The Autumn of the Patriarch (10 page)

old man disguised as a civilian inside the innocent linen suit, they saw his orphan paleness, his face that had seen it dawn so many mornings, that had wept in secret, no longer bothered about what they might have thought of the hand on his chest, the archaic taciturn animal who went along leaving a trail of illusions of look at him go since he can’t make, it any more in the glassy heat of the
forbidden streets, until the suspicions of strange illnesses became so loud and repeated they finally stumbled onto the truth that he was not at his mother’s house but in the shadowy parlor of Manuela Sanchez’s secret cove under the implacable vigilance of the mother who knitted without stopping to take a breath, because it was for her that he bought the ingenious machines that so saddened Bendición
Alvarado, he tried to seduce her with the mystery of magnetic needles, the January snowstorms captive in quartz paperweights, apparatuses of astronomers and pharmacists, pyrographs, manometers, metronomes and gyroscopes which he kept on buying from anyone who would sell them against the advice of his mother, and in opposition to his own steely avarice, and only for the pleasure of enjoying-them
with Manuela Sánchez,
he would put to her ear the patriotic shell that did not have the sound of the sea inside but the military marches that exalted his regime, he would bring the flame of a match close to the thermometers so you can see the oppressive mercury of what I think inside go up and down, he looked at Manuela Sanchez without asking her for anything, without expressing his intentions
to her, but he would overwhelm her in silence with those demented presents to try to tell her with them what he was capable of saying, for he only knew how to show his most intimate urges with the visible symbols of his uncommon power as on Manuela Sanchez’s birthday when he had asked her to open the window and she opened it and I was petrified with fright to see what they had done to my poor dogfight
district, I saw the white wooden houses with canvas awnings and terraces with flowers, the blue lawns with their spinning sprinklers, the peacocks, the glacial insecticide wind, a vile replica of the former residences of the occupation officials which had been minutely reproduced at night and in silence, they had slit the throats of the dogs, they had removed the former inhabitants from their
homes for they had no right to be the neighbors of a queen and sent them off to rot in some other dungheap, and in that way in a few furtive nights they had built the new district of Manuela Sanchez so you could see it from your window on your name day, there it is, queen, so that you may have many happy years to come, so see whether or not these displays of power were able to soften your courteous
but unconquerable behavior, my mama is there with the fetters of my honor, and he drowned in his urges, swallowed his rage, drank with slow grandfather sips the cool soursop water of pity which she had prepared to give drink to the thirsty one, he bore up under the icy jabs in his temples so that the imperfections of age would not be revealed, so that you will not love me out of pity after he
had exhausted all the resources for her to have loved him out of love, she left him in such a state of only when I’m with you I don’t have the spirit even to be there, agonizing to stroke her if only with his breath before the human-size archangel should fly inside the house ringing the bell
of my fateful hour, and he got in one last sip of the visit while she put the toys away in their original
cases so the sea rot would not turn them to dust, just one minute, queen, he got up from now until tomorrow, a lifetime, what a mess, he barely had an instant to take a last look at the untouchable maiden who with the step of the archangel had remained motionless with the dead rose in her lap while he took leave, he slipped into the first shadows trying to hide a shame which was in the public domain
and which everyone commented upon on the street, it gave birth to an anonymous song which the whole country knew except him, even the parrots sang it in courtyards make way women there comes the general crying green with his hand on his chest, see how he goes he can’t handle his power, he rules in his sleep, he’s got a wound that won’t close, wild parrots learned it from having heard it sung
by tame parrots, budgies and mockingbirds learned it from them and they carried it off in flocks beyond his measureless realm of gloom, and in all the skies of the nation one could hear at dusk that unanimous voice of fleeting multitudes who sang there comes my ever-loving general giving off crap through his mouth and laws through his poop, an endless song to which everybody even the parrots added
