The Autumn of the Patriarch (29 page)

and succulent and all it needed was a flame underneath to cook the great clam chowder of the universe in its own crater, so think about it, your excellency, we’ll accept it on account for the interest of that debt which is in arrears and which won’t be paid off even with a hundred generations of leaders as diligent as your excellency, but he didn’t even take him seriously that first time, he accompanied
him to the stairs thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado look at these gringo barbarians, how is it possible that they can only think of the sea as food, he sent him off with the usual pat on the shoulder and he was alone with himself again feeling around among the wisps of illusory mist on the barren
plains of power, because the crowds had abandoned the main square, they took away the repetitious
placards and put away the rented signs for other identical celebrations in the future as soon as the stimulus of things to eat and drink that the troops distributed during breaks in the ovations was exhausted, they had left the salons deserted and sad again in spite of his order not to close the main doors at any hour so that anyone who wants to can come in, as before, when this wasn’t a
house of the dead but a palace for the neighborhood, and yet the only ones who stayed were the lepers general sir, the blind men and the cripples who had remained for years and years in front of the building just as Demetrius Aldous had seen them gilding themselves in the sun by the gates of Jerusalem, destroyed and invincible, certain that sooner or later they would come in again to receive from
his hands the salt of health because he was to survive all the reverses of adversity and the most inclement passions and the worst attacks of oblivion, because he was eternal, and so it was, he found them again on his way back from the milking as they boiled cans of kitchen leftovers on the brick fireplaces improvised in the courtyard, he saw them stretched out with their arms crossed on the mats
devastated by the sweat of their ulcers in the fragrant shadows of the rose beds, he had a common fireplace built for them, he bought them new mats, and he had a palm-branch shelter built for them in the rear of the courtyard so that they wouldn’t have to take shelter inside the building, but four days didn’t pass without his finding a pair of lepers sleeping on the Oriental rugs in the ballroom or
a blind man lost in the offices or a cripple broken on the stairs, he had the doors closed so that they wouldn’t leave a trail of open sores on the walls or stink up the air of the building with the smell of the carbolic acid with which the sanitary services fumigated them although no sooner did he get them out of one place than they appeared in another, tenacious, indestructible, clinging to their
old fierce hope when nobody hoped for anything any more from that useless old man who had written reminders in the cracks in the wall and felt his way along like a sleepwalker
through the winds he found in the misty swamps of memory, he spent hours of insomnia in the hammock wondering how the hell am I going to get around the new ambassador Fischer who proposed to me to disclose the existence
of a plague of yellow fever in order to justify a landing of marines in accordance with the mutual assistance treaty for as many years as would be necessary to bring new breath into the dying nation, and he replied immediately never in a million years, fascinated by the evidence that he was living in the origins of his regime when he had taken advantage of the same solution to assume the exceptional
powers of martial law in the face of a serious threat of civil uprising, he had declared a state of plague by decree, he planted the yellow flag on the pole of the lighthouse, he closed the port, Sundays were suppressed, it was forbidden to weep for the dead in public and to play music that would make them be remembered and he made use of the armed forces to police the enforcement of the decree
and to dispose of those infested according to his will, so that troops with sanitary armbands held public executions of people of the most diverse stations in life, they would mark a red circle on the doors of houses suspected of nonconformity with the regime, they put a branding iron to the foreheads of the lesser lawbreakers, dikes and fags while a sanitary mission urgently summoned from his government
by Ambassador Mitchell took charge of keeping the contagion from the occupants of the presidential palace, they gathered up the runt poo from the floor to analyze it with magnifying glasses, they threw disinfectant tablets into the water jars, they fed water worms to animals in their scientific laboratories, and dying of laughter he told them through an interpreter don’t be such horses’ asses,
misters, the only plague here is you people, but they insisted there was, that they had superior orders that there was, they prepared a syrup with preventive powers, thick and green, with which they varnished visitors’ bodies all over without distinction of credentials from the most ordinary to the most illustrious, they obliged them to keep their distance in audiences, they standing in the
doorway and he sitting at the end of the
room where their voices but not their breath could reach him, parleying in shouts with highborn naked people who gesticulated with one hand, your excellency, and with the other covered their bedaubed little dove, and all that to guard from contagion the one who had conceived in the enervation of wakefulness the most banal details of the false calamity,
who had invented earth-born lies and spread apocalyptic predictions in accordance with his belief that the less the people understand the more afraid they’ll be, and who scarcely blinked when one of his aides, pale with fright, came to attention before him with the news general sir that the plague is causing tremendous casualties among the civilian population, so that through the foggy windows of
the presidential carriage he had seen time stopped by his orders on the abandoned streets, he saw the awe-struck look of the yellow flags, he saw the closed doors even on houses where the red circle had been omitted, he saw the gorged buzzards on the balconies, and he saw the dead, the dead, the dead, there were so many everywhere that it was impossible to count them in the clay pits, piled up in
the sun on terraces, stretched out over the vegetables in the market, flesh and blood dead people general sir, who knows how many, because there were many more than he would have wanted to see among the hosts of his enemies thrown out like dead dogs in garbage bins, and above the rotting of the bodies and the familiar fetid smell of the streets he recognized the mangy smell of the plague, but he didn’t
react, he gave in to no entreaties until he felt himself absolute master of all his power again, and only when there didn’t seem to be any means human or divine to put an end to the dying did we see appear on the streets a carriage without insignias in which no one perceived at first the icy wind of the majesty of power, but in the interior of funereal plush we saw the lethal eyes, the quivering
lips, the nuptial glove which went along throwing handfuls of salt into the doorways, we saw the train painted with the colors of the flag clawing its way up through the gardenias and terrified leopards to the heights of mist of the most precipitous provinces, we saw the hazy eyes through the windows of the
