I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  (Perpetual circular)

  Before going back across the Paraná, Belgrano gave Cavañas his watch as a gift. He gave 60 ounces of gold—actually 58—to be shared among the widows, the orphans of those who had not been able to withstand the leaden arguments of the Porteños’ preaching. The baggage lost, the arms destroyed, the animals killed were naturally not indemnified.

  Nor was poor Belgrano indemnified on his return to Buenos Aires. Not only did his efforts go unrecognized. In the final analysis, his successes went unrecognized as well. Did the brains devoid of gray matter of the Buenos Aires Junta think it a matter of little moment that the expeditionary general had been able to turn a military defeat into a diplomatic victory? His recompense: a trial by court-martial. In the same period in which Liniers, the Frenchy, was shot to death, shortly after having reconquered Buenos Aires from the English invaders. But that is a horse of another color, one too old to bear the burden of my story.

  Meanwhile the impassioned echoes of Takuary, Julius Caesar again notes, arrived in Asunción, turning the news of the strange armistice in which an invading army is allowed to withdraw with maximum honors into a burning issue.

  From the beginning I was the most heated critic of the Takuary accord, whereby Atanasio Cavañas’s immense satisfaction had come close to making common cause with the defeated invaders. At my insistence, during these days my friend Antonio Recalde led the attack in the Cabildo against Cavañas and his absurd behavior. The members of the Cabildo unanimously demanded an explanation from him as to the real causes of the capitulation. The tobacco dealer–commandant did not give one, and indeed could not give one without condemning himself. The demand was thus left hanging in the air. Do you remember the text, Patiño? Yes, Excellency; it is the demand dated March 28, 1811. Copy out the whole thing; it is one that merits being brought to the attention of my satraps of today. Those of yesterday. Those of tomorrow.

  The Cabildo in those days was the bastion of supporters of the Spanish cause, as I have already recounted; hence my long-term aims were other. The egg of Revolution was slowly incubating in the warm embers of the campfires of those bivouacs. Period. End for today of the perpetual.

  Hand me that repeater watch. Which one of the seven, Sire? The one that Belgrano presented to Cavañas at Takuary; the one just now striking twelve.

  *1 Read the previous installments of this perpetual-circular very attentively so as to find a continuous meaning each time it comes round. Do not stay on the edges of the wheel, which are what get the hard jolts, but place yourselves, rather, along the axis of my thought, which ever remains fixed as it turns upon itself. (El Supremo’s Note.)

  *2 El Supremo’s nickname for the Argentine general, statesman, and historian Bartolomé Mitre (1821–1906). Author of one of the historical sources of the novel Vida de Belgrano.

  *3 The Theo-Philanthropic Awakener.

  *4 A reminiscence of a famous verse composed by the emperor Hadrian shortly before his death: “Animula, vagula, blandula…” (Little soul, errant, affectionate…).

  *5 Anagram for the name of a historian, Alberdi, who wrote on Mitre.

  (In the private notebook)

  Last night I was again visited by the herbalist. Or rather, he returned to the attack. This time without his tisanes. Head drooping more than usual. A start of surprise on seeing me writing. He surely thought that I was working out my accounts in the monumentous ledger. What are you doing, Excellency? You can see very well, Estigarribia. When there’s nothing else to be done, one writes. He tried to take the thread of my pulse. Hand left suspended in midair. You should rest, Excellency. Complete rest, Sire. Sleep, sleep. He went on moving his toothless gums up and down as though he were biting dust. After a long silence he ventured to wheeze: The Government is very sick. I think it my duty to ask you to prepare yourself or to make the arrangements you deem most suitable, inasmuch as your state is worsening by the day. Perhaps the moment has come to choose a successor, to appoint a designate.

