The Autumn of the Patriarch (18 page)

the monastery where she had been baptized her birth certificate could not be found and on the other hand they found three different ones for her son and on all three he was three times different, conceived three times on three different occasions, given a bad birth three times thanks to the artifices of national history which had entangled the threads of reality so that no one would be able to decipher
the secret of his origins, the occult mystery which only the Eritrene managed to track down by removing the numerous falsehoods superimposed on it, because he had glimpsed it general sir, he had it within reach of his hand when there came the immense explosion that kept echoing along the gray ridges and deep canyons of the mountain range and one heard the endless wail of
fright of the tumbling
mule as it went on falling dizzily and endlessly from the peaks of perpetual snow through successive and instantaneous climes out of natural-history prints of the precipice and the birth trickle of great navigable waters and the high cornices up to which the learned doctors of the botanical expedition had climbed on Indian back with their herbal secrets, and the steppes of wild magnolias where warm-wooled
sheep grazed the ones who give us generous sustenance and cover and good example and the mansions of the coffee plantations with their paper wreaths on solitary balconies and their endless invalids and the perpetual roar of the turbulent rivers of the great natural boundary lines where the heat began and at dusk there were pestilent waves from an old dead man dead from treachery dead all
alone in the cacao groves with their great persistent leaves and scarlet blossoms and berry fruit whose seeds were used as the principal ingredient of chocolate and the motionless sun and the burning dust and the seed gourd and the honey gourd and the sad and skinny cows of the Atlantic province in the only charity school for two hundred leagues around and the exhalation of the still-living mule
whose guts exploded like a succulent sour-sop among the banana trees and frightened pullets at the bottom of the abyss, God damn it, they deer-hunted him general sir, they had hunted him down with a jaguar rifle at the pass of the Solitary Soul in spite of the protection of my authority, sons of bitches, in spite of my strong telegrams, God damn it, but now they’re going to find out who’s who, he
bellowed, chewing on his froth of gall not so much because of rage over the disobedience as over the certainty that they were hiding something big from him since they had dared go against the thunderbolts of his power, he carefully observed the breathing of those who gave him the information because he knew that only one who knew the truth would have the courage to lie to him, he scrutinized the secret
intentions of the high command to see which of them was the traitor, you who I brought up out of nothing, you who I put to sleep in a golden bed after finding you on the ground, you whose life I saved, you who
I bought for more money than anyone else, all of you, you dirty mothers’ sons, because only one of them would dare disregard a telegram signed with my name and countersigned with the wax
of the ring of his power, so he assumed personal command of the rescue operation with the unrepeatable order that within a maximum of forty-eight hours you find him alive and bring him to me and if you find him dead bring him to me alive and if you don’t find him bring him to me, an order so unmistakable and fearsome that before the time was up they came to him with the news general sir that they
had found him in the underbrush of the precipice with his wounds cauterized by the golden flowers of the frailejone plant more alive than any of us general sir, safe and sound by virtue of his mother Bendición Alvarado who once more was giving a sign of her clemency and her power in the very person of the one who had tried to damage her memory, they brought him down along Indian trails on a hammock
hung on a pole with an escort of grenadiers and preceded by a bullfight master on horseback who rang a high-mass bell so that everyone would know that this was a matter of the one who gives the orders, they put him in the bedroom for honored guests in the presidential palace under the immediate responsibility of the minister of health until he was able to bring to a close that terrible report written
in his own hand and countersigned with his initials on the right-hand margin of every one of the three hundred and fifty folios of every one of these seven volumes which I sign with my name and my flourish and which I guarantee with my seal on this fourteenth day of the month of April of this year of Our Lord, I, Demetrius Aldous, auditor of the Sacred Congregation of the Rite, postulator and
promoter of the faith, by the mandate of the Immense Constitution and for the splendor of justice of men on earth and the greater glory of God in the heavens I affirm and show this to be the only truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, your excellency, here it is. There it was, indeed, captive in seven lacquered bibles, so unavoidable and brutal that only a man immune to the spell of
