I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  The two thousand five hundred horsemen of Takuary parade past. My illustrious cousin Yegros, very pale at the head of the cavalry troops. He is already tied to the trunk of the orange tree. He has confessed his treason. It has cost him a great deal, and he has done so only after having had his hundred twenty-fifth taste of the lash. The Truth Chamber works miracles. He has shown great repentance. I had no other recourse than to have him shot to death twenty years ago. The best thing about his life was the way in which he took his leave of it. He died in the attitude of someone who suddenly realizes that he must throw away his most precious treasure as though it were a mere bauble. To think he was someone in whose ingenuousness and stupidity I had placed a certain trust! Ah ah ah! There is no such thing as an art enabling us to read in a face the evil of the soul hidden beneath that mask. He is galloping along amid the best horsemen passing in review. On his chest the wounds of the execution gleam as brightly, if not more brightly, than the decorations earned at Takuary. The latter speak of honor; the former of dishonor. It is the same with Cavallero-Bayard. The seven Montiel brothers. A number of others. Almost all the conspirator-cavaliers among the sixty-eight condemned men executed beneath the orange tree on July 17 of the year ’21.*9 Pale and gallant, they stand out at the head of the squads as they simulate a charge. Weightless. Disembodied. Free now of the sin of ingratitude. Washed clean of their lack of love of the Fatherland. They cross the light lens so swiftly, pulled so hard by the centrifugal force of time, that the winged act of remembering them is too slow to catch up with them.

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  I have my visitor-plenipotentiary-negotiator-spies seated on the porch of the cathedral. Not a drop of water to raise to their parched lips. Not a drop of air to breathe into their lungs. The fiery sun is melting their marauder-negotiator brains. The parade of the troops is endless. The artillery pieces pass, drawn by mules. Infernal racket. Correia da Cámara is swelling up more and more. His splendid costume has burst like a balloon, revealing, through the tatters, bits of skin crawling with flies sipping in libation the liquid of blisters along with his sweat. Nicolás de Herrera is in no better shape.*10 I see him fighting inside his skin against the torment of the heat. Brain befuddled. Tongue thick as a doormat. The parade seems fine to me, señor dean, but what I don’t quite understand is your stubborn resistance to union with Buenos Aires.

  Correia da Cámara has had to be tied to his chair with the ornamental cordons of the banners and his own braided aiguillettes. An augur, the sun casts the animalesque shadow of the imperial envoy before.

  The mirage of the parade enlarges, tenses its arc of reflections. The girandole of whirling visions spins faster and faster. The embroideries of the tambours take on a more and more dizzying rhythm. I keep Correia from fainting or falling asleep. Pilar the black screens him with a feather fan. Every so often he moistens his face with orange blossom and damascene rose water. In place of the plumed bicorne, an immense straw sombrero, giving off perfumed vapor, covers his head.

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  I have used mirages on other occasions with equal effectiveness. In the north, with the Brazilians. In the south with Artigueñians, Correntinos, Bajadeños, Santafesinos. My leaders receive thorough instruction in the mechanism of refractions. When the enemy attacks in desert terrain or in swamplands, they order a retreat. They cause their troops to flee deliberately. The invader presses on, pursuing them through burning hot sands or bogs. Hidden amid the dunes or the bulrushes, the Paraguayans leave the image of their army reverberating in the sands or the swamps. It thus becomes at once imaginary and real in the distance. False perspectives forge the miracle. The invaders advance. Lying in ambush, the Paraguayans wait. The invaders shoot. The Paraguayans play dead on the distant screen. The invaders fling themselves upon the “cowardly Guaraní enemy.” Everything has disappeared. For many days, many leagues, the same illusion tricks the invaders. Dumbfounded by this incomprehensible sorcery and asking themselves how the Paraguayan footsoldiers or their horses of smoke and fire, however swift they may be, can disappear instantaneously, taking their dead with them. This fight against phantoms exhausts the invaders, who are then surrounded by the Paraguayans descending upon them from all directions in a howling avalanche. Their adversaries are destroyed in the wink of an eye. They die, taking with them in their eyes the vague horror of a terrifying apparition rendered even more diabolical by its irony.

