The Autumn of the Patriarch (9 page)

the light switch and found Manuela Sanchez of my madness instead of the light, God damn it, why do I have to find you since you haven’t lost me, take my house if you want, the whole country with its dragon, but let me put the light on, scorpion of my nights, Manuela Sanchez of my rupture, daughter of a bitch, he shouted, thinking that the light would free him from the spell, shouting to get her
out of here, get her off my back, throw her off a sea cliff with an anchor around her neck so that no one will ever suffer the glow of her rose, he went shrieking along the corridors, sloshing through the cow flops in the darkness,
wondering in confusion what was going on in the world because it’s going on eight and everybody’s asleep in this house of scoundrels, get up, you bastards, he shouted,
the lights went on, they played reveille at three o’clock, it was repeated at the harbor fort, the San Jerónimo garrison, in barracks all over the country, and there was the noise of startled arms, of roses that opened when there were still two hours left until dew time, of sleepwalking concubines who shook out rugs under the stars and uncovered the cages of the sleeping birds and replaced the
flowers that had spent the night in the vases with last night’s flowers, and there was a troop of masons who were building emergency walls and they disoriented the sunflowers by pasting gilt paper suns on the windowpanes so that it would not be noticed that it was still nighttime in the sky and it was Sunday the twenty-fifth in the house and it was April on the sea, and there was a hubbub of Chinese
laundrymen who threw the last sleepers out of their beds to take away the sheets, premonitory blind men who announced love love where there was none, perverse civil servants who found hens laying Monday’s eggs while yesterday’s were still in the file drawers, and there was an uproar of confused crowds and dogfights in the councils of government urgently called together while he opened a way lighted
by the sudden day through the persistent adulators who proclaimed him the undoer of dawn, commander of time, and repository of light, until an officer of the high command dared stop him in the vestibule and came to attention with the news general sir that it’s only five after two, another voice, five after three in the morning general sir, and he fetched a ferocious clout with the back of his
hand and howled with all his aroused chest so that the whole world would hear him, it’s eight o’clock, God damn it, eight o’clock, I said, God’s order. Bendición Alvarado asked him when she saw him enter the suburban mansion where are you coming from with that face that looks like a tarantula bit you, why are you holding your hand over your heart, she said to him, but he dropped into the wicker
chair without answering her, changed the position of his hand, he had
forgotten about her again when his mother pointed at him with the brush for painting orioles and asked in surprise whether he really believed in the Sacred Heart of Jesus with those languid eyes and that hand on his breast, and he hid it in confusion, shit mother, he slammed the door, left, kept walking back and forth at the
palace with his hands in his pockets so that on their own they would not put themselves where they shouldn’t be, he watched the rain through the window, he watched the water slipping across the cookie-paper stars and the silver-plated moons that had been placed on the windowpanes so that it would look like eight at night at three in the afternoon, he saw the soldiers of the guard numb with cold in
the courtyard, he saw the sad sea, Manuela Sanchez’s rain in your city without her, the terrible empty parlor, the chairs placed upside down on the tables, the irreparable loneliness of the first shadows of another ephemeral Saturday of another night without her, God damn it, if only I could get rid of what had been danced which is what hurts me most, he sighed, he felt ashamed on his state, he
reviewed the places on his body where he could put his hand without its being on his heart, he finally put it on the rupture which had been eased by the rain, it was the same, it had the same shape, the same weight, it hurt the same, but it was even more atrocious like having your own living flesh heart in the palm of your hand, and only then did he understand why so many people in other times had
said that the heart is the third ball general sir, God damn it, he left the window, he walked back and forth in the reception room with the unsolvable anxiety of a perpetual president with a fishbone driven through his soul, he found himself in the room of the council of ministers listening as always without understanding, without listening, suffering through a soporific report on the fiscal situation,
suddenly something happened in the atmosphere, the treasury minister fell silent, the others were looking at him through the chinks of a cuirass cracked by pain, he saw himself defenseless and alone at the end of the walnut table with his face trembling from his pitiful state of a lifetime president with his hand on his chest having been
