The Autumn of the Patriarch (7 page)

complaining out of habit or disillusionment but because he no longer made her a participant in his shake-ups nor did he hurry over as before to share the best secrets of power with her, and he had changed so much since the times of the marines that to Bendición Alvarado he seemed to be older than she, to have left her behind in time, she heard him stumble over words, his concept of reality became
entangled, sometimes he drooled, and she was struck with the compassion that was not a mother’s but a daughter’s when she saw him arrive at the suburban mansion loaded down with packages and desperate to open them all at the same time, he cut the twine with his teeth, broke his fingernails on the hoops before she could get the scissors from her sewing basket, dug everything out from the underbrush
of debris with flailing hands as he drowned in his high-flying anxiety, look at all this wonderful stuff, mother, he said, a live mermaid in a fishbowl, a lifesize wind-up angel who flew about the room striking the hour with its bell, a gigantic shell in which the listener didn’t hear the sound of the waves and the sea wind but the strains of the national anthem, what fancy stuff, mother, now you
can see how nice it is not to be poor, he said, but she couldn’t feed his enthusiasm and began chewing on the brushes used to paint orioles so her son would not notice that her heart was crumbling with pity thinking back on a past that no one knew as well as she, remembering how hard it had been for him to stay in the chair he was sitting in, but not these days, lord, not these easy times when power
was a tangible and unique matter, a little glass ball in the palm of the hand, as he said, but when he was a fugitive shad swimming
around without god or law in a neighborhood palace pursued by the voracious swarm of the surviving leaders of the federalist war who had helped overthrow the general-poet Lautaro Muñoz, an enlightened despot whom God keep in His holy glory with his Suetonius missals
in Latin and his forty-two pedigreed horses, and in exchange for their armed help they had taken over the ranches and livestock of the outlawed former owners and had divided the country up into autonomous provinces with the unanswerable argument that this is federalism general, this is what we have shed the blood of our veins for, and they were absolute monarchs in their territories, with their
own laws, their personal patriotic holidays, their paper money which they signed themselves, their dress uniforms with sabers encrusted with precious stones and hussar jackets with gold frogs and three-cornered hats with peacock-tail plumes copied from ancient prints of viceroys of the country before them, and they were wild and sentimental, lord, they would come into the presidential palace through
the main door, with no one’s permission since the nation belongs to all general, that’s why we’ve sacrificed our lives for it, they camped out in the ballroom with their respective harems and the farm animals which they demanded as tribute for peace as they went along everywhere so that they would always have something to eat, they brought along personal escorts of barbarian mercenaries who instead
of boots used rags to clothe their feet and who could barely express themselves in Christian tongue but were wise in tricks of dice and ferocious and skilled in the manipulation of weapons of war, so that the house of power was like a gypsy encampment, lord, it had the thick smell of a river at flood-tide, the officers of the general staff had taken the furniture of the republic to their ranches,
they played dominoes gambling away the privileges of government indifferent to the entreaties of his mother Bendición Alvarado who did not have a moment’s rest trying to sweep up so much fairground garbage, trying to put just one little bit of order into that shipwreck, for she was the only one who had made any attempt to resist the irredeemable debasement of the
liberal crusade, only she had
tried to drive them out with her broom when she saw the house perverted by those evil-living reprobates who fought over the large chairs of the high command with playing-card altercations, she watched them do sodomite business behind the piano, she watched them shit in the alabaster amphoras even though she told them not to, lord, they weren’t portable toilets they were amphoras recovered from the
seas of Pantelleria, but they insisted that they were rich men’s pisspots, lord, it was humanly impossible to stop General Adriano Guzman from attending the diplomatic party celebrating the tenth year of my rise to power, although no one could have imagined what awaited us when he appeared in the ballroom wearing an austere linen uniform chosen especially for the occasion, he came without weapons,
just as he had promised me on his word as a soldier, with his escort of escaped French prisoners in civilian clothes and loaded down with goodies from Cayenne which General Adriano Guzman distributed one by one to the wives of ambassadors and ministers after asking permission from their husbands with a bow, for that was what his mercenaries had told him was considered proper in Versailles and so
