The Autumn of the Patriarch (15 page)

had not been able to reach an agreement, it doesn’t matter he said, you’ll see what they decide when they find out who pays them the most, the leaders of the civilian opposition have finally shown their faces and were conspiring openly in the street, all the better, he said, hang one from each lamppost on the main square so they’ll know who the one is who can do anything, there’s no way general
sir, the people are with them, that’s a lie, he said, the people are with me, so they won’t get me out of here except dead, he decided, pounding the table with his rough maiden’s hand as he only did in final decisions, and he slept until milking time when he found the reception room a shambles, because the insurrectionists in the Conde barracks had catapulted rocks which had not left one window
intact in the eastern gallery and tallow balls which came in through the broken windows and kept the inhabitants of the building in a state of panic all through the night, if you could have seen general sir, we haven’t closed an eye running back and forth with blankets and buckets of water to put out the puddles of fire that were lighting up in the least expected corner, but he scarcely paid any
attention, I already told you not to pay them any heed, he said, dragging
his graveyard feet along the corridors of ashes and scraps of carpets and singed tapestries, but they’re going to keep it up, they told him, they had sent word that the flaming balls were just a warning, that the explosions will come after general sir, but he crossed the garden without paying attention to anyone, in the
last shadows he breathed in the sound of the newborn roses, the disorders of the cocks in the sea wind, what shall we do general, I already told you not to pay any attention to them, God damn it, and as on every day at that hour he went to oversee the milking, so as on every day at that hour the insurrectionists in the Conde barracks saw the mule cart with the six barrels of milk from the presidential
stable appear, and in the driver’s seat there was the same lifetime carter with the oral message that the general sends you this milk even though you keep on spitting in the hand that feeds you, he shouted it out with such innocence that General Bonivento Barboza gave the order to accept it on the condition that the carter taste it first so that they could be sure it wasn’t poisoned, and then
they opened the iron gates and the fifteen hundred rebels looking down from the inside balconies saw the cart drive in to the center of the paved courtyard, they saw the orderly climb up onto the driver’s seat with a pitcher and a ladle to give the carter the milk to taste, they saw him uncork the first barrel, they saw him floating in the ephemeral backwash of a dazzling explosion and they saw nothing
else to the end of time in the volcanic heat of the mournful yellow mortar building in which no flower ever grew, whose ruins remained suspended for an instant in the air from the tremendous explosion of the six barrels of dynamite. That’s that, he sighed in the presidential palace, shaken by the seismic wind that blew down four more houses around the barracks and broke the wedding crystal
in cupboards all the way to the outskirts of the city, that’s that, he sighed, when the garbage trucks removed from the courtyards of the harbor fort the corpses of eighteen officers who had been shot in double rows in order to save ammunition, that’s that, he sighed when General Rodrigo de Aguilar came to attention before him with the news general sir that
once again there was no more room in
the jails for political prisoners, that’s that, he sighed, when the bells began to peal in celebration, the festival rockets, the music of glory that announced the advent of another hundred years of peace, that’s that, God damn it, the mess is over, he said, and he was so convinced, so careless about himself, so negligent about his personal safety that one morning he was crossing the courtyard on
his way back from the milking and his instinct failed him as he did not see in time the bogus leper who rose up out of the rosebushes to cut off his path in the slow October drizzle and only too late did he see the sudden glimmer of the flourished revolver, the trembling index finger that began to squeeze the trigger when he shouted with his arms opened wide offering him his chest, I dare you you
bastard, I dare you, dazzled by the surprise that his time had come contrary to the clearest forecasts of the basins, shoot if you’ve got any balls, he shouted, in the imperceptible instant of hesitation in which a pale star lighted up in the eyes of the attacker, his lips withered, his will trembled, and then he let go with both fists as hammers on his eardrums, he dropped him, he moved him on the
ground with a pile-driver kick on the jaw, from another world he heard the uproar of the guard who came running to his shouts, he passed through the blue explosion of the continuous thunder of the five explosions of the false leper writhing in a pool of blood having shot himself in the stomach with the five bullets in his revolver so that he would not be taken alive by the fearsome interrogators
of the presidential guard, he heard over the other shouts in the aroused building his own terminating orders that the body be quartered as a lesson, they sliced it up, they displayed the head smeared with rock salt in the main square, the right leg in the eastern confines of Santa Maria del Altar, the left one in the limitless saltpeter deserts of the west, one arm on the plains, the other in the
jungle, the pieces of torso fried in hog fat and exposed to sun and dew until all that was left was naked bone as chancy and difficult as things were in this nigger whorehouse so that there would be no one who didn’t know how those who raised
