The Autumn of the Patriarch

by Gabriel García Márquez

  HE HAD SKIRTED the reefs of so many earthly disorders, so many ominous eclipses, so many flaming tallow balls in the sky that it seemed impossible for someone from our time to trust still the prognostications of the cards regarding his fate. Yet, while the plans for reassembling and embalming the body went forward, even the most candid among us waited without so confessing for the fulfillment of ancient predictions, such as the one that said that on the day of his death the mud from the swamps would go back upriver to its source, that it would rain blood, that hens would lay pentagonal eggs, and that silence and darkness would cover the universe once more because he was the end of creation. It was impossible not to believe all of this since the few newspapers still publishing were still dedicated to proclaiming his eternity and counterfeiting his splendor with material from their files, every day they displayed him to us as during ecstatic times and on the front page in his tenacious uniform with the five sad pips of his days of glory, with more authority and diligence and better health than ever in spite of the fact that many years ago we had lost count of his age, in the usual pictures he was once more dedicating well-known monuments or public installations that no one knew about in real life, he presided over solemn ceremonies which they said had taken place yesterday but which had really taken place during the last century, even though we knew it wasn’t true, because no one had seen him in public ever since Leticia Nazareno’s atrocious death when he was left alone in that no man’s land of a house while the daily affairs of government went along all by themselves and only through the momentum of his immense power over so many years, he locked himself up until death in the run-down palace from whose highest windows we were now watching with tight hearts the same gloomy sunset that he must have seen so many times from his throne of illusions, we saw the intermittent beacon of the lighthouse as it flooded the ruined salons with its green and languid waters, we saw the lamps of the poor inside the shell of what had once been the coral reefs of solar glass of the ministries which had been invaded by hordes of poor people when the multicolored huts on the harbor hills had been leveled by another of our numerous cyclones, we saw below the scattered, steamy city, the instantaneous horizon of pale lightning flashes in the crater of ashes of the sea that had been sold, the first night without him, his vast lakelike empire of malarial anemones, its hot villages on the deltas of muddy tributaries, the avid barbed-wire fences of his private provinces where there flourished without count or measure a new species of magnificent cows who were born with the hereditary presidential brand. Not only had we ended up really believing that he had been conceived to survive the third comet but that conviction had infused us with a security and a restful feeling that we tried to hide with all manner of jokes about old age, we attributed the senile characteristics of tortoises and the habits of elephants to him, in bars we told the story that someone had announced to the cabinet that he had died and that they had asked each other in fright who’s going to tell him, ha, ha, ha, when the truth was that it wouldn’t have mattered to him if he knew it or not or he himself wouldn’t have been very sure whether that street joke was true or false, because at that time no one except him knew that all he had left in the pockets of his memory were a few odd scraps of the vestiges of the past, that he was alone in the world, deaf as a post, dragging his thick decrepit feet through dark offices where someone in a frock coat and starched collar had made an enigmatic signal to him with a handkerchief, hello, he said to him, the mistake became law, office workers in the presidential palace had to stand up with a white handkerchief when he passed, the sentries along the corridors, the lepers in the rose beds waved to him with a white handkerchief when he passed, hello general sir, hello, but he didn’t hear, he had heard nothing since the sunset mourning rites for Leticia Nazareno when he thought that the birds in his cages were losing their voices from so much singing and he fed them his own honey so they would sing louder, he fed them Cantorina with an eyedropper, he sang them songs from a different age, bright January moon, he sang, for he had not realized that it was not the birds who were losing the strength of their voices but that it was he who was hearing less and less, and one night the buzzing in his eardrums broke all apart, it was over, it had been changed into an atmosphere of mortar through which only the farewell laments of the illusory ships from the shadows of power could pass, imaginary winds passed, the racket of inner birds which finally consoled him for the abyss of silence of the birds of reality. The few people who had access to government house then would see him in the wicker rocking chair enduring the drowsiness of two in the afternoon under the arbor of wild pansies, he had unbuttoned his tunic, had taken off his saber and the belt with the national colors, he had taken off his boots but left on the purple socks from the twelve dozen the Supreme Pontiff had sent him from his private sockery, the girls from a nearby school who would climb over the rear walls where the guard was less rigid had surprised him many times in that heavy insomnia, pale, with medicinal leaves stuck to his temples, tiger-striped by the bars of light from the arbor in the ecstasy of a manta ray lying face up at the bottom of a pool, old soursop, they would shout at him, he would see them distorted in the haze of the quivering heat, he would smile at them, wave at them with the hand without the velvet glove, but he couldn’t hear them, he caught the shrimp-mud stench of the sea breeze, he caught the pecking of the hens on his toes, but he did not catch the luminous thunder of the cicadas, he couldn’t hear the girls, he couldn’t hear anything. His only contacts with the reality of this world were by then a few scattered scraps of his largest memories, only they kept him alive after he had been despoiled of the affairs of state and stayed swimming in a state of innocence in the limbo of power, only then did he confront the devastating winds of his excessive years when he wandered at dusk through the deserted building, hid in the darkened offices, tore the margins off ledgers and in his florid hand wrote on them the remaining residue of the last memories that preserved him from death, one night he had written my name is Zacarías, he read it again under the fleeting light of the beacon, he read it over and over and the name repeated so many times ended up seeming remote and alien to him, God damn it, he said to himself, tearing up the strip of paper, I’m me, he said to himself, and he wrote on another strip that he had turned a hundred around the time the comet had passed again although by then he wasn’t sure how many times he’d seen it pass, and on another ledger strip he wrote from memory honor the wounded and honor the faithful soldiers who met death at foreign hands, for there were periods when he wrote down everything he thought, everything he knew, he wrote on a piece of cardboard and tacked it to the door of a toilet that it was fourbidden to do any dirty bizness in toylets because he had opened that door by mistake and had surprised a high-ranking officer squatting down and masturbating into the bowl, he wrote down the few things he remembered to make sure that he would never forget them, Leticia Nazareno, he wrote, my only and legitimate spouse who had taught him to read and write in the ripeness of his old age, he made an effort to bring back her public image, he tried to see her again with her taffeta parasol with the colors of the flag and her first lady’s fur piece of silver-fox tails, but all he could manage was to remember her naked at two in the afternoon under the flour-haze light of the mosquito netting, he remembered the slow repose of your soft and pale body surrounded by the hum of the electric fan, he felt your living teats your smell of a bitch in heat, the corrosive humors of your ferocious novice nun hands that curdled milk and rusted gold and withered flowers, but they were good hands for love, because only she had reached the inconceivable triumph of take your boots off so you don’t soil my Brabant sheets, and he took them off, take off your saber, and your truss, and your leggings take everything off my love I can’t feel you, and he took everything off for you as he had never done before and would never do again for any woman after Leticia Nazareno, my only and legitimate love, he sighed, he wrote down the signs on the yellowed ledger margins that he rolled like cigarettes and hid in the most unlike
