I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  The nanny turned her back to me as she rubbed her kinky hair, the nape of her neck, her back, her breasts with turtle-fat. Stop asking so many questions, Master Josué, and come rub me round my middle. I’m an old woman and my hand lacks the reach and the strength. She stretched out on the floor. I began distractedly rubbing the bundle of wrinkles, thinking about the skull, as the nanny, her mouth glued to the floor, hummed:

  …I’ll never die

  without knowing why why

  why

  why

  yai yai yai…

  How long do you think this skull’s been buried? Heavens above! What in the world are you keeping that for? All skulls are mad. Why is that, machú Encarna? Because they’ve no brains, of course! This death’s head, she said, turning it round and round in her ashen-colored hands, has been buried for nine thousand one hundred twenty-seven moons. When the moon comes round again, it will go off and die yet again. Hi, hi! Better, if you want my bad advice, to take it to the cemetery ery ery. Tell me, machú Encarna: was it the head of a man or a woman? Of a man, of a man. Look here at the cock crest. A most distinguished gentleman, he was. Smell tells. The more cality the owner had in life, the worse smell he has after he’s dead ead ead. In other days he had a tongue, he could sing:

  When I was young

  strumming my guitar

  strumming my guitar

  I spent my time

  spent and spent

  avá avá*1

  avá avatisoká*2

  The gentleman’s tongue is now in the power of milord the worm. Hi hi hi! Ah, sir, if you’ve lost your good judgment you won’t last till Judgment Day! Hi hi hi! All those bones will be good for, my child, is a game of ninepins ins ins. They won’t even be good for that. Now that I’ve had a good look at it, I see it was an Indian’s head. The song said so. There’s nothing like singing to show a person what’s what. Look here: the mark of the leg iron on the bone, the cleft left by the hairband. Throw it in the river of the Payaguá guá guá. Throw it away, my little master, it could bring you a big handful of bad luck! Yai yai yai! The nanny’s voice echoing back and forth between the six walls: That’s no toy for a child!

  I wasn’t a child. I wasn’t one yet. I wouldn’t ever be one again. The nanny, laughing: When you sucked my tit I didn’t feel your mouth. What you need is to exist in your natural being.

  Ah fortune what misfortune

  when the she-ass wants to the he-ass can’t…

  Laughter. White in black. Your mama got you off to a bad start from the very first, little Jo. Worse still when there’s two mothers in the picture. Be still, Hermogena! I didn’t have a mother!, I said, but the nanny had flown out the window, leaving only the resounding echo of her laughter of a bird of ill omen.

  I see myself exploring by the light of a candle the armature of bone. First globe of a world that fell into my hands. Small dungeon where the thought of a man was imprisoned. No matter whether he was an Indian or a great lord. Greater than the terrestrial globe. Empty now. Who knows. Bah! Idle subject. Living imagination imagining dead imagination. No empty space anywhere. Anyway, what is there about emptiness that can terrify anyone? Those who are terrified of the image that they themselves have created are children. I place the candle inside the skull. The spongy transparency affords a hint of the now-vanished labyrinth of matter. Stains. Mere traces in the whiteness of the rotunda. I measure, I mark, I survey all that is within my compass. Radii, diameters, fissures, angles, cells, orbital nebulae, temporal circumvolutions, occipital, equinoctial, solstitial zones, parietal regions. Places of great brainstorms. Bottomless holes. Craters. Lunar globe. Ancient cranium. Oldster’s skull or a youngster’s. Ageless. The metopic suture divides it into two halves. Childhood/Old Age. Now that I repose in my great age without having emerged from the infancy that I never had, I know that I must have a beginning without ceasing to be an end. Given three or four lives or perhaps a hundred on this thankless earth, I might have been able to get somewhere. Know when I went too far or not far enough. Know what I did badly. Know, know, know! Though we already know from the Scriptures that knowledge increaseth grief.

