The Autumn of the Patriarch Read online

  THE 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 complaining out of habit or disillusionment but because he no longer made her a participant in his shake-ups nor did he hurry over as before to share the best secrets of power with her, and he had changed so much since the times of the marines that to Bendición Alvarado he seemed to be older than she, to have left her behind in time, she heard him stumble over words, his concept of reality became entangled, sometimes he drooled, and she was struck with the compassion that was not a mother’s but a daughter’s when she saw him arrive at the suburban mansion loaded down with packages and desperate to open them all at the same time, he cut the twine with his teeth, broke his fingernails on the hoops before she could get the scissors from her sewing basket, dug everything out from the underbrush of debris with flailing hands as he drowned in his high-flying anxiety, look at all this wonderful stuff, mother, he said, a live mermaid in a fishbowl, a lifesize wind-up angel who flew about the room striking the hour with its bell, a gigantic shell in which the listener didn’t hear the sound of the waves and the sea wind but the strains of the national anthem, what fancy stuff, mother, now you can see how nice it is not to be poor, he said, but she couldn’t feed his enthusiasm and began chewing on the brushes used to paint orioles so her son would not notice that her heart was crumbling with pity thinking back on a past that no one knew as well as she, remembering how hard it had been for him to stay in the chair he was sitting in, but not these days, lord, not these easy times when power was a tangible and unique matter, a little glass ball in the palm of the hand, as he said, but when he was a fugitive shad swimming around without god or law in a neighborhood palace pursued by the voracious swarm of the surviving leaders of the federalist war who had helped overthrow the general-poet Lautaro Muñoz, an enlightened despot whom God keep in His holy glory with his Suetonius missals in Latin and his forty-two pedigreed horses, and in exchange for their armed help they had taken over the ranches and livestock of the outlawed former owners and had divided the country up into autonomous provinces with the unanswerable argument that this is federalism general, this is what we have shed the blood of our veins for, and they were absolute monarchs in their territories, with their own laws, their personal patriotic holidays, their paper money which they signed themselves, their dress uniforms with sabers encrusted with precious stones and hussar jackets with gold frogs and three-cornered hats with peacock-tail plumes copied from ancient prints of viceroys of the country before them, and they were wil
d and sentimental, lord, they would come into the presidential palace through the main door, with no one’s permission since the nation belongs to all general, that’s why we’ve sacrificed our lives for it, they camped out in the ballroom with their respective harems and the farm animals which they demanded as tribute for peace as they went along everywhere so that they would always have something to eat, they brought along personal escorts of barbarian mercenaries who instead of boots used rags to clothe their feet and who could barely express themselves in Christian tongue but were wise in tricks of dice and ferocious and skilled in the manipulation of weapons of war, so that the house of power was like a gypsy encampment, lord, it had the thick smell of a river at flood-tide, the officers of the general staff had taken the furniture of the republic to their ranches, they played dominoes gambling away the privileges of government indifferent to the entreaties of his mother Bendición Alvarado who did not have a moment’s rest trying to sweep up so much fairground garbage, trying to put just one little bit of order into that shipwreck, for she was the only one who had made any attempt to resist the irredeemable debasement of the liberal crusade, only she had tried to drive them out with her broom when she saw the house perverted by those evil-living reprobates who fought over the large chairs of the high command with playing-card altercations, she watched them do sodomite business behind the piano, she watched them shit in the alabaster amphoras even though she told them not to, lord, they weren’t portable toilets they were amphoras recovered from the seas of Pantelleria, but they insisted that they were rich men’s pisspots, lord, it was humanly impossible to stop General Adriano Guzman from attending the diplomatic party celebrating the tenth year of my rise to power, although no one could have imagined what awaited us when he appeared in the ballroom wearing an austere linen uniform chosen especially for the occasion, he came without weapons, just as he had promised me on his word as a soldier, with his escort of escaped French prisoners in civilian clothes and loaded down with goodies from Cayenne which General Adriano Guzman distributed one by one to the wives of ambassadors and ministers after asking permission from their husbands with a bow, for that was what his mercenaries had told him was considered proper in Versailles and so he went through it with the rare genius of a gentleman, and then he sat in a corner of the ballroom with his attention on the dance and nodding his head in approval, very good, he said, these stuck-ups from Europeland dance good, he said, to each his own, he said, so forgotten in his easy chair that only I noticed that one of his aides was filling his glass with champagne after each sip, and as the hours passed he was becoming more tense and flushed than he normally was, he opened a button on his sweat-soaked tunic every time the pressure of a repressed belch came all the way up to eye level, he was moaning with drowsiness, mother, and all of a sudden he got up with difficulty during a pause in the dancing and finally unbuttoned his tunic completely and then his fly and he stood there wide open and staling away on the perfumed décolletages of the ladies of the ambassadors and ministers with his musty old hose of a buzzard’s tool, with his sour war-drunkard’s urine he soaked the muslin laps, the gold brocade bosoms, the ostrich-feather fans, singing impassively in the midst of the panic I’m the gallant swain who waters the roses of your bower, oh lovely rose in bloom, he sang on, with no one daring to control him, not even he, because I knew I had more power than any one of them but much less than two of them plotting together, still unaware that he saw the others just as they were while the others were never able to glimpse the hidden thoughts of the granite old man whose serenity was matched only by his smooth-sailing prudence and his immense disposition for waiting, we saw only his lugubrious eyes, his thin lips, the chaste maiden’s hand which did not even tremble on the hilt of his saber that noon of horror when they came to him with the news general sir that General Narciso Lopez high on green pot and anisette had hauled a cadet of the presidential guard into a toilet and warmed him up as he saw fit with the resources of a wild woman and then obliged him put it all into me, God damn it, that’s an order, everything, my love, even your golden little balls, weeping with pain, weeping with rage, until he found himself vomiting with humiliation on all fours with his head stuck in the fetid vapors of the toilet bowl, and then he lifted the Adonic cadet up into the air and impaled him with a plainsman’s lance onto the springtime tapestry of the audience room like a butterfly and no one dared take him down for three days, poor