revealed in broad daylight, his life was singed by the glacial
hot coals of the tiny goldsmith eyes of my comrade the minister of health who seemed to be examining him inside as he fingered the chain of his small gold vest-pocket watch, careful, someone said, it might be a pang, but he had already put his siren’s hand hardened by rage on the walnut table, he got his color back, along with the words he spat out a fatal wave of authority, you people probably
hoped it was a pang, you bastards, go on, they went on, but they spoke without hearing themselves thinking that something serious must have happened to him if he flew into such a rage, they whispered it, the rumor went around, they pointed at him, see how depressed he is, he has to clutch his heart, he’s coming apart at the seams, they murmured, the story went around that he had had the minister
of health called urgently and that the latter had found him with his right arm laid out like a leg of lamb on the walnut table and he ordered him to cut it off for me, old friend, humiliated by his sad condition of a president bathed in tears, but the minister answered him no, general, I won’t carry out that order even if you have me shot, he told him, it’s a matter of justice, general, I’m not
worth as much as your arm. These and many other versions of his state were becoming more and more intense while in the stables he measured out the milk for the garrisons watching Manuela Sánchez’s Ash Tuesday rising in the sky, he had the lepers removed from the rose beds so that they would not stink up the roses of your rose, he searched out the solitary places in the building in order to sing
without being heard your first waltz as queen, so you won’t forget me, he sang, so you’ll feel you’re dying if you forget me, he sang, he plunged into the mire of the concubines’ rooms trying to find relief from his torment, and for the first time in his long life of a volatile lover he turned his instincts loose, he lingered over details, he brought out sighs from the basest of women, time and again,
and he made them laugh with surprise in the shadows doesn’t it bother you general, at your age, but he knew only too well that that will to resist was a set of tricks he was playing on himself in order to
waste time, that each step in his loneliness, each stumble in his breathing was bringing him remorselessly to the dog days of the unavoidable two o’clock in the afternoon when he went to beg
for the love of God for the love of Manuela Sanchez in the palace of your ferocious dungheap kingdom of a dogfight district, he went in civilian clothes, without an escort, in the taxi which slipped away backfiring the smell of rancid gasoline through a city prostrate in the lethargy of siesta time, he avoided the Asiatic din of the commercial district alleys, he saw the great feminine sea of Manuela
Sanchez of my perdition with a solitary pelican on the horizon, he saw the decrepit streetcars with frosted-glass windows with a velvet throne for Manuela Sanchez, he saw the deserted beach of your sea Sundays and he ordered them to build little dressing rooms and a flag with a different color according to the whims of the weather and a steel mesh fence around a beach reserved for Manuela Sanchez,
he saw the manors with marble terraces and thoughtful lawns of the fourteen families he had enriched with his favors, he saw one manor that was larger with spinning sprinklers and stained glass in the balcony windows where I want to see you living for me, and they expropriated it forcibly, deciding the fate of the world while he dreamed with his eyes open in the back seat of the tin-can car until
the sea breeze was gone and the city was gone and in through the chinks of the window came the satanic din of your dogfight district where he saw himself and did not believe it thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado look where I am without you, favor me, but no one recognized in the tumult the desolate eyes, the weak lips, the languid hand on his chest, the voice with the sleeping talk of
a great-grandfather looking through a broken glass wearing a white linen suit and a foreman’s hat and going around trying to find out where Manuela Sanchez of my shame lives, the queen of the poor, madam, the one with the rose in her hand, wondering in alarm where could you live in that turmoil of sharp bump backbones of satanic looks of bloody fangs of the string of fleeing howls with the tail between
the legs of the butchery of dogs quartering each
other as they exchanged nips in the mud puddles, where could the licorice smell of your breath be in this continuous thunder of whore-daughter loudspeakers you’ll be the torture of my life of drunks booted out of slaughterhouse saloons, where could you have got lost in the endless binge of the fruits and the hodgepodge school of mullet and ray fish
