I the Supreme
Page 58
never…
never…
never…
never…
NEVERMORE!!!
He is coming back. I see his shadow loom larger. I hear his footsteps resound. Strange that a shadow should have such a heavy tread. Iron-tipped cane and studded boots. He climbs the stairs martially. He makes the stairboards creak. He stops on the last one. The most resistant one. The step of Certainty, Power, Command. The halo of his erect presence appears. Bright red aureole round the dark silhouette. Continuing to advance. For an instant a pillar hides it. It reappears. HE is here. He tosses the great round skirt of his cape over his shoulder and enters the chamber, inundating it in a scarlet phosphorescence. The shadow of a sword is projected on the wall: the nail of his index finger points at me. Runs me through. HE laughs. For two hundred seven years, for the space of a breath he scrutinizes me. Eyes of fire. I, playing dead. He locks the doors. Lowers the crossbars that weigh five arrobas into their catches. I hear him make the rounds of the thirteen remaining outbuildings of the House of Government with the same heavy step and go through the same operation of barring the doors, inspecting, checking every last detail: from the armory to the general storehouses, passing by the way of the toilets. I know that he did not neglect to search a single chink in the immense parallelopipedonic, baby-lonic bulk of the Supreme Fortress. The smoke of the fire extinguished in the afternoon slowly eddies and pools in the antechamber, in the chamber, in the inner chamber where I am lying. Why doesn’t this old wreck of a place just collapse and be done with it amid all the dampness!, I think in exasperation, remembering those mornings when I used to go after Mass to watch them excavating for the foundations. Hidden among the piles of red dirt, under cover of my altar boy’s baby-bonnet, I dumped cartloads of salt in the ditches in place of the stones the workers were shoveling in. I watched them attentively as they did their work while I did mine. If only the first rain dissolves the salt and sinks you, you damned mansion!, my thought cried out, seeing it grow in size, massive, quadrangular, pyramidal. Tumble down, once and for all! Surely the salt of one’s wits is more resistant than the millstone of disgrace. The salt of my sacred body resists intact the viscosity of the Third Deluge.
* * *
—
Despite the vapors, the hermetic immurement, the first cadavicera comes in. It probably stole in through some crack or crevice in the main altar. Cadaviceras are attracted by the fascination of death. Certain emanations announce its imminence to small flies. Once life has ended, other species of flies come swarming about. Migrations follow one upon the other. From the moment that the breath of corruption becomes perceptible by setting up camp in the cadaveric reality, the first one arrives: the green fly whose scientific name is Lucilia Caesar; the blue fly, Azura Passimflorata, and the large fly with a black-and-white-striped thorax, called the Great Sarcophaga, the spurhead of this first migratory invasion. The first colony of flies to respond to this signal of a taste-treat may produce in corpses up to seven and eight generations of larvae which accumulate and proliferate for some six months. The larvae of the Great Sarcophaga increase in weight two hundred times every day. The skin of the corpses then turns a yellow with a faint pinkish tinge; the belly a light green; the back a dark green. At any rate, that is what the colors would be if the entire phenomenon did not take place in total darkness. Then comes the next onslaught of cadaverophile grenadieres: Piophiles that produce cheese-worms. Then corniettes, longuettes, ophiras, pharidas. They form their chrysalises like the grated breadcrumbs on ham or the bean soup I was so fond of. Then the nature of the decomposition changes. A new fermentation, richer than the previous ones, and more lively and dynamic as well, produces fatty acids known vulgarly as corpse fat. This is the stage of dermestoid capricorn beetles, which produce larvae equipped with long hairs, and of the caterpillars that will later flower into beautiful butterflies called aglossates or Coronas Borealis. Some of these substances will crystallize and later gleam like spangles or tiny metallic nuggets in the definitive dust. More contingents of immigrants arrive. To this deliciously black decomposition there now hasten avid sylphids with diamantine, iridescent eyes; the nine species of necrophores, lyrophore Homers of this funerary epic. The squadron of round and hook-shaped aquarians initiates the process of desiccation and mummification. After the aquarians (whose real name is acarians although I prefer to call them aquarians) come the agrarians. They gnaw, saw, crumble the tissues thin as parchment, the ligaments and tendons transformed into a resinous substance, as well as the callosities, the horny matter, the hair and the nails. The moment has arrived when these latter cease to grow on the corpses, as is commonly, and rightly, believed. My toenails will grow no longer, and my unnatural baldness is beyond remedy. Finally, in three years’ time, the last great migrant, an immense black coleopter, larger than Government House, called Tenebrion Obscurus, arrives and dictates the decree of total dissolution. It is all over. The stench, the very last sign of life, has disappeared. Everything has melted away, vanished completely. Even the mourning has ended. The Tenebrion Obscurus has the magic quality of being ubiquitous and invisible. It appears and disappears. It is found in different places at the same time. Its eyes with their millions of facets gaze at me but I do not see them. They devour my image, but I cannot make out theirs enveloped in the black cape with the crimson lining…(the following ten folios are stuck together and petrified).
