I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  Here in Paraguay as well. Asunción was no better than Buenos Aires in that respect. Asunción, capital city. Founder of cities. Sanctuary-and-support of the Conquest, as certain royal decrees called it. An honor that dishonors it.

  The oligarchs wanted to go on living till the end of time on the increase of their money and their cows. To live by being do-nothings. Scions of those who betrayed the Comunero uprising. Aristocrat-Iscariots. Those who sold Antequera for the accursed Thirty Dinars. Band of contra-banders. Band of sneak-thieves of the rights of the Common People. Bastards of that legion of land-grantees. Lordlings of the earth and the club. Eupatrids who called themselves patricians. Make a footnote: Eupatrid means possessor. Feudal Lord. Owner of lands, lives, and vast wealth. No, just cross out the word eupatrid. They won’t understand it. They’ll start putting it in every other line of their dispatches, whether it makes sense or not. They’re dazzled by anything they don’t understand. What do they know about Athens, about Solon? Have you ever heard of Athens, of Solon? Just what Your Grace has told me about them. Go on writing: Moreover, here in Paraguay this word is meaningless. If we ever had eupatrids, we don’t have any now. They’ve been sent to their deaths or shut up for life. Yet the genes of gens engender tenacious traitorous taints: the Gotho-Creole gens endlessly reproducing itself in the chain of Iscariot-genes. They have been, and continue to be, the judis-cariots who set themselves up as judiscators of the Government. For a century now they have betrayed the cause of our Nation. Those who have betrayed once will betray forevermore. They have tried, they will continue to try, to sell it out to Porteños,*5 to Brazilians, to the highest bidder, European or American.

  They do not forgive me for having intruded upon their domains. They have nothing but scorn for the just treatment I accord clodhoppers and bumpkins; that is how these delicate souls refer to country people. They have forgotten that the slaves of the soil were the ones who nursed their lands and their fortunes in perpetual servitude. For those lordlings of the earth, for those swaggering club-wielders, the rural populace was just one more tool for working the earth. Plowing/procreating machines. Animated equipment. Grubbing in the fields of the fiefs, humbly kneeling on weary bones to receive the sun’s blazon, from generation unto generation. Without a day of rest, without a home and fireside, without anything save their worn-out nothingness.

  Until I took over the reins of Government, the title of don divided the people here into lords-and-masters with a don and servants-without-one. Person-people and multitude-people. On the one hand, the caliphary idleness of the Gotho-Creole estate owners. On the other, the slave nailed to his cross. The dead-while-still-alive: field hands, farmers, ferrymen, watermen and woodsmen, rowers and growers of maté, cowherds, craftsmen, caravaneers, mountaineers. Armed slaves some of them, charged with defending the fiefs of the Creole kaloikagathoí. If Your Excellency would be kind enough to repeat that term that escaped me. Just write: Masters. Did these lords-and-masters expect the starving populace to love them as well as serve them? The multitude-people; in other words the laboring-procreating populace produced all the goods and suffered all the ills. The rich reaped all the goods. Two apparently inseparable estates. Equally fatal to the common good: From the one came those responsible for tyranny; from the other, the tyrants. How to bring about equality between the rich and the beggars? Don’t bother your head over such chimeras!, the Porteño Pedro Alcántara de Somellera said to me on the eve of the Revolution. A vow, a pious dream that cannot be realized in practice. But don’t you see, Don Pedro, it’s precisely because the force of circumstances tends unceasingly to destroy equality that the force of Revolution must always tend to maintain it. No one should be rich enough to buy another, and no one poor enough to find himself obliged to sell himself. Ah, I see!, the Porteño exclaimed. You wish to distribute the wealth of a few so as to make everyone equal in poverty? No, Don Pedro, I want to bring the extremes together. What you want is to suppress the existence of classes, Señor José. There is no equality without freedom, Don Pedro Alcántara. Those are the two ends that we must conjoin.

  I began to govern a country where the poor counted for nothing, where scoundrels were everything. When I assumed Supreme Power in 1814, to those who advised me, either sincerely or with hidden motives, to rely on the upper classes, I said: Gentlemen, no thank you, not for the moment. In the situation in which the country finds itself, in which I myself find myself, my only nobility is the rabble. I didn’t know that around that time the great Napoleon had uttered the same or similar words. Belittled, defeated in days to come, for having betrayed the revolutionary cause of his country.

