(In the private notebook)
The fleabrain’s ideas aren’t bad at all. Paraguay, nucleus of a vast Confederation, is what I thought of from the very first and proposed to those Porteño imbeciles, those Oriental imbeciles, those Brazilian imbeciles. What’s bad, indeed downright deplorable, is that those miserable wretches are turning a project as generous and beneficent as an American Confederation, formed in the image and likeness of their own interests and freed of the influence of foreign masters, into a matter for underhanded plotting and scheming.
Another subject:
I have discharged José León Ramírez. Have me shot, Excellency!, he begged, weeping a bitter tear and throwing himself on my mercy when I ordered him to present himself and render an account of his misdeeds, because as you should have remembered, José León, fleas feast on feet stretched beyond the sheet. A consummate actor! He was about to swallow the buckle of my shoe. I shall die happy as I face the firing squad, Supreme Sire, if those bullets are the price I must pay for having pulled the leg of that rascal from the empire who tried to make fun of our Country and our Government!
I should not have been taken in by that farceur’s repentance. Exactly nine months after his rehabilitation he gave my supposed niece Cecilia Marecos a son. He obviously hadn’t found it necessary to tuck her into a basket or pretend that he wanted to try out a peculiar new way of catching fleas or crabs. I ordered him to pay the mother the pension to which she is entitled by law. To allow him to earn the money to pay it to her with all due dignity, I put him to work, in leg irons, mucking out army latrines. He’ll be at it quite a while, till the boy reaches his majority. In the end the years will deflate José León’s copulative conceits.
*1 Farrapos: literally, rags (Brazilian). Members of the republican movement centered in Rio Grande do Sul (1835) were known as Farrapos. (The word is also an anagram for Spanish párrafos, paragraphs.)
*2 “Reader of novels of chivalry, writer himself of unbearable tripe; one of the most decided pedants of the century, this errant Spanish righter of wrongs naturalized a Paraguayan; the vilest vermin I have ever known in all the years of my life. His forte is history, but many times he has Zoroaster acting in China, Tamerlane in Sweden, Hermes Trimegistus in France. A plotter of the first water, he struggled along in misery until he found a place as a spy with the Supreme Dictator, who, I am informed, holds him in great esteem. Night after night he has been reading me something vaguely resembling a novelized biography of El Supremo of Paraguay. An abject dithyramb in which he sets the misanthropic Dictator on the horns of the moon. As far as the Empire and I are concerned, old Amadís uses the most ignoble language. Cloaked in impunity, in ignorance, in vileness, he has poured out on paper a horrible hodge-podge of infamies and lies. The worst thing of all is that I have had to put up with the reading of the delirious manuscript for all of these two long years with feigned admiration and enthusiasm. Forced to listen to its knave of an author, the two of us have wept scalding tears amid the thick smoke from the cow dung they burn here to combat the hordes of insects. To me your tears are the best earnest of your emotion and sincerity, of your admiration and respect for our Supreme Dictator, the biographer and spy of the sultan of Paraguay dared to say to me. It is torture, the worst humiliation to which I have ever been subjected!” (Report by Correa, Anais, op. cit.)
Correa da Cámara’s indignation explodes: “What the Dictator is making me suffer is unspeakable. I am the representative of an Empire, and he is treating me as though I were a common horse thief. Instead of being offered suitable accommodations, I am detained, held prisoner almost, in the disease-infested shack of an ex commissariat in the middle of a swamp. Despite this ignominious treatment, were I the only one concerned I would not complain, since it is my duty to endure the greatest sacrifices. Is it right, however, that my wife and daughters should be obliged to tolerate such vile abuses? We find ourselves surrounded by pools of water from which there emanate pestilential miasmas, putrid effluvia, insects that are the carriers of swamp fever, dysentery, black fluxes. Storms, strong winds, torrential rains, hailstorms, fall intempestively and continually. Furious thunder and flashing lightning, all the miseries in the world! This is hell, I swear! Indian camps. Brothels everywhere. My wife and daughters are forced to witness obscene and abominable spectacles. The room in which we have been obliged to take refuge is missing half its walls. It has been impossible for us to sleep or rest since our arrival. Stones pelt the tin roof from midnight till dawn. Drunks pass by the house at all hours shouting and throwing stones at the doors and windows, as though for amusement. Indians steal into the dwelling and harass my female slaves. Rob us of food. The atmosphere reeks of the stink of their filthy persons. Soldiers who pretend to be drunk try to force the door, and go away only when I myself threaten to fire on them.
“Yesterday they shot a thief, not twenty paces from my window. Where is the delegate? I send for him. The spy Cantero brazenly tried to put me off with the story that he is busy, that he cannot see me because he is out chasing fleas. Set your mind at rest, Your Imperial Emissarial Excellency, he says, trying to placate me with feigned courtesy. Your Eminence may be absolutely certain that if the Delegate of the Supreme Government of Paraguay, Don Joseph León Ramírez, is out chasing fleas, he is beyond the shadow of a doubt doing so in honor of your comfort. Fleas are not the only plague tormenting us in this inferno, my dear sir!, I answer. I request, indeed I demand to see the representative immediately, and you tell me that he’s gone up in a basket to the top of the Government Delegation building and is now embarked upon an absurd flea-hunt. I remind Yr. Excy., the writer-spy answers imperturbably, that everybody has his own way of doing things, and when it comes to catching fleas the methods used by the Delegate of the Supreme Government are infallible.
