The Autumn of the Patriarch (25 page)

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 would 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