man, because all he did was keep an eye on his former comrades in arms so that they would not hatch plots but without getting enmeshed in their lives, convinced that they themselves would exterminate each other among themselves before they came to him with the news general sir that members of General Jesucristo Sanchez’s escort had been forced to beat him to death with chairs when he had an attack of rabies that he got from a cat bite, poor man, he scarcely looked up from his domino game when they whispered in his ear the news general sir that General Lotario Sereno had been drowned when his horse had suddenly died under him as he was fording a river, poor man, he barely blinked when they came to him with the news general sir that General Narciso Lopez had shoved a dynamite stick up his ass and blown his guts out over the shame of his unconquerable pederasty, and he said poor man as if he had had nothing to do with those infamous deaths and he issued the same decree of posthumous honors for all, proclaiming them martyrs who had fallen in acts of service and he had them entombed in the national pantheon with magnificent pomp and all on the same level because a nation without heroes is a house without doors, he said, and when there were only six combat generals left in all the land he invited them to celebrate his birthday with a carousal of comrades in the presidential palace, all of them together, lord, even General Jacinto Algarabía who was the darkest and shrewdest, who prided himself on having a son by his own mother and only drank wood alcohol with gunpowder in it, with no one else in the banquet hall like the good old days general, all without weapons like blood brothers but with the men of their escorts crowded into the next room, all loaded down with magnificent gifts for the only one of us who has been able to understand us all, they said, meaning that he was the only one who had learned how to manage them, the only one who had succeeded in getting out of the bowels of his remote lair on the highland plains the legendary General Saturno Santos, a full-blooded Indian, unsure, who always went around like the whore mother that gave me birth with his foot on the ground general sir because we roughnecks can’t breathe unless we feel the earth, he had arrived wrapped in a cape with bright-colored prints of strange animals on it, he came alone, as he always went about, without an escort, preceded by a gloomy aura, with no arms except a cane machete which he refused to take off his belt because it wasn’t a weapon of war but one for work, and as a gift he brought me an eagle trained to fight in men’s wars, and he brought his harp, mother, that sacred instrument whose notes could conjure up storms and hasten the cycles of harvest time and which General Saturno Santos plucked with a skill from his heart that awoke in all of us the nostalgia for the nights of horror of the war, mother, it aroused in us the dog-mange smell of war, it spun around in our souls the war song of the golden boat that will lead us on, they sang it in a chorus with all their heart, mother, I sent myself back from the bridge bathed in tears, they sang, while they ate a turkey stuffed with plums and half a suckling pig and each one drank from his personal bottle, each one his own alcohol, all except him and General Saturno Santos who had never tasted a drop of liquor in all their lives, nor smoked, nor eaten more than what was indispensable for life, in my honor they sang in a chorus the serenade King David sang, with tears they wailed out all the birthday songs that had been sung before Consul Hanemann came to us with the novelty general sir of that phonograph with a horn speaker and its cylinder of happy birthday in English, they sang half-asleep, half-dead from drink, not worrying any more about the taciturn old man who at the stroke of twelve took down the lamp and went to inspect the house before retiring in accordance with his barracks-bred custom and he saw for the last ti
me as he returned on his way through the banquet hall the six generals piled together on the floor, he saw them in embrace, inert and placid, under the protection of the five escort groups who kept watch among themselves, because even in sleep and in embrace they were afraid of each other almost as much as each one of them was afraid of him and as he was afraid of two of them in cahoots, and he put the lamp back on the mantel and closed the three locks, the three bolts, the three bars of his bedroom, and lay down on the floor face down, his right arm serving as a pillow at the instant that the foundations of the building shook with the compact explosion of all the escorts’ weapons going off at the same time, one single time, by God, with no intermediate sound, no moan, and again, by God, and that was that, the mess was over, all that was left was a lingering smell of gunpowder in the silence of the world, only he remained safe forever from the anxieties of power as in the first mallow-soft rays of the new day he saw the orderlies on duty sloshing through the swamp of blood in the banquet hall, he saw his mother Bendición Alvarado seized by a dizzy spell of horror as she discovered that the walls oozed blood no matter how hard she scrubbed them with lye and ash, lord, that the rugs kept on giving off blood no matter how much she wrung them out, and all the more blood poured in torrents through corridors and offices the more they worked desperately to wash it out in order to hide the extent of the massacre of the last heirs of our war who according to the official statement had been assassinated by their own maddened escorts and their bodies wrapped in the national flag filled the pantheon of patriots with a funeral worthy of a bishop, for not one single man of the escort had escaped alive from the bloody roundup, not one general, except General Saturno Santos who was armored by his strings of scapulars and who knew Indian secrets of how to change his form at will, curse him, he could turn into an armadillo or a pond general, he could become thunder, and he knew it was true because his most astute trackers had lost the trail ever since last Christmas, the best-trained jaguar hounds looked for him in the opposite direction, he had seen him in the flesh in the king of spades in his sibyls’ cards, and he was alive, sleeping by day and traveling by night off the beaten track on land and water, but he kept leaving a trail of prayers that confused his pursuers’ judgment and tired out the will of his enemies, but he never gave up the search for one instant day and night for years and years until many years later when he saw through the window of the presidential train a crowd of men and women with their children and animals and cooking utensils as he had seen so many times behind the troops in wartime, he saw them parading in the rain carrying their sick in hammocks strung to poles behind a very pale man in a burlap tunic who says he’s a divine messenger general sir, and he slapped his forehead and said to himself there he is, God damn it, and there was General Saturno Santos begging off the charity of the pilgrims with the charms of his unstrung harp, he was miserable and gloomy, with a beat-up felt hat and a poncho in tatters, but even in that pitiful state he was not as easy to kill as he thought for he had decapitated three of his best men with his machete, he had stood up to the fiercest of them with such valor and ability that he ordered the train to stop opposite the cemetery on the plain where the messenger was preaching, and everybody drew apart in a stampede when the men of the presidential guard jumped out of the coach painted with the colors of the flag with their weapons at the