  He blurted all that out in a single breath. Unexpected insolence from such a puny, fearful man. Thought embodied in a mere thread of a voice. Have you spoken with anyone concerning my illness? Not a soul, Sire. Then button your lip. Absolute, total secrecy. He leaned his shadow on the meteor. Certain people, Sire, already suspect the worst. Yet they see you venturing forth for your afternoon outing on horseback as usual. Those who have grave suspicions have fewer, and those who have few have none. Through the slits in their shutters, people spy the horse as it passes by, accompanied by the escort, amid the sound of fifes and drums. They see His Excellency! Tall and erect as always in the crimson velvet saddle. How do you know whether it is really I mounted astride the Arabian? Your friend Antonio Recalde told me this afternoon that Your Excellency looked to be in better countenance. Bah, that old parrot is forever cleaning his beak! But you, you who are my doctor, find me in a worse and worse state. You’ve come to put my semi-corpse in a death-trance. How do I know you’re not connivancing with the enemies prowling about on every hand, hoping to fish in a troubled river? Sire, you know my loyalty, my fidelity to Your Grace. I’ve never heard of such foolishness! Look, Estigarribia, you’re either a stupid idiot or a scoundrel, and both at the same time. You’re incapable of honoring the trust I have placed in you throughout my entire life. Are you too making mock of me? Are you too hoping for my death? In the name of heaven, no, Excellency! And is it not more despicable still for you, my doctor, to hope for it and to induce me into giving you that pleasure? Well, allow me to assure you that you are not going to have it. On the contrary, Sire, I have not abandoned the hope or the certainty that your health will improve, by the grace of God who performs miracles and brings about impossible things. I don’t give a damn for the hopes or assurances of men such as you who make fun of the cross from hell to breakfast. My only thought, Sire, was that someone must relieve you of your crushing responsibilities of Government. Don’t bother me with such trifles. Whoever can will take over after me. For the moment I am quite able to hold my own. Not only do I not feel worse; I feel terribly better. Hand me my clothes. I’m going to prove to you that you’re lying.

  See? I’m more steady on my feet than you are, than are all of those who would be pleased to see me carried out of here feet first. Death pays all debts. Retiring. Receiving your pension check in jubilation. Is that what you’re after? No, Excellency! You know that that’s not how it is at all. What more could all of us Paraguayans want than for you to live forever for the good of the Fatherland? Look, Estigarribia, I’m not saying I won’t die some day. But the when and the wherefore are a secret I’ll take to my grave with me. Death doesn’t ask us to keep a day free for it. I’ll wait for it sitting here working. I’ll keep it waiting behind my chair as long as necessary. I’ll keep it standing around cooling its heels till I’ve said my last word. They won’t need to come round with ten-foot poles to poke at my corpse to see if I’m dead. My hair won’t turn white in the grave.

  I got dressed, disdaining the herbalist’s help. He gesticulated, waved his arms wildly, embraced the air in his eagerness to keep a specter on his feet. He very nearly ended up on the floor. We went into the study. I wrote the note for Bonpland. Have it sent to San Borja, if he’s still thereabouts. Send that courier who’s swifter than lightning. If possible, have him be back here before he’s left. In years past, the Frenchman’s remedies at least calmed my nerves. Your treacherous herb concoctions, on the other hand, are contrabanding together with my ailments to undermine my health. What have they been able to do for my military gout and my civilian hemorrhoids? Eh, señor protophysician, what do you have to say to that? Keeping my leg, my butt in the air the whole blessed day, trying to emulate the weightless pose of holy apparitions. Thanks to you, I’m going to stick sideways in eternity’s throat.

  Your beverages won’t make me any worse off than I am. They won’t remedy my intestines hanging drying in the air like the gardens of Babylon
. The bellows of my lungs wheeze like an old bronco from the weight of all the air they’ve had to inhale/exhale. From their place between my ribs, they’ve spread out over more than ten thousand square leagues, over hundreds of thousands of days. They’ve unleashed floods, storms, the burning-hot breath of deserts. In their natural materials there breathes a political body, the State. HE/I: it is our lungs that the entire country breathes through. I beg your pardon, Excellency, I don’t understand this business about the lungs of HE/I very well. You, Don Vicente, like all the others, never understand anything. You haven’t been able to keep our lungs from becoming two membranous sacs. Poor ignorant fool! Worse still, if one considers the fact that you’re going to be the forebear of one of the greatest generals of our country. If you had defended my health with the strategy of cordons copied from that of the descendant of yours who defended-recovered the Chaco practically barehanded from the descendants of Bolívar, you would have already cured me. You would have been more or less of an honor to your profession. The art of healing is a martial art as well. But few families produce more than one grand cordon.

  You, exalated examiner of my insides, have not managed to mend a single gutter of my aching guts. I’m so full of fistulas I leak everywhere. You come in and announce to me: The Government is very sick! Don’t you think I know that? My protophysician not only fails to cure me. He kills me, he is the death of me every day. He brings me portents, presages of a protoinfirmity that’s already cured. He prophesies those raging storms that cause death before it comes, after it’s already passed by. He does the same thing with other patients-dying. That sentinel who guards my door buried his mother, his wife, two of his children this morning. You treated all of them. Your prescriptions have killed more people than all the plagues put together. Like your predecessors, that Rengger and Longchamp pair.

