The Autumn of the Patriarch

by Gabriel García Márquez

  SHORTLY BEFORE NIGHTFALL, when we finished taking out the rotten husks of the cows and putting a little order into that fabulous disarray, we were still unable to tell if the corpse looked like its legendary image. We scraped it with fish scalers to get the deep-sea shark suckers off, we washed it down with creolin and rock salt to fix up the marks of putrefaction, we powdered his face with starch to hide the burlap repairs and paraffin stuffing that we had to use to restore the face that had been pecked away by dung-heap birds, we gave him back the color of life with woman’s rouge and lipstick, but not even the glass eyes stuck into the empty sockets could give him the stamp of authority he needed if we were to put him on display for the masses. In the cabinet room meanwhile we called for the unity of all against the despotism of centuries so we could divide up the booty of his power in equal parts, because everyone had come home under the spell of the surreptitious news of his death that could not be contained, liberals and conservatives had returned in reconciliation with the embers of so many years of postponed ambitions, generals of the high command who had lost their compass of authority, the last three civilian ministers, the archbishop primate, all those whom he would not have wanted there were sitting around the long walnut table trying to come to an agreement on the manner in which the news of that enormous death was to be released so as to avoid the premature explosion of mobs in the street, first a bulletin number one at the start of the first night concerning a slight indisposition which had obliged him to cancel all of his excellency’s public appearances and civilian and military audiences, then a second medical bulletin in which it was announced that the illustrious patient had been obliged to remain in his private quarters due to an indisposition in keeping with his years, and lastly, without any announcement, the heavy tolling of the cathedral bells on the radiant dawn of the hot August Tuesday of an official death which no one was ever to know for certain that really was his or not. We were defenseless against that evidence, compromised by a pestilential corpse that we were incapable of replacing in the world because he had refused in his senile insistence to take any decision concerning the destiny of the nation after he was gone, with the invincible stubbornness of an old man he had resisted all suggestions made to him ever since the government had been moved to the ministry buildings with their sundrenched glass and he had stayed behind living alone in the deserted palace of his absolute power, we would find him walking about in dreams, waving his arms in the midst of the cows’ destruction with no one to command except the blind men, the lepers and the cripples who were dying not from illness but from old age in the weeds of the rose garden, and yet he was so lucid and stubborn that we could only get evasive answers and postponements out of him every time we brought up the matter of putting his legacy in order, because he would say that thinking ahead about the world that’s left after you’ve gone yourself was something made up of the same ashes as death itself, God damn it, because when I finally die the politicians will come back and divide up the mess the way it was during the times of the Goths, you’ll see, he said, they’ll go back to dividing everything up among the priests, the gringos and the rich, and nothing for the poor, naturally, because they’ve always been so fucked up that the day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole, you’ll see, he said, talking to someone about his days of glory, even making fun of himself when he told us as he choked with laughter that for the three days he was going to be dead it wouldn’t be worth the trouble taking him to Jerusalem and burying him in the Holy Sepulcher, and he put an end to all disagreement with the final argument that it didn’t matter whether something back then was true or not, God damn it, it will be with time. He was right, because during our time there was no one who doubted the legitimacy of his history, or anyone who could have disclosed or denied it because we couldn’t even establish the identity of his body, there was no other nation except the one that had been made by him in his own image and likeness where space was changed and time corrected by the designs of his absolute will, reconstituted by him ever since the most uncertain origins of his memory as he wandered at random through that house of infamy where no happy person had ever slept, as he tossed cracked corn to the hens who pecked around his hammock and exasperated the servants with orders he pulled out of the air to bring me a lemonade with chopped ice which he had left within reach of his hand, take that chair away from over there and put it over there, and they should put it back where it had been in order to satisfy in that minute way the warm embers of his enormous addiction to giving orders, distracting the everyday pastimes of his power with the patient raking up of ephemeral instants from his remote childhood as he nodded sleepily under the ceiba tree in the courtyard, he would wake up suddenly when he managed to grasp a memory like a piece in a limitless jigsaw puzzle of the nation that lay before him, the great, chimerical, shoreless nation, a realm of mangrove swamps with slow rafts and precipices that had been there before his time when men were so bold that they hunted crocodiles with their hands by placing a stake in their mouths, like that, he would explain to us holding his forefinger against his palate, he told us that on one Good Friday he had heard the hullabaloo of the wind and the scurf smell of the wind and he saw the heavy clouds of locusts that muddied the noonday sky and went along scissoring off everything that stood in their path and left the world all sheared and the light in tatters as on the eve of creation, because he had seen that disaster, he had seen a string of headless roosters hanging by their feet and bleeding drop by drop from the eaves of a house with a broad and crumbling sidewalk where a woman had just died, barefoot he had left his mother’s hand and followed the ragged corpse they were carrying off to bury without a coffin on a cargo litter that was lashed by the blizzard of locusts, because that was what the nation was like then, we didn’t even have coffins for the dead, nothing, he had seen a man who had tried to hang himself with a rope that had already been used by another hanged man from a tree in a village square and the rotted rope broke before it was time and the poor man lay in his death throes on the square to the horror of the ladies coming out of mass, but he didn’t die, they beat him awake with sticks without bothering to find out who he was because in those days no one knew who was who if he wasn’t known in the church, they stuck his ankles between the planks of the stocks and left him there exposed to the elements along with other comrades in suffering because that was what the times of the Goths were like when God ruled more than the government, the evil times of the nation before he gave the order to chop down all trees in village squares to prevent the terrible spectacle of a Sunday hanged man, he had prohibited the use of public stocks, burial without a coffin, everything that might awaken in one’s memory the ignominious laws that existed before his power, he had built the railroad to the upland plains to put an end to the infamy of mules terrified by the edges of precipices as on their backs they carried grand pianos for the masked balls at the coffee plantations, for he had also seen the disaster of the thirty grand pianos destroyed in an abyss and of which they had spoken and written so much even outside the country although only he could give truthful testimony, he had gone to the window by chance at the precise moment in which the rear mule had slipped and had dragged the rest into the abyss, so that no one but he had heard the shriek of terror from the cliff-flung mule train and the endless chords of the pianos that fell with it playing by themselves in the void, hurtling toward the depths of a nation which at that time was like everything that had existed before him, vast and uncertain, to such an extreme that it was impossible to know whether it was night or day in the kind of eternal twilight of the hot steamy mists in the deep canyons where the pianos imported from Austria had broken up into fragments, he had seen that and many other things in that remote world although not even he himself could have been sure with no room for doubt whether they were his own memories or whether he had heard about them on his bad nights of fever during the wars or whether he might have seen them in prints in travel books over which he would linger in ecs
tasy for long hours during the dead doldrums of power, but none of that mattered, God damn it, they’ll see that with time it will be the truth, he would say, conscious that his real childhood was not that crust of uncertain recollections that he only remembered when the smoke from the cow chips arose and he forgot it forever except that he really had lived it during the calm waters of my only and legitimate wife Leticia Nazareno who would sit him down every afternoon between two and four o’clock at a school desk under the pansy bower to teach him how to read and write, she had put her novice’s tenacity into that heroic enterprise and he matched it with his terrifying old man’s patience, with the terrifying will of his limitless power, with all my heart, so that he would chant with all his soul the tuna in the tin the loony in the bin the neat nightcap, he chanted without hearing himself or without anyone’s hearing him amidst the uproar of his dead mother’s aroused birds that the Indian packs the ointment in the can, papa places the tobacco in his pipe, Cecilia sells seals seeds seats seams scenes sequins seaweed and receivers, Cecilia sells everything, he would laugh, repeating amidst the clamor of the cicadas the reading lesson that Leticia Nazareno chanted to the time of her novice’s metronome, until the limits of the world became saturated with the creatures of your voice and in his vast realm of dreariness there was no other truth but the exemplary truths of the primer, there was nothing but the moon in the mist, the ball and the banana, the bull of Don Eloy, Otilia’s bordered bathrobe, the rote reading lessons which he repeated at every moment and everywhere just like his portraits even in the presence of the treasury minister from Holland who lost the thread of an official visit when the gloomy old man raised the hand with the velvet glove on it in the shadows of his unfathomable power and interrupted the audience to invite him to sing with me my mama’s a mummer, Ismael spent six months on the isle, the lady ate a tomato, imitating with his forefinger the beat of the metronome and repeating from memory Tuesday’s lesson with a perfect diction but with such a bad sense of the occasion that the interview ended as he had wanted it to with the postponement of payment of the Dutch debts for a more propitious moment, for when there would be time, he decided, to the surprise of the lepers, the blind men, the cripples who rose up at dawn among the rosebushes and saw the shadowy old man who gave a silent blessing and chanted three times with high-mass chords I am the king and the law is my thing, he chanted, the seer has fear of beer, a lighthouse is a very high tower with a bright beam which guides sailors at