The Autumn of the Patriarch (13 page)

we saw the sad eyes, the
faded lips, the pensive hand which was making the sign of the cross in a blessing so that the rains would cease and the sun shine, and he gave life back to the drowned hens, and ordered the waters to recede and they receded. In the midst of the jubilant bell-ringing, the festival rockets, the music of celebration with which the laying of the first stone of reconstruction
was laid, and in the midst of the shouts of the multitude crowded into the main square to glorify the most worthy one who had put the hurricane dragon to flight, someone took him by the arm to lead him out onto the balcony because now more than ever the people needed his words of comfort, and before he could get away he heard the unanimous clamor which got into his innards like the wind of an evil
sea, long live the stud, because ever since the first days of his regime he understood the unprotected state of being seen by a whole city at the same time, his words turned to stone, he understood in a flash of mortal lucidity that he did not have the courage nor would he ever have it to appear at full length before the chasm of a crowd, so on the main square we only caught sight of the usual
ephemeral image, the glimpse of an un-graspable old man dressed in denim who imparted a silent blessing from the presidential balcony and immediately disappeared, but that fleeting vision was enough for us to sustain the confidence that he was there, watching over our waking and sleeping hours under the historic tamarinds of the suburban mansion, he was absorbed in thought in the wicker rocking chair,
with the glass of lemonade untouched in his hand listening to the sound of the kernels of corn that his mother Bendición Alvarado was drying out in the calabash gourd, watching her through the quiver of the three o’clock heat as she grabbed a barred rock hen and stuck it under her arm and twisted its neck with a kind of tenderness while she told me with a mother’s voice looking into my eyes
you’re getting consumptive from so much thinking and not eating well, stay for dinner tonight, she begged him, trying to seduce him with the temptation of the strangled hen that she was holding with both hands so that it would not get away from her in its death throes, and he said
all right, mother, I’ll stay, he rested until sundown with his eyes closed in the wicker rocking chair, not sleeping,
lulled by the soft smell of the hen boiling in the pot, hanging on the course of our lives, for the only thing that gave us security on earth was the certainty that he was there, invulnerable to plague and hurricane, invulnerable to Manuela Sanchez’s trick, invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for
us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny, and he had reached that point, mother, he had sat down to rest at the end of an arduous trip on the last historic stone on the remote eastern frontier where the name and dates of the last
soldier killed in defense of the integrity of the nation were carved, he had seen the dismal and glacial city of the neighboring country, he saw the eternal drizzle, the morning mist with the smell of soot, the men in full dress on electric streetcars, the aristocratic funerals in gothic hearses with white Percherons with plumes on their heads, the children sleeping on the steps of the cathedral
wrapped in newspapers, God damn it, what strange people, he exclaimed, they look like poets, but they weren’t general sir, they’re the Goths who hold power, they told him, and he had returned from that trip exalted by the revelation that there is nothing to equal this wind of rotten guavas and this clamor of a marketplace and this deep feeling of mournfulness at dusk in this homeland of misery whose
frontiers he was never to cross, and not because he was afraid of moving from the seat where he was sitting, as his enemies said, but because a man is like a tree in the woods, mother, like the animals in the woods who never leave their lairs except to eat, he said, evoking with the mortal lucidity of siesta time the soporific August Thursday of so many years ago when he dared confess that he knew
the limits of his ambition, he had revealed it to a warrior from other lands and other times whom he had received alone in the hot shadows of his office, he was a withdrawn
young man, troubled by haughtiness and always standing out from the rest with the stigma of solitude, and he had stood motionless in the doorway unable to decide to cross the threshold until his eyes grew accustomed to the
half-light which was scented by a brazier of wisteria in all the heat and he was able to make him out sitting in the swivel chair with his fist motionless on the bare desk, so everyday and faded that there was nothing about him of his public image, without escort or weapons, his shirt soaked in the sweat of a mortal man and with salvia leaves stuck to his temples for his headache, and only when I
was convinced of the incredible truth that this rusty old man was the same idol of our childhood, the purest incarnation of our dreams of glory, only then did he enter the office and introduce himself by name speaking with the clear firm voice of one who expects to be recognized because of his deeds, and he shook my hand with a soft and miserly hand, the hand of a bishop, and he paid startling attention
to the fabulous dream of the foreigner who wanted arms and assistance for a cause which is also yours, excellency, he wanted logistical support and political aid for a war without quarter which would wipe out once and for all every conservative regime from Alaska to Patagonia, and he felt so moved by his vehemence that he had asked him why are you mixed up in this mess, God damn it, why do
you want to die, and the foreigner had answered him without a trace of modesty that there was no higher glory than dying for one’s country, excellency, and he replied smiling with pity don’t be a horse’s ass, boy, fatherland means staying alive, he told him, that’s what it is, he told him, and he opened the fist that he had resting on the desk and in the palm of his hand showed him this little glass
ball which is something a person has or doesn’t have, but only the one who has it has it, boy, this is the nation, he said, while he sent him away with pats on the back and not giving him anything, not even the consolation of a promise, and he ordered the aide who closed the door that they were not to bother that man who has just left any more, don’t even waste your time keeping him under surveillance,
he said, he’s got a fever in his
quills, he’s no good for anything. We never heard that expression again until after the cyclone when he proclaimed a new amnesty for political prisoners and authorized the return of all exiles except men of letters, of course, them never, he said, they’ve got fever in their quills like thoroughbred roosters when they’re moulting so that they’re no good for anything
except when they’re good for something, he said, worse than politicians, worse than priests, just imagine, but let the others come back without distinction of color so that the rebuilding of the nation can be the task of all, so that nobody would be left without proof that he was once more the master of all his power with the fierce support of armed forces that had become once more the same as
