The Autumn of the Patriarch (23 page)

terrace of government house, together they looked at the mysterious willows that they had been sent by the king and queen of Babylonia around Christmas time so they could plant them in the rain garden, they enjoyed the sun as it was broken up through the perpetual waters, they took pleasure in the pole star tangled in the branches, they scrutinized the universe on the dial of the small radio through
the interference of jeers from fugitive planets, together they would listen to the daily episode of the soap operas from Santiago de Cuba which would leave in their hearts the feeling of a doubt of whether we’ll still be alive tomorrow to find out how this misfortune is resolved, he would play with the child before putting him to bed in order to teach him everything it was possible to know about
the use and maintenance of weapons of war which was the human science he knew better than anyone, but the only advice he gave him was never
issue an order unless you’re sure it’s going to be carried out, he made him repeat it as many times as he thought necessary so that the boy would never forget that the only mistake that a man invested with authority and power cannot make even once in his lifetime
is to issue an order which he is not sure will be carried out, more a piece of advice from a wary grandfather than from a wise father and which the child would never have forgotten even if he had lived as long as he because he taught it to him while he was preparing him to fire for the first time at the age of six a recoil cannon to whose catastrophic report we attributed the fearful dry storm
of volcanic thunder and lightning and the awesome polar wind from Comodoro Rivadavia which turned the bowels of the sea upside down and carried off an animal circus set up on the square of the former slave port, we caught elephants in casting nets, drowned clowns, giraffes hanging on trapezes from the fury of the tempest which miraculously didn’t sink the banana boat which arrived a few hours
later bearing the young poet Félix Rubén García Sarmiento who was to become famous under the name of Rubén Darío, luckily the sea calmed down at four o’clock, the well-washed air filled with flying ants, and he looked out the bedroom window and saw to the lee of the harbor hills the little white ship listing to starboard and with its rigging dismantled sailing along out of danger in the backwaters
of the afternoon that had been purified by the brimstone of the storm, he saw the captain on the quarterdeck directing the difficult maneuvers in honor of the illustrious passenger in a long dark coat and a checkered vest whom he had never heard of until the following Sunday night when Leticia Nazareno requested of him the inconceivable favor of accompanying her to an evening of poetry at the National
Theater and he had accepted without blinking, agreed. We had been waiting for three hours standing in the steaming atmosphere of the orchestra seats suffocating in the full dress which had been required of us urgently at the last moment, when finally the national anthem began and we turned in applause toward the box marked with the national coat of arms where the chubby
novice appeared in a hat
with curling feathers and her nocturnal fox tails over a taffeta gown, she sat down without any greeting beside the young prince in an evening uniform who had answered the applause with the iris of the empty fingers of his velvet glove held in his fist as his mother had told him princes used to do in other days, we saw no one else in the presidential box, but during the two hours of the recital
we bore the certainty that he was there, we felt the invisible presence that watched over our destiny so that it would not be altered by the disorder of poetry, he regulated love, he decided the intensity and term of death in a corner of the box in the shadows from where unseen he watched the heavy minotaur whose voice of marine lightning lifted him out of his place and instant and left him floating
without his permission in the golden thunder of the trim trumpets of the triumphal arches of Marses and Minervas of a glory that was not his general sir, he saw the heroic athletes with their standards the black mastiffs of the hunt the sturdy war-horses with their iron hoofs the pikes and lances of the paladins with rough crests who bore the strange flag captive to honor arms that were not his,
he saw the troop of fierce young men who had challenged the suns of the red summer the snows and winds of the icy winter night and dew and hatred and death for the eternal splendor of an immortal nation larger and more glorious than all those he had dreamed of during the long deliriums of his fevers as a barefoot warrior, he felt poor and tiny in the seismic thunder of the applause that he approved
in the shadows thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado this really is a parade, not the shitty things these people organize for me, feeling diminished and alone, oppressed by the heavy heat and the mosquitoes and the columns of cheap gold paint and the faded plush of the box of honor, God damn it, how is it possible for this Indian to write something so beautiful with the same hand that he