their hands against their father ended up, and still green with rage he went among the rosebushes that the presidential guard had cleaned of lepers at bayonet
point to see if at last they would show their faces, sneaky bastards, he went up to the main floor kicking aside the cripples to see if at last they would learn who it was who put their mothers to birth, sons of bitches, he went along the corridors shouting for them to get out of the way, God damn it, here comes the one who gives the orders in the midst of the panic of office workers and the
persistent adulators who proclaimed him the eternal one, all through the house he left the rocky trail of his blacksmith-oven wheeze, he disappeared into the hearing room like a fugitive lightning flash toward the private quarters, he went into the bedroom, shut the three crossbars, the three bolts, the three locks, and with his fingertips he took off the pants he was wearing that were soaked in
shit. He did not find a moment of rest as he sniffed round about to find the hidden enemy who had armed the bogus leper, for he felt that there was someone within reach of his hand, someone that close to his life who knew the hiding place of his honey, who had his eye at the keyholes and his ears at the walls every minute and everywhere just like my pictures, a voluble presence who whistled in the
January trade winds and he recognized him in the jasmine embers on hot nights, one who had pursued him months on end in the fright of his insomnia dragging his fearful ghostly feet through the most hidden rooms of the darkened building, until one night at dominoes he saw the omen materialize in a pensive hand that finished the game with the double five, and it was as if an inner voice had revealed
that that hand was the hand of treason, God damn it, it’s him, he said to himself perplexed, and then he raised his eyes through the flow of light from the lamp hanging over the center of the table and met the handsome artilleryman’s eyes of my soul comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar, what a mess, his strong right arm, his sacred accomplice, it wasn’t possible, he thought, all the more pained as
he deciphered more deeply the weave of the false truths with which they had diverted his attention for so
many years in order to hide the brutal truth that my lifetime comrade was in the service of politicians of fortune whom for convenience’ sake he had taken from the darkest corners of the federalist war and had made them rich and had heaped fabulous privileges upon them, he had let himself
be used by them, he had tolerated the fact that they were using him to rise up to a point that the old aristocracy swept away by the irresistible breath of the liberal whirlwind had never dreamed of and they still wanted more, God damn it, they wanted the place of the elect of God that he had reserved for himself, they wanted to be me, motherfuckers, with the way lighted by the glacial lucidity and
the infinite prudence of the man who had managed to accumulate the most confidence and authority in his regime by taking advantage of the privileges of being the only person from whom he accepted papers to sign, he had him read aloud the executive orders and ministerial laws that only I could put through, he pointed out the amendments, he signed with his thumbprint and underneath he stamped it with
the ring which he then put away in a strongbox whose combination only he knew, to your health, comrade, he always said to him when he handed him the signed papers, here’s something to wipe yourself with, he told him laughing, and that was how General Rodrigo de Aguilar had succeeded in establishing another system of power within the power as widespread and as fruitful as mine, and not content
with that in the shadows he had set up the mutiny of the Conde barracks with the complicity and unreserved assistance of Ambassador Norton, his buddy in matters of Dutch whores, his fencing master, the one who had smuggled in the ammunition in barrels of Norwegian cod under the protection of diplomatic immunity while he would use balm on me at the domino table with the incense candles saying there
was no government more friendly, or just and exemplary than mine, and they were also the ones who had put the revolver in the hand of the false leper along with fifty thousand pesos in bills cut in half which we found buried at the attacker’s home, and the other half of which was to be turned over after the crime by my own lifetime comrade,
mother, what a bitter mess, and still they didn’t resign
themselves to failure but had ended up conceiving the perfect coup without shedding a drop of blood, not even yours general sir, because General Rodrigo de Aguilar had collected the most unimpeachable evidence that I spent my sleepless nights conversing with vases and oil paintings of patriots and archbishops in the darkened building, that I took the cows’ temperature with a thermometer and gave
them phenacetin to eat in order to bring down their fever, that I had had a tomb built for an admiral of the ocean sea who did not exist except in my feverish imagination when I myself with my own blessed eyes had seen the three caravels anchored across the harbor from my window, that I had squandered public funds on the irrepressible addiction of buying ingenious inventions and had even tried
to get the astronomers to upset the solar system in order to please a beauty queen who had only existed in the visions of his delirium, and that during an attack of senile dementia had ordered two thousand children put on a barge loaded with cement that was dynamited at sea, mother, just imagine, what sons of bitches, and it was on the basis of that solemn testimony that General Rodrigo de Aguilar