ready, no one remained in sight except General Saturno Santos beside his mythical harp with his hand tight on the hilt of his machete, and he seemed fascinated by the sight of the mortal enemy who appeared on the platform of the coach in his denim suit with no insignia, without weapons, older and more remote as if it had been a hundred years since we saw each other general, he looked tired and lonely to me, his skin yellow from liver trouble and his eyes tending toward teariness, but he had the pale glow of a person who was not only master of his power but also the power won from his dead, so I made ready to die without resisting because it seemed useless to him to go against an old man who had come from so far off with no more motives or merits than his barbarous appetite for command, but he showed him the manta-ray palm of his hand and said God bless you, stud, the country deserves you, because it has always known that against an invincible man there is no weapon but friendship, and General Saturno Santos kissed the ground he had trod and asked him the favor of letting me serve you in any way you command general sir while I have the ability in these hands to make my machete sing, and he accepted, agreed, he made him his back-up man but only on the condition that you never get behind me, he made him his accomplice in dominoes and between the two of them they gave a four-handed skinning to many despots in misfortune, he would have him get barefoot into the presidential coach and take him to diplomatic receptions with that jaguar breath that aroused dogs and made ambassadors’ wives dizzy, he had him sleep across the doorsill of his bedroom so as to relieve himself of the fear of sleeping when life became so harsh that he trembled at the idea of finding himself alone among the people of his dreams, he kept him close to his confidence at a distance of ten hands for many years until uric acid squeezed off his skill of making his machete sing and he asked the favor that you kill me yourself general sir so as not to leave someone else the pleasure of killing me when he has no right to, but he ordered him off to die on a good retirement pension and with a medal of gratitude on the byways of the plains where he had been born and he could not repress his tears when General Saturno Santos put aside his shame to tell him choking and weeping so you see general the time comes for the roughest of us studs to turn into fairies, what a damned thing. So no one understood better than Bendición Alvarado the boyish excitement with which he got rid of bad times and the lack of sense with which he squandered the earnings of power in order to have as an old man what he had lacked as a child, but it made her angry when they abused his premature innocence by selling him those gringo gewgaws which weren’t all that cheap and didn’t require as much ingenuity as the faked birds of which she had never managed to sell more than four, it’s fine for you to enjoy it, she said, but think about the future, I don’t want to see you begging hat in hand at the door of some church if tomorrow or later God forbid they take away the chair you’re sitting in, if you only knew how to sing at least, or were an archbishop or a navigator, but you’re only a general, so you’re not good for anything except to command, she advised him to bury in a safe place the money you have left over from the government, where no one else could find it, just in case you have to leave on the run like those poor presidents of nowhere grazing on oblivion in the house on the reefs and begging a hello from ships, look at yourself in that mirror, she told him, but he didn’t pay any attention to her except that he would ease her disconsolation with the magic formula of calm down mother, the people love me. Bendición Alvarado was to live for many years lamenting poverty, fighting with the maids over bills from the market and even skipping lunch in order to economize, and no one dared reveal to her that she was one of the richest women in the land, that everything he accumulated from government business he put in her name, that she was not only the owner of immeasurable land and uncountable livestock but also the local streetcars, the mails, the telegraph service, and the waters of the nation, so that every boat that plied the tributaries of the Amazon or the territorial seas had to pay her a rental fee which she never knew about down to the day she died, just as she was ignorant for so many years of the fact that her son was not so badly off as she supposed when he came to the suburban mansion and sank into the wonders of his old-age toys, for in addition to the personal tax that he collected for every head of cattle for the benefit of the country, in addition to payments for his favors and gifts which his partisans sent him to help their interests, he had conceived and had been putting to use for a long time an infallible system for beating the lottery. Those were the times following his false death, the noisy times, lord, and they weren’t called that as many of us thought because of the underground boom that was felt all over the nation one Saint Heraclius Martyr night and for which there was
never any sure explanation, but because of the constant noise of the projects begun that were proclaimed at their start as the greatest in the world and yet were never completed, a peaceful period during which he summoned councils of government while he took his siesta in the suburban mansion, he would lie in the hammock fanning himself with his hat under the sweet tamarind branches, with his eyes closed he would listen to the doctors with free-flowing words and waxed mustaches who sat around the hammock discussing things, pale from the heat inside their rough frock coats and celluloid collars, the civilian ministers he detested so much but whom he had appointed once more for convenience and whom he listened to as they argued over matters of state amidst the scandal of roosters chasing after the hens in the courtyard, and the continuous buzz of the cicadas and the insomnia-stricken gramophone in the neighborhood that was singing the song Susana come Susana, they suddenly fell silent, quiet, the general has fallen asleep, but he would roar without opening his eyes, without stopping his snoring, I’m not asleep you God-damned fools, go on, they went on, until he would feel his way out of the siesta cobwebs and declare that in all this damned-fool talk the only one who makes any sense is my old friend the minister of health, by God, the mess was over, the whole mess was coming to an end, he chatted with his personal aides walking them back and forth while he ate with plate in one hand and spoon in the other, he said goodbye to them at the steps with an indifference of do what you think best because in the end I’m the one who gives the orders, God damn it, this farting around and asking whether they wanted to or didn’t want to was over, God damn it, he cut inaugural ribbons, he showed himself large as life in public taking on the risks of power as he had never done in more peaceful times, what the hell, he played endless games of dominoes with my lifetime friend General Rodrigo de Aguilar and my old friend the minister of health who were the only ones who had enough of his confidence to ask him to free a prisoner or pardon someone condemned to death, and the only ones who dared ask him to receive in a special audience the beauty queen of the poor, an incredible creature from that miserable wallow we called the dogfight district because all the dogs in the neighborhood had been fighting for many years without a moment’s truce, a lethal redoubt where national guard patrols did not enter because they would be stripped