The Autumn of the Patriarch (8 page)

to stop opposite the cemetery
on the plain where the messenger was preaching, and everybody drew apart in a stampede when the men of the presidential guard jumped out of the coach painted with the colors of the flag with their weapons at the ready, no one remained in sight except General Saturno Santos beside his mythical harp with his hand tight on the hilt of his machete, and he seemed fascinated
by the sight of the mortal enemy who appeared on the platform of the coach in his denim suit with no insignia, without weapons, older and more remote as if it had been a hundred years since we saw each other general, he looked tired and lonely to me, his skin yellow from liver trouble and his eyes tending toward teariness, but he had the pale glow of a person who was not only master of his power
but also the power won from his dead, so I made ready to die without resisting because it seemed useless to him to go against an old man who had come from so far off with no more motives or merits than his barbarous appetite for command, but he showed him the manta-ray palm of his hand and said God bless you, stud, the country deserves you, because it has always known that against an invincible
man there is no weapon but friendship, and General Saturno Santos kissed the ground he had trod and asked him the favor of letting me serve you in any way you command general sir while I have the ability in these hands to make my machete sing, and he accepted, agreed, he made him his back-up man but only on the condition that you never get behind me, he made him his accomplice in dominoes and between
the two of them they gave a four-handed skinning to many despots in misfortune, he would have him get barefoot into the presidential coach and take him to diplomatic receptions with that jaguar breath that aroused dogs and made ambassadors’ wives dizzy, he had him sleep across the doorsill of his bedroom so as to relieve himself of the fear of sleeping when life became so harsh that he trembled
at the idea of finding himself alone among the people of his dreams, he kept him close to his confidence at a distance of ten hands for many years until uric acid squeezed off his skill of making his machete sing and he asked the favor that you kill me
yourself general sir so as not to leave someone else the pleasure of killing me when he has no right to, but he ordered him off to die on a good
retirement pension and with a medal of gratitude on the byways of the plains where he had been born and he could not repress his tears when General Saturno Santos put aside his shame to tell him choking and weeping so you see general the time comes for the roughest of us studs to turn into fairies, what a damned thing. So no one understood better than Bendición Alvarado the boyish excitement with
which he got rid of bad times and the lack of sense with which he squandered the earnings of power in order to have as an old man what he had lacked as a child, but it made her angry when they abused his premature innocence by selling him those gringo gewgaws which weren’t all that cheap and didn’t require as much ingenuity as the faked birds of which she had never managed to sell more than four,
it’s fine for you to enjoy it, she said, but think about the future, I don’t want to see you begging hat in hand at the door of some church if tomorrow or later God forbid they take away the chair you’re sitting in, if you only knew how to sing at least, or were an archbishop or a navigator, but you’re only a general, so you’re not good for anything except to command, she advised him to bury in
a safe place the money you have left over from the government, where no one else could find it, just in case you have to leave on the run like those poor presidents of nowhere grazing on oblivion in the house on the reefs and begging a hello from ships, look at yourself in that mirror, she told him, but he didn’t pay any attention to her except that he would ease her disconsolation with the magic
formula of calm down mother, the people love me. Bendición Alvarado was to live for many years lamenting poverty, fighting with the maids over bills from the market and even skipping lunch in order to economize, and no one dared reveal to her that she was one of the richest women in the land, that everything he accumulated from government business he put in her name, that she was not only the owner
of immeasurable land and uncountable livestock but also the local streetcars, the
mails, the telegraph service, and the waters of the nation, so that every boat that plied the tributaries of the Amazon or the territorial seas had to pay her a rental fee which she never knew about down to the day she died, just as she was ignorant for so many years of the fact that her son was not so badly off
as she supposed when he came to the suburban mansion and sank into the wonders of his old-age toys, for in addition to the personal tax that he collected for every head of cattle for the benefit of the country, in addition to payments for his favors and gifts which his partisans sent him to help their interests, he had conceived and had been putting to use for a long time an infallible system for
