I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  Ah, unworthy compatriots of William Tell! Was it not you who advised me to expose my tricorne on a pike in the Plaza de la República so as to receive the daily homage of the populace? Had I gone along with such a cheap farce, inconceivable in this country of proud, dignified citizens, you would have been the first to subject yourself willingly to such a ceremony of submission, the mere idea of which I severely reproached you for. In the remote likelihood that, like William Tell, you had refused to be subjected to such a humiliation, you would never have been able to put an arrow through the apple placed atop my head. Yours, however, would have fallen ipso facto beneath the executioner’s ax.

  Ah, you hypocritical Hippocrateses! Squatting cuckoos are capable, I grant you, of laying eggs in another’s nest, but not of popping out to announce the hour on the clock-face of my lower belly. I leave aside the uneven number of pills that I was to ingest at even intervals; the days of the year appointed for punctures and bleedings with leeches and tame bats; the lunar phases for enemas and emetics. As though the moon were able to govern the tides of my intestines!

  Let us not exaggerate, illustrious cuckoos. I would be more inclined to say that a Pentagon of forces governs my body and the State that possesses in me its material incarnation: Head. Heart. Belly. Will. Memory. Such is the integral magistrature of my organism. What happens is that the Pentagon does not always function in harmony with the alternate seasons of flux-constipation, rain-drought, that make for copious or disastrous harvests. Neither hypochondria nor misanthropy, my esteemed meteorologists. In any event, you should have said accidia, black bile. Medieval words. A better designation of my medieval ills. I am not going to waste time in fruitless discussion. Let us get down to the facts. Do you know why birds and all other animal species do not fall ill and live out the course of their lives normally? The two Swiss Galens launched forth at the same time into a long disquisition in French and in German. No, my esteemed Aesculapii. You don’t know. Well then, listen. The first reason is that animals live amid nature, which knows neither pity nor compassion, the source of all ills. Secondly, they do not speak or write as men do; in particular, they do not pen calumnies the way you do. Thirdly, birds and all animal or animated species do their business at the very moment they feel the need to. A starling flying by at a low altitude just then dropped on the crown of Juan Rengger’s head a smoking skullcap. It’s just as I told you, I said to the Swiss. As you saw, that starling didn’t postpone the moment or choose the best place to vent his spleen, but simply did his business. Man, on the other hand, must wait until a thousand ridiculous concerns do not interfere—as is the case with me at this moment—with the regular functioning of his gut. The two of them tried again, both at the same time in their two languages, to stammer an apology. They urged me with gestures to delay no longer if I needed to go to the toilet. No, sirs; there is no need to be concerned. The Supreme Government also exercises power over its bowels. I/HE have our good weather, our bad weather within. We do not depend on shifts of the wind, the seasons, the phases of the moon. You illustrious fatheads very nearly made the North Wind the real Supreme Dictator of this country. Like this one and countless others, you invented as many lies as you pleased about my regime, which you called “the most generous and magnanimous that exists in the civilized world,” in the days when you enjoyed my favors. When I finally expelled you, the same regime became for you, far away now from this land that so kindly gave you shelter, and farther still from decency, the somber Reign of Terror that set the mold for the Robertsons’ diatribes later on. The histories, the cheap fictions of every sort that scribble-starlings subsequently scrawl are nurtured on such muck. Papers befouled by badly digested infamies.

  You, Juan Rengo, were the most mendacious and most malicious. You described indescribable prisons and torments. Subterranean latomies whose labyrinth of dungeons reach as far as the foot of my own chamber, copied from the one that Dionysius of Syracuse ordered excavated in the living rock. You felt pity for those imprisoned for life whose sighs console me as I listen to them in the tympanum of the labyrinth that leads to the head of my bed; for those condemned to perpetual solitude in the remote penal colony of Tevegó, surrounded by a desert more impassable than the walls of underground prisons.

