I the Supreme

Where was this found? Nailed to the door of the cathedral, Excellency. A patrol of grenadiers discovered it early this morning and brought it in to headquarters. Luckily no one had time to read it. I didn’t ask you that, and it’s a matter of no importance. Your Grace is right. The ink of pasquinades turns sour more quickly than milk. But it’s not a page from the Buenos Aires Gazette, nor is it one torn out of a book, Sire. What books would there be around here outside of my own! The aristocrats of the Twenty Families turned theirs into playing cards ages ago. Have the houses of the antipatriots searched. The dungeons, down in the dungeons, go have a look in the dungeons. The guilty party might very well be among those rats with tangled dangling locks and foot-long fingernails. Tighten the knots in those notorious forgers’ iron neckties. Peña and Molas especially. Bring me the letters in which Molas pays me homage during the First Consulate, and then later during the First Dictatorship. I want to reread the speech he delivered in the Assembly of the year ’14, proposing that I be elected Dictator. His handwriting is very different in the draft of the speech, in the instructions to the deputies, in the statement to the authorities years later in which he accuses one of his brothers of having stolen cattle from him at his estancia in Altos. I can repeat what those papers say, Excellency. I didn’t ask you to recite by heart the thousands of documents, dossiers, and decrees in the archives. I merely ordered you to bring me the file on Mariano Antonio Molas. Bring me the pamphlets by Manuel Pedro de Peña as well. Cantankerous sycophants! They boast of having been the Word of Independence. The rats! They didn’t even begin to understand it. They think they’re still masters of their words in the depths of their dungeons. But all they know how to do is squeal. They haven’t shut up to this day. They keep finding new ways of secreting their accursed poison. They get out pamphlets, pasquinades, lampoons, caricatures. I am an indispensable figure for slander. For all I care they can manufacture their paper from consecrated rags. Write it, print it with consecrated letters on a consecrated press. Go print your drivel on Mount Sinai if that will unshrivel your souls, you cacogenic latrinographers!

—

Hum. Ah! Funeral orations, pamphlets condemning me to be burned at the stake. Bah! They’re daring to parody my Supreme Decrees now. They imitate my language, my handwriting, trying to infiltrate by way of it; to get to me from their lairs. Shut my mouth with the voice that thundered against them. Bury me in words, in effigy. An old trick of tribal witch doctors. Post more guards to watch over those who labor under the delusion that they can replace me once I’m dead. Where is the file of anonymous libels? It’s right there, Excellency, by your hand.

It is not wholly unlikely that those two sly scribble-scrabblers Molas and de la Peña were the ones who dictated this squib. The joke is altogether in the style of those two infamous Porteñista partisans, out to further the cause of Buenos Aires. If it is their doing, I shall immolate Molas, pen Peña in for life. One of their ignoble blind tools could well have learned it by heart. A second one written it down. A third goes and pins it to the door of the cathedral with four thumbtacks. The guards themselves are the worst traitors. Your Worship is more than right. In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie. I’m not asking you to flatter me, Patiño. I’m ordering you to seek and find the author of the pasquinade. The law is a bottomless pit, but I expect you to be able to discover a hair in that hole. Search the souls of Peña and Molas. Sire, they can’t be the ones. They’ve been confined to utter darkness for years now. And so? After Molas’s last Outcry was intercepted, Excellency, I ordered the skylights, the cracks in the doors, the chinks in the walls and ceiling filled in with stone and mortar. You know that the prisoners continually train rats to carry their clandestine communications. And even to bring them food. You’ll remember that that was how the ones from Santa Fe stole my ravens’ rations for months. I also ordered all the holes and runways of the ants, the culverts of the crickets, the sigh holes of the crannies plugged up. No darker darkness possible, Sire. They don’t have anything to write with. Are you forgetting memory, you of all people, you memorious lout? They may not have even a pencil stub, a little end of charcoal. They may not have light or air. But they have a memory. A memory just like yours. The memory of an archive-cockroach, three hundred million years older than homo sapiens. The memory of the fish, of the frog, of the parrot that always cleans its beak on the same side. Which doesn’t mean they’re intelligent. Quite the contrary. Can you state categorically that the scalded cat that flees even cold water is possessed of a good memory? No, merely that it’s a cat that’s afraid. The scalding has penetrated its memory. Memory doesn’t recall the fear. It has become fear itself.

—

Do you know what memory is? The stomach of the soul, someone wrongly called it. Though nobody is ever the first to give things a name. There is nothing but an infinity of repeaters. The only things ever invented are new errors. The memory of one person alone is useless.

Stomach of the soul. That’s too clever by half! What sort of soul could those pitiless, inhuman slanderers have? The quadruple stomachs of quadrupeds. Ruminant stomachs. That’s where the perfidy of those successive incurable scoundrels ferments. That’s where they cook up their potfuls of infamies. What sort of memory do they need to remember all the lies they’ve cranked out with the one aim of defaming me, of slandering the Government? A memory of cud-chewers. A ruminant’s memory. Ingestive-digestive. Repetitive. Disfigurative. Sulliative. They prophesied that they would turn this country into the new Athens. The Areopagus of the sciences, the letters, the arts of this Continent. What they were really out to do with their chimeras was to hand Paraguay over to the highest bidder. The areopagites came within a hair of doing just that. I managed to get rid of them. I picked them off one by one. I put them in their rightful place. Off with you, areopagites! To jail with the lot of you, blockheads!