  * * *

  —

  In the crypt-cryptorium of the Gothic pagoda of Monserrat we students read in secret the books of the “libertine” authors, sitting on skulls that had been robbed of their authority centuries before. In the light of the candles placed on their graves, amid the flutter of bats and the miasmas of death, those books of the “anti-Christs” held for us a strange flavor of new life.

  Long afterward, Brother Mariano Bel-Asshole passes on to his friend Dr. Ventura Días de Ventura the following confidential report on his nephew’s days as a student:

  “The resolute youth very soon becomes one of the first in his class. His total concentration on his studies permits him to advance more rapidly than his classmates. In two years he completes two curricula for the degree of bachelor of arts, at the end of which he sits for an examination in Logic and three entire branches of Philosophy, graduating with a Licenciate in Law and a Master of Arts degree. He crammed a volume of Aesthetics into his head which made him a visionary. Latin is his strong point. He speaks it to perfection and writes in that language his essays and studies, his love letters, and all the clandestine pasquinades with which he bombards the Students’ Quarters and the Rector’s Residence.

  “When the new pupil was admitted into the Boarding School we did not yet foresee that this fifteen-year-old adolescent would become in the course of time the protagonist of one of the most terrible political dramas of South America.

  “The Rector gave him the accolade in the Secret Hall of the Community. The students embraced the newcomer from Asunción as a sign of charity and welcome. All of us kissed the dark and taciturn Judas on both his cheeks crusted with pimples. We kissed his hands that later would cuff all those of us who helped him and aided him, in the realm of the temporal as in the realm of the eternal.

  “Nervous and irascible temperament. Withdrawn. Not at all communicative. Arrogant, rebellious, toward Masters and fellow students alike. Does nothing to gain their sympathy, but commands their respect nonetheless thanks to his intelligence and tenacity. In the classroom and outside, his strong personality makes a vivid impression. The memory of his mischievous pranks and exploits long lingers in the traditions of the Cloister. With respect to his fellow students, he takes especial pleasure in dominating them, and succeeds in so doing because he is bold, self-willed, intrepid in his plans and their execution. He frequently comes to blows with them and threatens them with a dagger that he carries about on his person at all times. But it is his courage that causes his fellow students to respect him. A number of anecdotes prove this.

  “Inside the church of the Company (which he called the ‘Gothic Pagoda’) there was a deep subterranean passage that ran through a good part of the city and came out at its other end in the building known as the Old Novitiate. That cellar containing numerous tombs of saintly and illustrious men also contained cells for the application of corporal punishment. The students were in the habit of stealing into this catacomb to hold their revels and carouse. The scholarship student from Asunción acted as leader of these forays, preceding the others with a lantern. One night he induced one of his companions to accompany him. Frightened to death but urged on by his pride, as the lad confessed later, he started down the gloomy passageway. Halfway through it, a skull appeared amid the tombs, blocking their way. The companion stumbled over it and fell to the ground, half terrified to death. The impetuous roisterer then unsheathed his rapier and plunged it repeatedly into the eye sockets of the skull. The subterranean passage rang with the cry of a wounded animal. The weapon came out dripping with blood, to the great terror of the other lad, who witnessed the macabre scene as though in a nightmare, he said. With a kick of his foot the ringleader sent the skull flying into the wall, as a
rat ran off amid the bits of bone scattered about on the ground. This episode won the Paraguayan pupil a somewhat sinister reputation, and made his influence on the others all the greater.

  “During one of the student outings to the countryside round the city, at the recreational villa of Caroyas, he carved his name on an inaccessible boulder on a hill. Much later, a bolt of lightning split the stone in two and destroyed his mark, but his name remained indelibly engraved on the desk that had been his, since he had carved it with a knife point so deeply that the strokes cut all the way through the log.

  “On another occasion he forced a companion to swallow the stones of several peaches because the boy had stolen fruit from him. He was already known around the school as El Dictador, a prophetic nickname that proved to be only too apt, going beyond the limits of the Royal College at that stage of his juvenile education. In the Private Book on the students of the College, the Rectors, Fathers Parras and Guittian, confirm that he is much taken by the diabolical doctrines of those anti-Christs appearing in legions in France, the Low Countries, or those in the North. An indefatigable reader of these new Books of Chivalry, not just of Romances, or of Vain or Profane Stories such as the Amadíses and others of this nature, he steeped himself in the Macchiabellian ideas whose arm is to build an atheist society on the abomination of man without God.

