* * *
—
Well then, Patiño, did you drop off to sleep? No, Excellency! I’m trying to discover whose handwriting it is. And did you manage to do so? To tell the truth, Sire, I have my suspicions, but no more than that. I can see that the more you doubt, the more you sweat it out. Take a close look at the anonymous writing just once less. Subtle attention, mind you, eh? What name does your memory call to mind? What face, you know-it-all seeing-with-my-own-eyes? What scriptuary features? Faint suggestion of a trembling of eyelids in a chimerical little slit in the protuberances. Tell me, Patiño…The entire person of the trust-unworthy scribe leans forward in its weighty carapace toward what he does not yet know that I am going to say. Hopeless hope of a commutation. Terror of the drunkard staring at the bottom of the empty bottle. Tell me, isn’t the handwriting of the pasquinade mine? Dull thud of the magnifying glass falling on the paper. Waterspout rising from the basin. Impossible, Excellency! Not even if I were possessed with the madness of right reason could I think such a thing of our Karaí-Guasú! One must always keep all eventualities in mind, my dear secreting-secretary. The possible is a product of the impossible. Look here, underneath the watermark, the flourish of the initials. Aren’t they mine? They are yours, Sire; you are quite right. The paper, the verjured initials as well. You see? Someone is dipping into the very coffers of the Treasury where I keep the pad of paper. Paper reserved for private communications with foreign personalities, that I haven’t used for more than twenty years now. Agreed. But the handwriting. What have you to say about the handwriting? It looks as though it were yours, Excellency, but it’s not yours exactly. What makes you say so? The ink is different, Sire. The only thing that’s copied perfectly is the hand. The spirit is someone else’s. Moreover, Excellency, nobody except an out-and-out enemy is going to threaten the Supreme Government and its servants with death. You’ve only half convinced me, Patiño. The bad thing, the very bad thing, the very serious thing, is that someone is able to break into the Coffers, to steal the quires of watermark. More unpardonable still is the fact that this someone is committing the rash misdeed of pawing through my Private Notebook. Writing on the folios. Correcting my notes. Jotting down injudicious judgments in the margin. Have the pasquinaders invaded my most arcane domains? Continue the search. For the time being we’ll go on with the perpetual-circular. Meanwhile prepare to wield your pen with vigor. I want to hear it make the paper moan when I begin to dictate to you the Supreme Decree with which I shall correct the decretory mockery.
By the way, Patiño, how far have you gotten with that other investigation I ordered you to conduct? Of the penal colony of Tevegó, Sire? Here is the order, all drawn up, to the commandant of Villa Real de la Concepción to proceed to dismantle the penal colony. All it lacks is your signature, Sire. No, you clod! I’m not talking about that camp of stone ghosts. I ordered you to find out what priest it was I met up with on that evening of the storm when I fell off my horse. Yes, Sire. There was no priest who was bringing the viaticum that evening. There wasn’t anybody who was dying. I made absolutely certain. As regards this subject, or this great to-do, as you would put it, Sire, there were only the vaguest of romurs. The word is rumors, you rummy. Right, Sire. Malicious rumors, gossip, stories, stemming from the house of the Carísimos because of its hatred of the Government, so as to prove that your fall was a punishment from God. There was even a cheap pamphlet sneak-snaking about spreading that rumor among those with evil tongues. Your Excellency has the entire preliminary inquiry here in this dossier. You read it on your return from the Hospital Barracks. Would you care to read it again, Sire? No. We’re not going to waste more time on tittle-tattle that gossip-mongering scribes will continue to repeat in minute detail down through the ages.
So they’re the ones, are they, who are going to defend the truth by means of poems, novels, fables, libels, satires, diatribes? What merit is there in that? Repeating what others said and wrote. Priapus, that wooden god of antiquity, contrived to remember a few Greek words he had heard his master utter as he was reading in his shadow. Lucian’s cock, two thousand years later, contrived to speak by dint of keeping company with human beings. He had as lively an imagination as they did. If only writers could master the art of imitating animals! Hero, the dog belonging to the last Spanish governor, had more of a way with words than the best of the areopagites, despite the fact that he was a spic and a royalist. My ignorant and untutored Sultan acquired as much wisdom as King Solomon after his death, if not more.