The worst offender, Manuel Pedro de Peña, parakeet number one of the patriciate, I disblazoned. Cured of his cock-a-hoop habits. Took him down off his heraldic perch. Caged him in a prison cell. He there learned to recite by heart, without a single mistake, the hundred thousand words in the Royal Academy dictionary, from A to Z. That’s how he exercises his memory in the cemetery of words. I wouldn’t want the enamel, the metal of his word-pipes to rust. Dr. Mariano Antonio Molas, Attorney Molas, or to put a fine point on it, Molas the pen-pusher, recites nonstop, even in his dreams, bits and pieces of a description of what he calls the Former Province of Paraguay. For these last surviving areopagites, the Fatherland continues to be the former province. They make no mention whatsoever, not even in the decorous euphemisms to which their colonized tongues were accustomed, to the Giant Province of the Indies, the one that in the last analysis was grandmother, mother, aunt, poor relation of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, which grew rich at her expense.

It is not only the patricians and vernacular areopagites who use and abuse their ruminating memory here. The foreign marsupials who stole from the country and buried the memory of their ladronicides in the stomach of their souls do so as well. There’s the Frenchman Pedro Martell. After twenty years in prison and as many more of madness he still thinks of nothing but his chest full of gold pieces. Every night he furtively removes the chest from the hole he’s dug underneath his hammock with his fingernails; he counts yet again the gleaming coins, one by one, proves them with his toothless gums, puts them back in his chest, and buries it in the hole again. He then stretches out in his hammock and sleeps in bliss above his imaginary treasure. Who could feel better protected than he? This was the sort of life lived in the cellars for many years by another Frenchman, Charles Andreu-Legard, ex prisoner of the Bastille, chewing over his memories in my republican bastille. Can it be said that those didelphians know what memory is? Neither you nor they know. Those who do know have no memory. Those with prodigious memories are almost always mentally retarded imbeciles. Besides being scoundrels and very clever tricksters. Or something even worse. They use their memory to harm others, but have no idea how to do so for their own good. No comparison with the scalded cat. Parrot-memory, cow-memory, ass-memory. Not sense-memory, judgment-memory, possessed of a lusty imagination capable of engendering events in and of itself. The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

—

The cow that my presumptive sister Petrona Regalada is allowed to keep in the yard of her house became infested with ticks. I ordered that she treat it the way this and other diseases are combated on the patrial estancias: by killing the animal. I have only one cow, Sire, and it does not belong to me but to my little catechism school. It gives just one glass of milk for the twenty little ones who come for instruction. You’ll be left, señora, without the cow, and your pupils won’t be able to drink even the milk of the Holy Spirit that you extract for their benefit as you dip candles. Goodbye cow, catechumens, catechesis. The ticks will devour not only the cow. They’ll devour you. They’ll invade the city, which already has enough to contend with, what with its plague of thugs and stray dogs. Don’t you hear their rabid howls mounting, louder and louder, on every hand? Sacrifice the cow, señora.

I saw from her eyes that she wasn’t about to do so. I ordered a soldier to butcher the sick animal with his bayonet and bury it. My supposed sister, the ex widow of Larios Galván, came to present a complaint. Her mind completely unhinged, the old woman swore that, even though it was dead, the cow was still mooing in muffled tones underground. I ordered the pair of Swiss forensic physicians to do an autopsy on the animal. They found in its bowels a bezoar stone the size of a grapefruit. The old woman now maintains that the hairy stone is an antidote for any poison. It cures illnesses, Sire. Especially milk fever. It tells the meaning of dreams. It foretells deaths, she says enthusiastically. She swears, moreover, that she heard the stone murmur inaudible words. Ah madness, memory in reverse that forgets its way as it retraces its path. How could anyone with an iota of good sense believe such insane things?

Begging Your Excellency’s pardon, I take the liberty of saying that I too heard those words. So did the grenadier who killed the cow. Come, come, Patiño, don’t you start raving too! Excuse me, Sire, with your permission I must tell you that I heard those moos-that-were-words, like human words. Voices very far away, a bit hoarse as if from a cold, gurgling words. The remains of some unknown language that doesn’t want to die completely, Excellency. You’re too stupid to go mad, secretary. Human madness is ordinarily extremely clever. A chameleon of sanity. When you think it’s cured, it’s because it’s worse. It has merely transformed itself into another still more subtle madness. Hence, like old Petrona Regalada, you hear those nonexistent voices coming from a carcass. What language, may I ask, might that excremental ball petrified in the stomach of a cow remember? With your permission, it’s saying something, Your Grace. Maybe in Latin or in some other unknown tongue. Doesn’t Your Worship believe that there might be such a thing as an ear for which all men and animals speak the same language? The last time Señora Petrona Regalada allowed me to listen to her stone, I heard it murmur something like…king of the world….Of course, you scoundrel! I should have thought of that! How could that stone that addled the widow’s brain be anything else but royalist? That’s the last straw! Not only do those filthy Spaniards pin pasquinades on the cathedral door; they also put a stone of contagion in the belly of cows!

As much or more than false memory, bad habits silence habitual phenomena. They form a second nature, just as nature is the first habit. Forget that bezoar stone, Patiño. Forget that tripe of yours about an ear able to understand all languages in a single one. Utter madness!

—

I have forbidden the woman regarded as my half sister to engage in those practices of witchcraft with which she diddles ignorant, credulous fools like herself. She already does enough damage by giving the little boys who attend her school a dose of the catechism tick. I allow her to do so. Harmless mania. The Patrial Reformed Catechism and patriotic zeal will extirpate these youngsters’ catechistic cyst once they’ve grown up.

The cursed bezoar didn’t keep the cow from being infested with the tick, I told her when she came to complain. It didn’t cure you, señora, of your calenture of the brain. It proved incapable of drawing the poison of dementia out of Bishop Panés. And still less capable of relieving my gout when you brought your stone here to rub it on my swollen leg for three days running. If the stone is of no use except to repeat for amusement’s sake those words that it receives from a world beyond, in an unnatural language that only scatterpates and lunatics think they hear, I’m damned if I see what on earth the stone is good for!