wipes his ass with, he said to himself, so excited by the revelation of written beauty that he dragged his great feet of a captive elephant to the rhythm of the martial beat of the kettledrums, he dozed off to the rhythm of the voices of glory of
the cadenced chant of the calorific choir that Leticia Nazareno recited for him in the shade of the triumphal arches of the ceiba tree in the courtyard,
he would write the lines on the walls of the toilets, he was trying to recite the whole poem by heart in the tepid cowshit olympus of the milking stables when the earth trembled from the dynamite charge that went off ahead of time in the trunk of the presidential automobile parked in the coach house, it was terrible general sir, such a violent explosion that many months later all over the city
they were still finding twisted pieces of the armored limousine that Leticia Nazareno and the child would have used an hour later for their Wednesday marketing, because the attempt was against her life general sir, without a doubt, and then he slapped his forehead, God damn it, how is it possible he didn’t foresee it, what had become of his legendary clairvoyance because for so many months the graffiti
in the toilets were not against him, as always, or against any of his civilian ministers, but were inspired by the audacity of the Nazarenos who had reached the point of nibbling away at the sinecures reserved for the high command, or by the ambitions of churchmen who were obtaining limitless and eternal favors from the temporal power, he had observed that the innocent diatribes against his
mother Bendición Alvarado had become the curses of a macaw, broadsides of hidden rancor which matured in the warm impunity of the toilets and ended up coming out onto the streets as had happened so many times with other minor scandals that he himself had taken care to precipitate, although he had never thought or would have been capable of thinking that they could have been so ferocious as to place
two hundred pounds of dynamite within the very confines of government house, sneaky bastards, how is it possible that he was going around so absorbed in the ecstasy of the triumphal bronzes that his fine nose of a ravening tiger had not recognized the old and sweet smell of danger in time, what a mess, he called an urgent meeting of the high command, fourteen trembling military men we were who
after so many years of ordinary behavior and secondhand orders were to see once more at
two fathoms distance the uncertain old man whose real existence was the simplest of his enigmas, he received us sitting on the thronelike seat in the hearing room with the uniform of a private soldier smelling of skunk piss and wearing small eyeglasses with solid gold frames which we had not seen even in his
most recent portraits, and he was older and more remote than anyone had been able to imagine, except for the languid hands without the velvet gloves which did not look like his natural soldier’s hands but those of someone much younger and more compassionate, everything else was dense and somber, and the more we recognized him the more obvious it was that he just barely had one last breath of life
left, but it was the breath of authority without appeal, devastating, difficult even for him to keep in line like the restlessness of a mountain horse, not speaking, not even moving his head as we rendered him the honors of chief supreme general and finally sat down facing him in the easy chairs arranged in a circle, and only then did he take off his glasses and he began to scrutinize us with those
meticulous eyes that knew the weasel hiding places of our second intentions, he scrutinized them without mercy, one by one, taking all the time he needed to establish with precision how much each one of us had changed since the afternoon in the mists of memory when he had promoted them to the highest ranks pointing to them according to the impulses of his inspiration, and as he scrutinized them
he felt the certainty growing that among those fourteen hidden enemies were the authors of the assassination attempt, but at the same time he felt so alone and defenseless facing them that he only blinked, only lifted his head to exhort them to unity now more than ever for the good of the nation and the honor of the armed forces, he recommended energy and prudence to them and imposed on them the
honorable mission of discovering without too much thought the authors of the attempt so that they could be submitted to the serene rigors of military justice, that’s all gentlemen, he concluded, knowing full well that the author was one of them, or all of them, mortally wounded by the unavoidable conviction that Leticia Nazareno’s life
did not depend on God’s will then but on the wisdom with which
