ed it was you who painted with your brushes the colored voices of the orioles when he awoke startled by the unforeseen belch of his insides in the bottom of the water, mother, he awoke congested, with rage in the perverted pool of my shame where the aromatic lotuses of oregano and mallow floated, where the fresh blossoms from the orange tree floated, where the hicatee turtles floated aroused by the novelty of the gold and tender flow of rabbit droppings from general sir in the fragrant waters, what a mess, but he survived that and so many other infamies of old age and had reduced his service personnel to the minimum in order to face them without witnesses, no one was to see him drifting through the no man's house for days and nights on end with his head wrapped in rags soaked in liniment moaning with despair against the walls, surfeited with pain, maddened by the unbearable headache of which he never spoke even to his personal physician because he knew that it was only just one more of the so many useless pains of decrepitude, he would feel it arrive like a thunderclap of stones long before the heavy storm clouds appeared in the sky and he ordered nobody to bother me as soon as he felt the tourniquet tighten on his temples, nobody come into this building no matter what happens, he ordered, when he felt the bones of his skull creak with the second turn of the tourniquet, not even God if he comes, he ordered, not even if I die, God damn it, blind with that pitiless pain which did not even give him an instant of respite to think until the end of the centuries of desperation when the blessing of the rains fell, and then he would call us and we would find him newborn with the little table ready for dinner opposite the mute television screen, we served him roast meat, beans with fatback, coconut rice, slices of fried plantains, a dinner inconceivable for his age which he let grow cold without even tasting it as he watched the same emergency film on television, aware that the government was trying to hide something from him since they had repeated the same closed-circuit program without noticing that the film was backward, God damn it, he said, trying to forget what they wanted to hide from him, if it were something worse he would have known it by now, he said, snorting over the dinner he had been served, until it struck eight on the cathedral clock and he arose with the untouched plate and threw the meal down the toilet as every night at that time for so many years to hide the humiliation that his stomach rejected everything, to while away with the legends of his times of glory the rancor that he felt toward himself every time he fell into some detestable act of the carelessness of an old man, to forget that he was only alive, that it was he and no one else who wrote on the walls of the toilets long live the general, long live the stud, and that he had sneaked out a healer's potion to do it as many times as he wanted and in one single night and even three times each time with three different women and he paid for that senile ingenuousness with tears more from rage than grief clinging to the chain of the toilet weeping mother of mine Bendición Alvarado of my heart, despise me, purify me with your waters of fire, fulfilling with pride the punishment of his naïveté because he knew only too well that what he lacked then and had always lacked in bed was not honor but love, he needed women less arid than those who served my comrade the foreign minister so that he would not lose the good habit since they closed the school next door fleshly boneless women for you alone general sir, sent by plane with official exemption from customs from the shopwindows of Amsterdam, the film festivals of Budapest, the sea of Italy general sir, look at what a marvel, the most beautiful in the whole world whom he would find sitting with singing-teacher decorum in the shadows of the office, they got undressed like artists, they lay down on the felt couch with the strips of their bathing suits printed like a photographic negative on their warm golden honey skin, lying beside the enormous concrete ox who refused to take off his military uniform while I tried to encourage him with my most loving means until he wearied of suffering the pressures of that hallucinating beauty of a dead fish, and he told her it was all right, child, go become a nun, so depressed by his own indolence that that night at the stroke of eight he surprised one of the women in charge of the soldiers' laundry and threw her down with his claws on top of the laundry tubs in spite of the fact that she tried to get away with the frightened excuse that I can't today general, believe me, it's vampire time, but he turned her face down on the laundry table and planted her from behind with a biblical drive that the poor woman felt in her soul with the crunch of death and she panted so big general, you must have studied to be a donkey, and he felt more relieved with that moan of pain than with the most frenetic dithyrambs of his official adulators and he assigned the washerwoman a lifetime pension for the education of her children, he sang again after so many years when he gave the cows their fodder in the milking stalls, bright January moon, he sang, without thinking about death, because not even on the last night of his life would he allow himself the weakness of thinking about anything that didn't make common sense, he counted the cows twice again while he sang you are the light of my darkened path, you are my northern star, and he discovered that four were missing, he went back into the building counting along the way the hens sleeping on the viceroys' coatracks, covering the cages with the sleeping birds which he counted as he put the cloth covers over them forty-eight, he set fire to the droppings scattered by the cows during the day from the vestibule to the audience room, he remembered a remote childhood which for the first time was his own image shivering on the icy barrens and the image of his mother Bendición Alvarado who stole the innards of a ram away from the garbage-heap buzzards for lunch, it had struck eleven when he covered the whole building again in the opposite direction lighting his way with the lamp as he put out the lights down to the vestibule, he saw himself one by one fourteen generals walking with a lamp repeated in the dark mirrors, he saw a cow collapsed on her back in the rear of the mirror in the music room, so boss, so boss, he said, she was dead, what a mess, he went through the sleeping quarters of the guard to tell them that there was