and the high command of the presidential guard in plenary session had decided to intern him in the asylum for illustrious old men on the reefs at midnight of March first next during the annual banquet in honor of the Holy Guardian Angel, the patron saint of bodyguards, or within three days general sir, just imagine, but in spite of the imminence and scope of the conspiracy he showed no sign that
might have aroused the suspicion that he had uncovered it, but at the appointed hour as every year he received his personal guard as guests and had them sit at the banquet table for aperitifs until General Rodrigo de Aguilar arrived to make the toast of honor, he chatted with them, laughed with them, one after the other, the officers furtively looked at their watches, put them to their ears, wound
them, it was five minutes to twelve and General Rodrigo de Aguilar hadn’t arrived, it was as hot as a ship’s boiler and there was a perfume of flowers, it smelled of gladioli and tulips, it
smelled of live roses in the closed room, somebody opened a window, we breathe, we look at our watches, we feel a soft sea breeze with the smell of the delicate stew of a wedding feast, they were all sweating
except him, we were all suffering from the drowsiness of the moment under the firm glow of the age-old animal who blinked with open eyes in a space of his own reserved in another age of the world, health, he said, the hand with no appeal like a languid lily raised again the glass with which he had toasted all evening without drinking, the visceral sound of watch works in the silence of a final
abyss, it was twelve o’clock but General Rodrigo de Aguilar was not arriving, someone started to get up, please, he said, he turned him to stone with the fatal look of nobody move, nobody breathe, nobody live without my permission until twelve o’clock finished chiming, and then the curtains parted and the distinguished Major General Rodrigo de Aguilar entered on a silver tray stretched out full length
on a garnish of cauliflower and laurel leaves, steeped with spices, oven brown, embellished with the uniform of five golden almonds for solemn occasions and the limitless loops for valor on the sleeve of his right arm, fourteen pounds of medals on his chest and a sprig of parsley in his mouth, ready to be served at a banquet of comrades by the official carvers to the petrified horror of the guests
as without breathing we witness the exquisite ceremony of carving and serving, and when every plate held an equal portion of minister of defense stuffed with pine nuts and aromatic herbs, he gave the order to begin, eat hearty gentlemen.

H
E HAD SKIRTED
the reefs of so many earthly disorders, so many ominous eclipses, so many flaming tallow balls in the sky that it seemed impossible for someone from our time to trust still the prognostications of the cards regarding his fate. Yet, while the plans for reassembling and embalming the body went forward, even the most candid among us waited without so confessing for the fulfillment
of ancient predictions, such as the one that said that on the day of his death the mud from the swamps would go back upriver to its source, that it would rain blood, that hens would lay pentagonal eggs, and that silence and darkness would cover the universe once more because he was the end of creation. It was impossible not to believe all of this since the few newspapers still publishing were
still dedicated to proclaiming his eternity and counterfeiting his splendor with material from their files, every day they displayed him to us as during ecstatic times and on the front page in his tenacious uniform with the five sad pips of his days of glory, with more authority and diligence and better
health than ever in spite of the fact that many years ago we had lost count of his age, in
the usual pictures he was once more dedicating well-known monuments or public installations that no one knew about in real life, he presided over solemn ceremonies which they said had taken place yesterday but which had really taken place during the last century, even though we knew it wasn’t true, because no one had seen him in public ever since Leticia Nazareno’s atrocious death when he was left
alone in that no man’s land of a house while the daily affairs of government went along all by themselves and only through the momentum of his immense power over so many years, he locked himself up until death in the run-down palace from whose highest windows we were now watching with tight hearts the same gloomy sunset that he must have seen so many times from his throne of illusions, we saw the
intermittent beacon of the lighthouse as it flooded the ruined salons with its green and languid waters, we saw the lamps of the poor inside the shell of what had once been the coral reefs of solar glass of the ministries which had been invaded by hordes of poor people when the multicolored huts on the harbor hills had been leveled by another of our numerous cyclones, we saw below the scattered,
steamy city, the instantaneous horizon of pale lightning flashes in the crater of ashes of the sea that had been sold, the first night without him, his vast lakelike empire of malarial anemones, its hot villages on the deltas of muddy tributaries, the avid barbed-wire fences of his private provinces where there flourished without count or measure a new species of magnificent cows who were born with
the hereditary presidential brand. Not only had we ended up really believing that he had been conceived to survive the third comet but that conviction had infused us with a security and a restful feeling that we tried to hide with all manner of jokes about old age, we attributed the senile characteristics of tortoises and the habits of elephants to him, in bars we told the story that someone had
announced to the cabinet that he had died and that they had asked each other in fright who’s going to tell him, ha, ha, ha, when the truth was that it wouldn’t have mattered
