Autumn of the Patriarch

ked the memory of the son who couldn't find where to begin to govern in that disorder, they couldn't find a piece of grass to cook or to use to warm up that immense unfurnished house in which nothing of value was left except the moth-eaten oil paintings of viceroys and archbishops from the dead grandeur of Spain, everything else had been carried off little by little by previous presidents for their private domains, they didn't even leave a trace of the wallpaper with heroic episodes on the walls, the bedrooms were full of barracks trash, everywhere there were forgotten traces of historic massacres and slogans written with a bloody finger by illusory presidents who lasted one night, but there wasn't even a mat to lie down on to sweat out a fever, so his mother Bendición Alvarado pulled down a curtain to wrap me in and left him lying in a comer of the main stairway while with the broom of green branches she swept out the presidential quarters that the English were finishing sacking, she swept the whole floor defending herself with broom blows from this pack of filibusters who were trying to rape her from behind doors, and a short while before dawn she sat down to rest beside her son who was done in by chills, wrapped in the velvet curtain, the sweat pouring off him on the last step of the devastated main stairway while she tried to bring his fever down with her easy calculations of don't let this disorder get you down, son, it's only a matter of buying a few leather stools the cheapest you can find and they'll be painted with flowers and animals, I'll paint them myself, she said, it's only a matter of buying some hammocks for when visitors come, those especially, hammocks, because in a house like this there must be a lot of unannounced visitors at all hours, she said, we'll buy a church table to eat on, we'll buy iron utensils and pewter plates so they can suffer the bad life of soldiers, we'll buy a decent jug for drinking water and a charcoal stove and that's it, after all it's the government's money, she said to console him, but he wasn't listening to her, depressed by the first mallow light of dawn which was lighting up the hidden side of truth in living flesh, conscious of being nothing but a pitiful old man who was shaking with fever sitting on the stairs thinking without love mother of mine Bendición Alvarado so that was the whole mess, damn it, so power was that house of castaways, that human smell of burned horses, that desolate dawn of another twelfth of August just like all the others was the date of power, mother, what kind of a mess have we got ourselves into, suffering the original upset, the atavistic fear of the new century of darkness that was rising up in the world without his permission, the cocks were crowing at sea, the English were singing in English gathering up the dead from the courtyard when his mother Bendición Alvarado ended her merry accounting with the remnant of relief of I'm not frightened by the things we have to buy and the chores we have to do, what frightens me is the number of sheets to be washed in this house, and then it was he who leaned on the strength of his disillusionment to try to console her with sleep easy, mother, in this country no president lasts long, he told her, and not only did he believe it then but he kept on believing it for every instant of his very long life of a sedentary despot, all the more as life convinced him more and more that the long years of power don't bring any two days that are just alike, that there would always be a hidden intention in the proposals of a prime minister when he released the dazzling display of truth in the routine Wednesday report, and he would only smile, don't tell me the truth, counselor, because we'll run the risk that it will be believed, thwarting with that single phrase a whole laborious strategy of the cabinet to try to get him to sign without asking questions, for he had never seemed more lucid to me than during the time of the rumors that he urinated in his pants during official visits without noticing it, he seemed more severe as he sank into the backwaters of decrepitude with the slippers of a terminal case and the eyeglasses with only one temple which was tied on with a piece of thread and his manner had become more intense and his instinct more certain in putting aside what was inopportune and signing what was needed without reading it, God damn it, because when all's said and done nobody pays any attention to me, he smiled, see how I ordered them to put up a barrier in the vestibule so the cows wouldn't climb up the stairs, and there it was again, so boss, so boss, it had stuck its head through the office window and was eating the paper flowers on the altar of the nation, but he limited himself to smiling you see what I'm talking about, counselor, what's got this country all fucked up is the fact that no one has ever paid any attention to me, he said, and he said it with a clearness of judgment that seemed impossible at his age, even so Ambassador Kippling said in his suppressed memoirs that around that time he had found him in a pitiful state of senile unawareness which did not even permit him to take care of himself in the most childish acts, he told how he found him soaked in an incessant and salty matter which flowed from his skin, that he had acquired the huge size of a drowned man and he had opened his shirt to show me the tight and lucid body of a dry-land drowned man in whose cracks and crannies parasites from the reefs at the bottom of the sea were proliferating, he had a ship