night, he chanted, conscious that in the shadows of his senile happiness there was no time but that of Leticia Nazareno of my life in the shrimp stew of the suffocating gambols of siesta time, there were no other anxieties but those of being naked with you on the sweat-soaked mattress under the captive bat of an electric fan, there was no light but that of your buttocks, Leticia, nothing but your totemic teats, your flat feet, your ramus of rue as a remedy, the oppressive Januaries of the remote island of Antigua where you came into the world one early dawn of solitude that was furrowed by the burning breeze of rotted swamps, they had shut themselves up in the quarters for distinguished guests with the personal order that no one is to come any closer than twenty feet to that door because I’m going to be very busy learning to read and write, so no one interrupted him not even with the news general sir that the black vomit was wreaking havoc among the rural population while the rhythms of my heart got ahead of the metronome because of that invisible force of your wild-animal smell, chanting that the midget is dancing on just one foot, the mule goes to the mill, Otilia washes the tub, kow is spelled with a jackass k, he chanted, while Leticia Nazareno moved aside the herniated testicle to clean him up from the last love-making’s dinky-poo, she submerged him in the lustral waters of the pewter bathtub with lion’s paws and lathered him with Reuter soap, scrubbed him with washcloths, and rinsed him off with the water of boiled herbs as they sang in duet ginger gibber and gentleman are all spelled with a gee, she would daub the joints of his legs with cocoa butter to alleviate the rash from his truss, she would put boric acid powder on the moldy star of his asshole and whack his behind like a tender mother for your bad manners with the minister from Holland, plap, plap, as a penance she asked him to permit the return to the country of the communities of poor nuns so they could go back to taking care of orphan asylums and hospitals and other houses of charity, but he wrapped her in the gloomy aura of his implacable rancor, never in a million years, he sighed, there wasn’t a single power in this world or the other that could make him go against a decision taken by himself alone and aloud, she asked him during the asthmas of love at two in the afternoon that you grant me one thing, my life, only one thing, that the mission territory communities who work on the fringes of the whims of power might return, but he answered her during the anxieties of his urgent husband snorts never in a million years my love, I’d rather be dead than humiliated by that pack of long skirts who saddle Indians instead of mules and pass out beads of colored glass in exchange for gold nose rings and earrings, never in a million years, he protested, insensitive to the pleas of Leticia Nazareno of my misfortune who had crossed her legs to ask him for the restitution of the confessional schools expropriated by the government, the disentailment of property held in mortmain, the sugar mills, the churches turned into barracks, but he turned his face to the wall ready to renounce the insatiable torture of your slow cavernous love-making before I would let my arm be twisted in favor of those bandits of God who for centuries have fed on the liver of the nation, never in a million years, he decided, and yet they did come back general sir, they returned to the country through the narrowest slits, the communities of poor nuns in accordance with his confidential order that they disembark silently in secret coves, they were paid enormous indemnities, their expropriated holdings were restored with interest and the recent laws concerning civil marriage, divorce, lay education were repealed, everything he had decreed aloud during his rage at the comic carnival of the process of the declaration of sainthood for his mother Bendición Alvarado may God keep her in His holy kingdom, God damn it, but Leticia Nazareno was not satisfied with all that but asked for more, she asked him to put your ear to the lower part of my stomach so that you can hear the singing of the creature growing inside, because she had awakened in the middle of the night startled by that deep voice that was describing the aquatic paradise of your insides furrowed by mallow-soft sundowns and winds of pitch, that interior voice that spoke to her of the polyps on your kidneys, the soft steel of your intestines, the warm amber of your urine sleeping in its springs, and to her stomach he put the ear that was buzzing less for him and he heard the secret bubbling of the living creature of his mortal sin, a child of our obscene bellies who would be named Emanuel, which is the name by which other gods know God, and on his forehead he will have the white star of his illustrious origins and he will inherit his mother’s spirit of sacrifice and his father’s greatness and his own destiny of an invisible conductor, but he was to be the shame of heaven and the stigma of the nation because of his illicit nature as long as he refused to consecrate at the altar what he had vilified in bed for so many years of sacrilegious concubinage, and then he opened a way through the foam of the ancient bridal mosquito netting with that snort of a ship’s boiler coming from the depths of his terrible repressed rage shouting never in a million years, better dead than wed, dragging his great feet of a secret bridegroom through the salons of an alien house whose splendor of a different age had been restored after the long period of the shadows of official mourning, the crumbling holy-week crepe had been pulled from the cornices, there was sea light in the bedrooms, flowers on the balconies, martial music, and all of it in fulfillment of an order that he had not given but which had been an order of his without the slightest doubt general sir because it had the tranquil decision of his voice and the unappealable style of his authority, and he approved, agreed, and the shuttered churches opened again, and the cloisters and cemeteries were returned to their former congregations by another order of his which he had no
t given either but he approved, agreed, the old holy days of obligation had been restored as well as the practices of lent and in through the open balconies came the crowd’s hymns of jubilation that had previously been sung to exalt his glory as they knelt under the burning sun to celebrate the good news that God had been brought in on a ship general sir, really, they had brought Him on your orders, Leticia, by means of a bedroom law which she had promulgated in secret without consulting anybody and which he approved in public so that it would not appear to anyone’s eyes that he had lost the oracles of his authority, for you were the hidden power behind those endless processions which he watched in amazement through the windows of his bedroom as they reached a distance beyond that of the fanatical hordes of his mother Bendición Alvarado whose memory had been erased from the time of men, the tatters of her bridal dress and the starch of her bones had been scattered to the winds and in the crypt the stone with the upside-down letters had been turned over so that even the mention of her name as a birdwoman painter of orioles in repose would not endure till the end of time, and all of that by your orders, because you were the one who had ordered it so that no other woman’s memory would cast a shadow on your memory, Leticia Nazareno of my misfortune, bitch-daughter. She had changed it into an age in which no one changed unless it was to die, she had managed with bedroom wiles to do away with his puerile resistance of never in a million years, better dead than wed, she had made him put on his new truss listen to the way it sounds like the bell of a stray sheep in the dark, she made him put on your patent leather boots from the time he had danced the first waltz with the queen, the gold spur on his left heel which had been given him by the admiral of the ocean sea so that he would wear it unto death as a sign of the highest authority, your tunic with gold braid and tasseled ribbons and the statue epaulets which he had not worn since the times when his sad eyes could still be glimpsed, his pensive chin, the taciturn hand with the velvet glove behind the peepholes in the presidential coach, she made him put on his military saber, your man’s perfume, your medals with the sash of the order of the knights of the Holy Sepulcher which the Supreme Pontiff sent you for having given back the church its expropriated possessions, you dressed me like a feast-day altar and you took me at early dawn on my own feet to the somber audience room which smelled of dead men’s candles from the boughs of orange blossoms hung by the windows and the symbols of the nation hanging on the walls, without any witnesses, harnessed to the yoke of the novice who was stuccoed with a linen petticoat under the light breeze of muslin in order to smother the seven-month shame of hidden unrestraint, they were sweating in the lethargy of the invisible sea which sniffed restlessly about the gloomy ballroom to which access had been forbidden by his orders, the windows had been walled up, all trace of life in the building had been exterminated so that the world would not get even the slightest rumor of the monstrous hidden wedding, you could barely breathe in the heat because of the urgent pressure of the premature male who was swimming among the shadowy lichens on the dunes of your insides, for he had resolved that it would be a boy, and it was, he sang in the subsoil of your being with the same voice of an invisible spring with which the archbishop primate wearing pontificals sang glory to God on high so that the dozing sentries would not hear him, with the same terror of a lost diver with which the archbishop primate commended his soul to the Lord to ask the inscrutable old man what no one until then or ever after until the end of time had dared ask him do you take Leticia Mercedes Maria Nazareno as your wife, and he only blinked, agreed, on his chest the military medals gave a slight tinkle from the hidden pressure of his heart, but there was so much authority in his voice that the terrible creature in your insides rolled over completely in his equinox of thick waters, corrected his compass and found the direction of the light, and then Leticia Nazareno doubled over sobbing oh my father and my lord have pity on this your humble servant who has taken much pleasure in breaking your holy laws and accepts with resignation this terrible punishment, but biting her lace wristlet at the same time so that the sound of the disjointed bones of her waist would not reveal the dishonor held in by the linen petticoat, she squatted down, she fell to pieces in the steaming puddle of her own waters and withdrew from among the muslin folds the seven-month runt who had the same size and the same forlorn unboiled-animal look of a calf fetus, she lifted him up with both hands trying to recognize him in the dim light of the candles on the improvised altar, and she saw that he was a male, just as the general had decreed, a fragile and timid male who was to bear without honor the name Emanuel, as had been foreseen, and he was appointed a major general with effective jurisdiction and command from the moment he placed him on the sacrifice stone and cut his umbilical cord with the saber and recognized him as my only and legitimate son, father, baptize him for me. That unprecedented decision was to be the prelude of a new epoch, the first announcement of the evil times in which the army cordoned off the streets before