The Autumn of the Patriarch (16 page)

her in the sleeping sheet, they should take the hens out of their nests when there’s thunder so they don’t hatch basilisks, yes mother, and he laid her down with her hand on her heart, yes mother, sleep easy, he kissed her forehead, he slept the few hours remaining lying face down next to the bed, hanging on the drift of her sleep, hanging on the interminable delirium that was becoming more lucid
as it approached death, learning with his accumulated rage gathered each night to bear up under the immense fury of the Monday of grief when the terrible silence of the world at dawn awoke him and it was that his mother of my life Bendición Alvarado had stopped breathing, and then he unwrapped the loathsome body and saw in the tenuous glow of the first cock’s crow that there was another identical
body with the hand on the heart painted in profile on the sheet, and he saw that the painted body had no plague wrinkles or ravages of old age but that it was firm and tight as if painted in oil on both sides of the shroud and it gave off a natural fragrance of young flowers that purified the hospital atmosphere of the bedroom and try as they might by rubbing with nitrate rock and boiling it in lye
they could not erase it from the sheet because it was integrated front and back into the very material of the linen, and it was eternal linen, but he had not been calm enough to measure the scope of that miracle but had left the bedroom slamming the door with such rage that it sounded like a shot throughout the building, and then the bells in the cathedral began tolling and then those of every
church in the nation which tolled without pause for one hundred days, and those who woke up to the bells understood with no illusions
that he was once more the master of all his power and that the enigma of his heart oppressed by the rage over that death was rising up stronger than ever against the whims of reason and dignity and indulgence, because his mother of my life Bendición Alvarado had
died on that early dawn of Monday February twenty-third and a new century of confusion and scandal was beginning in the world. None of us was old enough to have witnessed that death but the fame of the funeral ceremonies had come down to our times and we had trustworthy reports that he did not go back to being what he had been before for the rest of his life, no one had the right to disturb his orphan’s
insomnia for much more than the hundred days of official mourning, he was not seen again in the house of grief whose confines had been overflown by the immense resonances of the funeral bells, he had no time except for his mourning, he spoke to himself in sighs, the household guard went about barefoot as during the first years of his regime and only the hens could do what they wanted in the
forbidden house whose monarch had become invisible, bleeding with rage in the wicker rocking chair while his mother of my soul Bendición Alvarado was going through those wastelands of heat and misery inside a coffin full of sawdust and chopped ice so that her body would not rot more than it had in life, for the body had been carried in a solemn procession to the least-explored corners of his realm
so that no one would go without the privilege of honoring her memory, they carried it with hymns of black-ribbon winds to stations on the upland plains where it was received with the same mournful music by the same mournful throngs who in other days of glory had come to see the power hidden in the shadows of the presidential coach, they displayed the body in the convent of the Sisters of Charity
where a wandering bird-woman at the beginning of time had given difficult birth to a no man’s son who became king, they opened the large doors of the sanctuary for the first time in a century, mounted troops made a roundup of Indians in the villages, they herded them along, drove them with rifle butts into the vast nave of the church afflicted by the icy suns of the
stained-glass windows where
nine bishops in pontificals sang Tenebrae, rest in peace in your glory, the deacons sang, the acolytes, rest in your ashes, they sang, outside it was raining on the geraniums, the novices distributed cane juice and the bread of the dead, people sold spareribs, rosaries, flasks of holy water under the stone arcades of the courtyards, there was music in the sidewalk cafés, there was gunpowder, there
was dancing in the entranceways, it was Sunday, now and forever, they were years of festivals along the escape trails and the foggy mountain passes where his mother of my death Bendición Alvarado had passed into life following the son who was making merry in the federalist whirlwind, for she had taken care of him during the war, she had kept the troops’ mules from trampling him when he flopped onto
the ground rolled up in a blanket, unconscious, talking nonsense because of tertian fever, she had tried to inculcate in him her ancestral fear of the dangers that lay in wait in the cities by the shadowy sea for people from the plains, she was afraid of the viceroys, the statues, the crabs that drink the tears of the newborn, she had trembled in terror before the majesty of the house of power