beating the lottery. Those were the times following his false death, the noisy times, lord, and they weren’t called that as many of us thought because of the underground boom that was felt all over the nation one Saint Heraclius Martyr night and for which there was never any sure explanation, but because of the constant noise of the projects begun that were proclaimed at their start as the greatest
in the world and yet were never completed, a peaceful period during which he summoned councils of government while he took his siesta in the suburban mansion, he would lie in the hammock fanning himself with his hat under the sweet tamarind branches, with his eyes closed he would listen to the doctors with free-flowing words and waxed mustaches who sat around the hammock discussing things, pale
from the heat inside their rough frock coats and celluloid collars, the civilian ministers he detested so much but whom he had appointed once more for convenience and whom he listened to as they argued over matters of state amidst the scandal of roosters chasing after the hens in the courtyard, and the continuous buzz of the cicadas and the insomnia-stricken gramophone in the neighborhood that was
singing the song Susana come Susana, they suddenly fell silent, quiet, the general has fallen asleep, but he would roar without opening his eyes, without stopping his snoring, I’m not asleep you God-damned fools, go on, they went on, until he would feel his way out of the siesta cobwebs and declare that in all this damned-fool talk the only one who makes any
sense is my old friend the minister
of health, by God, the mess was over, the whole mess was coming to an end, he chatted with his personal aides walking them back and forth while he ate with plate in one hand and spoon in the other, he said goodbye to them at the steps with an indifference of do what you think best because in the end I’m the one who gives the orders, God damn it, this farting around and asking whether they wanted
to or didn’t want to was over, God damn it, he cut inaugural ribbons, he showed himself large as life in public taking on the risks of power as he had never done in more peaceful times, what the hell, he played endless games of dominoes with my lifetime friend General Rodrigo de Aguilar and my old friend the minister of health who were the only ones who had enough of his confidence to ask him to free
a prisoner or pardon someone condemned to death, and the only ones who dared ask him to receive in a special audience the beauty queen of the poor, an incredible creature from that miserable wallow we called the dogfight district because all the dogs in the neighborhood had been fighting for many years without a moment’s truce, a lethal redoubt where national guard patrols did not enter because
they would be stripped naked and cars were broken up into their smallest parts with a flick of the hand, where poor stray donkeys would enter by one end of the street and come out the other in a bag of bones, they roasted the sons of the rich general sir, they sold them in the market turned into sausages, just imagine, because Manuela Sanchez of my evil luck had been born there and lived there,
a dungheap marigold whose remarkable beauty was the astonishment of the nation general sir, and he felt so intrigued by the revelation that if all this is as true as you people say I’ll not only receive her in a special audience but I’ll dance the first waltz with her, by God, have them write it up in the newspapers, he ordered, this kind of crap makes a big hit with the poor. Yet, the night after
the audience, while they were playing dominoes, he commented with a certain bitterness to General Rodrigo de Aguilar that the queen of the poor wasn’t even worth dancing with, that she was as common as so many other slum Manuela Sánchezes
with her nymph’s dress of muslin petticoats and the gilt crown with artificial jewels and a rose in her hand under the watchful eye of a mother who looked after
her as if she were made of gold, so he gave her everything she wanted which was only electricity and running water for the dogfight district, but he warned that it was the last time I’ll ever receive anybody on a begging mission, God damn it, I’m not going to talk to poor people any more, he said, before the game was over, he slammed the door, left, he heard the metal tolling of eight o’clock,
he gave the cows in the stables their fodder, he had them bring up the cow chips, he inspected the whole building eating as he walked with his plate in his hand, he was eating stew with beans, white rice, and plantain slices, he counted the sentries from the entranceway to the bedrooms, they were all there and at their posts, fourteen, he saw the rest of his personal guard playing dominoes at the
