The Autumn of the Patriarch (30 page)

in the crater of the sea and it was the moon rising with its decrepit snows, frightening, take it away, he shouted, put out the stars, damn it, by order of God, but nobody ran to him in the former offices, the blind men on the stairs, the lepers pearled with dew who rose up as he passed the stubble of the first rosebushes to implore the salt of health from his hands, and that was when it happened,
disbelievers all over the world, shitty idolaters, it came to pass that he touched our heads as he went by, one by one, he touched each one of us on the place of our defects with a smooth and wise hand that was the hand of truth, and the instant he touched us we recovered the health of our bodies and the repose of our souls and we recovered the strength and will to live, and we saw the blind men
dazzled by the glow of the roses, we saw the cripples jumping on the stairways and we saw this my own skin of a newborn child which I go about exhibiting in carnivals all over the world so that everyone will know about the miracle and this fragrance of premature lilies from the scars of my sores which I go spreading over the face of the earth for the derision of the unfaithful and as a lesson for
libertines, they shouted it in cities and on byways, at dances and parades, trying to infuse in the crowds the terror of the miracle, but nobody thought it was true, we thought it was just one
more of the many aulic messages they sent to villages with an entourage of old quacks to try to convince us of the last thing we needed to believe that he had given skin back to lepers, sight to the blind,
agility to cripples, we thought that it was the last resort of the regime to call attention to an improbable president whose personal guard was reduced to a patrol of recruits against the unanimous advice of the cabinet who had insisted no general sir, tighter protection was necessary, at least a unit of riflemen general sir, but he had insisted that no one had any need or desire to kill me, you
people are the only ones, my useless ministers, my lazy commanders, except that you don’t dare and never will dare kill me because you know that afterward you’ll have to kill each other, so that all that was left was the guard of rookies for an extinguished house where the cows wandered with no law or order from the first vestibule to the hearing room, they had eaten the flowered lawns on the tapestries
general sir, they had eaten the files, but he didn’t hear them, he had seen the first cow come up one October afternoon when it was impossible to stay outside because of the fury of the cloudburst, he had tried to chase it away with his hands, cow, cow, remembering suddenly that cow was written with a c, he had seen it another time eating the lampshades at a moment in life when he was beginning
to understand that it wasn’t worthwhile moving toward the stairs to chase a cow away, he had found two of them in the ballroom exasperated by the hens who were flying up to peck at the ticks on their backs, so that on recent nights when we saw lights that looked like navigational signals and we heard a disaster of large-animal hoofs behind the fortified walls it was because he was going about
with a candle fighting with the cows over a place to sleep while outside his public life went on without him, every day in the newspapers of the regime we saw his fictionalized photographs at civil and military audiences in which they showed him to us with a different uniform according to the character of the occasion, every year for so many years on the major holidays of the nation’s anniversaries
we would hear the repeated harangues on the radio, he was present in our lives
as we left home, as we went to church, as we ate and as we slept, when it was public knowledge that he could barely make his way along with his rustic hiker’s boots in the decrepit building whose service had been reduced at that time to three or four orderlies who fed him and kept the honey hiding places well supplied
and chased away the cows who had made a shambles of the general staff of porcelain marshals in the forbidden office where he was to die according to the prognostications of oracles that he himself had forgotten, they stood hanging on his whimsical orders until he hung the lamp on the door and they heard the noise of the three locks, the three bolts, the three bars of the bedroom rarefied by the
lack of sea, and then they would withdraw to their quarters on the ground floor convinced that he was at the mercy of his dreams of a solitary drowned man until dawn, but he would awaken with unforeseen starts, he would browse through his insomnia, dragging his great feet of an apparition through the immense building in darkness disturbed only by the patient digestion of the cows and the obtuse breathing
