* Compaternity (fr. M. L. + com pater): the intimate ties between godparents of a child, or between them and the child’s parents. By extension, the term compadre (fem. comadre) also means bosom friend, crony.
(In the private notebook)
The parody of the obsequies decreed by the vicar general, the gloomy prophecy of the herbalist have brought to a paroxysm the pasquinerian insurrection. I knew those chatterboxes weren’t going to shut up. More diatribes, caricatures, and threats have dirtied the façades. I should have ordered them to be painted over with tar, rather than with the patrial whitewash that those panders of subversion besmirch in such cowardly fashion. We are back to the days of grand punchinellery.
Day before yesterday, the obscene figures in waspwax, appearing at dawn opposite the windows of Government House, representing my decapitated effigy. The head resting on the belly. An immense phallus-cigar thrust in the mouth. I managed to see the insulting simulacrum before it melted in the heat of the red-hot fire lighted by my careless guards. They were so horror-stricken that one of them fell into the fire. Embracing the figure embrasing him, become a blazing firebrand. The flames set off the cartridge in the rifle slung across his shoulder; the projectile embedded itself in the frame of the window from which I was witnessing the parody of my inhumation. They are trying their hand at intimidation through the sort of jiggery-pokery used elsewhere. They are boldly attempting to delude the ignorant people through the use of violence. To provoke terror. But terror is not the product of such idiotic intrigues. Such methods may have been effective in other countries where the anarchy, the oligarchy, the synarchy of apatriots has enthroned despots. Here the generality of the people is embodied in the State. Here I can affirm with perfect reason: I-am-the-State, since the people have made me their supreme potestate. Identified with it, what fear can we feel? Who can make us lose our judgment, our senses with such punchinullos’ tricks?
I pardon certain errors. Not those that threaten to endanger the order in which those who wish to live in dignity live. I do not tolerate those who seek to undermine the untouchable, the inviolable system on which the order of society, public peace, the security of the Government are firmly founded. I cannot coddle those enemies who bore from within. The most dangerous miscreants. The hair on their heads bristles with hatred. Hatred muffles their voices. It leaves them only the cowardly, the wretched courage to rush at me amid the shadows, pen at lance rest, stick of charcoal in hand. The perverse man liveth with a perverse mouth. He cannot look the sun in the face. He ever moves about behind his shadow. He does not deserve the pride of belonging to the most prosperous, independent, and sovereign country on the American continent. Pride that the very last, the most ignorant of free peasants of this Nation feels. The very last mulatto. The very last freedman.
Despite everything, I tried sometimes to help them. Throw them the end of a rope. Save them. Haul them back to the shore of the human. They refused my aid. They are filled with fear. Fear is terrified of everything, even of that which could alleviate it.
It is madness to lose one’s reason. The delirious hatred of these sons of the Great Sigillarla, their impotent ambition has dried up their very last atom of gray matter. They threaten to thread my head on the flagpole of the Republic. The Scrutinium Chymicum of my cremation is the least they ask. To ask more would be to ask less. Since they can’t burn me in person they burn me in effigy, making me smoke my own phallus. Dress rehearsal again. Ouf. Ah. I’m tired of their clowning. I don’t intend to answer them. Nothing enhances authority so much as silence. My patience has a very wide turning circle. I must also shelter you, you threepenny troublemakers. Castrati with your egg-souls cut off. Pamphletary band of incubi/succubi guerrillas. Debauched legion of seven-month eunuchs. You champ at the bit of Government and leave your decayed milk teeth imbedded in it. Effeminate phantoms. You shave your secret parts to get hair to make your paintbrushes. Corrupters of the public peace, of social peace. I shall not take the trouble to have you thrown in the river in a sack, Roman-style, along with a monkey, a cock, and a serpent. Secret agents of those who block navigation, you have no need of a safe-conduct pass to seek wider horizons downstream. The offspring of bad stock, I shall imprison you in the stocks, a good counselor for cooling heads seeking to inflame other people’s. The more you execrate me, the more authority you lend my cause. The more you justify my command. You are my best propagandists. You band of pasquinist serenaders: I’ll break your guitars over your heads. Music is only for people who understand it. I am not going to treat you with the scruples of the proverbial Friar Phlegm. What do you think, you scoundrels? Do you think that the reality of this nation to which I gave birth and which gave birth to me accommodates itself to your phantasmagorias and hallucinations? Conform to the law, you layabouts and loafers, you airy-fairy merry-andrews! The world as it ought to be. The law: the first pole. Its counterpole: anarchy, ruin, the desert which is the non-house, non-history. Choose if you can. There is not a third world beyond. There is not a third pole. There are no promised-lands. Less still, much less are there such for you, you virtuosos of rumor, you artful farters, you buzzing ball-less bees! I’ll have you know that once and for all, you worthless know-nothing turds, you sepals of shit in bloom!