verses to mock the security services of the state who tried to capture it, military patrols in full battle dress broke down courtyard doors and shot down the subversive parrots on their perches, they threw whole bushels of parakeets alive to the dogs, a state of siege was declared in an attempt to extirpate the enemy song so that no one would discover that everybody knew that he was the one who
slipped like a fugitive of dusk through the doors of the presidential palace, went through the kitchens and disappeared into the manure smoke of the private rooms until tomorrow at four o’clock, queen, until every day at the same hour when he arrived at Manuela Sanchez’s house laden with so many unusual gifts that they had to take over the houses next door and knock down the intervening walls in order
to have room for them, so that the original parlor had become an immense and gloomy shed where there were uncountable clocks from every period,
there was every type of phonograph from primitive ones with cylinders to those with a mirror diaphragm, there were all sorts of sewing machines with cranks, pedals, motors, whole bedrooms full of galvanometers, homeopathic pharmaceuticals, music boxes,
optical-illusion instruments, showcases of dried butterflies, Asiatic herbariums, laboratories for physiotherapy and physical education, machines for astronomy, orthopedics and natural sciences, and a whole world of dolls with hidden mechanisms for human traits, forbidden rooms where no one entered not even to sweep because the things stayed where they had been placed when they were brought, no one
wanted to hear about them and Manuela Sanchez least of all because she did not wish to know anything about life ever since that black Saturday when the misfortune of being queen befell me, on that afternoon the world ended for me, her former suitors had died one after the other struck down by unpunished collapses and strange illnesses, her girl friends disappeared without a trace, she’d been moved
without leaving her house into a district full of strangers, she was alone, watched over in her most intimate aims, the captive of a trap of fate in which she did not have the courage to say no nor did she have sufficient courage to say yes to an abominable suitor who besieged her with a madhouse love, who looked at her with a kind of reverential stupor fanning himself with his white hat, drenched
in sweat, so far removed from himself that she had wondered whether he really was looking at her or whether it was only a vision of horror, she had seen him hesitating in broad daylight, she had seen him nibble at fruit juices, had seen him nod with sleep in the wicker easy chair with the glass in his hand when the copper buzz of the cicadas made the parlor shadows denser, she had seen him snore,
careful your excellency, she had told him, he would wake up startled murmuring no, queen, I didn’t fall asleep, I just closed my eyes, he said, without realizing that she had taken the glass from his hand so that he wouldn’t drop it while he slept, she had amused him with subtle wiles until the incredible afternoon when he got to the house gasping with the news that today
I’m bringing you the
greatest gift in the universe, a miracle of heaven that’s going to pass by tonight at eleven-oh-six so that you can see it, queen, only so that you can see it, and it was the comet. It was one of our great moments of disappointment, because for some time a rumor had spread like so many others that the timetable of his life was not controlled by human time but by the cycles of the comet, that he had
been conceived to see it once but that he was not to see it again in spite of the arrogant auguries of his adulators, so we had waited like someone waiting for the day when that secular November night is born on which joyous music was prepared, the bells of jubilation, the festival rockets which for the first time in a century did not burst to exalt his glory but to wait for the eleven metal rings
of eleven o’clock which would signal the end of his years, to celebrate a providential event that he awaited on the roof of Manuela Sanchez’s house, sitting between her and her mother, breathing strongly so that they would not notice the difficulties of his heart under a sky numb with evil omens, breathing in for the first time the nocturnal breath of Manuela Sanchez, the intensity of her inclemency,
her open air, he heard on the horizon the conjure drums that were coming out to meet the disaster, he listened to distant laments, the sounds of the volcanic slime of the crowds who prostrated themselves in terror before a creature alien to their power who had preceded and who was to transcend the years of their age, he felt the weight of time, he suffered for an instant the misfortune of being
mortal, and then he saw it, there it is, he said, and there it was, because he knew it, he had seen it when it had passed on to the other side of the universe, it was the same one, queen, older than the earth, the painful medusa of light the size of the sky which with every hand measure of its trajectory was returning a million years to its origins, they heard the buzzing of bits of tinfoil,