“That isn’t all, Senhor Cantero. This morning, an old Indian woman demanded a large indemnity from me, claiming that her she-ass had been raped and killed by the he-ass that was bringing water to this hovel. I was obliged to give her a gold doubloon, since she refused to accept less. In your estimation, is all this possible to bear? To top off everything else, the death toll of victims of the plague is mounting. I have seen, with my own eyes from the door of this shack, more than five hundred of those unfortunates being buried in the immediate vicinity. Everything happens in the space of a day, and one day here is no different from the one that follows, from one end of the year to the next, so that I have no idea whether I arrived here during the past week or the past century. The way it is in dreams, Most Exc. Senhor!, Cantero says jokingly. Speaking of dreams, I had one about Paraguay and Brazil a week or so ago. I dreamed that Brazil would be the greatest empire in the world if the dividing line were extended to the shore of the Paraguay River on the west and to the Paraná River on the south. I dreamed, the crafty spy added, that Paraguay and Brazil forged not only a total alliance but formed a complete unity. I do not believe, however, that such are the aims of the Brazilian Empire. Moreover, I don’t believe in dreams, he said. I was forced to answer him in my severest tone of voice: I believe even less in trickery disguised as subtlety! One step more, Senhor Roa,* on the path of insults and the Paraguayan Government will discover to what point the representative of the Empire is capable of upholding the dignity of his eminent character and the offended majesty of his sovereign!” (Report by Correa, op. cit.)
* The compiler wishes to point out that this lapsus and mention are not attributable to him: Correa’s confidential report mentions this name textually, as can be verified in Anais, Volume IV, p. 60. (Compiler’s Note.)
Perpetual Circular
When I received this wretched Government, I found no money in the Treasury, not a yard of cloth, no arms, no munitions, no sort of provisions or equipment. I am nonetheless bearing all the ever-increasing expenses, securing the supplies, readying the war matériel required for public safety and national security, not to mention costly works projects, thanks to cle
ver schemes and strategies, astuteness, constant effort. Endless labors, days and nights without sleep, filling posts, ministries, offices that should be occupied by others, in the civil, the military, and even the mechanical domain. Overburdened by all this and by other tasks that are not my concern or my responsibility. All this because I find myself in a country full of nothing but idiots, where the Government has no one to turn to, thereby obliging me to turn to myself to get things done, to instruct, to train, to administer, to take care of everything down to the very last detail, in my eagerness to rescue Paraguay from the misery, the despair, the abjection into which it has been plunged for three centuries now.
I find myself unable even to breathe. Submerged in the immense cumulus of duties/occupations that are incumbent upon me alone, in this country where it is necessary for me to fill fifty offices at once. If things go on this way, it is best that I take a rest. Allow Paraguay to go on living as it always has, that is to say in the Paraguayan way. A people of redfaces, inured to the scorn, the mockery of the people of other countries. In the end my back-breaking labors will have been in vain; my outlays of money wasted. Silver down the drain. Paraguayans will remain Paraguayans, and nothing more, for all time to come. Thus, despite all its titles of Sovereign and Independent Republic that have made it the First Republic of the South, it will be regarded as nothing more than a Republic of Guanás, on whose sweat and substance others grow fat.
If, amid all these burdens I bear, there are those who want more than I can offer, I have no other choice than to dismiss them. I am unable to work what the friars call miracles. Certainly not in this land of impossibles. I’d like to see all of you fighting here from the Government with the incompetence of functionaries in the departments of Treasury, Police, Civil Justice, Public Works, Foreign Relations, Interior, Brake Inspection, and who knows how many others! Going in desperation day after day to berate the employees in the lime factory, the arms, gunpowder, and ammunition factory; the dockyards, the shipyards, where I am unable to get them to ready the fleet of war vessels that will cover the defense of the river from the Capital to Corrientes. The Ark of Paraguay, the great merchant vessel, has been lying buried in the sand for twenty years now. Add to these activities the equipping, instruction, training of our land-based artillery, infantry, cavalry troops; of navy crews that have mastered all the practical skills required; the superintendence, the supervision, the direction of the Patrial workshops, warehouses, estancias, farms; the organization of the espionage network, scouts, spies, liaison men, secret agents, the most ignorant and inept intelligence corps in the entire world.
In addition to being Perpetual Dictator, I must at the same time be Minister of War, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Chief Justice, Judge Advocate General, Director of the Armament Factory. Since all the ranks of commissioned officers down to captain have been done away with, I alone constitute the General Staff in all branches of the armed services. As Director of Public Works, I must personally supervise everyone, down to the last craftsman, the last little seamstress, the last mason, the last road worker; all this without counting the work, the irritations, the vexations continually caused me by all of you officials, you civil/military functionaries in garrisons all over the country, in the most distant fortresses.
