The Autumn of the Patriarch (17 page)

a color, he had suffered the ecstasy of the roundness of the earth lying face up under the dome of a solitary chapel in an unreal city where time
did not pass but floated, until he got enough courage to take his eyes off the sheet and his deep contemplation and declared with a soft but irreparable tone that the body printed on the linen was not an act of Divine Providence to give us one more proof
of His infinite mercy, not that or anything like it, your excellency, it was the work of a painter who was very skilled in the good and evil arts and who had abused your excellency’s greatness of heart, because that wasn’t oil paint it was house paint of the cheapest kind, for painting window frames, your excellency, beneath the smell of the natural resins that had dissolved in the paint the
bastard dew of turpentine still remained, plaster crusts remained, a persistent dampness remained that was not the sweat of the last shudder of death as they had made him believe but the fake dampness of linen soaked in linseed oil and kept in dark places, believe me I’m terribly sorry, the nuncio concluded with genuine sadness, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything more as he faced the granite
old man who was looking at him without blinking from the hammock, who had listened to him from the slime of his lugubrious Asiatic silences without even moving his mouth to contradict him in spite of the fact that no one knew better than he the truth of the secret miracle of the sheet in which I myself wrapped you with my own hands, mother, I was frightened with the first silence of your death
which was as if the world had dawned at the bottom of the sea, I saw the miracle, God damn it, but in spite of his certainty he didn’t interrupt the verdict of the nuncio, he only blinked a couple of times without closing his eyes, as iguanas do, he only smiled, it’s all right, father, he finally sighed, it’s probably the way you say, but I warn you that you carry the burden of your words, I’ll
repeat it letter by letter so that you won’t forget it for the rest of your life you carry the burden of your words, father, I’m not responsible. The world remained in a lethargy during the week of evil omens in which he didn’t get out of the hammock even to eat, he used the fan to shoo off the tame birds who alighted on his body, he shooed away the splotches of light coming through the pansies thinking
they were tame birds, he received no one,
he gave no orders, but the forces of public order remained aloof when the mobs of hired fanatics stormed the palace of the Apostolic Nunciature, sacked its museum of historic relics, surprised the nuncio taking his siesta outdoors in the peaceful backwaters of the inner garden, dragged him naked onto the street, shat on him general sir, just imagine, but
he didn’t move from the hammock, he didn’t blink when they came to him with the news general sir that they were parading the nuncio through the business streets on a donkey under a downpour of dishwater thrown onto him from balconies, shouted pretty boy at him, miss Vatican, suffer the little children to come unto me, and only when they left him half dead on the garbage heap in the public market
did he get up out of the hammock waving the birds out of the way with his hands, appear in the hearing room waving away the cobwebs of mourning with the black armband and his eyes puffy from poor sleep, and then he gave orders for the nuncio to be placed on a life raft with provisions for three days and they cast him adrift on the lane that cruise ships took to Europe so that the whole world will
know what happens to foreigners who lift their hands against the majesty of the nation, and the Pope will learn now and forever that he may be Pope in Rome with his ring on his finger sitting on his golden throne, but here I am what I am, God damn it, them and their shitty petticoats. It was an effective recourse, because before that year was out the process was initiated for the canonization of
his mother Bendición Alvarado whose uncorrupted body was displayed for public veneration in the main nave of the cathedral, the Gloria was sung on altars, the state of war that he had declared against the Holy See was revoked, long live peace, the crowds on the main square shouted, long live God, they shouted, while in a solemn audience he received the auditor of the Sacred Congregation of the Rite
and promoter and postulator of the faith Monsignor Demetrius Aldous, known as the Eritrene, to whom had been entrusted the mission of scrutinizing the life of Bendición Alvarado until not the slightest trace of doubt remained regarding the evidence of her sainthood, take as
long as you like, father, he said to him, holding his hand in his, for he had an immediate confidence in that jaundiced Abyssinian
who loved life above all things, he ate iguana eggs, general sir, he loved cockfights, the humor of mulatto women, dancing the cumbia, just like us general sir, the whole bag, and the most heavily guarded doors were opened without restriction by his orders so that the scrutiny of the devil’s advocate would not run into difficulties of any kind, because there was nothing hidden just as there