They take no respite and give me none. The malady plagues me from within and from without. Spreads throughout the city. Contaminates. Infects. Not sleeping releases in the air the salamandrine virus of sleepless sickness. Worse than cattle carbuncle. Plague of the general. By day, not even the flight of a fly. Silence turned topsy-turvy. Those lying in wait hold their breath from dawn to dark. Only then does the buzzing of the ground beetles begin. Scrabble of scarab-feet. Flutter of bats. Slithers of scales. The night is peopled with ghost-sounds. I am the spyglass, the telescope through the windows. Nothing. Not even a shadow. The houses leave white stains on the darkness. Milky way raised by me amid the trees. Whiter than the cloud of our galaxy amid the clouds. The sentries’ cries come from another world. Suddenly a shot. Howls. They multiply. Fill the night. All the dogs in Paraguay bark at the nightmare of darkness. Then the silence rides at anchor once again. Silhouettes enveloped in black ponchos loom up. Shaggy feet wrapped in sheepskin. They prowl about, glide past the houses of the enemy. They search about in the aisles of the churches, in the little squares, in the alleyways, in the tortuous back streets, in the ditches. I know that they will see nothing, find nothing, despite their instinct and their hunters’ flair. They will hear nothing through the cracks of doors and windows. The night is vaster, more monotonous than the day. It plunges them into another life. They think they see something. A sulfurous exhalation zigzagging along the ground. They retrace their steps immediately. Too late. Farther on, music of a sidewalk serenade. They hasten there. Window shutters closed. Only the memory of the sound beneath the eaves. The furry-feet hear nothing, see nothing. They spit out vulgar insults. They suck their decayed wisdom teeth. They spit. They stand there blinking in the slurry of their spit. That’s all they’re good for.
* * *
—
Here in my bedroom, the muffled tick-tock of the watches, among them the one Belgrano presented to Cavañas at Takuary. The faint flutter of moths in the books. The stealthy minute hand of the wood borer in the timbers. Every so often the weary sounds of the cathedral bell, marking not hours but centuries. How long a time I haven’t slept! Everything is repeated, in the image of what has been and will be. The infinitely great and the infinitely small. Absolutely true that there is nothing new under the sun, and this very sun the repetition of innumerable suns that have existed and will exist. The ancients knew the sun was two thousand leagues distant and were surprised that it looked to be two hundred paces away. They knew the eye could not see the sun if the eye were not somehow a sun itself. More than necessary to know how not to fall sick, to make oneself invulnerable to everything. According to the Jesuit Montoya, the Indian chieftain Avaporú chewed the magic herb of the Yayeup�
�-Guasú* he sneezed three times and became invisible. So that even if I were dead I wouldn’t be, since I would be my repetition. Only the shell of my first soul would be broken or dead after having incubated the others.