naked and cars were broken up into their smallest parts with a flick of the hand, where poor stray donkeys would enter by one end of the street and come out the other in a bag of bones, they roasted the sons of the rich general sir, they sold them in the market turned into sausages, just imagine, because Manuela Sanchez of my evil luck had been born there and lived there, a dungheap marigold whose remarkable beauty was the astonishment of the nation general sir, and he felt so intrigued by the revelation that if all this is as true as you people say I’ll not only receive her in a special audience but I’ll dance the first waltz with her, by God, have them write it up in the newspapers, he ordered, this kind of crap makes a big hit with the poor. Yet, the night after the audience, while they were playing dominoes, he commented with a certain bitterness to General Rodrigo de Aguilar that the queen of the poor wasn’t even worth dancing with, that she was as common as so many other slum Manuela Sánchezes with her nymph’s dress of muslin petticoats and the gilt crown with artificial jewels and a rose in her hand under the watchful eye of a mother who looked after her as if she were made of gold, so he gave her everything she wanted which was only electricity and running water for the dogfight district, but he warned that it was the last time I’ll ever receive anybody on a begging mission, God damn it, I’m not going to talk to poor people any more, he said, before the game was over, he slammed the door, left, he heard the metal tolling of eight o’clock, he gave the cows in the stables their fodder, he had them bring up the cow chips, he inspected the whole building eating as he walked with his plate in his hand, he was eating stew with beans, white rice, and plantain slices, he counted the sentries from the entranceway to the bedrooms, they were all there and at their posts, fourteen, he saw the rest of his personal guard playing dominoes at the post in the first courtyard, he saw the lepers lying among the rosebushes, the cripples on the stairs, it was nine o’clock, he put his unfinished plate down on a window sill and found himself feeling around in the muddy atmosphere of the sheds among the concubines who were sleeping as many as three to a bed together with their seven-month runts, he mounted a lump that smelled of yesterday’s stew and he separated two heads here six legs and three arms there without ever asking who was who or who was the one who finally suckled him without waking up, without dreaming about him, or whose voice it had been that murmured in her sleep from the other bed not to get so excited general you’ll frighten the children, he went back inside the house, checked the locks on the twenty-three windows, lighted the piles of cow chips every twenty feet from the entranceway to the private rooms, caught the smell of the smoke, remembered an improbable childhood that might have been his and which he only remembered at that instant when the smoke started up and which he forgot forever, he went back turning out the lights in reverse order from the bedrooms to the vestibule and covering the cages of the sleeping birds whom he counted before draping them with pieces of cloth, forty-eight, once more he covered the whole house with a lamp in his hand, he saw himself in the mirrors one by one as up to fourteen generals walking with the lighted lamp, it was ten o’clock, everything in order, he went back to the sleeping quarters of the presidential guard, turned out their lights, good night gentlemen, he made a search of the public offices on the ground floor, the waiting rooms, the toilets, behind the curtains, underneath the tables, there was no one, he took out the bunch of keys which he was able to distinguish by touch one by one, he locked the offices, he went up to the main floor for a room-by-room search locking the doors, he took the jar of honey from its hiding place behind a picture and had two spoonfuls before retiring, he thought of his mother asleep in the suburban mansion, Bendición Alvarado in her drowsiness of goodbyes between the balm and the oregano with the bloodless hand of a birdwoman oriole painter as a dead mother on her side, have a good night, mother, he said, a very good night to you son Bendición Alvarado answered him in her sleep in the suburban mansion, in front of his bedroom he hung the lamp by its handle on a hook and he left it hanging by the door while he slept with the absolute order that it was never to be put out because it was the light for him to flee by, it struck eleven, he inspected the house for the last time, in the dark, in case someone had sneaked in thinking he was asleep, he went alone leaving a trail in the dust made by the star of his gold spur in the fleeting dawns of green flashes of the beams from the turns of the beacon, between two instants of light he saw an aimless leper who was walking in his sleep, he cut him off, led him through the shadows without touching him lighting the way with the lights of his vigilance, put him back among the rosebushes, counted the sentries in the darkness again, went back to his bedroom, seeing as he went past the windows a sea that was the same in every window, the Caribbean in April, he contemplated it twenty-three times without stopping and it was still as it always was in April like a gilded fen, he heard twelve o’clock, with the last toll of the cathedral clappers he heard the twist of the thin whistle of his hernia, there was no other sound in the world, he alone was the nation, he lowered the three crossbars, locked the three locks, threw the three bolts in the bedroom, he urinated sitting down on the portable latrine, he urinated two drops, four drops, seven arduous drops, he fell face down on the floor, fell asleep immediately, did not dream, it was a quarter to three when he awoke drenched in sweat, shaken by the certainty that someone had been looking at him while he slept, someone who had had the ability to get in without taking off the crossbars, who’s there, he asked, there was no one, he closed his eyes, again he felt he was watched, he opened his eyes to see with fright, and then he saw, God damn it, it was Manuela Sanchez who went across the room without opening the locks because she came and went as was her will by passing through the walls, Manuela Sanchez of my evil hour with her
muslin dress and the hot coal of a rose in her hand and the natural smell of licorice of her breathing, tell me this delirium isn’t true, he said, tell me it’s not you, tell me that this deadly dizziness isn’t the licorice stagnation of your breath, but it was she, it was her rose, it was her hot breath which perfumed the air of the bedroom like an obstinate downwind with more dominion and more antiquity than the snorting of the sea, Manuela Sanchez of my disaster, you who weren’t written on the palm of my hand, or in my coffee grounds, or even in the death waters of my basins, don’t use up my breathing air, my dreams of sleep, the confines of this room where no woman had ever entered or was to enter, extinguish that rose, he moaned, while he felt around for the light switch and found Manuela Sanchez of my madness instead of the light, God damn it, why do I have to find you since you haven’t lost me, take my house if you want, the whole country with its dragon, but let me put the light on, scorpion of my nights, Manuela Sanchez of my rupture, daughter of a bitch, he shouted, thinking that the light would free him from the spell, shouting to get her out of here, get her off my back, throw her off a sea cliff with an anchor around her neck so that no one will ever suffer the glow of her rose, he went shrieking along the corridors, sloshing