  (In the private notebook. An unknown hand.)

  What else have you done?…(burned, the rest of the paragraph illegible).

  That coincidence with the Great Man who at every moment, in any circumstances, knew what he must do next and proceeded forthwith to do precisely that, was an inspiration to me. Something that you, functionaries and servants of the State, have not yet learned, and give few signs of being about to learn, to judge from the way you make my head swim with your dispatches full of questions, request for advice, dull-witted pondering of the least trifle. And when at long last you finally do something, I must also find a way to undo all the harm you’ve done.

  As for the oligarchs, not one of them has ever read a single line of Solon, Rousseau, Raynal, Montesquieu, Rollin, Voltaire, Condorcet, Diderot. Cross out all those names that you won’t know how to write out correctly. Not one of them has read a single line outside of the Catholic Paraguay, the Christian Year, the Florilegium of the Saints, which by this time have doubtless also been turned into playing cards. Perched in the branches of their genealogies, the oligarchs fall into ecstasies as they leaf through the Almanach of Notables of the Province. They have refused to accept that there are certain unfortunate situations in which it is possible to preserve one’s freedom only at the expense of others. Situations in which the citizen cannot be completely free without the slave being wholly a slave. They refused to accept that every true Revolution implies a change of goods. Of laws. Thoroughgoing change of the entire society. Not a mere coat of whitewash over the scaling sepulcher. I proceeded by simply going ahead. I tripped up the master, the trafficker, the whole bunch of gilded scoundrels. They fell headlong from the top of the heap to the bottom of the well. No one held out so much as a straw of consolation to them.

  I promulgated laws that were the same for the poor man, the rich man. I did not scruple to have them scrupulously enforced. In order to establish just laws I did away with unjust ones. In order to create the Rights of Citizens, I suspended the rights that for three centuries have been used for the wrong ends in these colonies. I did away with the improper uses of individual ownership of property by turning it into collective property, which is only proper. I put an end to the unjust domination and exploitation to which the Creoles subjected the natural-born citizens of the country, the most natural thing in the world since the latter as such had the right of primo-geniture over the proud mingle-blooded lordlings of the land. I concluded treaties with the indigenous peoples. I provided them with arms so that they might defend their lands against the depredations of hostile tribes. But I also contained them within their natural limits, thereby preventing them from committing the excesses that the whites themselves had taught them.*6

  Nowadays the Indians are the best servants of the State; it is from such cloth that I have cut the most upright judges, the most capable and loyal functionaries, my most valiant soldiers.

  All that is needed is equality within the law. Only rascals believe that the benefit of a favor is favor itself. Learn, once and for all: The benefit of the law is the law itself. There is no benefit, no law unless it is one for everyone.

  As for myself, for the benefit of all I have no kinfolk, stepchildren, friends. The libelists throw it up to me that my conduct toward my relatives, my old friends is more rigorous. True, in the most rigorous sen
se. Invested with Absolute Power, the Supreme Dictator does not have old friends. He has only new enemies. His blood is not swampwater, yet he recognizes no dynastic descendance. The latter does not exist save as the sovereign will of the people, source of Absolute Power, of Absolute Being-Able. Nature does not bring forth slaves; it is man, corrupter of nature, who produces them. The Perpetual Dictatorship left its mark on the soil, freeing it by expelling from the souls of its slaves the dark stain of their immemorial submission. If there are still slaves in the Republic they no longer feel themselves to be slaves. Here the one slave continues to be the Supreme Dictator, placed in the service of the power that dominates. But there is still a certain party who compares me to Caligula and even goes so far as to rouse the specter of Incitatus, the name of the little horse made a consul by an odd whim of the simpleminded Roman emperor. Would my peregrine detractor not have done better to look into the facts rather than the fictions of history? There was, indeed, a horse-consul in the First Junta: its own president. But I did not elect him. The Perpetual Dictator of Paraguay has nothing to do with the solipedal consul of Rome or with the bipedal consul of Asunción who ended up under the orange tree.