  “The rebel ringleader was therefore expelled from the Royal College and obliged to continue his studies at the University as a day student or one at liberty (though in this case a libertine one would be the more exact term) until he completed them and received the mortarboard in utroque juris of Doctor in Sacred Theology and Philosophy, at the hands of Saint Albert himself.

  “Yet another injustice was committed, for which I bear a double share of the blame, as professor and as relative. The expulsion of the aberrant disciple should have been total; his punishment, exemplary. How many tyrants, how many sinister personages who have unleashed torrents of blood and tears might we have been spared had they been crushed in time, when the young viper first begins to raise its poisonous head! These avernal ophidians are marked from birth by their triangular heads. I was weak enough to intercede on my nephew’s behalf. I not only defended him, offering myself as the guarantor of his future moderate comportment. I also paid a financial debt he owed the College. And finally, exposing myself to even greater derision and as punishment for my sins, I acted as his sponsor at the graduation ceremony.

  “If anything further were needed to model the image of his horrendous character, it suffices to add one more fact that casts a revealing light on his innermost secrets, from deep within his twisted mind. Around the time of his expulsion, he received the sad news of his mother’s death. A grievous occasion for any wellborn man of normal sensibilities. It did not, however, make the slightest impression upon him. Do you think, my dear friend Ventura, that the Dictator gave signs at any time of being in the least affected? Far from it! The wellsprings of filial love, of which even animals give proof, having dried up in his soul, he did not even appear to be aware of the distressing event. Rather than grief and mourning he manifested, on the contrary, a total insensibility, striking even more defiant poses and making even more arrogant remarks against Masters and fellow students. Finally, I could tell you of countless similar instances, but it is only pinned on the end of a fork that one could do this monster justice, and I fear that you may grow as weary of reading me as I am of digging about in such obdurate and ignominious material,” Brother Mariano concludes his long letter to Días de Ventura. (Compiler’s Note.)

  The rector summons me. He orders me to prostrate myself before his chair, and putting his arm about my shoulder speaks paternally in my ear in confessione, caressing the lobe of my other one with his silky fingertips: What deeply pains us and disturbs us is the venom of sedition and atheism that the books and the ideas of those libertine impostors that all of you are reading in secret are insinuating into your minds. The devil, my son, is prompting the pages of those deicidal and regicidal books. Spitting on the Holy Books his execrable slaver of exotic doctrines. But, your paternity, the God that all of you have brought to our America, binding to his service the mitayo and yanacona*3 gods of the Indians, is exotic too. Don’t be a heretic, my son! No, reverend father. We simply want to know what is new, and not just keep parroting the Paternicas, the Summa, the maxims of Peter Lombard. You still want to destroy Newton with syllogisms and all you can do is patch your decrepit theological bastion with other odd bits of old shoe leather. We, on the other hand, are endeavoring to make everything new with the help of masons such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, and others as good as they are. Omnia mecum porto, reverend father, and if I carry everything that is mine about with me, those new ideas form part of our new nature. You can’t confiscate them unless you wash our brains out with muriatic acid. Rebellious pig! The round rectorial gob of spit hit me square in the eye, rinsing it out. I noted that my powers of vision were all the better for it. Paradoxes of washing not properly done. When a hard rain falls, men get smeared with mud and pigs are left nice and clean.

  *1 Avá: in Guaraní, Indian.

  *2 Avatisoká: stick or pestle.

  *3 Indians in the service of Spaniards in colonial days were called mitayos and yanaconas.

  I have an old skull in my hands. I am searching for the secret of thought. At some point the greatest secrets are in contact with the smallest. This is the point that my fingernail traces on the bone. Lustravit lampade terras. After much groping about, I believe I have now located the throne of will. The locus of language beneath this mushroom of aphasia. Here, the forgotten screen of memory. Standing motionless, what were once power plants of movement. The senses, vanished; the power of reason that makes us miserable; the conscience that makes cowards of us all because it makes us know that we are cowards and miserable.