ly chinks in the house where only he would be able to find them to remember who he was himself when he could no longer remember anything, where no one ever found them when even the image of Leticia Nazareno had finally slipped away down the drain of memory and all that remained was the indestructible memory of his mother Bendición Alvarado on the goodbye afternoons at the suburban mansion, his dying mother who had gathered the hens together by making noise with the kernels of corn in a calabash gourd so that he wouldn’t notice that she was dying, who still brought him fruit drinks to the hammock hung between the tamarinds so that he wouldn’t suspect that she could barely breathe because of her pain, his mother who had conceived him alone, who had borne him alone, who was rotting away alone until the solitary suffering became so intense that it was stronger than her pride and she had to ask her son to look at my back to see why I feel this hot-ember heat that won’t let me live, and she took off her blouse, turned around, and with silent horror he saw that her back had been chewed away by steaming ulcers in whose guava pulp pestilence the tiny bubbles of the first maggots were bursting. Bad times those general sir, there were no secrets of state that were not in the public domain, there was no order that was carried out with complete certainty ever since the exquisite corpse of General Rodrigo de Aguilar had been served up at the banquet table, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care about the stumbling of power during the bitter months in which his mother was rotting away in a slow fire in the bedroom next to his after the doctors most adept in Asiatic scourges decreed that her illness was not the plague, or scabies, or yaws, or any other Oriental pestilence, but some Indian curse that could only be cured by the one who had cast it, and he understood that it was death and he shut himself up to care for his mother with the abnegation of a mother, he stayed to rot with her so that no one would see her cooking in her stew of maggots, he ordered them to bring her hens to government house, they brought him the peacocks, the painted birds who wandered about at their pleasure through salons and offices so that his mother would not miss the rustic activities of the suburban mansion, he himself burned annato logs in the bedroom so that no one would catch the death stench of his dying mother, he himself with germicidal salves consoled the body that was red with Mercurochrome, yellow with picric, blue with methylene, he himself daubed with Turkish balms the steaming ulcers against the advice of the minister of health who was frightened to death of curses, what the hell, mother, it’s better if we die together, he said, but Bendición Alvarado was aware of being the only one who was dying and she tried to reveal to her son the family secrets that she didn’t want to carry to her grave, she told him how her placenta had been thrown to the hogs, lord, how it was that I could never establish which of so many back-trail fugitives was your father, she tried to tell him for history that she had conceived him standing up and with her hat on because of the storm of bluebottle flies around the wineskins of fermented molasses in the back room of a bar, she had given birth to him with difficulty in the entranceway to a convent, she had recognized him in the lights of the melancholy harps of the geraniums and his right testicle was the size of a fig and he relieved himself like a bellows and exhaled a bagpipe sigh with his breathing, she wrapped him up in the rags the novices had given her and she displayed him in marketplaces in case she might find someone who knew of a remedy that was better and above all cheaper than honey which was the only thing they recommended to her for his malformation, they consoled her with clichés, you can’t get around fate, they told her, because after all the child was good for everything except playing wind instruments, they told her, and only a circus fortuneteller noticed that the newborn baby had no lines on the palm of his hand and that meant he had been born to be a king, and that’s how it was, but he wasn’t paying any attention to her, he begged her to go to sleep without digging up the past because it was more comfortable for him to believe that those stumbling blocks in national history were feverish deliriums, sleep, mother, he begged her, he wrapped her from head to toe in a linen sheet one of the many he had had made so as not to hurt her sores, he laid her down to sleep on her side with her hand on her heart, he consoled her with don’t try to remember that sorry mess, mother, in any case I’m me, sleep softly. The many and ardent official attempts to calm the public rumors that the matriarch of the nation was rotting away in life had been useless, they published contrived medical reports, but the very couriers who carried the bulletins averred that what they themselves denied was true, that the air of corruption was so intense in the dying woman’s bedroom that it had even frightened the lepers away, that they had butchered rams in order to bathe her in warm blood, that they took away sheets soaked in iridescent matter that flowed from her sores and no matter how much they washed them they were unable to return them to their original splendor, that no one had seen him again in the milking stalls or in the concubines’ rooms where he had always been seen at daybreak even in the worst of times, the primate archbishop himself had offered to administer the last rites to the dying woman but he had left him standing at the door, no one’s dying, father, don’t believe rumors, he told him, he shared his meals with his mother on the same plate with the same spoon in spite of the pesthouse atmosphere in the room, he bathed her before putting her to bed with thankful-dog soap while his heart stood still with pity from the instructions she gave him with the last threads of her voice for the care of the animals after her death, that the peacocks should not be plucked to make hats, yes mother, he said, and he rubbed her body all over with creolin, don’t let them make the birds sing at parties, yes mother, and he wrapped her in the sleeping sheet, they should take the hens out of their nests when there’s thunder so they don’t hatch basilisks, yes mother, and he laid her down with her hand on her heart, yes mother, sleep easy, he kissed her forehead, he slept the few hours remaining lying face down next to the bed, hanging on the drift of her sleep, hanging on the interminable delirium that was becoming more lucid as it approached death, learning with his accumulated rage gathered each night to bear up under the immense fury of the Monday of grief when the terrible silence of the world at dawn awoke him and it was that his mother of my life Bendición Alvarado had stopped breathing, and then he unwrapped the loathsome body and saw in the tenuous glow of the first cock’s crow that there was another identical body with the hand on the heart painted in profile on the sheet, and he saw that the painted body had no plague wrinkles or ravages of old age but that it was firm and tight as if painted in oil on both sides of the shroud and it gave off a natural fragrance of young flowers that purified the hospital atmosphere of the bedroom and try as they might by rubbing with nitrate rock and boiling it in lye they could not erase it from the sheet because it was integrated front and back into the very material of the linen, and it was eternal linen, but he had not been calm enough to measure the scope of that miracle but had left the bedroom slamming the door with such rage that it sounded like a shot throughout the building, and then the bells in the cathedral began tolling and then those of every church in the nation which tolled without pause for one hundred days, and those who woke up to the bells understood with no illusions that he was once more the master of all his power and that the enigma of his heart oppressed by the rage over that death was rising up stronger than ever against the whims of reason and dignity and indulgence, because his mother of my life Bendición Alvarado had died on that early dawn of Monday February twenty-third and a new century of confusion and scandal was beginning in the world. None of us was old enough to have witnessed that death but the fame of the funeral ceremonies had come down to our times and we had trustworthy reports that he did not go back to being what he had been before for the rest of his life, no one had the right to disturb his orphan’s insomnia for much more than the hundred days of official mourning, he was not seen again in the house of grief whose confines had been overflown by the immense resonances of the funeral bells, he had no time except for his mourning, he spoke to himself in sighs, the household guard went about barefoot as during the fi