  They accuse me of having planned and constructed more public works in twenty years than the indolent Spaniards left—a scarcely edifying example—in two centuries. I erected in the lonely wastelands of the Gran Chaco and the Banda Oriental houses, fortlets, forts, and fortresses. The largest and most powerful ones in South America: the first of all of them, the one that once went by the name of Borbón. I erased that name. I effaced that stain. What was once a mere stockade of palms and tree trunks was rebuilt from the ground up. Thus, while the Portuguese were fortifying Coimbra so as to attack us in the far north, I erected the Fortress of Olimpo as a countermove to stop them. I ordered its walls to be built of stone. Impregnable bastion. Fortified towers of a blinding whiteness against the black pirates, the black-slave traders of the Empire. Next came the Fortress of San José, in the south.*7

  The Town Hall, the Hospital Barracks, the reconstruction of the Capital and of numerous villages, towns, and cities in the interior of the country. All this was possible because of the first lime factory that I set up, and not by a miracle, in Paraguay. Hence and therefore, as my friend José Antonio Vázquez puts it, I introduced the civilization of lime here, on top of a past of adobe and beaten earth. Thus the patrial estancias, the patrial farms were crowned by the brilliant success of patrial lime.

  From Government House to the humblest hut on the farthest border, there reigned the gleaming white of patrial lime. My panegyrist will say: The House of Government was turned into a receptacle that received the vibrations of all of Paraguay. Palingenesis of white on white. The pasquinading chivosis,*8 for their part, will murmur that it was turned into the tympanum of the moans coming night and day from the captives in the labyrinth of the subterranean dungeons. Ear-Trumpet-of-Command. Receiver of sounds of a people on the march. Cornucopia of the multiple-fruit of abundance, some hymn in praise. Palace of Terror that has made an immense prison of the country, the exiled oligarchons, those migratory batracians, croak. What do I care what those deserters say! Let them taunt me, as they taunted Christ. Apology/Calumny mean nothing. They slide off the facts. They do not stain the white. White are the tunics of the redeemed. Twenty-four elders stand robed in white before the great white throne. The ONE who is seated upon it, white as lambswool: the whitest of all in the dark Apocalypse.

  Here too in luminous Paraguay white is the attribute of redemption. Against this background of blinding white, the blackness in which they have clothed my figure strikes even greater fear into the hearts of our enemies. To them black is the attribute of Supreme Power. A Great Darkness, they say of me, trembling in their cubicles. Blinded by the whiteness, they fear more, much more, the blackness in which they catch the scent of the Exterminating Archangel’s wing.

  I remember very well, Excellency, as though I were seeing it this minute, the time you presented the envoy of the Empire of Brazil with a puzzle. The pompedantic Correa da Cámara was unable to solve the riddle. What riddle are you talking about? Your Excellency said to the Brazilian that night: Why is it that the lion has only to bellow and roar to terrify all the other animals? Why is it that the so-called king of the jungle fears and reveres only the white cock? Since you don’t know the answer, I’ll explain, Your Excellency said to him: The reason is that the sun, the source and the epitome of all terrestrial and sidereal light, produces a more powerful effect, is better symbolized in the white cock of dawn, by virtue of its nature and attributes, than in the lion, king of the wild ladronicides. The lion walks abroad by night in search of prey and spoils, a bandeirante*9 with a great mane and a terrible hunger. The cock awakens with the light and stuffs the lion down his gullet. Correa swallowed hard and rolled his eyes. Your Excellency then said to him: Suddenly plumed devils appear in the guise of a lion and flee before a cock….Come, come, Patiño, enough of your hoary animal fables! It is not possible for us to predict what is going to happen. The roles could well be suddenly reversed and the king of the forest brigands prove savage enough to gulp down the cock. This will not happen, however, as long as the Perpetual Dictatorship lasts. If it is Perpetual, Sire, the Dictatorship will last forever and ever, through all eternity. Amen. With your permission, I am going to let go of the pen for a moment. I am going to cross myself. There, I’m done, Sire. At your orders. Valois is ready! I know your war-cry well. You’ve got writer’s cramp in your hand and hunger pangs in your gut. Go get yourself your bean stew and make the sign of the cross over the pot.

  Enough for now. The rest will come later. Send out what you already have as we go along. Take me to the chamber. To the Chamber, Sire? To my bedchamber, to my couch, to my hole. Yes, you lout, to my own Truth Chamber.