and a salami of penny-pitching and the black penny tossed of the mythical paradise of Black Adán and Juancito Trucupey, God damn it, which house do you live in in this clamor of peeling pumpkin yellow walls with the purple trim of a bishop’s stole and green parrot windows with fairy blue partitions and columns pink like the rose in your hand, what time can it be in your life since these lowlifes
don’t know about my order that it’s three o’clock now and not eight o’clock yesterday night as it seems to be in this hellhole, which one are you among these women who nod in the empty parlors and ventilate themselves with their skirts holding their legs apart in rocking chairs inhaling the heat from between their legs while he asked through the openings in the window where Manuela Sanchez of my
rage lives, the one with the frothy dress with diamond spangles and the solid gold diadem he had given her on the first anniversary of her coronation, now I know who she is, sir, somebody in the tumult said, a big-assed teaty woman who thinks she’s the gorilla’s own mama, she lives there, sir, there, in a house like all the others, painted at the top of its lungs, with the fresh mark of someone
who’d slipped on a lump of dog dirt and left a mosaic carlock, a poor person’s house so different from Manuela Sanchez in the chair of the viceroys that it was hard to believe it was her, but it was her, mother of my innards Bendición Alvarado, give me your strength to go in, mother, because it was her, he’d gone around the block ten times to catch his breath, he’d knocked on the door with three knuckle-raps
that were like three entreaties, he’d waited in the burning shadows of the entranceway without knowing whether the evil air he was breathing was perverted by the glare of the sun or by anxiety, he waited without even thinking of his own state until Manuela Sanchez’s mother had him come into the cool fish
leftover smell of the shadows in the broad stark living room of a house asleep that was larger
inside than out, he examined the scope of his frustration from the leather stool he had sat on while Manuela Sanchez’s mother woke her from her siesta, he saw the walls and the dribbles of past raindrops, a broken sofa, two other stools with leather bottoms, a stringless piano in the corner, nothing else, shit, so much suffering for this trouble, he sighed, when Manuela Sanchez’s mother came
back with a sewing basket and sat down to make lace while Manuela Sanchez got dressed, combed her hair, put on her best shoes to attend with proper dignity the unexpected old man who wondered perplexed where can you be Manuela Sanchez of my misfortune that I came looking for you and cannot find you in this house of beggars, where is your licorice smell in this pesthole of lunch leftovers, where is
your rose, where your love, release me from the dungeon of these dog doubts, he sighed, when he saw her appear at the rear door like the image of a dream reflected in the mirror of another dream wearing a dress of etamine that cost a penny a yard, her hair tied back hurriedly with a back comb, her shoes shabby, but she was the most beautiful and haughtiest woman on earth with the rose glowing in
her hand, a sight so dazzling that he barely got sufficient control of himself to bow when she greeted him with her lifted head God preserve your excellency, and she sat down on the sofa opposite him, where the gush of his fetid body odor would not reach her, and then I dared to look at him face to face for the first time spinning the glow of the rose with two fingers so that he would not notice my
terror, I pitilessly scrutinized the bat lips, the mute eyes that seemed to be looking at me from the bottom of a pool, the hairless skin like clods of earth tamped down with gall oil which became tighter and more intense on the right hand and the ring with the presidential seal exhausted on his knee, his baggy linen suit as if there were nobody inside, his enormous dead man’s shoes, his invincible
thought, his occult powers, the oldest ancient on earth, the most fearsome, the most hated, and the least pitied in the nation who was fanning himself with his foreman’s hat contemplating
me in silence from his other shore, good lord, such a sad man, I thought with surprise, and she asked without compassion what can I do for you your excellency, and he answered with a solemn air that I’ve only
come to ask a favor of you, your majesty, that you accept this visit of mine. He visited her without cease month after month, every day during the dead hours of the heat when he used to visit his mother so that the security service would think he was at the suburban mansion, for only he was unaware of what everyone knew that General Rodrigo de Aguilar’s riflemen were protecting him crouched on the
rooftops, they raised hell with traffic, they used their rifle butts to clear the streets he would pass along, they put them off limits so that they would seem deserted from two until five with orders to shoot if anyone tried to come out onto a balcony, but even the least curious found some way to spy on the fleeting passage of the presidential limousine painted to look like a taxi with the canicular