rst years of his regime and only the hens could do what they wanted in the forbidden house whose monarch had become invisible, bleeding with rage in the wicker rocking chair while his mother of my soul Bendición Alvarado was going through those wastelands of heat and misery inside a coffin full of sawdust and chopped ice so that her body would not rot more than it had in life, for the body had been carried in a solemn procession to the least-explored corners of his realm so that no one would go without the privilege of honoring her memory, they carried it with hymns of black-ribbon winds to stations on the upland plains where it was received with the same mournful music by the same mournful throngs who in other days of glory had come to see the power hidden in the shadows of the presidential coach, they displayed the body in the convent of the Sisters of Charity where a wandering bird-woman at the beginning of time had given difficult birth to a no man’s son who became king, they opened the large doors of the sanctuary for the first time in a century, mounted troops made a roundup of Indians in the villages, they herded them along, drove them with rifle butts into the vast nave of the church afflicted by the icy suns of the stained-glass windows where nine bishops in pontificals sang Tenebrae, rest in peace in your glory, the deacons sang, the acolytes, rest in your ashes, they sang, outside it was raining on the geraniums, the novices distributed cane juice and the bread of the dead, people sold spareribs, rosaries, flasks of holy water under the stone arcades of the courtyards, there was music in the sidewalk cafés, there was gunpowder, there was dancing in the entranceways, it was Sunday, now and forever, they were years of festivals along the escape trails and the foggy mountain passes where his mother of my death Bendición Alvarado had passed into life following the son who was making merry in the federalist whirlwind, for she had taken care of him during the war, she had kept the troops’ mules from trampling him when he flopped onto the ground rolled up in a blanket, unconscious, talking nonsense because of tertian fever, she had tried to inculcate in him her ancestral fear of the dangers that lay in wait in the cities by the shadowy sea for people from the plains, she was afraid of the viceroys, the statues, the crabs that drink the tears of the newborn, she had trembled in terror before the majesty of the house of power which she first saw through the rain on the night of the attack without having imagined then that it was the house where she would die, the house of solitude where he was, where he asked himself in the heat of rage lying face down on the floor where the hell have you gone, mother, in what grubby mangrove swamp has your body got entangled, who shoos the butterflies from your face, he sighed, prostrate with grief, while his mother Bendición Alvarado floated along under a canopy of banana leaves through the nauseating vapors of the swamps to be displayed in backwoods public schools, in barracks on the saltpeter deserts, in Indian corrals, they displayed her in the main houses along with a picture of her when she was young, was languid, was beautiful, a diadem had been placed on her forehead, a lace gorget had been placed around her neck against her will, she had let them put powder on her face and lipstick on her mouth for just that one time, they put a silk tulip in her hand so that she would hold it that way, not like that, madam, like this, casually in her lap when the Venetian photographer of European monarchs took her official portrait as first lady as a final proof against any suspicion of substitution, and they were identical, for nothing had been left to chance, the body was being reconstructed in secret sessions as the cosmetics wore off and the skin wrinkled as the paraffin melted in the heat, they removed the mildew from her eyelids during the rainy season, army seamstresses kept her burial dress in shape as if it had been put on yesterday and they maintained in a state of grace the crown of orange blossoms and the veil of a virgin bride which she had never had during her lifetime, so that no one in this brothel of idolaters would ever dare repeat that you were different from your picture, mother, so that no one will forget who it is who rules till the end of time even in the poorest settlements on jungle sand dunes where after so many years of being forgotten at midnight they saw the return of the ancient riverboat with its wooden paddle wheel with all lights on and they received it with Easter drums thinking that the times of glory had returned, long live the stud, they shouted, blessed be the one who comes in the name of truth, they shouted, they jumped into the water with their fattened armadillos, with a pumpkin the size of an ox, they climbed over the carved wood railings to render the tribute of submission to the invisible power whose dice decided the fate of the nation and they stood breathless before the catafalque of chopped ice and rock salt which was multiplied by the startling glass of the mirrors in the presidential galley, exposed to public judgment under the fan blades in the archaic pleasure boat that traveled month after month among the ephemeral isles of the equatorial tributaries until it got lost in a nightmare age in which gardenias had the use of reason and iguanas flew about in the darkness, the world ended, the wooden wheel ran aground on sandbanks of gold, broke, the ice melted, the salt turned liquid, the swollen body remained floating adrift in a soup of sawdust, and yet it didn’t rot, quite the contrary general sir, because then we saw her open her eyes and we saw that her pupils were bright and had the color of January wolfsbane and their usual quality of lunar stones, and even the most incredulous among us had seen the glass cover of the coffin fog over from the vapor of her breath and we had seen living and fragrant perspiration coming from her pores, and we saw her smile. You can’t imagine what it was all like general sir, it was fantastic, we’ve seen mules give birth, we’ve seen flowers growing in the salt flats, we’ve seen deaf-mutes confused by the miracles of their own cries of miracle, miracle, miracle, they broke the glass of the coffin general sir and they were at the point of making mincemeat out of the corpse in order to distribute the relics, so we had to use a battalion of grenadiers to hold back the frantic mobs who were arriving in a tumult from the breeding ground of islands which is the Caribbean captivated by the news that the soul of your mother Bendición Alvarado had obtained from God the faculty of going against the laws of nature, they were selling shreds of the shroud, they were selling scapulars, waters from her body, cards with her picture as a queen, but it was such a huge and wild rabblement that it looked more like a torrent of untamed steers whose hoofs devastated everything they found in their path and they made an earthquake roar that even you yourself can hear from here if you listen carefully general sir, listen to it, and he cupped his hand behind his ear which was buzzing less, he listened carefully, and then he heard, mother of mine Bendición Alvarado, he heard the endless thunder, he saw the bubbling swamp of the vast crowd spreading out all the way to the horizon of the sea, he saw the torrent of lighted candles that brought out a different and even more radiant day within the radiant brightness of noon, for his mother of my soul Bendición Alvarado was returning to the city of her ancient terrors as she had arrived the first time with the turmoil of war, with the raw-meat smell of war, but free forever of the risks of the world because he had them tear the pages about the viceroys out of school primers so that they would not exist in history, he had forbidden the statues that disturbed your sleep, mother, so that now she was returning without her congenital fears on the shoulders of a peaceful multitude, she was returning without a coffin, under a clear sky, in an air forbidden to butterflies, overwhelmed by the golden weight of the religious offerings that had been hung on her during the interminable journey from the far reaches of the jungle across his vast and convulsed realm of sorrow, hidden under the pile of small gold crutches that recovered cripples had hung on her, the gold stars of shipwrecked sailors, the gold babies of incredulous barren women who had had to give emergency birth in the bushes, as in the war, general sir, drifting along in the center of the sweeping torrent of the biblical move of a whole nation which could not find a place to put down its kitchenware, its animals, the remains of a life with no more hope of redemption than the very secret prayers that Bendición Alvarado said during combat to turn the direction of the bullets shot at her son, how he had come in the tumult of the wa
r with a red rag on his head shouting during the lull in fighting from the delirium of fever long live the liberal party, God damn it, long live victorious federalism, shitty Goths, even though really drawn along by the atavistic curiosity of knowing the sea, except that the misery-ridden crowd that had invaded the city with the corpse of his mother was more turbulent and frantic than any that had ravaged the country during the adventures of the federalist war, more voracious than that turmoil, more terrible than that panic, the most tremendous thing my eyes had seen in all the uncounted years of his power, the whole world general sir, look, what a wonder. Convinced by the evidence, he came out of the mist of his mourning, he came out pale, hard, with a black armband, resolved to make use of all the resources of his authority to attain the canonization of his mother Bendición Alvarado on the basis of the overwhelming proofs of her qualities as a saint, he sent his ministers of letters to Rome, once more he invited the apostolic nuncio for chocolate and cookies in the shafts of light under the pansy bower, he received him in a familiar way, he lying in his hammock, shirtless, fanning himself with his white hat, and the nuncio sitting opposite him with the cup of steaming chocolate, immune to the heat and the dust inside the lavender aura of his Sunday cassock, immune to the tropical languor, immune to the shitting of the dead mother’s birds as they flew free through the puddlelike splotches of sun from the covering, he took measured sips of the vanilla chocolate, chewed the cookies with