The Autumn of the Patriarch (3 page)

because the
only document of identity for an overthrown president should be his death certificate, he would say, and with the same disdain he would listen to the illusory little speech of I accept for this short time your noble hospitality while the justice of the people brings the usurper to account, the eternal formula of puerile solemnity which a while later he would hear from the usurper, and then from the
usurper’s usurper as if the God-damned fools didn’t know that in this business of men if you fall, you fall, and he put all of them up for a few months in the presidential palace, made them play dominoes until he had fleeced them down to their last cent, and then he took me by the arm over to the window looking out onto the sea, he helped me grieve over this meat-beating life that only goes in
one direction, he consoled me with the illusion that I go over there, look, over there to that big house that looked like an ocean liner aground on the top of the reefs where I have some lodgings with good light and good food, and plenty of time to forget along with other companions of misfortune, and with a terrace overlooking the sea where he liked to sit on December afternoons not so much for the
pleasure of playing dominoes with that bunch of boobs but to enjoy the base good fortune of not being one of them, to look at himself in the instructive mirror of their misery while he wallowed in the great slough of felicity, dreaming alone, tiptoing like an evil thought in pursuit of the tame mulatto girls who swept government house in the dimness of dawn, he sniffed out their public dormitory
and drugstore hair-grease trail, he would lie in wait for the chance to catch one alone and make rooster love to her behind office doors while they would burst with laughter in the shadows, what a devil you are general, such a great man and still so horny, but he would be sad after making love and would start singing to console himself where no one could hear him, bright January moon, he would sing,
see how sad I am standing on the gallows by your window, he would sing, so sure of his people’s love on those Octobers with no evil omens that he would put up a hammock in the courtyard of the suburban mansion where his mother Bendición Alvarado
lived and sleep his siesta in the shade of the tamarind trees, without an escort, dreaming about the errant fish who swam in the colored waters of the
bedrooms, a nation is the best thing that was ever invented, mother, he would sigh, but he never waited for the answer from the only person in the world who dared scold him for the rancid onion smell of his armpits, but he returned to the presidential palace through the main door in exaltation with that miraculous season of the Caribbean in January, that reconciliation with the world at the end of
old age, those mellow soft afternoons after he had made peace with the papal nuncio and the latter would visit him without an appointment to attempt to convert him to the faith of Christ while they had chocolate and cookies, and bursting with laughter he would allege that if God is the man you say he is tell him to rid me of this beetle that’s buzzing in my ear, he would tell him, he would unbutton
the nine buttons of his fly and show him his huge tool, tell him to deflate this creature, he would tell him, but the nuncio went along with his shepherd’s work with patient stoicism, tried to convince him that everything that is truth, no matter who says it, comes from the Holy Spirit, and he would see him to the door when the first lights went on, dying with laughter as had rarely been seen,
don’t waste your gunpowder on buzzards, father, he told him, why should you want to convert me since everything I’m doing is just what you people want, what the hell. That floating calmness shattered its hull suddenly at a cockpit on a faraway plain when a bloodthirsty cock tore the head off his adversary and ate it, pecking at it before an audience that was maddened by blood and a drunken brass
band that celebrated the horror with festive music, and he was the only one who spotted the evil omen, and he sensed that it was so clear and so imminent that he secretly ordered his escort to arrest one of the musicians, that one, the one playing the tuba, and, indeed, they found a sawed-off shotgun on him and under torture he confessed that he had planned to shoot him during the confusion as the
people left, it was quite obvious, of course, he explained, because I was looking at everybody and everybody
was looking back at me, but the only one who didn’t dare look at me one single time was that son of a bitch with the tuba, poor devil, and still he knew that that wasn’t the ultimate reason for his anxiety, because he kept on feeling it at night in government house even after his security
service had shown that there was no reason for worry general sir, everything was in order, but he had clung to Patricio Aragonés as if he were himself after he had received the omen at the cockpit, he gave him his own food to eat, he gave him his own honey to drink with the same spoon so that he would at least die with the consolation that they had both died together in case the things had been
