The Autumn of the Patriarch (26 page)

got married, people buried in previous episodes were resuscitated and villains were sacrificed ahead of time in order to please him general sir, everybody was to be happy by his orders so that life would seem less useless when he inspected the building to the metallic clangs of eight o’clock and he found that someone ahead of him had changed the cows’ fodder, the lights had been turned off in
the barracks of the presidential guard, the personnel were asleep, the kitchens were in order, the floors clean, the butcher blocks scrubbed with creolin without a trace of blood had a hospital smell about them, someone had drawn the bars on the windows and had locked the offices in spite of the fact that it was he and he alone who had the ring of keys, the lights were going out one by one before
he touched the switches from the first vestibule down to his
bedroom, he was walking in the dark dragging his thick feet of a captive monarch past the darkened mirrors with the single spur wrapped in velvet so that nobody could follow his trail of gold shavings, he went along seeing as he passed the same sea through the windows, the Caribbean in January, he looked at it without stopping twenty-three
times and it was the same as always in January like a flowering swamp, he looked into Bendición Alvarado’s room to see that her legacy of lemon balm was still in its place, the cages of dead birds, the bed of pain where the mother of her country bore her rotting old age, have a good night, he murmured, as always, even though no one had answered him for such a long time a very good night to
you son, sleep with God, he headed toward his bedroom with the runaway lamp when he felt the shiver of the astonished hot coals that were Lord Köchel’s eyes in the dark, caught a fragrance of man, the thickness of his dominion, the glow of his disdain, who goes there, he asked, although he knew who it was, José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra in full dress who was coming to remind him that it was an historic
night, August 12, general, the immense date on which we were celebrating the first centenary of his rise to power, so that visitors had come from all over the world captivated by the announcement of an event which it was possible to witness only once in the passage of the longest of lives, the nation was celebrating, everybody in the nation except him, since in spite of the insistence of José
Ignacio Saenz de la Barra that he live that memorable night in the midst of the clamor and fervor of his people, earlier than ever he drew the three bars of his sleeping dungeon, threw the three bolts, the three locks, he lay face down on the bare bricks with his rough denim uniform without insignia, the boots, the gold spur, and the right arm bent under his head to serve as a pillow as we were
to find him pecked away by the vultures and infested with animals and flowers from the bottom of the sea, and through the mist of the sleeping potions he perceived the remote rockets of the celebration without him, he perceived the joyful music, the bells of pleasure, the torrent of slime of the-crowds who had come to exalt a glory that was
not theirs, while he murmured more absorbed than sad
mother of mine Bendición Alvarado of my destiny, a hundred years already, God damn it, a hundred years already, the way time passes.

T
HERE HE WAS
, then, as if it had been he even though it might not be, lying on the banquet table in the ballroom with the feminine splendor of a dead pope amidst the flowers in which he would not have recognized himself in the display ceremony of his first death, more fearsome dead than alive, the velvet glove stuffed with cotton on a chest armored with false medals of imaginary victories
in chocolate wars invented by his persistent adulators, the thunderous full-dress uniform and the patent leather boots and the single gold spur that we found in the building and the ten sad pips of general of the universe to which he was promoted at the final moment to give him a rank higher than that of death, so immediate and visible in his new posthumous identity that for the first time it was
possible to believe in his real existence without any doubt whatsoever, although in reality no one looked less like him, no one was so much the opposite of him as that showcase corpse which was still cooking in the middle of the night on the slow fire of the tiny space of the little room where he was
laid out with candles while in the cabinet room next door we were discussing the final bulletin
with the news that no one dared believe word by word when we were awakened by the noise of the trucks loaded with troops in battle gear whose stealthy patrols had been occupying public buildings since before dawn, they took up prone positions under the arcades of the main commercial street, they hid in doorways, I saw them setting up tripod machine guns on the roofs of the viceregal district when
I opened the balcony of my house at dawn looking for a place to put the bouquet of wet carnations I had just cut in the courtyard, beneath the balcony I saw a patrol of soldiers under the command of a lieutenant going from door to door ordering people to close the doors of the few shops that were beginning to open on the commercial street, today is a national holiday they shouted, orders from higher
up, I threw them a carnation from the balcony and I asked what was going on with so many soldiers and so much noise of weapons everywhere and the officer caught the carnation in midair and replied to me just imagine girl we don’t know ourselves either, the dead man must have come back to life, he said, dying with laughter, because nobody dared think such an earthshaking event could have happened,
rather, on the contrary, we thought that after so many years of negligence he had picked up the reins of his authority again and was more alive than ever, once more dragging his great feet of an illusory monarch through the house of power where the globes of light had gone on again, we thought that he was the one who had put out the cows as they frisked about over the cracks in the paving on