* * *
—
(Beginning of the folio burned)…and now you can no longer act. You say you do not want to witness the disaster of your Country, that you yourself have paved the way for. You will die first. That part of you which sees what is mortal will die. You cannot escape seeing what does not die. Because the very worst thing of all, grotesque Archi-loco, is that the dead man suffers, everywhere and always, no matter how completely dead he is, regardless of how much earth and oblivion are piled on top of him. You believed that the Country you helped bring to birth, that the Revolution that came forth armed from your cranium, began-ended in you. Your own pride made you say that you were the offspring of a terrible parturition and a principle of mixture. You fooled yourself and fooled others by pretending that your power was absolute. You lost your oil, you old ex theologian passing yourself off as a statesman. You believed you were playing your game of absolute passion to the limit: everything or nothing. Oleum perdidiste.*10 You ceased to believe in God, but neither did you believe in the people with the true mystique of Revolution; the only one that leads a true locomotive-engineer of history to identify himself with its cause, not use it as a hiding place from his absolute vertical Person, in which worms are now feeding horizontally. With grand words, with grand dogmas that appeared to be just, once the flame of Revolution had been extinguished in you you continued to hoodwink your fellow citizens with the most contemptible baseness, with the most vulgar and perverse of ruses, that of illness and old age. Sick with ambition and pride, with cowardice and fear, you shut yourself up within yourself and turned the necessary isolation of your country into the bastion-hideout of your own person. You surrounded yourself with scoundrels who prospered in your name; you kept at a distance the people from whom you received power and sovereignty: well fed, protected, taught fear and veneration, because in your heart of hearts you too feared the people but did not venerate it. You turned yourself into a Great Obscurity for the peoplemob; into the great Don-Amo, the Lord-and-Master who demands docility in return for a full belly and an empty head. Ignorance of a time at the crossroads. Better than anyone else, you knew that so long as the city and its privileges hold dominion over the totality of the People, Revolution is merely a caricature of itself. Every truly revolutionary movement, in the present era of our Republics, begins, solely and self-evidently, with sovereignty as a real whole in act. A century ago, the Revolution of the Comuneros failed when the power of the people was betrayed by the patricians of the capital. You
wanted to avoid that. You stopped halfway, and did not form true revolutionary leaders but a plague of toadies trailing after your shadow. You misread the will of the People and as a consequence you misused your power, as your dotard’s affections spun about gerontropically in the vacuum of your all-embracing will. No, little mummy; true Revolution does not devour its children. Only its bastards; those who are not capable of carrying it out to its ultimate consequences. Beyond its limits if necessary. The absolute does not tremble to carry out its thought to the very end. You knew that. You copied it in those papers addressed to no one, destined to end up as dead letters. You hesitated. You too are doomed. Your punishment is worse than that of the others. For you there is no redemption possible. Oblivion will devour the others. You, ex Supreme, are the one who must render an account of everything and pay up to the very last quarter…(what follows is crushed into a ball, illegible).
