In the inferno of summer, even on the hottest nights, the basin remained stubbornly silent. By the light of the candle, of the moon, of the most powerful lantern, the heavy water slept undisturbed, without dreams. Like the dead. It was with the first spells of freezing winter weather that the clouds and the faint sounds began. I tried the most diverse reagents, of acids, salts, substances distilled from buckwheat, Sarrazin, lycopodium and many other aperitive essences. The seminal pollen of plants is highly inflammable. All they managed to do was to bring to a state of erection some elongated bubbles that silently burst, throwing in my face the fetor of the mulatto’s corns. I worked all night with an acetylene torch to see if I could defrost the words and the figures locked up in those clouds, in those murmurs. The flame of the torch turned whiter still, to a blinding bone-whiteness; the water blacker, till it began to boil, giving off a sulfurous vapor. The torch exploded. Its fragments embedded themselves in the walls, like splinters of a grenade. The following morning, I observed, with the greatest dissimulation and attention, my amanuensis’s behavior. Every so often, in the pauses of the dictation, he would lift up one foot and scratch it underneath the table as the drops fell, boring holes in the stone of my patience. I felt them fall like gouts of molten lead on the most sensitive areas of my gouty leg, made even more so by the attack of acephalalgy that I had been suffering from ever since nightfall. What’s the matter, Patiño? Why are you scratching your foot? Nothing, Sire, it’s just that the water seems a bit hot, that’s all. So I’m breaking out in a bit of a rash, or measles, or I don’t know what. With your permission, Sire, I’m going to go change it. No!, I begged him now, almost shouting. Don’t change it! Your wish is my command, Sire. I for my part like the water on the lukewarm side. One’s feet feel incomparably cool afterward in the breeze of the swaying hammock, when one drops off for an afternoon nap and sleeps the sleep of the dead. I was thinking of keeping that water with the secrets thought by my amanuensis’s feet. So clever, that mulatto, so infinitely clever that he foresaw that latter possibility and overturned the basin on purpose! There’s a little more water for under the bridge, I thought I heard him say as he left the room.
Tongues of fire shoot up joyfully in several places, perfectly attuned to my mood. Pabulum ignis!*7 Welcome, Igneous Power! Come in, friend Fire. Make yourself at home. Work with a will, like a man. It won’t take you long to put an end to all this. All of it! Eh! You will wreak the revenge of the small on the great. Of the hidden on the manifest. Don’t dissipate your energies. Concentrate. Don’t be distracted by the rumers spread by certain people to the effect that men are nothing but women expanded by heat, or that women are secret men because they have male elements hidden inside them. Allow me to address you in the familiar form. Unto thee I commend my end between your flame and the stone, just as I formed my beginning between water and fire. I did not arise from the rubbing of two sticks of wood together, nor from a man and a woman gaily rubbing their bacon as they made the beast with two backs, as my exegete Cantero claimed. You won’t suffer from indigestion with me. But neither will you be able to finish me altogether. There’s always some little bit left over that you find hard to swallow. You spit it out. Pliny flung himself into Aetna. The volcano ejected him as a vapor that preserved intact his form, his mocking smile, even the twitch in his eye (the left one—he was one-eyed), which never stopped winking. Empedocles, plastered to the gills, hurled himself into the same volcano, not so much because he wanted to kill himself as because he wanted to hoodwink his compatriots; to make them believe, when they found no trace of his body, that he had ascended to heaven. Vulcan vomited out intact the vapor of the one, the bronze sandals of the other, thereby giving away the game that those two vainglorious tricksters were up to.
I shall not burn on a pyre in the Plaza de la República but in my own room; on a bonfire of papers set aflame at my command. I wish you to understand me clearly. I am not flinging myself headfirst into your flames. I am throwing myself into the Ethna of my Race. Some day its crater in eruption will eject only my name. It will scatter the burning lava of my memory far and wide. Useless to inter my remains next to the main altar of the church of the Encarnación. Then in the common grave behind the sacristy. Then in a box of noodles. None of those places will give back a single buckle of my shoes, a single sliver of my bones. No one is taking my life from me. I am giving it. In doing so I am not even imitating Christ. According to the melancholy dean, the Son-God committed suicide on Golgotha. It matters little that the cause was the salvation of men. Perhaps the self-entitled “People of God” did not deserve, does not deserve, will not ever deserve to have any god commit suicide for its sake. Which would prove in passing that the idea of God is miserably human. A God-God-God three times First-Last is not one even though he may rise from the dead on the Third Day. Even though he is a Trinitarian-God in Three-Separate-and-Equal-Persons. If he really is one, he is obliged to exist without a pause; to be unable to die even for an instant. Furthermore, at the moment of the gall and vinegar, the Son-God hesitated in the Garden of Olives. O my Father, let this cup pass from me, et cetera et cetera…Soft! Chicken-hearted, the poor Son-God. Maybe the Redeemer failed to pay the last drop of blood of the ransom that will be exacted from the human species, supposedly redeemed, in the great pyre of universal destruction beneath the terrible mushroom-cloud of the Apocalypse. But let us not lose ourselves in atheological hypotheses.
