The mute held out his five martial cards: Winfield Scott’s squadron, Achille Bazaine’s army, Castillo Armas’s mercenaries, the “worms” of the Bay of Pigs, and Somoza’s National Guard.
“Full house!” shouted Buendía. “Masferrer’s Tigres, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes, and the Brazilian DOPs, plus an Odría and a Pinochet.”
“That’s shit, you’re wiped out, you and your momma and your papa,” Oliveira crowed triumphantly, spreading his four Prisons on the card table: the cisterns of the Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, Dawson Island, the cold plain of Trelew, and the Sexto in Lima … O.K., top that…”
“Just sweeten the pot and deal the cards again,” the Valkyrie proposed as she filled their glasses.
“Just when Santa Anna was winning the battle of San Jacinto against the Texas fifth columnists, he lost because he stopped to eat a taco and take his siesta.”
“You, Zavalita, what do you have?”
“Three of a kind, mass exterminations in the public plazas: Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in Izalco, Pedro de Alvarado at the festival of Toxcatl, and Díaz Ordáz in Tlatelolco.”
“The last two are the same things, that’s only a pair, you bastard.”
“‘Your destiny’s deceiving, I’m grieving, and leaving, to follow you forever…’” intoned Zavalita, tossing his cards face down on the table.
“What were you saying about Santa Anna?”
“When they blew off his leg he buried it after having it borne beneath a canopy to the cathedral in Mexico City. And when the Yankees captured him he sold them half the nation. Then later he sold another little piece to buy European uniforms for his guards and to construct equestrian statues of himself from Carrara marble.”
Humberto’s lips formed a silent “Son-of-a-bitching Diego.”
“And the cousins?” asked Buendía.
“Esteban and Sofía? Shhhh,” said the Valkyrie, “they’re in the bedroom.”
“A bust!” you exclaimed dispiritedly. “One Juan Vicente Gómez, an Indian branded by Nuño de Guzmán in Jalisco, a slave in the mines of Potosí, a slave ship in Puerto Príncipe, and a General Bulnes campaign of extermination against the Mapuche Indians.”
“Ché, Buendía”—again the Porteño—“tell about J. V. Gómez’s two deaths.”
“Well, Juan Vicente Gómez announced his death so that his enemies would come out into the streets of Caracas to celebrate. He hid behind the drapes in a palace window and observed the celebrations through little raccoon eyes, meanwhile issuing orders to his police: throw him in jail, torture that one, shoot that one over there … When he actually did die, they had to exhibit his body in the Presidential chair, dressed in gala sash and uniform, for all the people to file by, touch, and verify: ‘It’s true, this time he’s really dead.’ What a crock!”
“I trade you dis Gómes for two of de Péres Jiménes an’ de t’rone of gold in Bati’ta’s bat’room in Kukine,” crooned the rumba queen. ‘De emeral’ green of de sea sparkles deep in your beeoutiful eyes…’”
“‘Your lips wear the blush of the blood that seeps from the coral…’”
“‘Your voice is a poem of love, a divine and inspiring chorale…’”
“‘The sun-drunken palms brush your cheeks, and echo my sighs…’”
“At Christmas Bastista ordered enormous gift boxes wrapped in bright paper and ribbons to be sent to the mothers of the young men who fought in the Sierra Maestra and in the urban underground. They opened them to find their sons’ mutilated bodies.”
“C.I.A. Poker!” shouted Oliveira, sweeping in all the chips from the center of the table.
“Farewell, Utopia…”
“Farewell, City of the Sun…”
“Farewell, Vasco de Quiroga…”
“Juárez should never have died, ay, have died…”
“Nor Martí, chico…”
“Nor Zapata, mano…”
“Nor Ché, ché…”
“Farewell, Lázaro Cárdenas…”
“Farewell, Camilo Torres…”
“Farewell, Salvador Allende…”
“‘I’ll become once again the wandering troubadour…’”
“‘Who wanders in search of his love…’”
“‘Forgotten, discarded, downtrodden…’”
“De good ol’ days, chico, de good ol’ days.” Cuba Venegas began to sob.
Slowly you wander through the succession of rooms, all linked by French doors. You touch everything. No, you do not touch the red velvet of the furniture, the curtains, and walls. You touch all the objects you have gathered together here and carefully arranged on wardrobes, consoles, commodes, cabinets, antique writing desks with wire-mesh doors, rickety eighteenth-century secretaries, night tables, glass shelves, marble tables. The black pearl. A dog’s heavy spiked collar with a device emblazoned on the iron, Nondum, Not yet. Tall green empty bottles, eternally moldy, some imperfectly sealed with cork, some stoppered with red seals after having been opened with evident haste — when? by whom? — still others sealed with an imperial seal. You open, often, the long case of Cordovan leather that houses in beds of white silk the ancient coins you love to caress, effacing even more the blurred effigies of forgotten Kings and Queens. With your only hand you withdraw papers guarded in a Boulle cabinet, thin, transparent, faded chronicles. You compare their calligraphy, the quality of the inks, their resistance to the passage of time. Documents written in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish: codices written with Aztec ideograms. Characters like spiders, like flies, like rivers, like stone … cloud glyphs.
You soon tire of reading. You never know whether to feel sad or happy that these papers, these mute voices of men of other times, survive the deaths of the men of your time. Why preserve these writings? No one will read them now because there will be no one to read, or write, or make love, or dream, or wound, or desire. Everything that is written will survive untouched, because there will be no hands to destroy it. Is this sure desolation preferable to the uncertain risk of writing only to see one’s work proscribed, destroyed, burned on great pyres while uniformed masses shout, death to Homer, death to Dante, death to Shakespeare, death to Cervantes, death to Kafka, death to Neruda? Your eyes are tired. But there is no way you can get eyeglasses. Your body is fatigued. If only you could see yourself in a mirror and know that you were seeing yourself, not other men, other women, other children, motionless or animated, repeating forever the same scenes in the theater of mirrors. You have lost count. You no longer know your age. You feel very old. But what you can see of yourself when you disrobe — your chest, your belly, your sex, your legs, your only hand and arm — is young. You cannot remember now what the arm and hand you lost in battle looked like.
Once again you begin your wanderings through the apartment. You touch everything. The greasy gauntlet, its amputated fingers dried out and stiff. The rings of red stone, and bone. The ciborium filled with teeth. The ancient boxes ornamented with rope of gold and filled with skulls, thighbones, and mummified hands. One day, laughing darkly, you fitted two of those relics to your stump: an arm and a hand not yours. Afterward, you were nauseated. You know it all so well. You can touch and describe all the objects with your eyes closed. There are days when you entertain yourself doing just that, testing your memory, fearful as you are that you will lose it completely. Even if the roof of the hotel collapsed you could enumerate, describe, and place all the objects in this apartment in the Pont-Royal. A ustorious mirror. Two stones of unequal size. A pair of tailor’s scissors, varnished black. A basket filled with pearls, cotton, and dried grains of corn. You entertain yourself thinking that one day, perhaps, you can nourish yourself from the bread of the new world and then lie down to await death, bedfast and apathetic like the Spaniards in Verdín and the Cathari dedicated to endura. But up till now they still bring you your one daily meal. Invisible knuckles rap at your door. You wait several minutes to make sure that the silent servant has retired. You open the door. You pick up the tray. You eat with great deliberation. Your movements have become old, arthritic, minimal, repetitive, futile.