the modesty of a bride trying to delay the inevitable poison in the last sip, rigid in the wicker chair which he never let anyone sit in, only you, father, as on those mallow-mild afternoons of the days of glory when another old and innocent nuncio tried to convert him to the faith of Christ with Scholastic riddles from Thomas Aquinas, except that now I’m the one who is calling upon you to convert, father, that’s the way the world turns, but I believe now, although in reality he didn’t believe anything in this world or any other except that his mother of my life had a right to the glory of altars because of the very merits of her vocation for sacrifice and her exemplary modesty, so much so that he wasn’t basing his request upon the public excitement over the fact that the north star moved along in the same direction as the funeral cortege and stringed instruments played all by themselves in their cabinets when they heard the corpse pass by but he based it on the virtue of this sheet which he unfurled full sail in the splendor of August so that the nuncio could see what indeed he did see printed on the texture of the linen, he saw the image of his mother Bendición Alvarado with no trace of old age or the ravages of disease lying on her side with her hand on her heart, he felt the dampness of eternal sweat on her fingers, he breathed in the fragrance of living flowers in the midst of the uproar of the birds roused up by the breath of the miracle, you can see what a wonder, father, he said, showing the sheet up and down and on both sides, even the birds recognize her, but the nuncio was absorbed in the cloth with an incisive attention that had been capable of discovering impurities of volcanic ash in the materials worked by the great masters of Christendom, he had known the cracks in character and even the doubts of a faith from the intensity of a color, he had suffered the ecstasy of the roundness of the earth lying face up under the dome of a solitary chapel in an unreal city where time did not pass but floated, until he got enough courage to take his eyes off the sheet and his deep contemplation and declared with a soft but irreparable tone that the body printed on the linen was not an act of Divine Providence to give us one more proof of His infinite mercy, not that or anything like it, your excellency, it was the work of a painter who was very skilled in the good and evil arts and who had abused your excellency’s greatness of heart, because that wasn’t oil paint it was house paint of the cheapest kind, for painting window frames, your excellency, beneath the smell of the natural resins that had dissolved in the paint the bastard dew of turpentine still remained, plaster crusts remained, a persistent dampness remained that was not the sweat of the last shudder of death as they had made him believe but the fake dampness of linen soaked in linseed oil and kept in dark places, believe me I’m terribly sorry, the nuncio concluded with genuine sadness, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything more as he faced the granite old man who was looking at him without blinking from the hammock, who had listened to him from the slime of his lugubrious Asiatic silences without even moving his mouth to contradict him in spite of the fact that no one knew better than he the truth of the secret miracle of the sheet in which I myself wrapped you with my own hands, mother, I was frightened with the first silence of your death which was as if the world had dawned at the bottom of the sea, I saw the miracle, God damn it, but in spite of his certainty he didn’t interrupt the verdict of the nuncio, he only blinked a couple of times without closing his eyes, as iguanas do, he only smiled, it’s all right, father, he finally sighed, it’s probably the way you say, but I warn you that you carry the burden of your words, I’ll repeat it letter by letter so that you won’t forget it for the rest of your life you carry the burden of your words, father, I’m not responsible. The world remained in a lethargy during the week of evil omens in which he didn’t get out of the hammock even to eat, he used the fan to shoo off the tame birds who alighted on his body, he shooed away the splotches of light coming through the pansies thinking they were tame birds, he received no one, he gave no orders, but the forces of public order remained aloof when the mobs of hired fanatics stormed the palace of the Apostolic Nunciature, sacked its museum of historic relics, surprised the nuncio taking his siesta outdoors in the peaceful backwaters of the inner garden, dragged him naked onto the street, shat on him general sir, just imagine, but he didn’t move from the hammock, he didn’t blink when they came to him with the news general sir that they were parading the nuncio through the business streets on a donkey under a downpour of dishwater thrown onto him from balconies, shouted pretty boy at him, miss Vatican, suffer the little children to come unto me, and only when they left him half dead on the garbage heap in the public market did he get up out of the hammock waving the birds out of the way with his hands, appear in the hearing room waving away the cobwebs of mourning with the black armband and his eyes puffy from poor sleep, and then he gave orders for the nuncio to be placed on a life raft with provisions for three days and they cast him adrift on the lane that cruise ships took to Europe so that the whole world will know what happens to foreigners who lift their hands against the majesty of the nation, and the Pope will learn now and forever that he may be Pope in Rome with his ring on his finger sitting on his golden throne, but here I am what I am, God damn it, them and their shitty petticoats. It was an effective recourse, because before that year was out the process was initiated for the canonization of his mother Bendición Alvarado whose uncorrupted body was displayed for public veneration in the main nave of the cathedral, the Gloria was sung on altars, the state of war that he had declared against the Holy See was revoked, long live peace, the crowds on the main square shouted, long live God, they shouted, while in a solemn audience he received the auditor of the Sacred Congregation of the Rite and promoter and postulator of the faith Monsignor Demetrius Aldous, known as the Eritrene, to whom had been entrusted the mission of scrutinizing the life of Bendición Alvarado until not the slightest trace of doubt remained regarding the evidence of her sainthood, take as long as you like, father, he said to him, holding his hand in his, for he had an immediate confidence in that jaundiced Abyssinian who loved life above all things, he ate iguana eggs, general sir, he loved cockfights, the humor of mulatto women, dancing the cumbia, just like us general sir, the whole bag, and the most heavily guarded doors were opened without restriction by his orders so that the scrutiny of the devil’s advocate would not run into difficulties of any kind, because there was nothing hidden just as there was nothing invisible in his measureless nightmare realm that wouldn’t be an irrefutable proof that his mother of my soul Bendición Alvarado was predestined to the glory of altars, the nation is yours, father, here it is, and there he had it, of course, the armed
forces maintained order at the palace of the Apostolic Nunciature across from which at dawn could be seen the uncountable lines of restored lepers who came to show the newborn skin over their sores, former victims of St. Vitus’s dance came to thread needles before the disbelieving, to display their fortunes came those who had been enriched by the roulette table because Bendición Alvarado had revealed the numbers in her dreams to them, those who had had news of lost relatives and friends, those who had found their drowned ones, those who had had nothing and now had everything came, paraded by without cease through the oven-hot office decorated with cannibal-killing muskets and prehistoric tortoises of Sir Walter Raleigh where the tireless Eritrene listened to all without asking any questions, without interrupting, soaked in sweat, alien to the plague of humanity in decomposition that was accumulating in the office where the air was rarefied by the smoke of his cigarettes which were of the cheapest kind, he took detailed notes of the declarations of the witnesses and had them sign here, with your full name, or with an X, or like you general sir with your fingerprint, in one way or another, but they signed, the next one came in, just like the one before, I was consumptive, father, he said, I was consumptive, wrote the Eritrene, and now listen to me, sign, I was impotent, father, and now look how I can go all day long, I was impotent, he wrote in indelible ink so that his careful writing would be safe from changes until the end of humanity, I had a live animal inside my belly, father, I had a live animal inside my belly, he wrote coldly, drunk with cheap bitter coffee, poisoned by the rancid tobacco of the cigarette that he lighted from the butt of the previous one, his collar unbuttoned like an oarsman’s general sir, that’s a real stud of a priest, yes sir, he said, a real stud, to each his own, working ceaselessly, not eating anything so as not to lose any time until well into the night, but even then he wouldn’t take any rest but would appear freshly bathed in the dockside taverns in his rough patched cassock, he would arrive