dawn and made people close balcony windows and emptied the market with their rifle butts so that no one would see the fugitive passage of the flashy automobile with armored plates of steel and the gold shackles of the presidential squiry, and those who dared peek from the forbidden rooftops did not see as in other times the age-old military man with his chin resting on the pensive hand with the velvet glove through the peepholes edged with the colors of the flag but the chubby former novice with her straw hat with felt flowers and the string of blue foxes that hung around her neck in spite of the heat, we would see her get out across from the public market on Wednesdays at dawn escorted by a patrol of combat soldiers leading by the hand the tiny major general no more than three years old and because of his grace and his languid air it was impossible not to believe that it was a little girl dressed up as a soldier in the dress uniform with gold braid which seemed to be growing on his body, for Leticia Nazareno had put it on him even before he grew his first teeth, when she would take him in his baby carriage to preside over official acts as representative of his father, she carried him in her arms when he reviewed his troops, she would lift him over her head to receive the cheers of the crowds in the ball park, she would nurse him in the open car during parades on the national holiday not concerned with the secret jokes brought on by the public spectacle of a five-star general clinging ecstatically to his mother’s nipple like an orphaned calf, he attended diplomatic receptions from the time he was able to take care of himself, and then along with the uniform he wore the military medals which he had chosen himself from the jewel case full of decorations which his father had given him to play with, and he was a strange, serious child, he knew how to conduct himself in public from the age of six holding in his hand the glass of fruit juice instead of champagne as he spoke about grown-up matters with a natural propriety and grace that he had not inherited from anyone, although on more than one occasion a dark cloud would cross the ballroom, time would stand still, the pale dauphin invested with the highest powers had fallen into a lethargy, silence, they whispered, the little general is sleeping, his aides-de-camp would carry him out in their arms through the crisp conversations of high-class thugs and modest ladies who scarcely dared murmur repressing the laugh of embarrassment behind feathered fans, how awful, if the general only knew, because he let flourish the belief of his own invention that he was aloof from everything that happened in the world which was not up to the level of his grandeur and for that reason we had the public boldness of the only son he had accepted as his among the countless ones he had bred, or the widespread functions of my only and legitimate wife Leticia Nazareno who would arrive at the market at dawn on Wednesdays leading her toy general by the hand in the midst of the noisy escort of barracks maidservants and assault-troop orderlies who had been transfigured by that rare visible splendor of the awareness which precedes the imminent rising of the sun in the Caribbean, they would wade into the pestilential waters of the bay up to their waists to sack the sloops with patched sails that were anchored in the former slave port loaded with flowers from Mar
tinique and ginger roots from Paramaribo, they swept away all the live fish in their path like a wartime mopping up, they fought over the hogs with rifle butts around the former slave platform still in use where on another Wednesday of another time in the nation before him they had sold at public auction a captive Senegalese woman who brought more than her own weight in gold because of her nightmare beauty, they wiped out everything general sir, it was worse than the locusts, worse than a hurricane, but he remained impassive at the growing scandal which had Leticia Nazareno bursting as he himself would not have dared into the motley gallery of the bird and vegetable market followed by the uproar of street dogs who barked in surprise at the astonished eyes of the blue foxes, she moved with the insolent domination of her authority through slender columns of ironwork with great yellow glass leaves, with pink glass apples, with fabulous cornucopias of riches amidst the blue glass flora of the gigantic dome of lights where she chose the most delicious fruits and the tenderest vegetables which would wither the instant she touched them, unaware of the evil virtue of her hands which made mold grow on bread that was still warm and had blackened the gold of her wedding ring, so that she heaped curses on the vegetable women for having hidden their best wares and for the house of power had only these miserable pig mangoes left, sneak thieves, this pumpkin that sounds like a musician’s gourd inside, ill-born wenches, these shitty ribs with wormy blood that a person can see a mile away didn’t come from a steer but a donkey dead from some disease, by your evil mothers, she screamed, while the serving girls with their baskets and the orderlies with their troughs cleaned out everything edible in sight, their corsair shouts more strident than the clamor of the dogs maddened by the dampness of the snowy hideaways of the tails of the blue foxes she had had brought alive from Prince Edward Island, more cutting than the bloody reply of the foul-mouthed macaws whose mistresses taught them in secret what they themselves could not have the pleasure of shouting leticia larceny, whorehouse nun, they shrieked roosting up on the iron branches of the dusty colored-glass foliage of the dome of the market where they knew they were safe from the devastating wind of that buccaneer zambapalo dance which was repeated every Wednesday at dawn during the turbulent childhood of the miniature hoax of a general whose voice became more affectionate and his manners sweeter the more he tried to look like a man with the saber of a playing-card king that still dragged when he walked, he would stand unperturbed in the midst of the rapine, he would remain serene, haughty, with the inflexible decorum his mother had inculcated in him so that he would deserve the flower of the bloodline that she herself was squandering in the market with her drive of a furious bitch and her Arab vendor’s curses under the unaffected look of the old black women in bright-colored rag turbans who bore the insults and contemplated the sack fanning themselves without blinking with the canyon-deep calm of sitting idols, not breathing, ruminating wads of tobacco, wads of coca leaves, the medicines of poverty which allowed them to live through so much ignominy as the ferocious assault of the whirlwind passed and Leticia Nazareno opened a way with her vest-pocket officer through the frantic dogs whose hair stood on end along their spines and she would shout from the door send the bill to the government, as always, and they only sighed, oh Lord, if the general only knew, if there were only someone capable of telling him, fooled by the illusion that he would still be unaware until the hour of his death of what everyone knew to be the greatest scandal of his memory that my only and legitimate wife Leticia Nazareno had despoiled the Hindu bazaars of their terrible glass swans and mirrors with seashell frames and coral ashtrays, had stripped the Syrian shops of mortuary taffetas and carried off by the fistful the strings of little gold fish and the protective figs of the ambulant silversmiths in the business district who shouted to her face you’re more of a fox than the blue leticias she wore around her neck, she carried off everything she found in her path to satisfy the only thing left from her former status as novice which was her childish poor taste and the vice of asking for something when there was no need, except that now she didn’t have to beg in the name of God’s love in the jasmine-scented doorways of the viceregal district but she carted off in army trucks everything that pleased her wishes without any more sacrifice on her part except the peremptory order of send the bill to the government. It was the same as saying collect from God, because no one knew for sure from then on whether he existed or not, he had become invisible, we could see the fortified walls on the knoll of the main square, the house of power with the balcony of legendary speeches and the windows with lace curtains and flower pots on the cornices and at night it looked like a steamboat sailing through the sky, not just from any spot in the city but also from seven leagues away at sea after they painted it white and lighted it with glass globes to celebrate the visit of the well-known poet Ruben Dario, although none of those signs indicated for certain that he was there, on the contrary, we thought with good reason that those signs of life were military tricks to try to give the lie to the widespread rumor that he had succumbed to a crisis of senile mysticism, that he had renounced the pomp and circumstance of power and had imposed upon himself the penance of living the rest of his life in a fearful state of prostration with hair shirts of deprivation in his soul and all manner of irons of mortification on his body, with nothing but rye bread to eat and well water to drink, or nothing to sleep on except the slabs of a bare cell from the cloisters of the Biscayan sisters until he could expiate the horror of having possessed against her will and having made pregnant with a male child a forbidden woman who only because God is great had still not taken her final vows, and yet nothing had changed in his vast realm of gloom because Leticia Nazareno held the keys to his power and all she needed to do was say that he sent word to send the bill to the government, an ancient formula that at first seemed very easy to evade but which was getting more and more fearful, until a group of determined creditors dared present themselves after many years with a suitcase full of pending bills at the pantry of the presidential palace and we ran into the surprise that no one said yes to us and no one said no but they sent us with a soldier on duty to a discreet waiting room where we were received by a friendly young naval officer with a calm voice and a smiling face who offered us thin and fragrant coffee from the presidential crop, he showed us the white, well-lighted offices with metal screens on the windows and fans on the ceiling, and everything was so bright and human that one wondered in perplexity where the power of that air that smelled of perfumed medicine was, where was the meanness and the inclemency of power in the conscientiousness of those clerks in silk shirts who governed without haste and in silence, he showed us the small inner courtyard where the rosebushes had been cut down by Leticia Nazareno to purify the morning dew from the bad memory of the lepers and the blind men and the cripples who were sent off to die of oblivion in charity homes, he showed us the former shed of the concubines, the rusty sewing machines, the army cots where the harem slaves had slept up to groups of three in cells of shame which was going to be torn down to build the private chapel in its place, he showed us from an inside window the most intimate gallery of government house, the pansy bower gilded by the four o’clock sun on the lattice screen with green stripes where he had just lunched with Leticia Nazareno and the child who were the only people allowed to sit at his table, he showed us the legendary ceiba tree in whose shadow they would hang the hammock with the colors of the flag where he took his siesta on the hottest days, he showed us the milking stables, the cheese vats, the honeycombs, and on coming back along the way he followed at dawn to oversee the milking he seemed to be struck by a bolt of revelation and he pointed out to us the mark of a boot in the mud, look, he said, it’s his footprint, we were petrified as we looked at the imprint of a large, coarse sole which had the splendor and the dominion in repose and the stench of old mange of the track of a tiger accustomed to solitude, and in that footprint we saw the power, we felt the contact of his mystery with much more revealing force than when one of us was chosen to see him in
