The troops made up of heads of families installed in the Paraná zone, which I sent to fight the invading army of Correntinos, were a good example in the beginning. From now on, no more useless troops of the line. I shall dissolve the ranks of idlers and good-for-nothings who bolt off like a shot out of a gun at the first round of fire from the enemy. I have had quite enough of that army of parasites that uselessly suck the blood of the people and humiliate them endlessly by committing every sort of outrage and abuse.
From now on, the people itself will be the army: all men and women, all adults, young people, and children fit for service in the Great Army of the Fatherland. Unique, invisible, invincible. Study every aspect of its organization. Draw up, down to the very last detail, a strategic and tactical plan; a rule book of guerrilla warfare and a general system of self-sufficiency, aimed at meeting the central objectives of work and defense.
The most important basis for this conversion of traditional militias into militias of the people is…(rest of the folio burned).
The skull rises up, shaking off the dirt on itself. It raises up half its carcass, supporting itself on its hindquarters. It is about to throw the secret of Pilar the black in my face. A little rainbow of spittle is forming around its muzzle. A sarcastic smile in the naked shadow of the bone. I will take one step backward, out of its reach. I look at it out of the corner of my eye. The hydrophobia of a dead dog can be doubly fatal. You had him killed because of!…He contains himself by feigning a coughing fit. Take it easy, my good old Sultan. You have all eternity before you. Come on, out with it, what was it you were about to say about the black? Go on. I’m listening. You weren’t that good a listener in the old days, my esteemed Supreme. Nor were you that much of a conversationalist during your dog’s life. You sent him before the firing squad in the same year you celebrated the silver anniversary of your wedding to the Perpetual Dictatorship. Hot tallow ran that year as never before. Do you remember that giant taper, supreme? I can see it now. There’s never been a candle that could hold a candle to that one! Your hydrolatrous admirers erected it for you: forty rods high and three thick at the base. Ten thousand quintals of burning-hot wax were poured over this skeleton scaffolding. Then they lit the wick, with its flame inside its little mica niche calculated to last for at least another quarter of a century. They set it up during the night in the Plaza de la República. On the eve of the feast of the Nativity that year. You knew nothing about it. A complete surprise. Except for the light still burning after curfew, in a place you’d never seen one before or ever ordered one to be kept lit. You focused your telescope from your window. The Star of the North!, I heard you murmur. You contemplated it all that night. The low-pitched howl of a dog that has lost its mate. A thousand sighs. A single sigh, cut off by a thousand countersighs. So that they were a thousand yet one. You forced me to sigh and howl along with you, crushing my paw beneath the iron heel of your shoe. As you sighed and howled like a dog, I practically dragged you to bed. Shut you up in your attic. Mounted guard at the door.
Your attention attracted by the hubbub in the plaza, you discovered the giant taper a few hours later. It had come loose from its framework of takuara rods, and beneath the sun’s burning rays it was now bent completely double, with wax and smoke spurting from the tip. Shouts and peals of laughter, cheers and hurrahs for El Supremo! The crowd grows more and more excited. Leaps and cavorts round the immense candle, which has done its humble best to bow its head to the multitude in this unprecedented celebration. The women writhe frenetically in the red dust of the plaza. The more ecstatic of the vatic Bacchae fling themselves upon the softened tip. Their hair standing on end. Tunics rent to pieces. Eyes bulging from their sockets. They scrape off bits of hot wax. Gather the burning-hot drops in the hollow of their hands. Rub their bellies, their breasts, their mouths with chunks of warm wax. Howl in mad maenadic rapture:
Oé…oé…yekó raka’é
ñande Karai-Guasú o nacé vaekué…*1
You raised hell. What for them was the Fiesta of Fiestas struck you as the most sinister mockery of mockeries. You ordered troops to clear the plaza with fixed bayonets. Your grenadiers had to charge three times in combat formation. The hydrolators trembled.