  “The principal object of vigilance of his despotic regime was the well-off class, although he also kept a close eye on the lower classes. His suspicious mind sought victims even among the rabble. The better to isolate individuals from this sphere who aroused his suspicions, he founded a colony on the left bank of the Paraguay River, 120 leagues north of Asunción, and peopled it in large part with mulattoes and women of easy virtue. This penal colony, which he named Tevegó, is the southernmost one in the country.” (Rengger and Longchamp, op. cit.)

  “In Asunción there are two classes of prisons: the public jail and the State prison. Though it also contains a number of political prisoners, the former serves essentially as a jail for others condemned to imprisonment and at the same time as a house of detention for those awaiting trial. It is a building a hundred feet wide, with a low roof and walls almost two varas thick. Like the typical house in Paraguay, it has but one floor, at ground level, divided into eight rooms and a patio of about twelve thousand square feet. Thirty or forty prisoners are crowded together in each room; since there is not space for all of them to sleep on the floor, they string hammocks up in rows, one atop the other. Imagine if you can some forty persons, shut up in a small room without windows or airholes; this in a country where for three-quarters of the year the temperature never goes below 100 degrees, and beneath a roof which during the day the sun heats to over 120 degrees. Hence the prisoners’ sweat trickles down from hammock to hammock till it reaches the floor. If one also considers the bad food, the lack of hygiene, and the inactivity of these unfortunates, it can readily be appreciated that were it not for the health-fulness of the climate that Paraguay enjoys fatal epidemics would sweep through these dungeons. The courtyard of the jail is filled with small huts, which serve as quarters for individuals awaiting a court hearing, for those serving sentences for common crimes, and for political prisoners. They have been allowed to construct these huts because the rooms inside are not large enough. Here at least they can breathe the cool night air, though the lack of cleanliness is as great as inside the main building. Those serving life sentences go out every day to labor on public works projects. For this, they are chained together two by two, or wear only grilletes, that is to say leg irons, while the majority of the other prisoners drag about another sort of shackle, balls and chains called grillos, whose weight—twenty-five pounds sometimes—scarcely allows them to walk. The state provides a small amount of food and a few articles of clothing for those prisoners that it employs on public works projects; as for the others, they support themselves at their own expense and through the alms that two or three of them, accompanied by a soldier, go out every day to collect in the city, or that are brought to them out of charity or to fulfill a vow.

  “We have often visited these horrible prisons, both for cases of forensic medicine and to care for sick prisoners. In them one sees Indian and mulatto, black and white, master and slave thrown together indiscriminately; in them all ranks and stations, all ages are commingled, the guilty and the innocent, the condemned and the accused, the public thief and the debtor, and finally the murderer and the patriot. Very often they are bound by the same chain. But what puts the crowning touch on this frightful picture is the ever-increasing demoralization of the majority of the prisoners, and the fierce joy of which they give signs whenever a new victim arrives.

  “The women under detention, who fortunately are very few in number, live inside a large room and a palisade fence; within the large courtyard, where they can more or less communicate with the prisoners. A few women of a certain rank, who have attracted the Dictator’s hatred, find themselves promiscuously mingled there with prostitutes and criminals, and exposed to all the men’s insults. They
wear balls and chains just as the men do, and not even pregnancy lightens their burden.

