The Autumn of the Patriarch (6 page)

out to greet them and swim around their ships they climbed up onto the yardarms and shouted to each other look there how well-formed, of beauteous body and fine face, and thick-haired and almost like horsehair silk, and when they saw that we were painted so as not to get sunburned they got all excited like wet little parrots and shouted look there how they daub themselves gray, and they are the
hue of canary birds, not white nor yet black, and what there be of them, and we didn’t understand why the hell they were making so much fun of us general sir since we were just as normal as the day our mothers bore us and on the other hand they were decked out like the jack of clubs in all that heat, which they made feminine the way Dutch smugglers do, and they wore their hair like women even though
they were all men and they shouted that they didn’t understand us in Christian tongue when they were the ones who couldn’t understand what we were shouting, and then they came toward us in their canoes which they called rafts, as we said before, and they were amazed that our harpoons had a shad bone for a tip which they called a fishy tooth, and we traded everything we had for these red birettas
and these strings of glass beads that we hung around our necks to please them, and also for these brass bells that can’t be worth more than a penny and for chamber pots and eyeglasses and other goods from Flanders, of the cheapest sort general sir, and since we saw that they were good people and men of good will we went on leading them to the beach without their realizing it, but the trouble was
that among the I’ll swap you this for that and that for the other a wild motherfucking trade grew up and after a while everybody was swapping his parrots, his tobacco, his wads of chocolate, his iguana eggs, everything God ever
created, because they took and gave everything willingly, and they even wanted to trade a velvet doublet for one of us to show off in Europeland, just imagine general,
what a wild affair, but he was so confused that he could not decide whether that lunatic business came within the incumbency of his government, so he went back to his bedroom, opened the window that looked out onto the sea so that perhaps he might discover some new light to shed on the mix-up they had told him about, and he saw the usual battleship that the marines had left behind at the dock, and
beyond the battleship, anchored in the shadowy sea, he saw the three caravels.

T
HE SECOND TIME
he was found, chewed away by vultures in the same office, wearing the same clothes and in the same position, none of us was old enough to remember what had happened the first time, but we knew that no evidence of his death was final, because there was always another truth behind the truth. Not even the least prudent among us would accept appearances because so many times it
had been a given fact that he was prostrate with epilepsy and would fall off his throne during the course of audiences twisting with convulsions as gall froth foamed out of his mouth, that he had lost his speech from so much talking and had ventriloquists stationed behind the curtains to make it appear that he was speaking, that shad scales were breaking out all over his body as punishment for his
perversions, that in the coolness of December the rupture sang sea chanties to him and he could only walk with the aid of a small orthopedic cart which bore his herniated testicle, that a military van had brought in a coffin with gold echini and purple ribbons and that someone had seen Leticia
Nazareno bleeding to death from weeping in the rain garden, but the more certain the rumors of his death
seemed, he would appear even more alive and authoritarian at the least expected moment to impose other unforeseen directions to our destiny. It would have been easier for a person to let himself be convinced by the immediate indications of the ring with the presidential seal or the supernatural size of his feet of an implacable walker or the strange evidence of the herniated testicle which the
vultures had not dared peck, but there was always someone who had memories of other similar indications in the case of other less important dead men in the past. Nor did the meticulous scrutiny of the house bring forth any valid element to establish his identity. In the bedroom of Bendición Alvarado, about whom we only remembered the tale of her canonization by decree, we found broken-down birdcages
with little bird bones changed to stone by the years, we saw a wicker easy chair nibbled by the cows, we saw watercolor sets and glasses with paintbrushes of the kind used by bird-women of the plains so they could sell faded birds by passing them off as orioles, we saw a tub with a balm bush that had kept on growing in neglect and its branches had climbed up the wall and peeped out through the
eyes of the portraits and had gone out through the window and ended up getting all entangled with the wild bushes in the rear courtyards, but we couldn’t find the most insignificant trace of his ever having been in that room. In the bridal bedroom of Leticia Nazareno, of whom we had a clearer image, not just because she had reigned in a more recent period but also because of the éclat of her public
acts, we saw a bed good for the outrages of love with the embroidered canopy converted into a nesting place for hens, in the closets we saw what the moths had left of blue-fox stoles, the wire framework of hoopskirts, the glacial powder of the petticoats, the Brussels lace bodices, the men’s high-cut shoes that she wore in the house and the velvet high-heeled pumps with straps that she wore at
