, prognostications, or miracles from these twins against nature? I told them, Sire, that you were against sorceries of any sort, being vestiges of the influence of the País on people’s ignorance.

  The father, the uncle, and the wetnurse-aunt didn’t say another word. They gave no sign of fear or distress. To the pillory and twenty-five lashes for each of them!, I cried to the guards. The double creature stopped whimpering. The aunt lifted it up with no difficulty, put it astride one of her hips and followed the guards who were taking the men away. As she walked along she took the cap off the little girl’s head and gave it back to the guard. I left orders with the sergeant that once they’d been given their punishment they were to be put in the pillory and left there till Your Worship had recovered and gave orders as to what to do with them.

  I was drinking maté at my house the next morning when the sergeant appeared, looking completely dumbfounded. Stumbling over his words, still filled with the fear disguised as courage that a soldier must always have even though he’s already dead, he blurted out the story of what had happened. Fear is a bad counselor. Do you know what happened, Señor Patiño? If you stop talking like a deafmute, maybe I’ll find out some day, I said to him. What’s the story, sergeant? The two men and the woman were stripped for the punishment, señor secretary of the Government. Not one of the three of them had so much as a trace of their privates, male or female. Nothing at all. Just three holes they kept piddling out of in a steady trickle. The lashes rotted the minute they touched those damp bodies. We had to change even the toughest ones we had, the ones made of braided bull pizzle, as many as five times. The Indians refused to go on whipping them. I had the lawbreakers put in the stocks. The twins too. At dawn this morning they were gone. All that was left was a puddle of piss on the floor of the prisoners’ cell. The neckholes of the stocks were black, charred. Still warm. It’s something I wanted to tell Your Worship about. I wish I could understand these things without equal, but only you, Sire, could understand this happening that happened with your knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps what we ignorant people call monsters, like those others from Tevegó, aren’t monsters in your eyes. Maybe these beings of flesh and blood are only figures from a world unknown to ordinary people; the lost handiwork of some world that came before ours; things recounted in books lost to us. Perhaps they’re related to other beings that have no name, but exist nonetheless, and are more powerful than ordinary folk. You will never know what is enough if you don’t first find out what is more than enough, you always tell me, Sire, when I make an ass of myself.

  I read the entire Bible through seeking a like fact so as to compare. Isaiah told me that no work, no worthwhile book had ever been lost in this world or in any other. I asked the prophet Ezequiel why he ate dung and spent so much time lying on his right side, and on his left as well. He replied: the desire to elevate others to the perception of the infinite. I don’t know what those two words mean.

  I know I’m telling what I’m telling badly, Sire. But it’s not so as to waste your time or disguise my thought. You mustn’t think that. The thing is, I don’t know how to tell it any other way. You yourself, Sire, say that facts can’t be recounted, and yet you’re able to think other’s thought as though it were your own, even if it’s the thought of an ignorant man like myself.

  I have my reverence, Supreme Sire, my firm respect, signed with a firm hand. You are wasting your time and patience hearing me. What I am most grateful for is your close attention. You have even closed your eyes in order to hear me better. I envy your education; what I envy even more is your intelligence, your knowledge, your experience. Many of the things you say from up where you are I don’t understand from down where I am, even though I know without knowing that they are truth itself. You are more than good, far too kind, to listen to my idiotcies, the idiolatries that come drooling out of my mouth simply because the hole in it has been punched out, and you listen to me with the patience of a saint.

  In every movement of true joy or sorrow that I have ever had in my life, if I go on and put it into words, on hearing myself I feel that I am another person. A person-that-talks. He says what he has heard many times, till this tongue of mine manages to get moisture from someone else’s mouth so as to slide its words out. They come out gabbl
ed and garbled and gargled, like a parrot talking. I know that what I am saying is very hard to follow, very intervolved. But you pluck up my courage with your patience in hearing me out. I almost feel that I am confessing, like the demented man who killed himself with the guard’s bayonet because he believed he’d murdered Your Excellency in his sleep.