  This ruse never fails. All it takes is good training and the precise sense of parallaxes and angles of light that these men possess in the darkest depths of their instinct. They would not even need arms, since the shock effect of the bloody farce is more deadly than that of rifles. In the circle of its action every word creates what it expresses, the Frenchman used to say, feeling suddenly miraculous as he clutched his pen in the attitude of a magus twirling his magic wand. I don’t feel that sure of myself with my little mother-of-pearl club released from its prison. Just in case, I provide my soldiers with rifles and cartridges. Only a few all the same, ones who are in on the game. Only a very small number of the infantry’s muskets are real arms; those carried by the point men who are closest in the line of march to the official flag. The rest imitations, wooden rifles. Like the cannons carved out of trunks of timbó, the smoke-tree that has the color of iron and the weight of smoke. My secret arms! As for the troops, the men who have been parading for thirty years now number less than three thousand. They pass before the reviewing stand at a martial pace. They turn at the corner of La Merced. March down the block lined with Adam’s-apple trees. Disappear from sight in the depths of the Lower Town. Pass by the samu’ú-peré tree, a palo borracho stripped bare. Arrived at the cemetery and the church of San Francisco in the Tikú-Tuyá quarter. Then start back via the King’s Highway, return to La Merced, and pass by the reviewing stand once again, exactly as before. The farthest distant are already coming back round.

  The imperial envoy’s resistance is extraordinary. Superhuman. Anthropoidal. He won’t last much longer. He’s already collapsing. This makes three days and three nights now that he hasn’t slept, what with the festivities in the streets and the preliminal negotiations at Government House. Last night, after the performance in the Theater of the Lower Town, the blacks’ handkissing in homage to him began as dawn was breaking, and the sun was high in the sky by the time it ended. African blood found occasion for heathen celebration. They danced endlessly before the emperor’s portrait, placed in a forest of triumphal arches. And now the din of the military parade will not cease till sundown.

  Correia da Cámara’s head is dangling from its gold-braided restraints. Useless whole, complete in its own way. Every so often, he still straightens up for a brief moment. Tries his best to laugh at the situation. Laughter that does not come from the lungs. For long intervals he remains silent. Tongue hanging out, dribbling a flower the color of milk. I cast a sidelong glance at him. The same figure as at the beginning: Just one eye. Face in profile (though completely boldfaced). Body in profile. One arm. One leg. Trembling a little each time the troops pass by, shivering with intermittent fever, on the verge of sunstroke.

  The complete circuit takes one hour and six minutes, following the diagram of the parade that I have laid out down to the last quarter of a hair. Hence during the twelve hours of the parade they have managed to round off exactly twenty-six years in this motus perpetuus of their marching. Minuscule, punctilious little men advanced in seven platoons and a single direction at an equally motionless pace. Red dust. Magnetic vibrations of the reverberations. Monotonous tread of the infantry. Look at that, Correia. Doesn’t my army seem as large, as well armed as Napoleon’s? The imperial emissary doesn’t answer me. A green aqueous humor drips from the drooping lips, dribbles down the chest, spatters the iridescent jacket.

  *1 “They are diverting me with delaying tactics. They are keeping me practically interned in the Customs shed. I am told that I shall not be received
until after the congress and the change of government, but no one knows when this famous congress is to meet. The one thing certain is that Porteños are more detested here than Saracens. If the congress declines to send deputies and war is declared against it, half the province will rise up in arms….The gray eminence of this Govermt, a greater and greater tyrant, with a People more and more a slave, has no other object than to win time and enjoy without let or hindrance the advantages of independence. This man imvued with the maxims of the Republic of Rome is ridiculously attempting to organize his Govermt on that model. He has given me proofs of his ignorance, of his hatred for Buenos Ayres, and of the inconsistency of his principles. He has persuaded the Paraguayans that the province by itself is an Empire without equal, that Buenos Aires flatters it and courts it because it needs it: that on the pretext of union it is endeavoring to enslave the continent. That force has been used to make peoples send their representatives: That all our adbantages are supposed ones: And his bitter rivalry is transpirant even in his reply, since he has never recognized me as enboy of the Supreme Executive Power of the Provinces of the Río de la Plata, but only as a Deputy of Buenos Aires; nor is any other authority attributed to Yr. Excy.” Memorandum from Nicola de Herrera to the Executive Power, November, 1813.)

