The Autumn of the Patriarch (4 page)

you’re already killing me, it would be better now to take advantage and look truth in the face general, so you can know that no one has ever told you what he really thinks but that everyone tells you what he knows you want to hear while he bows to your face and thumbs his nose at you from behind, you might even thank fate that I’m the man who most pities you in this world because I’m the only one
who looks like you, the only one honorable enough to sing out to you what everyone says that you’re president of nobody and that you’re not on the throne because of your big guns but because the English sat you
there and the gringos kept you there with the pair of balls on their battleship, because I saw you scurrying like a cockroach this way and that, back and forth when the gringos shouted
to you we’re leaving you here with your nigger whorehouse so let’s see if you can put it all together without us, and if you never got out of your chair since that time or have never gotten out it’s probably not because you don’t want to but because you can’t, recognize it, because you know that the moment they see you on the street dressed as a mortal they’re going to fall on you like a pack of dogs
to collect from you in one case for the killings at Santa Maria del Altar, in another for the prisoners thrown into the moat of the harbor fort to be eaten by crocodiles, in another for the people you skin alive and send their hides to their families as a lesson, he said, dipping into the bottomless well of his long-postponed rancor and drawing out the string of atrocities of his regime of infamy,
until he could no longer tell him any more because a fiery rake tore his guts apart, his heart softened again and he ended with no intent of offense but almost one of supplication I’m serious general, take advantage of the fact that I’m dying now and die with me, no one has more right than I to tell you this because I never had any intention of looking like anyone much less a national hero but
only a sad little glass-blower making bottles like my father, take a chance, general, it doesn’t hurt as much as it seems, and he said it with an air of such serene truth that the rage to answer did not overcome him but rather he tried to hold him up in his chair when he saw that he was starting to twist about and hold his belly in his hands and was sobbing with tears of pain and shame I’m so sorry
general but I’m shitting in my pants and he thought he meant it in a figurative sense that he was dying of fear, but Patricio Aragonés answered him no, I mean real shit shitting general and he managed to beseech him hold on Patricio Aragonés, hold on, we generals of the fatherland have to die like men even if we pay for it with our lives, but he said it too late because Patricio Aragonés fell
face down and on top of him kicking with fear and soaked in shit and tears. In the office next to the hearing
room he had to scrub the body with a dishrag and soap to get rid of the bad smell, he dressed it in the clothes he was wearing, he put the canvas truss on, the boots, the gold spur on the left heel, feeling as he did it that he was changing into the most solitary man on earth, and last
of all he erased all traces of the farce and reproduced the perfection down to the tiniest details that he had seen with his own eyes in the premonitory waters of the basins so that at dawn on the next day the cleaning women would find the body as they did find it stretched out face down on the floor of the office, dead for the first time of natural causes in his sleep with his denim uniform with
no insignia, boots, the gold spur, and his right arm folded under his head as a pillow. They did not spread the news immediately that time either, contrary to what he expected, but many prudent hours passed with clandestine investigations, secret agreements among the heirs of the regime who were trying to gain time by denying the rumor of death with all manner of contrary versions, they brought his
mother Bendición Alvarado out into the commercial district to show that she was not wearing a mourning face, they dressed me in a flowered dress like a chippy, sir, they made me buy a macaw-feather hat so that everybody would see me happy, they made me buy every piece of junk to be found in the stores in spite of my telling them no, sir, it wasn’t a time for buying but for crying because even I
believed that it was really my son who had died, and they forced me to smile when people took full-length pictures of me because the military men said it had to be done for the good of the country while he wondered confused in his hiding place what’s happening out in the world since nothing had changed with the trick of his death, how was it that the sun had risen and had risen again without stumbling,
why that Sunday look, mother, why the same heat without me, he was wondering in surprise when a sudden cannon shot sounded from the fortress on the harbor and the main bells of the cathedral began to toll and all the way up to government house came the surge of the crowds that were rising up out of the age-old morass with the greatest piece of news