  “Since those detained in the public jail can communicate with their families and receive help, they consider themselves most fortunate when they compare their lot with that of the unfortunates confined in the State prisons. These latter are located in various barracks, and consist of small cells without windows in damp cellars, where there is not room enough to stand upright except in the middle of the vault. There prisoners, particularly those designated as the objects of the Dictator’s vengeance, may undergo solitary confinement; the others are shut up in cells by twos and fours. All of them are incommunicado and shackled, within view of a guard at all times. They are not permitted to have any sort of light, or engage in any sort of activity. One prisoner of my acquaintance managed to domesticate the rats that visited his cell; his guard hunted them down and killed them. Their beard, hair, and nails grow, without their ever being able to obtain permission to trim them. Their families are allowed to send them food only twice a day; and this food must consist only of those comestibles regarded in that country as the most ignoble, meat and manioc roots. The soldiers, who intercept them at the entrance to the barracks, search through them with their bayonets to see if there are papers or tools inside, and often keep them for themselves or throw them out on the ground. When a prisoner falls sick, he is given no help, save in certain instances at his last moments, and can be visited only during the day. At night the door is closed. The dying man is left to suffer by himself. Even in their death-agonies, the prisoners’ shackles are not removed. I have seen Dr. Zabala, whom through an unusual favor on the part of the Dictator I was able to visit on the last days of his illness, dying with shackles on his feet and refused the sacraments. The commandants of the barracks have made this treatment of prisoners more inhuman still, seeking thereby to please their Chief.” (Ibid.)

  For the same reasons, viciousness and malice, you have written nothing about the punishment that best defines the rigorously just quintessence of the penal regime in this country: the sentence to life-rowing. Cowardice, theft, treason, capital crimes meet with this punishment. The guilty party is not sent to his death. He is simply kept apart from life. This sentence fulfills its object since it isolates the guilty party from the society against which his crime was committed. It is in no way opposed to nature; what it does is return the condemned man to it. The description of the criminal is sent to all the towns, the remote hamlets, all the places at the back of beyond where there is the slightest trace of human beings. It is absolutely forbidden to take him in. He is placed in shackles and set in a small boat with sufficient provisions for a month. He is told the places where he can find more supplies as long as he is able to go on rowing. He is given the order to shove off and never set foot on terra firma again. From that moment on, his fate depends on himself alone. I free society of his presence and I do not have his death on my conscience. Everything that is below the waterline of that boat is not worth the blood of a citizen. Hence I take care not to spill it. The condemned man will go on rowing from shore to shore, up or down the wide river of the Fatherland, with everything left up to his own freedom-will. I prefer to correct rather than to impose a punishment that is not exemplary. The first course preserves the man, and if he accepts it and puts his heart and soul into it, it betters him. The second eliminates him, without the punishment serving as a lesson to him or to others. Self-pride is man’s most active and most intense sentiment. Guilty or innocent.

  An author of our day has woven a legend about a man so condemned, who goes on rowing endlessly and finally finds the third shore of the river. I myself, in order to institute this sentence here, took my inspiration from a story recounted by a libertine in the Bastille, which a French prisoner used to recite to me over and over during the siestas of the torrid Paraguayan summer. I take what seems good to me wherever I find it. Sometimes the most depraved libertines unwittingly fulfill the function of furthering public hygiene. That noble degenerate, shut up in the Bastille, reflected in his utopia the imaginary island of Tamoraé, the revolutionary island of Paraguay, that exemplary reality the two of you calumniated.

  Doubtless El Supremo is alluding to Sade’s story L’Île de Tamoé, known in Paraguay a century before its publication in France and in the rest of the world thanks to the oral version of the memorious Charles Andreu-Legard, companion of the marquis in the Bastille and in the Section of Pikemen; later a prisoner of the Perpetual Dictator during the first years of the Dictatorship, as is mentioned in the beginning of these Notes.

  The changing of the name of the imaginary island of Tamoé to Tamoraé is an unconscious, or perhaps deliberate, error on the part of El Supremo. The word tamoraé means, approximately, may-it-so-be in Guaraní. In a figurative sense: Island or Land of Promise. (Compiler’s Note.)

  In those days, shortly before their expulsion, the Swiss cuckoos were reduced to total silence and humility. I summoned Rengger. Look, Don Juan Rengo, you’ve made an herviborous lion out of me with your herbs. What am I to do with you? I must reward you with dismissal. From this day forward you are no longer my private physician. Limit your responsibilities to not poisoning any more of my soldiers and prisoners. Thirty more hussars died yesterday on account of your purges. At that rate you are going to leave me without an army. When you perform autopsies, I have asked you to look in the region of the nape of the neck for some hidden bone in the anatomy of the cadavers. I want to know why my compatriots are unable to lift up their heads. What answer can you give me? There’s no bone, you tell me. There must be something worse then; some weight that makes their heads fall down onto their chests. Look for it, find it, my good sir! With at least the same diligence with which you hunt for the rarest species of plants and insects.