person because the higher-ups in the army were beginning to rebel against the newcomer who had managed to accumulate more power than the supreme command, more than the government, more than he, for Leticia Nazareno had come so far with her airs of a queen that the presidential high command itself assumed the risk of opening the way to one of you, only one, in an attempt to have him get at least a tiny little idea of what’s happening to the nation behind his back general sir, and that was how I got to see him, he was alone in the hot office with white walls and prints of English horses, he was stretched out in an easy chair, under the fan, in the wrinkled white drill uniform with copper buttons and no insignia of any kind, he had his right hand with the velvet glove on the wooden desk where there was nothing but three identical pairs of very small eyeglasses with gold rims, behind him he had a glass-enclosed case with dusty books that looked more like ledgers bound in human skin, on the right he had a large and open window, also with a metal screen, through which the whole city could be seen and all the sky without clouds or birds all the way to the other side of the sea, and I felt a great relief because he showed himself to be less conscious of his power than any of his partisans and he was more homey than in his photographs and also more worthy of compassion because everything about him was old and arduous and he seemed to be mined by an insatiable illness, so much so that he didn’t have the breath to tell me to sit down but indicated it to me with a sad gesture of the velvet glove, he listened to my arguments without looking at me, breathing with a thin and difficult whistling, a mysterious whistling that left a dew of creosote in the room, concentrating deeply on the examination of the bills which I described with schoolboy examples because he couldn’t grasp abstract notions, so I began by showing him that Leticia Nazareno owed us for an amount of taffeta twice the nautical distance to Santa Maria del Altar, that is, one hundred ninety leagues, and he said aha as if to himself, and I ended up by showing him that the total debt with the special discount for your excellency was equal to six times the grand prize in the lottery for ten years, and he said aha again and only then did he look at me directly without his glasses and I could see that his eyes were timid and indulgent, and only then did he tell me with a strange voice of harmony that our reasons were clear and just, to each his own, he said, have them send the bill to the government. That was what he was really like during the period in which Leticia Nazareno had remade him from the beginning without the backwoods difficulties of his mother Bendición Alvarado, she made him give up the habit of eating while walking with the plate in one hand and the spoon in the other and the three of them ate at a little beach table under the pansy bower, he opposite the child and Leticia Nazareno between the two teaching them the norms of good manners and good health in eating, she taught them to keep their spines against the chair back, the fork in the left hand, the knife in the right, chewing each mouthful fifteen times on one side and fifteen times on the other with the mouth closed and the head upright paying no attention to their protests that so many rules were like a barracks, after lunch she taught him to read the official newspaper in which he himself figured as patron and honorary editor, she would put it in his hands when she saw him lying in the hammock in the shade of the gigantic ceiba tree in the family courtyard telling him that it was inconceivable that a full-fledged chief of state should not be up on what was going on in the world, she would put his glasses on him and leave him splashing about in the reading of his own news while she trained the boy in the sport of novices which was throwing and catching a rubber ball, and he would come across himself in photographs so ancient that many of them were not of him but of a former double who had been killed by him and whose name he couldn’t remember, he would find himself presiding over the Tuesday cabinet meetings which he hadn’t attended since the time of the comet, he learned of historic phrases that his ministers of letters attributed to him, he would read as he nodded in the sultriness of the wandering clouds of August afternoons, he would sink little by little into the corn-soup sweat of his siesta muttering this paper is a piece of shit, God damn it, I can’t understand how the people stand for it, he muttered, but something had to come out of that unpleasant reading because he would awaken from his short and tenuous sleep with some new idea inspired by the news, he would send orders to his ministers by Leticia Nazareno, they would answer him through her trying to get a glimpse of his thought, because you were what I wanted you to be the interpreter of my highest designs, you were my voice, you were my reason and my strength, she was his most faithful and attentive ear for the sound of the perpetual lava flows of the inaccessible world which besieged him, even though in reality the final oracles that governed his fate were the anonymous graffiti on the walls of the servants’ toilets, in which he would decipher the hidden truths that no one would have dared reveal to him, not even you, Leticia, he would read them at dawn on his way back from the milking before the cleaning orderlies had erased them and he ordered the toilet walls whitewashed every day so that no one could resist the temptation to unburden himself of his hidden rancors, there he learned about the bitterness of the high command, the repressed intentions of those who prospered in his shadow and repudiated him behind his back, he felt master of all his power when he succeeded in penetrating an enigma of the human heart in the revealing mirror of the role of the rabblement, he sang again after so many years contemplating through the mist of the mosquito netting the morning beached whale’s sleep of his only and legitimate wife Leticia Nazareno, get up, he sang, it’s six o’clock in my heart, the sea is where it belongs, life goes on, Leticia, the unpredictable life of the only one of all his women who had got everything from him except the easy privilege of his awakening in bed with her, for he would leave after the last love, hang the runaway lamp by the door of his old bachelor’s bedroom, fasten the three bars, the three locks, the three bolts, drop face down onto the floor, alone and with his clothes on, as he had done every night before you, as he did without you until the last night of his dreams of a solitary drownrd man, he would return after the milking to your room with its smell of a beast of darkness to continue giving you whatever you wanted, much more than the incalculable inheritance of his mother Bendición Alvarado, much more than any human being had ever dreamed of on the face of the earth, not only for her but also for her inexhaustible relatives who kept arriving from the unknown keys of the Antilles with no other fortune but the flesh that covered them or any other title but their identity as Nazarenos, a harsh family of intrepid males and women who burned with the fever of greed who had taken by storm the monopolies of salt, tobacco, drinking water, the former perquisites with which he had favored the commanders of the various branches of the armed services so as to keep them away from other kinds of ambition and which Leticia Nazareno had been snatching away from them little by little through his orders which he did not give but approved, agreed, he had abolished the barbarous method of execution of being quartered by horses and had tried to put in its place the electric chair which had been given him by the commander of the landing forces so that we too could enjoy the more civilized method of killing, he had visited the horror laboratory at the harbor fort where they chose the most run-down of political prisoners in order to get training in the manipulation of the throne of death whose discharges absorbed the total electrical power of the city, we knew the exact moment of the fatal experiment because we would be left in darkness for an instant holding our breath in horror, we would observe a minute of silence in the waterfront brothels and drink to the soul of the condemned man, not once but several times, because most of the victims remained hanging on the straps of the chair with their bodies looking like a blood sausage and sizzling like a roast but still panting with pain until someone had the mercy to shoot them to death after several frustrated attempts, all in order to please you, Leticia, for you had emptied the dungeons and authorized the repatriation of his enemies once more and promulgated an Easter edict that no one was to be punished for differences of opinion or persecuted for matters of consc
ience, convinced in his heart in the fullness of his autumn that his fiercest adversaries had a right to share in the tranquillity which he enjoyed on engrossing January nights with the only woman who had merited the glory of seeing him without a shirt and in his long drawers and the enormous rupture gilded by the moon on the terrace of government house, together they looked at the mysterious willows that they had been sent by the king and queen of Babylonia around Christmas time so they could plant them in the rain garden, they enjoyed the sun as it was broken up through the perpetual waters, they took pleasure in the pole star tangled in the branches, they scrutinized the universe on the dial of the small radio through the interference of jeers from fugitive planets, together they would listen to the daily episode of the soap operas from Santiago de Cuba which would leave in their hearts the feeling of a doubt of whether we’ll still be alive tomorrow to find out how this misfortune is resolved, he would play with the child before putting him to bed in order to teach him everything it was possible to know about the use and maintenance of weapons of war which was the human science he knew better than anyone, but the only advice he gave him was never issue an order unless you’re sure it’s going to be carried out, he made him repeat it as many times as he thought necessary so that the boy would never forget that the only mistake that a man invested with authority and power cannot make even once in his lifetime is to issue an order which he is not sure will be carried out, more a piece of advice from a wary grandfather than from a wise father and which the child would never have forgotten even if he had lived as long as he because he taught it to him while he was preparing him to fire for the first time at the age of six a recoil cannon to whose catastrophic report we attributed the fearful dry storm of volcanic thunder and lightning and the awesome polar wind from Comodoro Rivadavia which turned the bowels of the sea upside down and carried off an animal circus set up on