  One always feels himself to be someone else when he speaks. But I want to be myself. To speak as a man who is master of his tongue, of his thought. To tell you the story of my life with its pluses and its minuses. You, Sire, often say that living is not living but disliving. I would like to tell you about that. I would like to understand fear, valor, the urges that impel a person to embody what is happening without the body becoming aware of it. To do so many things that a person doesn’t understand, like dismented, disheartened, disfigured dreams. So many strange bad acts we do when we are so close to what is ours, by right, by destiny, who knows what, and one doesn’t know it, doesn’t know it, doesn’t know it!, even if he plunges his feet in the coldest water.

  Persons and things are not what they seem to be. It is very seldom that dreams show us visible, sensible figures. They have two faces, they do things backwards. It must have happened to you too, Sire: the light is less of a shock to your eyes on awakening if you have dreamed of visible things. No, Your Excellency is different. Your Worship must always see what he dreams of. You keep calling me an idiot, an animal. And you are right. I am different. I must be like the crow that would like everything to be white, or like the owl that would like everything to be black.

  What I am most grateful for is your kind attention. You listen to me, you think, you rethink what I am saying to you in a very simple-minded but very reverent way. I am talking to you about what I don’t know but I know that you know. I am going to talk to you a little more, now that my memory has turned into a wasp’s nest that is swelling up and making my head go round and round; now that my hand seems to be more faithful to the paper and is being pushed by another hand as it writes. The serious, the exact, the certain truth of what happened is this. Listen, Sire, listen to me disarmed; listen to me more than what I am saying, for only Your Excellency sees beyond all the visible, hears what is beyond all the audible. Only Your Excellency can couple the fact with the divination of the fact. Divining things that are past is easy. Joys don’t laugh. Sorrows don’t weep. Prayers don’t plow, praise doesn’t ripen. Those are all favorite díceres of yours. And many things lack a name. Or at least I don’t know what name to give them and so they escape me. I’m getting more and more confused. What’s happening is more serious than it appears to be. Because what happened on that ill-starred day of your fall happened again this morning. As though through an evil sorcerer’s trick, those monster-people have appeared in the city again. More monstrous still, and not just one family like the first time. I alone, Sire, coming from my house to Government House, ran into some ten covens of those no-goods. They’re coming out of the drains, climbing up the cliffs, coming down from Sentinel Hill. They seem very sure of themselves and very determined. They show no fear of anything or anybody. Although they’re still peaceable enough when there are soldiers and armed guards about, who knows what villainy they’ll be capable of when there are more of them. They’re turning up all over, according to the reports from the guard posts and the pickets outside the walls. But just as they appear, they disappear, in the blink of an eye, as though the earth had swallowed them up or they were hiding in the folds of the hills and the brush in the ravine. The ones now, Sire, don’t talk; or rather, they only talk among themselves, by signs or by buzzing like flesh flies at funerals….Isn’t your patience exhausted, Sire? Eh, Your Worship? Have you dropped off to sleep, Excellency? Enveloped in the depths of obscurity as you are, you don’t even seem to be breathing. And what if you were dead? Ah, if he were! Then…No, my dear secretary. Don’t get your hopes up. He who expects the death of another to be his salvation is doomed to perdition. That’s what’s going to happen to you shortly. You’ve been talking to me about those monsters of semihuman appearance that have begun to invade the city. But I tell you that there are others worse still, and they don’t need to invade us because they have been among us for a long time now. By comparison with them, those others are doubtless more innocent than suckling babes. Doubtless they are also more loyal, reliable, responsible, and intelligent. I am going to have to entrust the census I ordered my men to make to these peaceable but active monsters. What’s this bunch of nonsense you handed me yesterday? According to these population figures, Paraguay alone has more inhabitants than the entire continent all told. You can see from a hundred leagues away that that whole corps of idlers has been busy inventing all sorts of nonsense to get out of working. To sum it all up in a few words, writing, noting things down is easy. A piece of paper puts up with anything. In order to go on doing nothing, my civil and military functionaries have foisted the work off onto their clerks and sent them out to count heads, which they’ve done by counting on their fingers, lying stretched out in their hammocks after having chased after peasant girls, mulattas and Indians all over the backlands, in all the brakes and brambles, round the remotest farmhouse. One sniff at the papers and you can smell the stink of their breeches. Those good-for-nothings have given birth to people out of nothing. They’ve provided every family where the father and mother are unknown with a whole flock of kids that don’t exist. The couple that has the fewest shows up on their list with more than a hundred. Unmarried mothers are even more prolific than the ones who are married, kept, seduced, or concubinated. I find here one Erena Cheve, a woman those clerks have had the balls to give 567 sons to, all with the oddest names and ages, the youngest still unborn and the oldest older than his mother. This isn’t childbirth; it’s wildbirth. As a result, the population would appear to have increased a hundredfold since the last master-census that I had taken ten years ago, and if I trusted the word of that herd of rakehills, I could count on and order an immediate levy of no less than a hundred thousand names. An army of phantoms come from the heights of the imagination of those profligate figure-flingers who have made of their trousers flies their principal pieces of military equipment!

