The Autumn of the Patriarch (5 page)

room saying have a good night general, the same for you old friend, he answered, thank you very much, lying face down on the funereal marble of the cabinet room, and then he folded his right arm to serve as a pillow and fell asleep at once, more alone than ever, lulled by the sound of the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn of pain which had begun forever that night with the smoking bodies and the
puddles of red moons of the massacre. He did not have to take any of the predicted measures because the army broke up on its own, the troops scattered, the few officers who resisted until the last moments in the garrisons in the city and in another six in the countryside were wiped out by the presidential guards with the help of civilian volunteers, the surviving ministers fled into exile at dawn
and only the two most faithful remained, one who was also his private physician and the other who had the best handwriting in the country, and he did not have to kowtow to any foreign power because the government coffers were overflowing with wedding rings held as surety by instant partisans, nor did he have to buy any mats or leather stools of the cheapest sort to repair the ravages of defenestration,
because even before
the pacification of the country was over the audience room was restored and more sumptuous than ever, and there were birdcages everywhere, chattering macaws, royal lory parrots who sang in the cornices for Spain and not for Portugal, discreet and serviceable women who kept the building as neat and clean as a battleship, and in through the windows came the music of glory, the
same Roman candles of excitement, the same bells of jubilation that had begun celebrating his death and went on celebrating his immortality, and there was a great permanent rally on the main square with shouts of eternal support and large signs saying God Save the Magnificent who arose from the dead on the third day, an endless celebration that he did not have to prolong with any secret maneuvers
as he had done at other times, because affairs of state took care of themselves without any help, the nation went along, he alone was the government, and no one bothered the aims of his will whether by word or deed, because he was so alone in his glory that he no longer had any enemies left, and he was so thankful for his comrade of a lifetime Rodrigo de Aguilar that he did not get nervous again
over the expense of the milk but ordered the private soldiers who had distinguished themselves by their ferocity and sense of duty to form in the courtyard, and pointing to them according to the impulses of his inspiration he promoted them to the highest ranks knowing that he was restoring the armed forces who were going to spit in the hand that fed them, you to captain, you to major, you to colonel,
what am I saying, to general, and all the rest to lieutenant, what the hell old friend, here’s your army, and he was so moved by those who had been grieved by his death that he had them fetch the old man with the masonic salute and the gentleman in mourning who had kissed his ring and he decorated them with the medal of peace, he had them bring in the fishwife and he gave her what she said she
needed most which was a house with a lot of rooms where she could live with her fourteen children, he had them bring in the schoolgirl who had laid a flower on the corpse and granted her what I most want in this world which was to get married to a man of the
sea, but in spite of those acts of relief his confused heart did not have a moment of rest until in the courtyard of the San Jerónimo barracks
he saw bound and spat upon the assault groups who had sacked the presidential palace, he recognized them one by one with the remorseless memory of rancor and he went about separating them into different groups according to the intensity of the offense, you here, the one who led the assault, you over there, the ones who had thrown the inconsolable fishwife to the floor, you here, the ones who
had taken the corpse out of the coffin and dragged it down the stairs and through the mire, and all the rest on this side, you bastards, although he was really not interested in the punishment but in proving to himself that the profanation of the body and the attack on the building had not been a spontaneous and popular act but an infamous mercenary deal, so he took charge of the interrogation of
the prisoners physically present and doing the talking himself to get them to tell him willingly the illusory truth that his heart needed, but he could not manage it, he had them hung from a horizontal beam like parrots tied hand and foot with their heads down for hours on end, but he could not manage it, he had one thrown into the moat of the courtyard and the others saw him quartered and devoured
by the crocodiles, but he could not manage it, he chose one out of the main group and had him skinned alive in the presence of all and they saw his flesh tender and yellow like a newborn placenta and they felt the soaking of the warm blood broth of the body that had been laid bare as it went through its throes thrashing about on the courtyard stones, and then they confessed what he wanted that
they had been paid four hundred gold pesos to drag the corpse to the dung heap in the marketplace, that they didn’t want to do it for love nor money because they had nothing against him, all the less so since he was dead, but that at a secret meeting where they even saw two generals from the high command they had all been frightened with every manner of threat and that was why we did it general sir,
word of honor, and then he exhaled a great mouthful of relief, ordered them to be fed, that they be allowed to rest
that night and in the morning they would be thrown to the crocodiles, poor deceived boys, he sighed and went back to the presidential palace with his heart free of the hair shirt of doubt, murmuring you all saw it, God damn it, you all saw it, these people love me. Resolved to dissipate
even the dregs of the uneasiness that Patricio Aragonés had sown in his heart, he decided that those acts of torture would be the last of his regime, the crocodiles were killed, the torture chambers where it was possible to crumble every bone in the body one by one without killing were dismantled, he proclaimed a general amnesty, he looked to the future with the magical idea that came to him
that the trouble with this country is that the people have too much time to think on their hands, and looking for a way to keep them busy he restored the March poetry festival and the annual contest for the election of a beauty queen, he built the largest baseball stadium in the Caribbean and imparted to our team the motto of victory or death, and he ordered a free school established in each province
to teach sweeping where the pupils fanaticized by the presidential stimulus went on to sweep the streets after having swept their houses and then the nearby highways and roads so that piles of trash were carried back and forth from one province to another without anyone’s knowing what to do with it in official processions with the national flag and large banners saying God Save the All Pure
who watches over the cleanliness of the nation, while he dragged his slow feet of a meditative beast about in search of new formulas to keep the civilian population busy, opening a way among the lepers and blind men and cripples who begged the salt of health from his hands, baptizing with his name at the font in the courtyard the children of his godchildren among persistent adulators who proclaimed