That very day, you sent Pilar the black to his death before a firing squad. I went to lick the gaping wounds left by the bullets in his breast. Around the ninth hour, in the voice of a dead man, the black said to me, with just a trace of laughter: All those candles lit to Saint Fart, in honor of nothing at all! Isn’t that so, Sultan? I left Olariega the Indian girl pregnant. When she’s given birth to my child, tell her for me that I wish her to give it my name. And tell that shitty old bastard who doesn’t have a name that I wish him not to know where he’s going or what he should say when he gets there, that I hope it gets pitch dark inside him and he goes to sleep for good without ever knowing he’s died. That’s what Pilar the black said. His posthumous wish. Why is it you don’t write these true things down among all the lies that your hand borrows from other lies, believing that they’re your truths?
You know I didn’t order him killed out of sheer cruelty, Sultan, but on account of what he did. I sent him to hell for his thieving, for his treason. What hell? That of your black conscience? Your Supreme Inferno? Don’t be disrespectful! Have me shot to death too, you accursed old man dead of supremacy! I’ve had my fill of you! Kill me off before your hand is no longer able to push that pen. Now that we have both met our end we can understand each other. No, Sultan, all this requires a power of comprehension that, living or dead, is beyond your understanding. Bah, Supreme! You don’t yet know what happiness, what relief you’ll feel below earth! The delusion in whose toils you lie is making you swallow the dregs of that bitter elixir you call life, as you finish digging your own grave in the cemetery of the written word. Solomon himself says: the man who strays from the path of understanding will remain, though he be yet alive, in the congregation of the dead. You are only half initiated; as I am an initiate of far longer standing, in that order, you the novice owe me respect, Supreme. Wisdom increaseth grief, as we already know. But there is a grief that turns into madness, and this is not written anywhere. Don’t become too absorbed in contemplating that fire that your incipient verbal blindness thinks it sees burning in Books. If such a fire exists, it is not in books. It would only burn them to ashes. Fry you to a crisp. I returned to your stinking doghouse on this occasion only to keep you company for a short while; in the end I felt for you the pity that the dead feel for the living. Don’t try to understand me. You might suddenly be happy again. Do you know how terrible it is to be happy in this world?
In the blindness of your Absolute Power through which you think you dominate everything, you haven’t acquired a single real’s worth of the wisdom of King Solomon, the non-Christian. As he slept with his concubines he kept the knife of Ecclesiastes hidden beneath his pillow. Sometimes, without a sound, he took out the steel forged-in-pain as they slept. He cut off their hair and made from it splendid red, golden blond, raven-black, wavy, kinky, curly beards for himself that reached down to his navel. With a smile, he cut off their breasts in one stroke, so gently that those sleeping concubines must have felt they were still being caressed in their dreams. He plucked their eyes from their sockets in a twinkling. There is nothing more pleasing than to contemplate a pair of sleep-filled eyes nestling in the palm of one’s hand! The umbilical cord of the optic nerve dangling between one’s fingers. The pupils burn with a phosphorescent light in the dark for a moment. A sulphurous gleam of love-hate. Then they are hidden from sight on the dark side of the earth. These are things not found in the Song of Songs.
Wait a minute, Sultan! Who said that? Don’t confuse me. It doesn’t matter, Supreme. Don’t let it bother you. Why wouldn’t it bother me? I’m trying to understand; I don’t want to get what’s mine mixed up with your dog-tricks from beyond the grave. I’ve already told you: you won’t understand till you understan
d. But this won’t happen so long as you keep pretending you’re buried in these folios. False tombs make terrible refuges. A scriptorial sepulcher worth half a real a ream the worst one of all. It’s only beneath the earth-earth that you’re going to find the sol that never stops shining. Germinal darkness. The night-night of pilgrim-journeying eyes. A single lamp lighting your life-and-death labors. Because even though one doesn’t always die in the dark, it’s only out of the dark that one comes into the world, do you see what I mean, Supreme? You were useful to me when you were still alive, my dear Sultan. I hear you growl in your dreams. Bark. Wake up with a start. Raise your right paw to make your bad vision go away. The image of the Alien is reflected in your eyes. An unknown without color or form. Thing. Happening. Prophecy passing from black to gray; from gray to white; from white to a shadow halted before you. Your sleep too heavy now. Your dreams a bore. You can’t play death the way you used to so superbly in the old days to amuse my guests. Like that clownish Pilar the black, able to act out farces of the same sort, patching together voices, figures, gesticulations of the strangest strangers. Mime. Actor. Pander. Improviser. Satyr. Quick-change artist. Basso-buffo. Swindler. Petty larcenist.