he could manage to preserve it from a threat that sooner or later would irremediably be fulfilled, damn it. He made her cancel her public appearances, he made her more voracious relatives get rid of all privileges that might run afoul of the armed forces, the most understanding were named consuls with a free hand and the most bloody were found floating in the mangrove swamps off the channels
by the market, he appeared without prior announcement after so many years in his empty chair in the cabinet room ready to put a limit on the infiltration of the clergy into the business of state in order to keep you safe from your enemies, Leticia, and nevertheless he had made more deep soundings in the high command after the first drastic decisions and was convinced that seven of the commanders were
unreservedly loyal to him in addition to the general in chief who was the oldest of his comrades, but still lacked power against the other six enemies who lengthened his nights with the unavoidable impression that Leticia Nazareno was already marked for death, they were killing her right in his hands in spite of the measures to have her food tested ever since the day they found a fish bone in
the bread, they tested the purity of the air she breathed because he feared they had poisoned the Flit spray, he saw her looking pale at the table, he felt her become voiceless in the middle of love, he was tormented by the idea that they had put black vomit germs in her drinking water, vitriol in her eye drops, subtle and ingenious ways of death that embittered him at every moment during those days
and would awaken him in the middle of his sleep with the vivid nightmare that Leticia Nazareno had been bled during her sleep by an Indian curse, upset by so many imaginary risks and real threats he forbade her to go out without the ferocious escort of presidential guards under instructions to kill without cause, but she did go out general sir, she took the child along, he controlled his feelings
of evil omens to watch them get into the new armored limousine, he saw them off with signs of exorcism from an inner balcony begging mother of mine Bendición Alvarado protect them, make the bullets bounce
off her brassiere, weaken the laudanum, mother, straighten twisted thoughts, without an instant of rest until he heard the sirens on the escort from the main square and saw Leticia Nazareno and
the child crossing the courtyard with the first flashes from the lighthouse, she returned agitated, happy in the midst of the custody of warriors loaded down with live turkeys, orchids from Envigado, strings of little colored lights for Christmas nights already announced on the streets by signs made of luminous stars ordered by him to hide his anxiety, he would meet her on the stairs to feel you
still alive in the naphthalene dew of the blue-fox tails, in the sour sweat of your tufts of invalid’s hair, he helped you carry the gifts to the bedroom with the strange certainty that he was consuming the last crumbs of a condemned jubilation that he would have preferred never having known, all the more desolate as he became more convinced that every recourse he conceived of to alleviate that
unbearable anxiety, every step he took to conjure it away brought him mercilessly closer to the frightful Wednesday of my misfortune when he took the tremendous decision of no more, God damn it, if it had to be let it be soon, he decided, and it was like an explosive order that he had not finished putting together when two of his aides burst into his office with the terrible news that Leticia Nazareno
and the child had been torn to pieces and eaten by the stray dogs at the public market, they ate them alive general sir, but they weren’t the same usual street dogs but hunting animals with frightened yellow eyes and the smooth skin of a shark that someone had set upon the blue foxes, sixty dogs all alike who nobody knew when leaped out from among the vegetable stands and fell upon Leticia Nazareno
and the child without giving us time to shoot for fear of killing them who looked as if they were drowning along with the dogs in a hellish whirlpool, we could only see the instantaneous signs of some ephemeral hands reaching out to us while the rest of the body was disappearing into pieces, we saw fleeting and ungraspable expressions that sometimes were of terror, other times of pity, other
times of jubilation until they finally sank into the
whirlpool of the scramble and all that was left floating was Leticia Nazareno’s hat with felt violets facing the impassive horror of the totemic vegetable women spattered with hot blood who prayed my God, this couldn’t be possible unless the general wanted it, or at least unless he didn’t know about it, to the eternal dishonor of the presidential
guard who without firing a shot could only rescue the bare bones scattered among the bloody vegetables, nothing else general sir, the only thing we found were these medals that belonged to the boy, the saber without its tassels, Leticia Nazareno’s cordovan shoes which no one knows why appeared floating in the bay about a league away from the market, the necklace of colored glass, the chain-mail