The Autumn of the Patriarch (14 page)

absolved them of all blame pounding his fist on the table so that they would not see the tremor of uncertainty and ordered them as a consequence to continue at their posts fulfilling their duties with the same zeal and the same authority as they had always done, because my supreme and irrevocable decision is that nothing has happened, meeting adjourned, I will answer for it. As a simple means
of precaution he took the children out of the harbor fort and sent them in nocturnal boxcars to the least-inhabited regions of the country while he confronted the storm unleashed by the official and solemn declaration that it was not true, not only were there no children in the power of the authorities but there was not
a single prisoner of any type in the jails, the rumor of the mass kidnapping
was an infamous lie on the part of traitors to get people stirred up, the doors of the nation were open so that the truth could be established, let people come and look for it, they came, a commission from the League of Nations came and overturned the most hidden stones in the country and questioned all the people they wanted to and how they wanted to with such minute detail that Bendición Alvarado
was to ask who were those intruders dressed like spiritualists who came into her house looking for two thousand children under the beds, in her sewing basket, in her paintbrush jars, and who finally bore public witness to the fact that they had found the jails closed down, the nation in peace, everything in place, and they had not found any indication to confirm the public suspicion that there
had been or might have been a violation by intent or by action or by omission of the principles of human rights, rest easy, general, they left, he waved goodbye to them from the window with a handkerchief with embroidered edges and with the feeling of relief over something that was finished for good, goodbye, you horse’s asses, smooth sailing and a prosperous trip, he sighed, the trouble’s over,
but General Rodrigo de Aguilar reminded him no, the trouble wasn’t over because the children were still left general sir, and he slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, God damn it, he’d forgotten completely, what’ll we do with the children. Trying to free himself from that evil thought while a drastic formula was taking shape in his mind he had them take the children out of their hiding
place in the jungle and carry them off in the opposite direction to the provinces of perpetual rain where there were no treasonous winds to spread their voices, where the animals of the earth rotted away as they walked and lilies grew on words and octopuses swam among the trees, he ordered them taken to the Andean grottoes of perpetual mists so that no one would find out where they were, for them
to be transferred from the shady Novembers of putrefaction to the Februaries of horizontal days so that no one would know when they were, he sent them quinine
tablets and wool blankets when he found out they were shivering with fever because for days and days they had been hidden in rice paddies with mud up to their necks so that the Red Cross airplanes wouldn’t discover them, he had the light
of the sun tinted red along with the glow of the stars to cure them of scarlet fever, he had them fumigated from the air with insecticides so that fat banana lice would not devour them, he sent them showers of candy and snowstorms of ice cream from airplanes and parachutes with loads of Christmas toys to keep them happy while a magical solution could occur to him, and in that way he was getting out
of the reach of their evil memory, he forgot about them, he sank into the desolate swamp of the uncountable nights all the same of his domestic insomnia, he heard the metal blows strike nine o’clock, he took down the hens who were sleeping on the cornices of government house and took them to the chicken coop, he had not finished counting the creatures sleeping in the scaffolding when a mulatto
servant girl came in to collect the eggs, he sensed the sunlight of her age, heard the sound of her bodice, he jumped on top of her, be careful general, she murmured trembling, you’ll break the eggs, let them break, God damn it, he said, he threw her down with a cuff without undressing her or getting undressed himself disturbed by the anxiety to flee this Tuesday with its green-shit snow, sleeping
creatures, he slipped, he fell into the illusory vertigo of a precipice cut by livid stripes of evasion and outpourings of sweat and the sighs of a wild woman and deceitful threats of oblivion, on the fallen woman he was leaving the curve of the urgent tinkle of the shooting star that was his gold spur, the trace of saltpeter from his wheeze of an urgent spouse, his dog whine, his terror of existing
through the flash and the silent thunder of the instantaneous explosion of the deep spark, but at the bottom of the precipice there was the shitted slime again, the hens’ insomniac sleep, the affliction of the mulatto girl who got up with her dress all smeared by the yellow molasses of the yolks lamenting now you see what I told you general, the eggs broke, and he muttered trying to tame the rage
of another
love without love, write down how many they were, he told her, I’ll take it out of your wages, he left, it was ten o’clock, he examined one by one the gums of the cows in the stables, he saw one of his women quartered by pain on the floor of her hut and he saw the midwife who took from out of her insides a steaming baby with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, it was a boy,
what name shall we give him general sir, whatever you feel like, he answered, it was eleven o’clock, as on every night during his regime he counted the sentries, checked the locks, covered the birdcages, put out the lights, it was twelve o’clock, the nation was at peace, the world was asleep, he went to his bedroom through the darkened building across the strips of light from the fleeting dawns of
the beacon turns, he hung up the lamp for leaving on the run, he put up the three bars, ran the three bolts, closed the three locks, sat down on the portable latrine, and while he was passing his meager urine he caressed the inclement child of a herniated testicle until the twist was straightened out, it fell asleep in his hand, the pain ceased, but it returned immediately with a lightning flash
of panic when in through the window there came the lash of a wind from beyond the confines of the saltpeter deserts which scattered about the bedroom the sawdust of a song about tender-aged throngs who were asking about a gentleman who went to war who were sighing what pain what grief who climbed up onto a tower to see if he was coming who saw him coming back that he came back that well in a velvet
box what pain what mourning, and it was a chorus of such numerous and distant voices that he could have gone to sleep with the illusion that the stars were singing, but he got up irate, that’s enough, God damn it, he shouted, either them or me, he shouted, and it was them, because before dawn he ordered them to put the children in a barge loaded with cement, take them singing to the limits of the
territorial waters, blow them up with a dynamite charge without giving them time to suffer as they kept on singing, and when the three officers who carried out the crime came to attention before him with news general sir that his order had been carried
out, he promoted them two grades and decorated them with the medal of loyalty, but then he had them shot without honors as common criminals because