starving, sit down at the long plank table to share the bream stew with the longshoremen, he tore the fish apart with his fingers, he ground it right down to the bone with those Luciferine teeth that had their own glow in the dark, he drank his soup from the edge of the plate like a stevedore general sir, if you only could have seen him mingling with the human scum off the shabby sailing ships that weighed anchor loaded with fags and green bananas, loaded with shipments of unripe whores for the glass hotels of Curaçao, for Guantánamo, father, for Santiago de los Caballeros which doesn’t even have a sea to get there by, father, for the saddest and most beautiful islands in the world that we go on dreaming about until the first light of dawn, father, remember how different we were when the schooners left, remember the parrot who could guess the future in the house of Matilde Arenales, the crabs that came walking out of the bowls of soup, the shark wind, the distant drums, life, father, bitchy life, boys, because he talks like us general sir, as if he’d been born in the dogfight district, he played ball on the beach, he learned to play the accordion better than the natives, he sang better than they, he learned the flowery language of the queens, he teased them in Latin, he got drunk with them in the fairy joints in the marketplace, he got into a fight with one of them because he said something bad about God, they started punching each other general sir, what shall we do, and he gave the order that nobody should separate them, they formed a circle around them, he won, the priest won general sir, I knew it, he said, pleased, he’s a stud, and not as frivolous as everybody thought, because on those wild nights he found more truth than during the wearisome days in the palace of the Apostolic Nunciature, much more than in the shadowy suburban mansion that he had explored without permission one afternoon during a heavy rain when he thought he had tricked the sleepless vigilance of the presidential security services, he scrutinized it down to the last chink soaked by the interior rain from the roof gutters, trapped by the quicksands of malangas and the poisonous camellias of the splendid sleeping quarters that Bendición Alvarado had abandoned to the happiness of the servants, because she was good, father, she was humble, she put them to sleep on percale sheets while she slept on a bare mat on an army cot, she let them wear her first lady’s Sunday clothes, they perfumed themselves with her bath salts, they frolicked naked with the orderlies in the colored bubbles in pewter bathtubs with lion’s feet, they lived like queens while her life slipped past as she painted birds, cooked her vegetable mush on the wood fire, and cultivated medicinal plants for the emergencies of neighbors who would wake her up in the middle of the night with I’ve got a stomach spasm, ma’am, and she would give them watercress seeds to chew, that a godson was cross-eyed, and she would give him a worm remedy of epazote tea, I’m going to die, ma’am, but they didn’t die because she held health in her hand, she was a living saint, father, she walked about in her own pure space through that mansion of pleasure where it had rained without pity ever since they took her by force to the presidential palace, it rained on the lotus blossoms on the piano, on the alabaster table in the sumptuous dining room which Bendición Alvarado never used because it’s like sitting down to eat at an altar, just imagine, father, such a presentiment of sainthood, but in spite of the feverish testimony of the neighbors the devil’s advocate found more traces of timidity than humility among the ruins, he found more proofs of poorness of spirit than abnegation among the ebony Neptunes and the pieces of native demons and war-like angels that were floating in the mangrove swamps of the former ballrooms, and on the other hand he did not find the slightest trace of that other difficult god, one and trine, who had sent him from the burning plains of Abyssinia in search of truth where it had never been, because he found nothing general sir, as he said nothing, what a mess. Yet Monsignor Demetrius Aldous was not satisfied merely with the scrutiny of the city but went up on muleback into the glacial limbo of the upland barrens trying to find the seeds of Bendición Alvarado’s sainthood where her image might still not be perverted by the splendor of power, he rose out of the mist wrapped in a highwayman’s cloak and wearing seven-league boots like a satanic apparition who at first aroused the fear and then the surprise and finally the curiosity of the uplanders who had never seen a human being of that color, but the astute Eritrene urged them to touch to convince themselves that he didn’t give off tar, he showed them his teeth in the darkness, he got drunk with them eating cheese with his hand and drinking corn liquor out of the same gourd in order to win their trust in the gloomy little stores along the trails where at the dawn of other centuries they had known a striking birdwoman weighted down by her mad load of cages with chicks painted as nightingales, golden toucans, goatsuckers disguised as peacocks to trick mountain people on the funereal Sundays of upland fairs, she would sit there, father, in the glow of the bonfires, waiting for someone to do her the charity of going to bed with her on the wineskins full of molasses in the back of the store, in order to eat, father, only in order to eat, because no one was such a mountain hick as to buy those cheap goods of hers that faded with the first rain and fell apart when they walked, only she was so innocent, father, holy benediction of the birds, or of the barrens, as you wish, because no one knew for certain what her name was then or when she started calling herself Bendición Alvarado which couldn’t have been her original name because it’s not a name from these parts but for coastal people, what a mess, even that had been checked on by Satan’s slippery prosecutor who was uncovering and digging out everything in spite of the presidential security thugs who tangled up the thread of the truth on him and put invisible barriers in his way, what do you think, general sir, they could hound him off a cliff like a deer, they could make his mule stumble on him, he stopped that with the personal order to watch him but to maintain his physical integrity repeat maintain physical integrity permitting absolute freedom all facilities fulfilling his mission by command without appeal from this highest authority obey carry out, signed I, and he repeated, I myself, conscious of the fact that with that decision he was taking on the terrible risk of learning the true image of his mother Bendición Alvarado dur
ing the forbidden times when she was still young, was languid, went about dressed in rags, barefoot, and had to use her lower parts in order to eat, but she was beautiful, father, and she was so innocent that she fitted out the cheapest lory parrots with tails from the finest cocks to make them pass for macaws, she repaired crippled hens with turkey-feather fans and sold them as birds of paradise, no one believed it, of course, no one was innocent enough to fall into the snare of the solitary birdwoman who whispered about in the mist of Sunday marketplaces to see who would say one and take her for nothing, because everybody on the barrens remembered her for her innocence and her poverty, and yet it seemed impossible to discover her identity because in the records of the monastery where she had been baptized her birth certificate could not be found and on the other hand they found three different ones for her son and on all three he was three times different, conceived three times on three different occasions, given a bad birth three times thanks to the artifices of national history which had entangled the threads of reality so that no one would be able to decipher the secret of his origins, the occult mystery which only the Eritrene managed to track down by removing the numerous falsehoods superimposed on it, because he had glimpsed it general sir, he had it within reach of his hand when there came the immense explosion that kept echoing along the gray ridges and deep canyons of the mountain range and one heard the endless wail of fright of the tumbling mule as it went on falling dizzily and endlessly from the peaks of perpetual snow through successive and instantaneous climes out of natural-history prints of the precipice and the birth trickle of great navigable waters and the high cornices up to which the learned doctors of the botanical expedition had climbed on Indian back with their herbal secrets, and the steppes of wild magnolias where warm-wooled sheep grazed the ones who give us generous sustenance and cover and good example and the mansions of the coffee plantations with their paper wreaths on solitary balconies and their endless invalids and the perpetual roar of the turbulent rivers of the great natural boundary lines where the heat began and at dusk there were pestilent waves from an old dead man dead from treachery dead all alone in the cacao groves with their great persistent leaves and scarlet blossoms and berry fruit whose seeds were used as the principal ingredient of chocolate and the motionless sun and the burning dust and the seed gourd and the honey gourd and the sad and skinny cows of the Atlantic province in the only charity school for two hundred leagues around and the