the main square where the blind man sitting in the shade of the dying palm trees mistook the hoofs for military boots and recited those lines of poetry about the happy warrior who came from afar in a conquest of death, he recited them with full voice and his hand outstretched toward the cows who climbed up to eat the balsam apple garlands on the bandstand with their habit of going up and down stairs
to eat, they stayed on to live among the ruins of the muses crowned with wild camellias and the monkeys hanging from the lyres of the rubble of
the National Theater, dying with thirst and with the clatter of broken pots of spikenards they went into the cool shadows of entranceways in the viceregal district and sank their burning snouts into the pools in inner courtyards and no one dared molest
them because we recognized the congenital brand of the presidential iron which the females bore on their flanks and the males on their necks, they were untouchable, even the soldiers made way for them on the narrow turns of the commercial street which had lost its former clamor of an infernal Moorish bazaar, all that was left was a rubble pile of broken ship frames and pieces of rigging in the puddles
of burning sludge where the public market had been when we still had the sea and the schooners lay aground among the vegetable stands, there were empty spaces where the Hindu bazaars had stood in his times of glory, because the Hindus had left, they didn’t even say thank you to him general sir, and he shouted what the hell, confused by his last senile tantrums, let them go clean up Englishmen’s
shit, he shouted, they all left, in their place street vendors of Indian amulets and snakebite cures rose up, the frantic seedy jukebox bars with beds for rent in the rear which the soldiers wrecked with their rifle butts while the iron bells of the cathedral announced the mourning, everything had come to an end before he did, we had even extinguished the last breath of the hopeless hope that
someday the repeated and always denied rumor that he had finally succumbed to some one of his many regal illnesses would be true, and yet we didn’t believe it now that it was, and not because we really didn’t believe it but because we no longer wanted it to be true, we had ended up not understanding what would become of us without him, what would become of our lives after him, I couldn’t conceive
of the world without the man who had made me happy at the age of twelve as no other man was ever to do again since those afternoons so long ago when we would come out of school at five o’clock and he would be lying in wait by the skylights of the stables for the girls in blue uniforms with sailors’ collars and a single braid thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado how pretty women look to me at
my
age, he would call to us, we would see his quivering eyes, the hand with the glove with torn fingers which tried to entice us with the candy rattle from Ambassador Forbes, they all ran off frightened, all except me, I stood alone on the street by the school when I knew that no one was watching me and I tried to reach the candy and he grabbed me by the wrists with a gentle tiger’s claw and lifted
me painlessly up into the air, took me through the skylight with such care that not a pleat in my dress was wrinkled and he laid me down on the hay that was scented with rancid urine trying to tell me something that wouldn’t come out of his arid mouth because he was more frightened than I, he was trembling, you could see his heart beating under his jacket, he was pale, his eyes were full of
tears as no other man ever had them in all of my life in exile, he touched me in silence, breathing unhurriedly, he tempted me with a male tenderness which I never found again, he made my little buds stand out on my breasts, he put his fingers underneath the edge of my panties, he smelled his fingers, he made me smell them, smell it, he told me, it’s your smell, I didn’t need Ambassador Baldrich’s
candy any more to climb through the stable skylight to live the happy hours of my puberty with that man of a healthy and sad heart who waited for me sitting in the hay with a bag containing things to eat, he used bread to soak up my first adolescent sauce, he would put things there before eating them, he gave them to me to eat, he put asparagus stalks into me to eat them marinated with the brine
of my inner humors, delicious, he told me, you taste like a port, he dreamed about eating my kidneys boiled in their own ammonia stew, with the salt of your armpits, he dreamed, with your warm urine, he sliced me up from head to toe, he seasoned me with rock salt, hot pepper and laurel leaves and left me to boil on a hot fire in the incandescent fleeting mallow sunsets of our love with no future,
he ate me from head to toe with the drive and the generosity of an old man which I never found again in so many hasty and greedy men who tried to make love to me without managing to for the rest of my life without him, he talked to me about himself during the slow digestions
of love while we pushed away from us the snouts of the cows who were trying to lick us, he told me that not even he himself
knew who he was, that he was up to his balls with general sir, he said it without bitterness, without any reason, as if talking to himself, floating in the continuous buzzing of an inner silence that could only be broken with shouts, no one was more gracious or wiser than he, no one more of a man, he had become the only reason for my life at the age of fourteen when two military men of the highest
rank appeared at my parents’ home with a suitcase bulging with solid gold doubloons and in the middle of the night they put me aboard a foreign ship along with my whole family and orders never to return to the national territory for years and years until the news burst in the world that he had died without having known that I had spent the rest of my life dying for him, I would go to bed with
strangers off the street to see if I could find one better than he, I returned aged and embittered with this drove of sons by different fathers with the illusion that they were his, and on the other hand he had forgotten her the second day he didn’t see her climb in through the skylight of the milking stables, he replaced her with a different one every afternoon because by then he couldn’t distinguish
