The Autumn of the Patriarch (11 page)

forever in the enigma of the eclipse, nevermore, because never in the rest of the very long years of his power would he find Manuela Sanchez of my perdition again in the labyrinth of her house, she had disappeared in the night of the eclipse general sir, they told him that she’d been seen dancing the plena in Puerto Rico, there where they cut Elena general
sir, but it wasn’t her, that she’d been seen in the madness of Papa Montero’s wake, tricky, lowlife rumba bunch, but it wasn’t her either, that she’d been seen in the ticky-tacky of Barlovento over the mine, in the dance of Aracataca, in the pretty wind of the little drum of Panama, but none of them was her, general sir, she just blew the hell away, and if he did not abandon himself to the will
of death at that time it was not because he lacked the rage to die but because he knew he was remorselessly condemned not to die of love, he had known it ever since one afternoon during the first days of his empire when he went to a sibyl for her to read to him in the water of her basins the keys to his fate which were not written in the palm of his hand, or in the cards, or in his coffee grounds,
or in any other means of inquiry, only in that mirror of premonitory waters where he saw himself dead of natural causes during his sleep in the office next to the reception room, and he saw himself lying face down on the floor as he had slept every night of his life since birth, with the denim uniform without insignia, the boots, the gold spur, his right arm folded under his head to serve as a
pillow, and at an indefinite age somewhere between 107 and 232 years.

T
HAT WAS HOW
they found him on the even of his autumn, when the corpse was really that of Patricio Aragonés, and that was how we found him again many years later during a moment of such uncertainty that no one could give in to the evidence that the senile body there gouged by vultures and infested with parasites from the depths of the sea was his. The hand turned into a figurine by putrefaction
gave no indication that it had ever been held on the chest because of the rebuffs of an improbable maiden during the noisy times, nor had we found any trace of his life that could have led us to the unmistakable establishment of his identity. It didn’t seem strange to us, of course, that this should be so in our days, because even during his times of greatest glory there had been reasons to
doubt his existence and his own henchmen had no exact notion of his age, for there were periods of confusion in which he seemed to be eighty years old at charity raffles, sixty at civil receptions and even under forty during the celebration of national holidays. Ambassador Palmerston,
one of the last diplomats to present his credentials, told in his banned memoirs that it was impossible to conceive
of old age as advanced as his or of a state of disorder and neglect as in that government house where he had to make his way through a dungheap of paper scraps and animal shit and the remains of the meals of dogs who slept in the halls, no one could give me any information about anything in tax bureaus or offices and I was forced to have recourse to the lepers and cripples who had already invaded
the first part of the private quarters and who showed me the way to the reception room where the hens were pecking at the illusory wheat fields on the tapestries and a cow was pulling down the canvas with the portrait of an archbishop so she could eat it, and I realized at once that he was as deaf as a post not only because I would ask him about one thing and he would answer about another but
also because it grieved him that the birds were not singing when in fact it was difficult to breathe with that uproar of birds which was like walking through the jungle at dawn, and he suddenly interrupted the ceremony of credentials with a lucid look and cupping his hand behind his ear he pointed out the window at the dusty plain where the sea had been and said in a voice to awaken the dead that
I should listen to that troop of mules going along out there, listen my dear Stetson, it’s the sea coming back. It was hard to admit that that broken-down old man was the same messianic figure who during the beginnings of his regime would appear in towns when least expected with no other escort but a barefooted Guajiro Indian with a cane-cutting machete and a small entourage of congressmen and senators
whom he had appointed himself with his finger according to the whims of his digestion, he informed himself about the crop figures and the state of health of the livestock and the behavior of the people, he would sit in a reed rocking chair in the shadow of the mango trees on the square fanning himself with the foreman’s hat he wore in those days, and even though he seemed to be dozing because
of the heat he would not let a single detail go by without some explanation in his talks with the men and women he had called
together using their names and surnames as if he had a written registry of inhabitants and statistics and problems of the whole nation inside his head, so he called me without opening his eyes, come here Jacinta Morales, he said to me, tell me what happened to the boy he
had wrestled with himself and given a fall the year before so he would drink a bottle of castor oil, and you, Juan Prieto, he said to me, how is your breed bull that he had treated himself with prayers against sickness so the worms would drop out of his ears, and you Matilde Peralta, let’s see what you’re going to give me for bringing back that runaway husband of yours in one piece, there he is,