You too have your stone, she answered, pointing to the aerolith. I don’t use it for augury the way you do yours, Señora Petrona Regalada. It will end up fogging your brain, which is how your other brothers and sisters ended up. You know that the specter of madness has always haunted your kin. A more or less common family trait in those of the same blood. Bury your bezoar stone. Bury it in your courtyard. Place it at the foot of a wayside league-cross. Throw it in the river. Flush all this nonsense of yours down the drain. Don’t displease me again as you did when I learned that after ten years’ separation you were continuing to see your ex husband Larios Galván in secret. What is it you want from that Don Juan? He tried to deceive you. Before that he deceived the First Governing Junta. Then after that the Supreme Government. What is it you want, at your ripe old age, from that corrupt rakehell? Orphan offspring? Bastard bezoar pebbles? If not that, what? Bury your bezoar stone, the way I buried your ex husband in prison. Dip your candles in peace and enough of this foolishness!

Her eyes went blank. Characteristic cunning of madness as it outwardly feigns right reason. She began to look inward, seeking to hide herself from my presence in that perverse taciturnity of the Franças. The wretches!

Look here, Señora Petrona Regalada, for some time now the cigars you’ve been rolling for me have been thicker than usual. I am obliged to unroll them. To remove some of their innards. Impossible otherwise to smoke them. Make them as big around as this finger. Wrap them in a single leaf of tobacco softened in night dew and then well dried. The kind least irritating to the lungs. Answer me. Don’t just stand there not saying a word. Am I speaking to a post? Have you lost your tongue along with your mind? Look at me. Speak. She has turned her head. She looks at me with the expression of certain birds that have only one expression. A face strikingly similar to mine. She gives the impression that she is learning to see, seeing for the first time a complete stranger toward whom she does not yet know whether she feels respect, scorn, or indifference. I see myself in her. A mirror-person, old França Velho sends me back my image, dressed as a woman. Beyond all ties of blood. What have I to do with blood relations? Confabulations of chance.

There are many people. There are even more faces, since everyone has several. There are people who wear the same face for years. Simple, thrifty, miserly people. What do they do with the other ones? They save them. Their sons will wear them. It sometimes happens that their dogs wear them. Why not? A face is a face. Sultan’s looked very much like mine toward the last, especially just before passing on. The dog’s countenance looked as much like mine as that of this woman who is standing before me, looking at me, parodying my image. She will not have any more children now. I will not have any more dogs now. At this moment our faces coincide. Mine at least is the last. In a frock coat and a tricorne, old França Velho would be my exact replica. It would remain to be seen how this chance resemblance could be used…(the rest of the sentence burned, illegible). A story just for the fun of it!

Memory is of no use here. Seeing is forgetting. That woman is standing there motionless, reflecting me. The non-face, all of a piece, fallen forward. Does she desire something? She desires nothing. She does not desire the least thing in this world, save non-desire. But non-desire too is fulfilled if non-desirers are persistent.

Did you hear how you are to roll my cigars from now on? The woman wrenches herself violently away from herself. Her face is still between her hands. She doesn’t know what to do with it. As big around as this finger, eh? Rolled out of just one leaf of tobacco. Softened in night dew. Dry. The kind that draw best all the way down, till the red-hot tip gets very close to your mouth. Your breath, all nice and warm, escapes with the smoke. Do you understand me, Señora Petrona Regalada? Her puckered lips move. I know what she is thinking, flayed alive by her memories.

She is disremembering.

—

She is never without her bezoar stone. She keeps it hidden underneath the niche of the Lord of Patience. More powerful than the image of the Bloodstained God. Talisman. Stair. Platform. Last step. The most resistant. It sustains her in the place of certainty. Place where there is no further need of any sort of help. Obsession has its foundation there. Faith is supported entirely by itself. What is faith if not belief in things that have no verisimilitude? Seeing through a glass darkly.

The ruminant-stone has its own vigil light. Someday it will have its own niche. Perhaps, in time, its sanctuary.

In the face of the bezoar stone of the person taken to be my sister, the meteorite still has—will it ever cease to have?—the flavor of the improbable. And what if the world itself were only a sort of bezoar? Hairy excremental material, petrified in the intestine of the cosmos.

It is my opinion…(edge of the folio burned)…Where matters of opinion are concerned, all opinions are worse…

—

But this is not what I wanted to say. Clouds are piling up above my head. Quantities of earth. Bird with a long beak, I am unable to get any pellets out of the cup. A shadow, I cannot extract shadows from holes. I continue to wander aimlessly about, as on that stormy night that plunged me headlong into the place where the loss occurred. I thought I knew something about the desert. About dogs, a bit more. About men, everything. As for the rest, thirst, cold, betrayals, sicknesses, they all came my way. But I always knew what to do when the time came to act. As I remember, this is the worst time. If a chimera, swaying back and forth in a vacuum, can eat ulterior motives, I’ve been well chewed and swallowed, as compadre Rabelais put it. The chimera has occupied the place of my person. I tend to be the very image of the chimerical. A famous joke, that will bear my name. Look up the word chimera in the dictionary, Patiño. A false idea, a vain or foolish fancy, a fantastic creature of the imagination it says, Excellency. That’s what I’m in the way of being, in reality and on paper. It also says, Sire: A fabulous monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon. They say that that’s what I was. The dictionary also adds, Excellency: Name of a fish and of a butterfly. Quarrel. Dispute. I was all that, and none of that. The dictionary is an ossuary of empty words. If you don’t believe me, ask de la Peña.

Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible. No story can be told. No story worth the telling. But true language hasn’t yet been born. Animals communicate with each other, without words. Better than we, who are so proud of having invented words out of the raw material of the chimerical. Without foundation. No relation to life. Do you know, Patiño, what life is, what death is? No; you don’t know. Nobody knows. No one has ever known whether life is what lives or what dies. No one will ever know. What’s more, it would be useless to know, once we grant that the impossible is useless. There would have to be words in our language that had a voice. Free space. A memory of their own. Words that subsisted alone, that brought place with them. A place. Their place. Their own material. A space where the word would happen the way an event does. As in the language of certain animals, of certain birds, or certain very old insects. But does what is not exist?