receptions, the full-length shroud with felt violets and taffeta ribbons from her gala funeral as first lady and the homespun novice’s habit
like the hide of a gray sheep in which she had been kidnapped from Jamaica inside a crate of party crystal to be placed upon her throne as wife of a hidden president, but we didn’t find any vestige in that room either, nothing which would allow us to establish
at least whether that kidnapping by corsairs had been inspired by love. In the presidential bedroom, which was the part of the house where he spent the greater part of his last years, we found only an unused barracks bed, a portable latrine of the kind that antiquarians removed from the mansions abandoned by the marines, an iron coffer with his ninety-two medals, and a denim suit just like the
one the corpse had on, perforated by six large-caliber bullets that had left singe damage as they entered through the back and came out through the chest, which made us think there was truth to the legend going around that a bullet shot into his back would go right through without harming him, and if shot from the front it would rebound off his body back at the attacker, and that he was only vulnerable
to a coup de grace fired by someone who loved him so much that he would die for him. Both uniforms were too small for the corpse, but it was not for that reason that we put aside the possibility that they were his, because it had also been said at one time that he had kept on growing until the age of one hundred and at one hundred fifty he grew a third set of teeth, although in truth the
vulture-ravaged body was no larger than that of any average man of our day and it had some healthy teeth, small and stubby that looked like milk teeth, the skin was the color of gall speckled with liver spots without a single scar and empty pouches all over as if he had been quite fat in some other day, there were only empty sockets for the eyes that had been taciturn, and the only thing that seemed
out of proportion, except for the herniated testicle, was the pair of enormous feet, square and flat with the calluses and twisted talons of a hawk. Contrary to what his clothing showed, the descriptions made by his historians made him very big and official schoolboy texts referred to him as a patriarch of huge size who never left his house because he could not fit through the doors, who loved
children and
swallows, who knew the language of certain animals, who had the virtue of being able to anticipate the designs of nature, who could guess a person’s thoughts by one look in the eyes, and who had the secret of a salt with the virtue of curing lepers’ sores and making cripples walk. Although all trace of his origins had disappeared from the texts, it was thought that he was a man of
the upland plains because of his immense appetite for power, the nature of his government, his mournful bearing, the inconceivable evil of a heart which had sold the sea to a foreign power and condemned us to live facing this limitless plain of harsh lunar dust where the bottomless sunsets pain us in our souls. It was calculated that in the course of his life he must have sired five thousand children,
all seven-monthers, by the countless number of loveless beloveds he had who succeeded each other in his seraglio until the moment he was ready to enjoy them, but none bore his name or surname, except for the one he had by Leticia Nazareno, who was appointed a major general with jurisdiction and command at the moment of his birth, for he considered no one the son of anyone except his mother,
and only her. That certainty seemed valid even for him, as he knew that he was a man without a father like the most illustrious despots of history, that the only relative known to him and perhaps the only one he had was his mother of my heart Bendición Alvarado to whom the school texts attributed the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to any male and of having received in a dream the
hermetical keys to his messianic destiny, and whom he proclaimed matriarch of the land by decree with the simple argument that there is no mother but one, mine, a strange woman of uncertain origins whose simpleness of soul had been the scandal of the fanatics of presidential dignity during the beginnings of the regime, because they could not admit that the mother of the chief of state would hang
a pouch of camphor around her neck to ward off all contagion and tried to jab the caviar with her fork and staggered about in her patent leather pumps, nor could they accept the fact that she kept a beehive on the terrace of the music room, or bred turkeys and
watercolor-painted birds in public offices or put the sheets out to dry on the balcony from which speeches were made, nor could they bear
the fact that at a diplomatic party she had said I’m tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine
that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you’ll be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the corner, poor mother. That lack of a sense of history would have its night of splendor at the formal banquet with which
we celebrate the landing of the marines under the command of Admiral Higgingson when Bendición Alvarado saw her son in dress uniform with his gold medals and velvet gloves which he continued to wear for the rest of his life and she could not repress her impulse of maternal pride and exclaimed aloud in front of the whole diplomatic corps that if I’d known my son was going to be president of the republic
I’d have sent him to school, yes sir, how shameful it must have been after that when they exiled her to the suburban mansion, an eleven-room palace that he had won on a good night of dice when the leaders of the federalist war had used the gaming tables to divide up the splendid residential district of the fugitive conservatives, except that Bendición Alvarado disdained the imperial decor which
