I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

For some time the Paulista whoreson was to leave me in peace. He departed shortly thereafter on one of his inspection tours of the posts of Costa Abajo and Arriba, to distant Fuerte Borbón. I now had precious time and absence of time at my disposal. I set up camp in the attic. I took the box to the darkest corner of the garret. Sitting before it I began watching the whitish mass through the little glass circle, without the hours passing by or seeing the day drawing to a close. I felt it was night when the darkness grew denser within me. I then got the skull out and took it to bed with me. When the dogs began to bark I put it underneath the coverlet; its jaws were trembling with fear, its parietals damp with icy sweat. Everything white underneath the bedclothes, giving off in the darkness that lividity, that humidity that were not of this world. I hounded it with questions. Tell me, you aren’t really the skull of a libertine whoreson, are you? Tell me it isn’t true! You’re the skull of a most distinguished gentleman! Answer! A yawn. Less and less memory. Less and less desire to speak. When it slumped over sideways I knew it was dead-asleep again. Mute, deaf, white, burning in the whiteness: the skull. Icy. Sweaty. Dreaming of me. Dreaming of me so intensely it made me feel I was inside its dream. Its body full of thinking members was stretched out alongside my body. Tired of searching, with my hands, with my feet, for that body clinging to mine without touching me, tired of sounding that depth in vain, I too finally fell asleep beneath the shroud of the sheets. The effort not to fall asleep put me to sleep. Sleep overcame me, but only for an instant. In less than a second I woke up again. Perhaps I’ve never slept; not during that time or any other. Just as now, I pretended to be sound asleep. I watched his sleep closely. I kept on the lookout for his awakening, his slightest somnambulic movement, which was not merely opening his eyes, stirring, clacking his tongue from the bitter taste of saliva fermented by the miasmas of the protonight. Hanging by this tremulous thread, I nonetheless was always just a moment too late. It was necessary to begin all over again from the beginning, to start from the end. Bring into phase between the two that infinitesimal fraction of time that separated us more than millennia. Listen to me! I lowered my voice till it matched his silence. Don’t you think that by adding a second pitch to our roofs we might come to an understanding? It may be that with two counterposed angles our thought would fly farther and faster. Couldn’t it be that if they met, your death and my life would be shed down two different slopes? I was begging now: I want to be born in you! Don’t you understand? Make just a slight effort! What would it cost you anyway? My child’s tears mingling with his silence, the sweat that flowed from him in a thin, ice-cold stream. But even if that were possible, he finally chattered, you’d be born so old that before you were born you’d already be in death again, without ever really being able to get out of it. You don’t understand! You don’t understand, you old skull! You’ve the addled pate of an old Castilian. Poor Spain! When will it be able to get out of the Middle Ages with a breed of idiots like you! The only thing I’m asking you is your permission to incubate in your incubus-cube. I don’t want to be engendered in a woman’s womb. I want to be born in a man’s thought. Leave the rest to me. Okay, kid, if that’s all you want. Why do you keep pestering me so? Good Lord! Get out through whatever hole you please and stop trying my patience! There won’t be all that great a difference; take it from somebody who knows all about holes.

  From then on the skull was my mother-house. How long did I stay there gestating myself by my will alone? From before the beginning. Intense heat. Burning surfaces. Contractions. Circumvolutions of matter in combustion fall on me without burning me. Inundate my non-being. Submerge me in air-without-air. Primal fire. Isn’t that how native food is cooked? Isn’t that how savages are engendered, with no need of a mother? And less still of a progenitor?

  Infinite silence. More than in the cosmos. It enters, knocks hard, resounds in the bone. The bone resounds in the imagination. Floor, vault, cupola vibrate then. Even the shadow vibrates. Gray-white, smoke-black. Between the two, depending. We are not one. We are not two. He is gone now. I am not yet I. I feel the universe pressing down on me, aging me inside the skull. Come on, hurry up!, the skull-lender gibbers. Or are you going to brood inside there for an eternity and a bit more of the one after? I’m coming, I’m coming, calm down! I rub my hands over the damp calotte. I caress it, dripping with sweat. Embryonic matter. Perhaps I feel its hair growing. There’s that anyway; a sign, an indication. At last: hair growing! It grows and grows till it fills all the first-quarter. It envelops me. It asphyxiates me. Heat. Darkness. Viscous matter. A cord burning in my mouth. Mouth sewn shut. Eyes sewn shut. A voice of thunder: Lázaro veni fora!*2 Didn’t I tell you to bury that skull? Its bad smell tenerem house turned into dump heap. Rotten Indian head! Throw that skull into the river! Otherwise I mesmo will throw you in with it!