the square of the former slave port, we caught elephants in casting nets, drowned clowns, giraffes hanging on trapezes from the fury of the tempest which miraculously didn’t sink the banana boat which arrived a few hours later bearing the young poet Félix Rubén García Sarmiento who was to become famous under the name of Rubén Darío, luckily the sea calmed down at four o’clock, the well-washed air filled with flying ants, and he looked out the bedroom window and saw to the lee of the harbor hills the little white ship listing to starboard and with its rigging dismantled sailing along out of danger in the backwaters of the afternoon that had been purified by the brimstone of the storm, he saw the captain on the quarterdeck directing the difficult maneuvers in honor of the illustrious passenger in a long dark coat and a checkered vest whom he had never heard of until the following Sunday night when Leticia Nazareno requested of him the inconceivable favor of accompanying her to an evening of poetry at the National Theater and he had accepted without blinking, agreed. We had been waiting for three hours standing in the steaming atmosphere of the orchestra seats suffocating in the full dress which had been required of us urgently at the last moment, when finally the national anthem began and we turned in applause toward the box marked with the national coat of arms where the chubby novice appeared in a hat with curling feathers and her nocturnal fox tails over a taffeta gown, she sat down without any greeting beside the young prince in an evening uniform who had answered the applause with the iris of the empty fingers of his velvet glove held in his fist as his mother had told him princes used to do in other days, we saw no one else in the presidential box, but during the two hours of the recital we bore the certainty that he was there, we felt the invisible presence that watched over our destiny so that it would not be altered by the disorder of poetry, he regulated love, he decided the intensity and term of death in a corner of the box in the shadows from where unseen he watched the heavy minotaur whose voice of marine lightning lifted him out of his place and instant and left him floating without his permission in the golden thunder of the trim trumpets of the triumphal arches of Marses and Minervas of a glory that was not his general sir, he saw the heroic athletes with their standards the black mastiffs of the hunt the sturdy war-horses with their iron hoofs the pikes and lances of the paladins with rough crests who bore the strange flag captive to honor arms that were not his, he saw the troop of fierce young men who had challenged the suns of the red summer the snows and winds of the icy winter night and dew and hatred and death for the eternal splendor of an immortal nation larger and more glorious than all those he had dreamed of during the long deliriums of his fevers as a barefoot warrior, he felt poor and tiny in the seismic thunder of the applause that he approved in the shadows thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado this really is a parade, not the shitty things these people organize for me, feeling diminished and alone, oppressed by the heavy heat and the mosquitoes and the columns of cheap gold paint and the faded plush of the box of honor, God damn it, how is it possible for this Indian to write something so beautiful with the same hand that he wipes his ass with, he said to himself, so excited by the revelation of written beauty that he dragged his great feet of a captive elephant to the rhythm of the martial beat of the kettledrums, he dozed off to the rhythm of the voices of glory of the cadenced chant of the calorific choir that Leticia Nazareno recited for him in the shade of the triumphal arches of the ceiba tree in the courtyard, he would write the lines on the walls of the toilets, he was trying to recite the whole poem by heart in the tepid cowshit olympus of the milking stables when the earth trembled from the dynamite charge that went off ahead of time in the trunk of the presidential automobile parked in the coach house, it was terrible general sir, such a violent explosion that many months later all over the city they were still finding twisted pieces of the armored limousine that Leticia Nazareno and the child would have used an hour later for their Wednesday marketing, because the attempt was against her life general sir, without a doubt, and then he slapped his forehead, God damn it, how is it possible he didn’t foresee it, what had become of his legendary clairvoyance because for so many months the graffiti in the toilets were not against him, as always, or against any of his civilian ministers, but were inspired by the audacity of the Nazarenos who had reached the point of nibbling away at the sinecures reserved for the high command, or by the ambitions of churchmen who were obtaining limitless and eternal favors from the temporal power, he had observed that the innocent diatribes against his mother Bendición Alvarado had become the curses of a macaw, broadsides of hidden rancor which matured in the warm impunity of the toilets and ended up coming out onto the streets as had happened so many times with other minor scandals that he himself had taken care to precipitate, although he had never thought or would have been capable of thinking that they could have been so ferocious as to place two hundred pounds of dynamite within the very confines of government house, sneaky bastards, how is it possible that he was going around so absorbed in the ecstasy of the triumphal bronzes that his fine nose of a ravening tiger had not recognized the old and sweet smell of danger in time, what a mess, he called an urgent meeting of the high command, fourteen trembling military men we were who after so many years of ordinary behavior and secondhand orders were to see once more at two fathoms distance the uncertain old man whose real existence was the simplest of his enigmas, he received us sitting on the thronelike seat in the hearing room with the uniform of a private soldier smelling of skunk piss and wearing small eyeglasses with solid gold frames which we had not seen even in his most recent portraits, and he was older and more remote than anyone had been able to imagine, except for the languid hands without the velvet gloves which did not look like his natural soldier’s hands but those of someone much younger and more compassionate, everything else was dense and somber, and the more we recognized him the more obvious it was that he just barely had one last breath of life left, but it was the breath of authority without appeal, devastating, difficult even for him to keep in line like the restlessness of a mountain horse, not speaking, not even moving his head as we rendered him the honors of chief supreme general and finall
y sat down facing him in the easy chairs arranged in a circle, and only then did he take off his glasses and he began to scrutinize us with those meticulous eyes that knew the weasel hiding places of our second intentions, he scrutinized them without mercy, one by one, taking all the time he needed to establish with precision how much each one of us had changed since the afternoon in the mists of memory when he had promoted them to the highest ranks pointing to them according to the impulses of his inspiration, and as he scrutinized them he felt the certainty growing that among those fourteen hidden enemies were the authors of the assassination attempt, but at the same time he felt so alone and defenseless facing them that he only blinked, only lifted his head to exhort them to unity now more than ever for the good of the nation and the honor of the armed forces, he recommended energy and prudence to them and imposed on them the honorable mission of discovering without too much thought the authors of the attempt so that they could be submitted to the serene rigors of military justice, that’s all gentlemen, he concluded, knowing full well that the author was one of them, or all of them, mortally wounded by the unavoidable conviction that Leticia Nazareno’s life did not depend on God’s will then but on the wisdom with which he could manage to preserve it from a threat that sooner or later would irremediably be fulfilled, damn it. He made her cancel her public appearances, he made her more voracious relatives get rid of all privileges that might run afoul of the armed forces, the most understanding were named consuls with a free hand and the most bloody were found floating in the mangrove swamps off the channels by the market, he appeared without prior announcement after so many years in his empty chair in the cabinet room ready to put a limit on the infiltration of the clergy into the business of state in order to keep you safe from your enemies, Leticia, and nevertheless he had made more deep soundings in the high command after the first drastic decisions and was convinced that seven of the commanders were unreservedly loyal to him in addition to the general in chief who was the oldest of his comrades, but still lacked power against the other six enemies who lengthened his nights with the unavoidable impression that Leticia Nazareno was already marked for death, they were killing her right in his hands in spite of the measures to have her food tested ever since the day they found a fish bone in the bread, they tested the purity of the air she breathed because he feared they had poisoned the Flit spray, he saw her looking pale at the table, he felt her become voiceless in the middle of love, he was tormented by the idea that they had put black vomit germs in her drinking water, vitriol in her eye drops, subtle and ingenious ways of death that embittered him at every moment during those days and would awaken him in the middle of his sleep with the vivid nightmare that Leticia Nazareno had been bled during her sleep by an Indian curse, upset by so many imaginary risks and real threats he forbade her to go out without the ferocious escort of presidential guards under instructions to kill without cause, but she did go out general sir, she took the child along, he controlled his feelings of evil omens to watch them get into the new armored limousine, he saw them off with signs of exorcism from an inner balcony begging mother of mine Bendición Alvarado protect them, make the bullets bounce off her brassiere, weaken the laudanum, mother, straighten twisted thoughts, without an instant of rest until he heard the sirens on the escort from the main square and saw Leticia Nazareno and the child crossing the courtyard with the first flashes from the lighthouse, she returned agitated, happy in the midst of the custody of warriors loaded down with live turkeys, orchids from Envigado, strings of little colored lights for Christmas nights already announced on the streets by signs made of luminous stars ordered by him to hide his anxiety, he would meet her on the stairs to feel you still alive in the naphthalene dew of the blue-fox tails, in the sour sweat of your tufts of invalid’s hair, he helped you carry the gifts to the bedroom with the strange certainty that he was consuming the last crumbs of a condemned jubilation that he would have preferred never having known, all the more desolate as he became more convinced that every recourse he conceived of to alleviate that unbearable anxiety, every step he took to conjure it away brought him mercilessly closer to the frightful Wednesday of my misfortune when he took the tremendous decision of no more, God damn it, if it had to be let it be soon, he decided, and it was like an explosive order that he had not finished putting together when two of