was nothing invisible in his measureless nightmare realm that wouldn’t be an irrefutable proof that his mother of my soul Bendición Alvarado was predestined to the glory of altars, the nation is yours, father, here it is, and there he had it, of course, the armed forces maintained order at the palace of the Apostolic Nunciature across from which at dawn could be seen the uncountable lines of restored
lepers who came to show the newborn skin over their sores, former victims of St. Vitus’s dance came to thread needles before the disbelieving, to display their fortunes came those who had been enriched by the roulette table because Bendición Alvarado had revealed the numbers in her dreams to them, those who had had news of lost relatives and friends, those who had found their drowned ones,
those who had had nothing and now had everything came, paraded by without cease through the oven-hot office decorated with cannibal-killing muskets and prehistoric tortoises of Sir Walter Raleigh where the tireless Eritrene listened to all without asking any questions, without interrupting, soaked in sweat, alien to the plague of humanity in decomposition that was accumulating in the office where
the air was rarefied by the smoke of his cigarettes which were of the cheapest kind, he took detailed notes of the declarations of the witnesses and had them sign here, with your full name, or with an X, or like you general sir with your fingerprint, in one way or another, but they signed, the next one came in, just like the one before, I was consumptive, father, he said, I was consumptive, wrote
the Eritrene, and now listen to me, sign, I was impotent, father, and now look how I can go all day long, I was impotent, he
wrote in indelible ink so that his careful writing would be safe from changes until the end of humanity, I had a live animal inside my belly, father, I had a live animal inside my belly, he wrote coldly, drunk with cheap bitter coffee, poisoned by the rancid tobacco of the
cigarette that he lighted from the butt of the previous one, his collar unbuttoned like an oarsman’s general sir, that’s a real stud of a priest, yes sir, he said, a real stud, to each his own, working ceaselessly, not eating anything so as not to lose any time until well into the night, but even then he wouldn’t take any rest but would appear freshly bathed in the dockside taverns in his rough
patched cassock, he would arrive starving, sit down at the long plank table to share the bream stew with the longshoremen, he tore the fish apart with his fingers, he ground it right down to the bone with those Luciferine teeth that had their own glow in the dark, he drank his soup from the edge of the plate like a stevedore general sir, if you only could have seen him mingling with the human scum
off the shabby sailing ships that weighed anchor loaded with fags and green bananas, loaded with shipments of unripe whores for the glass hotels of Curaçao, for Guantánamo, father, for Santiago de los Caballeros which doesn’t even have a sea to get there by, father, for the saddest and most beautiful islands in the world that we go on dreaming about until the first light of dawn, father, remember
how different we were when the schooners left, remember the parrot who could guess the future in the house of Matilde Arenales, the crabs that came walking out of the bowls of soup, the shark wind, the distant drums, life, father, bitchy life, boys, because he talks like us general sir, as if he’d been born in the dogfight district, he played ball on the beach, he learned to play the accordion better
than the natives, he sang better than they, he learned the flowery language of the queens, he teased them in Latin, he got drunk with them in the fairy joints in the marketplace, he got into a fight with one of them because he said something bad about God, they started punching each other general sir, what shall we do, and he gave the order that nobody should separate them, they formed a circle
around them, he
won, the priest won general sir, I knew it, he said, pleased, he’s a stud, and not as frivolous as everybody thought, because on those wild nights he found more truth than during the wearisome days in the palace of the Apostolic Nunciature, much more than in the shadowy suburban mansion that he had explored without permission one afternoon during a heavy rain when he thought he
had tricked the sleepless vigilance of the presidential security services, he scrutinized it down to the last chink soaked by the interior rain from the roof gutters, trapped by the quicksands of malangas and the poisonous camellias of the splendid sleeping quarters that Bendición Alvarado had abandoned to the happiness of the servants, because she was good, father, she was humble, she put them to