  I come out again. Draw back. The little construct disappears. Up and away! Faster! White in the whiteness, the cupola ascends. The light grows fainter. Everything grows darker at the same time. Floor. Wall. Vault. The temperature of matter in a state of ignition-ebullition is going down. It rapidly descends to the minimum. Around zero. Instant at which the blackness appears again. The black point. It grows. It’s me, crawling. Hallucination. The shadow of the Paulist or Marian mulatto from the January River, the dark silhouette of the captain of militias astride the skull palpitating in the white tremor of its last contractions. What kind of a fix is this you’ve gotten me into, you little devil! The captain of militias astride a young lad of twelve, who has aged thirty or three hundred years inside a skull without having been able to be born. Which may seem odd if we think that things begin/end; if it is thought that death is the only remedy for the yearning for immortality to which the door of the tomb bars the way. Since mine has already been barred it will have to be reopened now in order for the dream to be explained. By whom? Explained by me alone, for me alone. No; that may not be how it is. A person’s life doesn’t end. No; or perhaps yes. What’s a man’s thought, hidalgo or whoreson? Must be son-of-something. Is there something born of nothing? Nothing. What is life/death? What is this mystery that divides and divides into other infinite mysteries, I keep asking myself. Hanging from a branch, the whore-nanny can’t teach me/peach on me now. The reason behind the mystery is mystery itself. I know that nowhere else is there anything similar to what has happened to me. It is not necessary to dream to discover once again that white point lost in whiteness, in the deepest depths of black. The Great Whiteness is immutable/mutable. It doesn’t end. It keeps engendering itself, over and over, from blackness.

  * * *

  —

  I put the skull in the noodle box. I took it to that place of the future already past for me, to which others will take the box with my skull. The house, the street, the entire city were filled with a stench of death. With slow steps I headed toward the cliffs. I squatted on my heels to rest for a moment beneath the orange tree, leaning the box against the trunk. Struck by the sun, the glass circle flamed. Nothing could be seen inside it. I went on down; or rather, I went on not knowing whether I was going up or down.

  Complete rest. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. The protophysician’s voice comes to me from far away, from an immeasurable distance. For this once, I take his advice. I pretend to sleep. I feel that someone is spying on me. I play dead. I open the door of my tomb a crack. I draw the tumulus open. It parts with a gritty granite sound. I open my eyes. I practice the simulacrum of my resurrection by raising myself up. Before me, He-who-is-sleepless. He-who-is-ageless. He-who-is-deathless. Keeping watch. Watching.

  *1 “Wretch! Playing ninepins with a human skull! Aren’t you ashamed, you ill-born creature! Off with you this minute: go bury it behind the sacristy of Encarnación!” (As here, whenever El Supremo has his father speak, it is in a bastard language, half Spanish, half Portuguese.)

  *2 Bastardized Portuguese: Lazarus, come forth.

  (Perpetual circular)

  I withdrew to my observatory in
Ybyray. I saw how the politically inept Takuary leaders, banded together now and summoned to Government House by the Porteño Somellera, were about to complete the capitulation, handing over all of Paraguay, tied hand and foot, to the Buenos Aires Junta. I therefore decided to put a stop to it. Glowing with happiness, Don Pedro Alcántara, a good spy for the Porteños, was in a fever of activity. Beguiled by the extravagant idea that I would help them, all of them called upon me as one to lend my aid. Urgent pleas. When to their misfortune I appeared at the barracks that morning of the fifteenth of May, Pedro Juan Cavallero received me at the door: You no doubt know, my dear doctor, that we’ve tried the bull with the cape and he’s turned out to be very docile. Yr. Grace is the only one who can lead us in this emergency from here on. As we were crossing the courtyard I asked him: What are the plans? What is being done? It has been decided that the shipowner José de María is to be sent posthaste by boat to inform the Buenos Aires Junta of what has happened, the captain answered.