in the world, and then he half-opened the bedroom
door and peeped into the audience room and saw himself laid out more dead and more decorated than all the dead popes of Christendom, wounded by the horror and the shame of his own body of a military stud lying among the flowers, his face pale with powder, his lips painted, the hard hands of a dauntless young lady crossed over the chest armored with military decorations, the showy dress uniform
with the ten pips of general of the universe, a rank someone had invented for him after death, the king-of-spades saber he never used, the patent leather boots with two gold spurs, the vast paraphernalia of power and the lugubrious martial glories reduced to his human size of a fagot lying in state, God damn it, that can’t be me, he said to himself in a fury it’s not right, God damn it, he said
to himself, contemplating the procession that was parading around his corpse, and for an instant he forgot the murky reasons for the farce and felt raped and diminished by the inclemency of death toward the majesty of power, he saw life without him, he saw with a certain compassion how men were bereft of his authority, he saw with a hidden uneasiness those who had only come to decipher the enigma
of whether it really was or was not he, he saw a very old man who gave the masonic salute from the days of the federalist war, he saw a man in mourning who kissed his ring, he saw a schoolgirl who laid a flower on him, he saw a fishwife who could not resist the truth of his death and strewed her basket of fresh fish all over the floor and embraced the perfumed corpse sobbing aloud that it was him,
my God, what’s going to become of us without him, she wept, so it was him, they shouted, it was him, shouted the throng suffocated by the sun in the main square and then the bells of the cathedral stopped tolling their knell and those of all the churches announced a Wednesday of jubilation, Easter rockets exploded, Roman candles, drums of liberation, and he watched the assault groups that came in
through the windows in the face of the silent complacency of the guard, he watched the ferocious leaders who dispersed the procession with clubs and knocked down the inconsolable fishwife, he watched the
ones who attacked the corpse, the eight men who took it out of its immemorial state and its chimerical time of agapanthus lilies and sunflowers and dragged it down the stairs, those who gutted
the insides of that paradise of opulence and misfortune thinking they were destroying the lair of power forever, knocking over the papier-mâché Doric capitals, velvet curtains and Babylonic columns crowned with alabaster palm trees, throwing birdcages out the window, the throne of the viceroys, the grand piano, breaking the funeral urns with the ashes of unknown patriots and Gobelin tapestries of
maidens asleep in gondolas of disillusion and enormous oil paintings of bishops and archaic military men and inconceivable naval battles, annihilating that world so that in the memory of future generations not the slightest memory of the cursed line of men of arms would remain, and then he peeped into the street through the slats in the blinds to see what degree the ravages Qf defenestration had
reached and with just one glance he saw more infamy and more ingratitude than had ever been seen and wept over by my eyes since the day I was born, mother, he saw his merry widows leaving the building through the service entrance leading the cows from my stables by the halter, carrying off government furniture, the jars of honey from your hives, mother, he saw his seven-month runts making music of
jubilation with kitchen pots and treasures from the crystal set and the table service for pontificial banquets singing with street-urchin shouts my papa is dead, hurray for freedom, he saw the bonfire that had been lighted on the main square to burn the official portraits and the almanac lithographs that had been in all places and at all times ever since the beginning of his regime, and he saw his
own body dragged by as it left behind along the street a trail of medals and epaulets, dolman buttons, strands of brocade and frog embroidery and tassels from playing-card sabers and the ten sad pips of the king of the universe, mother, look what they’ve done to me, he said, feeling in his own flesh the ignominy of the spitting and the sickbed pans that were thrown on him from the balconies as he
went by, horrified with the idea of being
quartered and devoured by dogs and vultures amidst the delirious howls and the roar of fireworks celebrating the carnival of my death. When the cataclysm had passed he still heard the distant music of the windless afternoon, he went on killing mosquitoes and with the same slaps trying to kill the katydids in his ears which hindered him in his thinking,
