The Autumn of the Patriarch (22 page)

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 conscience, 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