I the Supreme

by Augusto Roa Bastos

  Do what the mulatto inhabitants of Areguá did, on the advice of the Mercedary friars, when they felt they were being assailed by a horde of demons. They built them a house of their own so that they would stop raising havoc in theirs. The lucibels, lucifers, lieutifers, beelzebubs, mephistopheles, anopheles, leviathans, she-devilesses, and the lemurs of three sexes, which Dante did not record as being in his infernal circles of medieval demonology, launched a fierce assault on the people of Areguá. They continued their diabolical attacks because the house that was built for them did not seem noble enough or comfortable enough. Until Mistress Carlota Palmerola built them a marble palace on the shores of Lake Ypacaray which still stands today. (In the margin: Dictate the Decree confiscating this abandoned building, which belongs to the tax authority by right of escheat.) Only then did the cacodemons calm down, demanding only that the women bring them food, and the she-devils that the best-endowed black and mulatto males make the rounds of their bedrooms at night. A price that the first inhabitants of Areguá paid most willingly. For a time the town enjoyed its happiest days. What’s bad about happiness is that it doesn’t last; what’s good about orgies is that they soon wear out both men and demons. After those hundred days of lust in which the people of Areguá far surpassed Sodom and Gomorrah, with the surpassing advantage that fire did not destroy it, the darkies, men and women, returned to the routine of their decorous customs. Those bacchanales in the white castle are no doubt the source of the reddish pigmentation of the skin of Aregüeños, as is attested by the chronicler Benigno Gabriel Caxaxia in his veridical history now translated into several languages. Your father, who emigrated from Areguá to enter the service of the last Spanish governor as scribe, bore on his chubby dusky-purple cheeks this fire-and-ashes granulation. You inherited his face, but your barefacedness is yours alone.

  * All that is hidden will appear. (From the Dies Irae.)

  Revolution of the Farrapos*1 in Brazil. New paragraphs concerning an old acquaintance, that bugger Correia da Cámara. The young republic sends him to me as minister plenipotentiary. He requests permission to enter the country for the purpose of “maintaining with the Government of Paraguay the relations of perfect intelligence, peace, and good harmony that happily already exist between the two States.”

  What are the real motives of this so-called republic? If there’s an empire still, then there’s not a republic. I expect nothing new or good to be forthcoming from it; less still if Correia is its ambassador. And here he is, knocking again at the gates of Itapúa. Before, he came as the emissary of the empire; now, as ambassador of the republic. This good-for-nothing is eternal! More persistent than the great river, this man from Rio Grande do Sul! Running on endlessly. What is all this business about our relations of perfect intelligence, peace, and good harmony between the States? Are the Farrapos trying to gain my good will with a bad joke?

  Message to the deputy of Itapúa: I do not know what matter it is that the envoy sent by those who call themselves the revolutionaries of Brazil wishes to negotiate with me. The Brazilians are always the same tricky scoundrels, whatever their disguise. Empire or republic: underneath they’re still the same. That raggle-taggle bunch claims it has passed through the needle’s eye of Revolution! I am not surprised that it’s Correia they’ve sent once again to palaver with me, the same hunchbacked camel I expelled an endless number of times since his one reason for coming was to hold up and delay, with his endless inept maneuvers, the satisfaction of the claims that I have made and will continue to make till the end of time, so long as they are not duly satisfied. I don’t believe he’s coming on any important business, but with more of his impertinent stuff and nonsense, a field in which he considers himself a past master. We won’t be losing anything, however, by putting that scoundrel to the test to see what sort of skin game he’s playing with his republican phrygian bonnet, his imperial top hat, his gaucho pirate hat, or his bandeirante’s hairband.

  Ten years back, I offered the Brazilian envoy his last chance. He lost it. I gave orders that he be detained for two years in Itapúa, from September of ’27 to June of ’29. Nothing beats keeping people waiting for getting them to show their true fiber. Since I don’t trust that scatter-brain of an Ortellado, I replace him with Ramírez, the only one who can hold a candle to Correia for cynicism and knavery. The first thing you’re to tell him, my dear José León, is that Brazil must give the Republic of Paraguay complete satisfaction with regard to all its claims, and not dally, delay, while away the time and perhaps years in vain pretenses of being diligently engaged in efforts that are futile, frivolous, and fruitless, a strategy aimed at frustrating our extremely just demands concerning well known, indeed all too notorious, matters and facts, doubtless thinking that we here do not have enough intelligence to know what is going on and trying, moreover, with comical tenacity to come to spy on our territory in highly suspect bad faith. You must read the scoundrel this part of the message very solemnly, emphasizing the words, the silences, the threat-pauses. Your mission is to harass him in the countless ways that will occur to you, until he gives up, gives in, or goes away. Wring very delicate chords out of him, no matter how long it takes you. The greatest discretion, of course. All on your own account, without compromising the Supreme Government. Your orders will be executed, Excellency. I shall be most circumspect. Lodge Correia and his retinue in the ex commissariat, José León. Ortellado informs me that the imperial envoy has brought me a hundred Arabian horses as a subornative present from the empire. Put them in the most grazed-out pasture you can find, so that the Arabic steeds may shit their fill and starve at will; and see that the shameless scoundrel takes them with him when he goes. Do you understand, José León? Perfectly, Excellency. Don’t shrink before him by so much as a fingernail. Don’t retreat a single inch—or better put, a single flea-hop—in the face of the emissary. You know me well, Most Excellent Sire. I shall be very high-handed.