  * * *

  —

  Ah bed, hated bed. You’re eager for my weight on top of you, you want to be mistress of my end. Aren’t you satisfied to have already robbed me of hours, days, months, years? How long, how long my person has wandered amid the immensity of your sweat-soaked straw mattresses! Prop up my spine, Patiño. The cushion first. Then those two or three books. The Statutes of Alfonso the Wise underneath one buttock. The Laws of the Indies underneath the other one. Raise my tailbone up with the Code of the Visigoths. Ah ah uy. No, not like that. Still farther. Put the Code a little lower down. There, that’s a little better. I’d need Archimedes’ lever. Ah, if only an unknown science could hold me up in the air. Those rings that pots hang from over the fire. Even filled with hot gas, I can’t levitate like my horses. I could have a good hammock woven for you, Sire, like the ones the prisoners have in their dungeons. They feel so light in them that they even forget the weight of their balls and chains. You may be right. That’s the one thing lacking. Thanks for the advice. Go have your lunch. I can hear your guts bellyaching through your ears. Eh, eh, wait a minute! Bring me the pasquinade. I want to examine it again. Hand me the magnifying glass. Shall I open the window shutters, Sire? Why, are you thinking of escaping through the window like a bird? No, Sire; just so that Your Excellency will have more light. There’s no need. There’s as much light under my bed as there is up at the ceiling at midday.

  * * *

  —

  This filthy sheet intrigues me. I suppose you’ve realized that the paper of this anonymous squib hasn’t been used for years. I’ve never seen it, Excellency. What do you note about it? Paper covered with mildew, stored away for a long time, Sire. Looking at it against the light, one can see the very fine filigree work of the watermark: a rosette of strange initials, incomprehensible, Excellency. Ask the commissioner of Villa del Pilar if that smuggler named La Andaluza has brought more reams with this mark. Tomás Gill loves to scrawl his dispatches on laid paper. Or what’s more like it, lied paper. I must remind you, Sire, that Goyeneche’s widow hasn’t come back to Paraguay. Who’s Goyeneche’s widow? The captain of the boat that brought th
e contraband, the lady they call La Andaluza, Sire. Ah, I thought you were referring to the widow of Juan Manuel de Goyeneche, the secret emissary of Bonaparte and Carlota Joaquina, the Spanish spy who never set foot in Paraguay. After the audience that Your Excellency granted her, La Andaluza hasn’t made any more trips. You’re lying! I never received her. Don’t turn things all hind side to. Or topsy-turvy. Check with the commissioners, frontier officials, chief customs officers, when and how more reams of this verge-paper have entered the country. And now clear out of here. Will you have lunch, Sire? Have Santa bring me a pitcher of lemonade. Is Master Alejandro to come at five as usual? Why shouldn’t he? Who are you to change my habits? Tell that beard-scraper to put yours to soak. Get along with you, and good appetite.

  (In the private notebook)

  I think I recognize the handwriting, this paper. Once upon a time, in days long gone by, they represented for me the reality of what exists. By striking a flint spark above the sheet one could see infusoria still teeming in the ink. Parasitic fibrils. Annular, semilunar corpuscles of Plasmodium. They finally formed the filigreed florets of malaria. The squib quivers with the shivers of swamp fever. Long live the ague!, the fever buzzes in my ears. The work of anopheles culicids.

  Follow the trail of the handwriting through the labyrinths of…(torn).

  …the filigreed fleuron in the vergered-perjured paper, the flagellated letters, now mark the unreality of the inexistent. In the forest of differences in which we lie, I too must guard against being deluded by the delirium of similarities. People all reassure themselves with the thought that they are a single individual. Difficult to be the same man constantly. What is the same is not always the same. I am not always I. The only one who doesn’t change is HE. He maintains himself in the invariable. He is there, in the state of superlunary beings. If I close my eyes, I still see him, infinitely repeated in the rings of the concave mirror. (I must look for my notes on this subject of almastronomy.) It is not merely a question of eyelids. Sometimes HE looks at me, and then my bed rises and drifts at the mercy of whirlwinds, and I, lying in it, seeing everything from very high up or very deep down, till everything disappears in the point, in the place of absence. Only HE remains, not losing an iota of his form, of his dimension, but rather, growing, increasing by himself.