glory and alien to the interests of his power
dared expose it in living flesh before the impassive old man who listened to him without blinking fanning himself in the wicker rocking chair, who only sighed after each mortal revelation, who only said aha, repeated it, using his hat to shoo away the April flies aroused by the luncheon leftovers, swallowing whole truths, bitter truths, truths which
were like live coals that kept on burning in the shadows of his heart, because everything had been a farce, your excellency, a carnival apparatus that he himself had put together without really thinking about it when he decided that the corpse of his mother should be displayed for public veneration on a catafalque of ice long before anyone thought about the merits of her sainthood and only to contradict
the evil tongues that said you were rotting away before you died, a circus trick which he had fallen into himself without knowing it ever since they came to him with the news general sir that his mother Bendición Alvarado was performing miracles and he had ordered her body carried in a magnificent procession into the most unknown corners of his vast statueless country so that no one should
be left who did not know the worth of your virtues after so many years of sterile mortification, after so many painted birds without benefit, mother, after so much love without thanks, although it never would have occurred to me that the order was to be changed into the jape of the false dropsy victims who were paid to get rid of their water in public, they had paid two hundred pesos to a false
dead man who arose from his grave and appeared walking on his knees through the crowd frightened by his ragged shroud and his mouth full of earth, they had paid eighty pesos to a gypsy woman who pretended to give birth in the middle of the street to a two-headed monster as punishment for having said that the miracles had been set up by the government, and that they had been, there wasn’t a single
witness who hadn’t been paid money, an ignominious conspiracy that none the less had not been put together by his adulators with the innocent idea of pleasing him as Monsignor Demetrius Aldous had imagined during his first scrutinies, no, your excellency, it was a dirty piece of business on the part of your
proselytes, the most scandalous and sacrilegious of all the things they had made proliferate
in the shadow of his power, because the ones who had invented the miracles and backed up the testimonies of lies were the same followers of his regime who had manufactured and sold the relics of the dead bride’s gown worn by his mother Bendición Alvarado, aha, the same ones who had printed the little cards and coined the medals with her portrait as a queen, aha, the ones who enriched themselves
with curls from her head, aha, with the flasks of water drawn from her side, aha, with the shroud of diagonal cloth where they used door paint to sketch the tender body of a virgin sleeping in profile with her hand on her heart and which was sold by the yard in the back rooms of Hindu bazaars, a monstrous lie sustained by the supposition that the corpse remained uncorrupted before the avid eyes
of the endless throng that filed through the main nave of the cathedral, when the truth was quite something else, your excellency, it was that the body of his mother was not preserved because of her virtues or through the repair work done with paraffin and the cosmetic tricks that he had decided upon out of pure filial pride but that she had been stuffed according to the worst skills of taxidermy
just like the posthumous animals in science museums as he found out with my own hands, mother, I opened the glass casket as the funereal emblems fell apart with the air, I took the crown of orange blossoms from your moldy brow where the stiff filly-mane hairs had been pulled out by the roots strand by strand to be sold as relics, I pulled you out from under the damp gauze of your bridal veil and
the dry residue and the difficult saltpeter sunsets of death and you weighed the same as a sun-dried gourd and you had an old trunk-bottom smell and I could sense inside of you a feverish restlessness that was like the sound of your soul and it was the scissor-slicing of the moth larvae who were chewing you up inside, your limbs fell off by themselves when I tried to hold you in my arms because they
had removed the innards of everything that held together your live body of a sleeping happy mother with her hand on her heart and they had stuffed you up again with
rags so that all that was left of what had been you was only a shell with dusty stuffing that crumbled just by being lifted in the phosphorescent air of your firefly bones and all that could be heard were the flea leaps of the glass