his aides burst into his office with the terrible news that Leticia Nazareno and the child had been torn to pieces and eaten by the stray dogs at the public market, they ate them alive general sir, but they weren’t the same usual street dogs but hunting animals with frightened yellow eyes and the smooth skin of a shark that someone had set upon the blue foxes, sixty dogs all alike who nobody knew when leaped out from among the vegetable stands and fell upon Leticia Nazareno and the child without giving us time to shoot for fear of killing them who looked as if they were drowning along with the dogs in a hellish whirlpool, we could only see the instantaneous signs of some ephemeral hands reaching out to us while the rest of the body was disappearing into pieces, we saw fleeting and ungraspable expressions that sometimes were of terror, other times of pity, other times of jubilation until they finally sank into the whirlpool of the scramble and all that was left floating was Leticia Nazareno’s hat with felt violets facing the impassive horror of the totemic vegetable women spattered with hot blood who prayed my God, this couldn’t be possible unless the general wanted it, or at least unless he didn’t know about it, to the eternal dishonor of the presidential guard who without firing a shot could only rescue the bare bones scattered among the bloody vegetables, nothing else general sir, the only thing we found were these medals that belonged to the boy, the saber without its tassels, Leticia Nazareno’s cordovan shoes which no one knows why appeared floating in the bay about a league away from the market, the necklace of colored glass, the chain-mail purse which we deliver here to your own hand general sir, along with these three keys, the wedding ring of blackened gold and these fifty cents in ten-cent pieces which they put on the desk for him to count, and nothing else general sir, it was all that was left of them. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if more had been left or less, if he had known then that the years he would need to erase down to the last vestige the memory of that inevitable Wednesday were not many or very difficult, he wept with rage, he woke up shouting with rage tormented by the barking of the dogs who spent the night chained in the courtyard while he decided what shall we do with them general sir, wondering in confusion whether killing the dogs might not be killing Leticia Nazareno and the child who were inside them all over again, he ordered them to tear down the iron cupola of the vegetable market and build in its place a garden with magnolias and quails and a marble cross with a light higher and brighter than the lighthouse to perpetuate in the memory of future generations until the end of time the remembrance of a historic woman whom he himself forgot about long before the monument was demolished by a nocturnal explosion that no one avenged, and the magnolias were eaten by hogs and the memorable garden changed into a dungheap of pestilential slime which he never came to know, not only because he had ordered the presidential chauffeur to avoid passing by the former vegetable market even if you have to travel around the world, but also because he never went out again after he sent the officers off to the solar glass windows of the ministries and kept just the minimal personnel to live in the run-down building where by his orders not the least visible vestige of your urges of a queen was left, Leticia, he kept wandering about the empty house with no known task except the eventual consultations with the high command or the final decision of a difficult cabinet meeting or the pernicious visits of Ambassador Wilson who was accustomed to spend time with him until well into the afternoon under the foliage of the ceiba tree and who brought him candy from Baltimore and magazines with color prints of naked women to try to convince him that he should give him the territorial waters on account for the enormous interest on the foreign debt, and he let him speak on, feigning to hear less or more than he really could hear according t
o his convenience, he defended himself from the wagging tongue by listening to the chorus of the petite painted bird perched on a lemon limb from the nearby girls’ school, he would accompany him to the steps with the first shadows of evening trying to explain to him that he could take anything he wanted except the sea of my windows, just imagine, what would I do all alone in this big building if I couldn’t look out now as always at this time at what looks like a marsh in flames, what would I do without the December winds that sneak in barking through the broken windowpanes, how could I live without the green flashes of the lighthouse, I who abandoned my misty barrens and enlisted in the agony of fever in the tumult of the federalist war, and don’t you think that I did it out of patriotism as the dictionary says, or from the spirit of adventure, or least of all because I gave a shit about federal principles which God keep in his holy kingdom, no my dear Wilson, I did it all so that I could get to know the sea, so think about some other nuisance, he said, he took leave of him on the stairs with a pat on the shoulder, he went back lighting the lamps in the deserted salons of the former offices where on one of those afternoons he found a strayed cow, he chased her toward the stairs and the animal tripped on the patches in the rugs and fell on her back and tumbled down the stairs and broke her neck to the glory and sustenance of the lepers who fell upon her and carved her up, because the lepers had returned after the death of Leticia Nazareno and were there again along with the blind men and the cripples waiting for the salt of health from his hand in the wild rosebushes in the courtyard, he could hear them singing on starry nights, he would sing with them the song Susana come Susana from his times of glory, he would peek out of the skylight in the granary at five in the afternoon to watch the girls coming out of school and would grow ecstatic over their blue aprons, their knee socks, their braids, mother, we would run in fright from the consumptive eyes of the ghost who called to us from behind the iron bars with the torn fingers of his ragged glove, girl, girl, he would call to us, come let me feel you, he would watch them run off in fright thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado how young the young girls of today are, he would laugh at himself, but he would become reconciled with himself when his personal physician the minister of health would examine his retina with a magnifying glass every time he invited him to lunch, he would take his pulse, he tried to make me take some spoonfuls of candlewax to plug up the leaks in my memory, what a mess, spoonfuls of medicine for me who hasn’t had any ailment in this life except the tertian fevers in the war, shit doctor, he sat eating alone at the single table with his back to the world as the erudite Ambassador Maryland had told him the kings of Morocco ate, he ate with knife and fork and his head erect in accordance with the strict norms of a forgotten teacher, he would go all over the building looking for the jars of honey whose hiding places he would forget after a few hours and he would find by mistake the rolls from the margins of ledgers where he had written in other times so as not to forget anything when he could no longer remember anything, he read on one that tomorrow is Tuesday, he read that there was an initial on your white handkerchief a red initial of a name that was not yours my master, he read intrigued Leticia Nazareno of my soul look what has become of me without you, he read Leticia Nazareno everywhere without being able to understand how anyone could be so unhappy to have left that flow of written sighs, and still it was my handwriting, the unique left-handed calligraphy that was found at that time on the walls of the toilets where he wrote to console himself long live the general, long live the general, God damn it, completely cured of the rage of having been the weakest military man on land sea and air because of a fugitive from the cloister of whom all that remained was the name written in pencil on strips of paper as he had resolved when he didn’t even want to touch the things his aides put on his desk and he ordered without looking at them to take away those shoes, those keys, everything that might evoke the image of his dead, to put everything that belonged to them in the bedroom of his wild siestas and wall up the doors and windows with the final order not to enter that room even on my orders, God damn it, he survived the nocturnal shudders of the dogs chained in the courtyard for many months because he thought that any harm done to them might hurt his dead, he abandoned himself to his hammock, trembling with the rage of knowing who the assassins of his blood were and having to bear the humiliation of seeing them in his own house because at that moment he lacked power against them, he had been opposed to any kind of posthumous honors, he had forbidden visits of condolence, mourning, he was waiting for his moment rocking with rage in the hammock in the shade of the tutelary ceiba tree where my last comrade had expressed to him the pride of the high command over the serenity and order with which the people had withstood the tragedy and he gave a glimmer of a smile, don’t be a horse’s ass old friend, what serenity, what order, what’s happening is that the people didn’t give a shit for this misfortune, he went back and forth through the newspaper looking for something besides the news invented by his own press services, he had the little radio put within reach to listen to the same news item from Veracruz to Riobamba that the forces of law and order were close on the track of the authors of the attack, and he muttered of course, you sons of a tarantula, they had identified them beyond the slightest doubt, of course, they had them surrounded under mortar fire in a suburban house of ill repute, that’s it, he sighed, poor devils, but he stayed in the hammock without displaying even a glimmer of his malice asking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado give me life for this challenge, don’t let go of my hand, mother, give me inspiration, so sure of the efficacy of the plea that we found him recovered from his grief when we commanders of the general staff responsible for public order and state security came to give him the news that three of the authors of the crime had been killed in battle with public forces and the other two were awaiting your disposition general sir in the dungeons of San Jerónimo and he said aha, sitting in the hammock with the pitcher of fruit juice from which he poured each of us a glass with the calm pulse of a good marksman, wiser and more solicitous than ever, to the point that he guessed my anxiety to light a cigarette and gave me permission which until then he had never given to any officer on duty, under this tree we’re all equals, he said, and he listened without rancor to the detailed report of the crime in the market, how from Scotland they had brought in separate shipments eighty-two newborn bulldogs of whom twenty-two had died in the course of their raising and sixty had been evilly taught to kill by a Scottish trainer who inculcated them with a criminal hatred not only for the blue foxes but for the very persons of Leticia Nazareno and the boy making use of these articles of clothing which they had slipped out little by little from the laundry services in government house, making use of Leticia Nazareno’s brassiere, this handkerchief, these stockings, this complete uniform of the boy’s which we displayed for him so that he would recognize them, but he only said aha, without looking at them, we explained to him how the sixty dogs had even been trained not to bark when they shouldn’t, they were made accustomed to the taste of human flesh, they were kept locked up with no contact with the world for the difficult years of training on a former Chinese farm seven leagues from this capital city where they had life-size figures dressed in the clothing of Leticia Nazareno and the boy whom the dogs also knew from these original pictures and these newspaper clippings which we showed him pasted in an album so that you could get a better idea general sir of the perfection of the work those bastards did, if you could only say that for everybody, but he only said aha, without looking at them, we explained to him lastly that the accused had not been working on their own, of course, but were the agents of a subversive brotherhood with headquarters abroad whose symbol was this goose quill crossed over a knife, aha, all of them fugitives of military penal justice for other previous crimes against the security of the state, these three who are the dead ones whose pictures we showed him in the album with the respective police numbers hanging around their necks, and these two are the ones who are alive and in jail awaiting you