The parrot I gave the Robertsons recited the Pater Noster in Bishop Panés’s own voice. Indeed, better, much better, than the bishop, that parakeet. Clearer diction, without the showers of spit. That clever bird had the advantage of possessing a dry tongue. A more sincere intonation than the hypocritical mumble-jumble of clericletes. A pure animal, the parrot parrots the language invented by men without realizing it. Above all, without any utilitarian interest in mind. Swinging freely back and forth in its hoop, despite its domestic captivity, it preached a living language that the dead language of writers imprisoned in the coffin-cages of their books is incapable of imitating.
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There were eras in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote sacred books. Universal books. Codes. The epic. Oracles. Cryptic inscriptions on the walls of caves; maxims, on the porticos of temples. Not revolting pasquinades. But in those times the writer was not a single individual; he was a people. He transmitted his mysteries from age to age. Thus it was that the Ancient Books were written. Ever new. Ever timely. Ever future.
Books have a destiny, though destiny has no book. Without the people from which they had been cut off by sign and story even the prophets would not have been able to write the Bible. The Greek people called Homer composed the Iliad. The Egyptians and the Chinese dictated their histories to scribes who dreamed of being the people, not copyists who sneezed the way you do on what you’ve written. A Homer-people creates a novel. Presents it as such. As such it was received. No one doubts that Troy and Agamemnon existed, in the same way as the Golden Fleece, the Candiré of Peru, the Land-without-Evil and the Radiant-City of our indigenous legends.
Cervantes, one-armed, writes his great novel with his missing hand. Who could maintain that the Gaunt Knight in the Green Greatcoat is less real than the author himself? Who could deny that his fat secretary-squire is less real than you; mounted on his mule, plodding along behind his master’s old nag, more real than you mounted on the basin, awkwardly bridling your goose quill?
Two hundred years later, the witnesses of those stories are no longer alive. Two hundred years younger, readers do not know if they are fables, true stories, pretended truths. The same thing will come to pass with us. We too will pass for real-unreal beings. And having reached that pass, we shall go no farther. And a good thing it is too, Excellency!
In every country that considers itself civilized, there ought to be laws such as the ones I have established in Paraguay against penpushers of every breed. Corrupted corrupters. Vagrants. Scroungers. Ruffians, cheats and crooks of the written word. The worst poison that peoples suffer from would thereby be eradicated.
“The atrabilious Dictator has a stock of notebooks filled with clauses and conceits that he has lifted from good books. When he has an urgent need to draft a text, he goes through them. He selects the mottoes and maxims that to his mind are most effective, and proceeds to scatter them about here and there, regardless of whether or not they are à propos. All his efforts are concentrated on good style. Of good panegyrics he memorizes the rhetorical closes that most impress him. He takes dictionary in hand to vary the words. He never works on anything without it. The History of the Romans and the Letters of Louis XIV are the diurnal from which he prays each day. He has now taken to studying English with his associate Robertson in order to take advantage of the good books that the latter possesses and has collected for him in London and Buenos A
ires through his associates.
“One other thing, Rev. Father, with regard to the pretended phobia that the Great Cancerberas gives every sign of having against writers, the product, doubtless, of the envy and the resentment of this man who feels the urge to be a Caesar and a Phoenix of Wit, and whose brain has been anemified by the melancholy from which he suffers.
“See, Brother Bel-Asshole, if you don’t find this a most amusing story! As Your Mercy no doubt already knows, our Great Man disappears now and again for periodic confinements. He cloisters himself for months at a time in his quarters in the Hospital Barracks, making sure that the word of his retreat gets round through the use of the method of the official rumor, in other words the open State secret, so as to devote himself to the study of the projects and plans that his feverish imagination claims to have conceived in order to place Paraguay at the head of the American states. The rumor has leaked out, however, that these withdrawals to his hortus conclusus are for the purpose of writing a novel imitating the Quixote, for which he feels a fascinated admiration. To our novelist Dictator’s misfortune, he is not missing an arm like Cervantes, who lost it in the glorious battle of Lepanto, and at the same time he is more than lacking in brains and wit.