exhalation of the still-living mule whose guts exploded like a succulent sour-sop among the banana trees and frightened pullets at the bottom of the abyss, God damn it, they deer-hunted him general sir, they had hunted him down with a jaguar rifle at the pass of the Solitary Soul in spite of the protection of my authority, sons of bitches, in spite of my strong telegrams, God damn it, but now they’re going to find out who’s who, he bellowed, chewing on his froth of gall not so much because of rage over the disobedience as over the certainty that they were hiding something big from him since they had dared go against the thunderbolts of his power, he carefully observed the breathing of those who gave him the information because he knew that only one who knew the truth would have the courage to lie to him, he scrutinized the secret intentions of the high command to see which of them was the traitor, you who I brought up out of nothing, you who I put to sleep in a golden bed after finding you on the ground, you whose life I saved, you who I bought for more money than anyone else, all of you, you dirty mothers’ sons, because only one of them would dare disregard a telegram signed with my name and countersigned with the wax of the ring of his power, so he assumed personal command of the rescue operation with the unrepeatable order that within a maximum of forty-eight hours you find him alive and bring him to me and if you find him dead bring him to me alive and if you don’t find him bring him to me, an order so unmistakable and fearsome that before the time was up they came to him with the news general sir that they had found him in the underbrush of the precipice with his wounds cauterized by the golden flowers of the frailejone plant more alive than any of us general sir, safe and sound by virtue of his mother Bendición Alvarado who once more was giving a sign of her clemency and her power in the very person of the one who had tried to damage her memory, they brought him down along Indian trails on a hammock hung on a pole with an escort of grenadiers and preceded by a bullfight master on horseback who rang a high-mass bell so that everyone would know that this was a matter of the one who gives the orders, they put him in the bedroom for honored guests in the presidential palace under the immediate responsibility of the minister of health until he was able to bring to a close that terrible report written in his own hand and countersigned with his initials on the right-hand margin of every one of the three hundred and fifty folios of every one of these seven volumes which I sign with my name and my flourish and which I guarantee with my seal on this fourteenth day of the month of April of this year of Our Lord, I, Demetrius Aldous, auditor of the Sacred Congregation of the Rite, postulator and promoter of the faith, by the mandate of the Immense Constitution and for the splendor of justice of men on earth and the greater glory of God in the heavens I affirm and show this to be the only truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, your excellency, here it is. There it was, indeed, captive in seven lacquered bibles, so unavoidable and brutal that only a man immune to the spell of glory and alien to the interests of his power dared expose it in living flesh before the impassive old man who listened to him without blinking fanning himself in the wicker rocking chair, who only sighed after each mortal revelation, who only said aha, repeated it, using his hat to shoo away the April flies aroused by the luncheon leftovers, swallowing whole truths, bitter truths, truths which were like live coals that kept on burning in the shadows of his heart, because everything had been a farce, your excellency, a carnival apparatus that he himself had put together without really thinking about it when he decided that the corpse of his mother should be displayed for public veneration on a catafalque of ice long before anyone thought about the merits of her sainthood and only to contradict the evil tongues that said you were rotting away before you died, a circus trick which he had fallen into himself without knowing it ever since they came to him with the news general sir that his mother Bendición Alvarado was performing miracles and he had ordered her body carried in a magnificent procession into the most unknown corners of his vast statueless country so that no one should be left who did not know the worth of your virtues after so many years of sterile mortification, after so many painted birds without benefit, mother, after so much love without thanks, although it never would have occurred to me that the order was to be changed into the jape of the false dropsy victims who were paid to get rid of their water in public, they had paid two hundred pesos to a false dead man who arose from his grave and appeared walking on his knees through the crowd frightened by his ragged shroud and his mouth full of earth, they had paid eighty pesos to a gypsy woman who pretended to give birth in the middle of the street to a two-headed monster as punishment for having said that the miracles had been set up by the government, and that they had been, there wasn’t a single witness who hadn’t been paid money, an ignominious conspiracy that none the less had not been put together by his adulators with the innocent idea of pleasing him as Monsignor Demetrius Aldous had imagined during his first scrutinies, no, your excellency, it was a dirty piece of business on the part of your proselytes, the most scandalous and sacrilegious of all the things they had made proliferate in the shadow of his power, because the ones who had invented the miracles and backed up the testimonies of lies were the same followers of his regime who had manufactured and sold the relics of the dead bride’s gown worn by his mother Bendición Alvarado, aha, the same ones who had printed the little cards and coined the medals with her portrait as a queen, aha, the ones who enriched themselves with curls from her head, aha, with the flasks of water drawn from her side, aha, with the shroud of diagonal cloth where they used door paint to sketch the tender body of a virgin sleeping in profile with
her hand on her heart and which was sold by the yard in the back rooms of Hindu bazaars, a monstrous lie sustained by the supposition that the corpse remained uncorrupted before the avid eyes of the endless throng that filed through the main nave of the cathedral, when the truth was quite something else, your excellency, it was that the body of his mother was not preserved because of her virtues or through the repair work done with paraffin and the cosmetic tricks that he had decided upon out of pure filial pride but that she had been stuffed according to the worst skills of taxidermy just like the posthumous animals in science museums as he found out with my own hands, mother, I opened the glass casket as the funereal emblems fell apart with the air, I took the crown of orange blossoms from your moldy brow where the stiff filly-mane hairs had been pulled out by the roots strand by strand to be sold as relics, I pulled you out from under the damp gauze of your bridal veil and the dry residue and the difficult saltpeter sunsets of death and you weighed the same as a sun-dried gourd and you had an old trunk-bottom smell and I could sense inside of you a feverish restlessness that was like the sound of your soul and it was the scissor-slicing of the moth larvae who were chewing you up inside, your limbs fell off by themselves when I tried to hold you in my arms because they had removed the innards of everything that held together your live body of a sleeping happy mother with her hand on her heart and they had stuffed you up again with rags so that all that was left of what had been you was only a shell with dusty stuffing that crumbled just by being lifted in the phosphorescent air of your firefly bones and all that could be heard were the flea leaps of the glass eyes on the pavement of the dusk-lighted church, turned to nothing, it was a trickle of the remains of a demolished mother which the bailiffs scooped up from the floor with a shovel to throw it back any way they could into the box under the gaze of monolithic sternness from the indecipherable satrap whose iguana eyes refused to let the slightest emotion show through even when he was all alone in the unmarked berlin with the only man in this world who had dared place him in front of the mirror of truth, both looked out through the haze of the window curtains at the hordes of needy who were finding relief from the heat-ridden afternoon in the dew-cool doorways where previously they had sold pamphlets describing atrocious crimes and luckless loves and carnivorous flowers and inconceivable fruits that compromised the will and where now one only heard the deafening racket of the stalls selling false relics of the clothes and the body of his mother Bendición Alvarado, while he underwent the clear impression that Monsignor Demetrius Aldous had read his thoughts when he turned his sight away from the mobs of invalids and murmured that when all’s said and done something good had come out of the rigor of his scrutiny and it was the certainty that these poor people love your excellency as they love their own lives, because Monsignor Demetrius Aldous had caught sight of the perfidy within the presidential palace itself, had seen the greed within the adulation and the wily