After that storm-rent night, in the deathly pale light of dawn, an animal in the form of a stag came to meet me. Horn in the middle of its forehead. Green coat. Voice part blast of a trumpet, part sigh. It said to me: It is time My Lord return to earth. I struck it a blow on the muzzle with my cane and went on my way. I stopped outside of Nothing We Don’t Have, the general store run by our spy Orrego, who was opening the doors of the place by the light of a candle. Even he didn’t recognize the muddy beggar entering his establishment as the cocks were beginning to crow. I ordered a glass of cane brandy. I’ll be damned, pal!, he exclaimed. Thirsty this early in the day after that downpour last night! I threw an old rusty clipped copper coin on the counter, and it bounced off onto the floor. As the storekeeper bent over I left, melting into the fog.

—

Excellency, a post rider has just come galloping in on a badly winded horse with this dispatch from the commandant of Villa Franca:

I beg you to allow me to describe to you in brief detail the way in which we have proceeded to observe the occasion of the funeral of our Supreme Lord. On the evening preceding that sad day the plaza and all the houses of this City were illuminated.

On the eighteenth the parish priest celebrated a solemn sung Mass for the health, success, and felicity of the individuals who make up the new, provisory, and sole de fatuo Government. When the Mass was over, the Decree was proclaimed and was received and obeyed with great sounds of rejoicing. I swore allegiance as head of this City. A short three-rifle volley was fired amid the tolling of the bells, and a solemn Te-Demus was sung.

That night the City was illuminated once again.

On the nineteenth the funeral rites were held. A cumulus three cuerpos high, adorned with mirrors, was erected. A table covered with the snow-white altar cloths that the parish priest lent for the notable occasion was placed before it. On a black silk cushion lay the crossed baton and sword, emblems of Sovereign Power. The cumulus was illuminated with eighty-four candles, one for each year of the Supreme Dictator’s life. Many persons—if not all—noted his apparition amid the endlessly multiplied reflections, the very image and likeness of his infinite paternal protection.

On the twentieth a solemn vigil was sung, and during the Mass the parish priest delivered the funeral oration, developing the following theme: The Most Excellent Supreme deceased Dictator fulfilled not only the obligations of a Faithful Citizen, but also those of a Faithful Father and Sovereign of the Republic. But the oration remained unfinished for the reason that neither the multitude nor the father were able to contain their grief. Silent at first, it soon turned into wild sobs of lamentation. The Preacher descended from the pulpit bathed in tears.

On every hand there were moans, sobs, heart-rending laments. Many persons tore their hair with cries of profound pain. Paraguayan souls at their maximum intensity. The same was true of the appreciable crowd of more than twenty thousand Indians who came from both shores of the river to hold their funeral ceremonies in front of the church and mingled with the multitude. The agitation that was felt is beyond all description.

Our limited faculties did not allow us to devote more solemnity to the memory of the deceased Dictator. On the one hand, we were overcome with desolation. On the other, we felt a flood of consolation; we congratulate ourselves whenever the presence of the Supreme Lord appears or represents itself at our gatherings.

My trembling pen wrote as far as the above on the twentieth, at about six o’clock in the evening. But since very early this morning rumors that The Supreme is still alive have begun to circulate; that is to say, that he has not died, and therefore a provisory de fatuo Government does not yet exist.

Can it possibly be that this terrible commotion has profoundly altered the very meaning of the certain and the uncertain?

We beg Your Excellency to relieve us of this horrible doubt that leaves us with bated breath.

Answer the commandant of Villa Franca that I haven’t died yet, if being dead means simply lying beneath a gravestone on which some stupid good-for-nothing will write an epitaph on the order of: Here lies the Supreme Dictator/in perpetual memory/vigilant defender of the Fatherland…et cetera, et cetera.

My absence will be the gravestone over this poor people that will be obliged to go on breathing beneath it without having died since it has yet to be born. When this happens, inasmuch as I am not eternal, I myself will have word sent to you, my dear Antonio Escobar.

What is the date of the dispatch? October 21, 1840, Excellency. I have news for you, Patiño. We have here a Paraguayan who gets ahead of events. He drops his message through the keyhole of a month that hasn’t yet arrived. He leaps over all the hopeless confusions of time. The proper thing to do is to find a time for everything. One that has no end. What river’s flow ever grows old? Is it possible that people like Antonio Escobar have exact and certain knowledge of something that hasn’t happened yet? Yes. It’s possible. There’s nothing that hasn’t already happened. They have their doubts but they’re sure of themselves. They divine with their simple minds that the law is symbolic. They do not take everything literally as do those who speak a confused language.

I do not say unto you: This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled. I say unto you: After this generation another shall come. If it is not I, it will be He, who is ageless too.

Ah, with regard to Escobar’s dispatch, extend my thanks to him for the magnificent obsequies. Tell him not to let the second ones be so drenched in tears, or the hair-tearing quite so vigorous. Nor is there any need, my dear Escobar, to erect illuminated cumuli since my age is not measured in candles. You may spare this expense in my honor. Nor is there any need to decorate them with mirrors that give a false vision of things. Those mirrors must be the ones that were taken from the citizens of Corrientes years ago, during the siege of their city. Return them to their owners, who lost face at the time and haven’t known where to look for it since.

Another thing, Escobar. Inform me immediately, before my ashes grow cold, who signed the circular notifying you of my death and the establishment of what you call a provisory de fatuo government. The proper term is de facto, which means in fact. Although in fact what we have in this country is a bunch of fatuous fatheads. So that in your dispatch you’re right and wrong at the same time.

