Pupil Petronita Carísimo, age 7: “Mama says that he’s the Bad Man who put our grandfather in prison just because the horse he rides every afternoon stumbled on a loose flagstone in front of Grandfather’s house. He ordered a heavy shackle put on him and he sank to the bottom of the earth, so we’ll never see Grandpa José again.” Shall I tear up this little girl’s composition, Sire? No. Leave it. The truth as children see it is not to be torn up, twisted, bent, folded or mutilated.
Pupil Leovigildo Urrunaga, age 7: “The Supreme is the Man-Who-Is-Master-of-Fear. Papa says he’s a Man who never sleeps. He writes night and day and loves us backwards. He also says he’s a Great Wall around the world that nobody can get past. Mama says he’s a hairy spider forever spinning its web in Government House. Nobody escapes from it, she says. When I do something bad, my mama says to me: ‘The Karaí is going to stick a hairy foot through the window and carry you off!’ ” Have the parents of this child summoned. Have them bring him with them and let him see me. It is not right to fool children. They’ll be fooled enough in the schools later on, if there are any left, where they’ll be told that when the hairy spider died they had to stick a long pole through the window and poke it to see if it was really dead. Very well, Sire.
School Number 1, “Fatherland or Death.” Native teacher Venancio Touvé. Pupil Francisco Solano López, age 13: “I would like to ask the Supreme Government to give me the Perpetual Dictator’s dress sword, so as to keep it in my care and use it in the defense of the Fatherland.” That child has a brave soul. Send him the sword. Sire, with your permission I remind you that he is the son of Don Carlos Antonio López, the one who…I remember him, I remember him, Patiño. Carlos Antonio López and the Indian Venancio Touvé were the last two pupils of the Colegio San Carlos whom I examined and passed with the highest grade, shortly after the Revolution. You too will remember Don Carlos Antonio López, the future president of Paraguay. Before his star rises in the heaven of the Fatherland, the rope of your hammock will be knotted round your neck. Go on.
Special School “Home for Orphan and Foundling Girls.” Pupil Telésfora Almada, age 17: “The Supreme Government must immediately call for popular and sovereign elections. Meanwhile, it must dissolve the parasitical army commanded by corrupt and venal leaders, and transform it into militias that will advance the Revolution and all the people of the Fatherland….” Aha! That’s not a bad idea that little girl has there, not bad at all! Speaking of the Home for Orphan and Foundling Girls, Most Excellent Sire, I take the liberty of informing you that very strange things are going on in that establishment. Do you mean to tell me, Patiño, that those monsters never before seen that have begun invading the city and perhaps the entire country have been turning up there too? They haven’t gone that far, Sire. But the real and certain truth is that the greatest libertinage that anyone can imagine reigns there. Nobody knows exactly what they do, nor when those girls and women of every sort sleep. By night the Home is a brothel. By day a barracks. They’ve formed a battalion of every color, age, and estate. White, half-breeds, blacks, and Indians. Before dawn breaks they take off into the wilds. It could be that they practice combat maneuvers. From dawn to dark you can hear distant rifle fire. I’ve sent scouts to have a look. They come back without having seen one thing. One of them was tied fast to a tree with lianas and an insulting placard hung around his neck. The male-ysipó*4 they tied him up with couldn’t be cut even with a machete and it had to be burned off him to free him. He was subjected to a long interrogation in the Truth Chamber. He wouldn’t or couldn’t or decided he shouldn’t tell us anything that had happened, and finally fell senseless after five hundred lashes. I went personally this morning to search the House and found it empty. Not a trace, Sire. Except for the air of having been abandoned quite some time ago. Given these circumstances, I take the liberty of requesting orders from Your Eminence as to what I should do. As regards the House, nothing for the moment, my ex faithful scribe. Take your pen and write what I am about to dictate to you. Grip it firmly, squeeze it as hard as you can. I want to hear it moan with each stroke as it tears through the paper with my last will.
SUMMONS
I THE SUPREME DICTATOR OF THE REPUBLIC
Order all delegates, commandants of garrisons and troops of the line, appointed judges, administrators, stewards, tax collectors, customs agents, mayors of towns and villages, to present themselves at Government House for the meeting of the conclave announced in the Perpetual Circular. The meeting will begin at 12 o’clock next Sunday, the twentieth day of the month of September.
Appearance is mandatory and its omission will not be excused or justified in any case, no matter how extreme the cause.
I am now going to dictate to you the special invitation concerning your esteemed person:
I THE SUPREME PERPETUAL DICTATOR
ORDER that on presentation of this warrant by the interested party himself, the Commander of the Garrison proceed to arrest the confidential clerk Policarpo Patiño and keep him in confinement, totally and absolutely incommunicado. Having been implicated in a conspirative plan of usurpation of the Government, the criminal Policarpo Patiño is to be hanged as an infamous traitor to the Fatherland, and his corpse is to be buried in pastures outside the walls with neither cross nor mark to commemorate his name.