r final and unappealable decision general sir, the brothers Mauricio and Gumaro Ponce de León, twenty-eight and twenty-three years old, the first an unemployed army deserter with no fixed domicile and the second a ceramics teacher in the school of arts and crafts, and to whom the dogs gave such signs of familiarity and excitement that it alone would have been sufficient proof of guilt general sir, and he only said aha, but he cited with honors in the order of the day the three officers who brought the investigation of the crime to a conclusion and he awarded them the medal of military merit for services to the nation in the course of a solemn ceremony in which he named the summary court-martial which tried the brothers Mauricio and Gumaro Ponce de León and condemned them to be shot within the next forty-eight hours, unless they received the gift of your clemency general sir, you are in command. He remained in the hammock alone and absorbed, insensitive to the pleas for mercy from all over the world, on the radio he heard the sterile debate at the League of Nations, he heard insults from some neighboring countries and some distant support, he listened with equal attention to the timid reasons of the ministers in favor of clemency and the shrill motives of those in favor of punishment, he refused to see the apostolic nuncio with a personal message from the Pope in which he expressed his pastoral concern for the fate of two errant members of the flock, he heard the reports on public order from all over the country which was upset by his silence, he heard the distant shooting, he felt the earth quake from the explosion without origin of a warship anchored in the bay, eleven dead general sir, eighty-two wounded and the ship out of commission, agreed, he said, looking out the bedroom window at the nocturnal bonfire in the cove of the harbor while the two condemned men began to live the night of their eve in the chapel at the San Jerónimo base which was set up as for a wake, he remembered them at that time as he had seen them in their pictures with the bushy eyebrows of their common mother, he remembered them trembling, alone, with the tags of successive numbers hanging around their necks under the always lighted bulb of the death cell, he felt sorry for them, he knew he was needed, required, but he had not made the least gesture that would let the direction of his will peep through when he finished repeating the routine acts of one or more day in his life and he took leave of the duty officer who was to remain on watch by his bedroom to carry the message bearing his decision at any moment he might make it before the first cockcrow, he took leave as he passed without looking at him, good night, captain, he hung the lamp on the door, fastened the three bars, the three locks, the three bolts, sank face down into an alert sleep through whose fragile thin walls he kept on hearing the anxious barking of the dogs in the courtyard, the sirens of the ambulances, the fireworks, the waves of music from some mistaken party in the intense night of the city huddling under the rigor of the sentence, he awoke with the twelve o’clock bells from the cathedral, he woke up again at two o’clock, he woke up again before three with the rattle of the drizzle on the window screens, then he got up off the floor with the arduous maneuvers of an ox first the haunches and then the hind legs and finally the confused head with a string of spittle from his snout and he ordered first to the officer of the guard that he take those dogs off where I won’t hear them under the care of the government until their natural demise, secondly he ordered the unconditional release of the soldiers from the escort for Leticia Nazareno and the boy, and lastly he ordered that the brothers Mauricio and Gumaro Ponce de León be executed just as soon as my supreme and unappealable decision is known, but not at the execution wall, as had been called for, but under the punishment that had fallen into disuse, that of being quartered by horses and their parts exposed to public indignation and horror in the most visible places of his measureless realm of gloom, poor lads, while he dragged his great feet of a badly wounded elephant begging with wrath mother of mine Bendición Alvarado, stay with me, don’t let go of my hand, mother, let me find the man to help me avenge this innocent blood, a providential man whom he had imagined in the delirium of his rancor and whom he sought with an irresistible anxiety in the depths of the eyes he found in his path, he tried to find him crouching in the most subtle registers of voices, in the beating of his heart, in the least used crannies of his memory, and he had lost the illusion of ever finding him when he discovered himself fascinated by the most dazzling and haughty man my eyes have ever seen, mother, dressed like the Goths of yesteryear in a Henry Pool jacket with a gardenia in the buttonhole, with Pecover trousers and a brocade vest of silver highlights that he had worn with his natural elegance in the most difficult salons of Europe holding the leash of a taciturn Doberman the size of a young bull with human eyes, José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, at your excellency’s service, he introduced himself, the last scion of our aristocracy which had been demolished by the federalist leaders, wiped off the face of the nation with their arid dreams of grandeur and their vast and melancholy mansions and their French accents, a splendid tailend of a breed with no other fortune but his thirty-two years, seven languages, four records in trapshooting at Deauville, solid, slender, the color of iron, half-breed hair with the part in the middle and a dyed white lock, the linear lips of eternal will, the resolute look of the providential man who pretended to be playing cricket with a cherrywood cane so they could take his picture in color with the backdrop of idyllic springtimes of the tapestries in the ballroom, and the instant he saw him he let out a sigh of relief and said to himself that’s the one, and that he was. He entered his service under the simple condition that you give me a budget of eight hundred fifty million without my having to give an accounting to anyone and with no authority over me but that of your excellency and in the course of two years I will deliver to you the real assassins of Leticia Nazareno and the child, and he accepted, agreed, convinced of his loyalty and his efficiency after so many difficult tests to which he had submitted him in order to scrutinize the byways of his soul and learn the limits of his will and the chinks in his character before deciding to place in his hands the keys to his power, he submitted him to the ultimate test of the inclement domino games in which José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra assumed the temerity of winning without permission, and he won, because he was the bravest man my eyes had ever seen, mother, he had a patience without pause, he knew everything, he was familiar with seventy-two ways of making coffee, he could distinguish the sex of shellfish, he could read music and Braille, he would stand looking into my eyes without speaking, and I didn’t know what to do opposite that indestructible face, those listless hands on the nub of the cherrywood cane with a morning-water stone on the ring finger, that huge dog lying by his feet watchful and ferocious inside the live velvet wrapping of his sleeping skin, that fragrance of bath salts of a body immune to tenderness and death belonging to the most handsome man and the one with the most control my eyes had ever seen when he had the courage to tell me that I was only a military man out of convenience, because military men are just the opposite of you, general, they’re men of quick and easy ambition, they like command better than power and they’re not in the service of something but of someone, and that’s why it’s so easy to make use of them, he said, especially one against the other, and all I could think of to do was smile persuaded that he couldn’t have hidden his thoughts from that dazzling man to whom he had given more power than anyone he ever had under his regime since my comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar whom God keep at his holy right side, he made him absolute master of a secret empire within his own private empire, an invisible service of repression and extermination that not only lacked an official identity but was even difficult to conceive of in its real existence, because no one was responsible for its acts, nor did it have a name or a location in the world, and yet it was a fearsome truth that had been imposed by terror over other organs of repression of the state for a long time before its origins and its unfathomable nature had been established in all certainty by the high command, not even you yourself foresaw the reach of that machine of horror general sir, nor could I myself suspect that at the instant in which he
