The Autumn of the Patriarch (27 page)

anything to eat up above, she said, wrapped in the lugubrious aura of the unfathomable old man who listened to the revelation without blinking as he thought mother of mine Bendición Alvarado why do you send me this punishment, but he didn’t give any sign that would reveal his desolation taking care rather in every kind of stealthy investigation until he discovered that the girls’ school next door
had in fact been closed for many years general sir, his own minister of education had provided the funds in an agreement with the archbishop primate and the heads of family association to construct a new three-story building on the shore where the princesses of families of great conceit were safe from the ambushes of the sunset seducer whose body of a beached shad face up on the banquet table began
to stand out against the pale mallow of the moon-crater horizon of our first dawn without him, he was under the protection of everything among the snowy African lilies, free at last of his absolute power at the end of so many years of reciprocal captivity in which it was difficult to distinguish who was the victim of whom in that cemetery of living presidents which they had painted tomb-white inside
and out without consulting me about it but rather they ordered him around without recognizing him don’t come in here sir you’ll dirty our whitewash, and he didn’t go in, stay up on the second floor sir a scaffold might fall on you, and he stayed there, confused by the noise of the carpenters and the rage of the masons who shouted at him get away from here you old fool you’ll get the mixture
all shitty, and he got away, more obedient than a soldier during the harsh months of a renovation done without
consulting him which opened new windows to the sea, more alone than ever under the fierce vigilance of an escort whose mission didn’t seem to be to protect him but to watch over him, they ate half of his meal to avoid his being poisoned, they changed the hiding place of his honey, they
put his gold spur on up where a fighting cock has his so it wouldn’t bell-ring when he walked, God damn it, a whole string of cowboy tricks that would have made my comrade Saturno Santos die of laughter, he lived at the mercy of eleven flunkies in jacket and tie who spent the day doing Japanese acrobatics, they brought in an apparatus with green and red lights that went on and off when someone within
a radius of two hundred feet was carrying a weapon, and we went through the streets like fugitives in seven identical cars which kept changing places, some getting ahead of others along the way so that even I didn’t know which one I’m riding in, God damn it, a useless waste of gunpowder on buzzards because he’d pushed the blinds aside to see the streets after so many years of confinement and
he saw that no one was reacting to the stealthy passage of funereal limousines of the presidential caravan, he saw the cliffs of solar glass of the ministries that rose up higher than the towers of the cathedral and had cut off the colorful promontories of the Negro shacks on the harbor hills, he saw a patrol of soldiers erasing a sign recently painted with a broad brush on a wall and he asked what
it had said and they answered eternal glory to the maker of the new nation although he knew it was a lie, of course, if not they wouldn’t have been erasing it, God damn it, he saw an avenue with coconut palms six lanes wide with flower beds down to the sea where the bogs had been, he saw a suburb with villas replete with Roman porticoes and hotels with Amazonian gardens where the public market
dump had been, he saw cars moving like tortoises along the serpentine labyrinths of the urban freeways, he saw the crowds dulled by the dog-days sun of high noon on the sun-baked sidewalk while on the opposite side there was no one but the unofficial collectors of the tax for the right to walk in the shade, but no one trembled that time with the omen of hidden power
in the refrigerated coffin
of a presidential limousine, no one recognized the disillusioned eyes, the anxious lips, the useless hand that kept giving undestined waves amidst the shouting of vendors of newspapers and amulets, the ice cream carts, the three-numbered lottery signs, the everyday clamor of the street world alien to the intimate tragedy of the solitary military man who was sighing with nostalgia thinking mother of
mine Bendición Alvarado what has happened to my city, where is the alley of misery of women without me who came out naked at dusk to buy blue corvinas and red snappers and exchange mother curses with the vegetable women while their clothes were drying on the balconies, where are the Hindus who shat by the doors of their stalls, where are their pale wives who soften death with songs of pity, where
is the woman who was changed into a scorpion for having disobeyed her parents, where are the mercenaries’ bars, their brooks of fermented urine, the everyday look of the pelicans around the corner, and, suddenly, alas, the waterfront, where is it because it used to be here, what happened to the smugglers’ schooners, the iron scarp from the marines’ landing, my smell of shit, mother, what was going
