The Autumn of the Patriarch (12 page)

until he heard tell of a singular sibyl who deciphered death in the error-free waters of her basins and he went to seek her out in secret along mule trails and with no other witness than the angel of the machete all the way up to the settlement on the plains where she lived with a great-granddaughter who had three children and was about to bear another by a husband dead the month before, he found
her crippled and half blind in the back of a bedroom almost in darkness, but when she asked him to put his hands over the basin the waters became illuminated with a soft and clear interior glow, and then he saw himself, exactly as he was, lying face down on the floor, wearing a denim uniform without insignia, the boots and the gold spur, and he asked what place that was, and the woman answered examining
the sleeping waters that it was a room not much larger than this with something that can be seen here that looks like a desk and an electric fan and a window facing the sea and these white walls with pictures of horses and a flag with a dragon on it, and again he said aha because he had recognized without any doubt the office next to the reception room, and he asked if it was to be in a bad
way or from a bad illness, and she answered him no, it was to be during his sleep and without pain, and he said aha, and he asked her trembling when it was to be and she answered him that he could sleep peacefully because it would not take place before you reach my age, which was 107, but also not after 125 years more, and he said aha, and then he murdered the sick old woman in the hammock so that
no one else would know the circumstances of his death, he strangled her with the strap from
his gold spur, without pain, without a sigh, like a master executioner, in spite of the fact that she was the only being in this world, human or animal, whom he did the honor of killing with his own hand in peace or in war, poor woman. Similar evocations from his fasti of infamy did not twist his conscience
during the nights of his autumn, on the contrary they served him as exemplary fables of what should have been done and what had not been, above all when Manuela Sanchez evaporated into the shadows of the eclipse and he wanted to feel himself in the full bloom of his barbarity once more so he could pluck out the rage of deception which was cooking his innards, he would lie down in the hammock
under the tinkle bells of the wind in the tamarinds to think about Manuela Sanchez with a rancor that disturbed his sleep while the forces of land, sea and air sought her without any trace even in the unknown confines of the saltpeter deserts, where the fuck have you hidden yourself, he wondered, where the fuck do you think you can hide where my arm can’t reach you so that you’ll know who gives the
orders, the hat on his chest quivered with the drive of his heart, he lay there ecstatic with rage and paying no attention to his mother’s insistence as she tried to find out why you haven’t spoken a word since the afternoon of the eclipse, but he wouldn’t answer, he left, shit mother, he dragged his big orphan feet off bleeding drops of gall with his pride wounded by the irredeemable bitterness
that all this trouble is happening to me because I’ve become such a horse’s ass, because I haven’t been the director of my destiny the way I was before, because I went into the house of a bitch with her mother’s permission and not the way he had gone into the cool and quiet ranch house of Francisca Linero in Vereda de los Santos Higuerones when it was still he in person and not Patricio Aragonés
who showed the visible face of power, he had gone in without even touching the door knocker in accordance with the pleasure of his will to the rhythm of the tolling of eleven o’clock on the grandfather clock and I heard the metal of the gold spur from the courtyard terrace and knew that those pile-driver steps with all that authority on the brick floor could not belong to
anyone else but him,
I sensed him in the flesh before I saw him appear in the doorway of the inner terrace where the curlew was singing out eleven o’clock among the gold geraniums, a troupial disturbed by the fragrant acetone of the bunches of bananas hanging from the eaves, the light of the ominous August Tuesday was taking its ease among the new leaves of the plantain trees in the courtyard and the carcass of the young
buck which my husband Poncio Daza had shot at dawn and hung by its hind legs to bleed beside the bunches of bananas tiger-striped by their inner honey, I saw him larger and more somber than in a dream his boots dirty with mud and his khaki jacket soaked with sweat and with no weapons on his belt but protected by the shadow of the barefoot Indian who stood motionless behind him his hand resting
on the hilt of his machete, I saw the unavoidable eyes, the hand of a sleeping maiden that plucked a banana from the nearest bunch and ate it with anxiety his whole mouth making a swampy sound without taking his eyes off the provocative Francisca Linero who looked at him without knowing what to do in her modesty of a newly wed because he had come to give pleasure to his will and there was no power
