It’s quite obvious, I said to the green men. This dog is as taken as my amanuensis Patiño with the notion of gilding metals, silvering mirrors, clouding them with the vapor of his breath. Hero was left speechless. Come, gentlemen, it’s absurd to hang on the mystifications of a dog! Worse still, the ex canine of the last Spanish governor!, Sultan growled, baring his dislocated jaw. Shall I chase this insolent dog out of here, Excellency? Kick him out, drive him out with my sword? No, leave him where he is without being there, and you just stay quietly where you should be and aren’t, unconsulted, uncultivated Sultan. Taking advantage of the interruption, the Robertsons and Hero drained their glasses with a smug little smile.
* * *
—
Gentlemen, what this dog is relating is an old story. From age-old books, including Genesis, we know that in the beginning primitive man was male/female. No race is perfectly pure. Every hundred years and a day, or rather, every long hundred-year day, male and female incarnate themselves in a single being that gives rise to all creatures, events, things.*1 It brings them forth out of a terrible pact and a principle of intermixture. The elders of the tribes here also know, without having read Plato’s Symposium, that each one was originally two. Perfect types of dual men. Individuals all of a piece. Whole and complete. Fixed species. Many. Inheritance assured indefinitely through the union of the best and the best. Till thought tore them loose from nature. Separated them. Divided them in two. They continued to believe they were a single one, not knowing that one half was seeking the other half. Irreconcilable enemies in the impulse which the Man-of-Today calls love. The twins were not born of a mother; the so-called Mother-of-Mothers, so the indigenous payés who know their cosmogonies say, was devoured by the Blue-Jaguar that sleeps beneath the hammock of Ñanderuvasú, the First-Great-Father. The twins were born of themselves and engendered their mother. They inverted the idea of maternity, mistakenly considered to be the exclusive gift of women. They canceled out the difference between the sexes, so dear and so indispensable to Western thought, which can operate only by pairs. They conceived, or rediscovered the possibility, not only of two, but of many, of innumerable sexes. Though the man is the reasonable sex. Only he is capable of reflection. Hence, too, only he is called upon, destined, condemned to render an account of his unreason. How is it possible that we should have a single progenitor and a single mother? Can one not perhaps be born of oneself?
The only serious maternity is that of the man. The one real and possible maternity. I was able to be conceived without woman by the power of thought alone. Do people not credit me with two mothers, a false father, four false brothers, two birthdates? Does all this not prove beyond doubt that these many stories are without foundation? I have no family; if indeed I was really born, which has yet to be proved, since only what has been born can die. I was born of myself and I alone have made myself Double. (El Supremo’s Note.)
Yes, certainly, Excellency, but…I would venture to say that the pleasure principle enters into it. The wise principle of the preservation of the species! Supreme bliss! Ah! Oh! Ouuu! Is it not so? Very, very nice! Agreed, Mister Robertson. But an infinitely assured species does not mean immutable species. All right, Excellency, but…Pardon me, Don Juan. There is not a single species of men. Do you know of, have you heard of the other possible species? The ones that were. The ones that are. The ones that will be. Beings come from living roots; they are born only when their path forks. Which is not a happenstance. It is only our dim understanding that believes that chances rules everywhere. Nature never tires of repeating her trial efforts. Nothing that in any way resembles a divine or pantheistic lottery, however. If One grows and keeps on growing immeasurably in and by itself, the Many will disappear. One alone will remain. Then this One will again become Many. Are you suggesting, Excellency, getting along by oneself…as best one can? The green men with red hair looked at me with a sly gleam in their eye. What could they know of my double birth or disbirth? I riveted my gaze on them until it transpierced the nape of their neck: I merely said that all things are ruled by the rigorous necessity of a terrible impact and a principle of fusion. Man is an idiot. He doesn’t know how to do anything without copying, without imitating, without plagiarizing, without aping. It might even have been that man invented generation by coitus after seeing the grasshopper copulate. Ah, Excellency, let us grant then that the grasshopper is a reasonable animal. She knows what is good and what is practical. If I were the first man I wouldn’t be the last to imitate her. I’d even learn to sing the way she does. Make the most of your summer, Don Juan. I could see him once again at Doña Juana Esquivel’s country house, next to mine at Ybyray. I could see Juan Parish, not as a victorious grasshopper, but rather as the victim of that old nymphomaniac. Woman of the black sphere. Scarab, vulture in her female part, who made the green lamb of Scotland her “double” on earth.