The Commander of the Garrison and the three remaining commanders are jointly responsible for executing this Supreme Decree. Having so done, they are to report, immediately and personally, to the undersigned in order to render a full account, the four commanders being subject to the penalties for any and all subreption, leniency, or complicity, by omission or commission, in which they might be implicated.
Hand me the papers. I’m going to sign them right now. Another waterspout, the last one, splashed out of the basin as the result of the brusque movement. The condemned man has come to attention. Clicked his heels. Disappeared. The catafalque-person of the mulatto has dissolved in the pool of water flooding the floor and forming rivulets in the cracks. The pestilence of long standing has suddenly increased to double its size and fetor. The enormous flat feet are still there however. Heels together. Big toes apart, raising their horny heads with trembling movements of supplication, of terror. Only the wet feet, gleaming in the semidarkness. Immense. Bathed in sweat. They have become so swollen that the obese confidential clerk must have slid all of himself into them, trying to sink down deeper and deeper. To bury himself. But in his attempt to flee, to absent himself, the floor boards, harder than iron, have produced a contrary effect. They have made that absence more present still in the immense swelling of the human monster turned into two sweating feet. Two feet gazing out from amid blinking toenails. Two feet squared militarily, imploring. Two feet already moving back and forth in the slow swaying dangle of hanged men. Come on, come closer! Or do you want to die twice? Hand me the papers. The confidential clerk fearfully creeps out of his hiding place reinforced by a double heelbone. The enormous carcass emerges from its feet on tiptoe. Little by little. Fear by fear. The heel-sacs go slack as the carcass takes on its original size, plus its duplicity. The treacherous trickster, split cleanly in two from top to bottom by the slash of the pen. I sign. Signed. Scatter sand on these decrees. Put yours in an envelope. Seal it. There’s no more sealing wax left, Sire. It doesn’t matter, your ex person has left its greasy imprint on it. Suddenly naked, he covers himself with one decree in front, the other behind. From the innermost depths of his chest comes a mortal sigh. His right hand, transformed into a black penholder, smites his face. Is the wretch trying at this late date to suborn me by arousing my compassion? By performing one last circus turn on the high wire? He suddenly raises his pen-hand to his gullet, pierces his Adam’s-apple clean through, so that the nib comes out the other side of his neck at the base of his skull; on the very tip of it a little boy appears, singing and executing fiendishly difficult pirouettes. In the voice of a dwarf, ex Patiño begs me: Most Ex
cellent Sire, I humbly accept the just punishment that Your Worship has seen fit to visit upon me, since I have borne my black conscience along a very wicked way, a low road beset with mud and mire and secret ire, a path besmattered and besmirched by the blackest ingratitude toward Your Most Excellent Person. But more humbly still, I dare pray Your Excellency not to deprive my grave of that sign that is most precious to every good Christian, the Most Holy Cross. It does not matter to me, Sire, if I am buried in the barest pasture outside the walls. It does not matter to me if the Cross is made of the most lowly or even deadly wood. It doesn’t matter to me, Sire, if it is draped with a stole or adorned with little colored stones at its foot. But Sire, the Cross, the Cross!, the impenitent liar moans, his face contorting with mystery. Without the aid and protection of the Cross, Most Merciful Sire, the spirits with which I still have accounts to settle will come to balance the books and take their vengeance upon me!…If I hear rightly, you consider yourself already hanged and buried, and you want to hold your wake here and now. Who, me, Sire?…Your sighs smack of belches to me. Do you consider yourself a good Christian? I’m no plaster saint, Sire, but neither am I a whited sepulcher. My belief in the Cross couldn’t be simpler. It has always been my present help, Sire. And you’ve been the craftiest scoundrel in the last hundred years. So what can the cross mean to you? And so: Nequaquam! Neither cross nor mark! You were born by mistake and will die by mistake. I don’t intend to have a kicking-match with my ex pack mule. I’ll kick it out like an ex secretary. Go find your last shitting spot. You know the saying: When the burro’s kicked off you might as well shove its food up its ass. Off with you, and stop coming to attention because I’ll hear the sound of four heels clicking. The stupid beast didn’t understand. He gets down on all fours, brays a little, and splashes off through the mud. Ex Policarpo Patiño! He suddenly halts. At your orders, Excellency! The magnifying glass, remember the magnifying glass! What magnifying glass, Sire? Put the magnifying glass in the sun. Ah, yes, Excellency! The mulatto gets to his feet, puffing for all he’s worth. Come on, hurry up! Open the shutter. Place the lens in the arch that I ordered you ex profeso to set into the windowframe. Yes, Sire, I am placing it there now. He excitedly fits the lens into the circlet. Child’s play. Expende Dictatorem nostrum Populo sibi comiso et exercitu suo!*5 How many arrobas of ashes will my frail bones produce? At least a hundred, Sire! Exoriare aliquis nostris es ossibus ultor!,*6 I murmur as I see cinereal zenithal rays of the sun fall on the lens. As they glance off the biconvex surface, they form a solid ingot of melting gold. Good. Very good. The universe continues to cooperate by offering its precious gifts, which cost me a most modest price. Place beneath this ingot of fire your ex table and all the rest, with all the dead souls bound to its legs. Heap on top of it a pyre-pile of papers. Change the position of the table slightly. Focus the pencil of solar fire on the very peak of the paper-pyre. There, that’s it. When the first curls of smoke mount to his face, the ex confidential clerk stops smiling. He gazes at me with a hangdog look, his eyes brimming with tears. Wind the seven timepieces. None of them will strike the hour for you now. Put the one with the repeating mechanism within reach of my hand with its bells tolling twice. Take up your basin and go. If we are not to see each other again in this life, farewell till eternity!