  “The deputies were already so irritated that they considered the proposal insulting. Taking advantage of this mood, the Govermt persuaded them to reject it out of hand. The congress having received my message, a great tumult arose and the Deputies swore they would kill me if I made a move to join them, and had a priest not ascended to the pulpit to calm the multitude, I would have died, inevitably, ignominiously.” (Ibid.)

  *2 The person here referred to is Juan García de Cossio, sent in December, 1823, by Bernardino Rivadavia, the head of the Porteño government. He will be no more successful than the previous envoys. Cossio complains that El Supremo behaves toward him in the most obdurate and uncivil manner. The latter for his part, Julio César comments, never explained the reasons that lay behind his attitude; in his voluminous correspondence with his delegates, in which he dealt at length with all internal and external questions, he never once referred to García Cossio, to his mission, or to his notes. According to Juan Francisco Seguí—secretary to Vicente Fidel López—the fundamental objective of the Cossio mission was to negotiate an alliance with Paraguay in view of the imminent struggle with the Empire in the Banda Oriental. (Anais, t. IV, p. 125.)

  The communications from Cossio to El Supremo, as far from the other Porteño and Brazilian envoys subjected to the purgatory of being kept endlessly waiting, were numerous. In this “torture by hope,” the “tiresome pests and bothersome beggars” gave vent to their frustration in pleading, bitter, or melancholy missives.

  For each of the 37 notes sent from Corrientes to Asunción, Cossio was obliged to make the couriers a present of 6 ounces of gold, a complete outfit and set of riding gear, which included everything from the horse’s reins to the rider’s spurs, plus a horn flask filled with 10 liters of raw rum. In February, 1824, Cossio informs his government from Corrientes that The Supreme Dictator has not yet answered and that the messengers have not returned. Nothing. Not a sign of them. The earth appears to have swallowed them up. Cossio voices this sad reflection: “And this silence, so far removed from both the Law of Nations and Civilization, is manifest proof, naturally, that he has no intention of departing in the slightest from that conduct on which he has fixed his entire attention within the singular isolation in which he finds himself. All this despite reminding him of the successful joint undertakings of the two countries in the War of Independence and the threat which the ambitious aims of the Holy Alliance and the possibility of an expedition of reconquest represent at this time for America.” On March 19, 1824, Cossio again writes to El Supremo. His message concludes: “Paraguay is doing itself harm inasmuch as it has ceased to sell its maté, its tobacco, and its lumber; its commerce is falling off because of the closing of the rivers and the lack of foreign markets. Moreover, the government of Buenos Aires is alarmed by the opening of a port to Brazil, and requests that it be granted a facility identical to that granted the Portuguese, even though it be circumscribed to a single Point.” At the bottom of this communication there is a note of El Supremo’s, written slantwise in red ink: “We’re finally going to hear some good music!” (Compiler’s Note.)

  *3 But I’ve been saved by a hair!

  *4 “Early in 1795, Lázaro de Ribera was named military and civil Governor and Intendant of the royal Treasury of Paraguay. Before journeying to the seat of his government he married a lady of high lineage, María Francisca de Savatea, thereby establishing ties to the aristocracy of Buenos Aires. One of his sisters-in-law was the wife of Santiago de Liniers [the future viceroy]. Ribera need yield precedence to none of his great predecessors [in the governor’s chair]—Pinedo, Melo, Alós—and in many respects he may well have been their superior. He sank deep roots in the land of the Guaranís, knew its suffering and miseries, and held his hand out to the helpless and the poor. He pointed out, prophetically, that the great port for Paraguay was Montevideo, and anticipated the greatness of the Plata, writing: ‘The Provinces of the Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires will attain great opulence once it becomes easy to extract the raw materials that must cross the Ocean to revive and strengthen the Manufactories of the Peninsula.’ He believed in the future of Paraguay, because of its fertile land, its abundant harvests, its rivers that irrigate it and place it in contact with the world.” (Note by Julio César.)