of the hens roosting on the viceroys’ coatracks, he heard moon winds in the darkness, he felt the steps of time in the darkness, he saw his mother Bendición Alvarado sweeping in the darkness with the broom of green branches with which she had swept away the leaf storm of the illustrious singed heroes of Cornelius Nepos in the original, the immemorial rhetoric of Livius Andronicus and Cecilius
Stratus who were reduced to office trash on the night of blood when he entered the ownerless house of power for the first time while outside the last suicide barricades of the distinguished Latinist General Lautaro Munoz whom God keep in his holy kingdom were resisting, they had crossed the courtyard under the glow of the city in flames, leaping over the dead hulks of the personal bodyguard of
the illustrious president, he shaking from the heat of tertian fever and his mother Bendición Alvarado with no other arm but the broom of green branches, they went up the stairs stumbling in the darkness over the horses of the splendid presidential squiry who were still bleeding from the first vestibule to the
hearing room, it was difficult to breathe inside the closed building because of the
sour gunpowder smell of the dead horses, along the corridors we saw prints of bare feet stained with horse blood, we saw the marks of palms stained with horse blood on the walls, and in the pool of blood in the hearing room we saw the drained body of a beautiful Florentine woman in an evening gown with a saber thrust through her heart, and she was the wife of the president, and beside her we saw the
corpse of a little girl who looked like a toy windup ballerina with a pistol shot in her forehead, and she was his nine-year-old daughter, and they saw the corpse of the Garibaldian Caesar who was President Lautaro Muñoz, the ablest and most capable of the fourteen federalist generals who had succeeded to power through successive coups during eleven years of bloody rivalries but also the only one
who dared say no in his own tongue to the English consul, and there he was stretched out like a mullet, barefoot, suffering the punishment for his daring with his skull pierced by a pistol shot he had given himself in the palate after having killed his wife and daughter and his forty-two Andalusian horses so that they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the punitive expedition of the British fleet,
and that was when Commander Kitchener told me pointing to the body you see, general, that’s what happens to those who raise their hands against their fathers, don’t forget it when you’re in your own kingdom, he told him, although he already was after so many nights of insomnia from waiting, so many postponed rages, so many digested humiliations, there he was, mother, proclaimed supreme commander
of the three branches of the armed forces and president of the republic for such a time as was necessary for the reestablishment of order and the economic balance of the nation, it had been unanimously resolved by the last field commanders of the federation in agreement with the senate and chamber of deputies in joint session and the backing of the British fleet from my so many and so difficult nights
of domino with Consul Macdonall, except that neither I nor anybody else believed it at the beginning, naturally, who could have believed it in the
tumult of that frightening night since Bendición Alvarado herself still didn’t believe on her bed of putrefaction when she evoked the memory of the son who couldn’t find where to begin to govern in that disorder, they couldn’t find a piece of grass
to cook or to use to warm up that immense unfurnished house in which nothing of value was left except the moth-eaten oil paintings of viceroys and archbishops from the dead grandeur of Spain, everything else had been carried off little by little by previous presidents for their private domains, they didn’t even leave a trace of the wallpaper with heroic episodes on the walls, the bedrooms were full
of barracks trash, everywhere there were forgotten traces of historic massacres and slogans written with a bloody finger by illusory presidents who lasted one night, but there wasn’t even a mat to lie down on to sweat out a fever, so his mother Bendición Alvarado pulled down a curtain to wrap me in and left him lying in a corner of the main stairway while with the broom of green branches she swept
out the presidential quarters that the English were finishing sacking, she swept the whole floor defending herself with broom blows from this pack of filibusters who were trying to rape her from behind doors, and a short while before dawn she sat down to rest beside her son who was done in by chills, wrapped in the velvet curtain, the sweat pouring off him on the last step of the devastated main
stairway while she tried to bring his fever down with her easy calculations of don’t let this disorder get you down, son, it’s only a matter of buying a few leather stools the cheapest you can find and they’ll be painted with flowers and animals, I’ll paint them myself, she said, it’s only a matter of buying some hammocks for when visitors come, those especially, hammocks, because in a house like