poisoned, and they went like fugitives through forgotten rooms, walking on the rugs so that no one would hear their great furtive Siamese elephant steps, navigating together in the intermittent light from the beacon as it came in through the windows and flooded the rooms of the house every thirty seconds with green amidst the vapor from cow flops and the mournful greetings of nocturnal ships on the
sleeping seas, they would spend whole afternoons watching it rain, counting swallows on languid September afternoons like two aged lovers, so far removed from the world that he himself did not realize that his fierce struggle to exist twice was feeding the contrary suspicion that he was existing less and less, that he was lying in a lethargy, that the guard had been doubled and no one was allowed
in or out of the presidential quarters, that someone had still managed to get through that strict filter and had seen the birds silent in their cages, the cows drinking at the baptismal font, the lepers and cripples sleeping in the rose beds, and everybody at midday seemed to be waiting for dawn to come since he had died as had been announced in the prophetic basins of natural causes during his
sleep but the high command was delaying the notice while they tried to settle in bloody secret meetings their postponed quarrels. Although he did not know of those rumors he was aware that something was about to occur in his life, he would interrupt the slow domino games to ask General Rodrigo de Aguilar how the mess was going, friend, everything under control sir,
the nation was calm, he watched
for signs of premonition in the funeral pyres of cow chips that burned on the courtyard corridors and in the wells with their ancient waters but he could find no answer for his anxiety, he visited his mother Bendición Alvarado in the suburban mansion when the heat died down, they would sit and take in the cool afternoon breezes under the tamarinds, she in her maternal rocking chair, decrepit but
with her soul intact, tossing handfuls of grain to the hens and the peacocks who pecked about the courtyard, and he in the large wicker chair, fanning himself with his hat, following with his look of old hunger the big mulatto women who brought him colored fruit juices to quench his hot thirst, general, thinking oh Bendición Alvarado, my mother, if you only knew that I can’t stand the world any
more, that I’d like to go away I don’t know where, mother, far away from so much injustice, but not even his mother was shown the inside of his sighs but he would return to the presidential palace with the first lights of evening, go in through the service entrance hearing the clicking of sentries’ heels as he went along the corridors and they saluted him all’s well general sir, everything in order,
but he knew that it wasn’t true, that they were dissembling from habit, that they lied to him out of fear, that nothing was true in that crisis of uncertainty which was rendering his glory bitter and had been taking away his old desire to command ever since that fateful night at the cockpit, until very late he would stay stretched out face down on the floor without sleeping, through the open window
facing the sea he could hear the distant drums and sad bagpipes that were celebrating some wedding among the poor with the same uproar with which they would have celebrated his death, he could hear the farewell of a vagabond steamer that was weighing anchor at two o’clock in the morning without permission from the port captain, he could hear the paper sound of the roses as they opened at dawn,
without one moment of rest, sensing with a woodsman’s instinct the imminence of the afternoon when he would be on his way back from the suburban mansion and be surprised by a mob in the street, an opening and closing
of windows and a panic of swallows in the diaphanous December sky and he peeped through the curtain of the carriage to see what was going on and he said to himself this is it, mother,
this is it, he said to himself, with a terrible feeling of relief, seeing the colored balloons in the sky, the red and green balloons, the yellow balloons like great blue oranges, the innumerable wandering balloons that took flight in the midst of swallows’ fright and floated for an instant in the crystal light of four o’clock and suddenly broke with a silent and unanimous explosion releasing
thousands and thousands of bits of paper over the city, a blizzard of broadsides which the coachman took advantage of in order to slip through the tumult of the public market without anyone’s recognizing the coach of power, because everybody was busy in the scramble for the papers from the balloons general sir, they were shouting out the words on them from the balconies, from memory they repeated