Tell me, Patiño…Yes, Excellency. Do you know anything about all this? I’m completely in the dark, Sire! Nose about a little. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us—the two of us—to find out what’s going on. It’s awkward being alive and dead at the same time. Don’t give it a thought, Excellency. I haven’t, and that’s how things like this happen. Do you suspect anyone in particular? No one, Sire. No one has ever dared go this far. I don’t know who it could be, Excellency, who the guilty party might be. The truth of the matter, Most Excellent Sire, is that as far as I know I don’t know anything. It just so happens that this time I don’t have the least suspicion of anybody, any individual, group, or faction. If another conspiracy is afoot after twenty years of public peace, of respect for and obedience to the Supreme Government, I promise you that the guilty parties will not escape even though they hide underground. Stop picking your nasal fossae. I beg Your Excellency’s pardon! Enough of that! You don’t need to come to attention like that every other minute! Must I tell you so every day? Your diving in and out of the washbasin is going to turn the floor into a mudhole. We’ll both drown in this bog before our enemies have the pleasure of incinerating us in the plaza. God save us, Excellency! It’s not God who’s going to free you of your troubles. When we’re working, as I’ve also ordered you countless times, don’t keep repeating Your Grace, Your Worship, Your Excellency, all that fancy fiddle-faddle that has no place in a modern State. Less still in this chronic state of incommunication that separates us even as it unites us without visible hierarchy. And even more so, if we are soon to be comrades in the cineratorium of the Plaza de Armas. For the time being, use Sire, if you feel it absolutely necessary to address me in some way. That won’t lessen the distance between us, even if you kick the bucket. As I dictate to you, you write. Whereas I read what I dictate to you so as later to reread what you write. In the end the two of us disappear in what is read/written. Use the appropriate term of address only in the presence of third parties. For, I grant you, we must observe the formalities, save the appearances, so long as we are visible figures. Everyday words of ordinary language.

—

Let’s go back to the pamphlet found this morning on the door of the cathedral. Where is it? Here, Sire. As you keep nibbling at your nasal conchae with your pen you keep dribbling all over the anonymous screed. You’ve almost effaced the beautiful handwriting. Pass it over to me. The gachupines*1 or the Porteñistas*2 who gave birth to this monstrosity haven’t mocked me but themselves. Let all those termites eat each other up! This just makes me laugh all the more at their stupid self-importance and the pretension of their anonymous squibs. This paper isn’t worth even one of their ears. He who uses a leaf for cover gets wet twice over. Even if they hid underneath an entire forest of pasquinades, they’d still wet themselves in their own piss. Wretched descendants of those usurers, tradesmen, hoarders, shopkeepers who used to scream from behind their counters: We shit on the Fatherland and on all patriots! We shit on the puny little republic of the Paraguayans! They shat out of fear and were buried in their own shit. The same shit those turds were born from. Blood-sucking anopheles, buzzing out their behinds and not their proboscises, like all mosquitoes. In that case, Sire, I’ll be more than glad to wade through even the soiled toilet paper, coil by coil…Hold your tongue, you knave! I forbid you to wallow in filth playing dirty word games. Don’t try to imitate the jakish japes of those culicids. I humbly beg Your Grace’s pardon for my rude though involuntary irreverence. I have never allowed myself, and never shall allow myself, to fail in any way whatsoever to pay our Supreme Sire the respect due him.

Stop your whining and start looking for the perfidious scribbler. Listen, Patiño, don’t you think the padres, the vicar general himself, might be the authors? You never know with the padres, Sire. They weave a very fine, very close net. The handwriting and even the signature of the lampoon, so like yours, Sire. Though it would be bad business for them to get mixed up in these fish-and-fowl affairs now that they’re better off than ever. A new Government of people coming-and-going isn’t in their interest. That would be the end of their bigua salutis. Well put, Patiño! I crown you king of wits. I’ll will you my chamber pot. During the day, now that we’ve fallen on bad times again, you can wear it on your brow. Symbol of your power. During the night you’ll return the alabaster crown to its usual place. In that way it will serve you twice over for different and distant uses. What’s certain, Sire, is that reality has shifted place. When I read the lampoon I felt as though I had one foot touching the ground and the other dangling in the air. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to you. All I know, Excellency, is that I shall move heaven and earth in search of the guilty parties. I promise you I’ll find the hair in the bottomless hole. Don’t just chase after female-hairs as is your usual habit. Don’t do like the fellow who opened a cupboard door one night instead of a window. And then come tell me it’s dark and smells of cheese because you’ve stuck your nose someplace you shouldn’t have, instead of nosing about where you should have. You must bring the culprit to the foot of the orange tree in less than three days. Give him his full ration of rifle bullets. Whoever he may be. Even The Supreme.

You’re to make even the mutes of Tevegó speak. According to the lampooners, they go about on all fours. Give birth to mute offspring that look like dog-headed apes. With no tongue. No ears. A combination of humbug, superstitions, lies, of the sort that the Robertsons, the Renggers, those sulkers, those rogues, those ingrates wrote. The business about the people of Tevegó is true, Sire. Even though the lampoons lie, that’s true. Something not to be seen or believed even with my own eyes! I refused to believe it too, Sire, till at your order I went to investigate the case with the district commissioner of Kuruguaty, Don Francisco Alarcón, and a detachment of troops of the line in that region.