a dead cow inside a mirror, he ordered them to take it out early tomorrow, without fail, before the building fills up with vultures, he ordered, inspecting with the light the former offices on the ground floor in search of the other lost cows, there were three of them, he looked for them in the toilets, under the tables, inside every mirror, he went up to the main floor searching the rooms room by room and all he found was a hen lying under the pink embroidered mosquito netting of a novice from other times whose name he had forgotten, he took his spoonful of honey before going to bed, he put the bottle back in the hiding place where there was one of his little pieces of paper with the date of some birthday of the famous poet Rubén Darío whom God keep on the highest seat in his kingdom, he rolled the piece of paper up again and left it in its place while he recited from memory the well-aimed prayer of our father and celestial lyrophorous master who keepeth afloat airplanes in the heavens and liners on the seas, dragging his great feet of a hopeless insomniac through the last fleeting dawns of green sunrises from the turns of the lighthouse, he heard the winds sorrowing for the sea that had gone away, he heard the lively music of a wedding party that was about to die struck from behind by some carelessness of God, he found a strayed cow and he cut off its path without touching it, so boss, so boss, he went back to his bedroom, seeing as he passed by the windows the block of lights of the city without a sea in every window, he smelled the hot vapor of the mystery of its insides, the secret of its unanimous breathing, he contemplated it twenty-three times without stopping and he suffered forever as ever the uncertainty of the vast and inscrutable ocean of people sleeping with their hands on their hearts, he knew himself to be hated by those who loved him most, he felt himself illuminated by the candles of saints, he heard his name invoked to straighten the fortunes of women in childbirth and to change the destiny of those dying, he felt his memory exalted by the same ones who cursed his mother when they saw the taciturn eyes, the sad lips, the hand of a pensive bride behind the panes of transparent steel in the remote times of the somnambulant limousine and we would kiss the mark of his boot in the mud and we sent him fetishes for an evil death on hot nights when from our courtyards we saw the wandering lights in the soulless windows of government house, no one loves us, he sighed, looking into the old bedroom of the lifeless birdwoman painter of orioles his mother Bendición Alvarado her body strewn with sawdust, have a good death mother, he said to her, a very good death son, she answered him in the crypt, it was exactly twelve o'clock when he hung the lamp on the doorway wounded inside by the fatal twisting of the tenuous whistles of the hernia, there was no space in the world except that of his pain, he ran the three bolts of the bedroom for the last time, closed the three locks, the three bars, he suffered the final holocaust of his scant micturition in the portable latrine, he stretched out on the bare floor in the pants of rough burlap which he wore at home ever since he had put an end to audiences, the striped shirt without the artificial collar, and the slippers of an invalid, he lay face down with his right arm doubled under his head as a pillow and he fell asleep immediately, but at ten minutes after two he awoke with his mind aground and his clothes soaked in the pale and warm sweat of the eye of a cyclone, who's there, he asked shaken by the certainty that someone had called him in his sleep by a name that was not his, Nicanor, and once again, Nicanor, someone who was able to get into his room without taking down the bars because he came and went as he wished going through the walls, and then he saw her, it was death general sir, his, dressed in a penitent's tunic of pita fiber cloth, with a long-poled hook in her hand and her skull sown with the tufts of sepulchral algae and flowers of the earth in the fissures of her bones and her eyes archaic and startled in the fleshless sockets, and only when he saw her full length did he understand that she had called him Nicanor Nicanor which is the name by which death knows all of us men at the moment of death, but he said no, death, it still wasn't his time, it was to be during his sleep in the shadows of the office as it had always been announced in the premonitory waters of the basins, but she replied no, general, it's been here, barefoot and with the beggar's clothes you're wearing, although those who found the body were to say that it was on the floor of the office with the denim uniform without insignia and the gold spur on the left heel so as not to go against the auguries of their Pythians, it had been when he least wanted it, when after so many long years of sterile illusions he had begun to glimpse that one doesn't live, God damn it, he lives through, he survives, one learns too late that even the broadest and most useful of lives only reach the point of learning how to live, he had learned of his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands and in the invisible code of the cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power, he had made himself victim of his own sect to be immolated on the flames of that infinite holocaust, he had fed on fallacy and crime, he had flourished in impiety and dishonor and he had put himself above his feverish avarice and his congenital fear only to keep until the end of time the little glass ball in his hand without knowing that it was an endless vice the satiety of which generated its own appetite until the end of all times general sir, he had known since his beginnings that they deceived him in order to please him, that they collected from him by fawning on him, that they recruited by force of arms the dense crowds along his route with shouts of jubilation and venal signs of eternal life to the magnificent one who is more ancient than his age, but he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his power, that he was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to decipher the seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting even too late that the only livable life was one of show, the one we saw from this side which wasn't his general sir, this poor people's side with the trail of yellow leaves of our uncountable years of misfortune and our ungraspable instants of happiness, where love was contaminated by the seeds of death but was all love general sir, where