servility among those who flourished under the umbrella of power, and he had come to know on the other hand a new form of love among the droves of needy who expected nothing from him because they expected nothing from anyone and they professed for him an earthly devotion that could be held in one’s hands and a loyalty without illusions that we should only want for God, your excellency, but he did not even blink when faced with that startling revelation which in other times would have made his insides twist, nor did he sigh but meditated to himself with a hidden restlessness that this was all we needed, father, all we need is for nobody to love me now that you’re going off to take advantage of the glory of my misfortune under the golden cupolas of your fallacious world while he was left with the undeserved burden of truth without a loving mother who could help him through it, more lonely than a left hand in this nation which I didn’t choose willingly but which was given me as an established fact in the way you have seen it which is as it has always been since time immemorial with this feeling of unreality, with this smell of shit, with this unhistoried people who don’t believe in anything except life, this is the nation they forced on me without even asking me, father, with one-hundred-degree heat and ninety-eight-percent humidity in the upholstered shadows of the presidential berlin, breathing dust, tormented by the perfidy of the rupture that whistled like a teakettle during audiences, no one to lose a game of dominoes to, and no one to believe his truth, father, put yourself in my skin, but he didn’t say it, he just sighed, he just blinked for an instant and asked Monsignor Demetrius Aldous that the brutal conversation of that afternoon remain between ourselves, you haven’t told me anything, father, I don’t know the truth, promise me that, and Monsignor Demetrius Aldous promised him that of course your excellency doesn’t know the truth, my word as a man. The cause of Bendición Alvarado was suspended for insufficient proof, and the edict from Rome was made public from pulpits with official permission along with the determination of the government to repress any protest or attempt at disorder, but forces of public order did not intervene when hordes of indignant pilgrims built bonfires on the main square with the large wooden doors of the cathedral and broke the stained-glass windows with angels and gladiators of the Apostolic Nunciature with stones, they demolished everything general sir, but he didn’t move from the hammock, they laid siege to the convent of the Biscayan nuns to leave them to perish without food and water, they sacked churches, mission houses, they destroyed everything that had to do with priests general sir, but he remained motionless in the hammock under the cool shadows of the pansies until the commandants of his general staff in plenary session declared themsleves incapable of calming spirits and reestablishing order without the shedding of blood as had been resolved, and only then did he get up, appear in his office after so many months of indolence, and assume with his own voice and in person the solemn responsibility of interpreting the popular will through a decree which he conceived through his own inspiration and he proclaimed it on his own and at his own risk without advising the armed forces or consulting his ministers and in the first article of which he proclaimed the civil sainthood of Bendición Alvarado by the supreme decision of the free and sovereign people, he named her patroness of the nation, curer of the ill and mistress of birds and a national holiday was declared on her birthday, and in the second article and beginning with the promulgation of the present decree a state of war was declared between this nation and the powers of the Holy See with all the consequences which international law and all extant international treaties have established for such cases, and in the third article there was ordered the immediate, public and solemn expulsion of his grace the archbishop primate followed by that of bishops, apostolic prefects, priests, nuns and all persons native and foreign who had anything to do with the business of God in any condition and under any title within the borders of the country and up to fifty nautical leagues in territorial waters, and ordered in the fourth and last article was the expropriation of all goods of the church, its houses of worship, its convents, its schools, its arable lands with tools and animals thereon, its sugar plantations, factories and workshops and in the same manner everything which really belonged to it even though registered in the name of a third party, which goods would go to form part of the posthumous patrimony of Saint Bendición Alvarado of the Birds for the splendor of her cult and the grandeur of her memory from the date of the present decree promulgated orally and signed with the seal of the ring of this unappealable maximum authority of the supreme power, let it be obeyed and carried out. In the midst of the rockets of celebration, the bell-ringing of glory and the music of pleasure with which the event of the civil canonization was celebrated, he busied himself in person to see that the decree was carried out without any dubious maneuvers so as to be sure they would not make him the victim of new tricks, he picked up the reins of reality again with his firm velvet gloves as in the days of great glory when the people cut off his path on the stairs to beg him to restore horse racing in the streets and he so ordered, agreed, that sack races be revived and he so ordered, agreed, and he would appear in the
most miserable of villages to explain how they should put hens in their nests and how calves should be gelded, because he had just been satisfied with his personal test of the minute details of the taking of inventory of church goods but he took charge of the formal ceremonies of expropriation so that there would be no chink between his will and the accomplished acts, he checked the facts on paper against the tricky facts of real life, he oversaw the expulsion of the larger communities to whom had been attributed the intent of smuggling out in bags with double bottoms and trick brassieres the secret treasures of the last viceroy which had been buried in potter’s field in spite of the bloodthirsty way in which the federalist leaders had searched for them during the long years of war, and not only did he order that no member of the church was to take with him any more baggage than a change of clothing but he decided beyond appeal that they be embarked naked as the day their mothers bore them, the rough village priests to whom it made no difference whether to wear clothes or go naked as long as they had a change of fortune, the prefects from mission lands who had been devastated by malaria, clean-shaven and dignified bishops, and behind them the women, the timid sisters of charity, the fierce missionary nuns accustomed to taming nature and making vegetables grow in the desert, and the slender Biscayan sisters who played the harpsichord, and the Salesian sisters with thin hands and bodies intact, because even in the naked hide with which they had been thrown into the world it was possible to distinguish their high-class origins, the difference in their condition, and the inequality of their office as they filed past bundles of cacao and sacks of salted catfish in the huge customhouse shed, they went by in a whirling tumult of frightened sheep with their arms crossed over their breasts trying to hide the shame of the ones with that of the others before the old man who looked like stone under the fan blades, who looked at them without breathing, without taking his eyes off the fixed space through which the torrent of naked women would inexorably have to pass, he contemplated them impassively, without blinking, until there was not a single one left in all the national territory, for these were the last of them general sir, and yet he only remembered one whom he had separated with a simple touch of his glance from the troop of frightened novices, he distinguished her among the others in spite of the fact that she was no different, she was small and sturdy, robust, with opulent buttocks, large full teats, clumsy hands, protuberant sex, hair cut with pruning shears, spaced teeth firm as ax heads, snub nose, flat feet, a novice as mediocre as all of them, but he sensed that she was the only woman in the drove of naked women, the only one who on passing in front of him had left the obscure trail of a wild animal who carried off my vital air and he barely had time to change his imperceptible look to see her a second time forevermore when the officer from the identification services found her name in alphabetical order in the roster and shouted Nazareno Leticia, and she answered with a man’s voice, present. That was how he had her for the rest of his life, present, until the last nostalgia trickled away through the fissures in his memory and all that remained was the image of her on the strip of paper where he had written Leticia Nazareno of my soul look what has become of me without you, he hid it in the cranny where he kept the honey, he would reread it when he knew he was not being observed, he would roll it up again after reliving for a fleeting instant the unforgettable afternoon of radiant rain on which they surprised him with the news general sir that they had