  As I wait for things to take their course, I shut myself up in the Hospital Barracks. I thus cut off all possibility of official communication. Incidentally, I devote myself entirely to my studies and writings.

  Complete silence from my brand-new representative. What’s going on there? I send my liaison officer, Amadís Cantero. Correia da Cámara will later denigrate him in his reports and memoranda. It will be the one and only time he tells the truth.*2 Not without reason, doubtless, Corriea protests against Cantero. Meanwhile my exegete and liaison officer intercepts his messages and secret reports. Cantero sends me the intelligence that Itapúa is a beehive of minor events. They take place almost imperceptibly and as though in secret, he says, faithful to his mania for narrating trivia in literary style. Don José León Ramírez has set everyone, including the subdelegate, the commandant and the officers, every soldier in the garrison, to chasing fleas. Don José León himself has climbed into a basket bigger than a boat, fitted out with jugs of water and provisions, and had himself hoisted up to the rooftop of the Delegation building by means of some sort of apparatus, where presumably he too is engaged in hunting fleas. For the last three days he has given no signs of life other than a few sporadic tremors of the basket up there; spasms similar to violent attacks of the ague. What shall I do, Excellency?, Cantero asks. Wait, I order him. Go on drawing Correia out.

  My confidence in Ramírez is not yet shaken. He must be plotting some clever ruse against the envoy of the imperial court.

  As you will see, Your Excellency, Cantero tells me in his last report, I am endeavoring by every possible means to mollify the emissary of the imperial court and wheedle information out of him as to the hidden intentions of the second and third degree that may have brought him here, as Your Excellency has ordered me to do. During one conversation I hit upon the idea of taking another tack, trying my best to loosen his tongue by telling him of a supposed dream I had had concerning the alliance between Paraguay and Brazil, which would make the two of us together the major power on this Continent. The imperial
envoy appears to be in such low spirits that he is really beginning to arouse one’s pity for him.

  In the cool galleries of the Hospital Barracks I delight in imagining the envoy of the empire devoured by mosquitoes, bedbugs, and fleas. Overrun by the vipers of the swamplands. Sweltering from the heat of summer in the miserable oven of the ex commissariat. Hounded by that pest Amadís Cantero, who is trying to discover by way of dreams what Brazil’s expansionist plans are.

  A dispatch from Ramírez at last. He triumphantly explains to me in detail, on a millimetric scale, the relationship that obtains between a flea’s hop and the length of its feet. A hop that varies from male to female, before and after sucking the blood of its victims; also before and after copulation, begging Your Worship’s pardon. My crude clod of a delegate has recorded all the copulary movements in risqué sketches.

  Confidential report from Cantero: What the Honorable Delegate Ramírez has taken up to the rooftop of the Delegation in the basket, Excellency, isn’t just victuals or water; he has also placed one of the imperial envoy’s chambermaids aboard the basket. The Honorable Delegate took off toward the heavens so discreetly that no one saw or suspected a thing. The basket-belly buttoned the old fashioned way, the occupants joyously rubbed their bacon making the two-backed beast on the roof of the Delegation. The imperial envoy for his part has complained to me that the invasion of fleas has grown considerably worse. I am trying to keep him from getting wind of this latest turn of events, already public and notorious in the town. Even the Indians are laughing about the basket-that-went-to-heaven. I greatly fear that the mistrustful Brazilian will want to be indemnified, and thus recoup the indemnity he paid the Indian woman for her dead ass. The beautiful mulatta slave, however, seems to be well pleased after her encanastation with the Honorable Representative. We can only say that with a certain sacrifice on his part, it must be admitted, Don Joseph León Ramírez has cleverly contrived to benefit our cause. The mulatta is the one who steals her master’s secret correspondence, thereby allowing us to make a complete copy of it in order to keep Your Grace fully informed of the imperial envoy’s communications to his chancellery.