Tell me about this, I ordered the Nivaklé chieftain. Tell me everything you know about it. The native witch doctor’s face turns darker still. The coals of his eyes float back to the surface for an instant amid wrinkles stained red with paste from the bija tree. Speak! Wildcat leans on his staff of office and through his closed mouth there comes a murmur that seems to be traversing his body from somewhere very far away. Chasejk, the interpreter, translates. All beings have doubles. Garments, tools, arms. Plants, animals, men. This double appears to men’s eyes as a shadow, reflection, or image. The shadow all bodies project, the reflection of things in water, the image seen in a mirror. We may call it a shadow, though it is made of a more subtle material. Hence the shadow of the sun covers objects but does not conceal them. The reflection of water does not allow fish to hide themselves completely. Shadows are identical to the beings they duplicate. They are very thin, more-than-transparent. They cannot be touched. They can only be seen. But not always with the eyes of the face, only with the inner eye that thinks. Thus the shadow is the image of each being. All beings have doubles. But the double of the human being is one and triple at the same time. Sometimes more. Each one of these souls is different from the others, but despite their differences they form a single one. I tell the interpreter to ask the Nivaklé if that is like the mystery of Christianity: a single God in three different Persons. The sorcerer laughs dryly, without parting his lips puckered with tattoos. No, No! That’s not how it is with us, the men-of-the-forest! The first soul is called the egg. Then comes the little-soul, located in the center. Completely surrounding the egg is the shell or hide: the vatjeche. Hard bark that protects the soft-soul or pith. As the egg is the soul of the body, the shell is the soul of the egg. Neither of them can see or touch the other. They are formed by something that is less than the wind, since wind can be felt, while these two souls have nothing that can be seen or touched. They can pass through the hardest things. They never bump into anything. When a person blows his breath on another person’s face, that person feels it. The egg and the shell are thinner than breath. The third soul is vatajpikl: the shadow. Soul of the shell that “has something.” There are many people who see the shadow of a person who has recently died wandering about his tomb. Its likeness to the body “that isn’t there any more,” to its past movements, to its manner of being that is no more is so perfect that the boy gives the appearance of continuing to exist. But this wandering soul is completely empty; it has nothing at all inside. For us the body is more important than the souls, because the body is the origin of the souls. Without a body souls do not exist, though they survive after its destruction. This is the thought of the Old Ones. There are no words to explain this, but they, the Old Ones know that there are several souls in one: the egg soul, son-of-the-soul, or little-soul; the shadow cast by the sun; the reflection in water, the image in the mirror; the shadow cast by the sun around midmorning or midafternoon; the shadow of the sun when it falls on the back of the body moving forward; the shadow of the body when the sun is at the highest point in the sky; the shadow cast by the light of the sun filtered through clouds; the shadow cast by the light of the moon; the moon itself through the clouds. But of all of them, the principal ones are the three souls that are the support of the health and life of man. Their task is to keep him healthy, without ailments or miseries, with vigor and energy. That is their office; the sacred office that only the three together can fulfill. If any of the three is missing, the egg-soul for example, the incomplete man will go on, fulfilling his obligations, but his head and body will ache continually. Sign that the little-soul is no longer there. It has departed. The sick man may go on living. If he does not undergo a cure in time, the missing part of his being makes it easier for evil spirits to steal the other two. These evil spirits are the chivosis or dwarf creatures that live underground; deformed souls of newborn babes and dead children. There below, these creatures torture the stolen shadows. They drink maize beer and amuse themselves by torturing them, like those perverted Indians who administered torture in the cellars of the Great-White-Lord. Several chivosis get together and between them they cruelly twist and bend the stolen souls double. Then the body suffers the tremors of one-being-dead-continually. Ask him, Chasejk, if he can cure me. He says no, Excellency. He says that he sees Your Lordship’s inside as being entirely empty. Nothing there but bones, he says. The three souls have already departed. All that’s left is a fourth one, but he doesn’t see it. Tell him to look, to try to see. The shadow is more difficult than the egg. He says that he has no power over it; that he is unable to see it. He says, Excellency, that even if he were to blow till he had no breath left, the helpful spirits of the cure couldn’t penetrate the emptiness-without-a-soul of the body now. He could blow and spit till his mouth dries up and falls off. The great stone of death has fallen inside and there is no way to get it out now. That’s what the Nivaklé says, Excellency.
