The Prosecutor 1683930347, 9781683930341

Table of contents :
Contents
Translator’s Note
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Prosecutor
Bibliography
About the Author and Translator

Citation preview

The Prosecutor

The Prosecutor By Augusto Roa Bastos Translated with commentary by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Vancouver • Madison • Teaneck • Wroxton

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. © Augusto Roa Bastos, © 1993 and Heirs of Augusto Roa Bastos All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for scholarly publishing from the Friends of FDU Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932971 ISBN 978-1-68393-034-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-68393-035-8 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Translator’s Note

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Prosecutor

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The Prosecutor Augusto Roa Bastos

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Bibliography

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About the Author and Translator

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Translator’s Note

It has been an honor and a labor of love to translate the final work of Roa Bastos’s trilogy, the novel El fiscal. In this process, I have attempted to maintain the writer’s complex writing style, in which he employs very long sentences and frequently alternates between past and present tenses. However, for purposes of readability in English, on some occasions I have chosen to unify the verb tenses in a given paragraph where otherwise making sense of the meaning might have proved difficult for the reader. I have also made some other minor changes to conform to English-language punctuation and grammar practices, such as the elimination of frequent dashes, which have been replaced by commas and parentheses. Since I did not have the advantage of consulting with the author, who passed away in 2005, I also had to make some judgment calls in selecting equivalent English terms for some of the more difficult vocabulary and neologisms in the work. I hope that the product results in an enjoyable and productive reading experience that is faithful to the original words of the great Paraguayan writer.

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Acknowledgments

There are many people I would like to thank without whom this volume would never have been published. First, many thanks to director Harry Keyishian, and editor Zachary Nycum from FDU Press, as well as editor Brooke Bures from Rowman & Littlefield for helping to negotiate the translation rights to El fiscal, and to Ashleigh Cooke, for her meticulous work on the page proofs of the manuscript. I would also like to thank the Carmen Balcells Agency for granting permission to translate this work. Many thanks to the members of my translation board, who were available to help me with difficult spots in the translation: Dr. David William Foster, Dr. Tracy K. Lewis, Dr. Claudia Routon, and Dr. Alain Saint-Saëns. A special thank you goes to board member Lourdes Ríos González who helped to provide the Guaraní translations. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Fernando Burgos Pérez, who was of invaluable help on this project, and my dear friend, Dr. María Eugenia Mudrovcic, who was always available to consult regarding idioms from the Southern Cone. In addition, I would like to thank my husband Marc Basson, who originally suggested to me the idea of translating El fiscal into English and who served as a “guinea pig” for testing the readability of various versions of the translation. Finally, I would like to dedicate this translation to two special people: my sister, Rita, who is also my best friend, and my best friend, María, who is also like a sister.

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Introduction The Prosecutor

Augusto Roa Bastos was born on June 13, 1917, in Asunción, Paraguay, to Lucio Roa and Lucía Bastos, both of whom were from comfortable bourgeois families. While Augusto was still an infant, his father fell on economic hard times and had to close his exportation business. The family moved to Iturbe, in the Guairá region, where Lucio Roa became a worker in a sugarcane factory in Santa Clara and later, one of its administrators. Roa Bastos was home-schooled by his father, and later attended primary school in the town of Iturbe until third grade. At the age of eight, he was sent to live with his maternal uncle, Hermenegildo Roa, in Asunción, where he attended the Colegio San José, a Catholic private school. His uncle was a priest and thus was able to obtain a scholarship for Roa. In 1932, when Roa Bastos was fifteen, he dropped out of school during the Chaco War, a battle over oil rights between Paraguay and the bordering country, Bolivia. The war was fomented by the foreign interests of the Royal Dutch Shell (in Paraguay) and the Standard Oil Company (in Bolivia). Too young to enlist as a soldier, Roa Bastos served as a stretcher-bearer during the conflict. After the Chaco War, he became a journalist, working for the newspaper El País. He traveled to England during World War II as a war correspondent and his articles were published in a collection titled La Inglaterra que yo vi [The England That I Saw] in 1946. After the death of President José Félix Estigarribia in 1940, Higinio Morínigo was appointed president of Paraguay, allegedly by a coin toss by the army members.

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the Morínigo dictatorship, the offices of El País, the only politically independent newspaper, were burned, and the employees of the paper were forced to flee. Roa Bastos was sought by the government as a “communist threat” and left the country for Buenos Aires in 1947. Roa Bastos lived in Buenos Aires from 1947 to 1976, where he performed various odd jobs (among them bank worker, insurance agent, and editorial writer for the newspaper Clarín) while he cultivated his literary career. His career first began to prosper in 1937, the year in which he won a literary prize, the Premio del Ateneo de Asunción for the unpublished (and now lost) novel Fulgencio Moreno, while still in Paraguay. In Argentina, Roa Bastos published his first collection of short stories, El trueno entre las hojas (Thunder among the Leaves, 1953) followed by several other important collections: El baldío (The Vacant Lot, 1966), Los pies sobre el agua (Feet on the Water, 1967), Madera quemada (Burnt Wood, 1967), Moriencia (Slaughter, 1969), and Cuerpo presente y otros textos (Lying in State and Other Texts, 1971). He also published his first novel, Hijo de hombre (Son of Man, 1960), which won a literary prize from Editorial Losada. That year he also published his second book of poetry, El naranjal ardiente (The Burning Orange Grove, 1960), having already published his first poetry collection, El ruiseñor de la aurora (The Nightingale of Dawn), in Paraguay in 1942. Before he left Paraguay, he also published several plays: La carcajada (The Laugh, 1930); El niño del rocío (The Boy of Dew, 1940); La residenta (The Resident, 1940); and Mientras llegue el día (While Day Arrives, 1946). In addition to these poetry collections and plays, once in Argentina, he wrote the poems of El génesis de los Apapokuva (1971) [The Genesis of the Apapokuva] and also began his screenwriting career, adapting Son of Man to film and penning the screenplay for his story “Thunder among the Leaves,” both under the direction of film producer Armando Bó. Also during exile in Buenos Aires, Roa Bastos began to write children’s books: Los juegos 1: Carolina y Gaspar (The Games #1: Carolina and Gaspar, 1970) to be followed by El pollito de fuego (The Little Chick of Fire, 1974), and Los juegos 2: La casa de invierno-verano (The Games 2: The Winter-Summer House, 1981), the last one published while he was later living in France. However, his biggest literary accomplishment was the publication of his master work, the novel Yo el Supremo (I The Supreme) in 1974, based on the nineteenthcentury Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. This work took Roa Bastos five years to write. In 1976, Argentina suffered a military coup under General Jorge Videla, which began what was known as the “dirty war” (massive disappearances of 1. The biographical section of this introduction has been elaborated on the basis of information taken from Roa Bastos’s interviews with Rubén Bareiro Saguier in Las caídas y resurrecciones de un pueblo (where Roa asserts that Moríngo was elected by a coin toss) and WeldtBasson, “The Life and Works of Augusto Roa Bastos.”

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citizens and foreigners against the government; the imprisonment, torture, and murder of innocent people). Roa Bastos opted to accept an offer to become an associate professor of Latin American literature and Guaraní language at the University of Toulouse, in France, where he lived until 1996. During this period, in 1982, he once attempted to return to Paraguay. After a few months in the country with his family, he was expelled by the Stroessner government. Alfredo Stroessner had become dictator in 1954 and governed Paraguay until 1989 when he was ousted by a military coup. Roa Bastos’s Paraguayan citizenship was revoked in 1982. However, a year later, in 1983, he was offered citizenship by Spain, followed by citizenship in France, in 1985. While in France, Roa Bastos actively dedicated himself to writing and published the following works, including the novels Vigilia del almirante (The Admiral’s Vigil, 1992); El fiscal (The Prosecutor, 1993); Contravida (Counterlife, 1994); and Madama Sui (Madame Sui, 1995). He also published the poetry anthology Poemas recogidas (Collected Poems, 1995). Vigilia del almirante appeared eighteen years after his previous novel, Yo el Supremo, and focused on the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus, thus continuing Roa Bastos’s trajectory of writing historical novels. Other publications during this time period include the poetry collection Silenciario (1983); the play version of Yo el Supremo (1991); the short story “El sonámbulo,” which first appeared in an artwork collection of the paintings of the Argentine artist Cándido López in 1976; and two short story collections: Antología personal (Personal Anthology, 1980) and Contar un cuento y otros relatos (Telling a Story and Other Tales, 1984). Antología personal is the first collection that includes the first short story ever written by Roa Bastos, “Lucha hasta el alba” (Fight until Dawn), which he wrote as an adolescent but did not publish until many years later in the journal Hispamérica in 1979. The year 1989 was an important year for Roa Bastos. First, on February 3, a military coup ousted Stroessner, marking a transition to democracy in Paraguay that would eventually allow for Roa Bastos’s return to his native land. Later that year, Roa Bastos was awarded the prestigious Cervantes Prize in literature. Roa Bastos would eventually return permanently to Paraguay in 1996, where he dedicated the last years of his life to writing, lecturing to the younger generations, collaborating with the democratic transition, and forming a part of the Truth and Justice Commission that investigated human rights violations. During his last years in Paraguay he published another poetry anthology, Poesía (1999); the collective story project Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco (The Conspirators of the Shantytown of the Greater Chaco, 2001); Cuentos Completos (Complete Short Stories, 2003); and the play La tierra sin mal (1998). During his final years in Paraguay, Roa Bastos suffered from poor health, undergoing two heart operations and one prostate procedure. He died on

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April 26, 2005, after suffering a head injury from a fall in his apartment. Roa Bastos’s posthumous works include the play Pancha Garmendia y Elisa Lynch (2006); Valoración de la mujer paraguaya (Appreciation of the Paraguayan Woman, 2014); Ecología y cultura (Ecology and Culture, 2014); and Augusto Roa Bastos, escritos políticos (Augusto Roa Bastos: Political Writings, edited by Milda Riverola, 2017). These last three are collections that respectively gather various essays written by Roa on the topics of women, ecology, and politics. Those who knew Roa Bastos claim he was an intensely humble, private man. His personal life was perhaps as rocky as his political situation. His eldest son, Augusto, who died in 1998, before Roa Bastos himself, was the product of a relationship with María Isabel Duarte, while Roa Bastos was a young man in Paraguay. In 1942, he married Ana Lydia Macheroni, with whom he had two children, Mirta (born in Paraguay) and Carlos (born in Buenos Aires). Roa Bastos’s union with Macheroni disintegrated before he left Argentina for France. Once in France, Roa Bastos met his last partner, Iris Giménez, who was a student in his course on Guaraní language. Together they had three children: Francisco, Silvia, and Aliria. However, for reasons unknown, problems also developed between Roa Bastos and Iris, from whom he separated in 1996, which occasioned his return to Paraguay. The relationship between Roa Bastos and Iris Giménez is of particular interest for the study of the novel The Prosecutor, given that to a certain degree the novel is autobiographical, and the main characters, Félix and Jimena (note the similarity to the name Giménez), share many characteristics with the author and his partner. THE FIRST VERSION OF THE PROSECUTOR As Roa Bastos states in a brief paragraph that prefaces the beginning of the novel, the first version of The Prosecutor was written “during the final years of one of the longest and most savage tyrannies of Latin America. In 1989, an insurrection took the tyrant down. The novel was out of place and had to be destroyed” (1). In other words, the version here translated and presented to the reader is the second version of the novel, rewritten in light of Stroessner’s fall from power. In a recent conversation with the Paraguayan poet and historian VíctorJacinto Flecha, who is also vice president of the Roa Bastos Foundation in Paraguay, Flecha revealed that he had in fact read the original version of The Prosecutor, and that it was very different from the published version, which according to Flecha is “a love-letter to Iris Giménez,” with whom Roa Bastos was having personal difficulties at the time. Flecha explained that in the original version, the protagonist was not Félix Moral, but rather the historical

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figure Father Fidel Maíz (note the common initials of these two characters [Goloboff, 80]). These revelations reinforce an autobiographical interpretation of the novel to a certain degree. However, although the novel presents Jimena (the character based on Iris Giménez) in a very positive light, this straight identification of Jimena and Iris is simplistic. As I have argued elsewhere, Giménez can also be identified with the character Leda Kautner, the graduate student with whom Moral becomes infatuated in the novel. Jimena can be seen as a figure akin to the “great mother”—a positive, nurturing woman, while Leda is perhaps the dark side of Giménez, the terrible, devouring woman, who in the novel attempts to “rape” Félix (Weldt-Basson, “All Women Are Whores,” 226). While Jimena shares many characteristics with Iris (they are both Geminis, their names are similar, they both study indigenous cultures), at the same time we know that Iris was Roa Bastos’s student, just as Leda is Moral’s student in the novel. Similarly, Iris is a polyglot who speaks numerous languages, including French, Spanish, Náhuatl, and Guaraní, which makes her akin to Leda, who speaks French, German, and Spanish. In a series of interviews with the late Paraguayan writer and critic Rubén Bareiro Saguier, published in 1989 under the title Augusto Roa Bastos (caídas y resurrecciones de un pueblo) [Augusto Roa Bastos, Falls and Resurrections of a Nation], Roa Bastos speaks at length about the first version of The Prosecutor, which he was writing at that time. These comments give us some idea of what the original version of the novel was like and confirm the importance of the figure Father Maíz: One of the strongest chapters of The Prosecutor deals with this topic, so current these days and so ancient at the same time, of the tortures inflicted on the prisoners of the sinister torture and death chambers. There is a scene during the blood court of Paso Pucú, in which Father Maíz confesses to Bishop Palacios that he is going to be shot and whom López’s prosecutor comforts with these reflections. (Bareiro Saguier, 144, my translation)

Although Roa Bastos does not totally abandon the character of Maíz or the theme of López’s prosecution of his enemies in the blood court lead by Maíz in the nineteenth century, in the second, published version of The Prosecutor, these characters are relegated to a second plane, and the question of torture is transferred to the more contemporary dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay from 1954–1989. Instead of Maíz, Moral becomes Stroessner’s prosecutor by attempting to assassinate him and thus bring him to justice for his crimes against the Paraguayan people. Nonetheless, the novel swings back and forth between the López and Stroessner dictatorships, establishing parallels between Moral and López, both of whom can be seen simultaneously as heroes and martyrs in the pursuit of their goals.

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In this same interview, Roa Bastos also states that The Prosecutor is a “counterhistory,” rather than a history of the Triple Alliance War to show us “lo que podría ser verdadero a través de la ficción” (what could be true through fiction), something that he has also said about I The Supreme. In the article “Algunos núcleos generadores de Yo el Supremo” (Some Generative Nuclei of I The Supreme), Roa Bastos states, “My novelistic plan consisted . . . of writing a counterhistory, a transgressive and subversive replica of official historiography. As I compiled the novel, I felt with ever increasing force that I should use this rebellion against the history of the historians as the axis of the text’s operating system” (Roa Bastos, “Algunos núcleos generadores,” my translation, p. 78). In other words, I The Supreme presents an attempt to oppose official historiography by presenting a different version, or versions of events (information that contradicts the black legend created around the figure of Dr. Francia). Similarly, The Prosecutor can be understood as a “counter-history” in two ways. First, it is a counterhistory with regard to the figure of Francisco Solano López, because it questions both historical views of López as a hero and a crazy martyr. Second, the second version of The Prosecutor moves away from a strict analysis of López and the Great War to focus on more contemporary events of the Stroessner dictatorship and offer a counterhistory of them. In The Prosecutor, Roa Bastos presents historical events that, although perhaps undocumented, could be true (that is, similar things occurred), to show the “real” history of the Stroessner government (its torture and persecution of people and prostitution of women), and not the official one propagated by the dictatorship. 2 In sum, although the destruction of the original version of The Prosecutor resulted in a second version that is in many ways totally different, at the same time some elements characterizing the general essence of the first version (its focus on a prosecutor, its role as counterhistory, and as we shall see below, its use of a non-linear time) are still present and important factors in the second version of The Prosecutor. THE PROSECUTOR AS PART OF A TRILOGY The Monotheism of Power In the preface to The Prosecutor, Roa Bastos explicitly states that the novel is the third in his trilogy “on the monotheism of power.” Since Roa Bastos did not initially conceive the previous two novels included in this grouping, Son of Man (1960) and I The Supreme (1974) as part of a trilogy, he actually 2. For more information on the ways in which The Prosecutor constitutes a “counterhistory” aimed at achieving historical justice, see Weldt-Basson, Masquerade and Social Justice, 150–61.

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rewrote parts of the novel Son of Man (1960) and republished the revised edition of the work in 1982 to make it better fit with his conception of the trilogy. 3 It is thus safe to say that an important aspect of comprehending the novel The Prosecutor is to examine the ways in which, together with Son of Man and I The Supreme, these works constitute a trilogy and share certain important commonalities. Roa Bastos himself has signaled the first way in which these three works form a trilogy: each is a reflection on the “monotheism of power,” a phrase that evokes the notion of the worship of power as if it were a religion. Each book of the trilogy focuses on a different moment in Paraguayan history that illustrates this obsessive focus on obtaining and maintaining power and its detrimental effects. Son of Man takes place within three distinct political contexts. First, the novel presents successive popular rebellions against the Paraguayan government during the early twentieth century. Although the particular aborted revolution that is described as occurring on March 1, 1912, is not historical in nature, other similar rebellions have taken place in Paraguay during the governments of the right-wing Colorado party, founded in 1887, and which has held power in present-day Paraguay from 1947–2008, and then again since 2013. The second political context in Son of Man is that of the Chaco War, which took place between Paraguay and Bolivia from 1932 to 1935. This war is presented as an emblem of imperialistic power in the region, since it was fomented by the interests of foreign oil companies. The border dispute over possible oil territory in the Chaco between the two nations is presented as a civil war between brother nations that stand to gain nothing by the conflict, which will only benefit either the Royal Dutch Shell company (who was exploiting oil rights in Paraguay) or the Standard Oil Company (who was doing the same in Bolivia). The third political context surfaces in the reflections of the protagonist, Miguel Vera, on the Triple Alliance War that took place between Paraguay and Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay from1864 to 1870. Many of these reflections were added into the new version of the novel and serve to connect it with The Prosecutor, which also focuses to a large degree on the figure of Paraguay’s president during that war, Francisco Solano López. Vera also concentrates many of his reflections on the figure of Father Fidel Maíz, who was the prosecutor of alleged conspirators against López during the war. The second novel of the trilogy, I The Supreme, focuses on a time period prior to that of Son of Man. The novel centers on the government of the nineteenth-century dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay from its inception as an independent nation (1814) to his death in 1840. The novel, a dialogue between the first-person voice of the dictator, 3. For detailed information about the changes made to Hijo de hombre, see Weldt-Basson, “A Genetic Approach to Augusto Roa Bastos’s Hijo de hombre,” 135–48.

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known as “The Supreme” and numerous historical intertexts that comment on his reign, is largely constructed as an attempt by the dictator to evaluate the positives and negatives of his government, posted as “credits” and “debits” in his account book. The ultimate impossibility of judging the dictator is seen through the contradictions between the multiple discourses. However, The Supreme’s obsession with absolute power is clear through the varied voices and distinct episodes of the novel. In The Prosecutor, the third and final novel of the trilogy, the two major time periods that illustrate the “monotheism of power” are the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989), which alternates with reflections on the presidency of Francisco Solano López (1862–1870), especially during the aforementioned Triple Alliance War. Stroessner’s abuses of power are particularly focused on in the second half of the novel, while Solano López’s actions and image permeate the entire work. Although Roa Bastos only mentions the “monotheism of power” in his preface to The Prosecutor, there are in fact many other connections between these three works that validate their status as a trilogy. A discussion of these connections is presented here to enhance the reader’s comprehension of an intratextual reading of the works of Roa Bastos’s trilogy and overall understanding of The Prosecutor. Intertextuality One of the first and most important connections between these three works is their employment of intertextuality. Son of Man’s intertextuality is largely religious: the novel extensively engages with religious symbols whose context is necessary for comprehending the novel. I The Supreme is almost entirely based on intertextuality with numerous historical and literary sources. Finally, The Prosecutor shares some of Son of Man’s religious symbolism, largely through intertextual references to the image of Christ presented on the center altarpiece painted by Matthias Grünewald and the simultaneous painting of a crucifixion of Francisco Solano López that has allegedly disappeared. The Prosecutor also incorporates a variety of literary and philosophical intertexts, some of which have great importance for the novel’s development. Roa Bastos provides a clue to the fascination expressed for the altarpiece crucifixion painted by Grünewald in The Prosecutor through his mention of the J. K. Huysmans’s essays on the painter. “Huysmans, at the beginning of the century, contemplated and described with undisguised mystical emotion, the Crucifixion of Matheus Grünewald,” which according to Moral, Huysmans characterized as “the greatest work of supernatural naturalism that was produced in the late Gothic era, the most powerful Crucifixion that has ever

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been painted” (57). 4 The term “supernatural naturalism” is an oxymoron, a contradiction that anticipates the many ambiguities that the novel presents. Huysmans’s essay emphasizes both the human and divine aspect of Grünewald’s Christ. First, Huysmans insists on the human character of the Christ in Grünewald’s crucifixion which had “[t]he most abject of appearances. This was the Christ of the Poor, a Christ who had become flesh in the likeness of the most wretched of those he had come to redeem. . . . This was also the most human of Christs” (8). However, after underscoring Grünewald’s Christ as human, Huysmans goes on to describe that at the same time that “Grünewald was the most daring of realists” he was also “the most daring of idealists. Never had a painter so magnificently scaled the mystical heights” (9). The dual aspect of Grünewald’s Christ is mirrored in Son of Man by the dualistic aspect of the wooden Christ carved by Gaspar Mora. The townspeople, represented by Macario Francia, insist on the human quality of the Christ, and it is this identification of divine powers with man that is elaborated in both Son of Man and The Prosecutor. In contrast, in The Prosecutor, the descriptions of Grünewald’s Christ emphasize the suffering aspect of the image to create parallels with the death of Francisco Solano at Cerro-Corá. Perhaps the most important intertext for comprehending the philosophical underpinnings of all three novels is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is explicitly alluded to in The Prosecutor on several occasions. In addition, the narrator recounts an anecdote in which Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, tried to destroy some of his manuscripts. The Prosecutor makes explicit mention of Nietzsche’s theory of the Superman, which is an important element in the development of the protagonists of each novel in the trilogy. In The Prosecutor, it is said that Father Fidel Maíz once exclaimed, “The Superman!” he said. “The homo viator 5 . . . the man of the vía crucis 6 who assumes his destiny. . . ! The suicide of God in the Golgotha. . . . Mr. Nietzsche understood very well what happened in Paraguay, a country with which he was not familiar. He divined the mystic and patriotic impulse that led me, a poor priest from a country in ruins, from a Church in ruins, to proclaim Solano López, between the temporal and the eternal, the Paraguayan Christ. . . . There is only one True Christ, one who is both God and Man. But the human Christ is reproduced in all men who sacrifice themselves for the redemption of their people. Solano was the Paraguayan Christ sacrificed at Cerro-Corá.” (177) 4. Roa Bastos is referring to the two essays on Grünewald written by Huysmans: “The Karlsruhe ‘Crucifixion’” and “The Grünewalds in the Colmar Museum.” 5. This is Latin for “travelling man.” 6. Latin, literally meaning the road of the cross, but used as a religious reference for Stations of the Cross.

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In the work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche defines the Superman as a man who insists upon fulfilling a goal. Zarathustra preaches the death of God and the birth of the Superman who is “the highest being” or “the Son of Man, like God, man as a receptacle of divine grace, who rejoices in the idea of eternity” (Hollingdale, “Introduction,” 29). Later in the book, Nietzsche also states that “[h]e who has a goal and an heir wants death at the time most favourable to his goal and heir” (97). Nietzsche’s comments should not be interpreted as a religious belief in eternal life. When Nietzsche speaks of eternity, he is referring to the concept of eternal return, which is another aspect that unites the three novels of the trilogy and which I discuss below. 7 The idea of the Superman informs each of the three novels of the trilogy. The protagonists in each case are “Supermen” who live obsessed by the realization of a goal. In Son of Man, Cristóbal Jara is the revolutionary hero who brings water to the Paraguayan soldiers at Boquerón during the Chaco War. Jara dies while fulfilling his mission, which is highly symbolic within the context of the novel. Water is developed throughout the book as a symbol of love for one’s fellow man, and hence of revolutionary power and social justice. Jara, as the former revolutionary leader, represents this fight for equality. Moreover, the novel underscores, just as we have seen in the reference from The Prosecutor, that God is not a divine being, but is in men, as Nietzsche has indicated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Christ carved by Gaspar Mora is the legacy that remains on the road that Macario insists is not Tupa-Rapé, the path of God, but Kuimbaé-Rapé, the path of man. And Cristóbal, whose name contains the word “Cristo” (Christ) is a human figure who sacrifices himself for the good of others. 8 The concept of the Superman takes a different form in the novel I The Supreme. The protagonist, The Supreme, is based on the figure of the nineteenth-century dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who governed Paraguay from 1814 to 1840. In contrast with Cristóbal Jara’s heroism, The Supreme is more of an antiheroic figure, for having been a tyrant dazzled by absolute power. However, the novel approaches the figure of Dr. Francia from a revisionist perspective that breaks with the traditional black legend created by historical texts written about the dictator and recognizes some of his successes or positive aspects of his government. The character The Supreme evaluates himself throughout the novel and the reader comes to realize that everything that the dictator did, he did to protect Paraguay’s indepen7. John Kraniauskas discusses the importance of the concept of return in The Prosecutor, but does not link it to Nietzschean philosophy. Matamoro also speaks of return through resurrection. See Kraniauskas, “Retorno, melancolía, y crisis de futuro: El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos” and Matamoro, “El mito, alegoría de la historia: el Paraguay de Roa Bastos.” 8. Christina and Bryan Turner indicate that “ñande jara” means “Christ the Lord,” in Guaraní, suggesting that Cristóbal Jara’s last name is also symbolic of Christ. See “Guaraní Language Usage in the Trilogy by Roa Bastos.”

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dence as a nation, which was always under threat of annexation by its larger aggressive neighbors. When The Supreme judges himself at the end of the novel he states, “Very few grains. Perhaps only one: Very tiny. Diamantiferous. Blinding bright on the black pillow of the Insignia. A great deal of chaff: almost all the rest” (409). The “grain” of the citation undoubtedly refers to the dictator’s obsessive goal of maintaining Paraguayan independence, which converts him into another Nietzschean Superman, since Paraguay’s more powerful neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, made frequent attempts to annex the nation. Finally, The Prosecutor offers two supermen to the reader: the aforementioned Francisco Solano López, whose fight against the powers of the Triple Alliance during the Great War fits within the concept of an obsessive fight for a goal. However, in addition to López, whose life is remembered in different forms throughout the novel, there is the protagonist, Félix Moral, who is also a superman who insists upon trying to carry out the assassination of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner by poisoning him with the poison contained in a special ring. Moral is perhaps Roa Bastos’s most complex protagonist and the one who best incarnates Nietzschean philosophy. First, it is not a coincidence that the character’s last name is “Moral.” In the first part of The Prosecutor, Moral starts out as a man who struggles with the concept of Christian morals, a concept that is completely rejected by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. According to Brian Leiter, Nietzsche criticizes the concept of Christian and Kantian morality because it is based on unsustainable assertions about human agency and the metaphysical. Another expert on Nietzsche’s work, David Allison, affirms that in Nietzsche’s philosophy, man can only transform into the superman when “he frees himself from bitterness, resentment, the guilt and shame provoked by traditional moral doctrine” (Allison, 119). It is not that Nietzsche totally denies morality, but rather that he defines it in terms of what Allison calls “the valuable dimension of an individual life” (Allison, 120). Returning to the figure of the protagonist in The Prosecutor, in the first part of the book, Félix Moral lives harmoniously with his partner Jimena until he is tempted by the sexual advances of his graduate student, Leda Kautner. In a phantasmagoric scene, which the reader does not know whether to interpret as a dream or reality, the student appears in Moral’s house and “rapes” him in a description that portrays the student as an incarnation of the devouring woman. In his fight to free himself from the student, Moral thinks that he has strangled her. There is no certitude regarding this event, and later on, Moral finds out that Leda returned to Germany and she even reappears in the second part of the novel as a stewardess and later an actress (although once again, we are never completely sure if her presence is real or phantasmal). The important point is that during the entire first part of the novel,

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Moral feels enormously guilty for having betrayed Jimena (whether in thought or action) and also for believing himself guilty of having murdered Leda Kautner. Moral is an example of what Nietzsche calls “a penitent of the spirit,” who, in the words of Burnham and Jesinghausen, “recognizes in himself the operative presence of unhealthy or unproductive drives, and, as if they were a sin, he struggles to overcome them. He pays penance, but has not himself redeemed them” (100). Moral’s status as a “penitent of the spirit” is underscored in the episode in which he pursues Leda Kautner in his car. During this episode, Moral thinks he sees a group of penitents in the streets of Nevers, who later disappear. The episode takes on the character of a hallucination on the protagonist’s part, and without contextualizing the episode within Nietzsche’s philosophy, it would not seem to make any sense within the work. The narrator states, The penitents passed squeezing themselves gently against the car without putting the slightest pressure on it, as if instead of human bodies they were a mass of cottony silhouettes cloaked in religious habits. A blow of the wind raised some hoods. They were not living human faces. I glimpsed angular faces as if sculpted in varnished wood with very dark colors, all of them petrified in an identical grimace. . . . I had never seen processions of this nature in Nevers. (74–75)

Moral imagines a group of penitents because this image concretizes what is happening inside his own spirit. Moral only manages to transform into the Superman when he overcomes this stage of guilt and dedicates himself to his personal goal, that of assassinating the dictator Stroessner in order to free the Paraguayan people, a mission that constitutes the second part of the novel. The goals or missions of the three protagonists of the trilogy (Cristóbal Jara, The Supreme, and Félix Moral) coincide with the Nietzschean definition of an impossible project. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche says the following regarding the goal of the Superman: “You are treading your path of greatness: no one shall steal after you here! Your foot itself has extinguished the path behind you, and above that path stands written: Impossibility” (174). Attempting something that seems impossible is a description of what each protagonist of the trilogy proposes. In Son of Man, Jara manages to bring water to the soldiers in the Chaco, but in the process he and all his assistants die. Moreover, he only arrives in time to provide water for a single survivor. In I The Supreme, the dictator manages to maintain the independence of Paraguay against the annexation attempts of Brazil and Argentina, but he achieves this at the price of totally isolating Paraguay from trade and contact with other nations. The narrative situation of The Prosecutor is much more complex because it seems that Moral is not successful in poisoning the dictator and is assassinated after being tortured by Stroessner’s government. However, the novel also postulates another ending in which Moral manages

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to kill Stroessner and thus fulfill his mission and redeem his life, as will be later discussed. In an interview with Rubén Bareiro Saguier, Roa Bastos has commented about this very concept of the impossible, but from a different angle, speaking about the general dilemma that is postulated by each of the three novels. “I am obsessed with the impossible. It is the body of the trilogy” (Bareiro Saguier, “Caídas,” 136, my translation). Roa Bastos explains that the three “impossibilities” that characterize the novels of the trilogy are surrendering to religious transcendence (in Son of Man); the obsession with the absolute (in I The Supreme); and the pretension of claiming the right to judge another (in The Prosecutor) (Bareiro Saguier, “Caídas,” 136). In other words, each novel examines a concept that in itself carries its impossibility, like reaching an absolute status or judging another when no one is perfectly innocent. 9 Although Roa Bastos ascribes the question of judging another only to The Prosecutor, in essence this question is the foundation of the three novels of the trilogy and also has its basis in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche indicates the lack of innocence of all men, and thus, the impossibility of one person judging another. For example, in the following passage about judges Nietzsche states, Your killing, you judges, should be a mercy and not a revenge. . . . You should say “enemy” but not “miscreant”; you should say “invalid” but not “scoundrel”; you should say “fool,” but not “sinister.” And you, scarlet judge, if you would speak aloud all you have done in thought, everyone would cry: “Away with this filth and poisonous snake!” . . . Then devise the justice that acquits everyone but the judges! (65–94)

This citation from Nietzsche is very similar to what Roa Bastos has said about judging one’s fellow man in an interview with Héctor Febles: “Some things interest me a lot, justice for example. That some men can judge others means being perfectly innocent (but perfect innocence is proof by contradiction because in this state judgment is not possible) (Febles, 186, my translation). Roa, just like Nietzsche, indicates the impossibility of complete innocence, pointing out that even if that possibility existed, one would then lack the criteria for evaluation, and thus still not be in a position to judge another human being. This impossibility to judge is manifested in Roa Bastos’s novels through a series of ambiguous characters. The novel Son of Man presents various characters whom the reader finds himself at a loss to judge. To begin with, the protagonist Miguel Vera is represented as having a dual nature. On the one hand, he is an intellectual who identifies with the revolutionary struggle of the masses and tries to help 9. Alejandro Quin also discusses this aspect of the trilogy in his article “Escritura sobre las ruinas.”