on in the world that no one recognized the fugitive lover’s hand in the oblivion as it left a wake of useless waves of the hand from the opened panes of the window of an inaugural train that whistled through fields planted with aromatic herbs where the swamps with strident malaria birds in the rice paddies had been, it passed along through the unlikely plains of blue grazing land frightening herds
of cattle marked with the presidential brand and inside the railroad car of responses to my irrevocable fate padded with ecclesiastical plush he went along wondering where was my little old four-legged train, damn it, my boughs with anacondas and poisonous balsam apples, my uproar of monkeys, my birds of paradise, the whole nation with its dragon, mother, where is it all because there used to
be stations here with taciturn Indian women in derbies who sold candy animals through the windows, they sold mashed potatoes, mother, they sold hens boiled in yellow lard under the arches of a sign made
out of flowers eternal glory to the all-worthy that nobody knows where he is, but whenever he protested that that life of a fugitive was worse than being dead they answered no general sir it was
peace within order, they told him, and he ended up accepting it, agreed, dazzled one more time by the personal fascination of José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra of my unmothering whom he had degraded and spat upon so many times in the rage of his sleeplessness but he would succumb again to his charms as soon as he entered the office with the light of day leading that dog with the look of human people
whom he doesn’t leave even to urinate and who has a person’s name besides Lord Köchel, and once more he would accept his formulas with a meekness that rose up against himself, don’t worry Nacho, he would give in, do your duty, so that José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra would go back once more with his powers intact to the torture he had set up less than five hundred yards from the presidential palace
in the innocent colonial masonry building which had been the Dutch insane asylum, a house as large as yours general sir, hidden in an almond grove and surrounded by a field of wild violets, the first floor of which was reserved for the identification and registry services of the civil state and where in the rest of the building the most ingenious and barbarous machines of torture that the imagination
could conceive of were installed, so terrible that he hadn’t wanted to know about them but advised Saenz de la Barra you keep on doing your duty as best suits the interests of the nation with the only condition that I know nothing and I haven’t seen anything and I’ve never been in that place, and Saenz de la Barra pledged his word of honor to serve you, general, and he had kept it, just as he
followed his orders not to go back to martyrizing children under the age of five with electric wires on their testicles in order to force their parents to confess because he was afraid that the infamy might repeat itself during the insomnia of all those nights the same as during the days of the lottery, although it was impossible for him to forget about that workshop of horror because it was such
a short distance from his bedroom and on nights of a quiet moon he would be awakened
by the fleeting train music of Bruckner thunder dawns that brought on ruinous floods and left a desolation of tattered gowns of dead brides on the branches of the almond trees at the former Dutch lunatic asylum all so that the shrieks of terror and pain of those dying would not be heard on the street, and all
of that without collecting a cent general sir, because José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra used his salary to buy the clothing of a prince, shirts of natural silk with his monogram on the chest, kid shoes, boxes of gardenias for his lapel, lotions from France with the family crest printed on the original label, but he didn’t have a woman that anybody knew of and no one said he’s a fairy and he doesn’t
have a single friend or a house of his own to live in, nothing general sir, the life of a saint, slaving away at the torture factory until fatigue made him drop onto the couch in the office where he slept as best he could but never at night and never more than three hours at a time, with no guard at the door, no weapon within reach, under the tense protection of Lord Köchel who was bursting his skin
from the anxiety caused by eating the only thing they say he eats, that is, the hot guts of the beheaded people, making that boiling-pot sound to awaken him as soon as his look of a human person sensed through the walls that someone was approaching the office, no matter who it is general sir, that man doesn’t even trust mirrors, he would make his decisions without consulting anyone after listening