he went through it with the rare genius of a gentleman, and then he sat in a corner of the ballroom with his attention on the dance and nodding his head in approval, very good, he said, these stuck-ups from Europeland dance good, he said, to each his own, he said, so forgotten in his easy chair that only I noticed that one of his aides was filling his glass with champagne after each sip, and as the
hours passed he was becoming more tense and flushed than he normally was, he opened a button on his sweat-soaked tunic every time the pressure of a repressed belch came all the way up to eye level, he was moaning with drowsiness, mother, and all of a sudden he got up with difficulty during a pause in the dancing and finally unbuttoned his tunic completely and then his fly and he stood there wide
open and staling away on the perfumed décolletages of the ladies of the ambassadors and ministers with his musty old hose of a buzzard’s tool, with his sour war-drunkard’s urine he soaked the muslin laps, the gold
brocade bosoms, the ostrich-feather fans, singing impassively in the midst of the panic I’m the gallant swain who waters the roses of your bower, oh lovely rose in bloom, he sang on,
with no one daring to control him, not even he, because I knew I had more power than any one of them but much less than two of them plotting together, still unaware that he saw the others just as they were while the others were never able to glimpse the hidden thoughts of the granite old man whose serenity was matched only by his smooth-sailing prudence and his immense disposition for waiting, we
saw only his lugubrious eyes, his thin lips, the chaste maiden’s hand which did not even tremble on the hilt of his saber that noon of horror when they came to him with the news general sir that General Narciso Lopez high on green pot and anisette had hauled a cadet of the presidential guard into a toilet and warmed him up as he saw fit with the resources of a wild woman and then obliged him put
it all into me, God damn it, that’s an order, everything, my love, even your golden little balls, weeping with pain, weeping with rage, until he found himself vomiting with humiliation on all fours with his head stuck in the fetid vapors of the toilet bowl, and then he lifted the Adonic cadet up into the air and impaled him with a plainsman’s lance onto the springtime tapestry of the audience room
like a butterfly and no one dared take him down for three days, poor man, because all he did was keep an eye on his former comrades in arms so that they would not hatch plots but without getting enmeshed in their lives, convinced that they themselves would exterminate each other among themselves before they came to him with the news general sir that members of General Jesucristo Sanchez’s escort
had been forced to beat him to death with chairs when he had an attack of rabies that he got from a cat bite, poor man, he scarcely looked up from his domino game when they whispered in his ear the news general sir that General Lotario Sereno had been drowned when his horse had suddenly died under him as he was fording a river, poor man, he barely blinked when they came to him with the news general
sir that General Narciso Lopez had shoved a dynamite
stick up his ass and blown his guts out over the shame of his unconquerable pederasty, and he said poor man as if he had had nothing to do with those infamous deaths and he issued the same decree of posthumous honors for all, proclaiming them martyrs who had fallen in acts of service and he had them entombed in the national pantheon with magnificent
pomp and all on the same level because a nation without heroes is a house without doors, he said, and when there were only six combat generals left in all the land he invited them to celebrate his birthday with a carousal of comrades in the presidential palace, all of them together, lord, even General Jacinto Algarabía who was the darkest and shrewdest, who prided himself on having a son
by his own mother and only drank wood alcohol with gunpowder in it, with no one else in the banquet hall like the good old days general, all without weapons like blood brothers but with the men of their escorts crowded into the next room, all loaded down with magnificent gifts for the only one of us who has been able to understand us all, they said, meaning that he was the only one who had learned
how to manage them, the only one who had succeeded in getting out of the bowels of his remote lair on the highland plains the legendary General Saturno Santos, a full-blooded Indian, unsure, who always went around like the whore mother that gave me birth with his foot on the ground general sir because we roughnecks can’t breathe unless we feel the earth, he had arrived wrapped in a cape with bright-colored