post in the first courtyard, he saw the lepers lying among the rosebushes, the cripples on the stairs, it was nine o’clock, he put his unfinished plate down on a window sill and found himself feeling around in the muddy atmosphere of the sheds among the concubines who were sleeping as many as three to a bed together with their seven-month runts, he mounted a lump that smelled of yesterday’s stew
and he separated two heads here six legs and three arms there without ever asking who was who or who was the one who finally suckled him without waking up, without dreaming about him, or whose voice it had been that murmured in her sleep from the other bed not to get so excited general you’ll frighten the children, he went back inside the house, checked the locks on the twenty-three windows, lighted
the piles of cow chips every twenty feet from the entranceway to the private rooms, caught the smell of the smoke, remembered an improbable childhood that might have been his and which he only remembered at that instant when the smoke started up and which he forgot forever, he went back turning out the lights in reverse order from the bedrooms to the vestibule and covering the cages of the sleeping
birds whom he counted before draping them with pieces of cloth, forty-eight, once
more he covered the whole house with a lamp in his hand, he saw himself in the mirrors one by one as up to fourteen generals walking with the lighted lamp, it was ten o’clock, everything in order, he went back to the sleeping quarters of the presidential guard, turned out their lights, good night gentlemen, he made
a search of the public offices on the ground floor, the waiting rooms, the toilets, behind the curtains, underneath the tables, there was no one, he took out the bunch of keys which he was able to distinguish by touch one by one, he locked the offices, he went up to the main floor for a room-by-room search locking the doors, he took the jar of honey from its hiding place behind a picture and had
two spoonfuls before retiring, he thought of his mother asleep in the suburban mansion, Bendición Alvarado in her drowsiness of goodbyes between the balm and the oregano with the bloodless hand of a birdwoman oriole painter as a dead mother on her side, have a good night, mother, he said, a very good night to you son Bendición Alvarado answered him in her sleep in the suburban mansion, in front
of his bedroom he hung the lamp by its handle on a hook and he left it hanging by the door while he slept with the absolute order that it was never to be put out because it was the light for him to flee by, it struck eleven, he inspected the house for the last time, in the dark, in case someone had sneaked in thinking he was asleep, he went alone leaving a trail in the dust made by the star of his
gold spur in the fleeting dawns of green flashes of the beams from the turns of the beacon, between two instants of light he saw an aimless leper who was walking in his sleep, he cut him off, led him through the shadows without touching him lighting the way with the lights of his vigilance, put him back among the rosebushes, counted the sentries in the darkness again, went back to his bedroom, seeing
as he went past the windows a sea that was the same in every window, the Caribbean in April, he contemplated it twenty-three times without stopping and it was still as it always was in April like a gilded fen, he heard twelve o’clock, with the last toll of the cathedral clappers he heard the twist of the thin whistle of his hernia, there was no other
sound in the world, he alone was the nation,
he lowered the three crossbars, locked the three locks, threw the three bolts in the bedroom, he urinated sitting down on the portable latrine, he urinated two drops, four drops, seven arduous drops, he fell face down on the floor, fell asleep immediately, did not dream, it was a quarter to three when he awoke drenched in sweat, shaken by the certainty that someone had been looking at him while
he slept, someone who had had the ability to get in without taking off the crossbars, who’s there, he asked, there was no one, he closed his eyes, again he felt he was watched, he opened his eyes to see with fright, and then he saw, God damn it, it was Manuela Sanchez who went across the room without opening the locks because she came and went as was her will by passing through the walls, Manuela
Sanchez of my evil hour with her muslin dress and the hot coal of a rose in her hand and the natural smell of licorice of her breathing, tell me this delirium isn’t true, he said, tell me it’s not you, tell me that this deadly dizziness isn’t the licorice stagnation of your breath, but it was she, it was her rose, it was her hot breath which perfumed the air of the bedroom like an obstinate downwind
with more dominion and more antiquity than the snorting of the sea, Manuela Sanchez of my disaster, you who weren’t written on the palm of my hand, or in my coffee grounds, or even in the death waters of my basins, don’t use up my breathing air, my dreams of sleep, the confines of this room where no woman had ever entered or was to enter, extinguish that rose, he moaned, while he felt around for