  Somellera was at the guard post putting the finishing touches on the dispatch. I tore it out of his hands. This dispatch is not to be dispatched, I said. If it were, the proud Porteños would be overjoyed. Out of the question. We have just emerged from one despotism and must proceed with the greatest caution if we are not to fall into another. We are not going to transmit our tacit recognition of the Buenos Aires Junta in the tone of a subordinate to a superior. Paraguay does not need to beg for anyone’s aid. It need depend only on itself to ward off any aggression. I then turned to Somellera, who was watching me closely, an irritated chameleon. As a polite hint, I said to him gently: You are no longer needed here. I would even go so far as to say that you’re in the way. Each one must serve his own country in his own country. The same boat that was to take the dispatch will transport you without further delay. Sire, I must take my family with me, and the dry river is innavigable. You leave first. Your family will then leave the moment there is free traffic on the river again. The group of annexionists were profoundly disappointed and discountenanced. Their faces fell, leaving them only their masks. That was what I had intended.

  Just to see what he would do, that capitulator of a Cavañas was asked to come from his estancia in the Cordillera. Come, word was sent to him, rally to the cause of the Fatherland. Come join us patriots gathered together with the troops in the barracks. He had the effrontery to answer that he would come only if Governor Velazco summoned him. But Velazco had been dismissed from office, without having a say or a bray in the matter. Shortly thereafter he will end up in jail along with Bishop Panés and the most conspicuous of the Spaniards who keep tirelessly conspiring. The other leaders of the capitulation at Takuary also vanish into thin air. Gracia flees to the north in search of support from the Portuguese: that’s how much courage he showed under pressure! Gamarra answers that he will join the cause only on the condition that nothing ever be done to bring down the Sovereign. He even had the brass to write it with a capital letter. Sovereign idiot! He wanted to make the Revolution without rising up against the sovereign: like making a maize cake without maize.

  The rest of the milicaste, apparently faithful, was weighing the situation with a surreptitious thumb on the scales. Ever since the establishment of the First Junta, the milicasters had sought at every moment to shake the Government so as to obtain with threats not the good of the country but anything that tickled their fancy. Instead of occupying themselves with public affairs they spent their time gambling, parading, partying, devoting themselves to carousing. The Pompeys and the Bayards of the Junta got tangled up in their own spurs, in their ineptitude. Dudes. Knights of the lasso and bola who’d lost their seat. Braggarts, no doubt of that. Coxcombs. Beribboned billygoats, corseted in resplendent uniforms. Proto-heroes of their country gleaming with sweat saw themselves already shining with glory in what they believed to be the mirror of History. They promoted themselves to military ranks whose insignia they adopted, getting themselves up in disguise after the fashion of the ex governor, now as brigadiers, now as colonels of Spanish dragons. Back in the days of the Colony they were already noted for such military virtues. The procurator Marco de Balde-Vino, an inveterate Porteñista, said of them in his report to Lázaro de Ribera: Events have left us as an eternal monument the intolerable blows inflicted upon the Patriots reduced to serving and financing the militias which have become the worst plague of the Province.

  They trafficked in everything in order to meet the expenses entailed by their boundless passion for ostentation, now that in addition to being milicasters they were heads of government as well. Thus, in order to satisfy their ridiculous mania, they freed State prisoners after exacting fat sums in return for this dereliction of their duty. As they had little notion of what national Independence, civil or political Liberty meant, they allowed their subalterns to commit countless arbitrary acts throughout the land. Especially in the countryside, the principal theater of their violent excesses.

  In Ykuamandijú, a captain of militias who had distinguished himself by his revolutionary zeal endeavored to explain to the peasants what Liberty was. He reeled off a seven-hour discourse to them, speaking of everything without saying anything. The village priest then wound up the harangue by saying that Liberty was simply Faith, Hope, and Charity. After that the two of them went down, arm in arm, to get drunk at the district post, from which there were forthcoming orders of arrests, violent abuses, the most iniquitous vandalage, all in the name of the supernatural virtues they had just proclaimed.