When one is oneself the pit that exhales this mortal emanation, the oven that spews forth burning clouds of smoke, the mine that vomits out a suffocating damp, is it possible not to say that we do not kill ourselves with our own vapors? What have I done to engender these vapors that issue forth from me?, my left hand continues to copy, since the right one has already fallen dead at my side. It writes, it drags itself across the Book, it writes, it copies. I dictate the inter-dict beneath the rule of another hand, an alien thought. The hand is mine nonetheless. The thought as well. If anyone has a grievance against the written word, I am that person, since everywhere and always it has served to persecute me. But it is necessary to love letters despite the misuse that is made of them, as it is necessary to love our Country, however many injustices we suffer in it and even though we may lose our very life for it, since one dies only as one has lived. I take from others, here and there, those maxims that express my thought better than I myself could, not to store them up in my memory, since I lack that faculty. In this way the thoughts and words are my very own as well, as much mine as before writing them. It is not possible to say anything, however absurd it may be, without discovering that it has already been said and written by someone somewhere, Cicero says (De Divinat, II, 58). The I-would-have-said-it-first-if-he-hadn’t-said-it does not exist. Someone says something because someone else has already said it or will say it much later, even without knowing that someone has already said it. The one thing that is ours is what remains inexpressible behind the words. It is even farther inside us than what we ourselves are within ourselves. Those who feign modesty are the worst. Socrates hypocritically bows his head when he utters his famous sentence that is a lie: I only know that I know nothing. How could the peripatetic know that he knew nothing if he knew nothing? Hence he deserved the punishment of the hemlock. He who says I lie and tells the truth lies, indubitably. But he who says I lie and really lies is telling the scriptest truth. Sophistitricks. Politicoils. A miserable honor, entrusting the desire for immortality to words, the very symbol of the perishable, the melancholy dean sermonizes. Then countersermonizes: All humanity belongs to a single author. There is but a single volume. When a man dies, that does not mean that that chapter is torn out of the pages of the Book. It means that it has been translated into a better language. Each chapter is thus translated. The hands of God (said he who spoke of the suicide of God, a really witty sally!) will bind all of our scattered pages together once again for the Great Library in which each book will lie side by side with another, with its final page, its final
letter, its ultimate sentence. Compadre Franklin, a thrifty man, ever the hoarder, copies in his epitaph the thought of the dean. Compadre Blaise copies the Lord of the Mountain, feigning false modesty in his turn: When I write, my thought sometimes escapes me. I am thereby reminded of my weakness which I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as the forgotten thought, for I thus tend to turn my mind only to my failings. From an early age, when I read a book, I made my way inside it, so that when I closed it I went on reading it (like cockroaches or bookworms, eh?). It then seemed to me that those thoughts had always been mine. No one can think the unthought, only remember what has been thought or done. He who is not possessed of a memory copies, which is his way of remembering. That is how it is with me. When a thought escapes me, I would like to write it down, and all I write is that it has escaped me. It’s not the same with flies. Observe their radical power, their far from flyspecktatorial patriotism. They win battles. They prevent our souls from acting, devour our bodies, and deposit in our warm remains the eggs that make them eternal, even though each of them as a single fly lives only a few days. Flies! I’ve saved myself from them! The fire and smoke have kept me from being invaded by them, warded off their depredative migrations! When they arrive all they’ll find is one charred table companion at the Ash Supper, the Last Repast I never managed to offer the thousand Judases plus one among my traitorous apostles.