before since he had distributed the shipments of food and medicine and the material for public relief from foreign aid among the members of the high command, ever since the families of his ministers had Sunday outings at the beach with the Red Cross portable hospitals and field tents, they sold the shipments of blood plasma, the tons of powdered milk to the ministry of health and the ministry of
health resold them to charity hospitals, the officers of the general staff gave up their ambitions in return for public works contracts and rehabilitation programs with the emergency loan granted by Ambassador Warren in exchange for unlimited fishing rights for vessels of his nation within our territorial waters, what the hell, only the one who has it has it, he said to himself, remembering the colored
marble he had shown that poor dreamer who was never heard of again, so exalted with the reconstruction work that with his own voice and in person he worked on even the tiniest details as in the original days of his power, sloshing through the swamps in the streets with a hat and a pair of duck-hunter’s boots so that a city different from the one he had conceived for his glory in his dreams
of a solitary drowned man should be built, he ordered his engineers get rid of these houses here for me and put them over there where they won’t be in the way, make that tower six feet taller so that people will be able to see the ships on the high seas, they raised it, reverse the course
of this river for me, they reversed it, without any mistakes, without any signs of discouragement, and he
went about so befogged with that feverish restoration, so absorbed in his task, and so far removed from other minor matters of state that he ran smack into reality when an absent-minded aide mentioned by mistake the problem of the children and he asked from his cloud what children, the children general sir, but which ones, God damn it, because up till then they had hidden from him the fact that the
army was keeping in secret custody the children who picked the lottery numbers for fear they would tell why the presidential ticket always won, they told the parents who complained that it wasn’t true while they made up a better answer, they told them they were rumors spread by traitors, lies of the opposition, and those who demonstrated in front of the barracks were repulsed with mortar fire and
there was a public slaughter that we had also hidden from him so that you wouldn’t be bothered general sir, because the fact was that the children were locked up in the dungeons of the harbor fort under the best of conditions, in excellent spirits and very good health, but the trouble is that now we don’t know what to do with them general sir, and there were around two thousand of them. The infallible
method for winning the lottery had occurred to him without his looking for it, observing the inlaid numbers on billiard balls, and it had been such a simple and dazzling idea that he himself couldn’t believe it when he saw the anxious crowd that had overflowed the main square since noontime taking out their numbers in anticipation of the miracle under the broiling sun with a clamor of gratitude
and signs painted with glory to the magnanimous one who distributes happiness, anachronistic wheels of fortune and faded animal lotteries, the rubble of other worlds and other times that pillaged in the realm of fortune in an attempt to thrive on the crumbs of so many illusions, they opened the balcony at three o’clock, they brought up the three children under the age of seven chosen at random
by the crowd itself so that there would be no doubt concerning the honesty of the method, they gave each child a bag of a different color after showing trust-worthy
witnesses that there were ten billiard balls numbered from one to zero inside each bag, your attention, ladies and gentlemen, the throng held its breath, each child with his eyes blindfolded will take a ball from each bag, first the
child with the blue bag, then the one with the red, and last the one with the yellow, one after the other the three children put their hands into their bags, felt at the bottom nine balls that were just alike and one that was ice-cold, and following the orders we had given them in secret they chose the ice-cold ball, showed it to the crowd, sang it out, and in that way they drew out the three balls
that had been kept on ice for several days with the three numbers of the ticket he had reserved for himself, but we never thought about the children’s telling it general sir, it occurred to us so late that there was nothing else to do but hide them three by three, and then five by five, and then twenty by twenty, just imagine general sir, so pulling on the thread of the plot he ended up discovering
that all of the officers in the high command of the land, sea and air forces were implicated in the miraculous bounty of the national lottery, he found out that the first children went up on the balcony with the consent of their parents and even trained by them in the illusory science of telling the numbers inlaid in ivory by touch, but that the following ones were brought up by force because
the rumor had spread that once the children went up they didn’t come back down, their parents hid them, they buried them alive while the raiding parties that sought them in the middle of the night passed, the emergency forces did not cordon off the main square to control the public delirium as they had told him, but to hold at bay the crowds that they herded like a drove of cattle with threats of
death, the diplomats who had asked for an audience to mediate the conflict ran into the absurd tale that the functionaries themselves told them that the legend of his strange illnesses was true, that he couldn’t receive them because toads had proliferated in his belly, that he could only sleep standing up so as not to injure himself with the iguana crest that was growing along his spine, they had
hidden the messages of protest and entreaties from all over
the world from him, they had kept secret from him a telegram from the Supreme Pontiff in which our apostolic anguish over the fate of the innocents was expressed, there was no room in jail for any more rebellious parents general sir, there were no more children for the Monday drawing, God damn it, what kind of a mess have we got into.
In spite of all, he did not measure the true depth of the abyss until he saw the children like cattle in a slaughterhouse in the inner courtyard of the harbor fort, he saw them come out of the dungeons like a stampede of goats blinded by the brilliance of the sun after so many months of nocturnal terror, they were confused in the light, there were so many at the same time that he didn’t see them
as two thousand separate children but as a huge shapeless animal that was giving off an impersonal stench of sun-baked skin and making a noise of deep waters and its multiple nature saved it from destruction, because it was impossible to do away with such a quantity of life without leaving a trace of horror that would travel around the world, God damn it, there was nothing to do, and with that conviction
he called together the high command, fourteen trembling commandants who were never so to be feared because they had never been so frightened, he took his time scrutinizing the eyes of each one, one by one, and then he saw that he was alone against them all, so he kept his head erect, hardened his voice, exhorted them to unity now more than ever for the good name and honor of the armed forces,