* * *
—
My memory is not a dreamer. Once upon a time it did its work wide awake, even in sleep, if I ever managed to fall asleep. Which is most unlikely. At present, it works even in non-sleep. A dis-memory calling to mind my great command in eclipse. I write amid the swirls of smoke filling the room. Truth Chamber. Closet of Justice. Seat of Voluntary Confessions. Posthumous confessional. My works are my memorial. My innocence and my guilt. My right and wrong guesses. Poor countrymen, you have read me badly! And what is the final reckoning of your Debit and Credit, counterhearer of your own silence?, the one who is correcting these notes behind my back asks; the one who at times governs my hand when my strengths fall off from Absolute Power to Absolute Impotence. What is the final reckoning, perpetual executor of your mistrust? Amid the smoke the hand worms its way into my secrets. Pokes about. Separates the chaff from the grain. Very few grains. Perhaps only one: Very tiny. Diamantiferous. Blinding bright on the black pillow of the Insignia. A great deal of chaff; almost all the rest. Destined to be consumed in the fire. The iron hand forces my hand. Ever alert against everything, my hand writes as the other directs it. You can’t bear the suspicion and you can’t escape it. Immured in your concave mirror, you have seen and will continue to see, all at one time, repeated in successive rings to infinity, the earth in which you lie trying out your first-last-last resting place. Forests. Swamplands. Clouds. Objects surrounding you. The spectral image of your race, scattered like sands of the desert. You have played out your passion in cold blood. True. But you risked it at the gaming table of chance. The passion of the Absolute—oh, you bad player!—has rusted you, eaten you away little by little, though you took no account of it as you kept careful watch over every last penny in your ledgers. You have been content with very little. You have put your enormously swollen leg up on the aerolith. There it is, a prisoner. Here you are, trapped with it. You can feel it breathing, feel it throbbing better than you. You feel in the meteor the natural pulse of the universe. At any moment it may take to its stellar ways again. Those stray canines of the cosmos don’t catch hydrophobia. You can no longer move. Except for that hand that writes out of inertia. Vestigial act of an absolutely gratuitous Habit. The one thing left for you to do is fall into the grave. Down the drain, down the funnel: to the very bottom of the trick mirror. Any ray of light that penetrates its envelope of strange refraction, like nothing under the sun, heavier than the atmosphere of Venus, will follow an invariably rational arc more acute than your own thought…Am I repeating myself? No: because it is not my will that dips itself in ink and expresses itself in signs. Nonetheless: yes! The Voice repeats the cogitations I noted down one time in my almanac. I had completely forgotten them! The Almastronomy I wrote on December 13, 1804! The image of the concave mirror and the ray of light, repeating, in successive rings extending to infinity, the eye that is observing, till finally it causes it to disappear in its own multiple reflections. In this perfect hall of mirrors there would be no way of knowing which is the real object. Hence the real would not exist; only its image. I did not produce the philosopher’s stone in my alchemical laboratory. I succeeded in doing something much better. I discovered the line of perfect rectitude passing through all possible refractions. I fabricated a prism that could break a thought down into the seven colors of the spectrum. Then each one of them into seven others, until I caused a light to come forth that is white and black at the same time, there where those capable of conceiving only the double-opposite in all things see nothing more than a confused jumble of colors. News of this discovery never reached the ears of my master Lalande, to whom the pope, on that very same date, December 13, 1804, declared that an astronomer as great as he could not be an atheist. What would the Sovereign Pontiff have said of me had he come to Paraguay, where I had reserved the office of chaplain for him? What would His Holiness, bathed in the heavy atmosphere of Venus, have said on seeing in my concave mirror the specter of God come forth from the prism? Would he have called me an atheologue too?