  To administer was to imprison, to sequester anonymously, sometimes causing suspicion to fall on others as authors of the outrage; to condemn or free, for a base price, as hatred or greed demanded. The word patriotism was mouthed; in its name everything was permitted; it sanctioned any and all passions, crimes, acts of savagery.

  In that time of beginnings that was how things were. The troops, in very nearly their entirety, were made up of the most ignorant men, the worst felons in the country. Murderers, known criminals let out of prison. Unpunished, omnipotent in uniform, they considered themselves possessed of the right to insult, to humiliate the most peaceable citizens in a thousand ways. If a peasant forgot to doff his sombrero as he passed by a soldier, they cropped his hair with their sabers. Later on, I was the one who was said to have introduced this contemptible custom of salutation by baring the head, which in and of itself is not so much a sign of respect as it is a mutilation. Symbolic decapitation of the one saluting. In this land of twenty-four suns the sombrero-pirí forms part of the person. There was no way of eradicating this humiliating habit in our fellow citizens wrapped in straw inside their immense sombreros.

  The behavior of the officers was worse than that of the men. Without the least respect for their functions, their rank, they became involved in disputes between peasants, settling them with bullets when their arguments or their patience gave out. Since almost all the commissioned and noncommissioned officers were related to the chiefs of the Junta or of the principal barracks, the latter tolerated their most scandalous misdeeds.

  I tried in vain from inside the Junta to curb these excesses. Discouraged by my futile efforts to oblige my companions in the Government to comport themselves with greater moderation, I withdrew twice more from their midst. I cleared out and watched them from a distance. Affairs of state came to a standstill. Equerries sat in the curules in the absence of their drunken masters. Strike out curules. Strike out equerries. Put: Seated in the chairs of the Junta, the stableboys of the proto-fathers of their country did not conduct the affairs of state any worse than they. There was no way they could have been any worse. Dispatches were not dispatched. The loot they collected from their co-ladronicides was divided fairly among them. Just as all of you share and share alike today. Strike out that last sentence. I don’t want them to have the distinct feeling that they’re already sitting in the prisoner’s dock.

  The times that I abandoned the fatuous fops of the Junta, they themselves asked me to r
eturn. My cousin, Fulgencio-Pompey, the effulgent president, the Junta member Cavallero-Bayard, the scribe-pharisee Fernando Mora-torium wrote me. What’s the date of the note, Patiño? August 6, 1811, Sire: Entirely persuaded of your generosity of heart, we have no fear of appearing fearlessly bold in addressing the present plea to you, and inasmuch as our knowledge is quite inferior to our zeal, we have been able to discover no other step that we might take save to implore Yr. Grace to take your place once again at the helm of our vessel, which the present ignorant storm has carried off. Otherwise the Fatherland is lost and all else with it. Your ever affectionate comrades.

  Turning aside for a moment from his festive tourneys, the president of the Junta proposes, in his illiterate hand and with a friendly clap on the back: Let us try, my dear compatriot and kinsman, to settle matters between us so that you may again pilot the ship of State amid these ill winds that threaten to cause all our endeavors to founder.

  My other relative, Antonio Thomas Yegros, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, addresses me as Venerated Sire, as though I were a pre-late: The chaplain who is the bearer of this missive has offered to go to your residence to inform you of the decision arrived at today with regard to your return among all the officers and the Junta. Break through this sort of barrier that stands in the way of that possibility and your duty to return to the Junta to lead us. If you really love your country, illustrious kinsman, you will awake at dawn tomorrow in this city, and all of us will receive you in triumph, amid general rejoicing. You will have time later to mend the roof of your house, the cause of your absence, once you are beneath that of the Government. Your most affectionate kinsman q.s.m.b.*1

  I didn’t even answer them.

  Cavallero-Bayard insists in a note of the…Four days later, Sire, dated the 10th of August: Your withdrawal to your farm, due to your need to put your house in order, has moved me deeply, both because of the particular affection that I feel for you, and because great works that have been begun under your particular influence and direction may not be able to be completed and given the crowning touch.