After three days and nights, taking the shortest route, we arrived at the penal colony of Tevegó at daybreak. Too deep a silence. Not a site of life. There it is! the guide said. It was only after a long while, straining our eyes, that we could make out the colony sprawled out all over the countryside. In darkness still, because the sun’s rays didn’t reach that place that had moved its place to another place, to tell it in your words, Sire. There’s no other way of explaining the very strange thing that’s come about there, when there’s no way of finding out what’s going on. A shame not to have had your lens for far-seeing at that moment. Your star-gazing apparatus. Though on second thought, perhaps it wouldn’t have worked for seeing that. I took out the little mirror that I always carry about in my pocket to signal to my travel companions. It flashed for a moment and then went out when its reflection bounced off all that motionless air that had accumulated inside the camp. You can’t get into the penal colony of Tevegó, Excellency. Why not? Criminals, thieves, vagrants, scroungers, prostitutes, conspirators who escaped the firing squad in the year ’21 managed to get in without much trouble. The first bands from Corrientes that I ordered taken prisoner when they invaded Apipé, Yasyretá, Santa Ana, Candelaria got in. Even mulattoes and blacks got in. You’re more than right, Excellency. All I mean is that you can’t get in now. Not because it’s impossible, but because it takes so long. In your case, seeing as how you walk backwards all the time you’re on duty, that doesn’t surprise me. Entering there isn’t entering, Sire. There are no barbed-wire fences, no palisades, no barriers, no trenches. Nothing but ashen earth and stones. First, bare stones, scarcely half a hand high, marking the line where the green of the esparto grass and the reeds ends. On the other side of this mark, nothing but ashen tanimbú. Even the light. A burned light that sheds its ash in the air and hovers there dead-still, light-heavy, moving neither up nor down. If there are people there in the distance, there’s no way of telling if they’re people or stone. Except that if they’re people they’re not moving. Blacks, quadroons, mulattoes, men, women, kids, all ashen-colored, tanimbú-colored ashes, how to explain to you, Sire, not the color of your aerolith, which is black and doesn’t reflect light, but rather the color of that gritty sandstone of the ravines when there’s a bad drought or those big boulders that roll down the sides of mountains. Those can’t be the people that were sent here, Don Francisco Alarcón said. If they are, where are the guards? Look, Don Tikú, the guide said, if they’re stones they don’t need to be guarded. The soldiers laughed uneasily. Then we saw that. Or maybe we only thought we were seeing. Because I tell you, Sire, it’s something you’d see and not believe.

(In the private notebook*3)

My amanuensis, who has his thousand-and-one-nights side, has put his mercury on to heat. He is trying by every manner of means to make me lose time, to distract my attention from what is of prime concern to me. He’s come out now with a weird story about those people serving out a sentence who have migrated to some unknown place while remaining in the same place under another form. Transformed into unknown people who have caused their absence to take on a form there. Animals. Boulders worn smooth. Figures of stone. Fabled monsters, half-man, half-beast, that go by the name of endriagos. Patiño imitates everything. He has seen me practice the transmutation of mercury. The heaviest material in the world, it becomes lighter than smoke. Then on encountering the cold realm it immediately coagulates and turns back into that incorruptible liquor that penetrates and corrupts everything. Eternal sweat, Pliny called it, since there is scarcely anything that can absorb it. Dangerous conversation with a creature so daring and so deadly. It boils, breaks up into a thousand little droplets, and no matter how small, not a one is ever lost, for in the end they all join together to form one again. As mercury is the element that separates gold from copper it is also the one that tinctures metals, the mediator of this union. Does it not resemble imagination, mistress of error and falsehood? All the more deceiving in that it is not always so. For it would be an infallible proof of truth were it an infallible one of falsehood.

Perhaps my trust-unworthy amanuensis is only half lying. He can’t yet manage to melt the quicksilver of mirrors. He lacks the forgetfulness necessary to create a legend. His excess of memory makes him ignorant of the meaning of facts. Memory of an executioner, a traitor, a bearer of false witness. Separated from their people and place by accident or by vocation, they discover that they must live in a world made up of elements foreign to them with which they believe they are conjoined. They believe themselves to be providential figures of an imaginary populace. Aided by chance, they are sometimes enthroned in and by the stupidity of this populace, thereby making it more imaginary still. They are secret migrants and they are not where they appear to be. It costs Patiño an effort not to allow himself merely to coast downhill, to follow instead the uphill path of the telling and write at the same time; to hear the dispari-son of what he writes; to trace the sign of what his ear is taking in. To attune words to the sound of thought, which is never a solitary murmur, however intimate it may be; less still if it is the speech, the thought involved in dictating. If the ordinary man never talks to himself, the Supreme Dictator continually talks to others. He projects his voice before himself so as to be heard, listened to, obeyed. Although he may appear to be close-mouthed, silent, mute, his silence is commanding. Which means that in The Supreme at least there are two persons. The I can divide to form an active third who is an adequate judge of our responsibility with regard to the act that we must decide upon. In my day, I was a good ventriloquist. At present, I am unable even to imitate my own voice. The trust-unworthy scribe, even less capable. He hasn’t yet learned his craft. I am going to have to teach him to write.

—

What were you talking about, Patiño? Of the people of the Tevegó colony, Sire. It’s difficult to see that the shapes aren’t stones but people. Those nomads, vagrants, conspirators, prostitutes, migrants, deserters of all kinds and sorts that in another time Your Excellency sent to that place, aren’t human beings anymore either, if one is to disbelieve what one sees. Just shapes, nothing more. They don’t move, Sire; at least they don’t move in the same way people do. And if perchance I’m mistaken, they must move as slowly as tortoises. In a manner of speaking, Excellency: from here where I’m sitting to the table where Your Grace has the blessed patience to listen to me, for example, one of those tortoise-people shapes would take a man’s entire lifetime to cover the distance, provided he hustled right along and finally made it. Because when you come right down to it, those shapes don’t live like other people. They must live some other sort of life. They crawl on all fours without ever moving from the spot. It’s plain to see they can’t raise their hands, their backbones, their heads. They’ve taken root in the ground.

As I was telling you, Excellency, all those people scattered all over the countryside. Not a sound. Not even of the wind blowing. No sound and no wind. Not a single voice, man’s or woman’s, no baby’s crying, no dog’s barking, not the least sign. If you ask me, those people don’t have the least understanding of what’s happening to them, and to tell the truth there isn’t anything that’s happening. Except just being there, without living or dying, waiting for nothing, hoping for nothing, slowly sinking deeper and deeper into the bare earth. Opposite us, brush that must once have been a thicket used as a common latrine, full of cobs of maize. You know, Sire, what our country folk use them for when they relieve their bowels. Except that the stains on those cobs shone with the bright glint of cheap trade trinkets.