sleep on percale sheets while she slept on a bare mat on an army cot, she let them wear her first lady’s Sunday clothes, they perfumed themselves with her bath salts, they frolicked naked with the orderlies in the colored bubbles in pewter bathtubs with lion’s feet, they lived like queens while her life slipped past as she painted birds, cooked her vegetable mush on the wood fire, and cultivated
medicinal plants for the emergencies of neighbors who would wake her up in the middle of the night with I’ve got a stomach spasm, ma’am, and she would give them watercress seeds to chew, that a godson was cross-eyed, and she would give him a worm remedy of epazote tea, I’m going to die, ma’am, but they didn’t die because she held health in her hand, she was a living saint, father, she walked about
in her own pure space through that mansion of pleasure where it had rained without pity ever since they took her by force to the presidential palace, it rained on the lotus blossoms on the piano, on the alabaster table in the sumptuous dining room which Bendición Alvarado never used because it’s like sitting down to eat at an altar, just imagine, father, such a presentiment of sainthood, but in
spite of the feverish testimony of the neighbors the devil’s advocate found more traces of timidity than humility among the ruins, he found more proofs of poorness of spirit than abnegation among the ebony Neptunes and the pieces of native demons and war-like
angels that were floating in the mangrove swamps of the former ballrooms, and on the other hand he did not find the slightest trace of that
other difficult god, one and trine, who had sent him from the burning plains of Abyssinia in search of truth where it had never been, because he found nothing general sir, as he said nothing, what a mess. Yet Monsignor Demetrius Aldous was not satisfied merely with the scrutiny of the city but went up on muleback into the glacial limbo of the upland barrens trying to find the seeds of Bendición
Alvarado’s sainthood where her image might still not be perverted by the splendor of power, he rose out of the mist wrapped in a highwayman’s cloak and wearing seven-league boots like a satanic apparition who at first aroused the fear and then the surprise and finally the curiosity of the uplanders who had never seen a human being of that color, but the astute Eritrene urged them to touch to convince
themselves that he didn’t give off tar, he showed them his teeth in the darkness, he got drunk with them eating cheese with his hand and drinking corn liquor out of the same gourd in order to win their trust in the gloomy little stores along the trails where at the dawn of other centuries they had known a striking birdwoman weighted down by her mad load of cages with chicks painted as nightingales,
golden toucans, goatsuckers disguised as peacocks to trick mountain people on the funereal Sundays of upland fairs, she would sit there, father, in the glow of the bonfires, waiting for someone to do her the charity of going to bed with her on the wineskins full of molasses in the back of the store, in order to eat, father, only in order to eat, because no one was such a mountain hick as to
buy those cheap goods of hers that faded with the first rain and fell apart when they walked, only she was so innocent, father, holy benediction of the birds, or of the barrens, as you wish, because no one knew for certain what her name was then or when she started calling herself Bendición Alvarado which couldn’t have been her original name because it’s not a name from these parts but for coastal
people, what a mess, even that had been checked on by Satan’s slippery prosecutor who was uncovering and
digging out everything in spite of the presidential security thugs who tangled up the thread of the truth on him and put invisible barriers in his way, what do you think, general sir, they could hound him off a cliff like a deer, they could make his mule stumble on him, he stopped that with
the personal order to watch him but to maintain his physical integrity repeat maintain physical integrity permitting absolute freedom all facilities fulfilling his mission by command without appeal from this highest authority obey carry out, signed I, and he repeated, I myself, conscious of the fact that with that decision he was taking on the terrible risk of learning the true image of his mother
Bendición Alvarado during the forbidden times when she was still young, was languid, went about dressed in rags, barefoot, and had to use her lower parts in order to eat, but she was beautiful, father, and she was so innocent that she fitted out the cheapest lory parrots with tails from the finest cocks to make them pass for macaws, she repaired crippled hens with turkey-feather fans and sold them
as birds of paradise, no one believed it, of course, no one was innocent enough to fall into the snare of the solitary birdwoman who whispered about in the mist of Sunday marketplaces to see who would say one and take her for nothing, because everybody on the barrens remembered her for her innocence and her poverty, and yet it seemed impossible to discover her identity because in the records of