Why are you taking so long, fire, to do your work? Eh there, you layabout? What’s the matter with you? Are you too afflicted with senility and impotence after a certain age? Are you older than I am? Or is it just that you too are smothering to death in my sewer hole? Could I have gotten this from somewhere? Even if I did, no matter. Patiño, a spiritualist, would have consoled me: Sire, who can prove to you that that other Ancient of Days is not yourself? It’s proven fact that a spirit passes from one body to another and is always the same for time everlasting! The knave was quite capable of turning his dead souls into migratory meta-psychoses.
I don’t know why I’m still busying myself looking after the clocks at this point. In the mortal silence of the city, the repeater one is tolling its death knell. The only sound. For the living and for the dead. I do not want to die, but being dead no longer matters to me, I read in Cicero, copying one of Epicarnes’s*8 maxims. And in Augustine of Hippo: Death is an evil only because of what follows it (De Civit-Dei, I, II). Quite true, compadre. It is less cruel to be dead once and for all than to find oneself waiting for the end of life. Above all when I myself dictated my sentence and the death chosen by me is my own creature. How many prisoners have dug their own graves in this earth! Others have given the death squad at their own execution the order to fire. I have seen them act their parts in the drama resolutely, I might almost say joyfully. Others are still lying, after all this time, on the floor or in their hammocks, laden with chains. At this siesta hour, which for them continues to be one of impenetrable darkness, they are sleeping peacefully, sheltered from the blinding sun. They work in their dreams, digging their graves with their own weight no greater than that of the skinniest of my white crows. I see the latter fluffing up their scabby wings, delousing themselves in the long afternoon of their lingering hope. Two black spots amid light reflections. The prisoners rocking back and forth in the darkness. They scarcely move in the perpetual swaying back and forth. The creaking of their chains lulls me with a certain maternal sound. I, on the other hand, absolutely motionless. Beneficiary of a death that is certain, I teach them mortification by example. From midday on, I lie across the bed with my head hanging down toward the floor. In the window frame the inverted figures of Patiño and the commandants timidly appear. The ex confidential clerk is now clutching not his pen but a long takuara pole. He begins to poke my body, not to bring it to life but to see whether it is dead. Nudged by the pole, I feel myself float in the stygial-vestigial waters, but also in another living, dazzling river: the River-of-Crowns, the River-River.
“Always, to the very end, the torturing and perennial obsession of the river, a free path!” (Julio César, op. cit.)
My body continues to swell, to grow to giant size in the racial water that my enemies thought they had barred with chains. My corpse breaks them one by one, dredging the depths, widening the banks. Who can stop me now? The posthumous hand seizes the tip of the pole. Half dead with fear, the ex amanuensis lets go of it. We have traced the last sign together.
Policarpo Patiño escaped the sentence for a short time, just as El Supremo had predicted. On the latter’s death, on September 20, 1840, a junta formed by the military commandants took over the headless government, after a palace intrigue. It was brought down by a barracks coup led by another “marshal” of the Deceased, Sergeant Romualdo Duré (a cracker manufacturer). The ex scribe Policarpo Patiño, secretary of State and éminence grise of the defeated junta, hanged himself in his cell with the rope of his hammock. (Compiler’s Note.)
“On August 24, 1840, Saint Bartholomew’s Day, under the influence of his infernal manservant, the Dictator set fire before dying to all the important records of his communications and death sentence, without regard for the possibility that the voracity of the element might be so great that it would inevitably set his bed on fire. Desperate, suffocated by the smoke, he called to his servants and guards to come to his rescue. Doors and windows were opened, and amid the conflagration mattresses, bedcovers, clothing and papers in flames were thrown out onto the street. O clear forewarning of the flames that in the month to come would begin to consume his soul for all eternity! Meanwhile the one thing that is certain fact is that on this occasion the passersby who were able to overcome their terror saw for the first time the gloomy interiors of Government House. Some even stopped to examine the charred scraps of bombazine, a fabric unknown in the country, of which The Supreme’s sheets were made.
“For Catholics, the twenty-fourth of August is the day when the devil walks abroad alone. Many people associated this circumstance and the color of the Dictator’s cape, deducing therefrom that his end was near.” (Manuel Pedro de Peña, Letters.)
The fire drowses, not knowing exactly where to attack. It crackles on the papers that it is scorching and turning to smoke, to ashes. It sends out a trail of live sparks to the corners of the room. It does not dare to approach me; perhaps because it is unable to cross the quagmire surrounding the bed. The water and the fire, from which I formed myself, are plotting now to consign me to final solitude. Alone, in a strange country full of nothing but idiots. Alone. With no origin. With no destination. Shut up in perpetual captivity. Alone. Helpless. Defenseless. Condemned to wander without repose. Expelled successively from all the refuges I choose. Kept from descending to the grave…Come, come, things aren’t that bad! Death will not contrive to plunge you into the self-compassion that did not even dent the surface of your life. The dead are very weak. But the dead man who in death lives on / is to be counted triply strong.