remora on his back, polyps and microscopic crustaceans in his armpits, but he was convinced that those sprouíings from reefs were only the first symptoms of the spontaneous return of the sea that you people carried off, my dear Johnson, because seas are like cats, he said, they always come home, convinced that the rows of goose barnacles in his crotch were the secret announcement of a happy dawn in which he was going to open his bedroom window and would see again the three caravels of the admiral of the ocean sea who had grown weary of searching the whole world over to see if what they had told him was true who had smooth hands like his and like those of so many other great men of history, he had ordered him brought before him, by force if necessary, when other navigators told him they had seen him mapping the innumerable islands of the neighboring seas changing their old names of military men to the names of kings and saints while he sought in native science the only thing that really interested him which was to discover some masterful hair-restorer for his incipient baldness, we had lost all hope of finding him again when he recognized him from the presidential limousine disguised in a brown habit with the cord of Saint Francis around his waist swinging a penitent's rattle among the Sunday crowds at the public market and sunken into such a state of moral penury that it was impossible to believe that he was the same one we had seen enter the audience room in his crimson uniform and gold spurs and with the solemn gait of a sea dog on dry land, but when they tried to get him into the limousine on his orders we couldn't find a trace general sir, the earth had swallowed him up, they said he had become a Moslem, that he had died of pellagra in Senegal, and had been buried in three different tombs in three different cities in the world although he really wasn't in any of them, condemned to wander from sepulcher to sepulcher until the end of time because of the twisted fate of his expeditions, because that man was a fraud general sir, he was a worse jinx than gold, but he never believed it, he kept on hoping that he would return during the last extremes of his old age when the minister of health used pincers to pull out the ox ticks he found on his body and he insisted that they weren't ticks, doctor, it's the sea coming back, he said, so sure of his judgment that the minister of health had thought many times that he wasn't as deaf as he made one believe in public or as unraveled as he seemed to be during uncomfortable audiences, although a thorough examination had revealed that his arteries had turned to glass, he had beachsand sediment in his kidneys, and his heart was cracked from a lack of love, so the old physician took refuge behind the shield of old comradeship to tell him that it's time now to hand over the tools general sir, at least decide in whose hands you're going to leave us, he told him, save us from being orphaned, but he asked him with surprise who told him I'm thinking about dying, my dear doctor, let other people die, God damn it, and he finished in a joking vein that two nights ago I saw myself on television and I looked better than ever, like a fighting bull, he said, dying with laughter, because he had seen himself in a fog, nodding with sleep in front of the screen, and with his head wrapped in a wet towel in accordance with the habits of his more recent nights of solitude, he was really more resolute than a fighting bull before the charms of the wife of the ambassador of France, or maybe Turkey, or Sweden, what the hell, they were all so much alike that he couldn't tell them apart and so much time had passed that he couldn't remember himself among them with his dress uniform and a glass of champagne untouched in his hand during the festivities for the anniversary of August 12, or at the commemoration of the victory of January 14, or the rebirth of March 13, how should I know, because in the rigmarole of historic dates of the regime he had ended up not knowing which was when or what corresponded to what nor did he get any use from the little rolled pieces of paper that with so much good spirit and so much care he had hidden in the cracks in the walls because he had ended up forgetting what it was he was supposed to remember, he would find them by chance in the hiding places for the honey and he had read one time that April 17 was the birthday of Dr. Marcos de Leon, we have to send him a tiger as a gift, he had read, written in his own hand, without the slightest idea of who he was, feeling that there was no punishment more humiliating or less deserved for a man than betrayal by his own body, he had begun to glimpse it long before the immemorial times of José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra when he became aware that he only knew who was who in group audiences, a man like me who had been capable of calling the whole population of the most remote village in his realm of gloom by their first and last names, and yet he had reached the opposite extreme, from the carriage he saw among the crowd a boy he knew and he had been so surprised at not remembering where he had seen him before that he had him arrested by the escort while I tried to remember, a poor man from the country who spent twenty-two years in a jail cell repeating the truth established on the first day in the court transcript, that his name was Braulio Linares Moscote, that he was the illegitimate but recognized son of Marcos Linares, a fresh-water sailor, and Delfina Moscote, a breeder of jaguar hounds, both with an