which she first saw through the rain on the night of the attack without having imagined then that it was the house where she would die, the house of solitude where he was, where he asked himself in the heat of rage lying face down on the floor where the hell have you gone, mother, in what grubby mangrove swamp has your body got entangled, who shoos the butterflies from your face, he sighed, prostrate
with grief, while his mother Bendición Alvarado floated along under a canopy of banana leaves through the nauseating vapors of the swamps to be displayed in backwoods public schools, in barracks on the saltpeter deserts, in Indian corrals, they displayed her in the main houses along with a picture of her when she was young, was languid, was beautiful, a diadem had been placed on her forehead,
a lace gorget had been placed around her neck against her will, she had let them put powder on her face and lipstick on her mouth for just that one time, they put a silk tulip in her hand so that she would hold it that way,
not like that, madam, like this, casually in her lap when the Venetian photographer of European monarchs took her official portrait as first lady as a final proof against any
suspicion of substitution, and they were identical, for nothing had been left to chance, the body was being reconstructed in secret sessions as the cosmetics wore off and the skin wrinkled as the paraffin melted in the heat, they removed the mildew from her eyelids during the rainy season, army seamstresses kept her burial dress in shape as if it had been put on yesterday and they maintained in
a state of grace the crown of orange blossoms and the veil of a virgin bride which she had never had during her lifetime, so that no one in this brothel of idolaters would ever dare repeat that you were different from your picture, mother, so that no one will forget who it is who rules till the end of time even in the poorest settlements on jungle sand dunes where after so many years of being forgotten
at midnight they saw the return of the ancient riverboat with its wooden paddle wheel with all lights on and they received it with Easter drums thinking that the times of glory had returned, long live the stud, they shouted, blessed be the one who comes in the name of truth, they shouted, they jumped into the water with their fattened armadillos, with a pumpkin the size of an ox, they climbed
over the carved wood railings to render the tribute of submission to the invisible power whose dice decided the fate of the nation and they stood breathless before the catafalque of chopped ice and rock salt which was multiplied by the startling glass of the mirrors in the presidential galley, exposed to public judgment under the fan blades in the archaic pleasure boat that traveled month after
month among the ephemeral isles of the equatorial tributaries until it got lost in a nightmare age in which gardenias had the use of reason and iguanas flew about in the darkness, the world ended, the wooden wheel ran aground on sandbanks of gold, broke, the ice melted, the salt turned liquid, the swollen body remained floating adrift in a soup of sawdust, and yet it didn’t rot, quite the contrary
general sir, because then we saw her open her eyes and we saw that her pupils were bright and had the color
of January wolfsbane and their usual quality of lunar stones, and even the most incredulous among us had seen the glass cover of the coffin fog over from the vapor of her breath and we had seen living and fragrant perspiration coming from her pores, and we saw her smile. You can’t imagine
what it was all like general sir, it was fantastic, we’ve seen mules give birth, we’ve seen flowers growing in the salt flats, we’ve seen deaf-mutes confused by the miracles of their own cries of miracle, miracle, miracle, they broke the glass of the coffin general sir and they were at the point of making mincemeat out of the corpse in order to distribute the relics, so we had to use a battalion
of grenadiers to hold back the frantic mobs who were arriving in a tumult from the breeding ground of islands which is the Caribbean captivated by the news that the soul of your mother Bendición Alvarado had obtained from God the faculty of going against the laws of nature, they were selling shreds of the shroud, they were selling scapulars, waters from her body, cards with her picture as a queen,
but it was such a huge and wild rabblement that it looked more like a torrent of untamed steers whose hoofs devastated everything they found in their path and they made an earthquake roar that even you yourself can hear from here if you listen carefully general sir, listen to it, and he cupped his hand behind his ear which was buzzing less, he listened carefully, and then he heard, mother of mine