to him if he knew it or not or he himself wouldn’t have been very sure whether that street joke was true or false, because at that time no one except him knew that all he had left in the pockets of his memory were a few odd
scraps of the vestiges of the past, that he was alone in the world, deaf as a post, dragging his thick decrepit feet through dark offices where someone in a frock coat and starched collar had made an enigmatic signal to him with a handkerchief, hello, he said to him, the mistake became law, office workers in the presidential palace had to stand up with a white handkerchief when he passed, the sentries
along the corridors, the lepers in the rose beds waved to him with a white handkerchief when he passed, hello general sir, hello, but he didn’t hear, he had heard nothing since the sunset mourning rites for Leticia Nazareno when he thought that the birds in his cages were losing their voices from so much singing and he fed them his own honey so they would sing louder, he fed them Cantorina
with an eyedropper, he sang them songs from a different age, bright January moon, he sang, for he had not realized that it was not the birds who were losing the strength of their voices but that it was he who was hearing less and less, and one night the buzzing in his eardrums broke all apart, it was over, it had been changed into an atmosphere of mortar through which only the farewell laments of
the illusory ships from the shadows of power could pass, imaginary winds passed, the racket of inner birds which finally consoled him for the abyss of silence of the birds of reality. The few people who had access to government house then would see him in the wicker rocking chair enduring the drowsiness of two in the afternoon under the arbor of wild pansies, he had unbuttoned his tunic, had taken
off his saber and the belt with the national colors, he had taken off his boots but left on the purple socks from the twelve dozen the Supreme Pontiff had sent him from his private sockery, the girls from a nearby school who would climb over the rear walls where the guard was less rigid had surprised him many times in that heavy insomnia, pale, with medicinal leaves stuck to his temples, tiger-striped
by the bars of light from the arbor in
the ecstasy of a manta ray lying face up at the bottom of a pool, old soursop, they would shout at him, he would see them distorted in the haze of the quivering heat, he would smile at them, wave at them with the hand without the velvet glove, but he couldn’t hear them, he caught the shrimp-mud stench of the sea breeze, he caught the pecking of the hens on
his toes, but he did not catch the luminous thunder of the cicadas, he couldn’t hear the girls, he couldn’t hear anything. His only contacts with the reality of this world were by then a few scattered scraps of his largest memories, only they kept him alive after he had been despoiled of the affairs of state and stayed swimming in a state of innocence in the limbo of power, only then did he confront
the devastating winds of his excessive years when he wandered at dusk through the deserted building, hid in the darkened offices, tore the margins off ledgers and in his florid hand wrote on them the remaining residue of the last memories that preserved him from death, one night he had written my name is Zacarías, he read it again under the fleeting light of the beacon, he read it over and over
and the name repeated so many times ended up seeming remote and alien to him, God damn it, he said to himself, tearing up the strip of paper, I’m me, he said to himself, and he wrote on another strip that he had turned a hundred around the time the comet had passed again although by then he wasn’t sure how many times he’d seen it pass, and on another ledger strip he wrote from memory honor the
wounded and honor the faithful soldiers who met death at foreign hands, for there were periods when he wrote down everything he thought, everything he knew, he wrote on a piece of cardboard and tacked it to the door of a toilet that it was fourbidden to do any dirty bizness in toylets because he had opened that door by mistake and had surprised a high-ranking officer squatting down and masturbating
into the bowl, he wrote down the few things he remembered to make sure that he would never forget them, Leticia Nazareno, he wrote, my only and legitimate spouse who had taught him to read and write in the ripeness of his old age, he made an effort to bring back her public image, he
tried to see her again with her taffeta parasol with the colors of the flag and her first lady’s fur piece of silver-fox
tails, but all he could manage was to remember her naked at two in the afternoon under the flour-haze light of the mosquito netting, he remembered the slow repose of your soft and pale body surrounded by the hum of the electric fan, he felt your living teats your smell of a bitch in heat, the corrosive humors of your ferocious novice nun hands that curdled milk and rusted gold and withered
flowers, but they were good hands for love, because only she had reached the inconceivable triumph of take your boots off so you don’t soil my Brabant sheets, and he took them off, take off your saber, and your truss, and your leggings take everything off my love I can’t feel you, and he took everything off for you as he had never done before and would never do again for any woman after Leticia
Nazareno, my only and legitimate love, he sighed, he wrote down the signs on the yellowed ledger margins that he rolled like cigarettes and hid in the most unlikely chinks in the house where only he would be able to find them to remember who he was himself when he could no longer remember anything, where no one ever found them when even the image of Leticia Nazareno had finally slipped away down the