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  Sire, the first lists from 140 public schoolteachers have also arrived, with the answers of their pupils to the question of how they see the sacrosanct image of our Supreme National Government. Come, come, enough of your idiolatric rubbish. Read the first ones. I begin, Sire:

  School District Number 1, capital, School Number 27, “First Republic of the South.” Teacher José Gabriel Téllez. Pupil Liberta Patricia Núñez, age 12: “The Supreme Dictator is a thousand years old like God and has shoes with gold buckles edged and trimmed with leather. The Supreme decides when we should be born and that all those who die should go to heaven, so that there are far too many people there and the Lord God doesn’t have enough maize or manioc to feed all the beggars of his Divine Beatitude.” Another of Schoolmaster Téllez’s pupils, Victoriana Hermosilla, age 8, blind from birth, says: “The Supreme Government is very old. Older than the Lord God, that our schoolmaster Don José Gabriel tells us about in a low voice.” That’s enough from Téllez’s pupils. He and Quintana are the ones who earn the most as masters of the rod and ferule, but instead of teaching the Patrial Catechism they slyly slip in the one that’s been abolished, and instead of the usual First Reader, and the De Senectudine for the older ones, they pervert their pupils with vain and profane antipatriotic tales. If I remember correctly, Téllez and Quintana are fulfilling their functions as teachers on a temporary basis until more suitable ones are found, isn’t that right? Yes, Excellency, they have occupied their temporary posts since March 11, 1812, when they were appointed by the First Junta. Have a close watch kept on these schoolmasters who have gone so far as to give private lessons in secret to the children of the Twenty. Your order will be executed, Excellency.

  School Number 5, “Independent Paraguay.” Teacher Jua
n Pedro Escalada. Pupil Prudencio Salazar y Espinosa, age 8: “The Supreme Government is 106 years old. He helps us be good and works hard to make the grass, the flowers, and the plants grow. Sometimes he takes a bath and then it rains down here below. But it’s either God or the devil, I really don’t know which, or maybe both of them together, that make the weeds and the yavorai of our kapueras*3 grow.” Hmmm…Well! This pupil is making progress, despite the Porteño pedant who remained here as a leftover from the Areopagites.

  Same school, the following compositions:

  Pupil Genuaria Alderete, age 6: “The Supreme Government is like water that boils outside the pot. It goes on boiling even though the fire goes out, and sees to it that we don’t lack for food.”

  Pupil Amancio Recalde, age 9: “He rides by on his horse without looking at us but he sees all of us and nobody sees Him.” Ha! It’s plain to see that this boy is Don Antonio Recalde’s grandson.

  Pupil Juan de Mena y Mompox, age 11: “The Supreme Dictator is the one who gave us the Revolution. He’s in command now, because he wants to be, forever and ever.”