  I order Cantero to give up his pacifying offensive. In his last dispatch he informs me: I invited the imperial envoy and his family for an outing on horseback in the splendid woods along the Paraná. He curtly refused. I then sent him as a gift a Paraguayan hammock for him, his wife, and his daughters. And then later on some silverwork ornaments. Same refusal. On the occasion of the national celebration of your birthday, Most Excellent Sire, the imperial envoy took advantage of the opportunity to emphasize his vast annoyance. He had celebrated the sixth of January of the year before in a most notable fashion. He ordered two great bonfires lit and the front of his residence illuminated with eight hundred candles, in the way I had told him that the Paraguayan populace shows its devotion to our Supreme Dictator on the eve of the anniversary of his birth. Besides the candles, the imperial envoy distributed alms to the poor and, in full dress, witnessed with his family the dances and festivities of the people. This year, on the other hand, he kept the doors and windows of his dwelling closed and, dressed in the most ordinary garb, strode up and down outside in an ostensible and defiant manner. I allowed myself to remark on the change in his attitude from one year to the other. What obligation does the plenipotentiary of an Empire have, he replied with asperity, to celebrate the birthday of a head of government who detains him for seventeen months in an indecent, unhealthy Indian village? A man continually mistreated cannot and ought not to allow himself diversions. Inform your Supreme Dictator, who appears to boast of the fact that Brazil fears him, that such is not the case. The Empire is not frightened by petty things and considers the source of the insults heaped upon its envoy. Inform him for me that if the progress of the negotiations has slowed down, it is due to the duplicitous conduct of the Paraguayan Cabinet, a moral sickness most definitely unknown at the Court of Rio de Janeiro. How ought I to reply to the insolent remarks of this wretched envoy? Let him vent his spleen. Tell him that if he really has anything important to tell me, that proofs to that effect be forthcoming in the form of keeping his pledged word regarding the sending of arms and everything else. If he can’t come up with anything, let him go back where he came from. I must also inform Your Grace that the bones of the Arabian horses brought as a gift by the imperial envoy are already turning white in the pasture as flocks of birds of prey descend on them. Tell the ravens for me, Cantero, that I wish them good appetite!

  * * *

  —

  Last report of Correia to his government, Cantero chatters in code: The international ties of the Dictatorship are vast. Its tentacles extend to the Plata, to the Banda Oriental, to Rio Grande, to Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The fundamental objective is clear from the plans afoot for the formation of a Grand Confederation of which the center and the head would be Paraguay. There is no doubt that the Paraguayan government is in league with Marshal Barreto of Río Grande, and that it is not abandoning the project of inciting Rio Grande del Sur to wage Revolution and confederating it with Montevideo against Buenos Aires, as soon as it can count on an alliance with Brazil in order to thwart the bold intentions of the Porteños. The moment he received news that the provinces of the interior were planning to break with Buenos Aires, the Dictator, who is the soul of this new Federation, even though he is still keeping himself hidden behind a curtain that can easily be seen through, ordered the position or camp of Salto, which he had abandoned, to be reoccupied and sent a mission to reconnoiter the ports of his new future allies. Ah, that prattling plotter Correia! And you’re the one who’s coming now as the ambassador of the revolutionaries of Río Grande! I should allow you to come ahead to Asunción, just to have the pleasure of planting your head threaded on a pike in the center of the Plaza de la República! Bah, you filthy blackguard! I’m not even going to grant you the honor of staining Paraguayan soil with your blood! You can go straight to the devil himself! That naïve Cantero cautions me with his usual idiocy: I have learned, Excellency, that the imperial envoy is also an Arch-Mason, belonging to the highest and most fearsome ranks of this forbiddingly obscure association. That would be far from the worst thing about Correia, my dear Cantero. On the contrary, being a Mason, if that is what he is, would be the only minuscule good point about this scheming bandeirante disguised sometimes as an emissary of the empire and at others as the ambassador of the ragtag republic of the Farrapos. Poor republican tatterdemalions! Poor Masons! Having this superfluous swindler in their ranks will be their ruin. Cantero’s message continues: The imperial and republican representative, Most Excellent Sire, considers Your Grace to be the head of the vast confederation aborning. As of this date, he states in his report of April 2, more the head of the Argentine Federation than Buenos Ayres itself, conniving in the Cisplatine State and in the Peruvian Republic, able to count on supporters in Misiones and Rio Grande, with a wealth of secret contacts in Matto Grosso, the Dictator will take advantage of the first opportunity to lend a hand to the partisans of the absolute independence of the Province of Rio Grande and finish Buenos Ayres off once and for all; to place himself openly at the head of the present Federation, invade Matto Grosso, take possession of Misiones Orientales by way of compensation or reprisals, and bring the horrors of war to the center of the Province of San Pablo, entering by way of El Salto de Sete Quedas, on the same pretext. The uninterrupted correspondence between the Paraguayan Government and the dissident provinces of the Federation of the Río de la Plata, through the intermediary of Corrientes, during the most recent campaign in the south, the amazing repatriation of the subjects of Córdoba, Santa Fe, and Paraná by the Paraguayan Dictator, just a few short months before these Provinces rebelled against Buenos Ayres and declared war on it; all these circumstances, along with others of which I shall continue to give a punctual account in my reports, lead to the conclusion that there is no other way to ward off the dangers that threaten the Empire on every
hand save to form an alliance with Paraguay and its cunning and unruly dictator…And what did I have in mind other than that, you crafty rascal? You’re as good as Cantero at setting down on paper an impossible farrago of faked facts, fictions, fabrications of all sorts and sizes. Shut up inside your basket of intrigues, your imagination is feebler than José León Ramirez’s when it comes to killing fleas. Expel that impenitent degenerate once and for all, José León, and make sure you search his baggage carefully. Don’t let him carry off even one flea that belongs to us! Do you understand! Keep a sharp eye out! And tell him in no uncertain terms that if he doesn’t want to lose for good the head he doesn’t have, he is never to set foot on our shores again. He can go to hell with his empire or his republic, and with both at the same time!