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the workers in their rebellion against the government. Despite good intentions, Vera gets drunk and betrays the revolutionaries’ plans. In addition, Vera, hallucinating because of extreme thirst during the Chaco War, is the soldier who shoots and kills the hero Cristóbal Jara, the man who is bringing him water. However, as critics have frequently commented, these acts are unconscious and thus, it is difficult to totally blame Vera for his actions. Vera is a gray figure, whom the reader cannot completely condemn, although at the end of the novel Vera judges himself by committing suicide. 10 Vera is not the only ambiguous figure in Son of Man. The Doctor, a character who only appears in the second and third sections of the novel, is another individual whom the reader cannot judge. On the one hand, he cures many of the sick people in Sapukai without asking them to pay him. He seems like a good and generous person. But later on, when he discovers gold coins in one of the statues the poor people offer to him as payment for his services, he becomes greedy and from then on demands that the poor pay him with these images in the hope of finding more gold. At the end of section two, in another unconscious act, similar to Vera’s, the doctor gets drunk and rapes María Regalada, fleeing Sapukai right after. The entire novel I The Supreme turns on the idea of the impossibility of judging the historical figure Dr. Francia. The novel incorporates both authentic and altered citations from many texts written about Dr. Francia that helped to create a black legend surrounding the dictator. The novel also includes quotations from revisionist texts on Dr. Francia, like the work written by the historian Julio César Chaves, titled The Supreme Dictator. The many intertexts create a dialogue on the figure of the dictator that the reader has to evaluate. Together with historical discourses, the protagonist, The Supreme, judges himself in his own writings: he has a Debit and Credit column in his account book in order to evaluate his own actions throughout the novel. And as we have already seen, the dictator himself judges that he has only done one good thing: maintain the independence of the Paraguayan nation. The many contradictions that are presented between the incorporated texts, the compiler’s notes, and the dictator’s own discourse, ultimately make the task of judging the figure impossible, or at least makes it impossible to completely condemn him. Finally, the novel The Prosecutor problematizes the idea of judging one’s fellow man in various forms. In his excellent article “El fiscal y la imposibilidad de juzgar” [“The Prosecutor and the Impossibility of Judging”], Mario Goloboff states that the novel deals with the “human impossibility to judge, to become ‘a prosecutor’” (73). But Golobroff only applies this idea to the figure of father Fidel Maíz and how he is portrayed in both Son of Man and 10. The reader is never directly told whether Vera’s death is a suicide or an accident, but suicide is strongly suggested by the “clues” presented in the novel.

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The Prosecutor. Maíz is another historical figure who is characterized by both positive and negative actions. On one hand, he was what Roa Bastos has called “el fiscal de sangre” [the blood court prosecutor] in the trials against those who allegedly conspired against Francisco Solano López. He also shows himself to be a coward who repudiates López after his death and who tries to ingratiate himself with the triumphant Brazilians. However, both novels show how Maíz, in the final analysis, acted to safeguard the future of the Church in Paraguay, and this motive somehow rescues him from being a totally condemnable figure (Goloboff, 79). As Goloboff points out, it is not a coincidence that the protagonist of The Prosecutor, Félix Moral, shares the initials of his name with Fidel Maíz (Golobroff, 80). Just as Maíz judged the conspirators against López, Moral transforms into “the prosecutor” of Alfredo Stroessner with the intention of assassinating him, disguised as a participant in the international conference that takes place in Paraguay. However, the novel does not really challenge Moral’s role as prosecutor with regard to Stroessner, since Stroessner is in no way presented as a gray figure, but rather a completely negative one in the novel. The question regarding the judgment of one’s fellow man falls, rather on the protagonist himself, as well as on the historical figure of Francisco Solano López. The novel presents Moral as the double of Solano López in many ways. To begin with, Solano López is part of a love triangle between himself, Madame Lynch, and Pancha Garmendia. Lynch is a beautiful blonde and Garmendia is dark-haired and dark-skinned. In a similar manner, Moral is the axis of a love triangle with his graduate student, a lovely blonde, and his partner Jimena, who is described as dark-haired and dark-skinned and to whom he has given the nickname “Morena” (which means dark-haired and dark-skinned in Spanish). Moreover, Solano López is positioned within an ambiguous duality in both history and the novel. On one hand, he is presented as a crazy martyr who led his people to a collective suicide in the War of the Triple Alliance, since the battle between Paraguay and the armies from Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay was so unequal. On the other hand, López is presented as a hero who valiantly fought to his death against the imperialistic enemy. These superimposed images are not resolved in the novel and it is the reader who must decide how to interpret this figure. However, this ambiguity is an essential part of the novel’s message regarding the incapability of a person to judge his fellow man. This same martyr/hero duality characterizes Moral in his mission to assassinate Stroessner. On one hand, the plan is seen as insane, leading Moral to a predictable and useless martyrdom, especially since two years after his failed attempt to kill the dictator, and his own death at the hands of the government, Stroessner is unseated by a coup that began Paraguay’s transition to democracy. On the other hand, Moral’s plan becomes a heroic effort

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to free the Paraguayan people from tyranny that gives meaning to his degraded life, thus redeeming him. This dual and ambiguous aspect of The Prosecutor’s protagonist is prefigured in one of the novel’s “pretexts”: the short story “El Sonámbulo” [“The Sleepwalker”], which was first published in 1976 in Cándido López: Immagini della guerra del Paraguay con un testo di Augusto Roa Bastos. The story’s protagonist, Silvestre Carmona, recounts his version of the Great War to a prosecutor, a man who has written what Carmona calls a “libelous account” of López. Carmona defends López and underscores his heroism in his version of history. In addition to this double vision of López that prefigures his portrayal in The Prosecutor, Carmona himself is presented as a dual and ambiguous figure. Although Carmona loyally fights with López until the bitter end, at the story’s conclusion, without any explanation (except perhaps a desire to assure Madame Lynch’s salvation), it is revealed that Carmona was also the traitor who informed the enemy of López’s whereabouts, which resulted in López’s defeat and death. It is also important to note that the very figure of Cándido López, who is also important in The Prosecutor, is presented as a dual character. López was a historical Argentine painter who fought on the side of Argentina during the war of the Triple Alliance. He painted scenes of the Argentine triumph. However, in The Prosecutor, the narrator speaks of another Paraguayan Cándido López, who painted the tragedy of Paraguay’s loss and Paraguayan suffering during the war. This division creates ambiguity regarding Cándido López’s identity and the nature of his painting that will be later discussed. Returning to the heroic aspect of the characters and their designation as “supermen,” we can see a final important influence of Nietzsche on the works of the trilogy. Various critics have mentioned the concept of eternal return with regard to The Prosecutor, which has been discussed as a mythical concept from Mircea Eliade’s work. Eliade states that “archaic man does not recognize any act that has not been previously postulated and lived by another, some other being that was not man. What he does has been done before. His life is the endless repetition of gestures initiated by others” (Eliade, 4–5). In his article “El mito como paradigma de la novela El fiscal” [“Myth as the Paradigm of the Novel The Prosectuor”] Juan Antonio Tello Casao uses this principle to analyze Moral’s actions as a repetition of those of Solano López. However, Tello Casao does not make the connection between the concept of eternal return and Nietzsche. Upon returning to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we see that the concept of eternal return is a fundamental element of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Among other passages, the following one stands out: Now I die and decay,” . . . but the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! I myself am part of these causes of the

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eternal recurrence. . . . I shall return eternally to his identical and self-same life . . . to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things. (237)

Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return has been the object of study by various experts in the field of philosophy. David Allison points out that his concept can be seen not so much as the repetition of events or people identical to those who existed before, but rather as “an eternal flow or interaction of the same dynamic forces that always regroup in an infinity of permutations of nature” (121). In essence, this idea, which is so important in Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superman, is the principal axis of the three novels of the trilogy. In Son of Man, the story of the village of Sapukai is presented as an endless cycle of heroic revolutionaries who want to help their fellow man. For example, the hero Casiano Jara/Amoité participated in the popular rebellion of March 1, 1912, which was aborted by the betrayal of the telegraph operator and the explosion of a bomb placed in the train station by the government. Later, Casiano has a son, Cristóbal Jara, who is the head of another revolutionary attempt betrayed by Miguel Vera when he was drunk and thus also aborted by the government. In any case, Cristóbal Jara stands out as a hero during the Chaco War, when he is given the almost impossible mission of delivering water to the soldiers at Boquerón. When Jara dies, toward the end of the novel, the narrator Miguel Vera makes the following comment: But for these men around me now, it is only the future which counts, for they see it as an extension of the fascinating antiquity of the past. They never think of death. They live for action. . . . They know no other way of living. For them, death does not exist. . . . These men’s thirst for life acts as a compass through the thirstiest, most mysterious and most boundless desert of all: the human heart. The strength of the fellow-feeling between them is their God. They may crush it, break it, shatter it, but the pieces join together again, and it is livelier and stronger than ever. And it moves in an ever-widening spiral. (256)

This passage clearly manifests the doctrine of eternal return. Each rebellion, each hero, is another incarnation of the same principle of revolution and love for one’s fellow man. The second novel of the trilogy, I The Supreme, presents the theme of eternal return in a very different manner. Instead of manifesting itself in a positive sense, as in Son of Man or The Prosecutor, what is endlessly repeated in I The Supreme are the imperialistic efforts to annex Paraguay on the part of Brazil and Argentina. The different ambassadors—Correa da Cámara, Nicolás de Herrera, and Juan García de Cossio, who are sent to Paraguay by her neighboring countries, appear superimposed during the same military parade (even though they came at different times), because they share the

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same goals of annexing Paraguay. They are repetitions or the eternal return of the same action: “The plenipotentiary envoys of Buenos Aires, Herrera and Coso, and of the Empire of Brazil, Correia, superposed. Transposed to the dimension upon which I oblige them to gaze. Sitting on each other’s knees. In the same place though not at the same time” (Roa Bastos, I The Supreme, 248). On the other hand, it is precisely the lack of formation of revolutionary leaders to follow the dictator that results in the self-condemnation of The Supreme at the end of the novel: Every truly revolutionary movement, in the present era of our Republics, begins, solely and self-evidently, with sovereignty as a real whole in act. A century ago, the Revolution of the comuneros failed when the power of the people was betrayed by the patricians of the capital. You wanted to avoid that. You stopped halfway and did not form true revolutionary leaders. . . . No, little mummy; true Revolution does not devour its children. Only its bastards; those who are not capable of carrying it out to its ultimate consequences. (423)

The concept of eternal return lies beneath this self-critical comment. The social and political revolution depends upon the repetition of men capable of realizing it and maintaining it, like the Cristóbal Jaras in Son of Man. By not succeeding in perpetuating the revolutionary spirit in other leaders, The Supreme hopelessly fails. Finally, the novel The Prosecutor is also based on the notion of eternal return of its characters. Moral is not only the reincarnation of Solano López in his role as hero/martyr, but also of Father Fidel Maíz in his role as prosecutor. In addition to the many parallels established between these characters, Roa Bastos creates important connections with Nietzsche regarding this point. In The Prosecutor, the motif of the serpent is very important. First, Moral tells us the following anecdote from his youth: The same as the small creole dog from my childhood in Manorá. He died bitten by a ñandurié, a small snake, the smallest but one of the most venomous that crawl in the weeds of Paraguay. I had been about to step on it without seeing it. Laurel pounced on it and the mortal fangs that were destined for me stabbed him in the snout. (31)

This episode is very similar to the one Nietzsche recounts in Thus Spoke Zarathustra about a shepherd bitten by a snake, who is saved by his dog: But there a man was lying! And there! The dog, leaping, bristling, whining; then it saw me coming—then it howled again, then it cried out—had I ever heard a dog cry so for help? . . . I saw a young shepherd writhing, choking, convulsed, his face distorted; and a heavy, black snake was hanging out of his mouth. . . . My hands tugged and tugged at the snake—in vain! . . . Then a voice cried from me: “Bite! Bite! It’s head off! Bite! (179–80).

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The episodes are different, but in each case the dog has an important role in saving the man. According to Burnham and Jesinghausen, the episode is a riddle that reveals the process of eternal return. They indicate that the dog is a repetition of the howls of the dog when Nietzsche’s father died (and thus a repetition or eternal return) and that capability of biting the head off of the serpent symbolizes the superman who is always born again. The association of the serpent with eternal return is an element that can be seen in The Prosecutor through the ring in the form of a serpent who bites its tail. This figure is known as the ouroboros, and it is a symbol of the cycle that has its origins in the iconography of ancient Egypt. It is not a coincidence that the ring that Moral is going to use to kill Stroessner is the emblem of the ouroboros. It symbolizes the eternal fight against tyranny that has been repeated so many times in Paraguay. The theme of eternal return can be seen throughout Roa Bastos’s work and is by no means limited to his trilogy. The two novels that follow The Prosecutor, Contravida [Counterlife] (1994) and Madama Sui [Madame Sui] (1995), and which are the last two written by Roa Bastos, also center on the this theme inspired by Eliade and Nietzsche. In Contravida, the revolutionary hero who is the only survivor of a prison break identifies himself with the revolutionary hero Pedro Alvarenga, who is also a character in The Prosecutor. Moral also describes himself in The Prosecutor as identical to Pedro Alvarenga when both are on the same flight to Paraguay. When Moral reflects on his previous torture by the government he notes, “It is the extreme situation of Pedro Alvarenga that I seem to have lived in those atrocious sessions. That is what I am reliving now, at the sight of the pastor” (157). Moreover, the two carry identical briefcases on the plane and are going to Paraguay on similar rebellious missions. In the novel Madama Sui, the protagonist of the title seems to be a repetition of the figures Madame Lynch in Paraguay and Eva Perón in Argentina. Finally, there are elements of eternal return that cut across the novels of the trilogy. In Son of Man, the rebellion in Sapukai occurs March 1, 1912. Many critics have commented on the fact that there was no historical popular rebellion on that date. Roa Bastos chooses this date for his invented rebellion in order to connect it to the Francisco Solano López’s fight during the Great War. López died March 1, 1870. In this manner, the heroic rebellions (obviously distinct in nature), are a type of eternal return that occur during the same calendar date. A final connection between Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Prosecutor can be found on the topic of statues. Nietzsche specifically speaks about people who overthrow statues as a form of folly: And I say this to the over-throwers of statues: To throw salt into the sea and statues into the mud are perhaps the greatest of follies. The statue lay in the mud of your contempt; but this precisely is its law, that its life and living

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beauty grown again out of contempt! And now it arises again, with diviner features and sorrowfully seductive; and in truth! It will even thank you for overthrowing it, you overthrowers! I tender, however, this advice to kings and churches and to all that is weak with age and virtue—only let yourselves be overthrown! That you may return to life and that virtue may return to you. (154)

In The Prosecutor, we are told that the statue of Stroessner was dismantled and rolled down the hill on which it formerly sat atop and then dragged through the streets of the city during a popular celebration, after which it was symbolically hung from the gallows. It is difficult to know whether, following the Nietzschean view, the actions of the people are seen as a collective folly, or whether this is in fact a manifestation of a collective social and political process that contradicts the Nietzschean view of statues. Perhaps, following the logic of dualism and ambiguity that we have seen throughout the novels of the trilogy, the actions regarding statues are at once both. The Fantastic Another important element of the trilogy, the use of fantastic elements, can be seen as a subcategory of the focus on the impossible previously discussed. In Son of Man, the fantastic elements, or those of magical realism, have been widely discussed by the criticism on the novel. There is a destroyed train car that Casiano Amoité somehow manages to make advance without its wheels actually touching the train tracks and which symbolizes the revolutionary fight that has not been given up in Paraguay. In I The Supreme, the fantastic is manifested through the work’s narrative situation, in which The Supreme narrates both past and future events from beyond the tomb. However, the fantastic aspects of the novel The Prosecutor as yet have not been discussed by the literary criticism on the novel. When speaking of the difference between fiction and historiography, Roa Bastos states, The tale of fiction tries to annul this linearity of chronological time by substituting another temporal dimension for it that has its own pertinence or its own labyrinth, the pertinence of its own labyrinth. Historiography tries to explain or describe crises; that is, it tries to resolve them. Novelistic language, on the contrary, installs crisis in imaginary stories to suggest the meaning of real, individual or collective crises. (Bareiro Saguier, “Caídas,” 148, my translation).

This passage suggests the use of a non-linear, fantastic, labyrinthine time in Roa Bastos’s novel, which can be seen in The Prosecutor in the episodes delineated below.

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When the history of the Great War is being told, it is suggested that Cándido López painted a scene of the crucifixion of Francisco Solano López at Cerro-Corá on an inexistent day, a false leap year that was suggested by Father Maíz and inserted into the 1870 calendar by order of Solano López. The novel states, The Paraguayan Cándido López was in Cerro-Corá on March 1st, 1870, or February 29th of the false leap year invented by Maíz and decreed by Solano López. He witnessed the assassination of the Marshal and posterior simulacrum of the crucifixion of his cadaver. He painted that terrible scene on an inexistent day. He painted it without knowing either that he was copying not the inexistent Crucifixion of the Argentine painter, but another older and more remote one: that of Mathias Grünewald, which he never had seen not in its original or in reproductions of the center panel of the altarpiece. . . . The certain thing was that the obscure hiatus of that day messed up real history and even gave rise to the doubt that that atrocious war had taken place. Through the crack of a day centuries can disappear. (222)

This quotation is interesting for numerous reasons. First, one can see again the theory of eternal return in the idea of the painting of López’s crucifixion as a repetition of the crucifixion scene painted by Matthias Grünewald. But even more importantly, it is the postulation of something that happens on an inexistent day, in a “crack of a day.” This play of dates is most likely more than a coincidence in the novel. It is an idea carefully elaborated by Roa Bastos. There is a certain parallel established between this episode and the play of dates that also occurs around Moral’s trip to Paraguay as a congress participant. Moral supposedly travels to Paraguay at the end of August 1987. The novel tells us that the inaugural ceremonies of the conference occur “Thursday the 28th” without specifying what month. Later it specifies that the inaugural meeting occurred “Friday, September 1st and Jimena alleges that Moral disappeared September 3rd. However, when Moral inquired about the possibility that Leda Kautner was the flight attendant on the flight in which he arrived in Paraguay, Dalila Mieres said that she was on his flight “FAE 747-27th of September” under the name of Paula Becker. This ends up being even stranger, when Jimena, in her final letter to Moral’s mother, declares that she arrived in Paraguay a month after Moral on a flight “the 27th of September.” It is not possible that Moral and Jimena arrived on the same flight. In addition to the fact that the dates do not make sense, there are other strange or hallucinatory events: the possibility that Leda Kautner came to Paraguay as a stewardess; the fact that Moral and his ex- companion Alvarenga are on the same plane; the sensation Moral experiences that the plane is going backward and Moral’s surprise when he cannot see the river “which seems strange in this time of year, when the interminable August rains make

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the huge river lose control and the floods destroy the coastal populations (130). This comment draws our attention because August is the month with least rain in Paraguay. 11 To these oddities we can add the fact that we have already seen how Moral possibly has hallucinations in the case of the procession of penitents that he thinks he sees in the streets of Nevers, as well as his alleged rape by his student Leda Katuner, whom he thinks he has killed only to later find out that she is said to have returned to Germany on a flight from Paris. Among so many contradictions, the one that stands out the most is found in the novel’s conclusion itself. According to Moral’s own narration, he manages to shake Stroessner’s hand during the conference and succeeds in administering the poison to him. We know that Moral already successfully tried out the poison on his faithful Dalmatian who died at the end of the first part of the novel. These facts make us ask why Stroessner did not then die from the poison? Although Alain Sicard points out that the dog is only half of Stroessner’s weight (Sicard 145) we know that Moral consulted an expert, Julio Miñarro, “specialist in microbiology and toxicology” before making his trip to Paraguay, in order to administer the exact quantity of poison necessary to assassinate the dictator. Therefore, there is no reason for the poison to fail. This conclusion in which Stroessner receives the poison is in conflict with the facts narrated by Jimena, who traveled to Paraguay a month after Moral’s disappearance. In Jimena’s version, Moral is tortured by the government, and later assassinated when they try to escape during the annual pilgrimage to Cerro-Corá on the anniversary of the death of Solano López, March 1st (another fact that shows that Moral is the repetition of López in an eternal return). Those who interpret the novel in a realistic form assume that the poison did not achieve the desired effect and that later Moral was captured by the authorities. However, if we return to the interpretation that the narrator gives regarding the existence of two Cándido Lópezes, one Argentine who does not paint the crucifixion of López, and another Paraguayan who does paint the crucifixion but on an inexistent day that disappears through a crack in time, it seems that this episode prefigures what happens to Moral when he arrives in Paraguay. On an inexistent date that is lost in the incongruence of the different dates mentioned in the book, Moral manages to kill Stroessner, thus fulfilling the impossible task of the superman, administering the poison of the ring. That is why this encounter with the dictator is narrated as if it were a real event in the novel. But in real calendar time, Moral dies tortured and killed by the government, without assassinating the dictator and Stroessner is only removed from power two years later in a coup headed by Andrés Rodríguez. The bifurcation of Moral in two different times is prefigured by 11. I first pointed out these discrepancies and somewhat odd allusions in Weldt-Basson, “Postmodernism and Genre.”

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the bifurcation of Cándido López. Moral affirms regarding Cándido López: “No journalistic mention, no study from the most accredited art critics exists on this second Cándido López, on this sort of mysterious pictorial ‘transmigration.’ But his paintings are there, magically identical to those of the first one” (222). Another important episode that borders on the fantastic is the previously mentioned episode regarding the hooded penitents who, as we saw, relate to Nietzsche’s concept of the “penitents of the spirit.” While Moral is riding in his car through the streets of Nevers where he claims to have seen the penitents, a glob of bloody spit hits the rear view mirror of his car. When Moral describes this episode, he states, “A brief, sudden clink hit the rear view mirror. I opened my eyes. It was as if the order of time had been inverted, first the clink. Seconds after, I managed to see the trajectory of a reddish lump like that of a glob of spit that became squished against the rectangular glass. The procession of penitents had disappeared. With redoubled fury I pursued them going in circles along the adjacent streets, without hearing the screeches of the tires or the smell of burnt rubber. The entire time I had the stain in front of me on the rear view mirror” (75, my emphasis). Once again, as in the episode where Cándido López paints the López crucifixion on an inexistent day that fell through a crack in time, Moral experiences something impossible or out of the realm of reality: he hears the noise of the spit hitting the mirror before the spit actually strikes the mirror. This again suggests that Moral is either hallucinating or experiencing a fantastic time parallel to real calendar time. Another instance which vacillates on the border between reality and unreality is the episode concerning Leda Kautner’s appearance one night at Moral’s home. During a phantasmagoric scene, which is later “explained” by Moral suffering from a high fever, Leda is hiding in the shadows, naked, and “rapes” Moral. Moral reacts with anger and claims to have strangled her, although her body then “disappears.” Although “facts” are subsequently presented to suggest that it was all a dream or hallucination—in Paris, Moral is told that Leda was there after their encounter and purchased a ticket back to Germany; Leda later appears alive as the stewardess on the flight to Paraguay and the actress who plays Madame Lynch during the annual pilgrimage to Cerro Corá—other information is provided to suggest that the episode was real and actually took place. We are told that after the encounter the Dalmatian brings a lock of Leda’s hair to Moral, which he flushes down the toilet, and Jimena tells Moral that rats have been eating the dates that she hung to dry in the barn (which suggests a connection to Leda’s presence because Moral narrated that her breath smelled of dates). This mystery is never resolved for the reader and the air of the fantastic permeates the novel. Perhaps the strangest and most inexplicable of references is the comment that Félix Moral makes when he is leaving the Senlis Hotel in Paris, after

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having spent the night in the room that was formerly occupied by Leda Kautner. Moral states, “It was not from the Senlis of Paris that I was leaving. It was not the hotel where I had slept in Leda’s former bed. Her voice continued waiting on the phone receiver from Munich. I was leaving the murky hotel of La Boca in Buenos Aires and I walked toward nowhere” (XXX). Although in this section of the novel Moral is clearly situated in Paris, he suddenly describes his exit from the hotel as if he were in Buenos Aires. The episode (like those of the two Cándido Lópezes and the two different ends to Stroessner) suggests the projection of Moral into two parallel times or a species of alternate universe. This notion is enhanced by frequent comments made by the protagonist alluding to his belief in the supernatural. For example, after the episode in which the police take away the pictures that Moral shot at Pedro Alvarenga’s wake, Moral states, “Among the traces of faraway barks and the tremors of the wind, a very soft melody came from somewhere. A vague feeling penetrated me. It wasn’t fear. It was rather the feeling of the supernatural that I have experienced more than once but that I always considered with mistrust as an irrational or imaginary reaction before the unknown” (211). Perhaps these allusions by Moral regarding the supernatural are subtle indications pointing the reader toward a fantastic interpretation of the novel’s ending. History as a Collective Process Almost all of Roa Bastos’s work underscores the fundamental ambiguity of life, not only with regard to the dual nature of man, but also the ambiguity between reality and unreality. The postmodern vision that emphasizes the relativity and subjectivity of all truth is another element that unites the three works and grants them the status of a trilogy. As we have seen, postmodernism, which among other characteristics, questions the validity (emphasizes the subjectivity) of all historical knowledge, underpins the vision of all the ambiguous characters in Roa Bastos’s fiction. Was Solano López a patriot or a madman? Was Dr. Francia a tyrant or a nationalist? Roa Bastos’s fiction posits these questions in his trilogy, but by no means provides a definitive answer. The interpretation depends on the reader and the viewpoint he assumes, and this is a fundamentally postmodern approach to the interpretation of history. 12 Within this postmodern view of history, there is one clear emphasis that all three novels of the trilogy share: the focus on history as a collective process. In very different ways, each novel illustrates that effective historical

12. For an analysis of postmodernism in the trilogy see Weldt-Basson, “Augusto Roa Bastos’s Trilogy as Postmodern Practice,” 335-355 and Weldt-Basson, “Postmodernism and Genre in El fiscal,” 383-402.

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change cannot be achieved by an individual alone, but rather must be accomplished through collective action. Son of Man is clearly predicated on this notion of collective action. Although the numerous popular rebellions fail (first the 1912 rebellion and then the subsequent rebellion led by Cristóbal Jara), as we have already seen under the theme of eternal return, various passages of the novel suggest that rather than a fruitless cycle that repeats itself, these revolutions are a spiral that will eventually lead to social and political change. Similarly, as already noted regarding I The Supreme, the dictator Dr. Francia criticizes himself for his failure to create revolutionary leaders to continue the revolutionary process after his death. In the novel, the “unknown handwriting” that writes notes on the margins of The Supreme’s notebooks (and which may be another voice of his conscience or alterego) (Weldt-Basson, “Augusto Roa Bastos’s I The Supreme, 65–69) emphasizes that the dictator’s failure is anchored in his inability to see the Revolution as a collective process: “Is this the spin you gave the die so as to get the Revolution moving? Did you believe Revolution to be the mark of onealone-entirely-on-his-own? One alone is always wrong; truth begins with two and more” (98). Finally, in The Prosecutor, Félix Moral fails in his attempt to assassinate Stroessner because his plan in the act of a sole individual who does not have the authority to judge Stroessner and bring him to justice. Only the collectivity can do so. Armando Figueroa emphasizes that Moral, as an exile, lacks a collective experience, which condemns him to an insufferable individualism (54–57). Although Stroessner is overthrown by an army coup on February 3, 1989, this action holds the promise of a transition to democracy and is followed by a popular insurrection: The military coup was followed by a peaceful civil insurrection that launched a call for municipal elections. . . . The new communal authorities in Asunción, followed by an immense multitude, climbed to the top of the Tacumbú hill. They dismantled the bronze statue of the dictator and made it roll down the hill in a great explosion of collective jubilation that lasted three days. . . . Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from all social sectors in fraternal union with the indigenous villages dragged the statue through the streets of the city to the rhythm of various musical bands. . . . The statue was hung from an immense gallows, relic from the old days. . . . A National Constitutional Convention has just been celebrated from which a new Constitution has emerged. (241)

This passage emphasizes the actions of the collectivity in symbolically bringing Stroessner to justice.

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Dogs Another aspect that unites the three works of the trilogy is that dogs are important characters in each novel. In his book Literature and Animal Studies, Mario Ortiz Robles defines two principal roles for dogs in fiction: (1) dogs are, of course, man’s best friend, and thus “little humans” and (2) dogs are natural cynics who reflect men’s folly back to them (55–83). Both of these somewhat antithetical roles can be seen in the three novels of Roa Bastos’s trilogy. In Son of Man, a dog appears in only one of the ten chapters, but his presence is significant. In chapter 2, which focuses on the ambiguous character of the Doctor who is thrown off the train in Sapukai, the Doctor adopts a dog who becomes his best friend and follows him around every day as he goes to the town store and performs other errands. As we saw previously, The Doctor eventually becomes greedy and betrays the townspeople, raping María Regalada while drunk and then fleeing. Despite this extremely negative behavior, the novel portrays how María Regalada, pregnant, and the dog await the Doctor’s return. The dog continues to trot to the general store every day, faithfully following the routine that was established when the Doctor was present. The dog is important because he serves as a reminder of the Doctor when he was good and helped the townspeople, thus emphasizing this aspect of the Doctor’s ambiguous character: “There goes the Doctor!” The words are not actually spoken; nor are they used ironically. They merely reflect the villagers’ habitual reaction to the sight of the familiar figure of the dog, which is still, in spite of what has happened, a welcome sight. For at one time the Doctor was the friend and protector of Sapukai. He arrived there when the wounds of the disaster were still raw, and perhaps helped unintentionally to distract the attention of the people of Sapukai from their misfortune. . . . That is the kind of man the Doctor was, and the villagers still imagine that they see him walking behind the dog. (43–44)

Similarly, the Dalmatian who belongs to Félix Moral in The Prosecutor is consistently portrayed as a loyal friend whose human-like quality is emphasized. In the following passage in which Moral tests the poison that he will administer to the dictator on his faithful dog, the Dalmatian’s human-like nature stands out: The noble Dalmatian entered, parsimonious and solemn, as if he carried on his back the white and black crowns of the river Paraguay, and began to lick my hand. Precisely the hand on which I was wearing the ring. I saw the two-faced serpent reflected in his eyes, shining and understanding. The dying light of sundown reflected the shine of the small and faraway bonfires in his pupils.

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We conversed for a while. He moved his head as if he understood what I was saying to him. “Let’s go,” I said to him and I left carrying him by the collar. I sat down on the bench in the gazebo and began to speak to him again, as if I was the one who needed to be convinced that the barbarity that I was going to commit was an innocent and just act. “We are nothing,” I said to him in the end caressing his head. “And we are not even masters of our own life. You and I are going to die for the same cause. You are going to die with the death reserved for the tyrant. But you are not going to die like he, a ferocious beast, will. You are going to die like a man. I am going to die like a dog. We cannot avoid it. You have been for me a great friend and I love you a lot. . . . What I am going to do pains me a lot. I ask you for a lot of forgiveness. . . . “My eyes were moist, my voice was broken. . . . “Give me your hand,” I asked him, humble, guilty. He extended his right paw with the good behavior, patience and limitless confidence that a dog feels toward his owner. I squeezed it strongly while I lightly displaced the trigger of the opal with my thumb. The Dalmatian observed me as if anticipating my thoughts. He didn’t move a millimeter but upon feeling the toxin penetrate his blood, with a human voice he cried out “NO!”. . . (127–128)

Finally, in I The Supreme, there are two important dogs, Hero and Sultan, who are personified and speak as if they were humans. Sultan, the dictator’s dog, is a good example of Ortiz-Robles’s notion of the cynical dog who exposes human folly, because Sultan is portrayed as The Supreme’s alterego who points out the dictator’s errors, particularly with regard to his servant Pilar. For example, when the dictator tries to justify that “he sent him [Pilar] to hell” for being a thief, Sultan responds “What hell? That of your black conscience?” (375). Similarly, when the dictator condemns Pilar’s “ladronicide with the Indian woman” (384), Sultan indicates that The Supreme was unfairly condemning Pilar for his sexual relationship with her: “So what? You had him executed just for that. . . . He found everything good in what you call evil; from the line round his middle downward” (386) (WeldtBasson, I The Supreme, 69). This citation illustrates how I The Supreme counterpoises the cynical dog to the faithful dogs of Son of Man and The Prosecutor. However, in all three cases, dogs are given human-like qualities and serve as significant characters in each work. Guaraní The final characteristic shared by all three novels of the trilogy is their use of Spanish peppered with Guaraní words and phrases. Paraguay is a bilingual nation where most people speak Guaraní (even more so than Spanish), yet Spanish is the official language used by all governmental organs. Until recently, Paraguay lived a situation of diglossia, which refers to the presence of

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a dominant language of status versus a second language that is considered inferior and whose use is discouraged within a population. Only since the mid-1990s has Guaraní gained some respectability in the country, as it became an emblem of Paraguayan identity and nationhood in the politic rhetoric of the Colorado Party (Nicksen, 7). Roa Bastos had long grappled with the dilemma of writing in the dominant language, Spanish, versus the popular language, Guaraní. With a limited Guaraní-reading public, and living outside Paraguay for almost all of his adult life, Roa Bastos was obliged to write in Spanish. Nonetheless, a determination to capture the bilingual character of Paraguay and the spirit of Guaraní has permeated almost all of his fiction, especially the three novels that constitute the trilogy. As Bareiro Saguier has noted, Roa Bastos is interested in communicating the “collective spirit” of the spoken word, rather than the incorporation of words for a picturesque effect (Bareiro Saguier, “Colonialismo,” 85). The use of Guaraní within his texts presents additional problems—especially that of the comprehensibility of Guaraní words for a largely non-Guaraní-speaking audience. Roa Bastos employs various techniques to solve this dilemma in different ways as his texts evolve. Early in his career, in El trueno entre las hojas, Roa Bastos chose to include an index of Guaraní terms. A few years later, in the first novel of the trilogy, Son of Man, Roa Bastos developed a technique in which one can normally interpret the sense of the Guaraní terms either because they are followed by a Spanish translation, or because the context of the paragraph reveals their meaning. In I The Supreme, Roa Bastos finds yet new ways to incorporate the flavor of Guaraní in his text, by creating compound words in Spanish (like “tiestosescucha” or “listening jugs”) that mimic the compound words that characterize Guaraní as an agglutinative language (Weldt-Basson, “The Legacy of Guaraní,” 73–74). Finally, in The Prosecutor, although Roa Bastos has somewhat reduced his use of Guaraní, he simultaneously abandons concern for issues of comprehension, providing no direct translations or clues to the meaning of the words. Perhaps in the wake of the advent of the World Wide Web, Roa Bastos worried less about readers’ ability to find the meaning of the Guaraní phrases. Although some have concluded that this reflects an abandonment of the attempt of the intellectual to identify with the common people, 13 Roa Bastos’s continued use of Guaraní clearly reflects an ongoing preoccupation with linguistic identity and continued commitment to represent the plight of the common man in Paraguay. Owing to the importance of the presence of Guaraní in Roa Bastos’s works, I have chosen to keep all Guaraní phrases within the text and to provide notes that explain their meaning. 13. Christina and Brian Turner hold this viewpoint. See “Guaraní Language Usage in the Trilogy by Roa Bastos.”