they saw his afflicted face, his eyes overflowing with tears, the track of frozen poisons of its hair disheveled by the winds of space as it left across the world a trail radiant with star debris and dawns delayed by tarry moons and ashes from the craters of oceans previous to the origins
of earth time, there it is, queen, he murmured, take a good look at it because we won’t see it again for another
century, and she crossed herself in terror, more beautiful than ever under the phosphorous glow of the comet and with her head snowy from the soft drizzle of astral trash and celestial sediment, and it was then that it happened, mother of mine Bendición Alvarado, it happened that Manuela Sanchez had seen the abyss of eternity in the sky and trying to cling to life she had reached out her hand
into space and the only thing she found to hang on to was the undesirable hand with the presidential ring, his hot stiff hand of rapine cooked in the embers of the slow fire of power. Very few were those who were moved by the biblical passage of the glowing medusa which frightened deer from out of the sky and fumigated the fatherland with a trail of radiant dust of star debris, for even the most
incredulous of us were hanging on that uncommonly large death which was to destroy the principles of Christianity and implant the origins of the third testament, we waited in vain until dawn, we returned home more fatigued from waiting than from not sleeping through the post-party streets where the dawn women were sweeping up the celestial trash left by the comet, and not even then did we resign
ourselves to believe that it was true that nothing had happened, but that on the contrary we had been the victims of another historic trick, for the official organs proclaimed the passage of the comet as a victory of the regime over the forces of evil, they took advantage of the occasion to deny the suppositions of strange diseases with unmistakable acts of vitality on the part of the man in power,
slogans were renewed, a solemn message was made public in which he had expressed my unique and sovereign decision to be in my post of service to the nation when the comet passes again, but on the other hand he heard the music and the rockets as if they did not belong to his regime, he listened without emotion to the clamoring crowd gathered on the main square with large banners saying eternal glory
to the most worthy one who will live to tell it, he was not concerned with the troubles of government, he delegated his authority to underlings tormented by the
memory of the hot coal that was Manuela Sanchez’s hand on his, dreaming of reliving that happy moment even if nature’s direction had to be turned off course and the universe be damaged, desiring it with such intensity that he ended up
beseeching his astronomers to invent him a fireworks comet, a fleeting morning star, a dragon made of candles, any ingenious star invention that would be terrifying enough to cause a swoon of eternity in a beautiful woman, but the only thing they could come up with in their calculations was a total eclipse of the sun for Wednesday of next week at four in the afternoon general sir, and he accepted
it, all right, and it was such a true night in the middle of the day that the stars lit up, flowers closed, hens went to roost, and animals sought shelter with their best premonitory instincts, while he breathed in Manuela Sanchez’s twilight breath as it became nocturnal and the rose languished in her hand deceived by the shadows, there it is, queen, it’s your eclipse, but Manuela Sanchez did not
answer, she did not touch his hand, she was not breathing, she seemed so unreal that he could not resist his urge and he stretched out his hand in the darkness to touch her hand, but he could not find it, he looked for it with the tips of his fingers in the place where her smell had been, but he did not find it either, he kept on looking for it through the enormous house with both hands, waving his
arms about with the open eyes of a sleepwalker in the shadows, wondering with grief where can you be Manuela Sanchez of my misfortune as I seek you and cannot find you in the unfortunate night of your eclipse, where can your inclement hand be, your rose, he swam like a diver lost in a pool of invisible waters in whose reaches he found floating the prehistoric crayfish of the galvanometers, the crabs
of the musical clocks, the lobsters of your machines of illusory trades, but on the contrary he did not even find the licorice breath of your lungs, and as the darkness of the ephemeral night broke up the light of truth grew brighter in his soul and he felt older than God in the shadows of the six in the afternoon dawn in the deserted house, he felt sadder, lonelier than ever in the loneliness
of this world without you, my queen, lost