established domicile in Rosal del Virrey, that he was in the capital of this country for the first time because his mother had sent him to sell two dogs at the March poetry festival, that he had arrived on a rented donkey with no other clothes except those he was wearing at dawn on the same Thursday they had arrested him, that he was at a stand in the public market drinking a mug of black coffee as he asked the girls behind the counter if they knew of anyone who wanted to buy two cross-bred dogs for hunting jaguars, that they had answered no when the bustle of drums began, cornets, rockets, people shouting here comes the man, there he comes, that he had asked who was the man and they had answered him who else could it be, the one who gives the orders, that he put the dogs in a crate so that the counter girls could do him the favor of watching them for me until I get back, that he climbed up on a window ledge to be able to see over the crowd and he saw the escort of horses with gold caparisons and feathered crests, he saw the carriage with the dragon of the nation, the greeting by a hand with a cloth glove, the pale visage, the taciturn unsmiling lips of the man who gave the orders, the sad eyes that found him suddenly like a needle in a pile of needles, the finger that pointed him out, that one, the one up on the window sill, arrest him while I remember where I've seen him, he ordered, so they grabbed me and hit me, beat me with the flats of their sabers, roasted me on a grill so that I would confess where the man who gave the orders had seen me before, but they had been unable to drag any other truth out of him except the only one there was in the horror chamber of the harbor fort and he repeated it with such conviction and such personal courage that he ended up admitting he had been mistaken, but now there was no way out, he said, because they had treated him so badly that if he hadn't been an enemy he is now, poor man, so he rotted away alive in the dungeon while I wandered about this house of shadows thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado of my good times, be with me, look at what I am without the shelter of your mantle, shouting to himself that it wasn't worth the trouble having lived so many splendid days of glory if he couldn't evoke them to seek solace in them and feed himself on them and continue surviving because of them in the bog of old age because even the most intense grief and the happiest moments of his great times had slipped away irrevocably through the loopholes of memory in spite of his naive attempts to impede it with little plugs of rolled-up paper, he was punished by never knowing who this Francisca Linero aged ninety-six was, the one he had ordered buried with the honors of a queen in accordance with another note written in his own hand, condemned to govern blindly with eleven pairs of useless spectacles hidden in the desk drawer to hide the fact that he was really conversing with specters whose voices he couldn't even decipher, whose identities he guessed by instinctive signs, sunken in a state of abandonment whose greatest risk had become evident to him in an audience with his minister of war in which he had the bad luck to have sneezed once and the minister of war said your health general sir and he had sneezed again and the minister of war again said your health general sir, but after nine consecutive sneezes I didn't say your health general sir again but I felt terrified by the threat of that face twisted in a stupor, I saw the eyes sunken in tears that spat on me without pity from the quicksand of his throes, I saw the tongue of a hanged man on the decrepit beast who was dying in my arms without any witness of my innocence, without anyone, and then the only thing that occurred to me was to get out of the office before it was too late, but he stopped me with an authoritative wave between two sneezes not to be a coward Brigadier General Rosendo Sacristan, stay where you are, God damn it, I'm not such a damned fool as to die in front of you, he shouted, and that's how it was, because he kept on sneezing up to the edge of death, floating in a space of unconsciousness peopled by fireflies at midday but clinging to the certainty that his mother Bendición Alvarado would not give him the shame of dying from a sneezing attack in the presence of an inferior, never in a million years, better dead than humiliated, better to live among the cows than among men capable of letting a person die without honor, God damn it, for he hadn't gone back to arguing about God with the apostolic nuncio so that he wouldn't notice that he was drinking his chocolate with a spoon, nor back to playing dominoes for fear that someone would dare lose to him out of pity, he didn't want to see anyone, mother, so that no one would discover that in spite of the close vigilance of his personal conduct, in spite of his impression of not dragging his flat feet which after all he had always dragged, in spite of the shame of his years he felt himself on the edge of the abyss of grief of the last dictators in disgrace whom he maintained more prisoners than protected in the house on the cliff so that they wouldn't contaminate the world with the plague of their indignity, he suffered it alone on that evil morning when he had fallen asleep in the pool in the private courtyard while he was taking his bath of medicinal waters, he was dreaming about you, mother, he was dreaming that it was you who made the cicadas who were bursting from so much buzzing over my head among the flowering almond boughs of real life, he dream