through the cow flops in the darkness, wondering in confusion what was going on in the world because it’s going on eight and everybody’s asleep in this house of scoundrels, get up, you bastards, he shouted, the lights went on, they played reveille at three o’clock, it was repeated at the harbor fort, the San Jerónimo garrison, in barracks all over the country, and there was the noise of startled arms, of roses that opened when there were still two hours left until dew time, of sleepwalking concubines who shook out rugs under the stars and uncovered the cages of the sleeping birds and replaced the flowers that had spent the night in the vases with last night’s flowers, and there was a troop of masons who were building emergency walls and they disoriented the sunflowers by pasting gilt paper suns on the windowpanes so that it would not be noticed that it was still nighttime in the sky and it was Sunday the twenty-fifth in the house and it was April on the sea, and there was a hubbub of Chinese laundrymen who threw the last sleepers out of their beds to take away the sheets, premonitory blind men who announced love love where there was none, perverse civil servants who found hens laying Monday’s eggs while yesterday’s were still in the file drawers, and there was an uproar of confused crowds and dogfights in the councils of government urgently called together while he opened a way lighted by the sudden day through the persistent adulators who proclaimed him the undoer of dawn, commander of time, and repository of light, until an officer of the high command dared stop him in the vestibule and came to attention with the news general sir that it’s only five after two, another voice, five after three in the morning general sir, and he fetched a ferocious clout with the back of his hand and howled with all his aroused chest so that the whole world would hear him, it’s eight o’clock, God damn it, eight o’clock, I said, God’s order. Bendición Alvarado asked him when she saw him enter the suburban mansion where are you coming from with that face that looks like a tarantula bit you, why are you holding your hand over your heart, she said to him, but he dropped into the wicker chair without answering her, changed the position of his hand, he had forgotten about her again when his mother pointed at him with the brush for painting orioles and asked in surprise whether he really believed in the Sacred Heart of Jesus with those languid eyes and that hand on his breast, and he hid it in confusion, shit mother, he slammed the door, left, kept walking back and forth at the palace with his hands in his pockets so that on their own they would not put themselves where they shouldn’t be, he watched the rain through the window, he watched the water slipping across the cookie-paper stars and the silver-plated moons that had been placed on the windowpanes so that it would look like eight at night at three in the afternoon, he saw the soldiers of the guard numb with cold in the courtyard, he saw the sad sea, Manuela Sanchez’s rain in your city without her, the terrible empty parlor, the chairs placed upside down on the tables, the irreparable loneliness of the first shadows of another ephemeral Saturday of another night without her, God damn it, if only I could get rid of what had been danced which is what hurts me most, he sighed, he felt ashamed on his state, he reviewed the places on his body where he could put his hand without its being on his heart, he finally put it on the rupture which had been eased by the rain, it was the same, it had the same shape, the same weight, it hurt the same, but it was even more atrocious like having your own living flesh heart in the palm of your hand, and only then did he understand why so many people in other times had said that the heart is the third ball general sir, God damn it, he left the window, he walked back and forth in the reception room with the unsolvable anxiety of a perpetual president with a fishbone driven through his soul, he found himself in the room of the council of ministers listening as always without understanding, without listening, suffering through a soporific report on the fiscal situation, suddenly something happened in the atmosphere, the treasury minister fell silent, the others were looking at him through the chinks of a cuirass cracked by pain, he saw himself defenseless and alone at the end of the walnut table with his face trembling from his pitiful state of a lifetime president with his hand on his chest having been revealed in broad daylight, his life was singed by the glacial hot coals of the tiny goldsmith eyes of my comrade the minister of health who seemed to be examining him inside as he fingered the chain of his small gold vest-pocket watch, careful, someone said, it might be a pang, but he had already put his siren’s hand hardened by rage on the walnut table, he got his color back, along with the words he spat out a fatal wave of authority, you people probably hoped it was a pang, you bastards, go on, they went on, but they spoke without hearing themselves thinking that something serious must have happened to him if he flew into such a rage, they whispered it, the rumor went around, they pointed at him, see how depressed he is, he has to clutch his heart, he’s coming apart at the seams, they murmured, the story went around that he had had the minister of health called urgently and that the latter had found him with his right arm laid out like a leg of lamb on the walnut table and he ordered him to cut it off for me, old friend, humiliated by his sad condition of a president bathed in tears, but the minister answered him no, general, I won’t carry out that order even if you have me shot, he told him, it’s a matter of justice, general, I’m not worth as much as your arm. These and many other versions of his state were becoming more and more intense while in the stables he measured out the milk for the garrisons watching Manuela Sánchez’s Ash Tuesday rising in the sky, he had the lepers removed from the rose beds so that they would not stink up the roses of your rose, he searched out the solitary places in the building in order to sing without being heard your first waltz as queen, so you won’t forget me, he sang, so you’ll feel you’re dying if you forget me, he sang, he plunged into the mire of the concubines’ rooms trying to find relief from his torment, and for the first time in his long life of a volatile lover he turned his instincts loose, he lingered over details, he brought out sighs from the basest of women, time and again, and he made them laugh with surprise in the shadows doesn’t it bother you general, at your age, but he knew only too well that that will to resist was a set of tricks he was playing on himself in order to waste time, that each step in his loneliness, each stumble in his breathing was bringing him remorselessly to the dog days of the unavoidable two o’clock in the afternoon when he went to beg for the love of God for the love of Manuela Sanchez in the palace of your ferocious dungheap kingdom of a dogfight district, he went in civilian clothes, without an escort, in the taxi which slipped away backfiring the smell of rancid gasoline through a city prostrate in the lethargy of siesta time, he avoided the Asiatic din of the commercial district alleys, he saw the great feminine sea of Manuela Sanchez of my perdition with a solitary pelican on the horizon, he saw the decrepit streetcars with frosted-glass windows with a velvet throne for Manuela Sanchez, he