repatriated you in fulfillment of his orders which he had not given, for all he had done was to murmur Leticia Nazareno while he contemplated the last ash barge as it sank below the horizon, Leticia Nazareno, he repeated aloud so as not to forget the name, and that had been enough for the presidential security services to kidnap her from the convent in Jamaica, gagged and in a strait jacket inside a pine box with metal hoops and black letters saying fragile and in English do not drop this side up and an export license in accordance with the necessary consular permission for the two thousand eight hundred champagne glasses of genuine crystal for the presidential wine cellar, for the return voyage they loaded her aboard among the ship’s stores of a collier and they laid her naked and drugged on the columned bed in the bedroom for distinguished guests as he had remembered her at three in the afternoon under the flour-haze light of the mosquito netting, she had the restful look of sleep of so many other inert women who had served him without even awakening from the lethargy of the Luminal and tormented by a terrible feeling of abandonment and defeat, except that he did not touch Leticia Nazareno, he contemplated her in sleep with a kind of infantile amazement surprised at how much her nakedness had changed since he had seen her in the harbor shed, they’d curled her hair, they’d made her up right down to the most intimate nooks and crannies, and they’d put crimson polish on her fingernails and toenails and lipstick and rouge on her mouth and cheeks and mascara and she gave off a sweet fragrance that did away with your trace of a wild animal, Jesus, they’d ruined her trying to recreate her, they’d made her so different that he couldn’t even see her underneath the clumsy cosmetics while he contemplated her naked in the ecstasy of the Luminal, he saw her come to the surface, he saw her wake up, he saw her see him, mother, it was her, Leticia Nazareno of my bewilderment petrified with terror before the stony old man who was contemplating her mercilessly through the tenuous mists of the netting, frightened with the unforeseeable aims of her silence because he couldn’t imagine anything in spite of his uncountable years and his measureless power he was more frightened than she, more alone, more not knowing what to do, as confused and as defenseless as he had been the first time he was a man with a camp follower whom he had surprised in the middle of the night swimming naked in a river and whose strength and size he had imagined from her mare snorts after each dive, he heard her dark and solitary laugh in the darkness, he sensed the joy of her body in the darkness but he was paralyzed with fear because he was still a virgin even though he was already an artillery lieutenant in the third civil war, until the fear of losing the chance was more decisive than the fear of the attack, and then he jumped into the water with all his clothes on, boots, knapsack, cartridge belt, machete, carbine, buried under so many military encumbrances and so many secret terrors that the woman thought at first that he was someone who had ridden his horse into the water, but she realized immediately that he was only a poor frightened man and she gathered him into the lagoon of her pity, took him by the hand in the darkness of his confusion because he couldn’t manage to find his way in the darkness of the lagoon, she indicated to him with a mother’s voice in the darkness to get a good grip on my shoulders so the current won’t knock you over, not to squat down in the water but to kneel firmly on the bottom breathing slowly so you’ll have enough wind, and he did what she told him with a boyish obedience thinking mother of mine Bendición Alvarado why in hell do women do things as if they were inventing them, how can they be such men about it, he thought, while she was taking off the useless paraphernalia of other less fearful and desolate wars than that solitary war with the water up to his neck, he had died of fright under the protection of that body that smelled of pine soap when she finished unbuckling his two belts and unbuttoned his fly and I was twisted with terror because I couldn’t find what I was looking for except for the enormous testicle swimming like a toad in the darkness, she let go of it with fright, go back to your mama and have her turn you in for another one, she told him, you’re no good for anything, because he had been defeated by the same ancestral fear tht held him motionless before the nakedness of Leticia Nazareno in whose river of unforeseeable waters one was not to enter not even with everything he had on until she could lend him the aid of her mercy, he himself covered her with a sheet, played the song of poor Delgadina ruined by the love of her father on the gramophone until the cylinder wore out, he had felt flowers put into the vases so that they would not wilt like natural ones from the evil touch of her hands, he did everything he could think of to make her happy but he kept the rigors of captivity intact and the punishment of nudity so that she would unde
rstand that she would be well taken care of and well loved but that she had no possibility of escaping that fate, and she understood so well that during the first truce of fear she ordered him without saying please to open the window general so that we could have a little air, and he opened it, to close it again because the moon is hitting my face, he closed it, he carried out her orders as if they were from love all the more obedient and sure of himself the closer he got to the afternoon of radiant rain in which he slipped inside the mosquito netting and lay down with his clothes on beside her without waking her up, he participated alone for nights on end in the secret outflow of her body, he breathed in her smell of a mountain bitch that grew warmer with the passage of months, the moss of her womb sprouted, she woke up startled shouting get out of here general and he arose with his heavy parsimony but lay down beside her again while she was sleeping and in that way he enjoyed her without touching her during the first year of captivity until she grew accustomed to awakening beside him without understanding, the direction of the currents of that indecipherable old man who had abandoned the flattery of power and the enchantments of the world to devote himself to her contemplation and service, she all the more disconcerted as she came to know the afternoon of radiant rains when he had gone into the water with everything on, the uniform without insignia, the sword belts, the ring of keys, the leggings, the riding boots with the gold spur, a nightmare attack that awakened her in terror trying to get out from under that caparisoned charger, but he was so resolute that she decided to gain time with the last recourse of take your harness off general the buckles hurt my heart, and he took it off, he should take off the spur general it injures my ankles with its gold rowel, that he take off the clump of keys from his belt they keep bumping into my hipbones, and he ended up doing what she ordered although three months were needed to get him to take off his sword belt which hinders my breathing and another month for the leggings which break my soul with their buckles, it was a slow and difficult struggle in which she held him off without exasperating him and he ended up giving in so as to please her, so neither of them ever knew how it was that the final cataclysm occurred a short time after the second anniversary of the kidnapping when his aimless warm and tender hands by chance came upon the hidden gems of the sleeping novice who awoke in shock with a pale sweat and a death quiver and did not try to get away with either good or evil arts from the uncouth animal she had on top of her except that she shocked him by begging him to take off his boots they were dirtying my Brabant sheets and he took them off as best he could, take off your leggings, and pants, and the truss, take it all off my life I can’t feel you, until he himself didn’t know when he was left as only his mother had known him in the light that filtered through the melancholy harps of the geraniums, freed from fear, free, changed into a battling bison who with the first charge demolished everything he found in his way and fell face down into an abyss of silence where all that could be heard was the schooner-beam creaking of the clenched back teeth of Nazareno Leticia, present, she had clutched all my hair in her fingers so as not to die alone in the bottomless dizzy fall in which I was already dying sought at the same time and with the same drive by all the urgencies of the body, and none the less he forgot about her, he was alone in the shadows looking for himself in the brackish water of his tears general, in the gentle flow of the thread of his ox saliva general, in the surprise of his surprise of mother mine Bendición Alvarado how is it possible to have lived so many years without knowing this torment, he wept, disturbed by the anxiety of his kidneys, the artillery battery that was his intestines, the mortal tearing off of the tender tentacle that pulled his guts out by the roots and turned him into a beheaded animal whose tumbling death throes sprinkled the snowy sheets with a hot and sour matter that perverted in his memory the liquid glass air of the afternoon of radiant rains in the mosquito netting, because it was shit general, his own shit.