pulled along with a rope around his neck and warned by him in person that he’d rot in the stocks the next time he tried to desert his legitimate spouse, and with the same sense of immediate governance he had ordered a butcher to cut off the hands of a cheating treasurer in a public spectacle and he would pick the tomatoes in a private garden and eat them with the air of a connoisseur in the presence
of his agronomists saying that what this soil needs is a good dose of male donkey shit, it should be spread at government expense, he ordered, and he interrupted his civic stroll and shouted to me through the window breaking up with laughter aha Lorenza López how’s that sewing machine he had given me as a present twenty years earlier, and I answered him that it had already given up the ghost,
general, you have to remember that things and people we’re not made to last a lifetime, but he answered just the opposite, the world is eternal, and then he set about dismantling the machine with a screwdriver and an oilcan indifferent to the official delegation that was waiting for him in the middle of the street, sometimes his desperation was evident from the bull snorts and even his face was daubed
with motor oil, but after almost three hours the machine was sewing again as good as new, because in those days there was nothing contrary in everyday life no matter how insignificant which did not have as much importance for him as the gravest matter of state and he believed sincerely that it was possible to distribute happiness and bribe death with the wiles of a soldier. It was hard
to admit
that that aged person beyond repair was all that remained of a man whose power had been so great that once he asked what time is it and they had answered him whatever you command general sir, and it was true, for not only did he alter the time of day as best suited his business but he would change legal holidays in accordance with his plans to cover the whole country from holiday to holiday in the
shadow of the barefoot Indian and the mournful-looking senators and with the crates of splendid cocks who faced the bravest there were in every village square, he booked the bets himself, he made the foundations of the cockpit shake with laughter because we all felt obliged to laugh when he gave off his strange snare-drum guffaws that rang out above the music and the rockets, we suffered when he
was silent, we would break out in an ovation of relief when his birds struck ours with lightning ours having been so well trained to lose that not a single one let us down, except the cock of Dionisio Iguarán’s misfortune who struck down the gray one belonging to the power in an attack so clean and sure that he was the first to cross the ring and shake the winner’s hand, you’re a real man, he told
him with a pleasant manner, thankful that someone had finally done him the favor of an innocuous defeat, how much do you want for that red one, he said, and Dionisio Iguarán answered him in a quavering voice it’s yours general, my great honor, and he went home to the applause of the excited people and the noise of the music and the petards showing everybody the six pedigreed cocks he had been given
in exchange for the undefeated red one, but that night he locked himself up in his bedroom and drank a gourdful of cane liquor all by himself and hanged himself with the rope from his hammock, poor man, for he was not aware of the string of domestic disasters that his jubilant appearances brought on, nor the trail of undesired deaths he left behind, nor the eternal condemnation of comrades in
misfortune whom he called by the wrong name in front of solicitous assassins who interpreted the mistake as a deliberate sign of disfavor, he walked all across the country with his strange armadillo step, his trail of strong sweat, his
tardy stubble of a beard, he would appear without notice in some kitchen with that air of a useful grandfather which made the people of the house tremble with fear,
he would take a drink of water from the bucket with the calabash dipper, he would eat out of the stewpot itself picking up the chunks with his fingers, too jovial, too simple, not suspecting that that house was marked forever with the stigma of his visit, and he did not act that way out of any political calculation or the need for love as was the case in other times but because it was his natural
way of being when power was still not the shoreless bog of the fullness of his autumn but a feverish torrent that we saw gush out of its spring before our very eyes so that all he had to do was point at trees for them to bear fruit and at animals for them to grow and at men for them to prosper, and he had ordered them to take the rain away from places where it disturbed the harvest and take it
to drought-stricken lands, and that was the way it had been, sir, I saw it, because his legend had begun much earlier than he believed himself master of all his power, when he was still at the mercy of omens and the interpreters of his nightmares and he would suddenly cut short a trip he had just started because he had heard a bird sing above his head and he would change the date of a public appearance
because his mother Bendición Alvarado had found an egg with two yolks, and he got rid of the retinue of solicitous senators and congressmen who went with him everywhere and delivered for him the speeches that he never dared deliver, he went without them because he saw himself in the big empty house of a bad dream surrounded by pale men in gray frock coats who were smiling and sticking him