saw the deserted beach of your sea Sundays and he ordered them to build little dressing rooms and a flag with a different color according to the whims of the weather and a steel mesh fence around a beach reserved for Manuela Sanchez, he saw the manors with marble terraces and thoughtful lawns of the fourteen families he had enriched with his favors, he saw one manor that was larger with spinning sprinklers and stained glass in the balcony windows where I want to see you living for me, and they expropriated it forcibly, deciding the fate of the world while he dreamed with his eyes open in the back seat of the tin-can car until the sea breeze was gone and the city was gone and in through the chinks of the window came the satanic din of your dogfight district where he saw himself and did not believe it thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado look where I am without you, favor me, but no one recognized in the tumult the desolate eyes, the weak lips, the languid hand on his chest, the voice with the sleeping talk of a great-grandfather looking through a broken glass wearing a white linen suit and a foreman’s hat and going around trying to find out where Manuela Sanchez of my shame lives, the queen of the poor, madam, the one with the rose in her hand, wondering in alarm where could you live in that turmoil of sharp bump backbones of satanic looks of bloody fangs of the string of fleeing howls with the tail between the legs of the butchery of dogs quartering each other as they exchanged nips in the mud puddles, where could the licorice smell of your breath be in this continuous thunder of whore-daughter loudspeakers you’ll be the torture of my life of drunks booted out of slaughterhouse saloons, where could you have got lost in the endless binge of the fruits and the hodgepodge school of mullet and ray fish and a salami of penny-pitching and the black penny tossed of the mythical paradise of Black Adán and Juancito Trucupey, God damn it, which house do you live in in this clamor of peeling pumpkin yellow walls with the purple trim of a bishop’s stole and green parrot windows with fairy blue partitions and columns pink like the rose in your hand, what time can it be in your life since these lowlifes don’t know about my order that it’s three o’clock now and not eight o’clock yesterday night as it seems to be in this hellhole, which one are you among these women who nod in the empty parlors and ventilate themselves with their skirts holding their legs apart in rocking chairs inhaling the heat from between their legs while he asked through the openings in the window where Manuela Sanchez of my rage lives, the one with the frothy dress with diamond spangles and the solid gold diadem he had given her on the first anniversary of her coronation, now I know who she is, sir, somebody in the tumult said, a big-assed teaty woman who thinks she’s the gorilla’s own mama, she lives there, sir, there, in a house like all the others, painted at the top of its lungs, with the fresh mark of someone who’d slipped on a lump of dog dirt and left a mosaic carlock, a poor person’s house so different from Manuela Sanchez in the chair of the viceroys that it was hard to believe it was her, but it was her, mother of my innards Bendición Alvarado, give me your strength to go in, mother, because it was her, he’d gone around the block ten times to catch his breath, he’d knocked on the door with three knuckle-raps that were like three entreaties, he’d waited in the burning shadows of the entranceway without knowing whether the evil air he was breathing was perverted by the glare of the sun or by anxiety, he waited without even thinking of his own state until Manuela Sanchez’s mother had him come into the cool fish leftover smell of the shadows in the broad stark living room of a house asleep that was larger inside than out, he examined the scope of his frustration from the leather stool he had sat on while Manuela Sanchez’s mother woke her from her siesta, he saw the walls and the dribbles of past raindrops, a broken sofa, two other stools with leather bottoms, a stringless piano in the corner, nothing else, shit, so much suffering for this trouble, he sighed, when Manuela Sanchez’s mother came back with a sewing basket and sat down to make lace while Manuela Sanchez got dressed, combed her hair, put on her best shoes to attend with proper dignity the unexpected old man who wondered perplexed where can you be Manuela Sanchez of my misfortune that I came looking for you and cannot find you in this house of beggars, where is your licorice smell in this pesthole of lunch leftovers, where is your rose, where your love, release me from the dungeon of these dog doubts, he sighed, when he saw her appear at the rear door like the image of a dream reflected in the mirror of another dream wearing a dress of etamine that cost a penny a yard, her hair tied back hurriedly with a back comb, her shoes shabby, but she was the most beautiful and haughtiest woman on earth with the rose glowing in her hand, a sight so dazzling that he barely got sufficient control of himself to bow when she greeted him with her lifted head God preserve your excellency, and she sat down on the sofa opposite him, where the gush of his fetid body odor would not reach her, and then I dared to look at him face to face for the first time spinning the glow of the rose with two fingers so that he would not notice my terror, I pitilessly scrutinized the bat lips, the mute eyes that seemed to be looking at me from the bottom of a pool, the hairless skin like clods of earth tamped down with gall oil which became tighter and more intense on the right hand and the ring with the presidential seal exhausted on his knee, his baggy linen suit as if there were nobody inside, his enormous dead man’s shoes, his invincible thought, his occult powers, the oldest ancient on earth, the most fearsome, the most hated, and the least pitied in the nation who was fanning himself with his foreman’s hat contemplating me in silence from his other shore, good lord, such a sad man, I thought with surprise, and she asked without compassion what can I do for you your excellency, and he answered with a solemn air that I’ve only come to ask a favor of you, your majesty, that you accept this visit of mine. He visited her without cease month after month, every day during the dead hours of the heat when he used to visit his mother so that the security service would think he was at the suburban mansion, for only he was unaware of what everyone knew that General Rodrigo de Aguilar’s riflemen were protecting him crouched on the rooftops, they raised hell with traffic, they used their rifle butts to clear the streets he would pass along, they put them off limits so that they would seem deserted from two until five with orders to shoot if anyone tried to come out onto a balcony, but even the least curious found some way to spy on the fleeting passage of the presidential limousine painted to look like a taxi with the canicular old man disguised as a civilian inside the innocent linen suit, they saw his orphan paleness, his face that had seen it dawn so many mornings, that had wept in secret, no longer bothered about what they might have thought of the hand on his chest, the archaic taciturn animal who went along leaving a trail of illusions of look at him go since he can’t make, it any more in the glassy heat of the forbidden streets, until the suspicions of strange illnesses became so loud and repeated they finally stumbled onto the truth that he was not at his mother’s house but in the shadowy parlor of Manuela Sanchez’s secret cove under the implacable vigilance of the mother who knitted without stopping to take a breath, because it was for her that he bought the ingenious machines that so saddened Bendición Alvarado, he tried to seduce her with the mystery of magnetic needles, the January snowstorms captive in quartz paperweights, apparatuses of astronomers and pharmacists, pyrographs, manometers, metronomes and gyroscopes which he kept on buying from anyone who would sell them against the advice of his mother, and in opposition to his own steely avarice, and only for the pleasure of enjoying-them with Manuela Sánchez, he would put to her ear the patriotic shell that did not have the sound of the sea inside but the military marches that exalted his regime, he would bring the flame of a match close to the thermometers so you can see the oppressive mercury of what I think inside go up and down, he looked at Manuela Sanchez without asking her for anything, without expressing his intentions to her, but he would overwhelm her in silence with those demented presents to try to tell her with them what he was capable of saying, for he only knew how to show his most intimate urges with the visible symbols of his uncommon power as on Manuela Sanchez’s birthday when he had asked her to open the wi
