Amadeo Bonpland returned to Paraguay in 1857, aboard Le Bisson, a ship of the French fleet, with the intention of collecting plants in Asunción, the capital city that he had had no chance to become acquainted with during his benign ten-year captivity in Misiones, under the rule of El Supremo. It was evident that, as much as the collection of natural species, what passionately interested him was finding out what had happened to the mortal remains of the Perpetual Dictator. The monolith that marked the burial site in front of the main altar of Encarnación had disappeared and the tomb had been profaned. All his efforts to turn up any information whatsoever met with an impenetrable watchword of silence, in both official and popular circles.
The following year the celebrated naturalist died in his eighty-fifth year (May 11, 1858). His body was brought to the locality of Restauración (today Paso de los Libres). At his death he was director and founder of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Corrientes, an honorary post awarded him shortly after Rosas was overthrown. The governor ordered his body embalmed so that the entire population of Corrientes might participate in the funeral rites, which by his decree were to be held for seven days. The governor’s plan was thwarted, however, by a drunkard who knifed the corpse exposed to the night air in the front courtyard of the house, amid the smoke of the aromatic and medicinal plants in which he was “cured” or mummified, according to the embalming method indicated by Bonpland himself in his manuscripts. The drunkard’s assault was due to his belief that the well-known, beloved physician refused to greet him, something entirely beyond the possibilities of his proverbial affability.
A descendant of El Supremo’s, old Macario of Itapé, related the episode to a mediocre scribe, who transcribes it as follows:
“—A few years before the Great War I went to visit the Guasú doctor of Santa Ana to ask him for remedies for my sister Candé, who was suffering from a chilling of the blood. I remembered the previous journey, twenty years before, when they sent me with taitá to seek balm for the Karaí Guasú (El Supremo). This time I had no luck. Useless journey. The Frenchy was sick too. That’s what I was told. I stayed for three days in front of his house, waiting for him to get better. At night they brought him out onto the veranda in an old high-backed friar’s chair. We could see him, still and white and plump, fast asleep in the moonlight. On the last night a drunk kept passing by the sick man, shouting greetings to him. He kept walking back and forth, growing angrier and angrier, and shouting louder and louder:—Good evening, Karaí Bonpland! Ave María Purísima, Karaí Bonpland!…Finally he became downright insulting. The guasú doctor, big and white and naked, lost in dreams, paid no attention to him, didn’t turn a hair. That was too much for the drunk. He took out his knife, went up onto the veranda, and stabbed him in blind fury till I leapt upon him and took the knife from him. A whole bunch of people came. We later learned that the guasú doctor had died three days before. For me, it was as though he had died a second time, and because I tried to save him this second time at least, I ended up in prison with the criminal drunk, who got out safe and sound in three days. But they kept me in jail for three months on bread and water, because the police thought I was the drunkard’s accomplice. It’s plain to see you can’t do anybody a good turn in this world. Not even dead people. The living come along and beat the daylights out of you for just about anything. Especially if you’re poor. They accuse you of having killed a dead man, of having wiped your ass with a bird, of being alive. Anything. Just to nail you for something. The drunkard, who was some sort of relation of the governor’s, didn’t need to explain anything. But the more I explained, the less they believed me and the harder they laid into me. Finally they forgot all about me. Not even water or hardtack. I roasted mosquitoes in the fire of my cigar butt, and had at least them to eat. But there was even less to them than there was to me. I managed to escape only after I was nothing but skin and bones. Thinner than a grapevine. I gave one last puff on the butt and mingled with the smoke. Once I managed to slip through a crack in the adobe wall, I took off and never stopped once till I was home.” (Compiler’s Note.)
*1 French for Karaí Guasú.
*2 Spanish Golden Age author of El Criticón, an allegorical novel contrasting idyllic primitive life and the evils of civilization.
*3 There are no buts about it!
