The Autumn of the Patriarch (31 page)

lost all hope of finding him again when he recognized him from the presidential limousine disguised in a brown habit with the cord of Saint Francis around his waist swinging a penitent’s rattle among the Sunday crowds at the
public market and sunken into such a state of moral penury that it was impossible to believe that he was the same one we had seen enter the audience room in his crimson uniform and gold spurs and with the solemn gait of a sea dog on dry land, but when they tried to get him into the limousine on his orders we couldn’t find a trace general sir, the earth had swallowed him up, they said he had become
a Moslem, that he had died of pellagra in Senegal, and had been buried in three different tombs in three different cities in the world although he really wasn’t in any of them, condemned to wander from sepulcher to sepulcher until the end of time because of the twisted fate of his expeditions, because that man was a fraud general sir, he was a worse jinx than gold, but he never believed it, he
kept on hoping that he would return during the last extremes of his old age when the minister of health used pincers to pull out the ox ticks he found on his body and he insisted that they weren’t ticks, doctor, it’s the sea coming back, he said, so sure of his judgment that the minister of health had thought many times that he wasn’t as deaf as he made one believe in public or as unraveled as he
seemed to be during uncomfortable audiences, although a thorough examination had revealed that his arteries had turned to glass, he had beach-sand sediment in his kidneys, and his heart was cracked from a lack of love, so the old physician took refuge behind the shield of old comradeship to tell him that it’s time now to hand over the tools general sir, at least decide in whose hands you’re going
to leave us, he told him, save us from being orphaned, but he asked him with surprise who told him I’m thinking about dying, my dear doctor, let other people die, God damn it, and he finished in a joking vein that two nights ago I saw myself on television and I looked better than ever, like a fighting bull, he said, dying with laughter, because he had seen himself in a fog, nodding with sleep in front
of the screen, and with his head wrapped
in a wet towel in accordance with the habits of his more recent nights of solitude, he was really more resolute than a fighting bull before the charms of the wife of the ambassador of France, or maybe Turkey, or Sweden, what the hell, they were all so much alike that he couldn’t tell them apart and so much time had passed that he couldn’t remember himself
among them with his dress uniform and a glass of champagne untouched in his hand during the festivities for the anniversary of August 12, or at the commemoration of the victory of January 14, or the rebirth of March 13, how should I know, because in the rigmarole of historic dates of the regime he had ended up not knowing which was when or what corresponded to what nor did he get any use from the
little rolled pieces of paper that with so much good spirit and so much care he had hidden in the cracks in the walls because he had ended up forgetting what it was he was supposed to remember, he would find them by chance in the hiding places for the honey and he had read one time that April 17 was the birthday of Dr. Marcos de León, we have to send him a tiger as a gift, he had read, written
in his own hand, without the slightest idea of who he was, feeling that there was no punishment more humiliating or less deserved for a man than betrayal by his own body, he had begun to glimpse it long before the immemorial times of José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra when he became aware that he only knew who was who in group audiences, a man like me who had been capable of calling the whole population
of the most remote village in his realm of gloom by their first and last names, and yet he had reached the opposite extreme, from the carriage he saw among the crowd a boy he knew and he had been so surprised at not remembering where he had seen him before that he had him arrested by the escort while I tried to remember, a poor man from the country who spent twenty-two years in a jail cell repeating
the truth established on the first day in the court transcript, that his name was Braulio Linares Moscote, that he was the illegitimate but recognized son of Marcos Linares, a fresh-water sailor, and Delfina Moscote, a breeder of jaguar hounds, both with an established domicile
in Rosal del Virrey, that he was in the capital of this country for the first time because his mother had sent him to
sell two dogs at the March poetry festival, that he had arrived on a rented donkey with no other clothes except those he was wearing at dawn on the same Thursday they had arrested him, that he was at a stand in the public market drinking a mug of black coffee as he asked the girls behind the counter if they knew of anyone who wanted to buy two cross-bred dogs for hunting jaguars, that they had answered