makes me feel I’m the wife of the Pope himself and she preferred the servants’ quarters next to the six barefoot maids who had been assigned to her, she set up her sewing machine and her cages of painted-up birds in a forgotten back room where the heat never reached and it was easier to drive off the six o’clock mosquitoes, she would sit down to sew across from the lazy light of the main courtyard
and the medicinal breeze of the tamarinds while the hens wandered through the parlors and the soldiers of the guard lay
in wait for the housemaids in the empty bedrooms, she would sit down to paint orioles and lament with the servants over the misfortunes of my poor son whom the marines had set up in the presidential palace so far from his mother, lord, without a loving wife who could take care
of him if he woke up with an ache in the middle of the night, and all involved with that job of president of the republic for a measly salary of three hundred pesos a month, poor boy. She knew quite well what she was talking about because he visited her every day while the city sloshed in the mire of siesta time, he would bring her the candied fruit she liked so much and he took advantage of the
occasion to unwind with her about his bitter position as the marines’ pratboy, he told her how he had to sneak out the sugar oranges and syrup figs in napkins because the occupation authorities had accountants who in their books kept track even of lunch leftovers, he lamented that the other day the captain of the battleship came to the presidential palace with some kind of land astronomers who took
measurements of everything and didn’t even say hello but put their tape measure around my head while they made their calculations in English and shouted at me through the interpreter to get out of here and he got out, for him to get out of the light, and he got out, go somewhere where you won’t be in the way, God damn it, and he didn’t know where to go without getting in the way because there were
measurers measuring everything down to the size of the light from the balconies, but that wasn’t the worst, mother, they threw out the last two skinny concubines he had left because the admiral had said they weren’t worthy of a president, and he was really in such want of women that on some afternoons he would pretend that he was leaving the suburban mansion but his mother heard him chasing after
the maids in the shadows of the bedrooms, and her sorrow was such that she roused up the birds in their cages so that no one would find out about her son’s troubles, she forced them to sing so that the neighbors would not hear the sounds of the attack, the shame of the struggle, the repressed threats of quiet down general or I’ll tell your mama, and she would
ruin the siesta of the troupials and
make them burst with song so that no one would hear his heartless panting of an urgent mate, his misfortune of a lover with all his clothes on, his doggish whine, his solitary tears that came on like dusk, as if rotting with pity amidst the cackling of the hens in the bedrooms aroused by that emergency love-making in the liquid glass air and the godforsaken August of three in the afternoon, my
poor son. That state of scarcity was to last until the occupation forces left the country frightened off by an epidemic when they still needed so many years to fulfill the terms of the landing, they broke down the officers’ residences into numbered pieces and packed them up in wooden crates, they dug up the blue lawns in one piece and carried them off all rolled up like carpets, they wrapped up the
rubber cisterns with the sterile water sent from their country so that they would not be eaten up inside by the water worms of our streams, they took their white hospitals apart, dynamited their barracks so that no one would know how they were constructed, at the dock they left the old battleship from the landing and on the deck of which the ghost of a lost admiral strolled in the squall of June
nights, but before bearing off that portable paradise of war in their flying trains they decorated him with the medal of the good neighbor, rendered him the honors of chief of state, and said to him aloud so that everybody could hear we leave you now with your nigger whorehouse so let’s see how you shape things up without us, but they left, mother, God damn it, they’ve gone, and for the first time
since his head-down days of occupation ox he went up the stairs giving orders in a loud voice and in person through a tumult of requests to reestablish cockfights, and he so ordered, agreed, that kite-flying be allowed again, and many other diversions that had been prohibited by the marines, and he so ordered, agreed, so convinced of being master of all his power that he inverted the colors of the
flag and replaced the Phrygian cap on the shield with the invader’s defeated dragon, because after all we’re our own dogs now, mother, long live the plague. All her life Bendición Alvarado would remember those surprises of power and the other more
ancient and bitter ones of poverty, but she never brought them back with so much grief as after the death farce when he was wallowing in the fen of
prosperity while she went on lamenting to anyone who wanted to listen to her that it was no good being the president’s mama with nothing else in the world but this sad sewing machine, she lamented, looking at him there with his gold-braided hearse, my poor son didn’t have a hole in the ground to fall dead into after all those years of serving his country, lord, it’s not fair, and she did not go on