Shhh, shhh, I beg your pardon, Excellency! Hero is recounting something on that very subject this minute. As I was speaking, the rude ex regalist bow-wow hadn’t stopped talking, so that my words were counterpointed by the muffled harmonics of the dog’s growls. Merely to contradict everything I said, even in the realms of languages and unknown, forgotten myths. I put on the earpieces. Hieroglyphic voice of the dog. Half-drunk voice of his English interpreter: Hero is recounting a Celtic legend. Two creatures who form one. The old hag confronts the young hero with an enigma. If he deciphers it, that is to say, if he responds to the repulsive old woman’s advances, on awakening he will find in his bed a young and radiant woman who will enable him to obtain kingship…Dear Hero, we can’t hear you very well. A little louder. Couldn’t you go a little more slowly? The canine shook his head disdainfully and went straight on, in Spanish this time, ending the joke: The repulsive old woman, or the beautiful girl, has been abandoned by her people during a difficult migration as she was giving birth…A little more beer, please. From that time on the woman wanders about the desert. She is the Mother-of-the-Animals who refuses to deliver them into the hands of hunters. Anyone who chances to meet her in her bloody rags is so terror-stricken that he feels an irresistible erotic impulse. Infinite desires to copulate…To hide away in an immense fornicatory forest. To drown himself in a seminarial sea. A state that the old woman takes advantage of to rape him, rewarding him with abundant game. In that case…I laughed heartily, interrupting the storyteller. Ah, you’re finally in a good humor again, Excellency! As a matter of fact the night has turned cool and pleasant with the south wind. Odd that it should begin to blow at midnight. Perhaps the north wind has stopped blowing at the hour when ghosts walk abroad. Ah, caprice of the winds! And of ghosts, I added, to hide my uncontainable bursts of laughter. What are you laughing at so heartily, Sire? Oh, just a bit of nonsense, Don Juan! I suddenly remembered our first meeting, that afternoon in Ybyray.
In his Letters, Juan Parish Robertson describes the encounter as follows:
“On one of those pleasant Paraguayan afternoons, after the wind from the southeast has cleared and refreshed the atmosphere, I went out hunting in a quiet valley, not far from Doña Juana’s house. I suddenly came upon a small dwelling, clean and unpretentious. A partridge flew up. I fired, and the bird fell to the ground. Good shot!, a voice at my back exclaimed. I turned around and saw a gentleman of about fifty, dressed all in black.
“I apologized for having shot off the gun so close to his house, but with great kindness and extreme courtesy, typical of the simple, primitive hospitality of the country, he invited me to sit down on the veranda and smoke a cigar and had the little black bring me a maté.
“The owner of the house assured me that there was not the least reason to apologize, and that his lands were at my disposal whenever I wanted to divert myself with my shotgun in those parts.
“Through the little portico I spied a celestial globe, a large telescope, a theodolite and various other optical and mechanical instruments, which caused me immediately to infer that
the figure before me was none other than the gray eminence of the Government himself.
“The instruments confirmed the rumors I had heard concerning his knowledge of astronomy and his practice of the occult sciences. He left no doubt in my mind on this head. Here you have, he said to me with an ironic smile, motioning with his hand in the direction of the dark laboratory-study, my temple of Minerva, which has fed so many legends.
“I presume, he continued, that you are the English gentleman who is in residence at the house of Doña Juana Esquivel, my neighbor. I answered that that was indeed the case. He added that he had intended to visit me, but that the political situation in Paraguay, particularly with regard to his person, was such that he found it necessary to live in great seclusion. There was no other way, he added, to keep people from putting the most sinister interpretations on his most insignificant acts.
“He ushered me into his library, a closed room with a very small window, so shaded by the very low-hanging roof of the veranda that it barely allowed the dwindling light of late afternoon to filter into the room.
“The library was ranged along three rows of shelves running the width of the room and might have contained some three hundred volumes. There were several voluminous Law books. As many more on mathematics, experimental and applied sciences, some in French and Latin. Euclid’s Elements and a number of tomes on Physics and Chemistry were lying open on the table with marks between the pages. His collection of books on Astronomy and general Literature occupied an entire row. The Quijote, also lying open in the middle, in a handsome edition with a purple page marker and gold galloons on the cover, lay on a stand. Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Volney, Raynal, Rollin, Diderot, Julius Caesar, Machiavelli formed a choir just beyond it in the shadow which was beginning to grow darker.
“On a large table, more like a treasure galleon than a study table, were great piles of dossiers, sheets of paper with writing on them, and trial records. Several volumes bound in parchment were scattered about on the table.
“The Dictator took off his cape and lit a candle that did its feeble best to light the room, though it appeared to be used ordinarily to light cigars. A maté vessel and a silver inkwell adorned the other end of the table. There were neither rugs nor straw mats on the tile floor. The chairs were of such an antique style that they appeared to be prehistoric pieces that had come from some excavation. They were covered with old hides or incrustations in an unrecognizable material, almost phosphorescent, on which strange hieroglyphs, similar to rupestrian inscriptions, were imprinted. I tried to lift one of these chairs; but despite my every effort I did not manage to move it one millimeter. The Dictator then came to my aid, and with his affable smile levitated the heavy curule with a slight gesture of his hand. He then caused it to descend in the precise place I had wordlessly chosen in my mind.