  “Despite his ardent and impetuous character, vainglorious and impatient in the face of every obstacle, and despite his aristocratic lineage, Lázaro de Ribera was one of the most enlightened Spanish officeholders in this part of America in the twilight years of the eighteenth century.” (Comment. of Father Furlong, cited by J.C.)

  *5 Lanceman (a term still used for a bullfighter on horseback).

  *6 An earlier name for the Axé-Guayakí.

  *7 “Shortly after the arrival of Lázaro de Ribera in the Province, a terrible event occurred. In the district of Villa Real, one hundred fifty men armed themselves on the pretext of rebuking the Indians for having broken the peace pact, took one of their camps by surprise, and killed seventy-five Indians who had surrendered and were defenseless. All of them were bound by their waists to horses called ‘cincheros’; all of them died from blows with flint-edged wooden machetes, sabers, and lances. This entire testimony can be found in the records of the five court hearings held. The person principally responsible was the Commander José del Casal. The barbarous act took place on May 15, 1786. Ribera had assumed the governorship on April 8. Commander José Antonio Zabala y Delgadillo was named judge in the case.

  “The slaughter, with undertones of the death of Tupac Amaru in Cuzco, the dominant note being the quartering by horses, caused a tremendous stir throughout the Province. Thanks to his influence and his wealth, Casal escaped punishment.” (Julio César, op. cit.)

  Nonetheless, a short time thereafter, the ethnocide Casal fell into disgrace. As is evident in the documents pertaining to the case, José del Casal y Sanabria tried by every means possible to persuade El Supremo (who at the time was practicing as a lawyer, held no public office, and had no official influence whatsoever) to undertake his defense. “Among all the popinjays who defend cases,” the Indian-killer writes to the judge, “he is the only one who can get me out of this quagmire. I have offered him half my fortune, and more besides, for such note-worthy service. But all my efforts have been in vain. Not only has the proud barrister stubbornly refused to sponsor my cause, thereby leaving me helpless and defenseless; he has also dared to heap calumny upon my actions against these savages of the wilds by claiming, as is public and notorious fact, that he would not move a finger in my favor for all the gold in the world, when, on the contrary, as God and our Most Exc. Sr. Gov.nor know, I acted as I did only for the good of all of society.” (Compiler’s Note
.)

  *8 I’ve never seen a more beautiful morning!

  *9 “Day of terror, day of sorrow, day of mourning! You will forever be the anniversary of our misfortunes! O fateful day! If I could but erase you from the place you occupy in the harmonious round of months!” (Note by the Argentine publicist Carranza to Outcry of a Paraguayan, addressed to Dorrego and attributed to Mariano Antonio Molas in his Historical Description of the Former Province of Paraguay.)

  In the Outcry the Porteño leader Dorrego was again entreated to invade Paraguay. (Compiler’s Note.)

  *10 “As in a nightmare I saw those endless companies of dark specters pass by, their weapons gleaming in the blinding sunlight. The din, the clatter of hoofs seemed to me to grow gradually fainter. Cannons, strange catapults, complicated war machines passed by without a sound. They appeared to fly, to glide along a foot above the ground.

  “Beneath a yellow baldachin, which was the canopy of the Most Blessed Sacrament in the processions of yesteryear, the Caesar-Consul, seated in the high-backed curule that makes his scrawny figure look even more sickly and ridiculous, smiled enigmatically, inordinately pleased at the effects of his triumphal spectacle. Now and again he looked to each side out of the corner of his eye, and at such times his features took on an expression of insane self-importance.