no when the bustle of drums began, cornets, rockets, people shouting here comes the man, there he comes, that he had asked who was the man and they had answered him who else could it be, the one who gives the orders, that he put the dogs in a crate so that the counter girls could do him the favor of watching them for me until I get back, that he climbed up on a window ledge to be able to see
over the crowd and he saw the escort of horses with gold caparisons and feathered crests, he saw the carriage with the dragon of the nation, the greeting by a hand with a cloth glove, the pale visage, the taciturn unsmiling lips of the man who gave the orders, the sad eyes that found him suddenly like a needle in a pile of needles, the finger that pointed him out, that one, the one up on the window
sill, arrest him while I remember where I’ve seen him, he ordered, so they grabbed me and hit me, beat me with the flats of their sabers, roasted me on a grill so that I would confess where the man who gave the orders had seen me before, but they had been unable to drag any other truth out of him except the only one there was in the horror chamber of the harbor fort and he repeated it with such
conviction and such personal courage that he ended up admitting he had been mistaken, but now there was no way out, he said, because they had treated him so badly that if he hadn’t been an enemy he is now, poor man, so he rotted away alive in the dungeon while I wandered about this house of shadows thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado of my good times, be with me, look at what I am without
the shelter of your mantle, shouting to himself that it wasn’t worth the trouble having lived so many splendid days of glory if he
couldn’t evoke them to seek solace in them and feed himself on them and continue surviving because of them in the bog of old age because even the most intense grief and the happiest moments of his great times had slipped away irrevocably through the loopholes of memory
in spite of his naïve attempts to impede it with little plugs of rolled-up paper, he was punished by never knowing who this Francisca Linero aged ninety-six was, the one he had ordered buried with the honors of a queen in accordance with another note written in his own hand, condemned to govern blindly with eleven pairs of useless spectacles hidden in the desk drawer to hide the fact that he
was really conversing with specters whose voices he couldn’t even decipher, whose identities he guessed by instinctive signs, sunken in a state of abandonment whose greatest risk had become evident to him in an audience with his minister of war in which he had the bad luck to have sneezed once and the minister of war said your health general sir and he had sneezed again and the minister of war again
said your health general sir, but after nine consecutive sneezes I didn’t say your health general sir again but I felt terrified by the threat of that face twisted in a stupor, I saw the eyes sunken in tears that spat on me without pity from the quicksand of his throes, I saw the tongue of a hanged man on the decrepit beast who was dying in my arms without any witness of my innocence, without anyone,
and then the only thing that occurred to me was to get out of the office before it was too late, but he stopped me with an authoritative wave between two sneezes not to be a coward Brigadier General Rosendo Sacristán, stay where you are, God damn it, I’m not such a damned fool as to die in front of you, he shouted, and that’s how it was, because he kept on sneezing up to the edge of death,
floating in a space of unconsciousness peopled by fireflies at midday but clinging to the certainty that his mother Bendición Alvarado would not give him the shame of dying from a sneezing attack in the presence of an inferior, never in a million years, better dead than humiliated, better to live among the cows than among men capable of letting a person die without-honor, God
damn it, for he hadn’t
gone back to arguing about God with the apostolic nuncio so that he wouldn’t notice that he was drinking his chocolate with a spoon, nor back to playing dominoes for fear that someone would dare lose to him out of pity, he didn’t want to see anyone, mother, so that no one would discover that in spite of the close vigilance of his personal conduct, in spite of his impression of not dragging his
flat feet which after all he had always dragged, in spite of the shame of his years he felt himself on the edge of the abyss of grief of the last dictators in disgrace whom he maintained more prisoners than protected in the house on the cliff so that they wouldn’t contaminate the world with the plague of their indignity, he suffered it alone on that evil morning when he had fallen asleep in the