very well who was who among the troop of schoolgirls in identical uniforms who stuck out their tongues at him and shouted old soursop when he tried to entice them with candy from Ambassador Rumpelmayer, he called them without distinction, without ever wondering if today’s had been the same one as yesterday’s, he received them all equally, he thought of them all as the same one while he listened
half-asleep in the hammock to the always identical arguments of Ambassador Streimberg who had given him an ear trumpet just like the one with the dog of his master’s voice with an electrical amplifying device so that he could listen once more to the insistent plan to carry off our territorial waters as surety for the interest on the foreign debt and he repeated the same as always never in a million
years my dear Stevenson, anything except the sea, he would disconnect the electric hearing aid so as not to continue listening to
that loud voice of a metallic creature who seemed to be turning the record over to explain to him once more what had been explained to me so many times by my own experts without any dictionary tricks that we’re down to our skins general sir, we had used up our last
resources, bled by the age-old necessity of accepting loans in order to pay the interest on the foreign debt ever since the wars of independence and then other loans to pay the interest on back interest, always in return for something general sir, first the quinine and tobacco monopolies for the English, then the rubber and cocoa monopoly for the Dutch, then the concession for the upland railroad
and river navigation to the Germans, and everything for the gringos through the secret agreements that he didn’t find out about until after the sudden downfall and public death of José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra whom God keep roasting on an open flame in the cauldrons of his deep hell, we didn’t have anything left general, but he had heard the same thing said by all of his treasury ministers ever since
the difficult days when a moratorium was declared on the obligation contracted from the bankers of Hamburg, the German fleet had blockaded the port, an English warship had fired a warning shot that opened a breach in the cathedral tower, but he shouted I shit on London’s king, better dead than sold down the river, he shouted, death to the Kaiser, saved at the last moment by the good offices of
his domino companion Ambassador Charles W. Traxler whose government underwrote a guarantee of the European agreements in exchange for a right of lifetime exploitation of our subsoil and ever since then we’ve been the way we are owing everything down to the drawers we’re wearing general sir, but he took the eternal five o’clock ambassador to the stairs and took leave of him with a pat on the shoulder,
never in a million years my dear Baxter, I’d rather be dead than without a sea, overwhelmed by the desolation of that cemetery house where one could walk without running into anyone as if one were under water ever since the evil times of that José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra of my mistake who had cut off the heads of the whole human species except those he was
supposed to cut off, those of the authors
of the assassination of Leticia Nazareno and the child, the birds refused to sing in their cages no matter how many drops of Cantorina he put in their beaks, the girls in the school next door no longer sang their recess song about the petite painted bird perched on the green lemon limb, life had been going off for the impatient wait to be with you in the stables, my child, with your little
palm-nut teats and your clam of a thing, he ate alone under the pansy bower, he floated in the quivering two o’clock heat pecking at his siesta sleep so as not to lose the thread of the television movie in which everything happened according to his orders and completely the opposite of life, because the all-worthy who knew everything never knew that ever since the times of José Ignacio Saenz de la
Barra we had first installed an individual transmitter for the soap operas on the radio and then a closed-circuit television system so that only he would see the movies arranged to his taste in which no one died except the villains, love prevailed over death, life was a breath of fresh air, we made him happy with the trick as he had been so many afternoons of his old age with the girls in uniform
who would have pleased him until his death if he had not had the bad luck to ask one of them what do they teach you in school and I told him the truth that they don’t teach me anything sir, what I am is a waterfront whore, and he made her repeat it in case he hadn’t understood well what he had read on my lips and I repeated it letter by letter that I’m not a student sir, I’m a waterfront whore, the
sanitation service had bathed her in creolin and rinsed her off, they told her to put on this sailor suit and these nice-girl’s stockings and go along this street every afternoon at five, not just me but all the whores of my age recruited and bathed by the sanitary police, all with the same uniform and the same men’s shoes and these horsehair braids which look you can put on and take off like a
comb, they told us don’t be afraid he’s a poor foolish old grandfather who isn’t even going to lay you but will give you a doctor’s examination with his finger and suck on your titties and put things to eat in your pussies, well, everything you do to me when
I come, all we had to do was close our eyes in pleasure and say my love my love which is what you like, they told us that and they even made
us rehearse and repeat everything from the beginning before they paid us, but I think it’s too much of a drag all those ripe bananas in the twitty-twat and all those parboiled malangas up the behind for the four consumptive pesos we’ve got left after deducting the sanitation tax and the sergeant’s commission, God damn it, it’s not right to ruin all that food down below if a person doesn’t have