These people aren’t dead; these people eat, Tikú Alarcón, the district commissioner, said. That was before, the guide said. We saw no maize fields anywhere about. Refuse, yes, piles of it. Old dry rags, lots of crosses amid underbrush just as dry. Not one bird, not one maize-eating parrot, not one turtledove. A coot swooped down into the hard air overarching the camp. It bounced off as if it had hit a metal plate, reeled about like a drunkard, and finally fell at the feet of our group. Its head was split open and gobs of foam came bubbling out through the slit.

Let’s have a closer look, Tikú Alarcón said. The soldiers climbed down off their horses to gather up the gleaming crapcobs and stow them away in their haversacks in case they turned out to be solid gold ones. Anything can happen, one of them said. They take a walk all around the place. The same thing to be seen from no matter where. The shapes gazing at us from afar; us observing their vague outlines blurred by the smoky haze. If I may so put it, them from some time back; us from that moment, not knowing whether or not they saw us. A person knows when his gaze meets another’s, isn’t that so, Excellency? Well, with these people not a clue, not the slightest sign to tell us or not tell us.

Toward midday our eyes were dry from so much looking. Parboiled by the light of the sun reflecting off the shadow piled up behind. Half dead from thirst because for several leagues around all the rivers and brooks had long since gone dry. We also noted something else. The colony was getting darker, as though night were overtaking it, and it was only that the shadow was becoming denser.

A little patience, the guide said. By patiently waiting for the right moment, someone even saw a patronal festival of the blacks on the day of the Three Kings. My grandfather Raymundo Alcaraz also saw it, but he had been watching for something like three months. He used to tell how he’d even seen an attack by Mbayá Indians, when they were coming around on raiding parties with the Portuguese. A person has to have patience in order to see. You have to look and wait for months, years, if not more. You have to wait to see.

I’m going to have a look inside, the commissioner said, climbing down off his horse. The way I see it, those sons-of-the-devil don’t exist; they’re only pretending to. He spat and entered. After he crossed the line between the greenness and the dryness we lost sight of him. He went in and came out. According to me, he went in and came out. According to the others too. In a manner of speaking, a very quick round trip. The gob of spit that he’d hawked up hadn’t even dried yet and he was back. But he came back an old man, all bent over, so that he too was practically crawling on all fours. Looking for the speech he lost, the guide said.

Tikú Alarcón, the district commissioner Francisco Alarcón, went in a young man and came out an old one, in his eighties at least; bald, bare naked, mute, more stunted than a dwarf, bent double, his skin scaly and wrinkled and hanging off him, and lizard’s nails. What happened to you, Don Tikú? He didn’t answer; he was unable to make the slightest sign. We wrapped him in a poncho and hoisted him across the back of his horse. As the soldiers tied him to the saddle, I took a look at the camp. It seemed to me that the shapes were dancing the dance of the blacks of Laurelty or of Campamento-Loma on all fours. My eyes were filled with tears and might have fooled me. We made our way back as though we’d been to a funeral. The dead man was coming back alive with us.

When we reached Kuruguaty, the commissioner crawled into his house on all fours. The whole town came to see what had happened. The parish priest of San Estanislao and the exorciser of the Xexueños of Xexuí was summoned. Mass, procession, public prayers, vows. They proved useless; nothing could undo the harm done. I tried the Guaykurú remedy: I gave Don Tikú’s hair a good hard yank. It came off in my hands, heavier than a chunk of stone. A powerful smell of something buried.

Artigas was summoned, since people say he knows how to cure with simples. The general of the Oriental army came from his farm bringing a cartload of herbs of all sorts. Satules of melecines. A flacon of angel-water, a very powerful fragrance, distilled from all sorts of different flowers such as orange blossom, jasmine, and myrtle. He saw and treated the patient. He did for him everything that people know the Oriental refugee knows how to do. He couldn’t get a single word out of him—to tell the truth of the matter, Excellency—not one sound. He couldn’t force a single drop of melecine through his lips that had now turned to stone too. They laid the commissioner on his cot. Before we knew it, he was down on the floor on all fours again, like those people. They rubbed him with six taper-lengths of black wax. Don José Gervasio Artigas measured the space from the fingers of one hand to the other, which is the same distance as there is from feet to head. But he found that the measurement fitted two different men. The ex protector of the Banda Oriental shook his head. This isn’t my friend Don Francisco Alarcón, he said. Well then, who is it?, the priest asked. I don’t know, the general said, and went back to his farm.

The work of evil spirits!, the curé of the Xexueños of Xexuí exclaimed in annoyance. There were more public prayers, processions. The Brotherhood took the image of San Isidro the Laborer through the streets. Tikú Alarcón, still on all fours, grew older and stonier. Someone tried to bleed him. The blade of the knife broke when it touched the old man’s skin, which little by little had become hotter than an oven stone.

A cry ran through the village: We must go burn Tevegó down! The Evil One lives there! It’s hell! Well then, Laureano Benítez, the Elder of the Brotherhood, said gently, if this holy man could escape from hell and return, it seems to me we ought to make a niche for him. But by now the commissioner wasn’t even as tall as Saint Blaise.