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OTHER IMPORTANT THEMES The discussion of The Prosecutor as part of a trilogy reveals several important themes and narrative techniques that characterize the novel, including the topics of power (dictatorship), history, intertextuality, fantastic elements, animal characters, and the use of Guaraní. In addition to these themes, there are many other significant ones that the novel develops, particularly those of exile, death, and the role of women. I will briefly examine the development of these three themes in The Prosecutor. The theme of exile to some degree ties into the fact that in many ways The Prosecutor is an autobiographical novel, and Roa Bastos was exiled from Paraguay from 1947 to1989, more than forty years. The protagonist, Félix Moral, shares multiple characteristics with Roa Bastos—he is a screenplay writer who becomes a professor in France, he is a Gemini, he has written books like Contravida, which are in reality attributed to the real author Roa Bastos, and his partner, Jimena, shares, as we have seen, many of the characteristics of Roa’s partner, Iris Giménez. However, the most significant characteristic shared by Roa Bastos and his protagonist, is their mutual condition of exile. Although mention of exile is certainly made in the previous novels of the trilogy (in Son of Man there are political exiles who return and are on the train headed for Asunción; in I The Supreme, the dictator reflects on exiles as the worst species of man, and the character Loco-Solo predicts exile for the compiler in one of the novel’s extensive footnotes), it is only a major theme in The Prosecutor. Roa Bastos has said that there are two types of exile: internal and external, and that one has to find the discipline to live affirmatively within these two dimensions of the new identity afforded through exile (Bareiro Saguier, “Caídas,” 140). Interestingly, within the context of exile, he refers to a chapter of the then unpublished Contravida in which he retells the story of “Nonato” (Unborn), which originally appeared in the short story by that title. Not coincidentally, the story of “Nonato” is also retold in The Prosecutor, in what initially might seem like an extraneous passage. However, Roa Bastos gives the tale of “Nonato” a symbolic meaning in which the teacher’s desire to be reborn in his mother’s womb, his movement from an old man back to a child, encapsulates the dilemma faced by an exiled person who must reinvent himself in a new context and thus be “reborn.” Roa Bastos relates that when he was first exiled, he suffered an existential crisis but that he discovered: As a result of a crisis (the Chapter “Nonato”. . . tells of this crisis), that this new born, already thirty years old, must assume his new state at all costs, no longer as the forced punishment for a crime that he had not committed, but with the will, clarity and responsibility of spirit that individual sovereignty and the intimate and ultimate freedom that no power on earth can destroy except by death. (in Bareiro Saguier, “Caídas,”142, my translation)

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Thus, “Nonato,” a story that heretofore has been considered purely mythic, 14 symbolizes the dilemma of exile that constitutes the central theme of The Prosecutor. The protagonist, Félix Moral, exiled in France, undergoes a life crisis, precipitated by two life events: first, his rape by his graduate student Leda Kautner, and his subsequent alleged strangulation of the girl and second, his near-death experience after these events in which he almost perishes from a high fever. Moral, debased by his supposed actions and betrayal of Jimena, as well as traumatized by his near-death, feels a need to redeem himself and give meaning to his existence. Moral is given the opportunity to return to Paraguay disguised as an International Conference participant and decides to use this venue to execute an assassination plan against the dictator. Although the plan carries the risk of death, to some degree this death constitutes a rebirth for Moral because it will redeem his heinous actions and infidelity, and give him a meaningful death, or “a death of one’s own.” This leads us to a second important theme developed throughout The Prosecutor, the theme of death. Moral almost dies several times throughout the novel: from heart disease, fever, torture, and so forth. These deaths are what Rainer Maria Rilke would call “generic deaths” that are not unique to the spirit of a particular person. Roa Bastos alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke and his relationship with Paula Becker at various points in The Prosecutor. Moral’s friend Clovis, who retells their story, refers directly to Rilke’s concept of “a death of one’s own,” and his disappointment that Paula Becker died in childbirth, one of the “generic deaths” for women. The philosophical backdrop of Rilke and the concept of “a death of one’s own” explain, to some degree, Moral’s impetus to go on what is virtually a suicide mission to administer poison to the dictator through a special ring. By dying in an attempt to kill Stroessner, Moral can enact a death of his own—a unique and meaningful death that grants depth to his existence (Weldt-Basson, “All Women,” 222–23): This could be the unique and exceptional instant which I have been thinking about for quite some time. All my being stretched itself toward that definitive moment in which, in an infinitesimal flash, one becomes what he should be and does what he should do. The supreme adventure, success or catastrophe. (113)

Thus, death becomes a major novelistic theme that is repeated in various forms and through various characters, including Francisco Solano López, Pancha Garmendia, Leda Kautner, and the faithful Dalmatian, among others. 14. For this interpretation see Martin Lienhard, “Moriencia: Una intertextualidad indoamericana.”

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The third and final central theme is that of feminism and the role of women. Although female characters are always present in Roa Bastos’s works, very few actually feature female protagonists. The two novels in which female protagonists are most important are The Prosecutor and Madama Sui. Not only does The Prosecutor feature two significant female protagonists (Jimena Tarsis and Leda Kautner), but it also presents an array of other strong female characters, including the historical figures Madame Lynch (Francisco Solano López’s concubine) and Pancha Garmendia (another of López’s love interests). Moreover, there are frequent novelistic digressions in which Moral reflects upon feminism and praises women. The praise of the superiority of women permeates The Prosecutor. For example, we are told that man is only as good as “the woman who accompanies him” (14); later on that “woman is always the principal character behind any great man” (15); when Paraguay is destroyed by the Triple Alliance War, we are told that the women were the ones who reconstructed the nation. The elderly lady who mentored Jimena when she visited Paraguay explained to her that in Paraguay “everything depends upon women” (41); Moral constantly insists upon woman’s biological superiority for being able to give birth (38; 60). These are just a few of many examples that culminate with an explicit discussion of feminism and machismo (61–62), a topic upon which Moral claims to have written an “article on feminism and machismo . . . [in the university journal], very favorable, of course to women’s cause faced with ‘the incurable illness of man’” (73). As noted in the biographical section, Roa Bastos’s essays and thoughts on women were recently collected in a volume titled Valoración de la mujer paraguaya. This work includes diverse manifestations of Roa Bastos’s appreciation of women, including essays in which he advocates for a female president. The strength and independence of women is undoubtedly an important theme that the author manifests through Jimena, Leda Kautner, Madame Lynch, and Pancha Garmendia, all of whom are represented as strongwilled and determined to achieve their goals. 15 Pre-texts and Post-texts of The Prosecutor One of the most studied aspects of the novel The Prosecutor is how the novel’s various “pre-texts” relate to the novel. A “pre-text” is a text written prior to another text that contains elements that are then used to construct the posterior text. Roa Bastos has a long history of publishing fragments of texts prior to their completion. These fragments are then usually reworked and incorporated into one of his novels. For example, prior to publishing I The 15. See Weldt-Basson, “All Women Are Whores,” for a discussion of feminism in Roa Bastos’s works.

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Supreme, Roa Bastos published two fragments of the novel in journals: one in Hispamérica in 1972 titled “Ay del solo,” [Oh, The Solitary One], and another in Marcha in 1973 under the title “Mi reino el terror” (My Terror Kingdom) (Weldt-Basson, “The Genesis of Yo el Supremo,” 49–50). On a grander scale, Roa Bastos reworked his entire novel Son of Man (published in 1960) and republished the new version in 1982. The new version incorporates many changes, most notably, the addition of an extra chapter, which was formerly a short story titled “Kurupí.” 16 The Prosecutor is undoubtedly the novel of the trilogy with the most pre-texts. In addition, the work boasts several post-texts (texts that directly take elements from a previous text and elaborate them into a new work that ultimately “dialogues” with the previous one). Prior to the publication of The Prosecutor in 1993, Roa Bastos published the following texts that can be considered “pre-texts” of the novel: the short story “El Sonámbulo” [“The Sleepwalker,”] (1976); the short story “El ojo de la luna” [The Moon’s Eye] (1991) published in the journal Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos; a fragment of The Prosecutor titled “Un país detrás de la lluvia,” [A Country Behind the Rain], which appeared in the journal Hispamérica in 1991. 17 “Un país detrás de la lluvia” is actually a reworked and expanded version of “El ojo de la luna.” The first section of the fragment is new, but the second is a reproduction of “El ojo de la luna” with some omissions and additions. The novel’s post-texts include “Frente al frente paraguayo” [In Front of the Paraguayan Front] and “Frente al frente argentino” [In Front of the Argentine Front] both included in the Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco (2001); the essay “Transmigración de Cándido López” [Transmigration of Cándido López] included in a volume of López’s paintings published in 1998 by the Mercosur group; and the posthumously published play Pancha Garmendia y Elisa Lynch (2011). A number of excellent articles have examined many aspects of the interrelationships between these varied texts. 18 Thus, this introduction will limit itself to an overview of these pre-texts and post-texts. Both “El ojo de la luna” and “Un país detrás de la lluvia” introduce two important characters, both historical figures, whose works serve as eye-witness accounts of the Triple Alliance War. The first is Sir Richard Francis 16. For a detailed discussion of the changes made to the 1982 version of Hijo de hombre, see Rivas Rojas, “‘Kurupí’ y ‘Madera Quemada,’ 373–88 and Weldt-Basson “A Genetic Approach to Augusto Roa Bastos’s Hijo de hombre,” 135–38. 17. According to an interview with Roa Bastos, “Un país detrás de la lluvia” was originally a different novel than The Prosecutor. It may be that after the first version of The Prosecutor was burned, he decided to use material from this other novel in the second version of The Prosecutor, which is why this fragment published in Hispámerica includes passages from the published version of The Prosecutor but appears under the title “Un país detrás de la lluvia.” 18. See the studies by Albonico, Cárcamo, Courthes, De Chantellus, Ezquerro, Fernandes, Gómez, and Guerrero in the annotated bibliography.

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Burton, who traveled to Paraguay in the late 1860s, toward the end of the war, and subsequently published Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870). The second is the Argentine painter Cándido López who was a soldier during the war and who also painted numerous scenes from the battles he witnessed. Both of these figures appear in the final version of the novel The Prosecutor. However, Roa Bastos does not use these pre-texts word-forword in the novel. He changes and reworks them in The Prosecutor in some interesting ways. A detailed study of the changes made is outside the scope of this introduction. However, a discussion, in broad strokes, of the way these pre-texts relate to the final version of the novel is instructive for comprehending Roa Bastos’s complex text. Leila Gómez states that Roa Bastos uses these two figures as “prisms through which the history of Paraguay can be examined and the recovery of national identity can be achieved” (Gómez, 323). Gómez indicates that Burton idealizes the defeat of Paraguay and López’s tragic destiny that presents an “Orientalized” view of the Other (318–19), but that the protagonist Moral feels he can identify better with Paraguay through the view presented by foreigners. In contrast, Jorge Guerrero asserts that Burton carnivalizes the figure of Francisco Solano López who led his troops to almost certain death during the war (Guerrero, 206). Although one can see the value of Gómez’s and Guerrero’s assertions regarding the use of foreign “testimony” on Paraguay, the ways in which Roa Bastos incorporates López and Burton into The Prosecutor, both using and changing certain elements from the pre-texts, provides clues regarding the interpretation of these two figures. Roa Bastos essentially employs these two historical figures as “witnesses” who support the Paraguayan vision of the war, despite not being Paraguayan and even “belonging to the other side” (in the case of Cándido López). By supporting the view of the war as a tragedy of destruction for Paraguay by much greater forces than their own, Cándido López and Richard Burton actually end up lending credence to the melodramatic vision of a crucified Solano López. Despite the emphasis on the historical value of Cándido López and Burton, unlike in previous novels, such as I The Supreme, Roa Bastos does not cite directly from Burton’s letters, but only pretends to do so. In The Prosecutor and its pre-texts, Roa Bastos refers various times to the appendix to Burton’s Letters. However, if the reader actually consults the volume of Letters, there is no appendix. Similarly, the two paintings allegedly painted by López—the one with the balloon and the crucifixion of Solano López that is similar to the one by Grünewald—are both invented paintings that do not figure among the painter’s real work. Roa Bastos is simply playing with history and fiction as interchangeable elements, just as he did in the previous novels of the trilogy, especially in I The Supreme. Rather than Orientalized or carnivalized views of Paraguay, Burton and López are Paraguayan sympa-

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thizers, who make Paraguay’s plight more realistic precisely because they are not “biased” Paraguayans. 19 That Roa Bastos is emphasizing the historical value of these two figures is made clear by some of the passages he has chosen to omit in the novel but that were present in the pre-texts. For example, “El ojo de la luna” states, “I never met a woman, one hears him say in a whisper in his eleventh letter, of similar beauty” (15, my translation). This passage, which is invented by Roa Bastos (despite a very specific mention to the eleventh letter of Burton’s book) is omitted from The Prosecutor, precisely because it does not sound credible. One cannot “whisper” in a letter, and thus this sentence alludes more to the fictional quality of the narrative than the authenticity of the sources mentioned. A second example of this type of omission is when Burton is cited as calling the Brazilians “plumed macaques (he uses the contemptuous nickname of macaques that the Paraguayans gave to the Brazilians (“El ojo de la luna,”14, my translation). It is simply not believable that Burton, whom Moral in The Prosecutor claims was sent in an unofficial diplomatic capacity to Paraguay, would adopt such a scornful attitude toward the Brazilians. Cándido López and Richard Burton are ultimately a “support” for the historical veracity of the Paraguayan viewpoint in the novel. That being said, there is, as we have seen, no clear consensus about the novel’s “unjudgeable” figures, such as Solano López or Moral himself. Thus, these historical sources and figures (López and Burton), are also just another way in which the reader is made to vacillate regarding what to believe or disbelieve. Are the paintings mentioned real or fictitious? Did Burton really make the quoted statements? The reader is left doubting, just as he is left without direction regarding the other ambiguous figures in the novel. Another interesting aspect of the pre-texts “El ojo de la luna” and “Un país detrás de la lluvia” is their incorporation of the figure Bartolomé Mitre as the antithesis or foil of Cándido López. López is allegedly Mitre’s assistant during the Triple Alliance War. Although Mitre is mentioned in The Prosecutor, he does not directly interact with Cándido López or comment upon his paintings. In the two pre-texts, however, we are told that Mitre is not very fond of the paintings because they remind him of his defeats and moral flaws. Although this thread is not taken up by the novel, it is the nucleus of one of the novel’s post-texts, “Frente al frente argentino,” which is a dialogue between López and Mitre. The text is a post-text of The Prosecutor because of the presence of Cándido López, who acts once again as a defender of the Paraguayan viewpoint in “Frente al frente argentino.”

19. Although Moral does talk about Burton as “a foreign witness, in a certain way neutral, who raised one of the corners of the veil over the tragedy with humor and fantasy” (180), thus acknowledging imaginative elements in his account, he also emphasizes Burton’s neutrality as a factor that validates his sympathy for the Paraguayans.

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With regard to the remaining pre-text, “El Sonámbulo,” we have already seen how its protagonist, Silvestre Carmona, embodies the ambiguities characteristic of characters such as Moral and Solano López in the novel and is a precursor to the theme of the inability to judge. The story emphasizes the dual perspective on López as well, who is seen as both heroic and fanatical by Carmona, who simultaneously betrays him and yet fights by his side till the end. “Frente al frente paraguayo,” is in reality an excerpt from The Prosecutor (Moral’s letter to Jimena) with the addition of “El guerrero y su doble” [The Warrior and his Double], a few pages that once again expound on the figure of Cándido López. “El guerrero y su doble” is essentially a reworking and expansion of the post-text “Transmigración de Cándido López,” a short essay that appeared in the Mercosur volume of López’s paintings published in 1998. Roa Bastos there speaks of a Paraguayan “legend” in which the soul of the Argentine painter migrates into a Paraguayan painter at the end of the war who paints the pain of the Paraguayan defeat. Roa Bastos is the creator of this “legend”; as we have seen, the idea of two Cándido Lópezes, one Argentine and one Paraguayan, each one painting the perspective of his country, is part of the plot of The Prosecutor and reflects the deep dualism that underlies the entire work. Finally, the posthumous play Pancha Garmendia and Elisa Lynch expands upon the love triangle between Francisco Solano López, Madame Lynch, and the native woman Pancha Garmendia, which is suggested in The Prosecutor by the screenplay being made on Solano López and the Triple Alliance War. Whereas these two women are presented as opposites in the novel (Lynch, blond and aggressive, Pancha dark and demure), the play views them as “twins” who share the subordinate position of women in society (Weldt-Basson, “All Women Are Whores,” 224–25). In the play, they wear identical masks that underscore their commonalities despite their differences. The seeds of the relationship between these three characters are initially found in The Prosecutor. This complex web of interconnections between Roa Bastos’s different works is a general characteristic of his oeuvre. Thus, this introduction has focused on the interconnections between The Prosecutor and Roa Bastos’s other narratives to enhance the reader’s comprehension of both The Prosecutor and Roa Bastos’s work in general.

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NOTES WORKS CITED Allison, David B. Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy. The Gay Science. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. On the Genealogy of Morals. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. Bareiro Saguier, Rubén. Augusto Roa Bastos (caídas y resurrecciones de un pueblo). Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 1989. ———. “Colonialismo mental en el bilingüismo paraguayo.” Escritura 1.1 (1976): 76–85. Burnham, Douglas, and Martin Jesinghausen. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Febles, Héctor. “Entrevista con Augusto Roa Bastos.” La Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. 2.5 (1988): 173–89. Figueroa, Armando. “Cuando solo queda imaginar: El Fiscal, última novela de Roa Bastos.” Quimera 121 (1993): 54–57. Goloboff, Mario. “El Fiscal o la imposibilidad de juzgar.” In Coloquio Internacional Augusto Roa Bastos: La Obra Posterior a Yo El Supremo. Poitiers: Centre de Recherches LatinoAméricaines CRIA-Archivos, Université de Poitiers, 1999 (pp. 73–80). Gómez, Leila. “Viaje a los campos de batalla: Augusto Roa Bastos y la Guerra de la Triple Alianza.” MLN 125 (2010): 305–25. Guerrero, Jorge Carlos. “Rewriting in Roa Bastos’s Late Fiction.” In Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature: The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos. Edited by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010 (pp. 189–209). Hollingdale, R. J. “Introduction.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1969 (pp. 11–35). Huysmans, J. K. “The Grünewalds in the Colmar Museum.” Translated by Robert Baldick. In Grünewald. New York: Phaidon Publishers, Inc., 1958 (pp. 10–25). ———. “The Karlsruhe ‘Crucifixion.’” Translated by Robert Baldick. In Grünewald. New York: Phaidon Publishers, Inc., 1958 (pp. 7–9). Kraniauskas, John. “Retorno, melancolía, y crisis de futuro: El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos.” In Las culturas de fin de siglo en América Latina: Coloquio de Yale 8 y 9 de abril de 1994. Edited by Josefina Ludmer and Carlos J. Alonso. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1994 (pp. 209–17). Leiter, Brian. “Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015). Edited by Eduard N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ nietzsche-moral-political/. Lienhard, Martin. “Moriencia: Una intertextualidad indoamericana.” Texto Crítico 24-25 (1982): 142–60. Matamoro, Blas. “El mito, alegoría de la historia: El Paraguay de Roa Bastos. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. 709-710 (2009): 53–62. Nicksen, Robert Andrew. “The Revitalization of the Guaraní Language in Paraguay.” Latin American Research Review 44.3 (2009): 3–26. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Ortiz-Robles, Mario. Literature and Animal Studies (Literature and Contemporary Thought). New York: Routledge, 2016. Quin, Alejandro. “Escritura sobre ruinas: Augusto Roa Bastos, la trilogía paraguaya y el acontecimiento en Hijo de hombre.” Contracorriente 14.1 (Fall 2016): 226–49. Rivas Rojas, Raquel. “‘Kurupí’ y ‘Madera Quemada’: La progresión cuestionadora de Augusto Roa Bastos.” Escritura 15.30 (1990): 373–88. Roa Bastos, Augusto. El fiscal. México: Alfagura, S.A., 1993. ———. I The Supreme. Translated by Helen Lane. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. ———. “El ojo en la luna.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 493-494 (1991): 13–24. ———. Son of Man. Translated by Rachel Caffyn. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988.

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Sicard, Alain. “El fiscal o la sublimación de lo ominoso.” In Coloquio Internacional Augusto Roa Bastos: La Obra Posterior a Yo El Supremo. Poitiers: Centre de Recherches LatinoAméricaines CRIA-Archivos, Université de Poitiers, 1999 (pp. 123–48). Tello Casao, Juan Antonio. “El mito como paradigma de la novela El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos.” In Coloquio Internacional Augusto Roa Bastos: La Obra Posterior a Yo El Supremo. Poitiers: Centre de Recherches Latino-Américaines CRIA-Archivos, Université de Poitiers, 1999 (pp. 149–58). Turner, Brian, and Christina Turner. “Guaraní Language Usage in the Trilogy by Roa Bastos.” https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brian_Turner8/publication/267382426_Guarani_ Language_Usage_in_the_Trilogy_by_Roa_Bastos/links/56fl489d)08aec63f4c9b53df.pdf? origin+publication_detail. Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol. “All Women Are Whores: Prostitution, Female Archetypes, and Feminism in the Works of Augusto Roa Bastos.” In Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature: The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos. Edited by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010 (pp. 211–34). ———. Augusto Roa Bastos’s I The Supreme: A Dialogic Perspective. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. ———. “Augusto Roa Bastos’s Trilogy as Postmodern Practice.” Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 22.2 (1998): 335–55. ———. “A Genetic Approach to Augusto Roa Bastos’s Hijo de hombre.” Confluencia 11.1 (Fall 1995): 135–48. ———. “The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos.” In Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature: The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos. Edited by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010. 1–24. ———. Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. ———. “Postmodernism and Genre in El fiscal by Augusto Roa Bastos.” Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 77-78 (2013): 383–402.

The Prosecutor Augusto Roa Bastos

To Morena Tarsis, You motivated me To re-write this story, you lived it yourself And you are written by it. ARB

The Prosecutor, along with Son of Man and I The Supreme, form a trilogy on the “monotheism” of power, one of the thematic axes of my narrative work. After almost twenty years of silence, the first version of this work was written during the final years of one of the longest and most savage tyrannies of Latin America. In 1989, an insurrection took the tyrant down. The novel was out of place and had to be destroyed. The fruit was unripe. The silence of a tombstone is always deafening. The world had changed as much as the author’s vision of the world. Those ashes ended up being fertile. In four months, from April to July, a totally different version emerged from those changes. It was the act of faith of a non-professional writer in the utopia of novelistic writing. Only the imaginary space of no-place and no-time allow one to explore the enigmas of the human universe of all times and places. Without this attempt to search unknown reality, the work of a fiction writer would hardly make sense. A.R.B. Toulouse, 1993

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FIRST PART It doesn’t matter who is speaking I will not be here. I will not be me. I will go far away, I will not say anything. Someone is going to try to tell a story . . . ——Samuel Beckett

Last night, Clovis de Larzac called from Paris. “I have something urgent to tell you. Come as fast as you can,” he told me with his unmistakable voice and a certain buzzing little tone as if he were whistling through the corners of his lips. “Tomorrow, I will be there.” This sudden invitation surprised me. It had been a while since we had seen him. I decided to go. After what had happened to me in Paris, it was almost natural that I would punish myself by visiting the “golden carrion” again. Perhaps through unconscious association, when Clovis spoke to me, once more, as if incrusted in the sky, I saw the black marble tombstone of General La Fayette that was located in the back of the garden at the Rothschild Hospital, 33 Picpus Boulevard. I rarely go to Paris and then only when I cannot avoid it. By dint of losing time, one becomes stingy with it. For me, Paris (please forgive me, metropolitan scholars of mythology) continues being the ancient and muddy Lutèce where the Gauls and Romans battled with mud up to their chests. Now immigrants from all over the world swarm there. A true infection. There are thieves of high and low lineage, bank robbers, ardent and ferocious kidnappers of women, of children. There are politicians who are sufficiently mediocre to aspire to the highest positions. And almost all of them achieve such positions without much effort. There are, in short. . . . But didn’t Balzac 1 already say it more than a century ago? I do nothing more than repeat his unjust and excessive words: “One of the spectacles of the world that contains the most horrors is, without a doubt, the general appearance of the Parisian population, horrible vision of a sickly, yellowish people.” Forgive me, don Honoré, but don’t you believe that today within the Parisian population there are hardly any Frenchmen? Paris is there with its halo of eternal beauty. I hate it because it fascinates me. It is a personal issue; it has nothing to do with the gratitude and sympathy I feel toward the country. In France, the foreigner, the expatriate that I was—like millions of other foreigners—was born the citizen of a republic again, pride of the Western world. Here the dignity of a human being was restored to me without demanding anything in exchange.

1. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was an important nineteenth-century French novelist.

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I only had to take a false name, divest myself of my unbearable sincerity, change appearance, invent new physical characteristics for myself, a thick beard made iridescent by reddish gray hairs, a deep split in the zygomatic arch, and above all, master the language with the accent and tone of the provinces. I learned to simulate to perfection the lameness of an invalid and the frugal silence of a daydreamer, taking into account that the speaker falls quicker than the lame man, and that lameness always inspires compassion and antipathy, two elements that are always useful in relationships with one’s arrogant fellow man. The obsession of every exiled person is to return. I cannot return with the face of the outlaw. I have thus had to adopt a pseudonym and a pseudonymous body to make my own unrecognizable, I am not saying my true self because that no longer exists either. One can invent another form of life, but not disguise himself as another to continue being himself. Now my name is Félix Moral, Associate Professor of University X. I try to make a virtue out of opacity, to pass undetected, to barely and unceremoniously be anybody or anything. An instinctive rejection viscerally opposes me to everything that reeks of a mob, of sects of any type, of robed honors, of academic glories, of pseudo-literary or scientific colloquia. Activities in which the Hispanists and Americanists shine on their own merits like bearded members of enlightened sects such as the Templar Order. Encyclopedia readers of the exotic. For me, the most genuine of the Americanists is Mr. Antonine Augustin Parmentier, 2 who granted nobility to the potato and instituted the cult of the “frite” in perpetuity and universally, which is, in reality, the best in the world and not the “French fry” that we eat in America as if it were imported from France. “Exile is the greatest destroyer of souls,” my grandfather, Ezequiel Gaspar, wrote to me in the early days, to comfort me. “Any type of exile, even that of someone who goes to the corner to buy cigarettes and never returns, as if he himself had disappeared into thin air. And political exile, even that of those who do not get involved in politics, like you, is the worst of all,” the old soldier boy who fought in the Great War when he was barely thirteen years old scribbled in his letter. He only left his beloved Asunción from time to time to travel in a dilapidated stagecoach from the turn of the century to his ranch in Misiones, in the fields that were bequeathed to officers who were former soldiers, when the public lands were auctioned off. “I live,” the old

2. Parmentier lived in the eighteenth century and conducted pioneering nutritional studies in France. He was the chief promoter of the edibility of the potato.

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man used to ironically say, “on a small fraction of the lands that the Marshal 3 gave to Lynch, 4 a little before his defeat at Cerro-Corá.” Malicious tongues murmured that the handsome old man had a small harem of young girls there. In the morning he sent them by horse to the school in the town of San Ignacio, five miles away from the ranch. In the evening, one or two at a time, like King David, he brought them to his immense bed made of woven leather to study the eternal book with them by the warmth of their primitive innocence. If these rumors were not lies, old Ezequiel Gaspar had found his fountain of youth in this garden of pastoral sylphs, because he lived to 108 and naturally left behind him a ton of illegitimate children. “I survived three international wars,” he said in his letter with the confused voracity 5 regarding time that the elderly have, “half a dozen internal revolutions, eighteen coups and fourteen military dictatorships. I don’t know if the country will survive the German’s 6 current dictatorship. He is the most savage cannibal of those who have been merciless to this country. In the time of López, López would have made Tembelo 7 shine his boots and brush down his horse Manduví . . . and now this miserable Gringo from the Hoeneau colony 8 has declared himself to be López’s heir and successor!” The old man Ezequiel Gaspar made a chilling prediction: “For more than a century, military men and bad politicians, which is almost everyone, have been insisting on destroying our beautiful country, putting it on sale and handing its scraps over to foreign powers. . . . Lucky for me that I will not be here anymore to see this final infamy. Remember what I am telling you, my dear grandson. I hope that an earthquake terminates this plague that that

3. The Marshal refers to Francisco Solano López (1827–1870) who was president of Paraguay from 1862 to 1870. López led Paraguay into the War of the Triple Alliance (also known as the Great War) against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1864 and died defeated at CerroCorá on March 1, 1870. There are multiple references to López throughout the novel. 4. Elisa Lynch was Francisco Solano López’s mistress. 5. Although all the consulted versions of El fiscal have the word “voracidad,” it is possible that this is a typographic error and that Roa Bastos meant “veracidad” (veracity). Otherwise, the reader is to understand “voracity” in a metaphoric sense that means the elderly have an eagerness to conflate different time periods and exaggerate their accomplishments (in this case, the grandfather’s participation in three international wars). 6. “The German” refers to Alfredo Stroessner (1912–2006) who was the dictator of Paraguay from 1954 to 1989. Although Stroessner was born in Paraguay, he was of German descent. 7. Tembelo was a nickname given to the dictator Alfredo Stroessner that has its origins in the Guaraní language and refers to a ridiculous and despicable person. 8. Hoeneau appears to be an alternate spelling of Hohenau, which is a city near Encarnación where Stroessner was born. Hohenau was founded around 1900 by German colonists. Thus, it is referred to here as the “Hoeneau colony.”

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carape López 9 has sown since his death at Cerro Corá. 10 . . . He added a litany of insults, anathemas, and curses against “the vile race of soldiers and politicians” and ended his letter with an outburst typical of his wild temper: “Even if I were to see them burn in a heap, I wouldn’t even pee on top of them. They are so greedy and avaricious that they would deny their shit to the crows and prefer to turn it into ashes. . . . The only great one was my chief, General Bernardino Caballero 11 . That one was a true Paraguayan! But they put him into politics and fucked him up . . .” By that time, the old gossipy and loose-tongued war veteran was not all there, and his ravings had to be tolerated. A year before his death, in a very short trial, the military tribunal confiscated his land and house in Asunción “for betraying the country.” They did not reveal the details. I believe that they didn’t even initiate a lawsuit. Everything was decided by the unappealable “superior order” that establishes and removes laws, and that “sends packing” millions of members of the opposition who are buried alive, after savage torture sessions, or are thrown from army helicopters over the thickest part of the virgin forests. The truth is, the more than one hundred-year-old man remained, as they say, without a place to drop dead. He died, from a syncope, some say, and according to others, from a bullet in the neck, when he went on a shaky errand to present himself before the authorities to demand his rights as a veteran of the Great War. They buried him furtively, without any funeral rites, in the military pantheon of La Recoleta. 12 Ezequiel Gaspar, considered one of the best infantrymen of the army during the Great War, was one of Bernardino Caballero’s officers and accompanied Solano López to his death at Cerro-Corá. The Great Tembelo 13 could not “pack him off” as easily as other unfortunates. Ezequiel Gaspar led an accomplished life and died like a patriarch in exile, whose honored memory is thrown onto the garbage dump of oblivion. All means of dissimulation are necessary to hide the blemishes of exile. But the key to efficacy in this existence under a pseudonym is not to maintain any contact with exiles of the same origin. I have succeeded in completely avoiding relationships with my countrymen, cutting off all ties with the country that had the misfortune of being my birthplace. But exile stopped being the evil of one country a while ago. It is a universal plague. The entire 9. The original text reads “López carape.” “Carape” is Guaraní for shorty. Thus, “that shorty López.” I have left the Guaraní to capture the bilingual flavor of the text. 10. Cerro Corá is the site in Paraguay where Francisco Solano López was killed on March 1, 1870. 11. Juan Bernardino Caballero (1839–1912) was a general during the War of the Triple Alliance and later became president of Paraguay from 1881 to1886. He was also the founder of the Colorado Party, one of the major political parties in Paraguay. 12. La Recoleta is a neighborhood in Asunción. 13. See note 6.