(Logbook)
The sun’s rays beat down on the two-master. It is being rowed down the river at low water. Not a breath of a breeze. The fore-and-aft sail hangs limply from the gaff. At certain hours, gusts of hot air swell it, sending it upstream. The two-master moves backward in little leaps and bounds. The twenty rowers redouble their efforts to move it forward. Guttural cries. Eyes with the whites turned up. Black bodies oiled with sweat, leaning on their takuara boat poles. The sun riveted at the zenith. If the days and the nights pass, they do so behind Joshua’s shield,*1 without our having any way of knowing whether we are in the dazzling darkness of noon or in the searching shadow of midnight. For the moment, the sun is male. The female moon unbuttons her phases. She shows her full, round self, naked, the barefaced bawd. The Indian and mulatto rowers contemplate her, their whole bodies groaning, taut and slack in the arc of desire as they rhythmically row beneath the waxing and waning. They alone see her change form. They see her lie in her old swaybacked hammock. Man too will rock back and forth there one day, cohabiting with this animal the color of flowers. Soft, solitary animal the color of honey. Chameleoness of the night. Barren sow swelling up till the navel of her round pregnancy shows or, turning over on her side, nothing but the new-moon curve of her hip. Most fertile sterility. That makes seeds sprout. Tides ebb and flow. The blood of women. The thought of men. For all I care, you can go to the devil, satellite-woman. You’ve devoured even my teeth now, turning them to dust.
We are passing through a great patch of victoria-regias. Extending for more than a league. The entire stream covered with sieves of giant water lilies. The round black silk buds suck up the light and give off a vapor that smells of funeral wreaths. The water reeks of the slime of sunbaked shoals. Foul fumes of tarry viscosity. Stench of shallows where the fermented mire boils. Carrion of dead fish. Islands of festering water weeds. The fetor of the tawny dirtfilled water drifts out to meet us. Implacably pursues us.
The two-master is loaded with hides in vats of brine. Bales of maté. Barrels of tallow, wax, grease. Every so often the heat causes them to explode and the contents flow into the bilge. Flames flare up. The goatish captain leaps all about, smothering them with his poncho. Bundles of spices. Medicinal plants. Fierce odors. Farther within the stench, another. The unbearable stench that travels with us. Incalculable cubic yards, tons of cylindrical pestilence towering a hundred times higher than the mainmast. Coming up not from the hold of the two-master but from the cellar of our souls. Like the bad smell of Sunday Mass.*2 Something that cannot come from anything healthy or earthly. Blasphemous stench. Negotiium perambulans in tenebris.*3 A stench such as came to me only once, when I found myself standing immediately next to a moribund object: that old man who for more than seventy years had been regarded as a human being. And one other time that rank smell had attacked me, in the Archive of Genealogies of the Province as I was endeavoring to track down the facts of my origin. Naturally, I failed to find them there. They were nowhere to be found. Except for that terrible smell of a bastard lineage. I presented myself before the bar of justice, requesting a full and complete certification of blood lines and good conduct. My origin? You will know it as a fetor, someone murmured in my ear. You can tell the cality by the smell, nanny Encarnación used to say. The hotter a man’s blood is in life, the worse it smells after he’s dead. Did that stench constitute my entire agnatic ancestry? Seven false witnesses, echoing the false tenor of the questions, testifying under a false oath, falsely swear: that they hold my lineage to be noble and of pure and distinguished blood from generation unto generation, so known and recognized by the witness generally without v
oices to the contrary. Dreadful dialect! There were many contrary voices, including my own. Haven’t they said that Doña María Josefa de Velasco y de Yegros y Ledesma, the great patrician lady with the little slate, is not my mother? Haven’t they said that the Lusitanian-Cariocan scoundrel arrived from Brazil with his concubine in tow only to repudiate her later and enter into a marriage of convenience? Having married in accordance with the command of Holy Mother Church, he then continued, beneath her protection, to twist the black tobacco of his black soul. Nonetheless, the full and complete certification of genealogy and good conduct was approved with no objection by prosecutors and judges. They mistook mongrels for greyhounds. My genealogical tree is growing sideways in the chapter hall. Although I have no father or mother, and haven’t even been born yet, I have been had and procreated legitimately, according to the perjuries of notaries. Stink of an obscure heredity falsified on the coat-of-arms of my non-house: a black cat suckling a white rat on gray quarters in the gules abysses of the nine partitions, parturitions, and disparitions.