there were orders that can be given but which cannot be carried out, God damn it, poor children. Experiences as harsh as that confirmed his very ancient certainty that the most feared enemy is within oneself in the confidence of the heart, that the very men he was arming and raising up so that they would support his regime will end up sooner or later spitting in the hand that feeds them, he wiped
them out with one stroke, he took others out of nowhere, raised them to the highest ranks pointing at them according to the impulse of his inspiration, you to captain, you to colonel, you to general, and all the rest to lieutenant, what the hell, he watched them grow in their uniforms until they burst the seams, he lost sight of them, and a casual event like the discovery of two thousand sequestered
children permitted him to discover that it was not just one man who had failed him but the whole supreme command of the armed forces who are only good for making me use up more milk and in times of trouble they shit in the plate they’ve just eaten out of, God damn it, I made them rich, he had won bread and respect for them, and yet he didn’t have a moment’s rest trying to keep clear of their
ambition, he kept the most dangerous closest by to keep a better eye on them, the least bold he sent to frontier garrisons, because of them he had accepted the occupation by the marines, mother, not to fight yellow fever as Ambassador Thompson had written in the official communiqué, nor to protect him from public unrest, as the exiled politicians said, but to show our military men how to be decent
people, and that’s how it was, mother, to each his own, they taught them to walk with shoes on, to wipe themselves with paper, to use condoms, they were the ones who taught me the secret of maintaining parallel services to stir up distractive rivalries among the military, they invented for me the office of state security, the general investigation agency, the national department of public order,
and so many other messes that I couldn’t even remember them myself, identical organisms that he
made look different in order to rule with more relaxation in the midst of the storm making them believe that some were being watched by others, mixing beach sand in with the gunpowder in the barracks and confusing the truth of his intentions with images of the opposite truth, and yet there were uprisings,
he would storm into the barracks chewing the froth of his bile, shouting get out of the way you bastards here comes the one who gives the orders to the fright of the officers who were holding target practice with pictures of me, disarm them, he ordered without stopping but with so much authority that they disarmed themselves, take off those men’s clothes you’re wearing, he ordered, they took
them off, the San Jerónimo base is in revolt general sir, he went in through the main gate dragging his huge feet of an old man in pain through a double file of mutinous guards who rendered him the honors of general supreme chief, he appeared in the post of the rebel command, without escort, without a weapon, but shouting with an explosion of power get down flat on the floor because the one who
can do everything has arrived, on the floor, you bastards, nineteen officers of the general staff fell to the floor, face down, he paraded them eating dirt through the coastal villages so that the people could see how much a military man without a uniform is worth, sons of bitches, he heard over the other shouts in the aroused barracks his own irrevocable orders for the organizers of the revolt to
be shot in the back, they displayed their corpses hanging by the heels in sun and dew so that nobody would fail to know how those who spit on God end up, tricky bastards, but the trouble didn’t end with those bloody purges because with the least bit of carelessness he would find himself once more under the menace of that tentacular parasite he thought he had pulled out by the roots and which was
proliferating again in the north winds of his power, in the shadow of the obligatory privileges and the crumbs of authority and the confidence of interest that he had to concede to the bravest officers even against his own will because it was impossible for him to maintain himself without them but also with them, condemned
forever to live breathing the same air which asphyxiated him, God damn
it, it wasn’t fair, as it wasn’t possible either to live with the perpetual surprise of the pureness of my comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar who had come into my office with the face of a dead man anxious to know what had happened to those two thousand children of my first prize because everybody says we drowned them in the sea, and he said without changing expression not to believe rumors spread
by traitors, old friend, the children are growing up in God’s peace, he told him, every night I can hear them singing over there, he said, pointing with a broad sweep of his hand to an indefinite place somewhere in the universe, and he left Ambassador Evans himself wrapped in an aura of uncertainty when he replied to him impassively I don’t know what children you’re talking about since your own country’s
delegate to the League of Nations has made a public statement that the children in the schools are all there and in good health, what the hell, the mess is over, and yet he could not stop them from waking him up in the middle of the night with the news general sir that the two largest garrisons in the country were in revolt and also the Conde barracks two blocks away from the presidential
palace, an insurrection of the most dangerous kind led by General Bonivento Barboza who had dug himself in with fifteen hundred very well armed and well supplied troops with materiel obtained as contraband through consuls sympathetic to the opposition politicians, so things are in no shape for licking one’s fingers general sir, now we really are fucked up. In other times that volcanic subversion
would have been a stimulant for his passion for risks, but he knew better than anyone what the real weight of his age was, that he barely had enough will to resist the ravages of his secret world, that on winter nights he could not get to sleep without first placating the herniated testicle in the hollow of his hand with a coo of tenderness of sleep my sweet to the child of painful whistles, that
his spirits were slipping away as he sat on the toilet pushing out his soul drop by drop as through a filter thickened by the mold of so many nights of solitary urination, that his memory was unraveling, that he
was not really sure he knew who was who, or from whom, at the mercy of an inescapable fate in that pitiful house which for some time he would have liked to exchange for another, far away
from here, in some Indian settlement where no one would know that he had been the only president of the nation for so many and such long years that not even he himself had counted them, and still, when General Rodrigo de Aguilar offered himself as a mediator to negotiate a decorous compromise with the subversion he did not find himself in the presence of the dotty old man who would fall asleep
at audiences but with the bison of old who without thinking about it for one instant answered not on your life, that he wasn’t leaving, although it wasn’t a question of leaving or not leaving but that everything is against us general sir, even the church, but he said no, the church is with the one in charge, he said, the generals of the high command having been meeting for forty-eight hours now already