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humanity lives in exile. Since national territories no longer exist, and, even less so, this utopic homeland that is the place where one feels good, we are all nomadic Bedouins from an extinct tribe, transnational objects, like money, war, or the plague. Exile is, in effect, the worst illness that can attack a human being. Contact with others who are also infected only aggravates the sickness. It is not only the consumption of the body and the spirit; it is the moral degradation that an individual can suffer to an extreme degree and that can drive him to insanity, crime, mystical and political deliriums, and finally, moral or physical suicide. There comes a time when the ill one stops suffering. He is reduced to a satiated and tranquil shadow, lamentable and satisfied in his striking ruin, like that of the mentally weak individual in whom the source of all emotion has completely disappeared. My gratitude toward France begins with Jimena. I met this woman who was going to fill up my life entirely, after having saved it twice, in Paris. Jimena is my best judge and critic, not only with respect to my intellectual work; also in regard to my revamped physical appearance. She knew me before plastic surgery designed for me this Jewish nose and the scar from an axe blow on the left eyelid, not to mention the remodeling of my fingerprints and a few other details that only she knows about. She frequently tells me with scorn that this physical reconstruction has improved me. I also owe to Jimena the radical transformation of my character. I recognize that before meeting her, I was nothing more than a nomad from the Neolithic Age. Before meeting her, all these years of exile weren’t worth anything to me. They would not have allowed me to purchase an hour of life. I lived in the middle of incomprehensibility, of senselessness. Jimena helped me to recover the meaning of my life, and of the world. She carries within herself multiple and unexpected guests; she offers different companions at different moments: she is always herself but protean in manner and tone. It suffices for a smile to illuminate her face and unity is reestablished; her presence recovers all its plenitude. She is always there. At her side, repose is not only tranquility but also the active plenitude of being. Everything about her inspires absolute confidence in me. Absolute acceptance and respect exists between us. I love and admire the secret of her personality. Only a great secret defines and specifies the expression of a face and makes it at once infinitely variable and mysterious. What made her suffer in the beginning was not knowing the details of my life of which she had not been a part. She turned my life around and adhered to it like flesh to the bone. Now she knows everything that I don’t even know about myself. The good and the bad, the known and the unknown of my life, even perhaps what is going to become of me. My human destiny has deeply penetrated beneath her skin. She is unaware of my memories, but divines my premonitions. I cannot give her anything more than my limitless support,

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necessary for the equality of a solitary couple. We live under the same roof, under the same sign of a shared life, as in an intense and powerful fever that finds its own calm in its burning heat. In private, I call Jimena “Morena,” a nickname with which the name of El Cid’s wife, 14 thus loses in heroic magic what it gains in the halo of affection and domestic intimacy. Jimena Tarsis, of the Tarsis of Old Castile. Her physical qualities actually have the warmth, the nobility, the health of mahogany or ebony. Her hair, her eyes, her character, reflect this obstinate color of dark splendor on the silky and slightly golden matte skin, that color that seems to tint the skin of Hispanic women, inherited by the women of my country. Jimena was unable to reconstruct my past. But instead, she restored the Window on the West 15 for both of us in her house-museum, a kind of great, arched niche that faces the setting sun. We live there most of the time. When night falls, because of a curious phenomenon of refraction, the great window becomes a type of bridge for a ship navigating in the darkness. Then Jimena closes the curtains and the dark world remains on the other side; the light and calm remain within. But this silence of life in no way resembles the peace of a tranquil retreat. It is the quietness of something implacable that stalks and seems to ponder an inscrutable threat. The property had been owned for centuries by the same family before passing on to Jimena. It had a dilapidated chapel piled with books of religious hymns, pictures, images of saints and church curtains that had been eaten away by insects with mildewed eyes and legs. I don’t know if this corresponds to the reality of this house or if I imagine it this way now, confused by my memories from before my hospitalization, or by having read it in the novel The Princess of Clèves, one of Jimena’s favorite books. She greatly admires the novel’s author. She considers Madame Lafayette one of the precursors of enlightened feminism during the courtly era of Louis XIV. The Princess was one of our readings in the Window on the West. We read it like a living chronicle of Nevers. 16 The ducal palace and the family mansion of Clèves were part of the scenery of the city that time had made less alive and real than in the pages of the novel. It is impossible to communicate the feeling of a particular era of our own existence, that which constitutes the subtle and penetrating essence of human experience. We live alone, 14. El Poema del Cid is an epic poem about the medieval hero, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, also known as El Cid or El Cid Campeador (a medieval form of the word champion). El Cid was married to Doña Ximena, and hence there is a parallel between this character and Jimena in El fiscal, since they share the same name and the narrator specifically refers to El Cid in the text. “Morena” literally means dark-skinned or brunette. 15. The Window of the West is a reference to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It refers to a cavern that Gondor’s men would hide in during wars in Ithlien and thus connotes a safe haven in the novel. 16. Nevers is a city in central France.

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as we dream alone. Suddenly someone appears who is capable of reading those dreams, of entering into them, transforming them into a fantastic reality. That is what Jimena achieved with my life. She gives herself entirely up to the cause of others, leaving nothing for herself. Her destiny is that of people who were born devoid of everything, except generosity. She has concentrated her generosity on me, believing perhaps that I was someone whom she could still save. Sometimes, however, she complains about having had to always battle with expatriates: her father, her mother, Jimena herself, and, lastly, me. But these reproaches are nothing but outpourings of a soul satisfied with giving more than receiving, satisfied with having sustained lost souls, in the true sense of the word. Jimena had all the gelatinous, almost fossilized crap that filled up the house removed. She gave a curious gothic inkwell to Dr. Maurel. The doctor said it wasn’t an inkwell but a barber’s bowl that was used to blood let apoplectics during the Middle Ages. Jimena burned and donated everything that had to be burned and donated, and installed her own museum of furniture, objects and souvenirs from Spain, Mexico, and other countries. There were even relics from the Jesuit Missions: an altar, a pri-dieu, 17 images of saints and angels in the purest Hispanic-Guaraní baroque style, purchased from some Paraguayan ambassadors skilled in contraband and illegal trade, an activity that is precisely part of their diplomatic mission, in addition to being investors and agents of the Tyrannosaur’s 18 pocketbook. Jimena furnishes an uncertain future with these relics from other eras, perhaps because the memory of the past is the only future that remains for us. She stays outside of the ordered overcrowding as if time didn’t touch her and only she could manipulate time through these objects with her long and flexible hands without altering their distant and concentrated air. With rapid taps of the feather duster she strips the dust from those things that are destined to be dust. Jimena lives in the house; I occupy it, only partially, with the obsessive thought of return that dully eats away at me like a big cavity, a cavity in the bone of the soul where the call of my native land, only audible to me, resounds with a strong and permanent echo. Jimena’s daily routine is rapid and varied, but she does everything in a whisper, so that her movements are hardly noticed: preparing her classes, a frugal snack, kneading and baking bread toward evening and the chipá 19 or Paraguayan bread for the Saturday or Sunday teas. The upkeep of the garden falls to me; sometimes also washing the dishes. Soon I will return to these 17. A pri-dieu is a piece of furniture for prayer that has a kneeling surface and an elbow rest. 18. “Tiranosaurio” is the nickname of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner who ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989. The word, which means tyrannosaur, is also a wordplay because it contains the word “tirano” (tyrant) implying that in addition to being an outmoded dinosaur, Stroessner was a tyrant. 19. Chipá is a Paraguayan cheese bread that is a staple of the Paraguayan diet.

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helpful tasks in which I put more effort and joy than in teaching literature and Latin American civilization. A Portuguese woman helps her in the mornings with these minor tasks. Mrs. Alves comes very early, before sunrise. She comes in through the back door that we leave open because she doesn’t want to take a key with her. She says it is a lot of responsibility. She stays until mid-morning, when we are not yet up. The smell of her appetizing stews awakens us. She leaves the table set, with a tender, dewy rose in the fine crystal vase from Bohemia, a gift from Clovis, and then she leaves to work in other houses in the neighborhood. Silent, slow, always dressed in mourning, Mrs. Alves loves Jimena like the daughter she had who died when she was Jimena’s age. According to Mrs. Alves, her daughter was very similar to Jimena in physical appearance and character. They communicate in a laconic but very eloquent language of gestures and monosyllables. Mrs. Alves hardly moves her lips, as if she were murmuring a sigh. Jimena, even with her back to her, hears and understands her. She assures me that she is a cultured woman who once belonged to the high society of Lisbon. I have not yet entered into the world of this introverted and discrete being, sheltered in permanent mutism. I don’t know Mrs. Alves’s voice. She walks in front of me as if I were a column of smoke, which I attribute to respect and timidity, not scornful indifference. I conjecture that she might be the descendent or relative, perhaps the daughter of Rutilio Alves, friend of Fernando Pessoa, 20 the great poet who wrote Antinous, and was part of the same generation. I have not dared to ask her. Rutilio Alves died poor and forgotten in Paris. His daughter prepares food for us. The old, restored house was resurrected before my eyes, little by little, and it was only then that I noticed its air of recent antiquity. The buzz of the wind on its broken chimney is like a sedating music to me. The ruinous farm of some local proprietor, vast and dark, has been converted into this housemuseum, the ideal place for the encounter of two beings, like Jimena and me, two Geminis with scarcely a few days between our birthdays, with similar likes and different dislikes, but united in the same feeling of mutual affection and comprehension. “Ah, our brand-new ruination!” Jimena related that that was the first thing I said when I recovered consciousness. I don’t know. I don’t remember. Certain shadows of amnesia still surround my mind, and make me inhabit a space between day and night of a time that took place without me. I left the

20. Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was one of the most important Portuguese poets of the twentieth century. Rutilio Alves is a character invented by Roa Bastos.

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hospital smelling like the outdoors. 21 I have only brought with me my damaged health and the indelible odor of the operating room. From Rothschild Hospital, the only thing that remains etched on my mind is that tomb of General La Fayette, at the foot of my window. The twilight sun reflected it, inverted, on the window panes, as if the tomb were incrusted in the sky, between the clouds, with its mini wrought-iron gate made of forged iron and its small hedge of lilies. It is the smallest and most insignificant tomb for a general that I know of. I contemplated it through the oxygen mask and tubes that penetrated my body through all its orifices. Later, I didn’t see it anymore. The only thing that I heard all the time was the screeching racket of the subway trains as they went up the exterior ramp of Courteline station to Nation. But that noise also was becoming each time more diffuse and ended up reabsorbed into my comatose daydream. The doctors wouldn’t give half a dollar for my wretched hide. My clinical death was decreed. The chief of my hospital floor ordered them to disconnect my tubes. Jimena, at my side the whole time, kidnapped me on the way to the morgue with the complicity of the nurses who were transporting the stretcher. She rented an ambulance; she loaded me inside with the help of the same nurses who were made sensitive by a good tip. She drove it herself and in a few hours returned to our incomparable Nevers. Doctor Maurel, our old friend and protector, completed my emergency salvation. “This is a miracle!” he said. “Well, that is what always happens. Each man lives in his miracle until God decides to retract his confidence.” I only found out about everything several days later. Jimena had prepared a bed for me next to the windowsill of our Window on the West, the small mosque of our particular cult. “Ah, that window! I passed my deathly pale hand over the woodwork that covered the hollow of the arch, as wide as the thickness of the wall. I didn’t want to believe it. The site of our readings in the afternoon sun. Bed of love when night stuck to the window panes to spy on us. We had to close the curtains to hide from the complicit wink of the stars. I now feel the beating of the pulse of so many unforgettable things in those pieces of wood and coarse stones. We are nothing more than the memory of lost necessities, of irretrievable moments of what we were and are no longer. Once in a while the doctor comes, with his long beard and his heavy cane made of oak with its silver handle and chain at the wrist. He enters and looks at me as if it were impossible for me to still be here. “Encore vous ici? Ce revenant!,” 22 he muttered and left as if annoyed by an unnatural phenomenon that contradicted his old principles. Maurel had personal affection for me but detested me as a patient who altered the mortal 21. This may be a reference to a chemical with a pine-like smell that is used in hospitals and operating rooms to help bandages stick. 22. “You still here? I must be seeing a ghost!”

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deadlines so well-distributed in the economy of nature, in the scientific charts, and in the life expectancy tables of insurance companies. In this regard, I was nothing more to him than The Apparition. Once, while the doctor was leaving, he heard me mumble at a diabolic rate without understanding what I was saying, as if wanting to recover from the enormous quantity of silence in which I had been shipwrecked during an incalculable time period. Jimena did not miss a single sound of this ferocious and self-centered gibberish characteristic of the resurrected whose velocity of thought and voice is only possible in the absolute state of repose. Jimena translated my words back to me, emptied of their incoherence and that sticky mildew that one brings from the places of death. Hearing her was all that mattered to me for the moment in order to feel that life was continuing. After a few months, since I didn’t have anything else to do, I began to write this intimate diary to which I will grant a random title: perhaps the title of one of the books by the Danish author of Fear and Trembling: Posthumous Papers of Someone Who Is Still Alive. 23 This is exactly the title that is appropriate for it. It registers the impressions and events of the passing moment (that which could be called the deceitful memory of the present), some memories and premonitions not entirely clear: the fading odor of memory. It is absolutely not a literary text; literature that pretends to be more honest and imaginative than life seems abominable to me. These posthumous papers are nothing more than the raw material of my not always blessed human experience. They have been written with the abrupt, disjointed character, with the vague spontaneity, that letters written in a hurry in a moment of great emotional tension have, or that of the speech of someone who tries to narrate a bad dream but has forgotten most of it except the inexpressible anguish. The reality of the world, of a human being, is essentially fragmentary, as if it were reflected in a broken mirror. Posthumous writings are similar to those fragments that shine in the darkness. They try to tell a story in ruins. They are fragments of ruins themselves. They offer a place of residence appropriate to what we will never be again. And this happens all the more so in the great broken mirror of the history of a country, of humanity, sown with ruins, among which the dead of the world walk disoriented, as if they were alive. I would like to demolish those ruins. “The demolishing of a ruin is always a beautiful and terrifying spectacle,” Djuna Barnes 24 wrote. In a certain sense, all works are posthumous. Some are destined to survive their writers, which sometimes happens. The others are nothing more than ruins. One ends up learning resigned immobility from them. 23. This is a reference to Soren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Dutch philosopher. 24. Djuna Barnes is an American artist and writer. This is a quotation from her best-known work, the novel Nightwood published in 1936.

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These papers, Morena, are destined for you, when I am no longer here. They will relate for you some events from the past that you are unaware of and others that have not happened yet. They are not an intimate diary or the exalted chronicle of a resurrection. Even less, that spurious genre of autobiography. I detest autobiographies in which the “I” delights in its vacuous self-sufficiency, proffering sententious aphorisms invented for posterity, or warbling a moral or a cynicism likewise invented. The cosmetic image of he who presents himself in the mirror of writing as a model of “exemplary life” is the coarsest form of narcissistic deceit that men of letters could possibly concoct: even those who simulate the most opaque modesty and discretion or the most ruthless self-critical rigor. Some pretend to be mediocre and monotonous; it doesn’t cost them any effort because they are. I include myself in good faith: “di questi coati son io modesmo…” (Inf. IV 46). 25 Everything they say is contradicted by what they don’t say and the double swindle ends up being contradicted by real events, and these, by the infinite and essential unreality of the world. Whoever pretends to “portray” his life would have to invent his own language, distinct from what is understood as literature, that illusory activity of false counterfeiters. No one knows his own intimate truth. Only this prevents some from dying of shame. Only in the lack of certitude of what one is can he find the beginning of a revelation. He cannot write about himself without hiding. One always has something mysteriously false that one ignores about himself that makes those who do not love us furious and bothers those who do not know us. If one had to relate his life, he would have to do so as if it were the life of another person; ask for facts, memories and opinions from others; collect from those who love or hate us the floating images of us that they store. The art of the biographer, the not always lucid André Maurois 26 has lucidly said, is above all knowing how to forget. Selection itself is an art, but this art is not dominated by he who has a good memory. As in suicide, in which one always kills himself in opposition to another, autobiography is also written, in general, against someone. And there are obsessive hates, caused by envy and resentment that are capable of simulating talents and even vocations that otherwise would not exist. Men of letters that desire with unhealthy eagerness to always be at the top of the class are the most detestable fauna that infest the fantastic zoology. The only admirable thing that they possess is the enormous excess of their egoism and the narcissism of effeminate athletes. The clearest and most honorable mirror is undoubtedly the hate of the other: one sees himself reflected in that cold and implacable metal such as 25. This is a quotation from Dante’s Inferno that can be translated as “To these I myself belong.” 26. French writer (1885–1967) known for such works as Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silences of Colonel Bramble).

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one is. But not all of us have the luck to count on the mirror of a disinterested and honest hate. We must earn it and foment it with a thousand little ruses spurring envy, jealousy, and the innate malignancy of the mediocre. Such is the ferment that ends up destroying them. A disheartening and tiring job in the long run. Only the dearest friends are really in circumstances to hate us. I count on two or three of this species to whom I owe the gratitude of knowing that I still exist. I do not need to name them. Each one knows that I am referring to him. They suffer me from afar like an incurable illness. In short, what would we do without these friends, defended by their tenacious and protective imbecility that mitigates the blows of misfortune in our favor? And of these I am also one. When I die they will read poems and funeral eulogies, and they will write laudatory exegeses in the newspapers with the satisfaction of a completed duty, shaking off their hands as if they were ridding themselves of a bothersome dust in the end. Or, they will say nothing, they will be happy inside, and on to another thing. For those who are gone, there are no friends or acquaintances. Once the dog is dead, rabies is over. The death of a man, which is his only and ultimate truth, infallibly provokes a cloud of smoke of the most extravagant and mendacious praise. “Death is the same for all, but each one dies in his own way,” Novalis 27 said. Rilke 28 took this author’s thought as expressed in The Hymns of The Night as the foundation of his poetic conception of a death of one’s own. The story of a life does not exist except in fusion with other lives. Thus, the story of one’s own life related by he who undresses in public with the immodesty of an old prostitute is of the least interest to us and makes us desire the stories that he does not tell. How much nobler would it be to leave the truth in peace, no matter how deformed it might be. Truth is only truth when it remains hidden, even among the trimmings of the senile and prophetic poets that abound in the new lands that are still without a great literary tradition; that only possess a literature without a past and perhaps without a future. In these notes, there are paragraphs that of course I will suppress owing to this irreparable tendency of ours to want to always hide something that is true. I would not do it for Jimena, of course; she would divine the missing paragraphs; she would know how to read between the lines and even under27. Novalis is the pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Frieherr von Hardenberg (1772–1801) who was an important figure of German Romanticism. 28. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was an Austrian poet and novelist, author of the Notebooks o Malte Laurids Brigge, where he expounds upon his notion of a death of one’s own. This concept greatly influenced the conception of The Prosecutor. Its workings can be observed through the protagonist, Moral, whose potential death while seeking justice against the tyrant Stroessner, may be seen as “a death of one’s own,” rather than dying from an illness in a hospital, a so-called “generic” death, as Moral almost does, at the beginning of the novel.

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neath the erasures. I would only eliminate these paragraphs because of simple discretion, out of delicacy. One of Jimena’s qualities is the refinement of her manner of feeling, despite the somewhat apparently rough and authoritative manners with which she disguises her timidity, her lack of confidence in an environment of which she does not feel a part. “What can we do?” she said to me once. It is an old trauma from before birth. To be born in exile is like not having been born. My vital defense is to attack when I feel attacked. It is through my relationship with her that I have confirmed the idea that what one is or stops being doesn’t matter much to anyone, except in the mind of someone. I feel like someone in Jimena’s mind and perhaps in a more phantasmal manner in her heart. And this someone that I am carries the mark of this exceptional woman, because a man, any man, is only worth the woman who accompanies him. When I began the notes of this story, I hesitated between writing them from the angle of an impersonal narrator or from the viewpoint of he who uses the “I” form, always deceitful and conventional; the first allows the precise and apparently disinterested neutral vision; the second grants to the text the benefit of sinuous wandering, according to the moods and inspiration or apathy of the moment. Finally, the first intention of “narrating” my secrets in a long oral tale prevailed in me; or better yet, in an uninterrupted “posthumous” letter to a single addressee: Jimena. Those who come to read these papers will have to do so obliquely like he who reads furtively out of the corner of his eye, violating the secret of a private correspondence that someone is reading right next to him. I try to write them with the maximum frankness and loyalty that Jimena deserves. I am not suffering from the fear of deceiving myself and deceiving her even involuntarily, but from the fear of feigning sincerity with apparent reticence or oversights, those cuts and veils that the professional narrator practices by artifice every time that it is necessary to accommodate a story to his particular interests, in order to tell the truth as if lying, hiding himself in the comfort and impunity of the excluded witness. The procedure of the “omniscient” narrator seems to me even more deceitful. A fraudulent convention that comes to us from the ancient epic poem, or from even further away: from the Bible and even the Gospel. The parable of the Prodigal Son, the sweetest and falsest of those that the New Testament contains, is an example of it. No prodigal son or non-prodigal son has ever returned to the paternal house. If he returns, he does so like a stranger or a bothersome and inopportune intruder. And this, Christ himself knew better than anyone else. He paid for it with his blood and had to die on the cross in order to return to his Celestial Kingdom where surely he continues to be a stranger, as he is in the miserable society that He tried to redeem. He didn’t redeem human beings. He didn’t avoid or purify the horrors of life, the stupidity of the world, the

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rigors of destiny. Not in vain the mystic Thomas of Kempis, 29 as if copying from Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job, wrote in his Imitation of Christ with his spirit beset: “To live in this world is the worst of disgraces.” In addition to the Posthumous Papers I also invented a game, the old, infantile game of the magic lantern, with a kaleidoscope that I bought in an antiquities store. Through lanterns and slides I project small, short, colored films on the limestone of the wall. Innocent amusement of a failed filmmaker. The darkness alternatively illuminated by the colors of the spectrum relaxes me with its immobility into a type of semi-conscious state that annuls the passage of time. Exile killed in me the movie man. This happened when the film on Solano López and Madame Eliza Lynch was planned and made, if only partially. Lynch became the virtual empress of Paraguay. One of the great epic themes of Paraguay and South America, where a woman is always the principal character behind a great man; at times, beside him, and in many cases even ahead of him. The initial screenplay was written by me. I tried to relate in it, with the greatest rigor and fidelity possible, the story of these two personages, put them at the height of the historical role that they performed in the martyrdom of a people. By writing this script, no more important than the libretto of any opera, I felt in my being, without being able to avoid it, the tremendous power of the myths of a race, kneaded with blood and the sacrifice of a martyred people. I felt the shudder of a revelation that suddenly annulled all our doubts and incredulities. I comprehended the inconceivable mystery— that of Solano López—of an unstoppable soul, without faith, without law, without fear, and who nonetheless fought blindly with himself beyond human limits. He fought until his last breath to avoid his fall into the extreme degradation of cowardliness or fear. This fear and this cowardliness finally arrived. The superman, the demigod, fled like the most common and lily-livered of mortals. He fled like a deer, wounded in the stomach by the lance of a bugler. The great man launched his steed at full gallop in the direction of the river. His intestines unfolding in the air formed a bloody trail in the hair-raising race. The bolted horse suddenly stopped before the ravine and flipped over the fleeing marshal who rolled until he fell on his face in the muddy stream. He managed to turn on his side, facing his pursuers. They stopped, shocked, on the edge of the ravine. The morning sun pulled blinding sparkles from the bent sword that arose from the mud in the trembling fist of the dying man, and from his mouth, between sputters of blood, arose the clamor that shook the forests. The marshal was dead. Dead three times over, from the colossal defeat, from the laughable lance of the enemy bugler, from the asphyxiation from 29. Thomas of Kempis (1380–1471) was a Christian theologian born in Germany.

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drowning in the calm water of the little stream that got choppy and began to roar like a torrent of lava. Upon arriving at the crucifixion of Solano Lopez by the Brazilian enemies, I felt that these lances awoke in me the capacity for continuous fury and uncontrollable anger that led that man with superhuman energy to surpass all excesses of a terrible and useless war. And, nonetheless, that final and infamous defeat was the affirmation of a singular heroism; it was clearly a moral victory. (If one can speak of morals within the context of the barbarism of wars, whatever their causes might be and however sacred their objectives are proclaimed to be.) Solano López obtained an incalculable triumph with his death and the extermination of his people, greater than that of the victors; a triumph achieved at the price of innumerable defeats, abominable terrors, an abominable pride, and an abominable holocaust. The night of his assassination, the surviving women of the camp were raped by the enemy soldiers. A night of screams, of frightening scenes, of inexpressible brutalities under the unsteady light of the campfire. The intoxication of victory celebrated the obscene coven in the amphitheater of Cerro Corá, before the marshal’s cadaver nailed to a cross of branches. The naked and spectral women wandered around the mountain chewing roots and fat wild worms; they drank from the streams. Little by little, they were reconstructing the exodus of a pilgrimage in reverse, skirting the cliffs, wading across the rivers and streams, without any compass other than the migratory spurts of birds that were flying south. They traveled by the route of the sun. At night they slept under the trees, taking turns in groups at guarding the wandering camp. They hunted wild vermin in the forests and they took shelter in caves to sleep. Anger and furor shone in their eyes from the depths of their eye sockets excavated in the skull-like faces. Along the interminable and directionless road, they recovered abandoned arms, they seized boxes of projectiles, and they formed a battalion, without any preconceived idea, only through an instinct of self-defense; a battalion that was growing into a resuscitated army of coarse, hungry, and ferocious women, for whom a new war was reserved, more ruthless than the previous one. Those were the last and terrible Amazon women of Paraguay. Solano was there, nailed to the cross of badly peeled branches, like Christ in the altarpiece by Grünewald, 30 even more tragic than in that frightening representation. Solano was there naked, emasculated, monstrously deformed, a lance pierced through his side. He was there, black with flies and wasps, who were sipping the humiliation of pus from the swollen holes of his

30. Matthias Grünewald was an important German Renaissance painter known for his work on religious themes.

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wounds. The final iniquity of the victors was ciphered in that insignificant and miserable monstrosity. To a certain degree, it was the fulfillment of the obsequious prediction made by Father Maíz, prosecutor of the blood courts and principal chaplain of López’s army. In a famous homily-harangue, Maíz had praised the supreme chief to the sky, calling him the Christ of Paraguay. The enemies, without knowing it, had done nothing more than fulfill the prophecy of the prosecutor priest. There he was, sacrificed and dead, the man who did not know how to redeem or save his people. A Redeemer assassinated. The symbol made flesh. A triumphant rubbish made of his own nothingness. The ex-human beast hanging from the cross of trunks was not the carrion of God made into a man painted by the genius Grünewald with the darkness of his own soul. There was the Christ of Cerro-Corá without a halo, without the tangled crown of thorns, the body sown with purulent holes whose dark lumps no longer served any purpose other than to collect flies, said the sergeant who told the story in the last bivouac. The crude cross was planted close to the surface of the earth in the center of the amphitheater of Cerro-Corá, surrounded by bonfires whose coals shone still incandescent and were shooting off tenuous curls of bluish smoke. The rest of world escaped in those spirals with the remains of my soul. I contemplated the Golgotha on top of the mountain, but I saw the crucified body as if it were at the deep end of a precipice that no sun of justice was going to ever illuminate. That crucified body, for which there was no resurrection possible in all eternity, was there. I approached the cross as if in the darkness and silence of a burning temple. I looked fixedly at the eyes injected with blood, glassy from death, the entangled beard, speckled with red clumps, clots from the final vomit of agony, the mouth open, the jaw disjointed, hanging down on his chest. Small bits of military uniform were stuck to the patches of pus and served as the only apparel on the tumescent nakedness. There was the demigod of a people converted into the ignominy of his putrefaction. I insulted him in a shudder of my entire being: You conquered chance through a boundless insanity. . . . Was this frightening delirium necessary? . . . For what reason? . . . No one knows. . . . No one can respond for you. . . . You are isolated from humanity . . . from time . . .from life. . . .You have died with your country. . . . You didn’t exhale these words with your last breath. The prophets did not proffer them nor did the historians write them. The facts spoke through your mouth full of bloody mud from the furious river. Your land has disappeared. . . You no longer have a place to rest. . . . You don’t even have a place to rest in the heart of the race that has disappeared with you . . .

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The forest spectrally arose in the moonlight. The immense savage extension, the colossal body of fecund and mysterious life seemed to impassively contemplate the spectacle of the death of a man tied to a cross. From its depths a prolonged and tremulous lamentation of lugubrious fear, of extreme desperation, suddenly arose. Perhaps it was like the lamentation that will arise after the disappearance of the last survivors on earth. The funeral requiem stopped. Silence began to weigh heavily again like an immense gravestone on the thicket. The bell of the death-bird rang in the mountain . . . All my prejudices and old anathemas against López and Lynch, against the untamed nationalism of machetes and rosettes, were erased as if by a wind that was too strong. Only the furor and horror remained in me. I threw my pen against the wall and I leaped, along with the last soldiers, to defend this already dead Titan, supreme incarnation of the race. A woman of prodigious beauty was at the foot of the cross, dressed in white without any weapons other than her white parasol, with a gold handle, splashed with blood. She was like an apparition from another world, her body rigid, contemplating the destroyed body without shedding a tear, without proffering the smallest lament, not even that deep and final sigh that one utters when there is no longer any lament. A deathly silence continues weighing on the camp. The hideous black Brazilian macaques 31 are completely immobile. The chiefs and officers in formal dress, their chests sparkling with medals under the fiery sun, pass before Lynch with martial gait, their swords held high, as if paying homage to her, their beards tremulous with desire for that woman whose unreality makes her even more carnal and illusory before their eyes. When the military parade of the victors ends, Eliza Alice, overcoming her sorrow, without shedding a tear, makes them take down the terribly affronted body of the Paraguayan Christ from the insulting cross. Madame Lynch buries the remains of Solano and their son Panchito, the fifteen-year-old colonel, who defended her with his sword before being riddled with bullets and lance thrusts. A few women, their eyes scorched from crying, help her dig those two tombs with their hands and plant two crosses without names on them. The woman in white picks up her white parasol stained with blood, gets on her horse, moves away and disappears in a gallop, followed by her escort of squalid women, who are crawling on their wounded feet, their skeletal bodies hardly covered with rags. One of them is wrapped in the shreds of a flag from the war. The forest opens and closes over them without leaving any traces. 31. Roa Bastos uses the term “macacos” here, which literally means “macaques.” This was a negative term used to refer to the Brazilian soldiers.

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The mixture of darkness and light, of sepulchral silence and the clamor of the universe, swooped down on me and submerged me in a narcotic lethargy. During an indeterminable period of time, there was only shadow and silence. The forests formed an impassible mass, heavier than the door to an immense jail such as the night. Suddenly I heard undulating voices approach and move away in the gusts of a wind that came from everywhere and nowhere, from outside this world. Immemorial Race. . . Your time has fallen into the void. . . From now on you will only live in the past. . .

The chorus faded away. . . There was another heavy and prolonged pause during which fell a dew of thick, salty drops that scorched the crowns of the trees. The night was very black. It had disappeared in its own darkness. One could not see it, as if one were also in prison. Only the drops of fire that fell from the sky and the ashen glow of the coals illuminated the dark space. Everything was quiet, paralyzed. Suddenly a muffled and continuous roar exploded, different from the previous lament. The forest was ceaselessly growing. One could hear the subterraneous clamor of the torn roots. The trees, asphyxiated, ascended, abandoning the earth in search of air. The sprouts and seeds moved away in flocks like migratory birds in search of other more benign lands, of other less adversarial skies. The phantasmal chorus returned. Now only sharp and shrill voices were heard, upset and frenetic cries like those of weeping women in their psalms during wakes and burials. Let us cry for the death of the nation . . . It has died . . . and the simulacrum that still remains of her Only serves to dishonor her . . . The time of the thieves, assassins and gravediggers has arrived . . . Let them be damned for all eternity

The scene suddenly disappeared in a stampede that exploded within me as if I had been shot in the chest with the guns of a firing squad. I suddenly saw my livid hand squeezing the script. I smoothed it out. I read it again. I reconciled those conflicting sentiments that were combatting within my spirit. I said, it’s okay. . . . It isn’t a funeral requiem. Not an exalted chant to glory either. It is only a script for a movie. It relates the events of the past infused with the impressions of the contemporary era. Can one ask for more? Yes. Everything. But one had to be content with very little. The script was barely the negative of a story that could not be narrated in any language. That phantasmagoric event surpassed all the limits of the imagination and the possibilities of expression of the word and the image.

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The skinny producer arrived, a North American from the underground cinema, yet marked by the seal of Hollywood. He demanded sensationalism and something very spectacular. He was not worried about verisimilitude or fidelity to documentary history. “Bah!” Mr. Bottom said. “In one hundred years nobody will be able to say whether these details were true or false. One must give people what they ask for. Terror, sex, violence with its extreme tensions. This is the food of our civilization. And there isn’t any other. It is also a religious necessity. Violence, sex, terror are the Saintly Trinity of our time, the basis of material progress, the incentive for economic power in our world of civilization and abundance . . .” He turned his nose up at my script, rejecting it almost without having read it. He made his own screenplay writer come, who, in addition to not knowing the language, was totally ignorant of the history of this small and unfortunate country. Bob Eyre was considered one of the best screenplay writers in his country. In one week he handed over his version to the producer. He used a good part of the script written by me, but he reduced the intrigue to the interplay of two central characters: Madame Lynch and Pancha Garmendia, 32 who revolved around the faded silhouette of Marshal López, transformed into the character of an operetta, and who seemed to move the entire time in a dance rhythm in the constant background of Strauss waltzes. The plot proposed by Bob Eyre consisted of a secret war between the two women in counterpoint with the background of the “great war.” Rivals for the love of a cartoon-like Solano López, they hated each other as only the gazelle and the panther can hate each other during the night of the hunter. 33 Aside from the meetings with the officers of the State and some visits to the retreating front, the Marshal President imagined by Bob Eyre spent his time in his camp tent taking care of his feet, feet that were feminine and ridiculously small. The military boots, with very high heels, the immense trouser legs, reached to his groin. The brilliance of the polished patent leather shone before him lighting the road for him. The script gave the impression that the Marshal of the Paraguayan army walked on his toes to compensate for his small stature, swinging back and forth like a gunman from the Old West. Solano López and Lynch “played” the protagonists of the story and Pancha Garmendia, the mute antagonist, the sacrificial victim. It was a reckless enterprise and to a certain degree, delirious, given that those characters incarnated the purest national glories. The tyrannosaur con32. Pancha Garmendia was a young woman who lived in the time of Solano López and who was courted by him. Roa Bastos subsequently wrote a play about her titled Pancha Garmendia and Elisa Lynch, which was published posthumously. In the play’s introduction, Milagros Ezquerro refers to Pancha Garmendia as an “historical-legendary figure.” See Milagros Ezquerro, “Introducción,” Pancha Garmendia y Elisa Lynch (Asunción: Servilibro, 2011): 10. 33. The “night of the hunter” is also possibly a reference to the novel by Davis Grubb of the same title (and subsequent film version) in which a preacher murders women and justifies his actions as punishment for their sins.