ndow and she opened it and I was petrified with fright to see what they had done to my poor dogfight district, I saw the white wooden houses with canvas awnings and terraces with flowers, the blue lawns with their spinning sprinklers, the peacocks, the glacial insecticide wind, a vile replica of the former residences of the occupation officials which had been minutely reproduced at night and in silence, they had slit the throats of the dogs, they had removed the former inhabitants from their homes for they had no right to be the neighbors of a queen and sent them off to rot in some other dungheap, and in that way in a few furtive nights they had built the new district of Manuela Sanchez so you could see it from your window on your name day, there it is, queen, so that you may have many happy years to come, so see whether or not these displays of power were able to soften your courteous but unconquerable behavior, my mama is there with the fetters of my honor, and he drowned in his urges, swallowed his rage, drank with slow grandfather sips the cool soursop water of pity which she had prepared to give drink to the thirsty one, he bore up under the icy jabs in his temples so that the imperfections of age would not be revealed, so that you will not love me out of pity after he had exhausted all the resources for her to have loved him out of love, she left him in such a state of only when I’m with you I don’t have the spirit even to be there, agonizing to stroke her if only with his breath before the human-size archangel should fly inside the house ringing the bell of my fateful hour, and he got in one last sip of the visit while she put the toys away in their original cases so the sea rot would not turn them to dust, just one minute, queen, he got up from now until tomorrow, a lifetime, what a mess, he barely had an instant to take a last look at the untouchable maiden who with the step of the archangel had remained motionless with the dead rose in her lap while he took leave, he slipped into the first shadows trying to hide a shame which was in the public domain and which everyone commented upon on the street, it gave birth to an anonymous song which the whole country knew except him, even the parrots sang it in courtyards make way women there comes the general crying green with his hand on his chest, see how he goes he can’t handle his power, he rules in his sleep, he’s got a wound that won’t close, wild parrots learned it from having heard it sung by tame parrots, budgies and mockingbirds learned it from them and they carried it off in flocks beyond his measureless realm of gloom, and in all the skies of the nation one could hear at dusk that unanimous voice of fleeting multitudes who sang there comes my ever-loving general giving off crap through his mouth and laws through his poop, an endless song to which everybody even the parrots added verses to mock the security services of the state who tried to capture it, military patrols in full battle dress broke down courtyard doors and shot down the subversive parrots on their perches, they threw whole bushels of parakeets alive to the dogs, a state of siege was declared in an attempt to extirpate the enemy song so that no one would discover that everybody knew that he was the one who slipped like a fugitive of dusk through the doors of the presidential palace, went through the kitchens and disappeared into the manure smoke of the private rooms until tomorrow at four o’clock, queen, until every day at the same hour when he arrived at Manuela Sanchez’s house laden with so many unusual gifts that they had to take over the houses next door and knock down the intervening walls in order to have room for them, so that the original parlor had become an immense and gloomy shed where there were uncountable clocks from every period, there was every type of phonograph from primitive ones with cylinders to those with a mirror diaphragm, there were all sorts of sewing machines with cranks, pedals, motors, whole bedrooms full of galvanometers, homeopathic pharmaceuticals, music boxes, optical-illusion instruments, showcases of dried butterflies, Asiatic herbariums, laboratories for physiotherapy and physical education, machines for astronomy, orthopedics and natural sciences, and a whole world of dolls with hidden mechanisms for human traits, forbidden rooms where no one entered not even to sweep because the things stayed where they had been placed when they were brought, no one wanted to hear about them and Manuela Sanchez least of all because she did not wish to know anything about life ever since that black Saturday when the misfortune of being queen befell me, on that afternoon the world ended for me, her former suitors had died one after the other struck down by unpunished collapses and strange illnesses, her girl friends disappeared without a trace, she’d been moved without leaving her house into a district full of strangers, she was alone, watched over in her most intimate aims, the captive of a trap of fate in which she did not have the courage to say no nor did she have sufficient courage to say yes to an abominable suitor who besieged her with a madhouse love, who looked at her with a kind of reverential stupor fanning himself with his white hat, drenched in sweat, so far removed from himself that she had wondered whether he really was looking at her or whether it was only a vision of horror, she had seen him hesitating in broad daylight, she had seen him nibble at fruit juices, had seen him nod with sleep in the wicker easy chair with the glass in his hand when the copper buzz of the cicadas made the parlor shadows denser, she had seen him snore, careful your excellency, she had told him, he would wake up startled murmuring no, queen, I didn’t fall asleep, I just closed my eyes, he said, without realizing that she had taken the glass from his hand so that he wouldn’t drop it while he slept, she had amused him with subtle wiles until the incredible afternoon when he got to the house gasping with the news that today I’m bringing you the greatest gift in the universe, a miracle of heaven that’s going to pass by tonight at eleven-oh-six so that you can see it, queen, only so that you can see it, and it was the comet. It was one of our great moments of disappointment, because for some time a rumor had spread like so many others that the timetable of his life was not controlled by human time but by the cycles of the comet, that he had been conceived to see it once but that he was not to see it again in spite of the arrogant auguries of his adulators, so we had waited like someone waiting for the day when that secular November night is born on which joyous music was prepared, the bells of jubilation, the festival rockets