Bendición Alvarado, he heard the endless thunder, he saw the bubbling swamp of the vast crowd spreading out all the way to the horizon of the sea, he saw the torrent of lighted candles that brought out a different and even more radiant day within the radiant brightness of noon, for his mother of my soul Bendición Alvarado was returning to the city of her ancient terrors as she had arrived the first
time with the turmoil of war, with the raw-meat smell of war, but free forever of the risks of the world because he had them tear the pages about the viceroys out of school primers so that they would not exist in history, he had forbidden the statues that disturbed your sleep, mother, so that now she was returning without her congenital fears on the shoulders of a peaceful multitude,
she was returning
without a coffin, under a clear sky, in an air forbidden to butterflies, overwhelmed by the golden weight of the religious offerings that had been hung on her during the interminable journey from the far reaches of the jungle across his vast and convulsed realm of sorrow, hidden under the pile of small gold crutches that recovered cripples had hung on her, the gold stars of shipwrecked sailors,
the gold babies of incredulous barren women who had had to give emergency birth in the bushes, as in the war, general sir, drifting along in the center of the sweeping torrent of the biblical move of a whole nation which could not find a place to put down its kitchenware, its animals, the remains of a life with no more hope of redemption than the very secret prayers that Bendición Alvarado
said during combat to turn the direction of the bullets shot at her son, how he had come in the tumult of the war with a red rag on his head shouting during the lull in fighting from the delirium of fever long live the liberal party, God damn it, long live victorious federalism, shitty Goths, even though really drawn along by the atavistic curiosity of knowing the sea, except that the misery-ridden
crowd that had invaded the city with the corpse of his mother was more turbulent and frantic than any that had ravaged the country during the adventures of the federalist war, more voracious than that turmoil, more terrible than that panic, the most tremendous thing my eyes had seen in all the uncounted years of his power, the whole world general sir, look, what a wonder. Convinced by the evidence,
he came out of the mist of his mourning, he came out pale, hard, with a black armband, resolved to make use of all the resources of his authority to attain the canonization of his mother Bendición Alvarado on the basis of the overwhelming proofs of her qualities as a saint, he sent his ministers of letters to Rome, once more he invited the apostolic nuncio for chocolate and cookies in the shafts
of light under the pansy bower, he received him in a familiar way, he lying in his hammock, shirtless, fanning himself with his white hat, and the nuncio sitting opposite him with the cup of steaming chocolate, immune to the heat and the dust inside the lavender
aura of his Sunday cassock, immune to the tropical languor, immune to the shitting of the dead mother’s birds as they flew free through
the puddlelike splotches of sun from the covering, he took measured sips of the vanilla chocolate, chewed the cookies with the modesty of a bride trying to delay the inevitable poison in the last sip, rigid in the wicker chair which he never let anyone sit in, only you, father, as on those mallow-mild afternoons of the days of glory when another old and innocent nuncio tried to convert him to the
faith of Christ with Scholastic riddles from Thomas Aquinas, except that now I’m the one who is calling upon you to convert, father, that’s the way the world turns, but I believe now, although in reality he didn’t believe anything in this world or any other except that his mother of my life had a right to the glory of altars because of the very merits of her vocation for sacrifice and her exemplary
modesty, so much so that he wasn’t basing his request upon the public excitement over the fact that the north star moved along in the same direction as the funeral cortege and stringed instruments played all by themselves in their cabinets when they heard the corpse pass by but he based it on the virtue of this sheet which he unfurled full sail in the splendor of August so that the nuncio could
see what indeed he did see printed on the texture of the linen, he saw the image of his mother Bendición Alvarado with no trace of old age or the ravages of disease lying on her side with her hand on her heart, he felt the dampness of eternal sweat on her fingers, he breathed in the fragrance of living flowers in the midst of the uproar of the birds roused up by the breath of the miracle, you can
see what a wonder, father, he said, showing the sheet up and down and on both sides, even the birds recognize her, but the nuncio was absorbed in the cloth with an incisive attention that had been capable of discovering impurities of volcanic ash in the materials worked by the great masters of Christendom, he had known the cracks in character and even the doubts of a faith from the intensity of