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siders himself Solano’s depository, perpetual continuer and guarantor of his policies. I was sure that it was not going to end well. I warned the producer, who shrugged his shoulders and reduced me to the minimum and useless role of literary consultant. He distributed a lot of money in green bills to the intermediaries of the government. The filming began immediately. A witness of the era related in his Memoirs that the men, women, and children of the region walked through the branches of the trees, like squirrels, so as not to ever lose from view the spectacle never before seen or imagined by them, believing that it was a question of a new carnival or war. “All the monkeys of Paraguay,” he writes, “came to the amphitheater of Cerro-Corá, attracted by the cannon shots, and contributed their screeches to the background music.” A detail that enchanted the director. In the bursts of light from the film projectors, the dusty silhouettes of characters and monkeys clustered in the branches of the large-crowned trees and the tall palm trees, were confused in a strange fraternity, while below, in a simulacrum more credible than reality itself, the men killed each other in the radiance of the projectors. The lightning flash of a short circuit exploded and unleashed a fire in the virgin forest. The bonfire impelled by the wind expanded over various miles of land, in front of the frenzied disbanding of the people and monkeys who fled in middle of the frightening screeches and shouts. The tongues of the fire rose up to the clouds. The mountains and valleys of Aquidabán were converted into fields of steamy ashes. In Bob Eyre’s script, as in mine, the action takes place during the final stages of the war. It was decided that the new screenplay would remain a secret. It was the negation of official history. He had turned it upside down and he had to hide the fraud. The movie began to be filmed in a labyrinthine disorder of sequences, in such a way that the enormous and grotesque farce could smuggle its load of terror, sex and violence, the three unities dear to the principles of the producer. At the beginning, Lynch and Pancha Garmendia were not only rivals with regard to the love of the demigod of the war who seemed to spring from a Greek tragedy. They also were rivals in beauty. With regard to their physical characteristics, their hair color distinguished them: reddish in the Irish woman; flowing black in the Paraguayan woman. In terms of their spiritual and human aspect, the differences were abysmal. The beauty of the foreigner belonged to an arrogant and stagnant nature. The sharp, greedy and implacable cruelty of her features gave a type of luminous vibration to her face. What resembled a very fine layer of ice extended over her eye lids. Her face was a solid block of calculation under the metallic brilliance of her turquoise, almost violet, eyes. Her commanding beauty seemed as if it came from another world. The beauty of the native woman was soft and lunar. The power of her spirit was concentrated in her eyes, which were the same color as her hair,

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which gave a halo of candor and mystery to her face. Her contemporaries said that “perhaps no other woman on earth has a similar beauty.” And this proverb exasperated the envy of the courtesan that Solano López had brought from the elegant environs of Paris and imposed on Paraguayan society like a true empress. They were supposedly married but really just cohabited. Perhaps the Paraguayan marshal, who declared himself to be a friend of Napoleon III, tried to emulate and surpass the example of Maximilian of Habsburg in Mexico. History gave another direction to those almost simultaneous imperial adventures. Maximilian was judged and ordered shot by Juárez in Querétero in 1867. Solano López, like a vulgar bandit from the borders, was fleeing when he was lanced in 1870, by a corporal, the bugler of the Brazilian chief, the since then famous Chico Diavo. Drunk with alcohol and victory, the troops of Count D’Eu raped the women and crucified the marshal’s cadaver in the middle of the frightening bacchanal. The destinies of Charlotte Amelia and Eliza Alice were also similar and different. They lived to an old age, one in a tame madness, oblivious to everything other than her love for the emperor; the other with the demented obsession of recovering the disappeared splendor of her power, the lands that the marshal had bequeathed to her, his immense treasure buried along the route of exodus transported in hundreds of enormous carts. The wagon drivers had to bite the neck of the oxen who were down to skeletons to make them advance. The military guard made them deposit the great metallic coffers in predetermined places. The string of prisoners dug the enormously deep ditches without having their chains removed. Cart drivers and prisoners were thrown alive into the ditches that were filled with earth. The forest began to grow again very soon over the clearings until they completely hid the tracks of the “burial.” For a long time, the radiance of that new interred El Dorado rose up from the hills, the lakes, the entrails of the devastated land and produced new exoduses and pilgrimages in search of the divinity engendered by the war: the Madama-kuarepotyyiu-yvyguy, “Madame’s buried gold.” But this happened much later. And other chroniclers relate the tale better than I do. At the beginning of the story, according to Bob Eyre’s script, when Lynch began to rule, Pancha (she was thus known throughout the country) retired with her mother into solitary isolation, a little after the death of her father, of Argentine origin and ancient Hispanic lineage, whom López had shot because he considered him implicated in a plot against his life and government. As in similar cases, all Pancha’s father’s possessions were confiscated. Pancha Garmendia and her mother were reduced to extreme poverty. Very few were unaware of the true motives of this assassination, manipulated indirectly by Lynch. These supposed causes were no other than the fact that the respected rancher was Pancha’s father, so that the discharge from the firing squad also wounded her morally and mortally.

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When the war broke out, the empress intensified her offensive against the plebeian rival. “That barefoot tart will fall into my hands. . . . She will come to ask for charity and I will employ her as a washerwoman,” she vented with her confidants in the court of flatterers and steadfast informers that formed her entourage. In the filming of the movie, the actresses, both equally dazzling, knew how to achieve an unsurpassable dramatic effect from this rivalry. Few times has so perfect an interpretation of a feminine duel of such dimensions been seen in a movie, judging by what remained of the movie. The two actresses carried in each one of their gestures the passion and furor in their blood that destroyed the protagonists. In the middle of that war that finished off a nation, the war between the two women was even more merciless and cruel: a story of lyrical and outdated romanticism mise en abyme 34 within another scene of indescribable barbarism. From the beginning, defeat in the slow and furious war of extermination was sealed for the proud Paraguayan chief who considered himself the Napoleon of the River Plate region. In an unexpected and terrible turn, toward the end of this barbaric battle, the invisible and secret war of the two women revealed to those closest to the empress the true nature of her sickly obsession. Hate had ended up transforming itself in her heart into an even more violent and demented love. Consternation spread throughout the camp. But as usually occurs, the public secret was maintained better than the private secret. Another event occurred, no less significant than the first, and connected to it. Pancha Garmendia was also accused of being a liaison in a conspiracy, one of many, against the marshal. After interminable interrogations and barbaric sessions of torture, she was condemned to death by the prosecutors of the blood court, 35 along with fifty other people, most of them women. It was evident that the testimonies on the supposed conspiracy had been concocted by Lynch, a fact which she did not try to hide but rather, on the contrary, insisted upon giving the greatest possible publicity. In another turn of events that carried her stamp, Madame Lynch herself interceded on behalf of Pancha Garmendia, the principal defendant, to have her sentence suspended or commuted. Lynch’s plan became evident for those who were informed about this “conspiracy,” which had already become cyclical and permanent since the beginning of the war. But, also in the war 34. The French term has been adopted in literary criticism to refer to “a story within a story” that often implies a form of literary self-reflection. Roa uses the Spanish “puesta en abismo” in the original text, but the French expression has been incorporated into English. 35. Blood court is a term that refers to the highest level of justice during feudalism. It is the highest legal authority of a sovereign. In Spanish, Roa Bastos employs either the term “fiscales de sangre” (literally prosecutors of blood) or “tribunales de sangre” (courts of blood) to refer to Solano López’s judicial system in which he prosecuted conspirators during his government.

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tribunals, secrecy was jealously maintained. One way of hiding it with more security and legal rigor was to continue with interrogations and tortures that were fiercer each time. At intervals, Father Fidel Maíz, 36 spiritual director of the blood courts, tried to influence the prisoner under the sacrament of confession, without obtaining better results than Lynch herself. In the exodus of the condemned, Pancha Garmendia was nothing more than a specter like the other thousands and thousands of women who were being spurred on to death. But this specter, barely covered by rags, had just made the empress go entirely mad. The secret and shameful passion had swept the empress up into the unique and eager voluptuousness that beings destined for hidden relationships are capable of experiencing in the middle of terror and death. The marshal’s omnipotent and obsessed woman had offered Pancha Garmendia a bribe for her salvation: that of converting her into her “lady-inwaiting.” Pancha refused until the end with an impassive scorn that the proximity of death made even more insulting. She seemed to ignore Lynch, not even see her, when they brought her into Lynch’s presence. On the edge of annihilation, Pancha Garmendia found the strength to cut out her tongue with her teeth like prisoners who fell captive to the enemy. She insisted on thus eluding the interrogations of the blood courts until her last breath. And perhaps, with greater reason, she insisted on remaining mute before the foreign empress who hounded her with delusional stubbornness. There was a final encounter with Lynch who asked to see Pancha before her execution. Pancha was dragged before her. Her life had ended before her death. She was sustained only by the supernatural strength of innocent victims who resist disappearing before seeing their tormentors annihilated. The now irremediable muteness and scorn, the fire of an incorruptible conscience, of her spotless virtue, were the only weapons with which that walking cadaver could oppose her rival. The all-powerful woman loved and would continue loving beyond death this fragile but indomitable being. She loved everything that Pancha was; Madame Lynch loved in that specter everything that she herself was lacking; her pure and inaccessible femininity, her spirit of sacrifice. Pancha’s frightening silence terrified her. Madame Lynch’s crazed passion had not succeeded in contaminating the young woman whom she slowly destroyed without being able to take over her body and her soul. She was going to insist one last time. The condemned woman fainted. They thought that she had wanted to bend down on her knees before the empress to solicit a final grace. Lynch tried to help her to stand up. What 36. Father Fidel Maíz (1828–1920) was a priest who was named the prosecutor in Solano López’s trials against alleged conspirators. He later denounced Solano López when he was captured by the Brazilian forces. Maíz is thought to be the protagonist of the original version of Roa Bastos’s El fiscal that the author claims to have destroyed and rewritten because the original was no longer relevant in the wake of the coup that removed Stroessner in 1989.

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remained of Pancha sputtered a bloody foam in her face. Tremulous with a demented anger, the empress punished her angrily with her riding whip until her arm, dead tired, fell to one side. Pancha was erect in a kind of reddish halo. When Lynch approached her, the agonizing silhouette spit her blood again into Lynch’s livid face. Lynch passed her hand over her cheeks, cleaned off the blood, and put it to her mouth closing her eyes. She gave the order to immediately fulfill her sentence. Pancha Garmendia was lanced against the mound of dirt by a trench. The empress, in her general’s uniform, witnessed the execution mounted on her horse. She was surrounded by the battalion of women from her escort who howled their shouts of hate and victory till they were hoarse. The empress lowered her sword and the execution began. The firearms were gone. The soldiers, boys of ten to fifteen years old (the last soldiers that remained in Solano López’s army), could hardly manage the lances, so that the slaughter was atrocious. Petrified with horror, the childrensoldiers contemplated, even after the execution, another inexpressible scene, this one now incomprehensible for them; they saw the empress dismount with a jump and throw herself on her knees next to the still warm body of Pancha. She embraced her with desperation and kissed her freely on the mouth as if wishing to return to her the life that she had ordered to be taken away from her. Her aides carried her in the air, the Amazon’s uniform covered with blood, shaken by the spasms of an inner lamentation that exploded in a single shout of a beast mortally wounded: “a savage shout that could only emerge from the vulva of a wolf,” wrote a chronicler of the era. Soon the tyrannosaur found out about the true slant that the film was taking, transgressing the authorized script (mine), scene by scene, and censored everything that went against “national honor.” The chief of security in the film camp related the final scene between Lynch and Pancha Garmendia to him. The tyrannosaur gave the order that that assault troops should end the “masquerade” of the anti-historical and anti-Paraguayan pamphlet. Under the fire of the mortars and machine guns, the hundred or so actresses, actors and technicians and the five thousand “extras” that were camped out in the hills of Cerro-Corá, had to flee along the path of Chiriguelo sown with cadavers and canon props. Helicopters from the Hemispheric Force came from Sâo Paulo to rescue the foreign actors and actresses. They contemplated, amused, this other small war that did not figure in the script, but that seemed to form a real part of the Great War of more than a century ago. Bob Eyre’s script did not spare any details, so that the epic story sacred to Paraguayans ended up infamously grotesque and absurd. But this absurdity and grotesqueness exacerbated to their maximum, were brilliant from the filmic point of view. One could not deny that the movie drama imagined by Bob Eyre had reached and surpassed, at least in these sequences, the peak of horror.

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More than five thousand tons of film equipment were abandoned in the hills in the middle of the virgin forest. The producer returned to Asunción. Bottom tried to recover his equipment and the million dollars that he had spent for the authorization to film. They made him go from one place to another. He didn’t recover anything but the laughs and jokes in Guaraní of the functionaries. When the embassy of his country tried to intervene, he was expelled without further consideration. The story of that second Cerro-Corá where Solano López was crucified by his enemies one hundred years before like the Paraguayan Christ, was nothing but a melodrama, according to the history written by Father Fidel Maíz, general chaplain of the army and principal prosecutor in the blood courts. The truncated film got up to the scene of the crucifixion. I kept a fragment of this sequence. I tend to contemplate the still frames of the Christ of Cerro-Corá, from time to time through a magic lantern, which horrified Jimena when she saw them for the first time reflected on the limestone of the wall. There are some rolls from the filming that circulate clandestinely in the international film archives: an indecipherable mix of scenes of barbarism and terror illuminated by the fire of the battles. This film epic could have constituted the greatest testimony regarding the astonishing hecatomb of a people, of a nation. Things happened in a different manner. That adventure that tried to register in images the “difficult century of the Nation” is now less than a dream for me. It will not repeat itself. I was captured with the rest of the members of the Paraguayan team and taken to the sinister dungeon of the Secret Police. The operation of “antisubversive cleansing” ended, as usual, in the thickest national and international silence. There were already more than a million people banished from the country. A few more didn’t matter too much. Nor did they alter the statistics of the huge numbers that the tyrant handled, including his personal finances, which were much greater than those of the country. I recall that after one of the final sessions in the torture chamber with the electric prod and repeated pestilential immersion baths, I thought I was dying. I tried to remember the procedure used by the prisoners of the Great War to swallow their tongues and die by asphyxiation. My efforts always ended with retching and vomiting. On the wall of the cell with my fingertip dyed in my blood, I wrote an epitaph that was at the same time a farewell. It simply said “I am okay.” A year later, I managed to flee from the police infirmary where they had admitted me almost dead and where I spent various months chained to an iron stretcher embedded in the cement of the basement. That epitaph was also indicative of my life. I am always okay. I have lived like he who travels even in long periods of immobility. I never had the sensation of completely belonging to any place, to a group, to a race. A foreigner everywhere, I felt especially like a stranger, isolated even in the

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middle of the multitude, always alone, only within myself, until I met Jimena. With my kaleidoscope and small triangle of stroboscopic mirrors, I kill time now against the wall. I practice my entertainment of shadowgraphs. From time to time, when the melancholic flow of memories seizes me, which now seem like they were from another life, I usually project the sequence of the crucifixion (the only scene I succeeded in rescuing from the frustrated film by Bottom and Bob Eyre). The image fills the darkness with a sinister brilliance from hell. The music of Mozart’s requiem lends a tension to the mortuary images that is sometimes intolerable. Sometimes sobs escape me. I laugh out loud to disguise them. In reality, the image of the Paraguayan Christ is nothing more than the image of a ruin. And what is a ruin but an image at a standstill in Time? Time liberated from its duration. In reality, that atrocious image is nothing more than a ruined soul, perhaps mine, since a measurable time does not exist within an individual, but rather innumerable times that intertwine in the tangled mess of the cosmos, incomprehensible to human eyes. Dreams will never be able to decipher that infinite vortex of mathematical chaos. We only see an infantile game of shadows that approach each other and separate. Madness and delirium do not perceive the passage of time. Nor does the small death of copulation. In those fractions of sections we cross the threshold of the invisible. . . . We feel ourselves fall into emptiness. For a second, the rhythm of the body falls into step with the spasms of the earth. We want to sink ourselves forever in that soft, infinite, and fleeting mystery of another body. We awaken from the brief death with the sensation of having perpetrated a terrible act for having cohabited at once with twin sisters, with the twin gods of pleasure and suffering, happiness and misfortune. Jimena is working on the preparation of her classes. She searches in the codices for that fourth dimension of the Pre-Columbian past, the sense of sacrifice and death in the conquered peoples. She believes that she has found that among the Mayans; their myths of origin considered time as an element that could not be dissociated from material space. Time was for them the rite of sacrifice but also the sacrificial stone; the ceremonial movements of choreographed, thematic precision, the rhythms, the voices, the guttural chants, but also the space of the ceremonies; the blood running along the stone, the duration of the fire, the figures of the spirals of smoke under the light of the moon. “I know that our rational mind will never decipher this mystery,” she would say. “But it is comforting to think that culture is only the cultivation of the differences between groups of humans regarding their relationship with nature. I dissented in silence, but I could not follow her in these digressions that were at once slow and dizzying. Jimena explores this incredible faculty of

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perception of the cosmos in the so-called “primitive” cultures like an impassioned archeologist. In their animism explicatory of the origins of the universe, they knew the origin and age of the universe, whose face was revealed to them in the abstraction of the number zero, in the material of time that formed a part of immaterial space. This exalts Jimena. She tells me that she found something similar among the Guaraní. For them, “the beautiful words of the beginning” inaugurated time together with the creation of the world by the First-Last-Last First Father. 37 Jimena had been in Paraguay and traversed the pilgrimage routes, the confiscated territories, and sacred places of the ancient ethnic groups, who even today wander through them, persecuted and exterminated in an interminable exodus. “Félix!” she shouted from the kitchen, stirring the logs in the fire. She refused to have an electric kitchen, or a television set, or any of those electronic gadgets, symbols of consumerism in an opulent society. She used the live flame. And when she lacked coals, she began to use logs that she herself cut from the forest and dragged into the house with a sled that had both wheels and skates. She uses it to bring provisions from the supermarket in winter on the snow and in summer on the cement. “Come eat. You look like a hooded person surrounded by the fog.” I turned my head toward that voice that seemed to come from very far away through an aqueduct. And it was she who was surrounded by smoke. Morena Tarsis converted into a hazy and transparent silhouette. That smoke, with the scent of aromatic spices, resins from old trees, the aroma of bread browning in the oven, became an impalpable perfume on her clothing, in her hair, on her skin. In Nevers, everything is different. In the morning and toward twilight, I see the vapors of the Loire Valley rise among trees, far away. I hear flocks of migratory birds passing through the sky. While I write, the early smells of spring come to me. Spring in Nevers is incomparable. One could say that you can touch it with your hands. I go outside and lie down on the grass. The air, the odors, the colors, allow me to feel their density. I contemplate the sky and close my eyes. I feel the sky’s very high curvature weigh lightly on my eyelids. I rub my face on the impalpable silk of that luminous palpitation as cats rub on the skirts of their mistresses. I rub my body against the humid grass until it becomes distended and elastic like that of a young cat. The air is blue and tints the profile of the towers, the ridges of the buildings, the walls, the ducal palace, blue as well. The old city bleeds on the edge of its borders, making flow a small dust of bluish steam. An extraordinary thing happens after that. The red sky of sunset quickly erases the diaphanous 37. The First-Last-Last First Father (El Primer Padre Último-Último Primero in Spanish) is a reference to Ñamandú, the founding-father in Guaraní mythology, who created himself and was, among other things, responsible for the creation of language.

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blue that tints the sky again when darkness falls, even more luminous in the moonless nights. Fat, enormous stars palpitate, about to explode, at the reach of one’s hands. The earth makes a noise like weak sighs. Then it disappears in the haze. There is no other sound than the buzz of the wind, faraway barks, an occasional moo or bleating. There is the strident and muffled sound of crickets hidden in the night, broken voices far away, the distant buzz of motors. Yesterday afternoon we had mate 38 for the first time in the gazebo that Jimena had constructed around the parapet of an old blind well, in the back of the garden, while I was in the hospital. The hexagonal parapet roughly carved with unrecognizable motifs and covered with a heavy ring made of rock, serves as the table. It vaguely resembles a prehistoric dolmen on which the kettle of boiling water is poised on the bluish flame of the alcohol heater. I have joked with Jimena about her “Gaelic” gazebo. The golden and fragrant rings of chipá 39 in the basket adorned with jasmine add an exotic note to the rock covered with a white table cloth made of ao-poi. 40 In reality, Paraguayan tea, accompanied by pieces of Jimena’s good homemade chipá bread, has a very distinct taste in these ancient corners of the world that are always young. “I like Nevers,” I said inspired by an air of serenity and peace that floated around us. “Nevers sounds like never in English; no one in Latin; always in Guaraní. Death doesn’t seem to exist in Nevers. You don’t see funeral processions or carriages. You don’t hear the church bells ring. It is as if death had only transformed into an invisible illness that each one carries hidden under his clothing. “Yes, everything happens in silence,” Jimena said. After, in the house, she brought an old newspaper (we don’t read newspapers or magazines about current events either). She opened it up to the obituary section. There was a substantial list of names. But they were fresh and vigorous names of people who didn’t seem to have really died but rather had gone on vacation at the beach or to the mountain to go skiing in the snowstorms or hang-gliding. I recovered imperceptibly, like the apparition that returns from a mistaken and premature trip to the river Styx. 41 There are places that cure and places that kill. Nevers became again for me the place of life, of slow seclusion. And Jimena’s junk didn’t bother me at all; on the contrary, it accompanied me with its mute presence in which time had coagulated. Jimena took care of her knick-knacks with painstaking devotion. That heterogeneous collection 38. Paraguayan tea traditionally served with a large straw called “una bombilla.” 39. Paraguayan cheese bread. 40. Ao-poi is Guaraní for a fine Paraguayan fabric. 41. Reference to the mythological river Styx, which in Greek mythology Charon crossed in his boat to bring the dead to hell.

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was her interior landscape and I loved it as much as I hated my own, empty of any sign that could identify my desires or repulsions. I understand that Jimena has deliberately created an air of nostalgia in this “museum” in anticipation of our future: it is the design of those who take pleasure in accumulating memories of a life together without thinking about the vulnerability of the future that does not guarantee even the most solid unions or the invulnerability of memory. Did she have a premonition that perhaps sooner or later she was going to be left alone? She knew that sooner or later I was going to return there. The “personality” of the house would then turn against her, converting her into just one more figure carved in live flesh. A tall, white, and svelte virgin, with burnished hair down to the waist, among the very small virgins with cracked varnishes and the crude angels carved from the wood of the hundred-year old trees by the Guaraní novices from the Jesuit Missions. The cracked veins put wrinkles of an old man on the chubby-cheeks of those cherubs who flew from the Jesuit ruins to lodge themselves in this old house in Nevers. Very soon those obsessions dormant in my second nature of camouflaged “gringo” would attack me again: not knowing what to do and wanting to know how I could do it. Something useful and not purely vegetative in the anguish of exile. Finding a motive for which I was willing to die for others and not be saved each time like a shipwrecked survivor adrift. Not returning after each defeat, safe and sound, to the sanctuary and refuge of unprecedented possibilities to find oneself worthy of the indulgent approval of others. I have always tried to develop my entire thought process, even in the simplest thing, to its final consequences: getting to the bottom of myself in this bottomless mystery that is one’s self. This obsession with return is a fixed idea. A false, perturbing, idea. A fixed idea that comes to mind without respite and sustains me. A steady needle that marks the wandering direction within me. My motto cannot continue being: “I think because I ignore.” I didn’t ignore, I didn’t think, I didn’t exist. I was asphyxiating. I asked Jimena with a gesture to allow Yaguareté 42 to enter. With all the solemnity of which he was capable, the noble Dalmatian with a Guaraní name entered as if he were wearing the white and black crowns 43 of the river Paraguay on his back, and he began to lick my hand. He saw my eyes, shining and understanding, reflected in his own. The Dean’s wife, who gave him to us when he was still a puppy, warned us. “It is a very strange breed,” 42. Yaguaraté is Guaraní for jaguar, which often symbolizes power and valor within Guaraní mythology. 43. The reference to the crowns of the Paraguay River relates to the practice of wearing feathered crowns by indigenous tribes, on both sides of the river. Moreover, according to some, the word “para” (found in Paraguay) means “coronas variadas” (varied crowns) in Guaraní. See J. R. Rengger, Viaje al Paraguay (Asunción: Editorial Tiempo de Historia, 2010), 45.

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she said. “They seem like human beings. They are only lacking speech. They divine things. The mother of this little one died in childbirth and in the middle of her feverish delirium, her moans clearly expressed her fear of death, her yearnings to have her life saved. While she could, she maintained her front paws raised as if defending herself against something that threatened her head-on. She died with her head between her paws curling herself up into a hard ball that no one could unravel. They had to bury her in a round and deep hole in the back of the garden.” The silky skin of Yaguareté transmits to my hands the warmth of a friendship protected from betrayals and oversights. The same as the small creole dog from my childhood in Manorá. He died bitten by a ñandurié, a small snake, the smallest but one of the most venomous that crawls in the weeds of Paraguay. I had been about to step on it without seeing it. Laurel pounced on it and the mortal fangs that were destined for me stabbed him in the snout. That was when I changed the name of the village of Itapé to that of Manorá, which means Place-of-death in Guaraní. Jimena patiently helped me to recover my movements until I could support my shadow on the floor. I swore to never return to Paris. This story, however, for better or worse, began in Paris. This story began last night, with Clovis’s phone call from Paris. It began with the announcement of a piece of news, but I still do not have the slightest idea of what it is about. I do not know if this story will continue, what direction it will take, if it really concerns or includes me. Jimena was as disconcerted as I was. Don’t worry, I said to her. It must be Clovis’s latest joke. Two years after my frustrated second death, I felt once again strong and spirited. Perhaps because life preserves one for a single act, unique and unrepeatable that can justify one’s existence, even the most gray and mediocre. I have reflected many times on what could be this extreme and final act that justifies me. I have not come to any binding conclusion. Perhaps no one can know it. The facts are the ones that are in charge of testing us when the time has come. It is a topic on which one cannot seriously converse with anyone. Not even with Jimena who is always disposed, however, to listen to my digressions about the land that made me in its image only to hurl me from it, just as the poem by Luis Cernuda, 44 who died in exile, murmurs between its teeth. “I have to find that . . . ,” I murmured. I didn’t hear my voice, but Jimena was already familiar with that same old song. She continued my thought as if she were also reflecting inside. One never knows when one finds that which he has always sought and that appears when one no longer needs it. “As if one were condemned to walk 44. Reference to the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902–1963) who was a member of Spain’s famed Generation of ‘27.

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backwards,” she said with an air of momentary resignation. I answered her that even if blind, deaf, and mute, there are moments in which everything that a human being has been and is can be condensed into a supreme act of rescue for himself and others. Jimena does not believe in the fate of this always improbable rescue. “You seem,” she says, “like a possessed child, fooled by the idea of ‘redemption,’ vestige that you absorbed from those idiots of the Catholic religion in your house full of priests, nuns, and those people between crazy and messianic who believe themselves destined to sacrifice. “This time she went a bit further. She hit a nerve. “Do you consider yourself capable of that supreme act? Do you consider yourself the chosen one?” I told her that I was one among five million. “There is a limit situation without possible return in which everything is gambled by a toss, in a flash of lightning,” I cryptically slipped in, trying to not put emphasis on that trivial and grandiose phrase. “Yes, but that limit situation does not present itself to everyone, nor every day,” replied Jimena. You cannot choose it as if in a bazaar of fantasies either. That limit situation, when it presents itself, chooses you. Danger does not intimidate me. I have fought tooth and nail with death on various occasions and in the middle of the most incredible circumstances. The risk of dying in an attack against a being whom one deeply hates is the least exciting confrontation that the least valiant and least temerarious man can face. The only necessary thing, the only redeeming thing is the idea alone of doing it. An absolute belief in that idea. An act in which one can offer himself up in sacrifice. Finishing off the tyrant can completely change the fate of an enslaved society. This is the objective that counts. The liquidation of a terrible and mediocre man whose absolute power has only been able to forge itself on the absolute weakness of the oppressed is only a means of achieving it. Jimena’s look was hardly approving. It was a mix of doubt and diffuse fear. “I know that I am condemned to failure,” I admitted. “But even so I should persist like someone fighting with all his strength in middle of a current that is dragging him. Deferred hope is better than nothing.” “There is nothing more deceitful and unhealthy than hope,” said Jimena with a certain energy. “Especially when it represents what one has never possessed.” I think about my country, besieged and massacred. This unique and unrepeatable act through which an individual or group of people redeem themselves from the inhumane power that subjugates them must happen. Jimena remembers the sacrifice of the Spanish people during the civil war. A million dead and another million exiled did not avoid the tyranny of Franco nor did

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they have the necessary weight to make him fall or make him fly through the air as Carrero Blanco did. 45 The tyrannosaur will not fly through the air. I have studied in detail the plans of almost one hundred conspiracies and failed attacks against his person and I have come to the conclusion that the principal error in all of these cases was employing useless routine methods: bullets, hand grenades, subterranean tunnels under the government palace or along his daily route, airplanes plummeting on the official box seats during the parades for national holidays, car-bombs, elite snipers positioned on the rooftops while the presidential caravan was passing by. All this without taking into account that in the tyrant’s armored car, a conveniently camouflaged double, sparkling with military stars and decorations, is always traveling, while the tyrant escapes in a common car, dressed like a civilian, along different paths, raked over every day by security forces and watched over by entire squads of supposed roadway workers who in reality are police informants. “The death of the tyrant will not solve everything,” said Jimena. “Better put, it will not solve anything. What comes after will be worse. A blood bath and interminable civil war. Like what happened in Spain.” I took the opportunity to force my reply on her. “The example of Spain,” I said, “reinforces the imperious need to finish there in Paraguay as soon as possible.” She asked how many attempts had been made already. I responded, “many, but not all were known because the security organs were careful not to disclose them or allow them to filter down to that obscure multitude that was waiting for that possibility of salvation in the depth of their fear.” “Who authorizes you to think that they will not continue to fail? It is what always happens,” she said without the intention of making me depressed. I added that this was not going to happen if the plot counted on the support of a very powerful part of the armed forces. “It is known that a dormant rebellion exists in certain sectors of the army. The tyrant knows it but he has it controlled. He is afraid to dismount it by cannon shots. It has been years since he has been trying to do so gradually. But this military sector of the infantry, with tanks and planes at its disposition, is more powerful than the entire army at the side of the Supreme. A coup could erupt at any moment. Especially with the tyrant dead.” “‘For every dead tyrant, another tyrant put in place,’ is the usual rule in play in palatial coups,” Jimena murmured. “A free life without coercion or repression, without the cancer of corruption, is the only thing that can regenerate a society that is sick to the bones. “ 45. Luis Carrero Blanco served in the Nationalist navy during the Spanish Civil War. After Franco’s victory, he became a minister in the Franco government, and eventually became the Prime Minister in 1973. The reference to Carrero Blanco “flying through the air” alludes to Carrero Blanco’s assassination in 1973 through a bombing by Basque separatists.

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“In Spain that ‘political’ dream cost us a million deaths. Later, the ‘redemptive’ attacks only served to strengthen the power of the tyrant. Finally, in the throes of senile dementia, he died in his bed with the help of saintly religion when they could no longer prolong his life artificially, while his body shrunk until he was nothing more than a mummy the size of a fetus.”“This should not happen to the tyrannosaur. The monster should die hung by the people and dragged through the streets.” I felt as if I were recovering, without wishing to, the falsely rebellious and patriotic tone of my first years in exile: the “tone” of the café Berna, in Buenos Aires, one of our “trenches” of clandestine reunions in which we incubated heroic dreams of revolution and national salvation in our inaccessible Hispanic-Guaraní dialect that disoriented and sidetracked the spies from the Argentine police. “Look, Félix, ‘humanistic’ intellectuals like us have never been good at this type of task. We are nothing more than the ‘useful idiots’ that we have always been. The ‘objective allies’ of power, as the former communists say, who have now been converted into the ‘objective allies’ of cannibalistic capitalism. I am not trying to discourage you. I am trying to induce you to reason regarding the weakness of our position.” Around precisely this time, we had seen The Death of Danton again, in a Paris theater. 46 “Buchner wrote it when he was twenty years old,” Jimena got a little carried away. “A boy! More than a century ago, he destroyed the utopia of Revolution, almost at the same time that Marx invented it, like a toy that is no longer good for kids or adults. The Revolution as the work of Mandarinspeaking intellectuals. That boy was more lucid or at least more honorable than the great revolutionary patriarchs. When a true revolutionary leader emerges, things take on another dimension. Do you see any of that sort in Paraguay today?” “An authentic revolutionary leader emerges from the masses of a nation.” As soon as I pronounced the phrase it seemed to me unbearably ridiculous. I knew what she also didn’t ignore that those “masses,” almost in their totality, have either been bought by the tyrant with miserable privileges or crushed by the terror of repression, torture, and systematic genocide. But it was possible that the force of their identity could someday make them recover the consciousness of what they had been as a people. “Fear is the only form of public consciousness that exists today in your country. Just like what happened in mine while the Franco dictatorship lasted.” “That is why it is necessary to finish off the tyrannosaur.” 46. Georg Buchner wrote the play Danton’s Death in 1835 about the final days of the French revolutionary Georges Jacque Danton (1759–1794).