prints of strange animals on it, he came alone, as he always went about, without an escort, preceded by a gloomy aura, with no arms except a cane machete which he refused to take off his belt because it wasn’t a weapon of war but one for work, and as a gift he brought me an eagle trained to fight in men’s wars, and he brought his harp, mother, that sacred instrument whose notes could conjure
up storms and hasten the cycles of harvest time and which General Saturno Santos plucked with a skill from his heart that awoke in all of us the nostalgia for the nights of horror of the war, mother, it aroused in us the dog-mange smell of war, it spun around in our souls the war song of the golden boat
that will lead us on, they sang it in a chorus with all their heart, mother, I sent myself
back from the bridge bathed in tears, they sang, while they ate a turkey stuffed with plums and half a suckling pig and each one drank from his personal bottle, each one his own alcohol, all except him and General Saturno Santos who had never tasted a drop of liquor in all their lives, nor smoked, nor eaten more than what was indispensable for life, in my honor they sang in a chorus the serenade King
David sang, with tears they wailed out all the birthday songs that had been sung before Consul Hanemann came to us with the novelty general sir of that phonograph with a horn speaker and its cylinder of happy birthday in English, they sang half-asleep, half-dead from drink, not worrying any more about the taciturn old man who at the stroke of twelve took down the lamp and went to inspect the house
before retiring in accordance with his barracks-bred custom and he saw for the last time as he returned on his way through the banquet hall the six generals piled together on the floor, he saw them in embrace, inert and placid, under the protection of the five escort groups who kept watch among themselves, because even in sleep and in embrace they were afraid of each other almost as much as each
one of them was afraid of him and as he was afraid of two of them in cahoots, and he put the lamp back on the mantel and closed the three locks, the three bolts, the three bars of his bedroom, and lay down on the floor face down, his right arm serving as a pillow at the instant that the foundations of the building shook with the compact explosion of all the escorts’ weapons going off at the same
time, one single time, by God, with no intermediate sound, no moan, and again, by God, and that was that, the mess was over, all that was left was a lingering smell of gunpowder in the silence of the world, only he remained safe forever from the anxieties of power as in the first mallow-soft rays of the new day he saw the orderlies on duty sloshing through the swamp of blood in the banquet hall,
he saw his mother Bendición Alvarado seized by a dizzy spell of horror as she discovered that the walls oozed blood no matter how hard she scrubbed them with lye and
ash, lord, that the rugs kept on giving off blood no matter how much she wrung them out, and all the more blood poured in torrents through corridors and offices the more they worked desperately to wash it out in order to hide the
extent of the massacre of the last heirs of our war who according to the official statement had been assassinated by their own maddened escorts and their bodies wrapped in the national flag filled the pantheon of patriots with a funeral worthy of a bishop, for not one single man of the escort had escaped alive from the bloody roundup, not one general, except General Saturno Santos who was armored
by his strings of scapulars and who knew Indian secrets of how to change his form at will, curse him, he could turn into an armadillo or a pond general, he could become thunder, and he knew it was true because his most astute trackers had lost the trail ever since last Christmas, the best-trained jaguar hounds looked for him in the opposite direction, he had seen him in the flesh in the king of spades
in his sibyls’ cards, and he was alive, sleeping by day and traveling by night off the beaten track on land and water, but he kept leaving a trail of prayers that confused his pursuers’ judgment and tired out the will of his enemies, but he never gave up the search for one instant day and night for years and years until many years later when he saw through the window of the presidential train
a crowd of men and women with their children and animals and cooking utensils as he had seen so many times behind the troops in wartime, he saw them parading in the rain carrying their sick in hammocks strung to poles behind a very pale man in a burlap tunic who says he’s a divine messenger general sir, and he slapped his forehead and said to himself there he is, God damn it, and there was General
Saturno Santos begging off the charity of the pilgrims with the charms of his unstrung harp, he was miserable and gloomy, with a beat-up felt hat and a poncho in tatters, but even in that pitiful state he was not as easy to kill as he thought for he had decapitated three of his best men with his machete, he had stood up to the fiercest of them with such valor and ability that he ordered the train