So that I too, according to the diagnostic powers of this agnostic savage, have soul-eggs that are all broken. All he sees is emptiness amid the bones. But emptiness is still something; everything depends on what a person makes of it. No? Yes. The pamphleteering fetuses of the chivosis are twisting the wet rag of my body underground. They’re drinking maize beer. They keep on twisting me, their pockets bulging with calumnies. They drink more beer. They throw me into the fire. My body smolders in the tremors of being-dead-continually. But they won’t put an end to me. I’m water that boils outside the pot, a schoolgirl will say of me. Being dead and remaining on my feet is my forte, and even though for me it’s all a return trip, it’s always adios and onward, and I never come back, right? Right! Do trees grow downward? Do birds fly backward? Does a word that’s spoken get wet? Can all of you hear what I don’t say, see clearly in the dark? What is said is said. If you only listen to the half of it, you’d understand the double. I feel like a fresh-laid egg.
* Yayeupá: Let’s-Eat-Everything-Up.
What else do you have there among all that paperwork? The widow of the sentry José Custodio Arroyo, who was burned to death yesterday, has presented a petition to Your Mercy. What is it the widow wants? That we resuscitate her husband as a reward for the grave dereliction of duty he committed by leaving his post?
With all respect and veneration for the Supreme Government I declare, the widow declares: that I have the dead man lying in his coffin in my house without being able to bury him, and that with the heat of this season the stench has invaded the entire district of La Merced. For which reason, the neighbors are raising a great fuss and rumpus. They want to see him buried once and for all. The parish priest of Encarnación, Supreme Sire, absolutely refuses to say the prayer for the dead and to allow my deceased, Your Excellency’s servant, to receive Christian burial. I don’t mean to say under the floor of the church, as would only be fitting and proper, but at least behind the sacristy where all Christians are buried. May the priest say why he refuses to intone the interment. The Reverend Father claims that my deceased José Custodio was a double-dyed atheist and Mason. He also claims that for that reason it is no mere happenstance that he was seen amid the troop of demons dancing with infernal savagery around the great fire that swallowed up the Supreme. I don’t mean to say that, so I’ll take it back and say what I meant to say: around the fire that my deceased José Custodio lit so as to burn the sacrilegious figure of our Supreme Karaí Guasú, meeting his death with his arms clasped about him, that is to say, not the Supreme in person but only his wax image, burning to a crisp in the fire when he fell upon it.
That is what the parish priest claims, when I know better than very well that my deceased José Custodio did so solely and with all his soul because he was trying to save that image that to us is sacred, because it represents our Karaí, made with evil
intentions by those who wish to make mock of the Supreme Head of Government, and hence will meet with eternal damnation, if it be the will of God and Most Blessed Mary.
As a consequence of all this, the neighborhood, in league with the Paí, accuses me of being a witch. They continually take the Most Holy One, though forbidden, out in street possessions, amid lamentations and prayers. They also take out the image of Our Lady of the Assumption, which has been placed in the keeping of Doña Petronita Zavala de Machaín, as perpetual guardian of the Virgin, also forbidden.
They have brought from all over everywhere women specially chosen to weep and to pray, more than a thousand of them. They have lighted bonfires of palma-Christi and male-laurel in front of my house and on many streets, saying that it’s to drive away the bad spirits that according to them come out of the body of my José Custodio. They shout at me and insult me, on and at the hour.
I hereby declare that last night several individuals and women of my acquaintance, dressed in habits of the Tertiary Order, forcibly entered my house. They tied me up and veiled my face with rosaries of the Fifteen Mysteries. They dragged me to the shore of one of the rivers of fire that rage down the street and the ditches like the torrents of storms with their tongues of water. They also hauled along the coffin with the deceased inside and tied me on top of the lid with ropes. They would have thrown us into the ditch that the fire was coming out of, so that my José Custodio would have burned up—God save us!—for the second time after he was dead, and I for the first time before dying. This happening would have happened if the guards hadn’t arrived just in time to save us with their rifle volleys.
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