he still saw the light of the fires on the horizon, the lighthouse that tinted him with green every thirty seconds through the slits in the blinds, the natural breathing of daily life which was getting to be the same again while his death was changing into a different death more like so many others in the past, the incessant torrent of reality which was carrying him off toward the no man’s land of
compassion and oblivion, God damn it, fuck death, he exclaimed, and then he left his hiding place exalted by the certainty that his grandest hour had struck, he went through the sacked salons dragging his thick phantom feet in the midst of the ruins of his former life in the shadows that smelled of dying flowers and burial candlewicks, he pushed open the door of the cabinet room, heard through the
smoky air the thin voices around the long walnut table, and saw through the smoke that all the ones he wanted to be there were there, the liberals who had sold the federalist war, the conservatives who had bought it, the generals of the high command, three of his cabinet ministers, the archbishop primate and Ambassador Schontner, all together in one single plot calling for the unity of all against
the despotism of centuries so that they could divide up among themselves the booty of his death, so absorbed in the depths of greed that no one noticed the appearance of the unburied president who gave a single blow with the palm of his hand on the table, and shouted aha! and that was all he had to do, for when he lifted his hand from the table the stampede of panic was over and all that was left
in the room were the overflowing ashtrays, the coffee mugs, the chairs flung on the floor, and my comrade of a lifetime General Rodrigo de Aguilar in battle dress, minute, impassive, wafting away the smoke with his one hand and indicating to him to drop to the floor general sir because now the fun is going to begin,
and they both dropped to the floor at the instant the machine guns’ death jubilation
started up by the front of the building, the butcher feast of the presidential guard who with great pleasure and great honor general sir carried out his fierce orders that no one should escape alive from the meeting where treason was being hatched, any who tried to escape through the main door were mowed down with machine-gun bursts, the ones who were hanging out the windows were shot down
like birds from a blind, the ones who were able to escape the encirclement and took refuge in nearby houses were degutted with phosphorus grenades, and they finished off the wounded in accordance with the presidential criterion that any survivor is a dangerous enemy as long as he lives, while he remained lying face down on the floor two feet away from General Rodrigo de Aguilar tolerating the hail
of glass and plaster that came through the windows with every explosion, murmuring without pause as if he were praying, that’s it, old friend, that’s it, the trouble’s over, from now on I’m going to rule alone with no dogs to bark at me, tomorrow we’ll have to see what good has come out of this mother fucking mess and what hasn’t and if we don’t have anything to sit on in the meantime we’ll get six
leather stools of the cheapest sort, some straw mats and put them here and there to cover up the holes, we’ll buy a few more odds and ends, and that’s it, no plates, no spoons, no nothing, I’ll bring it all from the barracks, because I’m not going to have any military men or officers around, God damn it, all they’re good for is to waste more milk and when there’s trouble, as we’ve seen, they spit
on the hand that feeds them, I’ll only keep the presidential guard who are straight shooters and brave fellows and I’m not going to name any cabinet, God damn it, just a good minister of health which is the only thing anyone really needs in life, and maybe another one with a good hand for what has to be put in writing, and that way we can rent out the ministries and barracks and save the money
for help, because what’s needed here isn’t people but money, we’ll get two good maids, one for cleaning and cooking and the other to wash and iron, and I’ll take care of the cows
and the birds myself when we get some, and no more of jumping whores in the toilets or lepers in the rosebushes or doctors of philosophy who know everything or wise politicians who see everything, because after all this
is a presidential palace and not a nigger whorehouse as Patricio Aragonés said the gringos said, and I’m more than enough all alone to keep on ruling until the comet comes by again, and not just once but ten times, because the way I am I don’t intend to die again, God damn it, let other people die, he said, talking without any pauses to think, as if he were reciting by heart, because he had known
ever since the war that thinking aloud was driving off the fear of the dynamite charges that were shaking the building, making plans for tomorrow in the morning and for the coming century at dusk until the last coup de grace rang out in the street and General Rodrigo de Aguilar crawled over to the window and gave the order to get the garbage wagons and take away the dead bodies and he left the