I the Supreme
Page 60
“Who knows whether, by one of the ironies of fate, whereby Our Lord is sometimes pleased to frustrate the workings of human rancor, some of those bones that Loizaga kept in a box of noodles might not have been those of some beloved relative of his….For the Dictator, I presume, did not still have his baby teeth intact when he died!
“ ‘The remainder of the skeleton,’ Loizaga says, ‘was carried by me to an open grave.’ Again the same lack of witnesses to the goings and comings of this solitary gravedigger. If the rest of the skeleton was like the reconstructed skull, there is every reason to suppose that it was composed of, for example, five long bones [femurs], three backbones, fifty ribs, and so on; which could be regarded as proof that the Dictator was a far from ordinary skeletal phenomenon.
“In any event, it is most curious that Loizaga and Godoy left the church, enveloped in the shadows of the night, with two skulls of the Dictator, as though the latter had had two heads. Each of them was convinced that he had gone off with the authentic skull of El Supremo.”
[Compiler’s note: According to a revelation by an old family slave, Loizaga kept an urn containing the ashes of his maternal grandmother in the same cabinet. This informant, in full possession of her mental faculties despite the fact that she was over a hundred years old, told me that one night, by error, she put those ashes in the soup that she made for dinner. The slave, now freed, also told me in confidence that since her masters hadn’t noticed her mistake, she filled the funerary urn with sand from the courtyard, so that no one would discover her fateful error. She earnestly beseeched me not to tell on her or set “all this foolishness down on paper for no good reason.” Since the slave’s negligence was a much less grave offense than the profanation and theft of the remains of El Supremo committed by Loizaga, I am not being disloyal in bringing to public notice the story of the ex slave of the ex triumvir; on the contrary, I consider it only my duty to do so.]
Dr. Laconich continues:
“On June 23, 1906, Dr. Honorio Leguizamón wrote a letter to the publisher of La Nación that I regard as being of the utmost importance. In this letter Dr. Leguizamón, at the time the ship’s physician of the Argentine gunboat Paraná, describes the circumstances in which he obtained from Loizaga, in the year 1876, the remains in question, which he later turned over to Dr. Zeballos, who subsequently donated them to the Museo Histórico Nacional de Buenos Aires, in July, 1890.
“ ‘At first,’ Dr. Leguizamón writes, ‘I met with a resounding no; but once Señor Loizaga was convinced that my information had come from the best possible sources, since members of his own family confirmed that it was they who had passed it on to me, he was obliged to yield to my importunities and confess the whole truth to me: his religious spirit had impelled him to dig up those remains, which profaned the ground in which they had been buried. The remains were handed over to me inside a large noodle box’—and then he adds these words, which we would do well to keep in mind: ‘I was vastly disappointed to find myself in possession of nothing more than a shapeless mass of shattered bones….’
“Following this disappointing discovery, Dr. Leguizamón asked himself: ‘Could this fragmentation of the skeleton have resulted from the vengeful fury of some victim? At the time I did not dare to ask him.’
“The letter leaves the lingering suspicion between the lines that Loizaga pounded those bones to splinters with a mallet, thereby taking his vengeance upon the Dictator. In a postscript, Dr. Leguizamón furthers this suspicion by adding that it was an age-old tradition among the Guaranís to take their vengeance upon their enemies by removing their bones and breaking them to bits.
“It is our sincere belief that this custom of the Guaranís is a discovery of Dr. Leguizamón’s unsupported by other evidence, tailor-made by him to fit his needs. The Guaranís were far more interested in the flesh of their enemies than in their bones: if they found them appetizing, they ate them, without further ado. We leave it to Hans Staden to contradict us….
“The shapeless mass of fragmented bones would seem to confirm the hypothesis of a common grave, which goes hand in hand with the existence of the skullcap of a woman, the facial mask of an adult male, and the jaw of a child, the mere jumble of bones described in the expert opinion rendered by Dr. Outes. However…
“Dr. Leguizamón states categorically in his letter that the only remains of any sort of garment he found in the noodle box was ‘the intact sole of a shoe that would fit only a very small foot.’ It is a well-known fact that the Supreme Dictator had small hands and feet, of which he was very proud since he regarded them as proof of good bloodlines; but the words ‘very small’ call to mind a little child.