The unpublished correspondence between Dr. Ventura and Brother Mariano Ignacio Bel-Asshole, concerning the Proclamation of the latter, alludes to the genealogical mystery:
“Another observation of your critics, Rev. Father, has to do with the disputed Genealogy of the Tirant.
“They maintain that in order for you to attract the interest of our Countrymen, it matters little whether or not the Dictator is the son of a forainer, since in our provinces and Localities, due to the natives’ backwardness and ignorance, the most capable leaders are always or almost always sons of forainers.
“Likewise they adduce that little importance should be attached to attempts to cast a blot on his lineage by way of the two mothers that are attributed to him; one of Patrician origin; the other, plebeian and forain; the same is true of the tittle-tattle going the rounds concerning the dates of his double birth.
“In point of fact, as you doubtless know better than I, inasmuch as you are a Relative, the story generally accepted regards the Dictator as the son of Doña María Josefa Fabiana Velasco y de Legros y Ledesma, your cousin, begotten in the strange marriage of this patrician lady with the plebeian Portuguese parvenu José Engracia, or Graciano, or García Rodrigues, hailing according to some people from the district of Mariana in the Viceroyalty of Janeiro, as the immigrant from Rio himself swore before Governor Lázaro de Ribera.
“Before Alós and Brú he swears that he is Portuguese, a native of Oporto, in the kingdoms of Portugal. In several of his repeated and well-nigh obsessive requests for complete inquiries, the Dictator states that his father was French. A number of his relations assert, on the other hand, that he was a Spaniard from the Sierras de Francia, a region situated between Salamanca, Cáceres, and Portugal.
“The elements cleverly used by the Portuguese-Brazilian to compound the confusion and thereby conceal the bastard origins of his adventurous life are the letters of his suppositious names: the Portuguese suffix es changed to the Castilian ez, as it appears in certain documents; the maternal name (the ç of França, with a little cedilla underneath), very well known among Paulista bandeirantes, has also been Castilianized.
“The one thing that is certain is that, after sixty years of living in Paraguay and engaging in the most diverse occupations, from that of hired hand engaged in the manufacture of twists of chewing tobacco, to that of soldier and later on councilman and administrator of Temporalities in Indian Settlements, no one knows who he is nor where he came from.
“He is a forainer, a Governor will say of him, though we still do not know whether he is French or Portuguese, Spanish or descended from the moon. That he is a lunatic no one can doubt, judging from the stigmata of notable degeneration in his line of descent.
“An enigma that is especially painful to our Patrician stock is the union of Doña María Josefa Fabiana with the Lusitanian-Cariocan adventurer; something that has no plausible explanation, save for the scabrous little tale about it that is making the rounds, which I presume is also known to Yr. Mercy.
“One of the versions, as I have already said, has it that he is the son of Doña Josefa Fabiana, born on January 6, 1766; another, that the Dictator was born on that day and month, but in 1756, that is to say ten years earlier, of the union between José Engracia, or Graciano, or García Rodríguez, and the mistress or concubine that this individual apparently had brought with him when he came to Paraguay as a member of the group of Portuguese-Brazilians hired in 1750 by Governor Jaime Sanjust, at the request of the Jesuits, to exploit tobacco.
“Both of these knotty problems have been lost sight of in the nebula of more or less apocryphal testimony and documents; for, as you know, nothing is certain regarding these facts appertaining to the origin and genealogy that the Dictator has done his best to keep hidden until his ascent to Absolute Power.