pool in the private courtyard while he was taking his bath of medicinal waters, he was dreaming about you, mother, he was dreaming that it was you who made the cicadas who were bursting from so much buzzing over my head among the flowering almond boughs of real life, he dreamed it was you who painted with your brushes the colored voices of the orioles when he awoke startled by the unforeseen belch
of his insides in the bottom of the water, mother, he awoke congested with rage in the perverted pool of my shame where the aromatic lotuses of oregano and mallow floated, where the fresh blossoms from the orange tree floated, where the hicatee turtles floated aroused by the novelty of the gold and tender flow of rabbit droppings from general sir in the fragrant waters, what a mess, but he survived
that and so many other infamies of old age and had reduced his service personnel to the minimum in order to face them without witnesses, no one was to see him drifting through the no man’s house for days and nights on end with his head wrapped in rags soaked in liniment moaning with despair against the walls, surfeited with pain, maddened by the unbearable headache of which he never spoke even
to his personal physician because he knew that it was only just one more of the so many useless pains of decrepitude, he would feel it arrive like a thunderclap of stones long before the heavy storm clouds appeared in the sky and he ordered
nobody to bother me as soon as he felt the tourniquet tighten on his temples, nobody come into this building no matter what happens, he ordered, when he felt
the bones of his skull creak with the second turn of the tourniquet, not even God if he comes, he ordered, not even if I die, God damn it, blind with that pitiless pain which did not even give him an instant of respite to think until the end of the centuries of desperation when the blessing of the rains fell, and then he would call us and we would find him newborn with the little table ready for
dinner opposite the mute television screen, we served him roast meat, beans with fatback, coconut rice, slices of fried plantains, a dinner inconceivable for his age which he let grow cold without even tasting it as he watched the same emergency film on television, aware that the government was trying to hide something from him since they had repeated the same closed-circuit program without noticing
that the film was backward, God damn it, he said, trying to forget what they wanted to hide from him, if it were something worse he would have known it by now, he said, snorting over the dinner he had been served, until it struck eight on the cathedral clock and he arose with the untouched plate and threw the meal down the toilet as every night at that time for so many years to hide the humiliation
that his stomach rejected everything, to while away with the legends of his times of glory the rancor that he felt toward himself every time he fell into some detestable act of the carelessness of an old man, to forget that he was only alive, that it was he and no one else who wrote on the walls of the toilets long live the general, long live the stud, and that he had sneaked out a healer’s
potion to do it as many times as he wanted and in one single night and even three times each time with three different women and he paid for that senile ingenuousness with tears more from rage than grief clinging to the chain of the toilet weeping mother of mine Bendición Alvarado of my heart, despise me, purify me with your waters of fire, fulfilling with pride the punishment of his naïveté because
he knew only too well that what he lacked then and had always lacked in bed was not honor but love, he needed
women less arid than those who served my comrade the foreign minister so that he would not lose the good habit since they closed the school next door, fleshy boneless women for you alone general sir, sent by plane with official exemption from customs from the shopwindows of Amsterdam,
the film festivals of Budapest, the sea of Italy general sir, look at what a marvel, the most beautiful in the whole world whom he would find sitting with singing-teacher decorum in the shadows of the office, they got undressed like artists, they lay down on the felt couch with the strips of their bathing suits printed like a photographic negative on their warm golden honey skin, lying beside the
enormous concrete ox who refused to take off his military uniform while I tried to encourage him with my most loving means until he wearied of suffering the pressures of that hallucinating beauty of a dead fish, and he told her it was all right, child, go become a nun, so depressed by his own indolence that that night at the stroke of eight he surprised one of the women in charge of the soldiers’
laundry and threw her down with his claws on top of the laundry tubs in spite of the fact that she tried to get away with the frightened excuse that I can’t today general, believe me, it’s vampire time, but he turned her face down on the laundry table and planted her from behind with a biblical drive that the poor woman felt in her soul with the crunch of death and she panted so big general, you must