* * *
—
…at midnight, you will go down to the dungeons. You will walk about amid the rows of hammocks hanging one atop the other, rotted by twenty years of darkness, suffering, and sweat. They will not recognize you. They will not even see you. They will neither see nor hear you. If you still had a voice, you would have liked to insult them, to cause a great uproar as usual; to wreak your vengeance on these specters who dare to ignore you. Listen to me, you damned dimwits!, you would have liked to apostrophize them, repeating for the last time what you growled thousands of times. The good part, the best part of all is that nobody hears you now. Useless to scream your head off in the absolute silence. You will go down the rows of prisoners. You will look each one of them in their gummy eyes dimmed by cataracts. They will not blink. Will you know whether they are dreaming, dreaming of you as a strange animal, as a monster without a name? Dreaming. A dream. What is most sacred in man and beast. For them you will be no more than the form of forgetfulness. An emptiness. An obscurity in that obscurity. You will finally stretch out in an empty hammock. The last one. The lowest one among the rows of hammocks that sway gently beneath arrobas of irons a hundred times heavier than their bones of specters. Fallen to pieces from mildew and age, the hammock will dump you out onto the floor. No one will laugh. Silence of the tomb. You will spend the entire night there, lying amid the pestilential remains. Eyes closed, hands crossed on your chest. The sweat of these wretches, their shit, their urine, trickling from hammock to hammock, will dribble down on you, rain down drops, drops of sepulchral slime. They will crush you flatter and flatter, push you farther and farther down. They will aim these inversed pillars at your immobility. Stalactites growing above your supreme impotence. When the scab mites, the sylphs, the cadaviceras, the sarcophagas, and all the other migrations of larvae and caterpillars, of tiny necrophagous gnawers and plowers, finish with what remains of your esteemed non-person, you will at that moment also be seized with a tremendous urge to eat. A terrible appetite. So terrible that eating up the world, the entire universe, would still not be nearly enough to appease your hunger. You will remember the egg that you ordered placed beneath the warm ashes for your last breakfast, the one you never got to eat. You will make a superhuman effort to raise yourself up from beneath the great mass of darkness that is crushing you. You will not be able to. Your last hair will fall out. The larvae will go on peacefully feeding on your remains. They will weave a wig from its long hairs to cover your baldness, so that your bare skull will not suffer too much from the cold. As they are fretting away at you to the sound of their lutes and lauds, aphonic, aphasic, in a catarrhal mutism aggravated by the dampness, you will beg them to bring you your egg, the fertilized egg, the egg forgotten in the ashes, the egg that others more astute than you and less forgetful will already have eaten or thrown into the garbage. That’s how things are. So then, Supreme Deceased, what if we leave you as you are, condemned to perpetual hunger to gobble down an egg, because you didn’t know…(the remainder stuck together, illegible, the rest unable to be found, the worm-eaten letters of the Book hopelessly scattered).
*1 Guaraní: Go to the devil!
*2 Guaraní (from Spanish): exactly.
*3 Guaraní: brush of our farmlands.
*4 Guaraní: liana.
*5 Combination of the expression Expende Hannibalem, from a verse of Juvenal (Satires, X, 147): “Put Hannibal in the scales. How many pounds of ashes will you find that that great captain weighs?”, and the phrase of the daily rogation made mandatory for secular and cloistered priests by the congress of June 1, 1816 that elected El Supremo as Perpetual Dictator of the Republic, replacing the ejaculatory prayer De Regem previously offered. (Compiler’s Note.)
*6 May one to avenge these ashes be born one day! (Virgil, Aeneid, 625).
*7 Food for fire.
*8 Epicarnes: Greek comic poet, d. circa 450 B.C., renowned for his wise saws and philosophical disquisitions.
*9 To the stars through bolts and bars.
*10 You wasted the oil [in your lamp].
APPENDIX
1. The remains of EL SUPREMO
On January 31, 1961, an official circular invited historians of the nation to a conclave, in order to “initiate steps leading to the recovery of the mortal remains of the Supreme Dictator and the restoration of these sacred relics to the national patrimony.” The invitation was also extended to the citizenry as a whole, urging it to collaborate in the patriotic Crusade to reconquer both the sepulcher of the Founder of the Republic and his remains, which had disappeared, scattered to the winds by anonymous profaners, enemies of the Perpetual Dictator.
The echoes of this summons reach the most remote confines of the country. As in other crucial moments of the nation’s life, its citizens rise to their feet as one and answer as with a single voice.
The one dissonant note in this plebiscitary chorus of approval is—surprise!—that sounded by specialists, chroniclers, and popularizers of Paraguayan history. A sudden uncertainty would appear to have unexpectedly fallen like a dark shadow over the national historiographic consciousness as regards the question of the one and only true skull of El Supremo. Opinion is divided; the historians contradict each other, engage in heated exchanges, argue vociferously. As if in fulfillment of El Supremo’s predictions, this epic national undertaking turns into a small-scale civil war, fortunately a bloodless one, since the confrontation takes place “only on paper.”