  As for me, learned Aesculapius, haven’t you prescribed for me in your concoctions the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, the liver of an armadillo, blood extracted from the right wing of a white pigeon? Ridiculous folk remedies! Superstitious quackery! To get me to eat a snail you mysteriously prescribe: Imprison that son of the earth that crawls along the ground, possessed of neither bones nor blood, carrying his house about with him on his back. Have it boiled. Drink the broth after fasting. Having breakfasted, eat the flesh. If my health had depended on those poor yatytases, I would have been cured. The colic is still entranced with my entrails. And what do you prescribe in such a crucial ventral event? Nothing but pulverized turds of rats and wild guinea pigs, roasted over logs of brazilwood. Do you think I’m going to allow myself to be poisoned by such concoctions? I suspect that your mere presence makes me ill, my esteemed protophysician: seeing your curly locks, your grizzled muttonchops, the reflection of your spectacles in the shadow, your enormous skull rolling along on little cockroach feet makes me leap out of bed and into the watercloset. I shall not mention that air of surly self-importance that surrounds your immense dwarf’s head: Charon rowing his funereal barque on the floor around my table, my bed, at any and all hours.

  The same thing happened to me with that Rengger and Longchamp pair.* I was treated by them with unconscionable negligence. They observed my fistulas as though they were cracks in a wall. I don’t know why I named you my personal physician, Don Juan Rengo, I upbraided him one time. Too bad I don’t have a Corvisart at my side, like Napoleon! His magic potions allowed the Great Man to keep his intestines fresh as the morning breeze. I don’t expect you to get my bile duct to flowing freely again and turn my entrails to velvet, as Voltaire asked of his physician. Nor can I drink great quantities of potable gold as the kings of antiquity did in order to postpone the moment of their last hour, as I’ve read somewhere. I cannot eat the philosopher’s stone. I do not expect the secret of imperial tisane to be forthcoming from your herbal alchemy. But you should have at least tried a more modest dictatorial eggnog. Did I ask you to give me back my youth? Did I perchance demand that you rewind my cock, set it at its hour of yesteryear on the virile dial again? Decrepit old gaffers, bald, abject, stooped, cynical, toothless, impotent, would ask nothing else of all the deities of the universe. I expect no such thing of you, my esteemed Galen. My virility, as you know, is of another sort. It never peters out from gout. It does not decline. It does not grow any older. I conserve my energy by expending it. The deer that is chased knows a certain kind of herb; on eating it it expels the arrow from its body. The dog that chases it also knows an herb that cures it of the wounds from the jaguar’s claws and fangs. You, Don Juan Rengo, know less than the deer, than the dog. A real physician is one who has survived every sort of malady. If he is to cure the French disease, stubborn itches, multiform leprosy, hanging hemorrhoids, he must first have suffered these ills himself.

  You and your crony Longchamp have made a slave of me. You’re the ones who have killed off half the soldiers in my army with your deadly potions. Didn’t you yourselves confess as much in the libel that you invented and published two years after I expelled you from here? Were you out to defame me in return for the hospitality and all the kind attention I naively paid you? You printed in that libelous dragonflier that the temperature has a great influence on my mood. When the north wind begins to blow, his accesses of rage become much more frequent. This very damp, suffocatingly hot wind affects those who have an excessive sensibility or suffer from an obstruction of the liver or lower belly. When this wind blows continuously, on occasion for days on end, there reigns at siesta time in the towns and in the countryside a silence profounder still than that at midnight. The animals seek the shade of the trees, the coolness of the springs. The birds hide in the foliage; they can be seen to fluff up their wings and raise their feathers. Even the insects seek shelter amid the leaves. Humans become lethargic. Lose their appetite. Sweat even when not moving about, and their skin becomes dry and paper-thin. Along with all this, they suffer from headache, and in the case of persons of nervous disposition, hypochondriacal affections follow. Overcome by them, The Supreme shuts himself up for days at a time, with no communication or nourishment whatsoever, or vents his wrath on those who come within his reach, be they civil servants, officers, or men in the ranks. He then vomits out insults and threats against his real or imagined enemies. He orders arrests. He inflicts cruel punishments. At such stormy moments it would be a mere bagatelle for him to pronounce a death sentence. Ah, you pair of mendacious Swiss medics! What malicious buffoonery! First you attribute to me an excessive sensibility. Then extreme perversity that makes the north wind my prompter and accomplice. And finally, you violate the ethics of your profession by divulging my illnesses. Did you ever see me fulminate death sentences in such a state, inflict cruel punishments, as you maintain? You should have been put to death as liars, false witnesses, and cynics. You richly deserved such a fate. You received instead kind and generous treatment, even when the sultriest of north winds blew in. Likewise when the dry and pleasant south wind was blowing, which according to you is when I sing, dance, laugh all by myself, and hold endless colloquies with my private phantoms in a language that is not of this world.