“Hence it is my opinion that it is not advisable to organize this national homage to celebrate the repatriation of remains of such dubious and much-debated authenticity of those preserved at present in the Museo Histórico Nacional de Buenos Aires. The circumstances leading to a hoax linked to the box of noodles of Legionnaire Loizaga”—Dr. Laconich concludes—“would inevitably cast a shadow over the homage paid to the illustrious memory of the Founding Father.”
FINAL COMPILER’S NOTE
This compilation has been culled—it would be more honest to say coaxed—from some twenty thousand dossiers, published and unpublished; from an equal number of other volumes, pamphlets, periodicals, correspondences and all manner of testimony—gleaned, garnered, resurrected, inspected—in public and private libraries and archives. To this must be added the versions collected from the sources of oral tradition, and some fifteen thousand hours of interviews, recorded on tape, filled with inexactitudes and confusions, with supposed descendants of supposed functionaries; with supposed kith and kin, close or distant, of The Supreme, who always boasted of not having any; with epigoni, panegyrists, and detractors no less self-proclaimed and nebulous.
The reader will already have noted that, unlike ordinary texts, this one was read first and written later. Instead of saying and writing something new, it merely faithfully copies what has already been said and composed by others. Thus in this compilation there is not a single page, a single sentence, a single word, from the title to this final note, that has not been written in this way. “All history that is not contemporary is suspect,” El Supremo was fond of saying. “It is not necessary to know how they were born to see that such fabulous stories are not of the time in which they were written. There is a vast difference between a book made by an individual and put before the people, and a book made by a people. There can be no doubt, then, that this book is as old as the people that dictated it.”
Hence, imitating the Dictator once again (dictators fulfill precisely this function: replacing writers, historians, artists, thinkers, etc.), the re-scriptor declares, in the words of a contemporary author, that the history contained in these Notes is reduced to the fact that the story that should have been told in them has not been told. As a consequence, the characters and facts that figure in them have earned, through the fatality of the written language, the right to a fictitious and autonomous existence in the service of the no less fictitious and autonomous reader.
GUARANÍ WORDS USED IN THE NOVEL
(Note: The spelling used in the novel has been preserved here.)
abatí: uncured brandy distilled from corn
aó-poí: a type of handmade cotton cloth
axé-guayakí: an indigenous tribe
caranday: palm
chipá: maize cake
chiripá: long cloth girdling the loins
guaná: indigenous nation
guasú: great
Guaykurú: Indians who live apart, on the plains of Paraguay, Buenos Aires, Bolivia, and Brazil
güembé: plant whose bark has medicinal properties
jupiká: a stew whose principal ingredient is broad beans
kaguaré: ant bear
ka’aiguá: people of the wilds
kambá: a black
, especially a Brazilian soldier during the War of the Triple Alliance
kapuera: a plot of farm land cultivated for family use
karaguatá: a plant that produces textile fibers
karaí: lord, leader, chief; the Supreme Dictator was known as Karaí Guasú.
kõi: twin
machú: nanny, nurse, housekeeper
marandová: worm
Mbayá: indigenous tribe that lived west of the Paraguay River
mbopí: bat
ñandutí: very delicate handmade lace
paí: priest, friar
payaguá: (1) tribe of Indians; (2) plant
payé: sorcerer
pindó: variety of palm tree
pirí: straw sombrero
samu’ú-peré: large tree, from the trunk of which canoes were made; known in Spanish as palo borracho. Peré = bare.
sarakí: playful, frisky, mischievous
so’yo: a soup made with water, rice, chopped or ground meat, oregano, salt, and oil
taguató: sparrow hawk
taitá: papa
takuara: bamboo, hollow cane
tanimbú: ash
tapera: tumbledown house, ruins
tepotí: excrement
Tikú: diminutive of Francisco
timbó: timber tree; a red and a white variety exist. Timbó = emitting smoke.
tuyá: old
urukure’á: owl
urundey: timber tree with hard red wood
xake: watch out!
yateí-ka’á: medicinal herb, used to ward off appendicitis
yatytá: snail
yavorai: brush
ysipó: liana
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