“Other credible versions of these periodic disappearances allow one to presume that they are owed, rather, to the furtive journeys that the illustrious Misogynist makes to the houses of numerous concubines who reside in the country, with whom he has had more than five hundred natural children, having thereby pushed his record beyond that of Don Domingo Martínez de Irala and other of our no less prolific founding fathers.
“My informants have also spoken to me of one of these concubines, an apostate ex nun who is said to be his favorite. They say that this doubly impure and sacrilegious courtesan lives in a country house between the villages of Pirayú and Cerro-León. Thus far, however, no one has managed to see the Dictator’s private hothouse, since it is protected on all sides by tall fences and hedges of poppies, as well as by numerous pickets of guards. The Great Man has floated the rumor that that is where he has established his artillery park.
“Publish your Proclamation to our compatriots, Rev. Father. It may come to be a true Gospel for the liberation of our countrymen from the gloomy despot to whom Your Mercy has the misfortune of being very closely related. What I set down on this paper are naked truths, which he cannot deny. He is a hotheaded man, who lays about with everything he can put his hands on in his accesses of fury. Do not fear him; it is by keeping far out of his reach that we can best combat him.” (Letter from Dr. V. Días de Ventura to Brother Mariano Ignacio Bel-Asshole.*)
The writing mania appears to be the symptom of an uncontainable century. Outside of Paraguay, when has so much been written as in the days since the world has lain in perpetual convulsion? Not even the Romans in the period of their decadence. There is no more deadly merchandise than the books of these convulsionarles. There is no worse plague than the scribonic. Menders of lies and benders of truths. Lenders of their pens, the borrowed plumes of plebeian peacocks. When I think of this perverse fauna, I imagine a world in which men are born old. They shrink, they shrivel till they’re small enough to put inside a bottle. They grow smaller still inside it, so that a person could eat ten Alexanders and twenty Caesars spread on a slice of bread or a chunk of manioc cake. My advantage is that I no longer need to eat and it matters not at all to me if I am eaten by these worms.
* El Supremo’s nickname for Brother M. I. Velasco, one of his detractors, author of a Proclamation of a Paraguayan to His Countrymen, Buenos Aires, 1814.
(In the private notebook)
In the worst heat of the summer, I ordered the French Catalan Andreu-Legard brought from his dungeon to my chamber at siesta time. He made my difficult digestions more pleasant with his songs and amusing anecdotes. He helped me to take my rest, if only in sips. In five years he caught the knack of it and did his work quite efficiently, thereby paying for his meals as a prisoner without any great problems. An odd mixture of prisoner-transmigrant. Shut up in the Bastille as an agitator. On one occasion, the executioner’s ax almost got him. During one siesta he showed me on the nape of his neck the scar of what might have been the fatal chop. After the storming on the fourteenth of July, he got out and participated in the Revolutionary Commune, under the direct command of Maximilien Robespierre; so at least he said or lied. A member of a section of Pikemen during the Jacobin dictatorship, he again fell in disgrace when the Incorruptible was put to death.