I agree that this struggle ad astra per aspera*9 has made of me a half-breed with two souls. One, my cold-soul, now gazes from the other shore, where time is stemmed and is beginning to crab its way backwards. The other one, the warm-soul, is still keeping watch within me. An adept at absolute doubt, I can still get about by leaning my diurnal right leg, the one too swollen now to be able to support me, on my nocturnal left one. That one is still holding up. It carries my weight. I am going to get up for a while. I must poke up the fire. It is HE who emerges from I, turning me over again with the momentum of his retrocharge. HE claps a hand. The fire revives instantly. It dances merrily once again, with greater energy than before. Its blazing flames bring a sort of dawn to the room. HE gives another clap of his hand. It echoes like a cannon report. Dragoons, hussars, grenadiers come rushing in helter-skelter with pails of water and wheelbarrows full of sand. All the contingents with all the elements. As when I ordered José Tomás Isasi consigned to the gunpowder flames, and the blaze of yellow lava spread to my own room. The fire is n
ow smothered once more beneath veritable torrents of water and sand. A deluge of mud falls into the room through doors, windows, skylights, bull’s-eyes, cracks in the ceiling. Great guttering gouts. Drops of molten lead, at once burning-hot and ice-cold; a heavy, more than solid downpour, making my bones rattle. The spouts of mire shoot in all directions. They soak, burn, pierce, stain, congeal, melt everything they come across in my lair. They turn it into an overflowing cesspool, in which there float viscous bits of ice, islets of flames. In the middle, HE, erect, with his usual brio, the sovereign power of the first day. One hand behind him, the other tucked in the lapel of his frock coat. The blasts of wind and water do not touch him. I pop the last aneurism of voice I was hoarding beneath my tongue. I spit a bloody insult at him. I want to exasperate him: even though they bury us at opposite ends of the earth, the same dog will find both of us! I do not recognize my voice: that breath that comes from the lungs and starts up all the elaborate machinery of phonation. Chords, tubes, alveoles, ventricles, palate, tongue, teeth, lips no longer form in me the ephemeral sound we call a voice. I haven’t shouted for such a long time now! Attuning words and the sound of thought. The most difficult thing in the world! I pass my hand across my face in the darkness. I do not recognize it. Seeing in a lamp two focuses of light. One black, the other white. In a man, two faces. One alive, the other dead. HE loses interest. Feigns indifference. Opens the door. Heads toward the entrance. Goes outside. I see his silhouette in the passageway, haloed with that filament of white and black light, phosphorically streaking the darkness. I hear him give the password to the head of the guard detail: THE FATHERLAND OR DEATH! His voice fills the whole night. The last watchword I will hear. It remains sewed to the lining of the destiny of my fellow citizens. The earth trembles with the vibration of that outcry. It is passed on from one sentinel to another through all the confines of the night. I is HE, definitively, I-HE-SUPREME. Immemorial. Imperishable. The one thing left for me to do is swallow my old skin. He molts. I molt. He mute. I mute. Only the silence listens to me now, patient, without a word, seated beside me, atop me. Only the hand goes on writing endlessly. Animal with a life of its own, wriggling, writhing endlessly. It writes, writes on and on, impelled, shaken by the violent agitation of convulsionarles. Ultima ratio, last rat escaped from the sunken ship. Enthroned upon the stage machinery of Absolute Power, the Supreme Person constructs his own gallows. Is hanged with the rope that his own hands have braided. Deus ex machina. Farce. Parody. The Supreme-Clown’s company of strolling players. On the boards, only the hand writes. Hand that dreams that it writes. Dreams that it is awake. Only if he is awake can the sleeper relate his dream. The hand-rat-shipwrecked victim writes: I feel myself falling amid the blind birds falling as the sun sets on the afternoon of the fall. Their blown-out eyes soak me with blood. They retain the image of my fall amid the storm. Those birds are mad! Those birds are I! Attention! They are waiting for me! If I don’t keep a tight hold at all times on the Justice pouch I shall never recognize them…never…
I the Supreme Page 57