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“There are more important things for a people than stabbing or hanging a tyrant even if it is only in effigy . . . or in thought. Tyrants die, nations survive. Franco could not destroy Spain. Sometimes nations revive, just like yours did after that infernal war that devastated by blood and fire every last man. 47 “The women remained to reconstruct it.” “Yes. Women sometimes do not do anything more than that: reestablish everything so that man returns to make them, romantically, the queens of their love songs, but, in practice, the resigned inhabitants of their harems, the unredeemable and complacent beasts of burden as always.” This was also true. The supermacho of Paraguay had only begun to consolidate his power when he converted the country into a great whorehouse. Sex, violence, and terror continue to be the infallible resource of power when the miserable living align themselves with the miserable dead. The old trick, since colonial times, that continues serving the masters of power. To the method of “divide and rule” the even more powerful “corrupt and prostitute” has been added to soften society and make it into a servile and complacent prostitute. “There is an immanent justice and another one, more practical, immediate, that should be executed for the good of all,” I theorized with a certain automatic reflection. “Neither of the two are worth much. The myth of absolute justice is an unrealizable utopia. A trap. A play on words. There is not the most remote possibility of judging an individual, a society, or the universe, just as the possibility of judging oneself does not exist.” “There are facts, Jimena. Repression, genocide. A juridical science, a penal code exists, the ultimate experience of the crimes against humanity of Nazism and Fascism judged by special tribunals.” I was aware of the moral scorn that Jimena felt for “just” justice. Jimena got worked up. “Is that,” she said, “what you call just justice? Who can apply it? If the tyrannosaur were to fall prisoner at this very moment through a military coup or through a popular uprising, who would be able to judge him? An absolutist justice? The same one that Absolute Power practices as an exclusive and providential privilege? An omniscient prosecutor? Come on, Félix! Don’t dream about that ‘just justice.’ It doesn’t exist except as a dream that has claimed innumerable victims in reality.” “The tyrannosaur is a war criminal, Jimena. Everything is done under his strict personal control and under the only legal statute of “Superior Order.” A 47. This is a reference to the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), also known as the Great War. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (the forces under General Urquiza), had secretly made a pact to unite against Paraguay should Paraguay send troops to aid one of the factions of Uruguay’s civil war. Paraguay was no match against the countries of this alliance and consequently lost the war and most of its male population.

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very short trial would be sufficient to send him in front of a firing squad, to the gallows, or life imprisonment, just as what is happening to the Nazi war criminals hunted down by the Jews. Or is Simon Wiesenthal the only hunter of war criminals left in the world? In proportion, the holocausts of Paraguay have surpassed the greatest atrocities of all times.” “Are you going to hunt him down and finish him off with your bare hands?” “My gaze is accustomed to blood. I am learning to see . . . to find a way of doing it. . . .” I felt ridiculous citing the typical “progressive” verse of the “committed” intellectual before her. I think that that is the way that our long “political” dialogue ended on that cold Sunday afternoon from last February. From our Window on the West, while we drank down kettles and kettles of hot and frothing mate tea, we saw the snow fall that was erasing the outline of the landscape and turning our Window into a gothic bell surrounded by icicles. The Dalmatian, Yaguareté was dozing near the chimney, lulled by our discussion. Jimena seemed anguished as if waiting for an imminent event. Perhaps she was worried about the phone call from Clovis. I saw the shadow of her inner visions circulate in her eyes in rapid succession. She looked me in the eyes for an instant. She lowered her eyelids for a moment. She leaned over me. I took her face between my hands and kissed her at length on the lips. She got up and went to the kitchen. “I am going to prepare a very hot chocolate.” The two times that Jimena and I tried to enter Asunción clandestinely, they threw us out. The famous commissary Cantero, 48 the most feared of the bloodhounds of the Secret Police, directed the expulsion operative. He spied on us the whole time with the sanguinary sense of smell of a bloodhound. He consulted the rigmarole of the police criminal record that he requested from his henchmen from time to time. The fingerprints did not deliver results. He didn’t recognize me. “This one is a dirty-footed foreigner.” . . . And he let loose a rude expression that for us was a sign of our salvation. 49 It was a difficult but useful test. They made us undress in the commissary and they searched us from head to toe without sparing Jimena from the insult of rummaging around her anus and genitals in search of some secret message. I was carrying a cyanide capsule in my navel for extreme cases. It was the only place that it did not occur to them to search. They allowed us to go. 48. Alberto Cantero was head of political affairs under the Stroessner dictatorship and served time in jail for the “disappearing” of political prisoners. 49. The sign of salvation refers to the fact that the authorities believe Moral to be a foreigner and do not recognize him as a Paraguayan who is prohibited from entering the country and who would consequently be detained and possibly tortured.

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Others were not so lucky. They were “sent packing” and buried alive in some random place. Paraguay is full of, stuffed with, nameless tombs, with disappeared people, with wandering phantoms. During the Great War, the exodus of the conquered buried its treasures. Now they bury the bones of the tortured. The foxfires continue zigzagging over the tombs. Those phosphorescent glimmers light the places that no one would dare to dig up. The chroniclers called Paraguay the Promised Land, The Land of Prophecy, The Land without Evil of the ancient Guaraní tribes. Charismatic prophets, revolutions, ritual sacrifices, interminable holocausts, the most primitive forms of cannibalism, abounded there. A people always in migration, in pilgrimage, in exoduses, as if in search of a saving escape. I always had the sensation that time in Paraguay is immobile, the time of fixedness, petrified time, dry, empty, fossilized. And that what moves on this island surrounded by land are the people in incessant pilgrimages, in neverending exoduses. Quiet, non-existent time. Only the silent multitude of specters walks night and day in search of the nourishment of horror. A great popular palpitation, mortally wounded, but that continues to advance dragging itself on its knees toward some already prepared, already executed crucifixion, or a crucifixion that is about to be executed in the great amphitheaters of the jungle. The two times that Jimena and I arrived in Paraguay, it seemed to us that those pilgrimages had stopped, anchored in an unhealthy fear. Processions and religious pilgrimages, political demonstrations, except naturally those of the party in power, were prohibited. The internal migrations from the country to the city of those in search of work, of food, were violently repressed. Crowds were dispersed with the assault of antiriot cars. The human avalanche was driven back through passageways of spiked fences, interminable passageways like those that are used to carry livestock in the wagons on their way to the slaughterhouse. These topics hurt Jimena. Tall and solid, with her little-girl face, she shows the force of her nature, at once savage and refined, in times of tension. In temperament, she is a primitive creature who refuses to accept the ruthless cruelty of the world. She is an exceptionally gifted person and at the same time, extremely sensitive and vulnerable. Her destiny is that of people who have been born devoid of everything, except generosity. She gives herself up entirely to each thing that she does, incapable of containing herself, but since she doesn’t demand anything for herself, she can be hard and demanding with others. She does not tolerate any deception. And since she is innocent, her instinct more than her eyes sees with her entire body what she wants to know as if a faculty that were not sight were lodged under those thin eyelids trimmed with long eyelashes. Perhaps she compensates herself in this way for all the desires she has had to repress but that latently and privately dwell deep within her.

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Perhaps she also lives, without knowing it, in an extreme situation. But for her, at least, there is a return escape: that of the children that she wants to have, that true act of salvation that the biological superiority of women has reserved for her as a privilege of origin. Jimena desires those children that I cannot give her. I am consumed by the anguish that, more than Jimena’s lover, companion, her friend in the deep friendship of love, I am nothing more than a child adopted by her. I know it, I feel it inside myself; I would never say it to her. It would sound like moral blackmail to her. It would be like wanting to coerce her with a sincerity that would always sound false to her. “Do you know something?” I said to her one day. “I have always thought that a woman, women, by dint of the fact that they can give birth, have a certain gift of prophecy that men lack.” “Having children is a natural biological function. Why must it produce a supernatural gift like that of prophecy? In any case, you men are participants, genetic accomplices of this ‘gift’ of prophecy.” I felt touched in the most vulnerable spot of my condition as a man by Jimena’s words. She said them without remembering or realizing this “death” of mine regarding the most vital aspect of human beings. The electrical rods and “clinical” blows of the Secret Police specialists were responsible for eradicating this “gift” of gifts. I looked at her humiliated with the injured attitude of those who are condemned. “Forgive me,” she said doubly saddened. “Don’t worry,” I replied “Let us refrain from lamenting what is already done. Nobody is his father or his mother. I have bad seed. And, even if I had good seed, I would not have wanted to have a child. And, if I were a father, I would not have wanted to have that child, and he would not have wanted me to be his father.” Jimena drew me toward her and kissed me on the forehead as if wishing to dissipate my bad memories. “Something as crazy as having a kid,” I insisted in order to return to my theme, “being the possessor of the genetic seed, allows woman to know it all. Only an insanity of this nature can engender true wisdom.” “In any case,” she joked, “men have always been the only prophets. I don’t know of any woman who has deserved this title in the sacred books. It is something that doesn’t worry me. Each one knows what he or she has to know and this is enough,” she argued putting an end to the matter. Her ardent sensuality, in which her intelligence has been embodied, has concentrated all its desires in the most powerful of all: the progeny of her flesh and blood, the prolongation, through those tots, of the ancient familial roots (she never speaks of race, lineage or genealogies) that come to her from Castile on her mother’s side and from Aragon on her father’s side. She often travels to Veguillas, in the highest part of Teele, to the small and rustic native

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village of her father, in La Cruz de los Tres Reinos, and to Valladolid, her mother’s birthplace. These places are to Jimena, what, on another level and from the other side of the ocean, Asunción and Manorá are to me, stations for another kind of pilgrimage: the personal procession of a secular faith, not the impossible return to one’s origins. The same accents, the same sounds, the same mythical parallels of origin, of ending, of loss. Our union rests upon these affinities. Jimena has always rejected the idea of matrimony. “It seems immoral to me to delegate to a priest and a judge the will and responsibility of a couple to live their love and destiny together, and for love, there are no prohibitions or taboos that cannot be transgressed by two beings who truly love each other.” In her adolescence, she saw the frustrated May of ‘68 arrive in Paris. She traveled to Mexico and saw the dead that this same Mexican “May” felled by bullets in the Tlatelolco Plaza. 50 The phantasmagoric footprints of Artaud, among the Tarahumaras, 51 thirty years before, appeared incorrect and terrible to her. They were still burning alive in the mescal via crucis. 52 He opted to follow his own pilgrimage. He penetrated the legendary past of the Nahuas. 53 He learned the language from the natives following the via crucis of Father Sahaguán’s codices, sacked, fragmented, cut up, scattered, as if they had been subjected to Hernan Cortés’ quartering rack. She knew the principal chroniclers of the empire almost by heart. She knew even better the tales of the native chroniclers who spoke of other stories, those stories that can only be told aloud, Jimena used to say. And even better if they are told by the collective voice. She passed through Paraguay and learned Guaraní. The dark faces of the peasants who don’t speak Spanish but are no longer indigenous dazzled her. She was impressed by this racial, not personal, mystery of those barefoot women stronger than misfortune, silent as if wrapped in a protective emanation of something mute and obscure that didn’t impede their laughter and humor, while they smoked their great cigar made of the strongest tobacco leaf, the pety-pará, the one that is covered with bulging white beauty marks similar to the eyes of a partridge. Between the scorching sun and the darkness 50. This is a reference to the government massacre of protesting students that occurred in the Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City in 1968, ten days before the Summer Olympics were to be held there. 51. The Tarahumaras were an indigenous tribe in northwestern Mexico. Antonine Artaud (1896–1948) was a French playwright who wrote a work titled “Les Tarahumaras” (1947) [The Peyote Dance]. Artaud wrote of his experiences living among the Tarahumaras in Mexico while he was undergoing heroin withdrawal. José Navarrete Lezama, “Antonine Artaud y los tarahumaras.” Mito: Revista Cultural 43 (Mayo 2017). http://revistamito.com/artaud-en-elpais-de-los-tarahumaras-la-montana-de-los-simbolos/. 52. Via Crucis is Latin for Way of the Cross and also refers to a painful procedure. Moral is referring to Artaud’s drug addiction while among the Tarahumaras. 53. The Nahuas were an ancient indigenous tribe in Mexico.

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of collective misfortune, the feet of those women tread on the earth as if tinted with blood, and they carried away the footprints of their steps without leaving traces. They walked from one side to the other with eyes in pilgrimage but they always returned to those places of grief where their tapyi 54 used to be. They once again had to raise the fallen wooden posts, a little bit of straw, mud, attached with wild vines. Or take them to another place. The advantage of the ranches is that their ruins are transportable. The strangers arrived and left after satiating their hunger, their bestial instincts, their anger of being men. Jimena lived for two years with an elderly woman from that place, allowing herself to be penetrated by the magnetism of the earth, of the people, of the immobile time. She learned to speak and love the vernacular language and to hate with her entire soul the blind perversity and abjection of men. “Sometimes strangers arrive, now more than before,” Jimena recounts what the elderly woman said without changing the tone of her voice and without a single one of her innumerable wrinkles moving. “But before the strangers did not have weapons. Now the strangers arrive in uniform, with guns and arms of all calibers. Now the strangers are rapists. They arrive drunk and shouting. They come from shooting the landless peasants who have become smugglers in the great lands of the pogosus. 55 They arrive, look for and drag away the young women. Then there is no choice but to allow them to do what they want. Sometimes an entire battalion passes over the bodies of the youngest women. Even the children are not saved from this. Afterwards, they go to wash the blood away in the stream, while the oldest women must prepare food for the strangers with fruits from the country stolen from someone else’s farm. Those rapists carry away the beauty of the girls between their legs and the girls remain to nurse the children of those unknown fathers and to take care of the children of those who are dying.” “For those innocent ones,” moaned the old woman, the only hope that remains is to die as quickly as possible. That, here, is safer than living. If they don’t die immediately it becomes too late and there is no longer any solution. Many of them also later become rapists, and the worst kind. They rape their mothers, sisters, and even sometimes their grandmothers, those whose age doesn’t show and who become prettier with time. The soldiers leave as they came, without remembering anything, without recognizing anyone, without anything mattering to them. The elderly peasant woman initiated Jimena into the oral history of the country. She related to her the cases and things from before and for always, stories, legends, as if they dealt with small quotidian miracles that were being produced at that very moment. The toothless old woman, almost one hun54. Guaraní for “hut.” 55. “Poguasú” is the Guaraní word for a politically or economically powerful man.

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dred-years-old, didn’t have more than skin and bones under her rags. She didn’t know how to read, she didn’t know how to write, she didn’t show evidence of suffering and perhaps she had even forgotten to die. But she knew about those things from the other side of life. She felt fear, but her silent and slow fear was like an element of nature that came to her from outside, like the wind, the heat, or the cold, and that went away like the wind, the heat, and the cold or like the thick smoke from her cigar. Those women had lost their familial bonds, their huts, their names, consciousness of their necessities. They had forgotten their connections with things and the sensitive phases of nature. The mountain had no limits. Men and their extermination camps appeared and disappeared. Beneath the fiery sun that incinerated their shadows, the women had returned to the primitive mystery of the darkness of anonymity, of oblivion. They didn’t seem to need anything but a soul. But even that would have now probably turned out to be an impediment for their bodies in which they miraculously maintained the ardor of life. They only needed that silent courage whose harsh use had made them all equal from time immemorial. They called each other with the shouts of birds whose echoes roamed and died in the hills, in the “trails,” in the gorges. With a slow and memory-filled wisdom, the old woman from Alto Paraná, between one and another puff of her crushed cigar stub, taught Jimena the way to sleep in order to be more awake during sleep and see in the darkness of night the bottom of reality that the light of day hides. “Although you may be deeply asleep,” the old woman had said to her, “you are going to see what happens before it is happening. It might be a long time. It is like a memory that is waiting outside, lying down like a dog whom you don’t see and who doesn’t bark, but is very effective. He warns you slowly, without noise, of danger, of threat. But then you have just enough time to hide, to escape, to save your mortality. A Christian can die at any moment, all the more so if she is a woman alone and without defense. And you are still too young, che ama, 56 and should save yourself from perdition, because the life of this country and everything depends on women.” Jimena learned that light sleep populated with diffuse images from the bottom of the “caves” where Doña Encarnación hid her at night in fear of the attacks. “Memory, che ama, has its burden. Amome 57 is heavier than stone,” Jimena recounted that the elderly woman had said to her with a trembling voice. “Thus, one must press his ear to that stone that each one of us carries inside and know its secret. What people have forgotten is the memory of hurt. And 56. “Che” is a Guaraní word that signifies “My friend” and “ama” in Spanish means “lady” or “mistress.” Hence the translation “my lady.” 57. Amome is the Guaraní word for “time.”

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what good does it do a Christian to think about eternal life like the Pai 58 wish, if they don’t even remember what just happened. . . ?” Jimena returned to France with an unspeakable nostalgia for those savage and punished lands. When she was alone, she found that she had to begin everything from the start. We met each other at a university in the South. We took long walks along that landscape full of trees and water. This time the admiration was mutual. I had just separated from my ex-wife. More correct would be to say that she abandoned me. I refused to mortgage Jimena’s life. I did everything possible for her to despise and forget me. I put on another mask: that of the libertine and heartless corruptor of young girls. I became the lover of a neighborhood prostitute and I made her attend my classes, paying for her “intellectual” boredom with good money. The scandal had begun to circulate. They were preparing administrative proceedings that would surely end in my expulsion and jail. I did not succeed in deceiving Jimena. She waited for me one day at the Faculty exit. She took my hand in front of my lover. She said to me aloud without mattering to her who might hear: “I am not going to allow you to sink yourself.” “I cannot give you a home.” “The two of us together can construct one.” “My destiny is to not have one,” I said to her without bitterness, without reproach. She approached the girl who contemplated the scene with an absent demeanor. I saw that she was speaking to her in a kind way. Jimena put her hand on the other’s shoulder. The girl left crying as if she had been thrown down a staircase with a push. I fled to the other end of the Hexagon. 59 I succumbed to alcohol and the absolute indifference of the clochard 60 without completely being one yet. Awhile later, by true chance, a letter arrived in which she said to me: “That which we call destiny is what we make of it. We do not need to ask permission from God or whomever to live and love each other as we desire within permissible passions. I don’t know of a single one that is prohibited as long as we know how to employ it and we are free to elect it and live it in our own way. . . .” The letter got lost in my travels. I am writing it from memory. That was the first time she saved my life in full spiral toward nothingness. When I recovered a degree of human appearance, I returned and proposed that we take refuge in Nevers to live together in our own way. But this “own 58. “Paí” are the priests. 59. The “other end of the Hexagon” is a reference to Moral’s acquisition of habits which are the extreme opposites of his usual practices. 60. “Clochard” is a French word for a vagrant.

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way” is only peculiarly “ours” to the extent that it was we who elected it and reinvented it all the times that were necessary in a constant game of finetunings and adjustments, on occasion too slow; those that demand the patience of a goldsmith engrossed in the image of his passion and his work, which does not always correspond to his inner inspiration. Ten years have passed since then. The decennial cycles that divide my life in slices like those of a past-season melon have never treated me too well. The ten years with Jimena have passed like a thought. Light, serene, timeless. I resumed my classes at the university. I devoted myself to them with the happiness of tasks that are not performed under compulsion and the monotony of routine but rather the exaltation of a truly creative activity. I gave courses on Latin American culture and civilization. I hardly spoke of its current literature. During these years of exile, I have only been interested in reading ancient writers: Greek and Latin, the European classics, the chroniclers of the New World, who are really Latin America’s authentic classics. And naturally, the re-reading of giants like Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Rabelais, the great women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Tolstoy, Proust, Stendhal, Flaubert, Conrad, Joyce, Beckett. And among the North Americans, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner (led by the hand by Conrad), Emily Dickinson, Eudora Welty, Djuna Barnes, the mysterious and magical Ambrose Bierce of the Tales of Soldiers, whose life, identical to his work, marked the direction of my own. Nobody elects his epoch. But he elected the worst one. He fled and disappeared during the vortex of the Mexican Revolution, like he who throws himself into the crater of a volcano. I didn’t know anything about what was currently being written in the Latin American countries, the majority of them subjected to dictatorships, persecutions and repressions of all types. Their cultures of resistance, fighting to survive, could do little for art and literature, which wasn’t useful for anything but the amusement of little girls from the wealthy classes. They had no immediate practical utility. It didn’t exist. I invented those books by contemporary authors that I was obliged to read but that I was probably never going to read nor would they ever be written. A few names, a few books, reached me. I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t touch those books that reeked of inner exile, repressive asphyxiation. I placed the newest and most unknown to me in the chapter “Unknown Masterpieces.” I spoke about them as if I had really read them, with the secret certainty that these masterpieces existed or would be written sometime, and that my imaginary versions would coincide with the real texts. At some point these coincidences should be produced because the combinatorics of the possible variants in literature is rather limited. I recalled the amusing aphorism cited by Borges who affirmed: “If ten thousand monkeys set themselves to typing on ten thousand typewriters during ten thousand years, it is

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inevitable that The Divine Comedy will suddenly emerge.” I believe that this improbable variant is the greatest incentive for the magnificent and excessive production of books that very few people read but that burden our era. “There is no end to making many books,” said Ecclesiastes. I preferred to read in my imagination those abstract and pure books that didn’t exist, but that could be invented each time in a different manner. If a literature of fiction exists, it cannot be other than this one, I said to myself, leafing through these fictive books whose precursors were all found in the future. I felt my students to be quite resistant in the beginning to that unreal material of knowledge that was not going to provide them with any immediate advantage. Today’s girls and boys feel a rather scornful indifference toward literature. I allowed them to familiarize themselves with the idea of the useless as an inoffensive luxury. I tried to create for them the reverberation of a center of interest awakening their apathy with the lens of my own enthusiasm. I excited their curiosity and self-esteem with small challenges that one should know how to allow himself to give into on occasion. Pride also has its gratitude, like the obscure estimation in which a beautiful body holds itself, or feelings that do not doubt their strength and wish to be recognized. Behind the half-closed eyes, I observed curious shifts, changes so varied, so free, and nonetheless still timid and limited. They still didn’t possess sufficient audacity to arrive at that point of delirium between reality and desire, between vertigo and fear, at once luminous and obscure. They finally entered the atmosphere of enchantment that can only sprout from acceptance and surrender, from the suspension of incredulity. A phenomenon of contagion was produced among the most sensitive of the group, not exactly among the most intelligent. I observed it in their shining eyes, in the tense posture of their forgotten bodies, captivated by what they were hearing and feeling with new emotion. I saw that kind of rosy halo that makes blood rise to a youthful face when something truly seduces it. The match between an instructor and students is only won if the latter find the former worthy of their approval. I did not demand it. One is never sure of deserving it. I rather shunned such approval, allowing them to offer it to me spontaneously and until they demanded that I receive it. Without this approval, no instructor can explain or teach anything. I felt like I was earning it little by little, through small nuclei, sometimes from one or two propitiatory victims, against the tide of the most disobedient and arrogant. Communication was established in an unconscious manner. The fields of resistance, including hostility, are useful for that kind of hypnotic transference that is the basis of pedagogical experience. There were no schedules for us. When the classroom had to be occupied by other courses, we went out to the garden and sat on the grass. Or those who could allow ourselves the luxury of wandering around a little while

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more escaped down the ancient narrow streets at dusk. The movement of the march keeps in step with the rhythm of the heart and thought. It stimulates and exalts them, as these in turn shift with the movement of the earth and the stars. We became invisible for the others, but we saw ourselves each time more clearly in the shadows through the light of a nascent friendship, that free friendship that seems like love, but that doesn’t suffer the anxiety of the flesh, the anxiety of loss, nor the fear of mistrust or infidelity. “Remember,” I told them. “What you don’t know is lost once. But what you know and forget is lost twice. . . . Contemplate this and that. You see something, right? One must learn to know what one sees and above all to see it within oneself.” They followed the examples taken from surrounding reality. And everyone competed with one another to see more and know better about the most insignificant things. Youth does not love artificial order but rather the natural incoherence of the world. I installed myself in that space well known by me and without realizing it, they entered the magnetized circle. While we spoke, we traveled. I spoke to them about mythical birds, gods, deserts, virgin forests, savage ceremonies that have the wisdom of the inscrutable, of sacrifices that join flesh, blood, and fire in an elementary mystery; of the evolution of love and religion throughout the ages; of the sense of the genuinely erotic in ancient cultures, so contrary to the aberrations to which the erotic has been lead in our consumerist times. A mere article of perverse excitement, at the lowest point of the moral and social scale. The boys and girls cited examples of these deviations and aberrations taken from movies and television. Love converted into a commodity and its most intimate secrets manipulated like the raw material of publicity. Erotic ecstasy like a formula for commercial success; erotic boredom like the formula for a couple’s failure. We suddenly contemplated from afar a house with illuminated windows at night. We heard the noise of a faraway party. Laughter, voices, music with a lively rhythm, happy songs. We tried to capture the essence of that sound. Sometimes it was the spectacle of a street acrobat in whose contortions the tension of the muscles and the perfection of the movements could reach at times, in fractions of seconds, the everlasting beauty of the most perfect statues. We clustered together around the young and smiling acrobat spreading our laughter and the heat of our bodies to one other. We applauded him with a vengeance to discharge the tension. A little while later we had to separate. They offered their humid and slightly tremulous hands to me. We said goodbye in silence. I saw the group move away until it got lost in the shadows and their voices and laughter waned at the bend. Their retaliation was to make a little fun of the professor, make a joke of him; neutralize the momentary

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intoxication that they had experienced upon discovering with him new and unknown roads. Such relaxation was the most appropriate and healthy. I felt the point of a knife on my neck. A harsh voice in the Maghreb argot intimidated me: “Remain quiet. Drop everything that you have in your dirty pockets. The wallet. . . . Throw it down on the pavement.” The furious and energetic order, the sharp point of the knife driven into the occiput, eliminated any temptation to reply or resist. I extracted my almost empty wallet. I threw it behind me with the deliberate parsimony of someone who generously grants a gift without the slightest trace of fear. “Quick! Your shoes. . . Your socks . . . I took them off and also threw them over my shoulder, trying to make them hit an invisible target, not to attack him in mocking retribution, but rather so that he would face me and I could see his face. I heard that one of the shoes hit him smack in the face. “Come on you bastard! Don’t play any jokes! He ran the point of the knife over my vertebrae, slashing me. Your jacket . . . your pants . . . your shirt . . . Quick!” While I got undressed I thought that the assailant must be very tall, thin, and very young. The blade of the knife was pressed hard against my neck from top to bottom. His voice through clenched teeth sounded muffled above my head. He probably had his head stuffed into a woman’s stocking or was wearing a hood. Because of the roughness of his hands when he touched my body at the beginning, I deduced that his muscular strength and his nervous reflexes were those of a true athlete. I thought of the acrobat. His movements were those of a dancer. It occurred to me that that invisible shadow corresponded to the body of the street contortionist. At no point could I see his face or distinguish his silhouette. “We saw you working on the street a little while ago. . . . We liked it a lot,” I said without any indiscreet intention, only as if looking to open a crack of communication. “Shut up, shit! I felt the burning pain of a new stab on the back and another one marking a cross on my temple. “That is so you learn not to be a snitch . . . ” the camouflaged voice mumbled again. My clothing was reduced to my boxer shorts. “Take off that filthy loincloth.” I threw it with haste before the contortionist skinned me alive. The assailant gathered the booty with astonishing speed and disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up. I had the feeling that I had been assaulted by a phantom, except for the material evidence of the robbery and for the blood that was running down from my shoulder blade to my buttocks.

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I didn’t feel any rancor toward the assailant. I considered that he had done something natural. It only seemed a little strange that he would have chosen me and slashed me like an enemy when I had applauded him with my students a moment ago. I would have liked to have seen his face and shaken his hand. Not the assailant. The artist. It was cold and began to rain. I crossed my hands over my private parts and advanced without direction, searching for an improbable taxi or at least for emergency help. A pair of cops appeared from a side-street, advanced toward me, each one taking one of my arms. They asked me for documents. I don’t have them on me, I said, as you can see. I showed them my back that was bleeding as if from two spigots. I believed this avoided any useless explanation. They interpreted it the other way around. One of the agents picked up the boxer shorts from the road with the tip of his billy stick and stretched it out to me. I put it on with the modesty that I didn’t feel when they made me take it off. The dark and corpulent cop locked a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. The other one went to pick up a vehicle. “Merde!” 61 . . . These pedophiles grow like mushrooms! They should burn them all . . . I heard one of the policemen was mumbling while he was leaving. In a few minutes a police van appeared, sweeping the torturous narrow street with its headlights that slit open the oblique curtain of rain. They stuffed me into the back seat with kicks and shoves. The myth of the navel as the scar of birth and the erotic center of the body is the source of prenatal life and the bottomless crater of desire where the two sexes converge and fuse reestablishing original unity, the specialists say. Which is only partially true. The Omphallic 62 mystery is more complex than it seems in reality, the root of many fertility rites and feminine and androgynous divinities. In man, however, once the umbilical cord is cut, the always protuberant navel is nothing more than the stump of the first phallus that is lost upon being born; in the same way that the nipples with false areolas do not fulfill any function. In women, the navel withdraws into a deep hole, the concave vase of the moon of the Song, 63 in Shulamite’s womb, always full of the exquisite liquid which King Solomon took pleasure in drinking, without ever satiating his longings, and in which I, plebeian and agnostic, exhaust my own desires, no less intense and unquenchable than those of a king. My lunar vase

61. “Shit” in French. 62. I am translating “onfálico,” a neologism in Spanish based on the word “Omphalos,” which refers to an ancient stone used to indicate the center of the world, as “Omphallic,” an equivalent neologism in English (an adjectival form of the noun Omphalos that also captures the phallic symbolism that Roa Bastos develops in this passage). 63. This is a reference to the “Song of Songs,” a section of the Old Testament.

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is excavated in Jimena’s womb, my Sul Ama, 64 who knows how to surrender to the mysterious dream of love as if she died each time in the transport of pleasure. The scar of birth. This myth has been obsessing me for many years already. In Manorá, my birthplace, when I was a child, an event, half real, half fantastic, occurred. A man of Lilliputian size was born, or thought that he was born once he was already an adult. He called himself “Unborn.” But everyone called him don Chiquito. 65 He wasn’t “unborn,” he was a son born of a mother like everyone else; an unfinished project of a man. When he was born, the fetus seemed dead. He revived and he already had the face of an old man that would not change later. The midwife and the village people believed that while he was growing he would recover his youth, with which nature’s error would thus be corrected. 66 “These creatures,” declared the midwife without much conviction, “are born old and grow backward toward childhood. They shrink as they approach the adult age. In old age they reach infancy. They fancy that they are fetuses and seek their mother’s lap on which to perch. They seek to forget that they were once born. From there was born the ñe’ engá 67 : no one is older than he who was just born. “Cierto ité pa upeva!” 68 admitted a woman with a big wart on the corner of her lips. Don Chiquito was born each morning and unborn in the evenings. His intelligence was exceptional. He became the teacher at the school. I met him in the beginning grades. He was a marvelous narrator of “facts.” His voice of an asthmatic, deep and sharp, kept us amazed and intimidated. When he was probably in the forties of his ageless age, he wore rolled up at his waist a wild vine, parched and tanned in his own sweat, which he claimed was his umbilical cord, but at the same time he believed that he continued to live in the maternal womb. He walked bent over, almost folded in two, always looking at the ground in search of the navel that he had lost. He raised his shabby shirt and showed his dried belly, black and smooth without the 64. Roa Bastos clearly intends a form of word play on the Spanish name Sulamita (Shulamite in English), which he here converts into two words, Sul Ama. In Turkish, “sulama” means “irrigation,” so that the use of the word “Sul Ama” here might refer to the womb as a source of liquid as expressed in this passage. In Spanish, the word “ama” clearly means “mistress” or “owner.” However, the use of “Sul” before “Ama” is ambiguous since “sul” is not a Spanish word. In Italian, it means “on the” which would render the wordplay “on the mistress,” which is possibly another sexual allusion within the context of this paragraph. 65. “Chiquito” means “tiny” in Spanish. 66. Note that this section is a recounting of the short story written by Roa Bastos and titled “Nonato” (Unborn). The story was originally published in the collection titled Moriencia (Slaughter) and published in 1969. 67. Ñe engá is Guaraní for “proverb.” 68. “Cierto Ité pa upeva” means “How true that is!” in jopara (the Guarani, that is [ité pa uupeva] mixed with the Spanish, cierto, meaning certain or true).