I should like to see you do what I do! I offer you the job. Come take it over if it still seems to you a mere nothing. Do it better than I do, if you can.
A pasquinade circulating these days claims that the people have lost their confidence in me, that they are sick and tired of me, completely fed up with me; and that I continue in the Government only because they do not have the power to overthrow me. Is that certain fact? I am certain it is not. On the other hand, if I were to end up losing confidence in the people, having my fill of it, growing so weary of it that I can bear no more, can I dissolve it, elect another? Note the difference.
* * *
—
Chiefs of the Republic: Above all else you should examine yourselves, delve into the depths of your consciences, ask yourselves to what degree you regard yourselves as being free of that ptomaine that appears in those who are dead before they die. Make a footnote: Ptomaine is the poison that results from the corruption of animal substances. A thick suppuration with a fetid odor, produced by the Vibrio proteus bacillus in connubial conjunction with the virgula or comma. Mortally pathogenic, since it comes from the alembics of Thanatos. Those savages, I now realize, are capable of going so far as to make ptomaine instead of cane brandy in their clandestine stills! It is also vulgarly known as cadaverine. I can offer you no antidote for this poison that the living-dead manufacture inside themselves. I shall tell you without vacillation that for this bacillus there is no counterbacillus. There is no resurrection against cadaverine. At least no one has discovered it yet, and probably no one ever will. So be careful! These poisonous juices form not only in those who are to be buried in pastures outside the walls with neither cross nor mark to commemorate their names. They are also engendered in those who lie beneath fatuous “cumuli.” In those more monstrously fatuous still who commission pyramid-mausoleums in which to keep their carcasses like a treasure in a strongbox. The proto-founders of our country, the proto-heroes, the proto-beings, the proto-rogues and other sorts of protos have statues of themselves erected, get plazas, streets, public buildings, forts, fortlets, cities, towns, villages, general stores, places of amusement, pelota courts, schools, hospitals, cemeteries named after them. Lupanary sanctuaries of their sacred rests and recreations. This has always been so, in all times and places. It is still so today. It will continue to be so, as long as the living go on being idiots. Things will change only when it is commonly recognized, without false pride but also without false humility, that the people, not the plebs, is the only living monument that no cataclysm can cause to fall to wrack and ruin.
Here too, before our Revolution, this happened. I have already spoken to you of the fastuousness and the fatuousness of the militia of noble lineage; that is to say, those lords of the lasso and bola who inherited estancias, sabers, and gold braid. It would not be at all surprising if this happened again now. Weeds put down deep roots. It might well be that the ptomaine of those unworthy officials and chiefs is again infecting you from the outside in, from the inside out. I have said and still say that a revolution is not really revolutionary unless it forms its own army; that is to say if this army does not come forth from the very bowels of revolution. Its offspring, engendered and armed by it. But it may happen that the hierarchies of this army become corrupted or go rotten in their turn, if instead of placing themselves completely at the service of Revolution, they place Revolution in their service and degenerate. I would say then that the execution of some hundred conspirators and traitors to the Country was not enough. I thought I had rounded up every last treacherous stray in the military, lie-quidated every last one of them; skimmed off the scum of all those who took themselves to be specially called and chosen, each of them of and by himself, to be the head of the Revolution, when all they were was ignorant politicasters, venal milicasters tricked out in glittering uniforms. It would seem evident that the ignominious punishments reserved for these miserable traitors to their Country and the People of the Republic have not served as a remedy. These punishments—the gantlet, shooting, running through the pikes—have apparently not put an end to the degradation of chiefs and officials, a degradation which has propagated itself to a disgraceful degree and spread its rank infection to the lower echelons of the armed services. I would be obliged to infer the following: there is something uniformly malign beneath the uniform. This something thus comes to constitute the very insignia of dishonor, not of honor; the sign not of the condignity of loyalty but of the indignity of disloyalty. The inventions of men are different from century to century. The malice of the militia seems to be forever the same. A uniform stigma in signia saeculorum.
Comport yourselves as not only honorable but also humble soldiers
of your Country, whatever your rank, function, and authority.
El Supremo’s principal libelists, whose testimony may be partial but nonetheless not open to the suspicion of a marked bias in his favor, explain and unwittingly justify the austere rigor and implacable discipline that the Perpetual Dictator tried to impose upon his armed forces, apparently without much success:
“Running the gantlet is ordinarily a military punishment only. In order for such punishment to be inflicted, an order from the Supreme Dictator suffices. Those sentenced to capital punishment meet their death at the hands of harquebusiers, as in the last days of Spanish rule. On the day of the execution a gibbet is set up in the plaza, from which the body of the executed criminal hangs suspended.” (Rengger and Longchamp, Historical Essay, chap. II.)
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