to the reports of his agents, nothing went on in the country and no exile in any part of the planet could so much as sigh without José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra’s knowing about it immediately thanks to the threads of the invisible web of informers and bribery with which he had covered the whole orb of the earth, that’s what he spent his money on general sir, because it wasn’t true that the torturers
received the salary of ministers as people said, on the contrary, they volunteered for nothing to show that they were capable of quartering their mothers and throwing the pieces to the pigs without any change in their voice, instead of letters of recommendation and certificates of good conduct, they offered testimony of atrocious antecedents so they would be given work
under the guidance of French
torturers who are rationalists general sir, and consequently are methodical in cruelty and resistant to compassion, they were the ones who made progress within order possible, they were the ones who anticipated conspiracies long before they started incubating in people’s thoughts, the distracted customers who were enjoying the coolness of the fan blades in ice cream parlors, those reading the
newspaper in Chinese lunchrooms, those who slept in the movies, those who gave their seats on the bus to ladies, those who had learned to be electricians and plumbers after having passed half a lifetime as nocturnal muggers and bandits of the byways, the casual boyfriends of servant girls, the whores on ocean liners and in international cocktail lounges, the promoters of tourist trips from Miami
to the paradises of the Caribbean, the private secretary of the Belgian minister of foreign affairs, the tenured chambermaid of the fourth floor of the International Hotel in Moscow, and so many others that no one knows to what far corner of the earth they reach, but you can sleep peacefully general sir, because the good patriots of the nation say that you know nothing, that all of this is going on
without your consent, that if general sir knew it he would have sent Saenz de la Barra to push up daisies in the renegades’ cemetery at the harbor fort, because every time they learned of a new act of barbarism they would sigh inside if the general only knew, if we could only make him know, if there were some way to see him and he ordered the one who had told him never to forget that the truth is
I don’t know anything, I haven’t seen anything, I haven’t talked about these things with anyone, and in that way he regained his calm, but so many sacks of severed heads kept arriving that it seemed inconceivable to him that José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra was daubing himself with blood up to his tonsure without some benefit from it because people are dumb bastards but not that dumb, nor did it seem
reasonable to him that whole years could pass without the commanders of the three services protesting over their subordinate status, nor did they ask for a raise in salary, nothing, so he had made soundings on his own to
try to establish the causes of military compliance, he wanted to find out why they weren’t trying to rebel, why they accepted the authority of a civilian, and he had asked the
most greedy of them if they didn’t think it was time to trim the crest of the bloodthirsty upstart who was tarnishing the merits of the armed forces, but they answered him of course not general sir, it’s nothing serious, and since then I no longer know who is who, or who is with whom or against whom in this snare of progress within order that’s starting to smell to me like someone playing possum
like that other time I don’t care to recall with the poor children and the lottery, but José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra calmed his drives with his suave domination of a trainer of wild dogs, sleep in peace, general, he told him, the world is yours, he made him believe that everything was so simple and so clear that he left him again in the shadows of that no man’s house which he would cover from one
end to the other asking himself with great shouts who the hell am I because I feel as if the reflection in the mirrors is reversed, where the hell am I because it’s going on eleven o’clock in the morning and there isn’t a single hen even a stray one in this desert, remember the way it was before, he shouted, remember the uproar of the lepers and the cripples as they fought with the dogs over food,
remember that slippery chute of animal shit on the stairs and that hullabaloo of patriots who wouldn’t let me walk with their begging throw the salt of health on my body general sir, baptize my body to see if he can get rid of his diarrhea because they all said my laying on of hands had binding virtues more effective than green bananas, put your hand here to see if my palpitations die down because
I don’t feel like living any more with this eternal earth tremor, fix your eyes on the sea general sir to send the hurricanes away, look up to the skies to make eclipses repent, look down to the earth to drive off the plague because they said I was the all-worthy one who filled nature with respect and straightened the order of the universe and had taken Divine Providence down a peg, and I gave