  I turn the calcareous ball between my hands. Valleys, dark depressions where Capricorn gambols. Horns in flames. Mountains. A mountain. Shadow of a mountain. The top still emits a vague phosphorescence. It goes out. I withdraw the smoking candle. I enter. There is no horizon other than the bone underfoot. I slowly drag myself toward the precise point that does not divagate. Great darkness. Great silence. Not even an echo answers my shouts in the concave dungeon. Sound of footsteps. I leave in a hurry.

  Betrayal by the nanny. Ambush. Heelbones of the artillery captain of the king’s militias. Creaking of the door. The man they say is my father, the Paulista mameluco, is here, immense, imposing, swarthy-skinned. Loud voice, very high, heard from ground level. It takes a long time to reach me. Thundering cannon blast: Miserable! Jogar-se jôgo da bola con un cráneo humano! Haverem vergonha malnacido! Vai’mbora ahora mismo a enterrarlo en la contrasacristía de la Encarnación!*1 Then you’re to go to confess this profanation to the senhor cura! Nanny says, sir, that it’s not a Christian head but an Indian one. Throw it into the river then! Black with rage, the captain of militias makes his exit with such a hard slam of the door/fillip of his finger that it nearly splits my head in two. The skull has rolled off into the darkest corner. It is there, some ten paces away, bobbing its head. Pleading. Pleading. Pleading, it too, to return to earth. White, disborn, not-finished. All white in the little milky shadow it casts about it in the darkness. Supplicant pleading for memory. Penitent having forgotten what is habit among the living. Dust begging to return to dust. It drags itself over to me. Take me away! Bury me again! It sways drunkenly back and forth. I’m nothing but the skull of a rakehell whoreson! It is weeping through its empty eye sockets. Come, come, you ungrateful rascal! This is no time for tears. If you were weak-willed whilst you lived, be strong-hearted whilst you’re dead. Don’t try to fool me. I’m no numskull: I know you for the true skull that you are. You’re not a libertine whoreson, as is the individual who claims to be my progenitor. Ah you, son, you don’t know anything because you haven’t been born yet. Nanny told me you were the skull of an Indian.
No, my boy, no! If that were so, how is it that I speak the Old Castilian of Castilla la Vieja? With a La Mancha accent, to boot. Naturally thou art not a past master of the art of sounds of language. Were it otherwise, thou wouldst know it to be a veridical truth that I am a sly rascal. I nursed my reputation as a liar so as to tell the truth with impunity. Nannies are bitches whose lies are like beeches: their fruits aren’t good for anything but fattening pigs. In the name of charity, bury me, throw me in the river! A very dark place where I can hide my shame! Standing there before it, amid the ringing that fills my battered head, I dimly hear its silence begging me, begging me, begging me. I pick up the gray flowerpot. All grays are reaching the same level as in the beginning. There where the fall began. Quicksilvered gray is situated between white and black; white reduced to the state of darkness. The buzzing fills my skull and comes out my ears, my mouth, the eye sockets of the dark whiteness I am cradling in my arms. Everything known: White. Everything past: Gray. Everything finished: Black. The nanny’s song comes to my lips. I allow it to screech out between my clenched teeth, my mouth pressing against the bone of the penitential-pestilential skull. What’s the matter now? I’m suffering mightily, my boy! My feeling of guilt has undone me. My mother said to me one day, with glassy eyes: When you’re in bed and hear the dogs barking in the countryside, hide under the coverlet. Don’t take what they’re doing lightly. The white ball began shivering again. Come on, skull, forget such tripe! Forget your mother. Think of something serious; I need you to think of something serious. You’re beginning to bore me with your melancholy humor. You were much more amusing when you asked me riddles or made fun of the grave-diggers. I shut it up in a box of noodles, which I then hid in the attic amid the rusty junk that the captain of militias had stored up there.