In prison he met and became a particularly good friend of the libertine marquis whom Napoleon had ordered arrested because of a clandestine pamphlet that the noble rakehell had circulated against the Great Man and his mistress Josephine de Beauharnais. Napoleon was the first consul. In that country they had no way of reining in the authors of pamphlets and pasquinades. There thus appeared, supposedly translated from the Hebrew, a Letter from the Devil to the Great Whore of Paris. The French Catalan assured me that although his licentious friend was not the author of this pamphlet, he deserved to be, since it was an extraordinarily corrosive one. To tell me that, to hear the ex sergeant of Pikemen, fichu comme l’as de pique, lancer des piques, was to make mention of the rope in the house of the hanged man. Tais-toi, canaille, eh! Mais non, Sire!, Legard exclaimed apologetically. I don’t understand how that monstrous, sordid, fierce, evil sodomite of a friend of yours could be, as you maintain, a friend of the people and of Revolution. That is what he was, Excellency. A revolutionary avant la lettre. Ooh la la, and what a forceful one! The most sincere conviction. Seven years before the Revolution he wrote the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, that I’ve just recited to Your Excellency. A year before the attack on the Bastille and in the eleventh year of his captivity, the marquis exclaims in other works of his: A Great Revolution is incubating in the country. It has grown weary of the crimes of our sovereigns, their cruelties, their profligacies, their stupidities. The people of France are revolted by despotism. The day is fast approaching when, in fury, it will break its chains. That day, France, a light will awaken you. You will see at your feet the criminals who are destroying you. You will know that a people is free only through the nature of its spirit, and can be led by no one save itself. Be that as it may, what you say strikes me as strange, Legard. There was not a single case of that sort here among the whoring oligarchons whom I was obliged to bastille. And the same goes both for the tonsured rabble and the milicasters, not to mention the cacographic bookshitters who considered themselves born of Minerva and were nothing but mongrels sired by Diogenes’ dog and whelped by Erostratus’ bitch. As for the great libertine, Excellency, his libertinage was more a profound task of moral liberation in all domains. In the Section of Pikemen, where his atheism brought him face to face with Robespierre. In the sessions of the Paris Commune. At the Convention. On the Hospital Commission. Even in the asylum where he was finally shut up. There you are! That licentious scoundrel was bound to end up in the madhouse! Consider the fact, however, Most Excellent Sire, that his most revolutionary political work dates from that period. His proclamation Sons of France: One last effort if you would be republicans! equals or may even surpass the Social Contract of the no less libertine Rousseau and the Utopia of Saint Thomas More. The Catalo-Frenchman disturbed my naps. He took his petty revenge with all the subtle little tricks of a man condemned to forced labor, scratching about in the sepulchral dirt of perfidy. When the marquis dies in 1814, the same year in which Your Excellency assumes Absolute Power, his holograph will is discovered among his papers in the hospice: Once it is filled in, my grave is to be sown with acorns, so that in time to come my tomb and the forest will be indistinguishable. In this way, my grave will disappear from the face of the earth, as I hope my memory will be erased from the minds of men; except for the small number of those whose wish it was to love me to the very last, and of whom I shall bear a tender memory to the tomb. His posthumous desire was not fulfilled.
Nor was his outcry heard: I address myself only to those able to understand me! He lived in prison almost his entire life. Hidden away in a deep dungeon, he was strictly forbidden, by decree, the use of pencils, ink, pen, charcoal, and paper, on any pretext whatsoever. Buried alive, he was forbidden to write, on pain of death. His corpse buried, he was denied the acorns that he had asked to have planted on his tomb. They were unable to erase his memory. Later on, the tomb was opened. A profanation more perfidious still, for it was a deed performed in the name of science. They made off with the skull. They did not find anything extraordinary, as Your Excellency tells me will be the case with your own. The cranium of the “degenerate of sad renown” was of harmonious proportions, “as small as though it were a woman’s.” The zones that indicate maternal tenderness, love of children, were as evident as on the skull of Héloise, who was a model of tenderness and love. This ultimate enigma, following upon the others, constituted one last challenge laid down to his contemporaries. It piqued their curiosity, aroused their execration. And perhaps led them on to his final glorification. The requiem did not succeed in dimming my light enough for a good long rest. The Catalo-Frenchy knew from A to Ζ no less than twenty of the works of the raving pornographer, since he had served him for many years as a repository of memory; something like the listening-flowerpots that I fashion with the china clay of Tobatï and the resins of the Tree-of-the-Word. One scratches the thin little hymen-optera membrane; the needle of sardonyx and chrysoberyl awakens, sets in movement once again, sends flying out in countermovement, the words, the sounds, the faintest sigh imprisoned in the little cells and nervous membrances of the speaking-listening vessels, since the sound falls silent but does not disappear. It is there. One searches for it and it is there. It buzzes down below itself, stuck to the ribbon that is sticky with wax and wild resins. I have more than a hundred of these jars full of secrets, jealously guarded in the treasury. Forgotten conversations. Softest whimpers. Martial sounds. Exquisite moans. The mortal voice of the tortured amid the crack of whips. Confessions. Prayers. Insults. Rifle reports. Discharges of executions.
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