  As for the resplendent butterfly that has you bedazzled, the daughter of Antonio Recalde, leave her be. You know very well that all Europeans, not only Spaniards, are absolutely forbidden to marry a white woman of this country. Requests to marry are never granted, not even if rape is alleged to be involved. The law is the same for all and there can be no exceptions. You tell me that you wish to leave the country, as does your companion Longchamp. You ask me to authorize your wedding and then your departure. Impossible, Don Juan. You maintain that you’re in a hurry. Haste is not a good counselor. I know that from experience. Even if this ban did not exist, it would not be a good thing to marry Miss Backward to Doctor Forward. You claim that this prohibition is absurd and is tantamount to the civil death of Europeans. Do not commit suicide then, my dear Don Juan Rengo, for you will not be restored to civil life no matter how good a doctor you may be. Find yourself one of the many pretty mulattas or Indian girls who are the pride of this country. Wed her. You’ll be ahead on the deal twice over. One who knows all the ins and outs of the game can assure you of that. Let me ask you an indiscreet question. How many times have you visited the daughter of Don Antonio Recalde? Don’t answer. I know. Many times. Almost every night for the last three years. This prolonged courtship, romance, love-sickness, or however you want to call it, is proof of the steadfastness of your sentiments. It also proves that if Herr Juan Rengo finds himself in a great hurry, his haste has not been wasted in mere flirtations, I presume. I am nonetheless going to allow myself to ask you another question. Have you by any chance come to know the most notable particularity of this beautiful girl? No; of course not. Unless your love is really so great that you willingly overlook this small detail. And if that is the case, I should be inclined to grant you a dispensation. I can imagine your trysts. The charming daughter of Antonio Recalde has always received you with the table and the thick tablecloth that completely hides her lower limbs between you, right? Have you happened to discover, has someone perhaps told you, what the beautiful Recalde girl’s nickname is? No, you don’t know, I can see that. I’ll tell you. They call her Big-Feet. Huge feet. Almost an ell long and half an ell wide. Probably the biggest feet that any damsel in
the world of fact and fable ever had. And the best part is that they’re getting bigger still. They never stop growing. If you, Don Juan, are moon-struck enough to want to take specimens of sole-flowers not yet in full bloom back with you in your collection, I’ll sign the dispensation. Go on. Think it over. Then come back and tell me what you’ve decided. He didn’t come back. A few days later the two Swiss embarked for Buenos Aires. The Recalde girl lost out on a wedding and the country won itself two rogues less.

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  The protophysician isn’t a bad sort. Heart above reproach. Mouth not versed in perversity. Incapable of telling a half-lie; but not able to tell a half-truth at the opportune moment either. Incapable of duplicity, he is pliable because he is softhearted by nature, so that anyone can bend his ingenuous will, by guile if not by crossing his palm with gold. A little squat jug of a man, sweating through every pore the transparent water of his immeasurable naïveté. Far from assuaging my thirst he aggravates it. When I find myself in such a state I cannot bear even this child-oldster. I vent my fury on my own pain. I abandon my body to its many sufferings. For if the pain suffered is equal to that which one is afraid of suffering, the more man allows himself to be dominated by pain the more it torments him. Physical suffering does not torment me. I can get the better of it, get it off my back, more easily than my shirt. What torments me is what happened in that storm. Pain of another sort. It sliced me clear through with a single two-handed blow of its sword; made me double by cutting me down to half my size at most, the half that is rapidly shrinking. Very shortly there won’t be anything left but this tyrannosaurain hand, which will go on writing, writing, writing, already a fossil, a fossil writing. Its scales flying off. Its skin falling off. Going on writing.