which for the first time in a century did not burst to exalt his glory but to wait for the eleven metal rings of eleven o’clock which would signal the end of his years, to celebrate a providential event that he awaited on the roof of Manuela Sanchez’s house, sitting between her and her mother, breathing strongly so that they would not notice the difficulties of his heart under a sky numb with evil omens, breathing in for the first time the nocturnal breath of Manuela Sanchez, the intensity of her inclemency, her open air, he heard on the horizon the conjure drums that were coming out to meet the disaster, he listened to distant laments, the sounds of the volcanic slime of the crowds who prostrated themselves in terror before a creature alien to their power who had preceded and who was to transcend the years of their age, he felt the weight of time, he suffered for an instant the misfortune of being mortal, and then he saw it, there it is, he said, and there it was, because he knew it, he had seen it when it had passed on to the other side of the universe, it was the same one, queen, older than the earth, the painful medusa of light the size of the sky which with every hand measure of its trajectory was returning a million years to its origins, they heard the buzzing of bits of tinfoil, they saw his afflicted face, his eyes overflowing with tears, the track of frozen poisons of its hair disheveled by the winds of space as it left across the world a trail radiant with star debris and dawns delayed by tarry moons and ashes from the craters of oceans previous to the origins of earth time, there it is, queen, he murmured, take a good look at it because we won’t see it again for another century, and she crossed herself in terror, more beautiful than ever under the phosphorous glow of the comet and with her head snowy from the soft drizzle of astral trash and celestial sediment, and it was then that it happened, mother of mine Bendición Alvarado, it happened that Manuela Sanchez had seen the abyss of eternity in the sky and trying to cling to life she had reached out her hand into space and the only thing she found to hang on to was the undesirable han
d with the presidential ring, his hot stiff hand of rapine cooked in the embers of the slow fire of power. Very few were those who were moved by the biblical passage of the glowing medusa which frightened deer from out of the sky and fumigated the fatherland with a trail of radiant dust of star debris, for even the most incredulous of us were hanging on that uncommonly large death which was to destroy the principles of Christianity and implant the origins of the third testament, we waited in vain until dawn, we returned home more fatigued from waiting than from not sleeping through the post-party streets where the dawn women were sweeping up the celestial trash left by the comet, and not even then did we resign ourselves to believe that it was true that nothing had happened, but that on the contrary we had been the victims of another historic trick, for the official organs proclaimed the passage of the comet as a victory of the regime over the forces of evil, they took advantage of the occasion to deny the suppositions of strange diseases with unmistakable acts of vitality on the part of the man in power, slogans were renewed, a solemn message was made public in which he had expressed my unique and sovereign decision to be in my post of service to the nation when the comet passes again, but on the other hand he heard the music and the rockets as if they did not belong to his regime, he listened without emotion to the clamoring crowd gathered on the main square with large banners saying eternal glory to the most worthy one who will live to tell it, he was not concerned with the troubles of government, he delegated his authority to underlings tormented by the memory of the hot coal that was Manuela Sanchez’s hand on his, dreaming of reliving that happy moment even if nature’s direction had to be turned off course and the universe be damaged, desiring it with such intensity that he ended up beseeching his astronomers to invent him a fireworks comet, a fleeting morning star, a dragon made of candles, any ingenious star invention that would be terrifying enough to cause a swoon of eternity in a beautiful woman, but the only thing they could come up with in their calculations was a total eclipse of the sun for Wednesday of next week at four in the afternoon general sir, and he accepted it, all right, and it was such a true night in the middle of the day that the stars lit up, flowers closed, hens went to roost, and animals sought shelter with their best premonitory instincts, while he breathed in Manuela Sanchez’s twilight breath as it became nocturnal and the rose languished in her hand deceived by the shadows, there it is, queen, it’s your eclipse, but Manuela Sanchez did not answer, she did not touch his hand, she was not breathing, she seemed so unreal that he could not resist his urge and he stretched out his hand in the darkness to touch her hand, but he could not find it, he looked for it with the tips of his fingers in the place where her smell had been, but he did not find it either, he kept on looking for it through the enormous house with both hands, waving his arms about with the open eyes of a sleepwalker in the shadows, wondering with grief where can you be Manuela Sanchez of my misfortune as I seek you and cannot find you in the unfortunate night of your eclipse, where can your inclement hand be, your rose, he swam like a diver lost in a pool of invisible waters in whose reaches he found floating the prehistoric crayfish of the galvanometers, the crabs of the musical clocks, the lobsters of your machines of illusory trades, but on the contrary he did not even find the licorice breath of your lungs, and as the darkness of the ephemeral night broke up the light of truth grew brighter in his soul and he felt older than God in the shadows of the six in the afternoon dawn in the deserted house, he felt sadder, lonelier than ever in the loneliness of this world without you, my queen, lost forever in the enigma of the eclipse, nevermore, because never in the rest of the very long years of his power would he find Manuela Sanchez of my perdition again in the labyrinth of her house, she had disappeared in the night of the eclipse general sir, they told him that she’d been seen dancing the plena in Puerto Rico, there where they cut Elena general sir, but it wasn’t her, that she’d been seen in the madness of Papa Montero’s wake, tricky, lowlife rumba bunch, but it wasn’t her either, that she’d been seen in the ticky-tacky of Barlovento over the mine, in the dance of Aracataca, in the pretty wind of the little drum of Panama, but none of them was her, general sir, she just blew the hell away, and if he did not abandon himself to the will of death at that time it was not because he lacked the rage to die but because he knew he was remorselessly condemned not to die of love, he had known it ever since one afternoon during the first days of his empire when he went to a sibyl for her to read to him in the water of her basins the keys to his fate which were not written in the palm of his hand, or in the cards, or in his coffee grounds, or in any other means of inquiry, only in that mirror of premonitory waters where he saw himself dead of natural causes during his sleep in the office next to the reception room, and he saw himself lying face down on the floor as he had slept every night of his life since birth, with the denim uniform without insignia, the boots, the gold spur, his right arm folded under his head to serve as a pillow, and at an indefinite age somewhere between 107 and 232 years.