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trace of a navel. To those who made fun of or doubted him, he usually gave this as proof of his no-birth. He was an old child who never finished growing. We would go to spy on him in the afternoons when he “spoke” with his mother who had died many years ago. For him, she continued to be alive. He was convinced that when night (which he greatly feared) fell, he took refuge in the maternal uterus, which he did not leave until daybreak, to meet with us at the school in ruins, and give classes to the few ragged students who attended because of curiosity, but who left having learned to read and write. He had built his ranch on four pilings at the edge of the dead lagoon that exists next to the bridge of the railroad tracks. In times of rain, in August, the lagoon swelled and don Chiquito’s lacustrine cabin seemed to float on the stagnated water that fermented a heavy cream of vegetal detritus, aquatic plants, and even the carrions of dead animals. From the tracks, on the embankment, we could see don Chiquito when he was talking to his mother and we even heard the faraway and indistinct voice of the latter in an interminable discussion in which maternal sweetness and reprimands alternated with the incomprehensible pleas of the unborn one who didn’t want to be born. We even seemed to hear sobs and the smothered groans of the woman in labor. Then we saw don Chiquito climb up and enter the “maternal womb,” a type of backpack that was hanging from the main wooden post, until he completely disappeared. This mystery that we saw enacted from the bridge, while silent and bewildered, overwhelmed us. One morning, while don Chiquito was at the school, I waded across the lagoon and slipped inside the ranch through a crack in the floor boards, between the pilings. I approached the oval-shaped bag and discovered, stupefied, that in reality it was a bird’s nest, or at least it was built like a heron’s nest, the bird that in Guaraní is called kuarahy-mimby, the flute-of-the-sun. It was made with the softest materials that one can imagine, but that I did not recognize. They were not bird feathers or animal skins; it was rather like a very fine but resistant membrane, similar to what I would later find out was a human placenta. From the inside, a thick, twisted vine was hanging in knots and rings. Perhaps it was an authentic umbilical cord dried and shiny from continuous rubbing. With some dread, I passed my fingers over the knots and convolutions. I couldn’t continue. The voice of don Chiquito first, then that of the mother, in violent altercation, sprouted clearly from somewhere. Through the opening I launched myself into the lagoon and swimming, reached the bridge. From the tracks I saw don Chiquito who was approaching along the road, always with his head down and as if absent from the world that surrounded him. As long as one could remember, don Chiquito lived separated from the congregation. The village priest had asked for his excommunication from the

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diocese, but he couldn’t succeed in getting don Chiquito thrown out of the school, because he was the only teacher in the village. From time to time, in his sermons, the priest referred to the crazy old man who lived in the sacrilegious lie of considering himself an unborn. And to condemn him, he repeated the words of Nicodemus, the prince of the Pharisees, to Jesus (John: 3,4): “How can man be born, being old? How can he enter again into the womb of his mother, and be born?” “Because honestly,” thundered the priest from the pulpit, “a man who is a nobody and almost nothing, and passes himself off as an unborn creature, is the worst thing in the world, a monster of nature. . . And if this false child pretends to be born every day in order to go to the school to teach real children, he is even more monstrous. . . A true sacrilege, without pardon from God, Our Lord.” That day, don Chiquito had entered the church. His voice rose like a scream. “True, true, I tell you, Jesus said to Nicodemus, that he who is not born again, cannot enter the kingdom of God. . .” The sacristan came and removed him with shoves while he stunned him with the sound of the bell. We saw him get lost among the swirls of red dust in the plaza. He never again entered the church. And it can be said that, despite his shriveled-up arms, don Chiquito beat the priest at arm-wrestling, which also meant, in a certain way, the triumph of secular school over the Church. When I entered the University, I remembered the event and began to write about it. That unfinished essay dealt with the mystery of birth from the angle of psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology (Freud, Jung, Durkeim, Mircea Eliade, Marcel Mauss and company, without excluding the extensive reflections that Saint Augustine makes in his Confessions, on his intrauterine relations with his mother). It was titled Contravida. 69 It remained abandoned among so many other useless papers and books from which exile happily freed me. Another one of the favors that I owe to exile. I believe that, departing from a half real, half fantastic event, that essay reflected the obsession of demonstrating that man of all eras, perpetual unborn, nostalgically seeks to eagerly suckle from that birth scar the delicate prenatal nourishment, perhaps the presentment of his future life. The itch of the myth persisted in me, and I think that I transmitted it to Jimena. My mythical interest was in her a cultural and biological one. During a vacation, we decided to set off in search of this primordial trace of birth. We were in London contemplating Bronzino’s 70 Venus, luminous in her dark corner of

69. This is a reference to a novel by Roa Bastos titled Contravida (Counterlife) in which don Chiquito also appears and which deals with the protagonist’s return to his birthplace. The novel was unfinished at the time that Roa Bastos published El fiscal (1993), but appeared in print in 1994. 70. Bronzino was a sixteenth-century Italian sculptor, Agnolo di Cosimo.

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the National Gallery. Jimena fell hopelessly in love with her to the point of not being able to contain her tears. In the Vatican Museum, I fell in love with Aphrodite of Cnidus, born from the hands of Praxiteles four centuries after Christ. We traveled to Naples to admire the vase of the moon of Omphale, 71 which according to those in the know, is a model of supreme perfection. I remembered, I felt in me, the words of Max Aub, 72 that seemed copied from the Song; an echo from the exalted canticle of the Lover from more than three thousand years ago. “Oh, soft thighs, and the golden white lunar surface of the abdomen, with the coiled cave of the navel. . . .”! Of course, with the vision of the Naples Museum group before me, I wasn’t thinking about Omphale, but Jimena, two women, two perfect beauties, whom I could never unite in my imagination. Their perfections are also different and unique. They are incomparable, except from the perspective of measureless cosmos of absolute beauty that spins in the mind of visionaries, crazy people, artists; only they are capable of perceiving it like a revelation at once mystical and erotic. Another defining example is the carved figure of Antinous, the Bithynian ephebe-slave whom the emperor Hadrian made his domestic demigod. In art, there is also an insurmountable limit whose rupture would perhaps provoke an unexpected and terrible catastrophe. No art is superior to another; they are only different as an emanation of beauty or even as a representation of the diabolical ugliness of the world. In the same Museum of Naples, we became entranced before the sculpture of Hercules and Omphale, “she of the beautiful navel.” “Entranced,” is a mere saying. I was dying of shame before Jimena, owing to the humiliating spectacle of Hercules cross-dressed with the vaporous tunic of Omphale, his hair delicately braided into a woman’s hairdo by the slaves. Omphale, however, is dressed in the skin of the lion from Nemea, the fabulous beast fallen from the moon, booty obtained by the hero in his first labor, Omphale’s trophy now from Hercules. I noticed the missing finger that the lion had pulled out in the fight. I pointed with some dissimulation to Hercules’s shrunken phallus, hidden by the fold of the cape; then Hercules’s nail in Omphale’s hands. Jimena put her index finger over her mouth and whispered in a very low voice in the middle of the pilgrimage of visitors that circulated in religious silence: “Gosh! This would never happen to you. . .” In the Prado Museum, we were fascinated by the little statues of Epimetheus and Pandora, carved by El Greco. The umbilical dimples, painted black,

71. In Greek mythology, Omphale is the queen of the kingdom of Lydia. 72. Max Aub was a twentieth-century Spanish writer.

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stand out on the whiteness of the bodies like open eyes drunken with mystical fury on the transparent slimness of their abdomens. In Mexico, Jimena saw the Venus of Xico, found at the foot of the volcano of the same name. She has a very faithful copy among her dearest objects. It is very small but seems immense under certain light effects. The round navel, wide and deep, is excavated in the center of the abdomen, between the breasts and the sexual organ that simulates another navel. The hole is surrounded by an oval ring bristling with umbilical uvulas similar to fleshy teeth positioned face to face. Jimena has counted up to sixty of these defensive teeth, similar in a sense to the myth of the toothed vulva that Sir James Georges Frazer seriously pondered in The Golden Bough. Of course, there are navels with an internal nipple and its corresponding areola. There are navel-eyes with half-closed eyelids that look dreamily at what they cannot see; there are cat-eyed navels, oblique or vertical, and horizontal navels similar to a very thin mouth that smiles, allowing the tip of a diminutive forked tongue to be glimpsed. Something like this is perceived in the abdomen of Queen Nefertiti that we admired in the Louvre. But the ophidian 73 nipple has been gnawed on by time. They all have a relationship with the elements, food, cults of procreation and fertility, and, above all, with music from the most ancient tradition. Jimena, during her years in Mexico, taped the Sound of the Navel in Tehuantepec, to whose rhythm the natives of the Isthmus still dance. It would not be surprising that the famous dance of the abdomen sprung forth from these very ancient ritual rhythms, marked by the melodious and syncopated sway of the navel in the sexual act. The Brazilians boast that their women have “coffee bean navels,” whose form, size and color are exactly those of a bean of that aromatic drink. It is strange that this image has not yet appeared in graphic and audiovisual publicity posters and sessions whose surge of cheap pornography invades the streets, the homes, the rooms of children, the minds that are rapidly made stupid in this phenomenon of collective erotomania. Hunger, obsession, confusion, tedium of lovers without love. The phenomenon does not have limits or antidotes. It is the depravity of sex converted into pure animal pleasure. We are nothing more than monkeys full of tedium, moved by the automatism reminiscent of desire. It doesn’t make any sense to speak of civilization, of decadence, or the end of an age. We are perhaps witnessing the extinction of all of that. The pilgrimage along the Omphallic route confirmed for us a simple and outlandish truth. One does not see the beauty of that which one possesses. One always sees “the beauty of others,” as my friend Ticio Escobar says in the book he has dedicated to the Chamococo Indians from the Paraguayan 73. Ophidian is something related to reptiles.

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Chaco region. It is true that Ticio, an anthropologist and respectful art critic, does not waste time studying the umbilical crack that in indigenous women is hidden by the colorful tattoos that cover their bodies. Between them and nature, there is a vivid and tangible umbilical cord that is never cut, not even in death. We didn’t stop until we visited in Bihar, in India, the sculpture of Tara, the Buddhist virgin mother of an almost insufferable perfection for the eyes and the sensibility of the “foreigners” from the West. I asked myself why some of the prodigious representations of the Christian Virgin do not produce this same impression. “It is obvious that it is a problem of cultural visions and sensibilities,” Jimena said, “not of an artistic perfection, whose limits we are incapable of perceiving.” As the final stage of our Omphallic pilgrimage, we attempted a trip to Mauritania where it is rumored that there still exists a cult of the navel as a deity or fetishism of an already extinct tribe of Berbers or Bedouins. Supposedly, this cult derives from another more primitive one whose antiquity goes back to Set, the third son of Adam. The cult of a monstrous fish-uterus into which Set was converted because of the crime of having raped one of the Goddess Ashtar’s virgins, when the Sahara Desert was still an immense region of virgin rain-forests. Races and cultures disappear, the jungles become deserts, but the essential myths survive to surely create new races and cultures in their own image. We didn’t manage to get there. We fell prisoners to the guerrillas of the Polisario Front. As if they had sprouted from the sand, some twenty men with ragged uniforms suddenly surrounded us, with skin and dried bones like vine shoots from the grapevine. “Who are you”? “Frenchmen.” “What are you looking for here?” “We want to get to the city of Attar.” “And once there?” “To visit the sanctuary where they say the goddess of the lunar navel is venerated.” They didn’t understand. Their dialect of crackling monosyllables was harsh and incomprehensible. They repeated the question for us. The nervous barrels of their automatic rifles oscillated pointing very close to our chests. “We want to visit the sanctuary of the fish-uterus,” I answered sketching the image with the most graphic and least obscene gestures possible. “The virgin in the form of a human uterus with breasts, a double navel, and vulva.” They thought we were making fun of them. I repeated the answer with the most decent and convivial phrasing and gestures (here the Gallicism expresses well what I wanted to explain). “It doesn’t exist anymore. We burned it.,” we thought they were saying.

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In any case, it was all the same. With or without fire, the fish-uterus was not going to come to visit us on this sea of sand scorched by the red hot white light that seemed permanently suspended in the sky. The absent brightness of the pure light did not pull any shadows from the plucked shrubs, from our figures, from the Mauritanian warriors, skinny like lances, very tall and beautiful like Ethiopians with their tawny-colored skin and their fine, almost feminine, features. The atmosphere was abstract and immobile, and at the same time, vertiginous, like in dreams. They suspected that we were spies. No tourist was going to search for erotic idols in that universe of sand, wind, and solitude. They put us in a deep cave in the middle of the dunes where we were captive for a time that seemed infinite to us. At night we were freezing despite tightly hugging as we lay on the sand of a dry ditch and sparse herbal plants. During the day, the heat suffocated us. Two or three armed Bedouins were always posted at the mouth of the cave. From time to time, they descended to observe us with their muffled lanterns that bathed us for a little while with the beams of bone dust white light. Toward daybreak they brought us water and fermented goat milk. They looked at Jimena with astonishment and they left without turning their faces away from us. We were condemned to hunger, abstinence of the flesh, and lack of sleep. A strange, almost supernatural sensation possessed us, as if we were buried alive. Jimena pressed against me. From one moment to another I expected the worst. I saw it reflected in the eyes charged with desire of the beautiful Ethiopians. And Jimena feared the reproduction in this African cave of the scenes that the elderly peasant woman in the Guairá of Paraguay had related to her. She saw once again the girls raped by the soldiers of the tyrant, no longer as a listener but as a victim, she herself, after my prior decapitation. I tried in vain to calm her desperation. I cursed a thousand times my thoughtlessness, my stupidity, for having mentioned to the Saharans our search for the erotic charm. It was as if I had launched the fatal exorcism of the infernal amulet against Jimena’s body, to make it more visible and desirable to those men of the desert. When the guards were not there, Jimena dedicated herself to studying the stones with strange yellow streaks that shone in the semi-darkness. In reality, she was looking for an escape hole through those chimney-like funnels that sometimes are found in rocky caves. A ray of livid light fell perpendicular through some invisible gap. We searched for it with determination. But what we discovered was a nest of gigantic spiders. Immobile and as if lying in wait, they had all turned their immense antennas toward us. We killed many of them with pieces of rock.

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The battle lasted all afternoon. Jimena suddenly launched a shout of horror pointing with her finger at various dead spiders that were upside down. I approached to see. I felt that my skin and hair stood on end with the horror of the shout that Jimena had exhaled. I observed on the abdomen of the hairy spiders two buttons like those of an umbilical protuberance joined to a fissure that was very much like a vulva-like orifice simultaneously joined to the anus of the arachnids located among the eight very long legs. What we saw was pretty similar to a hallucination of our feverish and worn out senses. It was too much. The fish-uterus of Set, exiled from Eden, converted into Cainitic spiders, obscure great-great grandsons of Adam, united against us after millions of years by the umbilical cord of creation, of sin and death. “It cannot be. . . !” Jimena murmured, holding on to my arms. We receded toward a clearer place in the cave. We ran the risk that some had escaped. Suddenly darkness inundated the enclosure. We were on our feet all night with our backs glued to the wall of stone, stuck up to the knees in a putrid lagoon whose waters, upon being stirred up, let loose a stench that asphyxiated us and made us cough without stopping. Some muffled lanterns entered the cave toward dawn as during the previous days. Suddenly, I no longer saw Jimena. She had hidden in a bend. I pointed out the hundred or so crushed spiders to the Saharans to distract their attention. They didn’t even notice the dark shells. With gestures and muffled voices, they asked for Jimena. I pointed in the wrong direction. They went directly to the place where she had hidden. They extracted her from the crack dragging her by the arms. I launched myself against them, impotent. Someone knocked me unconscious, with the strong blow of the butt of his weapon. When I recovered consciousness, I didn’t see Jimena anymore. I dragged myself crawling toward the exterior. She was there among the Saharans, drinking from a wineskin that they had handed to her. My spirit returned to my body. Jimena approached, she helped me to stand up and she gave me something to drink from the pot protected from the heat by a thick woolen cover. The Saharans were joking and laughing among themselves as if before a very amusing scene. The sun began to rise toward the East over the Atlas mountain chain, painting the snow-covered summits a tender pink. From the northern sky a dark stain was descending rapidly toward us. Because of a notification from the Saharans themselves, a Spanish helicopter was coming to rescue us. They took us, hand-cuffed, to Ceuta where, at first, they confused us with drug traffickers from Morocco, for whom they were searching. Our baggage had been lost and with it, our passports. We had to wait for the results of consultations and inquiries with the Spanish and French authorities.

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We were fried from fatigue, hunger, lack of sleep, our eyes injected with blood, our lips and gums ulcerated by the beginning of scurvy, our bodies swollen and deformed from insect bites. But at heart we were content because the unexpected adventure had come to a happy conclusion. Jimena was unrecognizable. But that ugliness that the desert inflicted upon her made the aura of her untouched beauty shine even more. The vicissitudes of this pilgrimage plunged us into a state of special sensitivity that resurrected the mind-boggling image of Mathis or Mathaeus Grünewald’s polyptych, which I had not contemplated except in poor reproductions. “We must go see it,” I proposed to Jimena. The serviceable Eurail passes took us to Colmar. We went directly to the ex-convent converted into a museum. A guide led us along a hallway that surrounded the garden and we entered an enclosed chapel. In the room, eerily lit by the colored chiaroscuro of the stained-glass windows, we didn’t see the polyptych anywhere. I forgot that the entire altarpiece, composed of numerous foldable wings, had been dismantled, when it was brought from Issenheim, its city of origin, during the territorial fluctuations of the wars between Germany and France. It would not have otherwise been able to fit in the small gothic chapel of Colmar. “Where is the Christ?,” we asked the guide with gestures, outlining in the air the sign of the Cross. The brusque and laconic Alsatian extended his hand. We turned our heads and, as if responding to our question, we saw the central panel with the scene of the crucifixion advance toward us. An incredible force, like a magnetic suction, attracted us to the center itself of the optic field of the painting that irradiated a tremendous dynamism. The cross planted on the ground curved toward us. The body of the Crucified was at our level, as if coming out of the frame. It gave the impression that at any moment it was going to detach from the Cross. In a parallel movement, we extended our arms toward Him to gather him up and avoid the final humiliation of the fall. The Christ by Mathis Grünewald was there, alive, agonizing on the cross made of wild branches more than four centuries ago, or twenty centuries, or all the eons since man is man, haloed by the sinister dignity of being the assassin of his brother; he who engendered the race of Cain, the most ferocious species that inhabits the planet. The Son of God, made Man, had wished to redeem mankind and save it, achieving nothing more than making it more and more ferocious and miserable. The lacerations that covered the body of that living cadaver imparted to him a kind of painful shudder. His pectorals shook with tetanic spasms, as if it were a great effort for him to breathe. His chest, puffed out due to putrefaction, let fly in the air a few ribs, among the pieces of broken lances stuck in the decomposed flesh. The big and purplish hands flinched under the enor-

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mous nails. His knees clinked together their kneecaps on his legs twisted down to the feet. Those feet! Those coagulated and spongy feet, one on top of the other, were horrible. They were drained and stretched out in putrefaction to the point of seeming like those of a web-footed monster. The black and square heads of the nails stood out on the purplish flesh. The thumb and the index finger, immeasurably grown, almost scratched the floor forming the V of a swastika. On top of this cadaver in turmoil, the enormous and tumultuous head hung on his chest, under the weight of the tangled crown of thorns that was stuck on his forehead. From his half-open and ashen eyes gushed an infinite look of suffering and terror. Jimena covered her face; her hands trembled. Huysmans, at the beginning of the century, contemplated and described with undisguised mystical emotion, the Crucifixion of Matheus Grünewald, 74 which he qualified as the greatest work of supernatural naturalism that was produced in the late Gothic era, the most powerful Crucifixion that has ever been painted. He gave it an exalted title: “The Divine Abjection of Grünewald.” I couldn’t get out of my mind, or stop overprinting on the Christ from the altarpiece the images evoked by the words of the great writer of The Damned, which foreshadowed his conversion. 75 The sensation that overwhelmed me was of a different nature. Something strange perturbed my vision. I suddenly observed that a thick beard had grown on the lowered head. And at that moment I became conscious of the fact that the entire time I had been contemplating the Christ of Cerro-Corá in the Christ of Colmar. The strange thing was that this altarpiece was not known in America. And certainly, even less so by the immolators. I saw a reproduction of this altarpiece many years later, already in European exile. For the invaders and assassins of the past century, the crucifixion of Solano López was nothing more than a vengeful and burlesque parody. But the sacrilegious derision that the Brazilian soldiers implemented on the cadaver of the enemy who had been conquered and profaned in the most barbarous way, was, through some inexplicable mystery, the exact replica of the crucifixion by Grünewald, painted four centuries earlier. It undoubtedly was a question of one of those mysterious symmetries that are suddenly found in the infinite and unknown reality of the cosmos, between our miserable and opaque reality and the 74. Note that Grünewald was previously referred to as Mathias, not Matheus. Roa Bastos employs two different spellings for his name in the novel. 75. This is a reference to the essays “The Karlsruhe ‘Crucifixion” and “The Grünewalds in the Colmar Museums” written by J.-K. Huysmans and originally published respectively in his books La-Bas and Trois Primitifs. See the book Grünewald: The Paintings (London: Phaidon, 1958): 7–25.

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transfiguring universe of art, without any physical law or supernatural reason able to explain these coincidences. Jimena seemed petrified. Her face, intensely pale, denoted the clash of contradictory feelings. I took her by the hand and we escaped from this Calvary. Its supernatural stench mixed with the aroma of the flowers that we were trampling as if drunk and blind, without finding the exit. The heavy hands of the Alsatian fell on us and pushed us toward the railings. I discretely offered him a Christian tip. With a slap, like someone who shoos away a fly, he made the crumpled bill fly in the air without moving a muscle of his stony features. Jimena, in a nightgown, combed her hair before the mirror. The reflected image looked increasingly to me like Titian’s Nude Combing Her Hair. I felt a tremendous longing for her body, her navel, that warm blood that makes her cheeks red, for that life oil that makes her long hair blacker. It was a furious, almost animalistic compulsion. I needed to recoup from caves, hairy spiders, the taste of death that we felt burn our bodies like an acid, after having been lost in the “divine abjection of Grünewald” for hours. Only an infinitesimal line separates mystical emotion from amorous transport. We cross it in the palpitating weightlessness of desire. By the light of the moon, Jimena’s marvelous abdomen synthesized and consolidated the entire beauty of her body, the energy of her being. And, on this abdomen, the hole of the Omphale shone with its particles of amber, its nectar. Only the tongue folded in two, like a sucking annelid, could penetrate to the bottom and softly suction the ambrosia of that hallucinogenic liquor. I did it with my eyes closed, without respecting the Arab proverb: “there is no sin above the navel.” The smooth and full curvature of the abdomen, in horizontal position, no longer had an above or below. No border delimited zones of sin or impurity. The vase full of moon and liquor was transformed into the erotic center of the cosmos. It covered all the universe of dreams. Each particle, magnetized by desire, manages to reproduce, to be, the entire body. The moist edge of the corner of her eyelid and the silky eyelashes, the damp armpits, the most secret places in a woman’s body can achieve reproduction of the soft genital cavity during the voluptuous trance. That delicate fossula was Jimena’s entire body. The moon crystals with the taste of milk and honey, of the salt of deep seas, of the honey perfumed with musk of the black bees, the oil of her own sweat, of her most hidden juices, dissolved in my mouth with an unspeakable delight. And each crystal reproduced, like a mirror, Jimena’s body, her abdomen, her navel, her genitals, and once again her body, her abdomen, her navel, her genitals, each time on a smaller scale, until infinity, and I, like a black insect pilgrimaging over

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those beauties, over those oils, those salts, those perfumes, sipping them with unquenchable delight. Yesterday I had an incident with Jimena, the first since we met each other. A misunderstanding, foreign to us, absurd and almost incredible, regarding the letter of a graduate student whose thesis on contemporary Latin American literature I am directing. Leda Kautner is a German girl who is studying in Paris. The letter in truth has nothing to do with her thesis. Quite ambiguous, the letter implies the obvious: what often happens between a professor and his young students; that reversal of the paternal relationship into an affective and even erotic bond. The letter, written on several sides of paper with an irregular and nervous handwriting, arrived folded in fine creases in a large-sized fuchsia envelope with my name written in capital letters, the same kind as on anonymous letters and private messages. Also her signature, at the end, was written in capital letters and underneath the date, the underlined word: Personal. I will eliminate or summarize the paragraphs that are too incoherent. Like the one on the obsessive dream that relentlessly pursues her and for which she accuses me of being responsible. She sees herself attacked by a man who rapes her and stabs her in a vacant lot. That man is me. Dead, she sees the reconstruction of the crime that the investigating judge orders. Leda comments: “In my birthplace of Transylvania there exists an ingenuous and terrible popular belief. They say that the blood of a dead person flows again from its wounds if the assassin touches them. The terrible thing is that among the suspects that the judge tests in extremis is you, professor! . . . This is what tortures me the most. One by one, the suspected assassins pass by. They touch my wounds with their fingers but they remain dry. You, the last one, pass by and under your trembling finger the wounds begin to bleed. You must tell me something. . . . This torture of the dream must end. . . . I know that you understand me and will help to liberate me from it. . . .” She confides various secrets of an intimate nature. She tells me that she was born in the city of Tirgu Muresh, in the Carpathians. Orphaned at a young age, her mother and father killed in Ceaucescu’s 76 concentration camps, she was adopted by a German family, the Kautners, who were able to flee the horror and took her to Munich. Even now they live there among the memories of Hitler, whom the Kautners simultaneously revere and hate. They live in a house near the bar where Hitler initiated his millennial utopia

76. Nicolae Ceaucescu was the last Romanian communist leader in power from 1965 to 1989. He was shot by a firing squad for crimes of genocide in Romania.

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of the Supermen, of the super race destined to conquer the world and purify it in the crematory ovens of the weak and sickly races. The girl curses that dream that has made her hate her gender, and which she blames for her loneliness and fears. “I never had it before,” she complains. She speaks of a recent date. She holds me responsible for her obsessive nightmare. Blackmail is evident. She relates in detail some of her erotic fantasies and at the end formulates a strange question that, she explains, some fragments of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra have inspired. “Don’t you think that woman is an animal on the verge of being converted into a human being and can only be transmuted through love? . . . The love of whom? Does love exist? . . .” A few exalted reflections that clearly allude to me follow. Finally, she begs me to accompany her during la soutenance 77 of her thesis because of her anxiety al trac 78 that often comes over her in difficult moments. Leda’s inconceivable attitude upsets my ideas about the man-woman relationship. I have always suspected that man uses woman so that woman does not abuse him. Leda’s shameless, sudden gesture, almost too theatrical, opened up the reverse possibility: that woman can use man to affirm her superiority over him. I accepted this possible inversion, as law and fact, since it always seemed like an error to me that women did not seek to go back to their natural level, that of their biological superiority over men. Resigned to her immemorial slavery, woman resists seeing man as an animal of prey, as her predator and exploiter. Moreover, there is the immense disproportion between the relative powers of women and men. The latter are the owners of jobs, authors of laws, judges and executors of norms, exclusive protagonists of politics and the “art” of governing, regulators of the social universe made in their image, etc. etc.; the entire string of concepts and facts so commonly circulated by the socalled “human sciences.” Some time ago. I had written an article on this topic for the journal of the University, or rather, on the enormous anguish that man experiences faced with the smallest advancement of women in the recovery of their freedom and rights, before the slightest manifestation of their independence. Based on the documentation of specialists and current statistics, I tried to describe the mechanisms of defense and counterattack that the “virile gender” unleashes against its “better half” at the slightest attempt at rebellion, at the smallest sign of occupying the place that rightfully corresponds to her. “We live in a world,” the article concluded, “attacked by an incurable disease called man.” 79 77. Dissertation defense in French. 78. Stage fright in French. 79. The narrator attributes to himself a quotation that comes from Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The earth (he said) has a skin; and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called “man” (153).

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In that essay, I advocated for the study and discussion of a new kind of sentimental, sexual, and moral education faced with the ravages of the technological and anti-humanistic civilization of the Western world. Within the context of the civilization of images and raw libido, I advocated for the transformation of sexual freedom and bourgeois Epicureanism into a new practice remodeling human body and spirit. In sum, the essence of this transformation should reside in ethical and aesthetic comradery and in the mutual respect of a couple (the smallest cell of human society; a pair of two alone in the unity of two in company), in the realization of the fusion between the sexual and the erotic based on the full exaltation of desire as the identification and synergy of two different sexualities, sometimes antagonistic, in the harmonization of contrary forces. In other words, abolish sexual egoism and assume the body of the other as the center of gravity and equilibrium of the erotic, whatever the genders, the nature, and the age of the couples. I think that this article was infrequently read in my courses. In general, girls do not want to know anything about the “intellectual hysteria” of feminism, which they consider a paranoid invention of the “lesbianized” sect of women; perhaps a trap incited by men themselves to better use and abuse women. “Poorly understood feminism is inverted machismo,” I heard one of the most recalcitrant activists say, a sort of mannish woman with a baritone voice and thick dark peach fuzz over her lips. Feminist machismo has produced a terrible emotional shock for women. It has created a new right for women: the right to be an idiot. “We don’t want to be machista women,” added another one. “We don’t want to send men to the house, to the kitchen, to hell. It is not our idea to castrate them and make them all become eunuchs or homosexuals. That’s their business. We want to be in charge of ourselves as women. End the sexual harassment by men, with blackmail and bribery in the workplace, where secretaries must wear a chastity belt and an armored breastplate. We want to compete with men as equals. Choose the man or woman whom we like, make love with him or her, live with him or her while we mutually wish, and let each one go his or her separate way without reproach or owing each other anything.” The discussion about feminism and machismo, about supporters of homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality, arose during the intermission between the two parts of the seminar and continued in courses during the days following a sad episode. Two homosexual boys who formed a couple and lived within the dignity of a model marriage became ill with AIDS and died almost at the same time, a few hours apart. The unfortunate occurrence gave rise to someone going to the extreme of sustaining that AIDS was a “gay” invention, a venereal disease engendered by homosexuals and that they were

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the true “extermin-AID-erS” or “obliter-AID-erS.” 80 The violent and confused debate could not come to any reasonable conclusion. Meanwhile, women who didn’t want to be anything more than women maintained that the obsession with equality at all costs has forced them to sacrifice their quite legitimate sentimental and maternal aspirations. In any case, these swings of the pendulum in the fight between genders does not matter too much to them: what the Yankees call “backlash,” the French call “retour de manivelle,” and in Spanish, “golpe de culata,” or “efecto de retrocarga.” The girls and boys agreed that the only important thing was the immediate sexual impulsion of the present. The short-lived “horizontal vertigo” of the beddable person was the only thing that could be demanded from homo, hetero, or bisexual love. Outside of this, the majority affirmed, there is nothing. Nothing matters to us. Except to repeat the game until the croupier 81 of the roulette wheel sings “No more bets!” I ignore Leda Kautner’s ideas in this regard. Through her letter I understand that she is experiencing a somewhat late awakening of her female condition, of sexual larva in the lethargic dream into which she was plunged, an awakening that is truly a bit alarming and flamboyant. One can divine the roots of the problem in her faraway and nightmarish Transylvanian infancy under the regime of Ceaucescu, in a way Stroessner’s twin, with the gothic tradition of vampirism, which could be summarized in the aphorism: “If you are invited to dinner by a vampire you should contribute your blood.” I looked over Zarathustra. 82 In the chapter titled “On Immaculate Knowledge,” one reads: “When I saw the moon come out last night, so swollen and pregnant on the horizon, I thought that it was going to give birth to a sun. But this supposed pregnancy was false. I would rather believe the moon to be a man than a woman” . . . The parable of the nihilist and misogynist philosopher distills his small amount of venom: “On the moon there is a lascivious and envious monk who passes over the roof tiles spying on and encircling the half-closed windows. Lascivious toward everything obscene that there is in the night . . . envious of all the pleasures and joys of lovers . . .” Leda Kautner asks with an ingenuousness or cynicism that is quite nonNietzschean: “The thing about the moon-man doesn’t surprise me because in German moon, mond, is masculine. What intrigues me is the negative concept of pleasure (the word “enjoyment” is crossed-out) that Nietzsche proposes. Is it that pleasure is only enjoying the pleasure of others by “looking,” 80. The Spanish version contains the wordplay “homi-cidas o sex-sidas” which I have rendered here with a similar wordplay on the terms “exterminAID-erS” (exterminators) and “obliterAIDerS (obliterators).” “Homi”evokes “homosexual” at the same time that “homicida” is a killer. “Sex-sida” includes the wordplay on “sida,” which is AIDS in Spanish, and the suffix “cida” (-cide) which means killer. 81. French word meaning the person in charge of the gaming table. 82. Moral refers to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose connection to the novel is discussed at length in my introduction to The Prosecutor.

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spying through the half-closed windows like that obscure and hooded monk? There is another very compact cross-out under which one divines more than reads: “Or must one enter the bedrooms directly through the half-shut windows?” (The rest, illegible). The “cat on a hot tin roof” 83 . . . I thought with some humor recalling the piece by Tennessee Williams. I imagined Leda on the roof furtively spying through the half-closed windows. And it is true that sometimes an animallike aura arises in Leda: that voluptuousness of an angora cat in heat with its iridescent fur standing on end double its size, whose looks are capable of hypnotizing a tree. I have tracked down in encyclopedias the origin and history of this race of cats in all its varieties and species. The cats from Transylvania are the most terrible, capricious, and unpredictable. But this aspect of Leda’s personality only lasts as long as an ephemeral and turbid echo of her privacy. One could think of the latency of a remote and unachievable vice, yet unrevealed in her as a vice, and that for now curiously constitutes the strength of her solitary character, the basis of her virtue of being reserved, isolated, to say it all, her intransigent chastity, if in effect she maintained that for fear of the unknown or the obsession of a sovereignty poorly understood by a still immature woman. “Dear Professor, can you clarify this doubt for me?” the letter continued. “Books are always more deceiving than real-life events, right? . . . I am walking along the edge of my body but I cannot find it. Perhaps it is in another’s power and I have never had it. I cannot find my face. I don’t know who I am . . . Can you help me? I promise not to create problems of any kind for you and from now on I submit myself completely to your will, experience and knowledge . . . , to whatever you wish to do with me . . .” I was enormously surprised by this letter that was at once so laughably infantile and “intellectual.” Leda Kautner always impressed me because of her intelligence, because of a great timidity that usually blushes her cheeks and completely cuts off her capacity for communication. There are moments in which her graceful silhouette, her small and rosy face, with fine features in proportion to her height and long neck, tended to fade, as if she retreated into her interior, absorbed by a fixed idea or a memory. At first I thought she was near-sighted, but I never saw her use glasses. At other times, bursts of anxiety born of a deep sensuality flash in her golden eyes, which doesn’t go along with her character type, at least in appearance, as if there were something mysteriously falsified in her. Her fearful and sensitive face allows one to perceive a girl affronted by a dark drama of which she surely has no memory, or by the suspicion of carnal desire, of which she probably doesn’t have any consciousness either, and

83. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play by Tennessee Williams published in 1955.