with butcher knives, they harried him with such fury that wherever he turned to look he found a blade ready to wound him in the face and eyes, he saw himself encircled like a wild beast by the silent smiling assassins who fought over the privilege of taking part in the sacrifice and enjoying his blood, but he did not feel rage or fear, rather an immense relief that grew deeper as his life trickled
away, he felt himself weightless and pure, so he too smiled as they killed him, he smiled for them and
for himself in the confines of the dream house whose whitewashed walls were being stained by my spattering blood, until someone who was a son of his in the dream gave him a stab in the groin through which the last bit of breath I had left escaped, and then he covered his face with the blanket
soaked in his blood so that no one who had not been able to know him alive would know him dead and he collapsed shaken by such real death throes that he could not repress the urgency of telling it to my comrade the minister of health and the latter ended up by putting him in a state of consternation with the revelation that that death had already occurred once in the history of men general sir, he
read him the story of the episode in one of the singed tomes of General Lautaro Muñoz, and it was identical, mother, so much so that in the course of its reading he remembered something that he had forgotten when he woke up and it was that while they were killing him all of a sudden and with no wind blowing all the windows in the presidential palace opened up and they were in fact the same number
as the wounds in the dream, twenty-three, a terrifying coincidence which had its culmination that week with an attack on the senate and the supreme court by corsairs along with the cooperative indifference of the armed forces, the august home of our original patriotic forebears was burned to the ground and the flames could be seen until very late in the night from the presidential balcony, but he
did not change his expression with the news general sir that they had not even spared the foundation stones, he promised us an exemplary punishment for the perpetrators of the attack who never appeared, he promised us that he would rebuild an exact replica of the house of our forebears but its blackened ruins remained down to our times, he did nothing to disguise the terrible exorcism of the bad
dream but took advantage of the occasion to liquidate the legislative and judicial apparatus of the old republic, he heaped honors and fortune upon the senators and congressmen and magistrates whom he no longer needed to keep up the appearances of the beginning of his regime, he exiled them to happy and remote embassies and remained with no other
retinue but the solitary shadow of the Indian with
his machete who did not abandon him for an instant, who tasted his food and water, kept his distance, watched the door while he stayed in my house giving fuel to the story that he was my secret lover while in fact he visited me once or twice a month to consult me about the cards during those many years when he still thought himself mortal and had the virtue of doubt and knew how to make mistakes
and trusted more in the deck of cards than in his rustic instincts, he still arrived as worried and as old as the first time he sat down opposite me and without saying a word stretched out to me those hands with palms as smooth and tight as the belly of a toad such as I had never seen or was ever to see again in my long life as an examiner of the destiny of others, he laid them both on the table
at the same time almost like the mute begging of a hopeless case and he seemed so anxious to me and so without illusions that I was not so impressed by his arid palms as by his unalleviated melancholy, the weakness of his lips, his poor heart of an old man eaten by •doubt whose fate was not only hermetic in his hands but in all the means of inquiry that we knew in those times, for as soon as he
cut the cards they became pools of murky water, the coffee grounds became muddy in the bottom of the cup he had drunk from, the keys to everything that had to do with his personal future, his happiness and the destiny of his acts had been erased, but on the other hand they were crystal clear as concerned the destiny of anyone who had anything to do with him, so we saw his mother Bendición Alvarado
painting birds with foreign names at such an advanced age that she could barely distinguish the colors in an air rarefied by a pestilential vapor, poor mother, we saw our city devastated by a hurricane so terrible that it did not deserve its woman’s name, we saw a man with a green mask and a sword in his hand and he asked in anguish what part of the world he was in and the cards answered that every
Tuesday he was closer to him than on other days of the week, and he said aha, and asked what color eyes he had, and the cards answered that one was the color of juice in the light and the other cane juice in the dark, and he said
aha, and he asked what that man’s intentions were, and that was the last time I revealed to him the truth of the cards to the very end because I answered him that the
green mask was that of perfidy and treason, and he said aha, with a stress of triumph, I already know who he is, God damn it, he exclaimed, and it was Colonel Narciso Miraval, one of his closest aides who two days later put a bullet in his ear with no explanation, poor man, and that was how the destiny of the nation was arranged and its history anticipated according to the predictions of the cards