this there must be a lot of unannounced visitors at all hours, she said, we’ll buy a church table to eat on, we’ll buy iron utensils and pewter plates so they can suffer the bad life of soldiers, we’ll buy a decent jug for drinking water and a charcoal stove and that’s it, after all it’s the government’s money, she said to console him, but he wasn’t listening to her, depressed by the first mallow
light of dawn which was
lighting up the hidden side of truth in living flesh, conscious of being nothing but a pitiful old man who was shaking with fever sitting on the stairs thinking without love mother of mine Bendición Alvarado so that was the whole mess, damn it, so power was that house of castaways, that human smell of burned horses, that desolate dawn of another twelfth of August just like
all the others was the date of power, mother, what kind of a mess have we got ourselves into, suffering the original upset, the atavistic fear of the new century of darkness that was rising up in the world without his permission, the cocks were crowing at sea, the English were singing in English gathering up the dead from the courtyard when his mother Bendición Alvarado ended her merry accounting
with the remnant of relief of I’m not frightened by the things we have to buy and the chores we have to do, what frightens me is the number of sheets to be washed in this house, and then it was he who leaned on the strength of his disillusionment to try to console her with sleep easy, mother, in this country no president lasts long, he told her, and not only did he believe it then but he kept
on believing it for every instant of his very long life of a sedentary despot, all the more as life convinced him more and more that the long years of power don’t bring any two days that are just alike, that there would always be a hidden intention in the proposals of a prime minister when he released the dazzling display of truth in the routine Wednesday report, and he would only smile, don’t tell
me the truth, counselor, because we’ll run the risk that it will be believed, thwarting with that single phrase a whole laborious strategy of the cabinet to try to get him to sign without asking questions, for he had never seemed more lucid to me than during the time of the rumors that he urinated in his pants during official visits without noticing it, he seemed more severe as he sank into the
backwaters of decrepitude with the slippers of a terminal case and the eyeglasses with only one temple which was tied on with a piece of thread and his manner had become more intense and his instinct more certain in putting aside what was inopportune and signing what was needed without reading it, God damn
it, because when all’s said and done nobody pays any attention to me, he smiled, see how
I ordered them to put up a barrier in the vestibule so the cows wouldn’t climb up the stairs, and there it was again, so boss, so boss, it had stuck its head through the office window and was eating the paper flowers on the altar of the nation, but he limited himself to smiling you see what I’m talking about, counselor, what’s got this country all fucked up is the fact that no one has ever paid any
attention to me, he said, and he said it with a clearness of judgment that seemed impossible at his age, even so Ambassador Kippling said in his suppressed memoirs that around that time he had found him in a pitiful state of senile unawareness which did not even permit him to take care of himself in the most childish acts, he told how he found him soaked in an incessant and salty matter which flowed
from his skin, that he had acquired the huge size of a drowned man and he had opened his shirt to show me the tight and lucid body of a dry-land drowned man in whose cracks and crannies parasites from the reefs at the bottom of the sea were proliferating, he had a ship remora on his back, polyps and microscopic crustaceans in his armpits, but he was convinced that those sproutings from reefs
were only the first symptoms of the spontaneous return of the sea that you people carried off, my dear Johnson, because seas are like cats, he said, they always come home, convinced that the rows of goose barnacles in his crotch were the secret announcement of a happy dawn in which he was going to open his bedroom window and would see again the three caravels of the admiral of the ocean sea who had
grown weary of searching the whole world over to see if what they had told him was true who had smooth hands like his and like those of so many other great men of history, he had ordered him brought before him, by force if necessary, when other navigators told him they had seen him mapping the innumerable islands of the neighboring seas changing their old names of military men to the names of kings
and saints while he sought in native science the only thing that really interested him which was to discover some masterful hair-restorer for his incipient baldness, we had