eyes on the pavement of the dusk-lighted church, turned to nothing, it was a trickle of the remains of a demolished mother which the bailiffs scooped up from the floor with a shovel to throw it back any way they could into the box under the gaze of monolithic sternness from the indecipherable satrap whose iguana eyes refused to let the slightest emotion show through even when he was all alone in
the unmarked berlin with the only man in this world who had dared place him in front of the mirror of truth, both looked out through the haze of the window curtains at the hordes of needy who were finding relief from the heat-ridden afternoon in the dew-cool doorways where previously they had sold pamphlets describing atrocious crimes and luckless loves and carnivorous flowers and inconceivable fruits
that compromised the will and where now one only heard the deafening racket of the stalls selling false relics of the clothes and the body of his mother Bendición Alvarado, while he underwent the clear impression that Monsignor Demetrius Aldous had read his thoughts when he turned his sight away from the mobs of invalids and murmured that when all’s said and done something good had come out
of the rigor of his scrutiny and it was the certainty that these poor people love your excellency as they love their own lives, because Monsignor Demetrius Aldous had caught sight of the perfidy within the presidential palace itself, had seen the greed within the adulation and the wily servility among those who flourished under the umbrella of power, and he had come to know on the other hand a new
form of love among the droves of needy who expected nothing from him because they expected nothing from anyone and they professed for him an earthly devotion that could be held in one’s hands and a loyalty without illusions that we should only want for God, your excellency, but he did not even blink when faced with that startling revelation which in other times would have made his insides twist,
nor did he
sigh but meditated to himself with a hidden restlessness that this was all we needed, father, all we need is for nobody to love me now that you’re going off to take advantage of the glory of my misfortune under the golden cupolas of your fallacious world while he was left with the undeserved burden of truth without a loving mother who could help him through it, more lonely than a left
hand in this nation which I didn’t choose willingly but which was given me as an established fact in the way you have seen it which is as it has always been since time immemorial with this feeling of unreality, with this smell of shit, with this unhistoried people who don’t believe in anything except life, this is the nation they forced on me without even asking me, father, with one-hundred-degree
heat and ninety-eight-percent humidity in the upholstered shadows of the presidential berlin, breathing dust, tormented by the perfidy of the rupture that whistled like a teakettle during audiences, no one to lose a game of dominoes to, and no one to believe his truth, father, put yourself in my skin, but he didn’t say it, he just sighed, he just blinked for an instant and asked Monsignor Demetrius
Aldous that the brutal conversation of that afternoon remain between ourselves, you haven’t told me anything, father, I don’t know the truth, promise me that, and Monsignor Demetrius Aldous promised him that of course your excellency doesn’t know the truth, my word as a man. The cause of Bendición Alvarado was suspended for insufficient proof, and the edict from Rome was made public from pulpits
with official permission along with the determination of the government to repress any protest or attempt at disorder, but forces of public order did not intervene when hordes of indignant pilgrims built bonfires on the main square with the large wooden doors of the cathedral and broke the stained-glass windows with angels and gladiators of the Apostolic Nunciature with stones, they demolished
everything general sir, but he didn’t move from the hammock, they laid siege to the convent of the Biscayan nuns to leave them to perish without food and water, they sacked churches, mission houses, they destroyed everything that had to do with priests general sir,
but he remained motionless in the hammock under the cool shadows of the pansies until the commandants of his general staff in plenary
session declared themsleves incapable of calming spirits and reestablishing order without the shedding of blood as had been resolved, and only then did he get up, appear in his office after so many months of indolence, and assume with his own voice and in person the solemn responsibility of interpreting the popular will through a decree which he conceived through his own inspiration and he proclaimed
it on his own and at his own risk without advising the armed forces or consulting his ministers and in the first article of which he proclaimed the civil sainthood of Bendición Alvarado by the supreme decision of the free and sovereign people, he named her patroness of the nation, curer of the ill and mistress of birds and a national holiday was declared on her birthday, and in the second