greater than his to stop him, I barely felt the fearful breathing of my husband who sat down beside me and we both remained motionless holding hands and our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another two steps from the door and tossing the peels over his shoulder into the courtyard without having
blinked a single time after he had begun to look at me, and only after he had eaten the whole bunch and the bare stalk was left beside the dead buck did he make a signal to the barefoot Indian and ordered Poncio Daza to go with my comrade the one with the machete for a moment because he has some business and although I was dying with fear I maintained enough lucidity to realize that my only means
of salvation was to let him do everything he wanted to with me on the dinner table, even more, I helped him find me among the lace of the petticoats after he left me gasping for breath with his ammonia smell
and he tore off my drawers with a claw and looked for me with his fingers where I wasn’t while I thought in confusion oh Blessed Sacrament such shame, such misfortune, because that morning
I hadn’t had time to wash myself being involved with the buck, so he finally did his will after so many months of siege, but he did it fast and poorly, as if he had been older than he was, or much younger, he was so upset that I scarcely noticed when he did his duty as best he could and broke into sobbing with the hot urine tears of a great and solitary orphan, weeping with such deep affliction that
not only did I feel pity for him but for every man in the world and I began to rub his head with my fingertips and console him with don’t worry about it general, life is long, while the man with the machete took Poncio Daza into the banana groves and cut him up into such thin slices that it was impossible to put his body back together again after it had been scattered by the hogs, poor man, but
there was no other way out, he said, because he would have been a mortal enemy for the rest of his life. They were images of his power which came to him from far away and increased the bitterness over how much the brine of his power had been watered down since it hadn’t even been of any use to conjure up the evil arts of an eclipse, he was shaken by a thread of black bile at the domino table across
from the frozen realm of General Rodrigo de Aguilar who was the only man of arms in whom he had confided his life since uric acid had crystallized the joints of the angel with the machete, and yet he wondered if so much confidence and so much authority delegated to one single person might not have been the cause of his misfortune, if it wasn’t my lifetime comrade who had turned him into an ox
by trying to shear him of his natural fleece of a backlands leader and convert him into a palace invalid incapable of thinking up an order that hadn’t already been carried out ahead of time, by the unhealthy invention of showing in public a face that wasn’t his when the barefoot Indian of the good old days had been sufficient and more than enough all by himself to open a path with blows from his machete
through the crowds of people shouting make way you bastards
here comes the man in charge without being able to distinguish in that thicket of ovations who were the real patriots and who were the tricky ones because we still hadn’t discovered that the shadiest ones were those who shout loudest long live the stud, God damn it, long live the general, and quite the opposite now the authority of his
weapons wasn’t even of any use to him to find the death-breeding queen who had made a mockery out of the unbreakable encirclement of his senile appetites, God damn it, he threw the pieces on the floor, left games half finished for no visible reason depressed by the sudden revelation that everyone ended up finding his place in the world, everyone except him, conscious for the first time that his
shirt was soaked in sweat at such an early hour, conscious of the carrion stench that rose up from the vapors of the sea and the soft flute whistle of his rupture twisted by the dampness of the heat, it’s the humid weather, he told himself without conviction at the window trying to decipher the strange state of the light of the motionless city where the only living beings seemed to be the flocks of
vultures fleeing in fright from the cornices of the charity hospital and the blind man in the main square who sensed the trembling old man at the window of government house and made an urgent signal to him with his staff and shouted something that he couldn’t make out and which he interpreted as one more sign in that oppressive feeling that something was about to happen, and yet he repeated to himself