When I fixed the formula, my own thought was a prism and a mirror-funnel. Even the very smallest mote of dust was reflected in it. It made the page of ether sparkle. There was another time, I remind myself, when I wrote, dictated, copied. I flung myself heart and soul into paper-and-ink work. Suddenly a full stop. An abrupt end to this abandon. The point at which the absolute begins to take on the form of history from the other side. At one time toward the beginning, I believed that I dictated, read, and worked under the sway of universal reason, under the rule of my own sovereignty, under the dictates of the Absolute. I now ask myself: Who is the amanuensis? Not the trust-unworthy scribe, certainly. Back then, I ordered him to work
barefooted, so that the blood that had accumulated in his feet from the heat of his patrial half-boots would expand and fill his head. The blood rose and activated to a slightly greater degree the battery cells of his encephalus, which were clogged with fat and lacking in gray matter. His blood went to his head, but so did the fumes. We were in the early days of the Perpetual Dictatorship then. The faithless-faithful scribe wasn’t satisfied with the coolness of the dirt floor. He made improvements. He himself contributed the basin of cold water. For more than a quarter of a century he kept his feet in that black water that turned thicker than ink. Without knowing it, without doing so intentionally, he managed to contradict Heraclitus. The amanuensis’s amphibian feet bathed in the very same motionless water in an always quite like eternity. Throw out that dirty, stinking water, Patiño. Change it. Sire, with your permission, I’d really rather just leave it in the basin for now. It’s taken on the shape of my feet by this time. If I change it I don’t know what might happen. It might turn us to rust, or who knows what. It could be—Heaven preserve us!—that the new water would dissolve my feet and even my body. How am I to know! I’m deathly afraid of river water and even of rain water. Of the first because it runs. Of the second because it falls like the piss-tail streaming down from a cow or a horse. My Sancho Panza’s reasoning is not at all unreasonable. Didn’t King Solomon the Wise maintain that time eats away iron with rust and men with uncertainty? What is there that is more fixed and immovable than the Pater Noster? And yet the Our Father moves unceasingly in people’s mouths. The thought of the Pater Noster is more agile than twelve thousand Holy Ghosts, even if each one had twelve feather capes, and each cape had twelve winds, and each wind twelve victoriosities, and each victoriosity twelve thousand eternities. The Grotiuses and Pufendors make the same observation. They say its clauses were already in use at the time of Christ. And who are you to contradict them! Where is the counterproof? What Christ did, they maintain, was to gather them up and string them all together like nuggets of gold, myrrh, and frankincense. Ah, the smoke is growing thicker and coughing is absorbing the functions of thought! I’m the one who’s sneezing now! During the night I would kneel before the amanuensis’s basin. In the white cone of the candle, I would bend over the round black mirror. I would join my hands and wait in the attitude of prayer. At a given moment, at long last, sometimes, not always, I would see blurred images like clouds glide very slowly from one horizon to another on the tarred surface. Did the feet of my confidential clerk think, then, in a manner that was the reverse of his untutored and retentive mind? Those amphibian soles were thinking some secret thought. I also heard voices sometimes; something like the droning of a procession marching through the streets behind the baldachin of the Most Holy. Thinking of the amanuensis brought me to Aristotle, when he maintained that Plato’s words were fleet, ever-shifting, and as a consequence, animated, and to Antiphanes, when he argued that the words addressed by Plato to children congealed because of the coldness of the air. Hence they were not understood until they were old; the children too grew old, whereupon they understood something very different from what the words said in the beginning. But what did the amanuensis’s feet think? What did they say? Were their words animated like Plato’s? If they said something it wasn’t in Castilian, Guaraní, Latin, or any other language, living or dead. The images never turned into anything more than very white clouds that took on the forms of unknown animals. Bestiaries. Animal fables. At times, tinged by the reflections of some tiny submerged sun, the clouds turned the bluish color that dims the cornea of the one-eyed; to the opalescent color of the thin membrane of cataracts, or the red-and-gold of jaguars in heat. Merely that. No revelation in the Patmos of the basin. Nonetheless, one must proceed cautiously. One never knows. A louse mounted on a speck of dandruff can fly. The most profound revelations sometimes take the rudest and most unexpected paths. Petronius thought that words touched each other in the form of an equilateral triangle, and that Truth resided in the center of them. All words, example, ideas, and images of all things, past and future, dwelt therein.
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