drain of memory and all that remained was the indestructible memory of his mother Bendición Alvarado on the goodbye afternoons at the suburban mansion, his dying mother who had gathered the hens together by making noise with the kernels of corn in a calabash gourd so that he wouldn’t notice that she was dying, who still brought him fruit drinks to the hammock hung between the tamarinds so that
he wouldn’t suspect that she could barely breathe because of her pain, his mother who had conceived him alone, who had borne him alone, who was rotting away alone until the solitary suffering became so intense that it was stronger than her pride and she had to ask her son to look at my back to see why I feel this hot-ember heat that won’t let me live, and she took off her blouse, turned around, and
with silent horror he saw that her back had been chewed away by steaming ulcers in whose guava pulp pestilence the tiny bubbles of
the first maggots were bursting. Bad times those general sir, there were no secrets of state that were not in the public domain, there was no order that was carried out with complete certainty ever since the exquisite corpse of General Rodrigo de Aguilar had been served
up at the banquet table, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care about the stumbling of power during the bitter months in which his mother was rotting away in a slow fire in the bedroom next to his after the doctors most adept in Asiatic scourges decreed that her illness was not the plague, or scabies, or yaws, or any other Oriental pestilence, but some Indian curse that could only be cured by the
one who had cast it, and he understood that it was death and he shut himself up to care for his mother with the abnegation of a mother, he stayed to rot with her so that no one would see her cooking in her stew of maggots, he ordered them to bring her hens to government house, they brought him the peacocks, the painted birds who wandered about at their pleasure through salons and offices so that
his mother would not miss the rustic activities of the suburban mansion, he himself burned annato logs in the bedroom so that no one would catch the death stench of his dying mother, he himself with germicidal salves consoled the body that was red with Mercurochrome, yellow with picric, blue with methylene, he himself daubed with Turkish balms the steaming ulcers against the advice of the minister
of health who was frightened to death of curses, what the hell, mother, it’s better if we die together, he said, but Bendición Alvarado was aware of being the only one who was dying and she tried to reveal to her son the family secrets that she didn’t want to carry to her grave, she told him how her placenta had been thrown to the hogs, lord, how it was that I could never establish which of so many
back-trail fugitives was your father, she tried to tell him for history that she had conceived him standing up and with her hat on because of the storm of bluebottle flies around the wineskins of fermented molasses in the back room of a bar, she had given birth to him with difficulty in the entranceway to a convent, she had recognized him in the lights of the melancholy harps of the geraniums
and his
right testicle was the size of a fig and he relieved himself like a bellows and exhaled a bagpipe sigh with his breathing, she wrapped him up in the rags the novices had given her and she displayed him in marketplaces in case she might find someone who knew of a remedy that was better and above all cheaper than honey which was the only thing they recommended to her for his malformation,
they consoled her with clichés, you can’t get around fate, they told her, because after all the child was good for everything except playing wind instruments, they told her, and only a circus fortuneteller noticed that the newborn baby had no lines on the palm of his hand and that meant he had been born to be a king, and that’s how it was, but he wasn’t paying any attention to her, he begged her
to go to sleep without digging up the past because it was more comfortable for him to believe that those stumbling blocks in national history were feverish deliriums, sleep, mother, he begged her, he wrapped her from head to toe in a linen sheet one of the many he had had made so as not to hurt her sores, he laid her down to sleep on her side with her hand on her heart, he consoled her with don’t
try to remember that sorry mess, mother, in any case I’m me, sleep softly. The many and ardent official attempts to calm the public rumors that the matriarch of the nation was rotting away in life had been useless, they published contrived medical reports, but the very couriers who carried the bulletins averred that what they themselves denied was true, that the air of corruption was so intense in
the dying woman’s bedroom that it had even frightened the lepers away, that they had butchered rams in order to bathe her in warm blood, that they took away sheets soaked in iridescent matter that flowed from her sores and no matter how much they washed them they were unable to return them to their original splendor, that no one had seen him again in the milking stalls or in the concubines’ rooms
where he had always been seen at daybreak even in the worst of times, the primate archbishop himself had offered to administer the last rites to the dying woman but he had left him standing at the door, no one’s dying, father, don’t believe rumors, he told him, he shared
his meals with his mother on the same plate with the same spoon in spite of the pesthouse atmosphere in the room, he bathed
her before putting her to bed with thankful-dog soap while his heart stood still with pity from the instructions she gave him with the last threads of her voice for the care of the animals after her death, that the peacocks should not be plucked to make hats, yes mother, he said, and he rubbed her body all over with creolin, don’t let them make the birds sing at parties, yes mother, and he wrapped