“But that is a horse of a different color.”
Am I the hook of the binnacle of the pestilential compass? Gripping the rudder bar, the pilot looks at me out of the corner of his eye and every so often corrects the heading as he negotiates the sinuous canal lying between treacherous sand banks. The compact mass of the stench, heavier than the cargo, causes the two-master to sink below its waterline. Welcome, fierce wild odor, if you come alone! My companion, my comrade. Useless to gather together the thoughts put to flight by the evil furies of life. I linger over one memorable invocation: In the name of the Living One who does not die and shall not die. In the name of Him to whom there belong glory and permanence. The words are not his. The words are not anyone’s. The thoughts belong to everyone and to no one. As do this river and the animals: they know nothing of death, memories. Deserters of the past, of the future, they have no age. This water that is flowing by is eternal because it is fleeting. I see it, touch it, precisely because it is passing and at the same instant recomposing itself. Life and death form the pulse of its matter, which is not merely a figure. Whereas I…what can I say of myself? I am less than the water that flows past. Less than the animal that lives and does not know that it lives. At this moment that I am writing I can say: an infinite duration has preceded my birth. I have always been I; that is to say, all those who said I during this time, were none other than I-HE, together. But what’s the use of adding to the collection of foolishness that has already been endlessly repeated by an endless number of copycat com-pilers? In that moment, in this moment in which I am floating along sitting on top of the solid stink, I am not thinking of such rubbish. I am a youngster fourteen years old. At times I read. At times I write, hidden in the prow amid the bales of maté and the reeking hides. Heedlessness. Diversion. I am still within nature. At times I let my hand fall in the overheated water.
* * *
—
It’s going on twenty days now that we’ve been on this journey. The man who says he’s my father, devoting his efforts at present to commercial dealings, is captaining his boat. Standing between barrels as between the embrasures of a fort. He is making for a precise port, Santa Fe, where a watertight state monopoly on tobacco holds sway, along with other leonine tariffs levied on Paraguayan products.
My presumptive father has decided to send me to the University of Córdoba. He wants me to become a priest. He wants me to become a rogue. He wants to free himself of my bothersome presence. But he also wants to make of me his future crook and crutch, his rod and staff, once my scion’s hide has been ecclesiastically tanned. For the moment he has loaded me into the two-master, amid the skins and the spices, the tallow and the maize. I, the most insignificant, the most worthless of his goods.
Someone, mayhap the patrician lady who is taken to be his wife, who is taken to be my mother, has predicted: One day this obscure child will be heard condemning the name of his father on the brow of Sentinel Hill! The patrician lady was a mute. Some sort of throat trouble caused her to lose the power of speech. At least I never heard issue from her lips a hu
man voice, any sound or murmur that resembled one. Hence she must have written the prediction on the little tablets she used in order to communicate. As she slept one afternoon, I hid the slate and the sticks of chalk. I beat them to dust with a hammer. I buried them in a vacant lot. They provided her with new little tablets and pieces of chalk. She wrote once again in a firmer hand: One day this obscure child will be heard condemning his father and mother! After writing this, the mute woman broke the slate tablet and began to weep, ceaselessly, for seven days in a row. They had to change her sheets, her pillows, her soaking wet mattresses again and again. Nobody knew what it meant. Probably some family relation, Colonel Espínola y Peña perhaps (who was also rumored to be my real father), or perhaps that rascal of a Bel-Asshole, or who knows who read the sibylline phrase in some book. The nanny repeated it in her songs. She sewed it inside the lining of my destiny.
*1 In the constellation of Orion.
*2 People were buried beneath the floor and all round the churches; the heat of the perpetual Paraguayan summer, made worse by that of the crowds of the faithful, brought up from the cracks in the floor the foul odor that gave rise to the expression still current in popular speech, even though its origin has been forgotten: “more evil-smelling than Mass-on-Sunday.” (Compiler’s Note.)
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