solitary railroad car, the afflicted face, the haughty maiden’s hand that went along leaving
a trail of salt across the mournful barrens of his childhood, we saw the steamboat with its wooden paddle wheel and rolls of mazurkas in chimerical pianolas that bumped its way along among reefs and sandbars and the ruins of the catastrophes caused in the jungle by the dragon’s springtime strolls, we saw the sunset eyes in the window of the presidential stateroom, we saw the pale lips, the hand
without origin which threw handfuls of salt into villages deadened by the heat, and those who ate that salt and licked the ground where it had been recovered their health immediately and were immunized for a long time against evil omens and the rash of illusions, so that he was not to be surprised in the twilight of his autumn when they proposed to him a new disembarkation regime sustained by
the same lie of a political epidemic of yellow fever but he stood up to the arguments of the sterile ministers who shouted bring back the marines, general, bring them back with their machines for fumigating plague-ridden people in exchange for whatever they want, let them come back with their white hospitals, their blue lawns, their spinning sprinklers, those people who ended their leap years with
two centuries of good health, but he pounded on the table and decided no, under his supreme responsibility until the blunt Ambassador MacQueen answered him that conditions don’t warrant any more discussion, your excellency, the regime wasn’t being sustained by hope or conformity or even by terror, but by the pure inertia of an ancient and irreparable disillusion, go out into the street and look truth
in the face, your excellency, we’re on the final curve, either the marines land or we take the sea, there’s no other way, your excellency, there was no other way, mother, so they took away the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing’s nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had
inside general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons, in spite of the fact that he had appealed to the most
audacious registers of his age-old cunning trying to promote a national convulsion of protest against the despoilment, but nobody paid any attention general sir, they refused to take to the streets either by persuasion or by force because
we thought it was a new maneuver on his part like so many others to satiate even beyond all limits his irrepressible passion to endure, we thought just so long as something happens even if they carry off the sea, God damn it, even though they carry off the whole nation along with its dragon, we thought, unmoved by the seductive arts of the military men who appeared in our houses disguised as civilians
and begged us in the name of the nation to rush into the streets shouting out with the gringos to stop the implementation of the theft, they incited us to sack and burn the stores and mansions of foreigners, they offered us ready cash to go out and protest under the protection of the troops who were solidly behind the people in opposition to the act of aggression, but no one went out general
sir, because nobody had forgotten that one other time they had told us the same thing on their word of honor as soldiers and still they shot them down in a massacre under the pretext that agitators had infiltrated and opened fire against the troops, so this time we can’t even count on the people general sir, and I had to bear the weight of this punishment alone, I had to sign alone thinking mother
of mine Bendición Alvarado no one knows better than you that it’s better to be left without the sea than to allow a landing of marines, remember that they were the ones who thought up the orders they made me sign, they turned our artists into fairies, they brought the Bible and syphilis, they made people believe that life was easy, mother, that everything is gotten with money, that blacks carry a
contagion, they tried to convince our soldiers that the nation is a business and that the sense of honor is a bother invented by the government so that soldiers would fight for free, and it was to avoid the repetition of all those ills that I granted them the right to make use of our territorial waters in the way they considered best for the interests of humanity and peace among peoples, with the
understanding that said
cession not only included the physical waters visible from the window of his bedroom to the horizon but everything that is understood by sea in the broadest sense, or, the flora and fauna belonging to said waters, its system of winds, the inconstancy of its millibars, everything, but I could never have imagined that they would be capable of doing what they did to carry
off the numbered locks of my old checkerboard sea with gigantic suction dredges and in its torn crater we saw appear the instantaneous sparkle of the submerged remains of the very ancient city of Santa María de Darién laid low by the whirlwind, we saw the flagship of the first admiral of the ocean sea just as I had seen it from my window, mother, it was identical, trapped by a clump of goose barnacles
that the teeth of the dredges had pulled out by the roots before he had time to order an homage worthy of the historic importance of that wreck, they carried off everything that had been the reasons for my wars and the motive of his power and left behind only the deserted plain of harsh lunar dust that he saw as he passed by the windows with a heavy heart crying out mother of mine Bendición Alvarado
illuminate me with your wisest lights, because on those twilight nights he would be awakened by the fright that the dead of the nation were standing up in their tombs asking him for an accounting of the sea, he felt their scratching on the walls, he heard their unburied voices, the horror of the posthumous looks that spied through keyholes on the trail of his great feet of a dying saurian
in the steaming bog of the last fens of salvation in the shadowy house, he would walk ceaselessly through the cross currents of the tardy trade winds and the false mistrals from the wind machine that Ambassador Eberhart had given him so that he would not think so much about that bad piece of business with the sea, on the top of the reefs he saw the solitary light from the rest home for refugee dictators
who sleep like sitting oxen while I suffer, evil-born bastards, he remembered the farewell snoring of his mother Bendición Alvarado in the suburban mansion, her good birdwoman’s sleep in the room lighted by the vigil of the oregano, if he were only her, he sighed, happy sleeping
mother who never let herself be frightened by the plague, or let herself be intimidated by love or let herself be scared
by death, and on the contrary he was so wrought up that even the flashes of the lighthouse without a sea coming at intervals through the windows seemed to him to have been befouled by the dead, he fled in terror from the fantastic starlike firefly that fumigated in its orbit of a spinning nightmare the fearsome outpouring of the luminous dust of the marrow of the dead, put it out, he shouted,
they put it out, he ordered the building caulked inside and out so that even the slightest wisp of death’s nocturnal mangy air would not creep in through cracks in doors and windows, not even concealed in other fragrances, he remained in the dark feeling his way, breathing with difficulty in the airless heat, feeling himself pass by dark mirrors, walking from fear, until he heard a troop of hoofs