Tell me, Sultan, just between us, paw on your chest. Tell me, absolutely frankly, if the black ever said anything to you about that mad idea of his that set his brain on fire, that business about being king of Paraguay some day. All humbug! Lies cooked up by your finagling private secretary to discredit the black even more! The last thing he would ever have wanted to be was king of this shitty country! The one who’s dreaming of dethroning you and making himself king someday is none other than your secretary, Policarpo himself. Look at the back of your lackey’s chair. What do you see written there in charcoal: Policarpo I King of Paraguay! Have him erase that legend with his tongue. That’s just what he’ll do, don’t worry, before the hangman’s knot makes it come leaping out of his mouth, all warm and wet.
* * *
—
By order of the dog, I shall write then about Pilar the black. For ten years the valet enjoyed my entire confidence. Except for the protophysician, the only one to enter my room. He prepares my maté. Supervises the cooking of my food. Tastes the dishes before I do. Acts as assistant at audiences; as lookout on my afternoon outings. I ride along on the Arabian; I advance slowly down the streets bared of trees. The black’s hawk eyes watch every crack in the façades of the barricaded houses. Stragglers in the underbrush, a bunch of straw-hatted heads. Pilar falls upon them, brandishing the whip. Heads of curious youngsters hidden beneath the sombreros. Lashing out with his rawhide, he drives them away.
During military exercises he rides along at my side. He can handle a lance or a rifle as well as the most expert of my hussars. The black arouses envy, astonishment, admiration in them. In the annual dog hunts, Pilar is always in the forefront. He takes special delight in entering patrician mansions. Before the eyes of their terrified masters, he finishes off, with skillful thrusts of his bayonet, the little lapdogs hidden underneath the beds, in the kitchens, in the basements, beneath the women’s petticoats. During one of these battues he ran Hero through with a pike, thus settling old accounts with him. You’re lying, Supreme. It wasn’t Pilar the black who killed Hero, already starving to death back in the days when you expelled the Robertsons. Nobody would throw a bone his way, not even in secret, for fear of falling into disgrace if you should happen to hear about it. Be still, Sultan. Don’t you start interrupting me now. I won’t have you dictating or correcting. I’m talking about Pilar the black, not about you. I am writing about him, and letters couldn’t care less whether what is written with them is true or false.
* * *
—
What most dazzled him was contemplating the heavens at night through the telescope, searching for my favorite constellations. Look, José María, I’m going to read the calendar of the zodiac to you. What’s the zodiac, Godfather? Something like an almanac of the sky. Oh, I see, Godfather, something like the Almanach of Notable Personages that you sometimes read. Don’t mix up vulgar things with things of the cosmos! Listen, if I handed you a candle end and told you to eat it, would you do so? No, Sire, because you yourself have told me that a person shouldn’t consume his own candle. Listen, you little rascal: the sun travels round and round its burning ring and needs no other food than its own self. If only a person could be a sun! Don’t you think so too, Sire? Imagine eating whole bellyfuls of yourself! Don’t interrupt me now. The zodiac is the circular band of the twelve constellations that the sun travels through in the space of a year. The twelve signs mark the four seasons. We’re going to read the calendar now. Here is Aries, the ram, a lustful beast that engenders us. Next, Taurus, the bull, who starts off by butting us with his horns. When we play bull-candle, Sire, I’m always the first to give the other blacks a goring. Look now at Gemini, the twins; that is to say, Virtue and Vice. As we’re trying to catch virtue, Cancer, the crab, comes along and grabs us with his snaggle-toothed pincers. As we depart from Virtue, Leo, the roaring lion, crosses our path. He rakes us fiercely with his claws. Is he the dying lion of the Aesop’s fable you often tell me, Sire? The one that organizes the parade so as to devour the other animals? If you don’t let me talk, we’ll never get to the end. Glue your black soul to the telescope; listen to what I’m telling you. We flee from the Lion and meet Virgo, the virgin. Our first love. We wed her. Why are you laughing? Nothing, Sire; it’s just that I’ve also heard you say that