“Open envelopes and folded letters were scattered all about the floor of the room; one could not say in disorder, but in accordance with a certain pre-established order that gave the atmosphere, from below, a slightly sinister and incomprehensible air.
“A large earthen jar for water and a pitcher stood on a rough wooden tripod in one corner. In another, the Dictator’s saddles and riding gear gleamed in the half-light.
“As we talked together the little black began to pick up, slowly, with studied gestures and as though imbued with the importance of his task, the half-boots, the slippers, the shoes that were scattered about everywhere, without, as I have said, their disturbing the more profound and unalterable order of a pre-established system that ruled the atmosphere of the humble, meticulously neat little dwelling located so idyllically amid the trees, giving every appearance of being inhabited by a being who loved beauty and tranquillity.
“From the outside, perhaps from the enclosed yards or pens in the back, the sound of shrill squeals, as of hungry rodents, began to reach my ears, growing louder and louder.
“My attention was instantly arrested, for those squeals were so muffled, so hideously concerted, that they seemed to me to be coming from some subterranean cave, if not from beyond the grave.
“Only then did the Dictator, who had not ceased pacing the room from one end to the other as we conversed, halt in his tracks too.
“He summoned another of the heavy chairs with a clap of his hands and sat down in front of me. On noting my look of utter surprise at the more and more audible concert of squeals, he reassured me, with his odd smile: It’s supper-time in my rat nursery. He ordered the little black to go tend to them.”
Ah! You behaved like a gentleman in this hospitable land! You repaid as best you could the interested hospitality of the octogenarian damsel of Ybyray.*2 When I withdrew from the Junta because of my war with the military, I was the involuntary witness of that other less silent, albeit more intimate, war, staged in the rural Troy of my neighbor Juana Esquivel. I heard at all hours the din of her well-nigh secular salaciousness. I saw her chasing you along the veranda, amid the greenery, up and down the stream. Her battle-hardened Fallopian tuba sounded the charge, in sunlight and shadow, with energy enough to annihilate an entire army. The old lady’s cries of pleasure ruptured my Eustachians. The two of you made the trees shake, the water in the river boil when you dived into it naked. Doña Juana’s ardor made the white-hot heat of afternoon siestas last far into the night. She brought the cool night dew to the boiling point. A fog with the taste of acid drifted across the land bathed in moonlight. It crept into my hermetically sealed house. It kept me from concentrating on my thoughts, on my studies. It disturbed my solitary contemplation. I was obliged to give up my favorite occupation: taking out my telescope and observing the constellations. I saw the gaunt cicada of an old hag drag herself across the grass, moaning, enveloped in a long tail of smoke. You Don Juan, the Young hero of the Celtic legend, were powerless to decipher the enigma that the repulsive sorceress compulsively propounded to you, varying it each time. Each time you waited for the next rape, knowing beforehand that your recompense would never take the form of seeing the old woman turned into a radiant damsel. You can’t complain, however, since she did reward you after all—by bringing you exceptional good luck in hunting doubloons, if not turtledoves.
I have a bad memory, Don Juan. I don’t remember which writer of antiquity it is who speaks of an Old Woman-Devil, armed with a double set of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her sex. Here in Paraguay too, where the devil is a woman for the natives, certain tribes worship this succubus. What is the meaning of the vulva-with-teeth if not the devouring nonengendering principle of the woman? Juan Robertson gave a slight shudder. Don’t those teeth fall out, Excellency, when the woman grows old? No, my dear Don Juan. They become harder, even sharper. Is there something you’re afraid of? Has something unpleasant happened to you? I don’t think so, Excellency. In any event, Don Juan, I think you ought to know how the Indians conjure away these risks. They begin to dance, night and day, around the devil-woman. They dance madly, and make her dance and leap and cavort too. At sunrise on the third day, two things can happen: The fangs fall out and the floor of the Ceremonial House turns white with them. The men then run after those teeth that hop from one place to another, trembling, hanging from the umbivaginal cord, till they fall motionless, turned into dry coconut, thistle, tuna cactus thorns. They gather them up and throw them in a big fire where it takes three more days for them to be entirely consumed, as meanwhile they fill the brush with a thick, viscous, acrid smoke, as befits their origin and condition. It may also happen that the lower-teeth of the woman do not fall out. Convulsed and driven out of their minds, the men-dancers are turned, to their misfortune, into what we call sometics or he-whores here. Once they have met with this disaster, they are condemned to the most humiliating duties. It is best to be forewarned against such contingencies. Suddenly, without his having foreseen it, the cleverest of men may find himself sitting on the horn of a bull, swaying back and forth. Fi, fi, fo, fum! Watch o
ut for the devil-woman, Englishman!
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