down with oppression, they shouted death to the tyrant, and even the sentries along the corridors of the presidential palace were reading aloud about the union of all without distinction of class against the despotism of centuries, patriotic reconciliation against the corruption and the arrogance of the military, no more blood, they shouted, no more pillaging, the whole country was awakening from
its age-old sleep at the moment he was going through the coach house door and he ran into the terrible news general sir that Patricio Aragonés had been fatally wounded by a poisoned dart. Years before one night of bad moods he had proposed to Patricio Aragonés that they gamble their lives on heads or tails, heads you die, tails I die, but Patricio Aragonés made him see that they would both meet death
in a tie because all coins had both their faces on both sides, he then proposed that they gamble their lives at the domino table, the best out of twenty games, and Patricio Aragonés accepted with great honor general sir, with the proviso that you grant me the privilege of being allowed to beat you, and he accepted, agreed, so they played one game, they played two, they played twenty, and Patricio
Aragonés always won because he only used to win because it was forbidden
to beat him, a long and bloody battle was joined and they reached the last game without his having won a single match, and Patricio Aragonés dried the sweat of his brow with his shirt sleeve sighing I’m deeply sorry general but I don’t want to die, and then he went about picking up the pieces, placed them in order in the
little wooden box while he said like a schoolmaster chanting a rote lesson that he had no need to die at the domino table either but in his own time and his own place from natural causes in his sleep as had been predicted ever since the beginning of his days by the sibylline basins, and not even that way, when you come to think of it, because Bendición Alvarado didn’t bring me into the world to pay
any heed to basins but to command, and after all I am what I am, and not you, so give thanks to God that this was only a game, he told him laughing, not having imagined then or ever that the terrible joke was to come trite the night he went into Patricio Aragonés’s room and found him facing the demands of death, hopeless, with no chance of surviving the poison, and he greeted him from the door with
his hand outstretched, God save you, stud, it’s a great honor to die for your country. He stayed with him during his slow agony, the two of them alone in the room, giving him the spoonfuls of anodyne with his own hand, and Patricio Aragonés took them without gratitude telling him between spoonfuls I will leave you here for a while my general with your world of shit because my heart tells me that
quite soon we shall meet again in the depths of hell, I all twisted up worse than a mullet because of this poison and you with your head in your hand looking for a place to put it, let it be said without the least bit of respect general sir, that I can tell you nowthat I never loved you as you think but that ever since the days of the filibusters when I had the evil misfortune to chance into your
domains I’ve been praying that you would be killed, in a good way even, so that you would pay me back for this life of an orphan you gave me, first by flattening my feet with tamping hands so that they would be those of a sleepwalker like yours, then by piercing my nuts with a shoemaker’s awl so I would develop a rupture, then by making me drink turpentine so
I would forget how to read and write
after all the work it took my mother to teach me, and always obliging me to go through the public ceremonies you didn’t dare face, and not because the nation needs you alive as you say but because even the toughest man can feel his ass freeze up when he crowns a beauty whore and doesn’t know from what direction death will explode in on him, let it be said without the least respect general, but
he wasn’t bothered by the insolence but rather by the ingratitude of Patricio Aragonés who I set up in life like a king in a palace and I gave you what no one has ever given anybody in this world even lending you my own women, although we’d best not talk about that general because it’s better to be gelded by a mace than to go about laying mothers on the ground as if it were a matter of branding calves,
just because those poor heartless bitch waifs don’t even feel the brand or kick or twist or complain like calves, and they don’t smoke from the haunches or smell of singed flesh which is the least one asks of good women, but they lay down their dead-cow bodies so a person can do his duty while they go on peeling potatoes and shouting to the other women please keep an eye on the kitchen for me
while I take a breather here so my rice doesn’t burn, only you would think that stuff like that is love general, because it’s the only kind you know, without the least respect of course, and then he began to roar shut up, God damn it, shut up or you’ll pay for it, but Patricio Aragonés kept on saying without the slightest intention of a joke why should I shut up when all you can do is kill me and