virgins are as hard to find as a needle in a haystack, though that’s the best place to look for them. But from what you’re saying they’re not as hard to come by in heaven. We believe that we will be eternally happy when Libra, the scales, appears, and we find that our happiness weighs no more in the balance than smoke. This leaves us very sad. Scorpio, the scorpion, then gives us a stab in the back that gives us a terrible start. We are just curing ourselves of our wounds when arrows come raining down on us from all directions: Sagittarius, the archer, is making sport of us. We pull out the arrows. Watch out! We are now floating in the Ark. Aquarius, the water-bearer, has arrived, unleashing his deluge that floods the earth. He’s turned it into an ocean where Piscis, the Fish, reigns, because they catch us without using either bait or hook. A meaning is hidden in each thing. A sign in each man. What is yours, Sire? Capricorn, the capricorn of the Tropic. A battering ram that butts its way and horns in everywhere. This Book of the Heavens is some book, Godfather! The sun reads it every year, Pilar. It always has a happy ending, and he goes gaily on his daily round, safe and sound up there. I can do that too, Sire. Read it directly. I don’t know when I was born, neither the month, nor the day, nor the hour, but when I see the devilment of the different signs, I think maybe mine is the Twins. I’m the kõi of my kõi. It’s more likely your sign is the next one, the crab. If I just look at little things from day to day, yes, you’re more than right, Sire. What I’m wondering now is if that’s how it is in Your Worship’s life too. Since to me, your sign is your very self, Sire. You don’t depend on the luck of the moment that makes its way along a thread in little hops, nudging along the things we don’t see as the things we do see happen. Isn’t that how it is in the stories in books? If Your Grace will allow me, I too will read that Almanac of the Noble Persons of Heaven. You don’t know how to read yet. Learn. Go learn the alphabet in school. I’m going to see if I can do it, Sire, what I mean to say is, make a hundred flowers bloom with words alone.
The black won’t get past Capricorn. A very delatory scholar. His false inventiveness keeps him stuck fast in treacherous irreverence. Mere echoing of the stale stories spread so maliciously by my detractors, who attribute my hatred for patricians to my love for the daughter of Colonel Zavala y Delgadillo that came to nothing. The brazen-faced chatterbox doesn’t mention names. Just vague, vulgar allusions to the Star of the North, an amusing appellation bestowed upon the charming Doña María Josefa Rodríguez Peña, mother of the stunningly beautiful Petrona. A public
nickname equated in the mouth of the black with my most carefully kept secret. A tale of a constellation that was pure fiction. Further solid proof that even in the most distant galaxies the vile worm inevitably spoils sound fruit. The black’s heart was already being gnawed at. I had him given a thorough thrashing. He took it without a whimper. Then he knelt at my feet, begging my pardon. I gave him a chance to rehabilitate himself. This was the last time I ever committed an act of stupid compassion. He continued to deceive me for a time. In my presence, unexampled humility, discretion; in secret, the worst rascal imaginable. He became a cynic, a libertine, a toper, a relapsed thief. Aided by the young Indian Olegaria Paré, his concubine, he began to steal from the State stores. Wickedness coupled with wickedness. He began to pocket money regularly behind my back, to collect bribes for supposedly pulling strings with the Government. Trickery of every sort, a product of his prodigious capabilities for knavery, invention, guile. Everyone fought for the favors of the famous gentleman of the bedchamber that my former valet had become. Meanwhile the Indian woman, pregnant and about to give birth, went on boldly selling the goods that her lover stole, in the marketplace and even in the houses of the enemy. Lengths of English linen, brabant, spiderwork, dragonfly-gauze, lace jabots, colored ribbons, handkerchiefs, toys ended up in the hands of old families come down in the world, once-wealthy Spanish immigrants who had lost their fortunes, pretentious patricians. They gave what they did not have in order to pay for these luxuries stolen from the State Stores. Great rejoicing. A guard caught him throwing through the skylights spools of ribbon that slowly came unwound in the breeze from the river.*2
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