for the second time at the end of a long Monday of dejection that it’s the humidity, he said that to himself and he fell asleep at once, lulled by the scratching of the drizzle on the frosted glass of the sleeping potion, but suddenly he awoke with a start, who’s there, he shouted, it was his own heart oppressed by the strange silence of the cocks at dawn, he felt that the ship of the universe
had reached some port while he was asleep, he was floating in a soup of steam, the animals of earth and sky who had the faculty to glimpse death beyond the clumsy omens and best-founded sciences of men were mute with terror, there was no more air, time was changing direction, and as he got up he felt his heart
swelling with every step and his eardrums bursting and some boiling matter was running
out of his nose, it’s death, he thought, his tunic soaked with blood, before realizing no general sir, it was the hurricane, the most devastating of all those that had broken the ancient compact realm of the Caribbean up into a string of scattered islands, a catastrophe so stealthy that only he had detected it with his premonitory instinct long before the panic of dogs and hens began, and so quick
that there was scarcely time to find a woman’s name for it in the disorder of terrified officials who came to me with the news that now yes it was true general sir, this country had gone to hell, but he ordered them to reinforce the doors and windows with long beams, they tied the sentries to their posts along the corridors, they locked up the hens and the cows in the offices on the first floor,
they nailed everything down in place from the main square to the last border stone of his terrorized realm of gloom, the whole nation was anchored in place with the absolute order that with the first show of panic they would shoot twice in the air and the third time shoot to kill, and yet nothing could resist the passage of the tremendous blade of the spinning winds that cut a clean slice through
the armored doors of the main entrance and carried off my cows into the air, but he did not realize it in the spell of the impact of where did it come from that roar of horizontal rain that scattered in its wake the volcanic grapeshot of the remains of balconies and beasts from the jungle and the bottom of the sea, nor was he lucid enough to think about the fearful proportions of the cataclysm
but he walked about in the midst of the downpour wondering with an aftertaste of musk where can you be Manuela Sanchez of my bad saliva, God damn it, where can you have hidden yourself that this disaster of my vengeance hasn’t reached you? In the peaceful pool that came after the hurricane he found himself alone with his closest aides floating in a rowboat in the stew of destruction that had been
the reception room, they rowed out the coach house door without bumping into anything through the stumps of the palm trees and the downed lampposts of the main square, they
went into the dead lagoon of the cathedral and for an instant he suffered the clairvoyant spark that he had never been nor would he ever be the master of all his power, he was still mortified by the irony of that bitter certainty
while the rowboat ran into spaces of densities that differed according to the changes in color of the light from the stained glass in solid gold trim and the clusters of emeralds over the main altar and the gravestones of viceroys buried alive and archbishops dead of disenchantment and the granite promontory of the empty mausoleum for the admiral of the ocean sea with the profile of the three
caravels which he had had built in case he wanted his bones to rest among us, we went out through the canal of the presbytery toward an inner courtyard converted into a luminous aquarium in the tiled depths of which schools of mojarra fish wandered among the stalks of spikenards and sunflowers, we cut through the gloomy streams of the cloister of the convent of Biscayan nuns, we saw the abandoned
cells, we saw the harpsichord adrift in the intimate pool of the music room, in the depths of the sleeping waters of the refectory we saw the whole community of virgins drowned in their dinner places at the long table with the food served on it, and he saw as he went out through a balcony the broad lakelike expanse under a radiant sky where the city had been and only then did he believe that the
news was true general sir that this disaster had happened all over the world only to free me from the torment of Manuela Sanchez, God damn it, how wild God’s methods are when compared to ours, he thought smugly, contemplating the muddy swamp where the city had been and on whose limitless surface a world of drowned hens floated and all that rose up out of it were the steeples of the cathedral, the
beacon of the lighthouse, the sun terraces of the stone and mortar mansions of the viceregal district, the scattered islands which had been the hills of the former slave port where the shipwrecked refugees from the cyclone were encamped, the last disbelieving survivors as we watched the silent passage of the row-boat painted with the colors of the flag through the sargasso of inert bodies of hens,