The following day, Tikú Alarcón died in the same position, older than a lizard. They had to bury him in a child’s coffin. All right, enough of that, you insolent windbag! You sound like the lampoons. I beg your pardon, Excellency. I was a witness of this story; I brought back the preliminary inquiry made by the judge of the Township of Kuruguaty and the dispatch of Fernando Acosta, the commandant of Villa Real de la Concepción. When Your Excellency returned from the Hospital Barracks, he tore up the papers without reading them. The same thing happened, Sire, with the message about the mysterious round stone found by the thousand-some political prisoners that Your Eminence sent under heavy guard to work in the quarries of the Yariguaá. Did both things happen at the same time? No, Excellency. The stone from Yariguaá Hill, or Chair-of-the-Wind, was found four years ago, after the great harvest of ’36. The story of Tevegó not a month ago, shortly before Your Eminence had his unfortunate accident. I ordered that I be sent a faithful copy of all the signs that are carved in the stone. This was done, Excellency, but you destroyed the copy. Because it was badly made, you knave! Or do you think I don’t know what those rock inscriptions look like? I sent instructions as to how the copy to scale of the petroglyph should be made. Measurement of its dimensions. Astronomical orientation. I asked for samples of the material of the stone. Do you know what it would have meant to find the vestiges of a civilization thousands of years old there? Send a dispatch immediately to the commandant of the Yariguaá region ordering him to send me the stone. It will not be any harder than bringing the aerolith from the interior of the Chaco, a distance of eighty leagues. I believe, Excellency, that the stone of the Wind-Chair was used in the construction of the new garrison in the region. Have them remove it! And if it was broken to bits for the foundations, Sire? Have them all collected! I’m going to examine them under the microscope myself. Determine their age, because stones do have one. Decipher the hieroglyph. I am the only one able to do this in this country of know-it-all cretins.

Another dispatch to the commandant of Villa Real. Order him to proceed to dismantle the penal colony of Tevegó, using the troops of the line under his command. If there is a single survivor, have him sent here in chains under heavy guard. What was that you muttered? Nothing, Excellency, nothing in particular. It’s just that I think that it’s going to be easier to haul in the stone with its thousands of years and its thousands of arrobas than it will be to get those people out of Tevegó.

—

Let’s get back to the matter at hand. Let’s begin the cycle all over again. Where is the pasquinade? In your hand, Excellency. No, you secreting ink-slinger. On the door of the cathedral. Pinned up with four thumbtacks. A patrol of grenadiers takes it down with the tip of a saber. They bring it to headquarters. They advise you. When you read it, it leaves you with eyes bulging like a roped steer, seeing the bonfire already lighted in the plaza, about to turn us all into firebrands. You bring me the paper with the eyes of a butchered calf. Here it is. It doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t matter what it says. What matters is what’s behind it. The sense of the non-sense.

You are to start tracking down the handwriting of the pasquinade in all the files. The dossiers of agreements, disagreements, counteragreements. International communications. Treaties. Remissory notes. Demissory letters. All the bills of Portuguese-Brazilian traders, of Oriental merchants. The piles of paperwork concerning food excises, tithes, the salt tax. Fructuary assessments. State monopoly, commercial commissions, war duties. Import-export records. Customs permits for incoming-outgoing shipments. Complete correspondence of all functionaries, from the lowest rank to the highest. Messages in code from spies, informers, agents of the various intelligence branches. Invoices of arms smugglers. Everything. The least little scrap of paper with writing on it.

Do you understand what I’m ordering you to do? Yes, Excellency: I must search for the model of the handwriting of the cathedral pasquinade, look hide and hair for it in all the documents in your archives. You’re finally learning how to speak without getting lost in the clouds. This is not to be a listless search, remember. You are to go systematically through the names of the enemies of the Fatherland, of the Government, the faithful friends of our enemies. I want you to catch the most intempestive of the many pesky idiots buzzing about the streets of Paraguay, as my jingoist uncle, Friar Bel-Asshole, claims in his proclamation. Cherchez the culicid. Make him sizzle in his definitive candle-flame. Bury him in his own shit. I want to be shut of him. Do you follow me? Well then, get to work! No more mooning about. The only thing, Excellency…What’s the matter now? It’s just that the job is going to take me a certain amount of time. There are some twenty thousand dossiers in the archives. As many more in the secretarial offices of the tribunals, district headquarters, regional headquarters, frontier outposts and all the rest. Not to mention the ones on hand that are still being examined. Some five hundred thousand pages altogether, Sire. Not counting the ones that have gotten lost through your carelessness, you master of disorder, negligence, neglect. The only reason you haven’t lost your hands is that you need them to eat. If I may say so, Excellency, if I may so put it with all due respect, my will never grows cold in your service, and if Your Grace so orders me, I’ll find the hair in the bottomless hole, and above all those miscreants of the written rumor. You keep saying that, but you haven’t put a stop to them. The dossiers get lost; there are more and more lampooners all the time. I allow myself to remind Your Eminence that of the dossiers the only one missing is the trial of the year ’20, presumably stolen by the criminal José María Pilar, your manservant, who thanks to Your Excellency’s inexorable justice has already met the fate he deserved. If it wasn’t for that crime that he ended up underneath the orange tree, since there was not sufficient evidence against him, it was for others no less grave. All the other dossiers are there. I might even venture to say to Your Grace, begging his pardon, that there are so many that there are even too many. You’re soaked in the feet, otherwise you couldn’t come up with such nonsense! Those documents, even the ones that in your misjudgment are completely insignificant, have their importance. They are sacred, since they record in detail the birth of the Nation, the formation of the Republic. Its many vicissitudes. Its victories. Its failures. Its patriotic sons. Its traitors. Its invincible will to survive. Only I know how many times it was necessary to add a bit of fox fur when the lion’s skin rampant on the shield of the Republic wasn’t enough to cover its ass. Go over those documents one by one. Examine them through a loupe with the eyes of a lupus, with the three eyes of ants. Even though they’re totally blind they know what kind of leaf they’re cutting. So as not to reduce your time on duty, recruit the horde of public scribes, scriveners, scribblers, and pen-wigglers who spend all their days scrounging themselves a living in the public squares and marketplaces. Conscript them. Shut them up in the