him the one and only because now he could not count on the resources of any look-alike and he had to make himself double in a marketplace of a palace where every day cages and more cages of rare birds arrived ever since the secret was let out that his mother Bendición Alvarado followed the trade of bird-woman, and even though some sent them out of adulation
and others sent them as a joke after
a short time there was no room to hang any more cages, and he tried to attend to so many public matters at the same time that among the crowds in the courtyards and the offices it was impossible to tell who were the servants and who were the ones served, and they knocked down so many walls to make more room and opened so many windows for a view of the sea that the simple act of going from one room
to another was like crossing the deck of a sailboat adrift in a crosswind autumn. They were the March trade winds which had always come in through the windows of the building, but now they said they were the winds of peace general sir, it was the same buzzing in the eardrums that he had had for many years, but even his physician told him that it was the buzz of peace general sir, because ever since
they had found him dead the first time all things on heaven and earth had changed into things of peace general sir, and he believed it, and he believed it so much that in December he went back to going up to the house on the reef to seek solace in the misfortune of the brotherhood of nostalgic former dictators who would interrupt the game of dominoes to tell him that he was for example the double
six and let’s say that the doctrinaire conservatives were double three, only I wasn’t aware of the clandestine alliance between Masons and priests, who in hell would have thought of it, without worrying about the soup that was jelling in the plate while one of them explained that for example this sugar bowl was the presidential palace, here, and the only cannon the enemy had left had a range of
four hundred yards with the wind in its favor, here, so if you people see me in this state it’s only because of nineteen inches of bad luck, that is to say, and even those most encrusted by the barnacles of exile wasted their hopes scanning the horizon and spotting ships from their homelands, they could recognize them from the color of their smoke, from the rust on their foghorns, they would go
down to the harbor in the drizzle of early dawn in search of the newspapers the crewmen had used to wrap up the lunch they took ashore, they found them in the garbage cans and read them up and down and left to right
down to the last lines to predict the future of their countries from the news of who had died, who had got married, who had invited whom and whom they had not invited to a birthday
party, deciphering their destiny according to the direction of a providential storm cloud that was going to roar down on their country in an apocalyptic tempest that would overflow the rivers which would burst the dams that would devastate the fields and spread misery and plague in the cities, and they will come here to beg me to save them from disaster and anarchy, you’ll see, but while they waited
for the great hour they had to call aside the youngest exile and ask him to do them the favor of threading their needles to patch these pants that I don’t want to throw away for sentimental reasons, they washed their clothes in secret, they honed the razor blades that the new arrivals had used, they would shut themselves up in their rooms to eat so that the others would not see that they were
living off leftovers, so that they would not see the shame of pants stained by senile incontinence, and on some unexpected Thursday we would use pins to fasten medals on the last shirt of one of them, wrap his body in his flag, sing his national anthem, and send him off to govern the forgotten people at the base of the sea cliffs with no other ballast than that of his own eroded heart and without
leaving any more gap in the world than an easy chair on the terrace without horizons where we would sit down to cast lots for the dead man’s possessions, if there were any left general, just imagine this life as civilians after so much glory. On another distant December when the house was inaugurated, he had seen from that terrace the line of the hallucinated isles of the Antilles which someone pointed
out to him in the showcase of the sea, he had seen the perfumed volcano of Martinique, over there general, he had seen the tuberculosis hospital, the gigantic black man with a lace blouse selling bouquets of gardenias to governors’ wives on the church steps, he had seen the infernal market of Paramaribo, there general, the crabs that came out of the sea and up through the toilets, climbing up
onto the tables of ice cream parlors, the diamonds embedded in the teeth of black grandmothers
who sold heads of Indians and ginger roots sitting on their safe buttocks under the drenching rain, he had see the solid gold cows on Tanaguarena beach general, the blind visionary of La Guayra who charged two reals to scare off the blandishments of death with a one-string violin, he had seen Trinidad’s
burning August, automobiles going the wrong way, the green Hindus who shat in the middle of the street in front of their shops with genuine silkworm shirts and mandarins carved from the whole tusk of an elephant, he had seen Haiti’s nightmare, its blue dogs, the oxcart that collected the dead off the streets at dawn, he had seen the rebirth of Dutch tulips in the gasoline drums of Curacao, the
windmill houses with roofs built for snow, the mysterious ocean liner that passed through the center of the city among the hotel kitchens, he had seen the stone enclosure of Cartagena de Indias, its bay closed off by a chain, the light lingering on the balconies, the filthy horses of the hacks who still yawned for the viceroys’ fodder, its smell of shit general sir, how marvelous, tell me, isn’t
the world large, and it was, really, and not just large but insidious, because if he went up to the house on the reefs in December it was not to pass the time with those refugees whom he detested as much as his own image in the mirror of misfortune but to be there at the moment of miracles when the December light came out, mother—true and he could see once more the whole universe of the Antilles from
Barbados to Veracruz, and then he would forget who had the double-three piece and go to the overlook to contemplate the line of islands as lunatic as sleeping crocodiles in the cistern of the sea, and contemplating the islands he evoked again and relived that historic October Friday when he left his room at dawn and discovered that everybody in the presidential palace was wearing a red biretta,
that the new concubines were sweeping the parlors and changing the water in the cages wearing red birettas, that the milkers in the stables, the sentries in their boxes, the cripples on the stairs and the lepers in the rose beds were going about with the red birettas of a carnival Sunday, so he began to look into what had happened to the world while he was
sleeping for the people in his house
and the inhabitants of the city to be going around wearing red birettas and dragging a string of jingle bells everywhere, and finally he found someone to tell him the truth general sir, that some strangers had arrived who gabbled in funny old talk because they made the word for sea feminine and not masculine, they called macaws poll parrots, canoes rafts, harpoons javelins, and when they saw us going