accepted the agreement I was at the mercy of the irresistible charm and the tentacular drive of that barbarian dressed like a prince who sent to me at the presidential palace a fiber sack that seemed to be full of coconuts and he ordered them to put it over there in a closet for file papers built into the wall where it would be out of the way, he forgot about it and after three days it was impossible to breathe because of the stench of carrion that penetrated the walls and fogged the mirrors over with a pestilential mist, we looked for the stink in the kitchen and we found it in the stables, we chased it out of the offices with incense and it came out to meet us in the hearing room, with its outpouring of rotted roses it saturated the most hidden crannies where even concealed in other fragrances the tiniest breath of the nighttime plague air mange had reached, and yet it was where we had looked for it least in the sack of seeming coconuts that José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra had sent as the first fruit of the agreement, six heads with the corresponding death certificates, the head of the blind stone-age founding father Don Nepomuceno Estrada, age ninety-four, last veteran of the great war and founder of the Radical Party, dead according to the accompanying certificate on May 14 as the consequence of a senile collapse, the head of Dr. Nepomuceno Estrada de la Fuente, son of the first, age fifty-seven, homeopathic physician, dead according to the accompanying certificate on the same date as his father as the consequence of a coronary thrombosis, the head of Eliécer Castor, age twenty-one, student of letters, dead according to the accompanying certificate as a consequence of various stab wounds from a barroom fight, the head of Lídice Santiago, age thirty-two, clandestine activist, dead according to the certificate as the consequence of an induced abortion, the head of Roque Pinzón, alias Jacinto the Invisible, age thirty-eight, manufacturer of colored globes, dead on the same date as the previous as a consequence of ethyl alcohol intoxication, the head of Natalicio Ruiz, secretary of the clandestine October 17 Movement, age thirty, dead according to the accompanying certificate as a consequence of a pistol shot in the palate because of a broken love affair, six in all, and the corresponding receipt which he signed with his bile all bubbling because of the smell and the horror thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado this man is a beast, who would have imagined that with his airs of a mystic and the flower in his buttonhole, he ordered don’t send me any more chops, Nacho, your word is enough, but Saenz de la Barra answered that it was a matter between men, general, if you haven’t got the stomach to look truth in the face here’s your gold and we’re the same friends we were before, what a mess, for much less than that he would have had his own mother shot, but he bit his tongue, it’s all right, Nacho, he said, do your duty, so the heads kept on coming in those shadowy fiber sacks that looked like bags of coconuts and with his innards all twisted he ordered them taken far away from here while he forced himself to read the details of the death certificates in order to sign the receipts, agreed, he had signed for nine hundred eighteen heads of his fiercest enemies the night he dreamed that he saw himself changed into an animal with only one finger which went along leaving a trail of fingerprints on a plain of fresh concrete, he woke up with a dampness of bile, he eluded his bad dawn mood by taking a head count in the dungheap of sour memories of the milking stalls, so abstracted in his old-man ponderings that he confused the buzzing in his eardrums with the sound of the insects in the rotten hay thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado how is it possible that there are so many of them and they still haven’t got to the ones who are really guilty, but Saenz de la Barra had made him note that with every six heads sixty enemies are produced and for every sixty six hundred are produced and then six thousand and then six million, the whole country, God damn it, we’ll never end, and Saenz de la Barra answered him impassively to rest easy, general, we’ll finish with them when they’re all finished, what a barbarian. He never had an instant of doubt, he never left a chink for an alternative, he relied on the hidden strength of the Doberman lying in wait eternally who was the only witness to the audiences in spite of the fact that he tried to stop it from the first time he saw José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra leading the animal with mercurial nerves who only obeyed the imperceptible mastery of the most dashing but also the least accommodating man my eyes have ever seen, leave that dog outside, he ordered, but Saenz de la Barra answered him no, general, there’s no place in the world where I can enter where Lord Köchel doesn’t enter, so he entered, he remained asleep at his master’s feet while they took the routine account of the severed heads but he got up with a throbbing anxiousness when the accounting became harsh, his feminine eyes made it hard for me to think, his human breath made me shudder, I saw him lift up his steaming snout suddenly with the bubbling of a saucepan when he pounded on the table with rage because in the sack he had found the head of a former aide who had also been his domino crony for many years, God damn it, that’s the end of this mess, but Saenz de la Barra always convinced him, not so much with arguments as with his soft inclemency of a trainer of wild dogs, he reproached himself for his submission to the only mortal who dared treat him like a vassal, alone he rebelled against his domination, he decided to shake himself loose of that servitude which was slowly saturating the space of his authority, this mess is all over right now, God damn it, he would say, because when all’s said and done Bendición Alvarado didn’t give birth to me to take orders but to give them, but his nighttime decisions fell apart the moment Saenz de la Barra came into the office and he would succumb to the dazzle of his soft manners the natural gardenia his pure voice aromatic salts emerald cufflinks the waxed head his serene walking stick the serious beauty of the most attractive and most unbearable man my eyes had ever seen, it’s all right, Nacho, he would repeat, do your duty, and he kept on receiving the sacks of heads, he signed the receipts without looking at them, he sank with nothing to grasp on to into the quicksands of his power wondering with every passage of every dawn of every sea what’s happening in the world it’s going on eleven o’clock and there isn’t a soul in this cemetery house, who’s there, he asked, only he, where am I that I can’t find myself, he said, where are the teams of barefoot orderlies who unload the donkeys with their greens and chicken cages in the passageways, where are the puddles of dirty water of my foul-mouthed women who replaced the night flowers with fresh ones in the vases and washed the cages and shook rugs off the balconies singing to the rhythm of their dry reed brooms the song Susana come Susana I want to enjoy your love, where are my skinny seven-month runts who shat behind the doors and drew dromedaries in piss on the walls of the hearing room, what happened to my uproar of clerks who found hens laying in the file drawers, my traffic of whores and soldiers in the toilets, the rampaging of my street dogs who ran about barking at diplomats, who has taken my cripples away from the stairs again, my lepers from the rose beds, my insistent adulators from everywhere, he could barely catch a glimpse of his last comrades of the high command behind the compact fence of the new ones responsible for his personal security, he barely had occasion to participate in the meetings of new cabinet members named at the instance of someone who was not he, six doctors of letters in funereal frock coats and wing collars who anticipated his thoughts and decided on matters of government without consulting me about them and I am the government after all, but Saenz de la Barra explained to him impassively that you aren’t the government, general, you are the power, he grew bored on domino nights even when he faced the sharpest opponents because try as he might to set up the best traps against himself he couldn’t lose, he had to submit to the designs of the testers who dunked into his meals an hour before he could eat them, he couldn’t find the honey in its hiding places, God damn it, this isn’t the power I wanted, he protested, and Saenz de la Barra answered that there isn’t any other, general, it was the only power possible in the lethargy of death which in other times had been his paradise and when he had no other chore except to wait for four o’clock to listen to the radio and the daily episode of the soap opera with its sterile loves on the local station, he wou
ld listen to it in the hammock with his pitcher of fruit juice untouched in his hand, he would remain floating in the emptiness of suspense his eyes moist with tears over the anxiety to know whether that girl who was so young was going to die or not and Saenz de la Barra would ascertain yes, general, the girl is going to die, then she’s not to die, God damn it, he ordered, she’s going to keep on living to the end and get married and have children and get old like everybody else, and Saenz de la Barra had the script changed to please him with the illusion that he was giving the orders, so no one died again by his orders, engaged couples who didn’t love each other got married, people buried in previous episodes were resuscitated and villains were sacrificed ahead of time in order to please him general sir, everybody was to be happy by his orders so that life would seem less useless when he inspected the building to the metallic clangs of eight o’clock and he found that someone ahead of him had changed the cows’ fodder, the lights had been turned off in the barracks of the presidential guard, the personnel were asleep, the kitchens were in order, the floors clean, the butcher blocks scrubbed with creolin without a trace of blood had a hospital smell about them, someone had drawn the bars on the windows and had locked the offices in spite of the fact that it was he and he alone who had the ring of keys, the lights were going out one by one before he touched the switches from the first vestibule down to his bedroom, he was walking in the dark dragging his thick feet of a captive monarch past the darkened mirrors with the single spur wrapped in velvet so that nobody could follow his trail of gold shavings, he went along seeing as he passed the same sea through the windows, the Caribbean in January, he looked at it without stopping twenty-three times and it was the same as always in January like a flowering swamp, he looked into Bendición Alvarado’s room to see that her legacy of lemon balm was still in its place, the cages of dead birds, the bed of pain where the mother of her country bore her rotting old age, have a good night, he murmured, as always, even though no one had answered him for such a long time a very good night to you son, sleep with God, he headed toward his bedroom with the runaway lamp when he felt the shiver of the astonished hot coals that were Lord Köchel’s eyes in the dark, caught a fragrance of man, the thickness of his dominion, the glow of his disdain, who goes there, he asked, although he knew who it was, José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra in full dress who was coming to remind him that it was an historic night, August 12, general, the immense date on which we were celebrating the first centenary of his rise to power, so that visitors had come from all over the world captivated by the announcement of an event which it was possible to witness only once in the passage of the longest of lives, the nation was celebrating, everybody in the nation except him, since in spite of the insistence of José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra that he live that memorable night in the midst of the clamor and fervor of his people, earlier than ever he drew the three bars of his sleeping dungeon, threw the three bolts, the three locks, he lay face down on the bare bricks with his rough denim uniform without insignia, the boots, the gold spur, and the right arm bent under his head to serve as a pillow as we were to find him pecked away by the vultures and infested with animals and flowers from the bottom of the sea, and through the mist of the sleeping potions he perceived the remote rockets of the celebration without him, he perceived the joyful music, the bells of pleasure, the torrent of slime of the-crowds who had come to exalt a glory that was not theirs, while he murmured more absorbed than sad mother of mine Bendición Alvarado of my destiny, a hundred years already, God damn it, a hundred years already, the way time passes.