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which augments in her the fear of sex and the rebellion against herself for not accepting it. I can separately recall each one of her features, the straight nose with palpitating nostrils, the firm chin, the perfect teeth, the long hair down to the waist, of a golden blond with reddish sparkles, the pupils of the same color in her almond-shaped and slanting eyes, almost white, the short torso, the long, well-toned legs of a mountain woman, the small mole next to the corner of her lips, the gesture of crossed-hands when she doubts or resists speaking, closing her eyes until they are converted into two slits that allow their golden shine to filter through. What strikes one the most is her completely hoarse voice with a deep register that often falls into a guttural purr, as if she were always about to interrupt herself. I remember all of this, but it is impossible for me to reconstruct her entire figure, something that rarely tends to happen to me with my students, whom I remember for years regarding the smallest details of their physical presence, their personality, their character. In class, they used to call Leda Kautner the Latin nickname Fulva, because of her golden, tawny color. Since I met her at the beginning of the school year, an ambiguous connection was established between us, divided between sympathy and hostility. Her fine but well-formed lips allow one to glimpse a need for kindness and even sweetness in the slow and barely outlined smile that immediately disappears into her permanent seriousness. She simultaneously attracts and repels because of this manner of turning colorless until she appears ghostly. An evanescent being. Once I had to call her by her name to find her in class. She stood up at her desk, between arrogant and surprised: “Ah, there you are . . . ,” I said to her with a certain tone of irony and reproach. “It seems like it pleases you to hide under your shadow. Leave notice when you are absent.” She didn’t say anything but remained looking at me fixedly as if she had also suddenly found me and didn’t finish recognizing me. She remained silent with her appearance of a wounded adolescent, her frightened and sullen facial expression, her attitude of ostensible aggressiveness, at once scornful and exasperated. If I had been next to her, I think that she would have slapped me. Deep lines crossed her forehead as if she had suddenly grown old. That attitude lasted only a second. After the dark flash of lightning, she immediately adopted again her expression of absence and reserve, of rough and unrivaled shyness. I recalled at that moment that she was the only one who did not take part in our walks. Once classes ended she furtively left; no one saw her disappear. Leda Kautner was, nonetheless, one of the best students, something that the other students did not forgive her for either. Despite this initial lack of understanding, a little later she asked me to direct her dissertation. In all the time that we were working together, the slightest trace of what is now happening was never insinuated. Or perhaps

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there was one vaguely premonitory trace. One afternoon, in the study area of the school, we found ourselves alone while we were working on bibliographical records. In a given moment, she accidentally brushed against my hand. She apologized with a guttural and cross monosyllable. She dropped her pencil; we both bent down to pick it up. Our heads collided with a certain force. I passed my hand over her forehead on the spot where you could see the rosette from the blow, asking in turn that she forgive me. She stood up impulsively, with her face a bright red. She gathered up her books and folders, and left without saying goodbye. The next day we saw each other again. She seemed to have totally forgotten the incident. She gave me the last chapter to read on silence as an expression of an underlying discourse in Latin American narrative, corresponding to the indigenous and African cultural substratum. She has been working for two years principally in Mexico and Brazil. Her thematic analyses are based on major Latin American authors, with reference to and in dialectic opposition to the most representative chroniclers of the Indies, whom she considers the true classics of Latin American literature. Her thesis is one of the best conceived and written by a European student dedicated to Latin American culture and literature that I have read in the last few years. Leda speaks seven languages correctly and knows various Transylvanian and Slavic dialects. She possesses a gift for languages. The text of the letter reveals an uncommon intelligence, but at the same time, a tormented spirit, full of incomprehensible twists. Obsession inhabits her closed and somber world. The thesis and the letter seem to come from not only two different people but also polar opposites. Owing to the total absence of implicit messages, the letter could be taken as an expression of authentic candor. But also, inversely, if it were premeditated, it could be taken as a master work of astuteness that simulates this candor and uses it for some preconceived purpose. The shameless, almost defiant manipulation of an intimacy that does not exist between us annuls any presumption of naiveté or oversight. In any case, I couldn’t read the letter without experiencing the sensation of a low blow that was pretty cunning and despicable. At first I didn’t know how to distinguish between what could be the product of a mental or psychological disorder or a vengeful settling of scores, perhaps because of the distancing to which she felt herself relegated by me, but that she herself establishes with others. After all, I have done whatever was possible to help her, and I cannot recall any discourtesy that excluded her. On the contrary, on occasion I have held her up to others as a model of intelligence and modesty. It is true that at the beginning, at least, I considered her letter a gratuitous and groundless insult that greatly annoyed me, producing a mixture of anger and resentment that it was difficult for me to overcome. One probably had to read Leda’s

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behavior the other way around, and in function of her peculiar way of being. I didn’t know how to do it. I showed the letter to Jimena, from whom I do not usually hide these slightly hysterical unpleasant incidents of the trade, with which she, in turn, is also familiar with regard to her male students and even with regard to some female students, those that tend to fall into what is usually called by the euphemism “confusion of feelings.” While she was reading the letter, Jimena’s face became serious and her factions hardened. “Something is going wrong?” she asked with a different voice than usual. “I get the feeling that yes, in the mind or body of this girl,” I said to say something because I myself did not know how to take the thing except with a mixture of humor and uneasiness. “Schizophrenic or paranoid, perhaps. She wants to prove to herself that she is capable of being normal like the others. But she lacks courage to face reality and she feels persecuted by everyone and everything.” “That girl, Leda Kautner, is very strange,” I said, like he who refers to a common fact. “Her classmates make fun of her saying that she is as beautiful as Paradise but as dumb as a rabbit. She doesn’t like hanging out with the crowd. She doesn’t go to parties or night clubs, or group orgies. She doesn’t smoke marijuana or hashish or sleep with anyone; the guys make fun of her. The female classmates are not more accommodating and take advantage of the slightest reason to ridicule the way she is, the way she dresses, and her behavior. They make fun of the strange hoarseness of her voice that some attribute to shameful vices. In secret, they put syringes and condoms in her bag, the most obscene photos cut out of pornographic magazines, insults that she ignores, or, to which does not react.” “Perhaps she secretly takes drugs,” one girl said, “with that appearance of a wolf in sheep’s clothing that she has.” The highlander girl from the Carpathians has not known how to adapt to modern life, and less so to the craziness, each time more dissolute, full of cynicism and licentiousness, of student life in the big cities. The freedom of habits is the supreme prize that one has to maddeningly win since other discernable ones do not exist. “Leda Kautner does not enter the game because of lack of interest, cowardliness, or some glandular dysfunction,” I commented to Jimena with a lack of conviction. “She is a stray bullet that doesn’t have a solution,” I said believing that with that I had put an end to the disagreeable affaire 84 of the student who had developed a sudden sexual attraction to the professor. Upon saying that, I felt that I was lying a little ignominiously, directly or indirectly, with a cynicism more hypocritical than that of the boys and girls I had just criticized. Jimena listened to me as if she were absent. Leda Kautner 84. French for “affair.”

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is absolutely not that way; rather she is too laconic and reserved. But underneath that somewhat phantasmal appearance beats an unshakeable determination and assurance, a courage that can reach delirium. A little later she would give proof of this. I was speaking at that moment perhaps under the impression of the letter; also perhaps to calm Jimena with a devaluating and ironic comment, useless because of her sometimes excessive perspicacity. “Do you remember Brunilde, the one from Geneva . . . ?” I interrupted myself without finishing the sentence because I immediately understood that I had committed a completely stupid gaffe, aggravated by the memory of Brunilde, the Swiss adolescent whose thesis Jimena had directed and who had spent a month at our house. A parallel of that nature (One night Brunilde had proposed, quite naturally and impudently, to go to bed with us to find out how that was), truly did not seem the most appropriate to clarify and pacify the situation. That night (I still recall with astonishment) Jimena called Brunilde. The girl appeared in her bathrobe. “Take off your clothes,” she ordered her imperiously. “Come and get in bed with us to see how that is.” Brunilde cringed in her bathrobe, her head fell on her chest and she began to cry. “Go to sleep,” Jimena said to her in the same tone. “And don’t have bad dreams. Tomorrow, on the first train, you will return to Geneva. And don’t get involved anymore in what you don’t understand and should discover yourself. Tell your parents the reason for your return. They will be very satisfied and proud.” Jimena returned the letter to me after folding it crease by crease with a slowness that hid her indignation. She didn’t add a single word and withdrew into a silence that was also very uncharacteristic of her. The appearance of jealousy that sometimes emerges in her feelings is not vulgar jealousy provoked by the unhealthy desire of possession or the humiliation of deceit or infidelity. Jimena doesn’t feel any of that. “An adult love like ours cannot be adulterous,” she herself once said, circumventing an analogous situation to that one which was just produced with a wordplay. I will not adulterate our union. “Yes, Jimena,” I responded in the same tone. “I think that both of us are above that sad possibility. We are united by amor fati, 85 the love of a couple in real existence such as it is. And even more: in love made destiny. A destiny made by us as you yourself often say.” “We cannot be sure of always getting it right. Life is not a long term, low interest lending bank. Suddenly the overdrafts and account adjustments

85. “Amor fati” is a Latin phrase meaning “love of one’s fate.”

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come. There is always unexpected squandering, small flings that sometimes end up being expensive,” she added with a certain intended sarcasm. “You are not so simple as to allow yourself to be deceived by appearances, nor am I idiotic enough that my love for you excludes the possibility that you could love another. I mean, the right that you put into play your freedom. Freedom doesn’t allow obligations or bondages, it weakens and disappears through habit. Habit is its worst enemy.” “Nobody truly desires his freedom. When he has it in full measure he searches for a way to lose it in another manner.” “There will always be somebody better than me, simply because he is someone else, who is waiting for you in some corner of the universe.” “Don’t be a fool!” “I owe you my life. As long as it lasts, I am yours . . .” “Enough! Please!” she interrupted me again with a metallic voice. “Do not repeat that idiotic jingle that makes me feel like your tormentor. You are as free as I am and my love does not demand yours in exclusivity as payment for having ‘saved your life.’ And even less so keeping you here like a hostage in the perpetual reclusion to which you have condemned yourself.” “I have elected it; I cannot do anything else.” Jimena looked deeply into my eyes and shaking her head in disapproval she told me in a whisper with her teeth clenched: “You are full of remorse! After infidelity comes repentance. But I know that you are the most faithful man in the world. Probably more than I am with respect to you. The day that I do not love you anymore, I will tell you so with the same sincerity.” “I know. The preservation of our union rests on it.” Jimena stood up and took a few steps with her arms crossed, as if speaking to herself. “And as far as fidelity is concerned, the only fidelity that counts is the one that is sure of itself. True fidelity demands a loyalty that no ruse, as refined as it might be, can betray. There is no authentic fidelity but that which accepts the love of another without demanding reciprocity and without judging another when he or she puts an end to a finished relationship.” She leaned with her back against the wall and turned toward me; her intonation was tense and she could barely disguise her personal discomfort. “Would you do it, would you demand from me that reciprocity?” “At this moment I would say no,” I responded before her inquisitive gesture. “But for me what truly counts is your generosity.” “Why must you reproach me constantly that I put your socks on for you when you could not do it?” “Ah, if it had only been the socks!” “Paraguayan women are entirely submissive to their men, in addition to the other atavistic slaveries which they impose upon themselves with truly

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aberrant humility and love. The builders of temples, the women of exoduses and pilgrimages, are nothing more than full-service beasts of burden! I didn’t save your life. I simply did what I should do, as you would have done for me in a similar situation.” The high and erect head, even more beautiful because of the muffled anger that made her breasts palpitate beneath her light shirt, turned toward me with a compassionate air. I looked into her enormous eyes where the contracted pupils were barely a dark dot, and I bit her lips, softly. Jimena closed her eyes and kissed me passionately and freely till she lost her breath while she fell onto the couch. “Your scenes of jealousy produce tenderness in me,” I said to her. “They are your way of reminding me of your love, but also of what is missing from it. Or perhaps what exceeds it. The rust of custom; it is the illness of metal but also of our fragile human condition. I warned you one day. There is an age limit for everything. I wonder if that of our love is reaching that final line?” She sealed my lips with a long kiss again. In reality, these imbalances in Jimena’s emotional equilibrium correspond to other deeper and more subtle causes. They are part of the insecurity, the fear that she has not succeeded in totally dominating in her nature otherwise so compact and harmonious. I know her moments of tranquil and temerarious desperation. She hates lies and hypocrisy. Daughter of exile, without having left anywhere, as she herself often says, she feels exiled from within. “I was born in exile and I didn’t leave it,” she tends to complain as if joking. After the battle of Ebro, 86 her father and many others arrived with difficulty at the border with weapons in their hands. The fugitives were disarmed and interned in concentration camps. Her mother was able to flee in a fishing boat with more than four hundred children from a school of which she was the principal, a little before the siege of Bilbao by the rebel troops. They arrived in Bordeaux. From there they were led to Prades where the great cellist Pablo Casals had his colony of refugee children. Jimena knows and hates her limitations. Weakness in others or in herself does not inspire any compassion in her. She despises pity, but also self-pity. When she doubts something or someone, it is herself she is doubting, and it is only in those rare moments of exasperation that the humiliated and blind being that the violence of reality has implanted in the darkest part of her character emerges in her. Jimena, so carnal, so earthly, doesn’t have a firm ground that she can consider her own and on which she can finally find security and peace in her heart. She feels as if she is standing on a narrow 86. The Battle of Ebro (1938) was the longest battle of the Spanish Civil War, which resulted in a great defeat for the Republican army.

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ledge on the edge of an abyss. She sees herself fall, having me as a mute witness who can do nothing to avoid it. She doesn’t fear the fall; she hates to lose her privacy, even in front of me. My companionship strengthens her anxiety to live but also weakens the reason itself for this anxiety. She needs to get fed up, “leave” herself, criticize and self-criticize when she discovers that to love someone blindly implies the surrender of what is most hers, without the possibility of constructing for herself a faith in compensation, repressing self-pity as well as self-esteem. Isn’t that what is happening to her with me? I think that she “invents” her jealousy to inflict a punishment on herself or to collect a debt from the past. She mortifies herself constantly in purging supposed mistakes and faults, hers and those of others, as if punishment were only an aberration of human nature. These passing ruptures of her equilibrium immunize her for a time against her doubts at the cost of the damage that they produce. Her serene beauty, her profile like that of a Greek medallion, is then altered as if under the influence of the vapors from an acid that flows from her interior. Her voice changes key. Her face of loving everyone can then take on an implacable expression. She hates, she detests lies, with an irrepressible feeling. There is something like the infection of death in lies, she once said; something like the stench of putrefaction of human dignity. I cannot stand them. I prefer silence to false words, because I understand that not everything can be said because of infinite, powerful, or trivial reasons. You will find many of those silences in this long tale that now begins, my dear Morena. You will read in what is written what cannot be said aloud when the breath of courage is lacking. “What are you going to do with that girl?” she asked me. “Nothing,” I said. “She will get over it. The erotic cramps of adolescence do not last. They calm down with the first nocturnal sweats and the light rub of the pubis against the sheets. Then they dedicate themselves to more serious questions. Young women still do not know what to do with the sexual freedom that two world wars brought them. They sink into sex, into its full gamut of nuances, ending up getting bored or looking for the most absurd variants of homosexuality or bisexuality. And the gay omega point is still far from being reached.” Jimena waited for me to stop foaming at the mouth. She repeated her question without an inquisitive spirit. “What are you going to do with your student? You probably have to help her I suppose.” “I don’t think this girl is into that; on the contrary, I think she is on the opposite end. She will manage by herself.” “Make her come here.” “To what end?”

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“She needs to speak to you. You are her thesis director.” “My work directing has ended.” “It begins now with respect to the most important thing. I consider it immoral that this foul-mouthed little girl scoffs at your work, your authority as a professor, your condition as a man. You should teach her to distinguish and separate things. Literature doesn’t have anything to do with this, or only in an indirect manner. Not all women know what they want. But almost all want what they know, although they know it in a twisted fashion. Make her come and show her that things are normal when there is mutual respect and consideration.” I immediately accepted her proposal because I myself was interested in clarifying such an equivocal situation in which I had nothing whatsoever to do but in which all outward appearances seemed to accuse me. I judged it insane to leave Jimena with the suspicion that I was the seducer and my student the victim. Jimena attributes to me the ability to seduce with a type of “calculated disinterest,” with “enchanting indifference,” creating a space of distance and resistance. She sees in my behavior with women a simultaneous attitude of respect and rejection that excites the curiosity of young people of the opposite sex and also of ephebes whom I cannot see and treat except as my children. I think Jimena is wrong about this. It’s true that I adore beautiful and youthful bodies, but there is no greater enjoyment than the beginning of the curve of pleasure in which the eroticism of the flesh is sublimated and transforms us and we can enjoy it without ceding to the temptations of the fugaciousness of sex. The voluptuousness of sensuality, yes, but not of sexuality, whose exacerbation becomes sad and tedious in the long run, insatiable, devouring, and savage. “You are more silent than Achilles. But your feet are lighter. You have a way of seducing that seduces because of its way. Abstention. Looks full of a nameless distance. You want them to love you, to spoil you, not to have compassion for you. A lone wolf that searches for the young sheep and locates her by the smell of the wool and urine that the aroma of young flesh releases.” “An irrefutable diagnosis!” I said to say something, treating it as a joke. Perhaps this was the initial experience that Jimena had with me, I thought. Perhaps she fears that the captivating quality of “enchanting indifference” will produce new “victims.” I called Leda on the phone, inviting her to come over. She arrived the following day. Jimena was not home. When I returned from the University, I found a message in which she said that she was going to Seville for a few days to finish a research paper that she was working on in the Archive of the Indies.

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Through the window, I spied Leda sitting on a bench in the garden, patting the back of the Dalmatian while she was waiting with the contrite and humiliated air of someone who feels as if he were convened to a court. The rays of sunlight produced reddish reflections on her smooth and golden hair that covered her back like a cascade and that the afternoon breeze tossed in very soft waves. The Dalmatian licked one of her hands and she caressed his long snout with the other one. Later it will be your turn to play the swan 87 I said to myself ironically between fear and annoyance. I was momentarily startled, but I didn’t lend any importance to it. After all, I never have been able to recognize the symptoms of misfortune when it initiates one of its unfortunate cycles. I have sufficient proof. Premonitions do not work for me. And here, with this girl, despite the strangeness of her letter, of her attitude, of her inexplicable behavior, there was no risk to fear, except not being able to offer her any of the help that she was asking me for and needs. Human beings are not evil or perverse, they are only stupid and unhappy, I said to calm myself and neutralize the discomfort that this visit was causing me. The repulsion that the letter produced in me, the moral repugnance of feeling myself “used” by the sudden passion of the young girl, that threatened to transform itself in an insistent harassment, eased a little bit. I thought that there were beings that age prematurely. Perhaps only Leda’s soul was old. I considered the audacity, the courage and the desperation of that adolescent that was swept along by a perverse caprice. Or even worse, by the “terrible love” with which chance had wounded her as if by a blow of a spear. Those mistaken loves, hopeless from the beginning, take a man, any man, as a pretext for their revelation. Leda has mistakenly chosen me, and at a bad time, and this fatal error made her choice doubly unfortunate. I had a vague premonition of what was waiting for me at the slightest mistake, by exhibiting any behavior that could tinge my comportment toward her with ambiguity. In a similar situation, even the most rigorous honesty and integrity could seem ambiguous. Or is it that all this had already been happening in my relationship with this girl, without my realizing it? In that case, only I was the guilty one in this misunderstanding; but it also proves at the same time the little importance that I gave to this supposed relationship. I didn’t feel that this relationship, at least as Leda tried to suggest in her letter, existed in reality, and even less, that I had encouraged it inadvertently. I felt beyond any remorse for the supposed crime of having transgressed or stimulated that which is forbidden. My behavior with my students, with no exceptions, is governed by ethical norms, not Puritan but human ones, of respect, 87. This appears to be an allusion the Greek myth in which Zeus transforms himself into a swan to seduce Leda. Moral is referring to Leda’s possible future role as seducer, thereby “playing” or taking the form of the swan, as Zeus did in the myth.

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consideration, freedom, and tolerance. I didn’t understand that something nonexistent would demand what a man in my situation, a situation that Leda knew well, could not concede. I began to feel a certain sympathy for that girl of faraway origin, because of her destroyed infancy in Ceaucescu’s kingdom of terror. Wasn’t I trying to justify her to hide the eruption of my vanity and make it safe from any suspicion, including my own? Or perhaps the intimacy, the familiarity, that the letter surprisingly demanded and that was outside all logic, including capricious sentimental logic, was nothing more than the S.O.S. of a being trapped by loneliness, by lack of self-confidence, by pride, by terror? Who was Leda Kautner? I observed her for a long instant. Then I went to open the door. Leda Kautner did honor to Jimena’s confidence. I mean that Jimena had again hit the mark with her infallible intuition. There was not the slightest vestige in Leda of the anguish that had made her write that letter. She didn’t even make the slightest allusion to it. She brought another, calmer kind of uneasiness that was contained with great difficulty. She looked around her, fearful, as if in wait of a disagreeable surprise. “Calm down and get comfortable. We are going to work,” I said to her with a firm and neutral voice. “I am alone in the house. But even if Jimena, my partner, were here, you would not bother us at all. She also receives her doctoral students here.” She didn’t make the slightest gesture. I only noticed that her fine nostrils were palpitating with a faster rhythm than usual. The blush did not rise to her cheeks as other times, or at least it did not tinge the paleness of her skin, or attenuate the deep bags that excavated her face without make-up. In the anxiety that dominated her she didn’t even seem to hear me. I opened my arms preparing to listen to her. “Where should we start?” In silence, she held out the books and an index-card box that I had loaned her. She also gave me the university journal in which my article on feminism and machismo had appeared, very favorable, of course to women’s cause faced with “the incurable illness” of man. Leda simply came to return them to me. With her voice hoarser than ever and with an almost inaudible stutter, she thanked me for my help and said that she had withdrawn from presenting her thesis. She didn’t bring the two thick folders made of black leather. “Where do you have them?” “I burned them last night.” “Why did you do that?” She took a long time to answer me, as if she could not get out of the state of humiliation and dejection that one observed in her voice, gestures, and vibratile body, divested completely of the aura of sensuality that at times tends to fleetingly flow from her. She was agitated and could not look me in

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the face. She bit her lips. She kept her eyes down, her hands linked over her knees covered by the long and ridiculous Scotch skirt that completely deformed the harmony of her body. “Why did you do that?” I insisted without reproach. “All of this is very . . . unheimlich” 88 . . . she murmured, twisting her hands and closing her eyes. “Disagreeable, you mean?” “Much worse than that . . . . Abominable!” I left to bring her a drink. When I returned she had left. I saw her recede among the hedges of the garden. By the movement of her head, I observed that she was running followed by the dog with a complicit little trot. I only saw the top part of her head advancing among the foliage. In the oblique light of the sun, the parted pieces of her hair shone now a furious blond and her swinging movement was rapid and tense like that of a child in a tantrum who escapes an unjust and intolerable reprimand. She opened the gate and rushed forward across the field. I followed her in the car because I realized that she was confused about the path to the station. “Get in. I will take you.” She shook her head and continued walking on the dirt road with a firm and accelerated, almost martial step. She bumped into a tree trunk and fell down. She sunk into and rubbed her face against the sand. I got out to help her get up. She ordered me in German to leave and let out a savage interjection like the moan of a wounded animal while she punched the earth with her fists. I approached her and gave her two forceful slaps on her cheeks covered with the mud of her tears. A blow of the wind undressed her knees. I lifted the hem of her skirt. I bent over her and again inflicted two strong spanks on her bottom that resonated on her hard and gleaming skin. She straightened up slowly as if she were awakening from a bad dream. She walked as if drunk and got lost in the mist that was beginning to thicken. I slowly cleaned the mud from my hands rubbing them against the grass. I saw that the palm and back were red and I felt that they were burning. She will probably travel seated in the train also on a red and burning backside, I thought. Some retired people who were playing pétanque 89 in the plaza observed the scene motionless. They shouted something to me. I didn’t hear them. I pulled out in a rage. The tires were screeching on the gravel. A procession of hooded people, very similar to those of Easter Week in Seville, were advancing along the street. The thick row of people forced me to break. I stopped the car at the curb to allow the penitents to pass. They crooned an unintelligible litany in a muffled voice. The hollow voices resorbed themselves without any resonance. I put up the windows. The confused psalmody faded. The 88. “Scary” in German. 89. A lawn bowling game that originated in France.

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penitents passed, squeezing themselves gently against the car without putting the slightest pressure on it, as if instead of human bodies they were a mass of cottony silhouettes cloaked in religious habits. A blow of the wind raised some hoods. They were not living human faces. I glimpsed angular faces as if sculpted in varnished wood with very dark colors, all of them petrified in an identical grimace. Only the deep eye sockets glowed twinkling sparkles. I closed my eyes, stupefied, without wanting to. A brief, sudden clink hit the rearview mirror. I opened my eyes. It was as if the order of time had been inverted, first the clink. Seconds after, I managed to see the trajectory of a reddish lump like that of a glob of spit that became squished against the rectangular glass. The procession of penitents had disappeared. With redoubled fury, I pursued them going in circles along the adjacent streets, without hearing the screeches of the tires or the smell of burnt rubber. The entire time I had the stain in front of me on the rearview mirror. It followed me like a reddish hole in my own vision. I had never seen processions of this nature in Nevers. The streets were almost deserted. A few women returned from the supermarket with their little wagons full of supplies. I parked the car in the garage and confirmed that the lump stuck to the window was a blood stain. I scraped it conscientiously with a little stick. The penitential red blood corpuscles resisted, possessed by a genuine stubbornness of faith. I cleaned them the best I could with my fingers smeared in saliva. I entered and put water in the bathtub. While it was filling up, I searched the books, index card box, and papers that Leda had returned to me, in case there was among them some other letter as delirious as the first one. Luckily, I didn’t find anything. I saw my article underlined and sifted with question marks, annotations in the margins in German, a language in which I am not fluent, and other marks that I didn’t manage to decipher. I submerged myself in the cold water. In a subliminal flash, I imagined again the red and burning backside of Leda to the borderline of her panties. It is even more beautiful than her face, I thought. I experienced a certain excitation that quickly disappeared. I think that I fell asleep immediately dreaming without images. When I woke up it was completely dark. I shook from cold in the water. I got out, put on my bathrobe and covered my head with the hood. I turned on the light and saw that in the tub two milky jellyfish were floating. I thought of the foam of the soap, but I had not used soap. I let the water run and scrubbed the tub with a sponge until the tile was shining. I drank half a bottle of rum and fell heavily on the bed of the west window, my small hermitage, my refuge against prohibited temptations. The music from the wedding was at its peak. The recently married very young couple is dancing to the rhythm of the blue Danube. On the platform of special guests seated in high armchairs, the parents contemplate them spellbound with family happiness. Thick watch chains made of gold oscillate

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on the stomachs of the fathers. The mothers wear enormous hats made of raffia and fan themselves with plumed fans that move like live birds. The betrothal is the greatest event of the region. The small-town crowd, fascinated and dazzled, clusters behind the rails of the great windows, which are wide-open to the heat and darkness of the night. The boy, disoriented, anguished, dances with his splendid bride as if he carried a shadow between his arms. He searches with his eyes for someone in the middle of the frenetic racket. A couple approaches the recently married pair and intertwines with them. The strange and beautiful blond girl, without stopping dancing with her companion, struggles to catch sight of the face of the recently married man with her own. Their heads finally join. Their lips unite and do not separate anymore. The two intertwined couples continue dancing in the middle of an explosion of applause, laughs and shouts. The parents have stood up, they gesticulate and shout their heads off, indignant, humiliated, red with anger. Their voices are not heard. The big mouths open and close like those of four fat fish asphyxiating and writhing in agony on the sand beach of the blue Danube. The orchestra attacks with new energy. The recently married woman is dragged in the turns of the waltz, crying bitterly. She is dancing clinging to the prematurely unfaithful husband. The nuptial crown slides over the veil and covers her eyes. The long train of tulle sweeps the ground, stepped on by hundreds of heels. The recently married woman flees. The train caught in her heels makes her lose her balance. She falls on her knees. She gets up and continues fleeing, her head between her wings, with the fear of a wounded bird. The male dancer of the intrusive couple has also disappeared. Only the blond girl and the recently married man remain dancing alone, very close, without stopping kissing. A circle of hundreds of people has formed around them that applauds and screeches bristling with dark sensuality. The lovers kiss as if to wound each other. They kiss with frenzy, with desperation, in the spins of an interminable kiss. They kiss infinitely, seeking to enter each other, to transfuse themselves, disappear together in the middle of the hubbub that is increasing with the rhythm of the music. The immense ballroom is emptying out, silent, distant. In the darkness, only the brilliance of a diamond necklace fallen on the floor palpitates. 90 Placidly sleep gathered me up again in its arms. Jimena returned three days later. Her face shone with serenity. She didn’t ask anything. The matter was not discussed anymore, not even when she found on the sofa Leda’s crumpled, violently fuchsia-colored handkerchief with which she had wiped away her tears. Perhaps it was still wet. Discreetly,

90. This appears to be Moral’s dream, which reflects his conflict between Jimena (the wife) and Leda (the blond girl who dances with the recently married man).

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Jimena ran the vacuum that swallowed up pieces of crumpled papers and also the handkerchief. That night, in a state of special euphoria, we repeated the entire ritual of Omphale. Entranced, carried away by nameless passion, we traversed once more the road of the caravans that advance toward the small lunar crater. I lapped up the last drop of the round dimple full to the brim. There was no place, no crack or fold of Morena’s body along which I did not slither and let my tongue jump like the viviparous fish from the Song of Songs, the dolphin from Delphi, in procurement of that nectar that drives to distraction kings and laborers alike. Her infinitesimal crystals had the flavor of secret salts from marine caves. I saw Jimena’s white moon body spring forth from them. I caressed it, enraptured. I contemplated her as she was traversed by small tremors in the final intoxication of sleep until she became immobile in a long sigh from the abdomen that scratched her nostrils with a sort of very soft snore. Something in me, however, annulled or clouded my happiness. I felt as if I myself could generate the failure of a perfect moment that had transpired as if outside of time. It wasn’t its fugaciousness. One can always enjoy the transitory in a lightning flash. And we, Jimena and I, had enjoyed it as never before in a transport outside of time. There was another cause for my sinking uneasiness. An anguishing impulse to deny something that was happening right there but on the plane of an unknown dimension. A feeling independent of any rebellion of my flesh or spirit smothered me, suspended or paralyzed any impulse of my will or strength. I tried in vain to overcome this mysterious phenomenon of insensitivity that left me in a state of abeyance. On the other hand, incredulity sharpened the eager expectation to perceive that as if it were separated by an abyss from what could be considered natural, from what was possible to occur in the world, something like an unhealthy slippage toward the inexplicable, the never heard or seen. I thought I heard a restrained breathing that was not Jimena’s soft and deliberate breathing during sleep. I felt more and more clearly that someone had been inside for a while. I allowed myself to roll slowly toward the edge of the bed to the rug that muffled my fall. I heard a muffled and rhythmic noise that immediately disappeared. I navigated toward the rustling on tiptoes. It could be that of a mouse looking for food. I stood up with a jump and I went to close and lock the door. I leaned against it with my back. I suddenly thought of the door that led to the kitchen. It was half-closed. Through there, the aroma of bread baked that afternoon entered, floated in the room. I ran to bolt it with the iron bar.

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Night was inside. I found myself isolated, besieged, hounded, defenseless, because the contrast between light and dark had been eliminated. 91 Also because of the presentiments and the feeling of guilt that Jimena’s proximity made sharper and more painful. But, above all, I felt disarmed by an inexpressible desire that beat within me without my being able to repress it or forget it. Horror, not yet revealed as horror, had already taken possession of me and had me paralyzed. Horror, yes, but the horror of fascination was gradually invading me as in nightmares. Through the glass, like the distortion of a memory, I saw the moon with the shape of a fat and naked woman seated on the ledge of a roof. Accustomed to the semi-darkness, very soon I distinguished the forms of the hefty trees in the garden. The rebellion of incredulity had disappeared almost as quickly as the initial astonishment of discovery. The first thing I perceived, toward the corner of the room, was the scent of a woman. The scent of a young woman, strange, distinct, not Jimena’s unmistakable aroma. But the strangest thing was that I also knew that scent. The perfume of a woman’s body is the most genuine clue to her identity, the unmistakable sign of her age, her character, her most intimate pleasures, her personality, her nationality, her race, her moods. With eyes closed, by only sniffing her, you can describe the unknown woman before you. Although I was still denying it to myself with a remaining passive unwillingness, I was able to admit that before seeing the one who was there, I had already recognized her by this aroma that flowed from her. I approached a little more. By the tenuous light of a lunar reflection, I saw a naked silhouette stretched out and writhing with her face glued to the rug. There, two steps away, before me was the image of a young girl with formidable charm whom I believed to be far away from here, enveloped in her own desperation, locked up in her miserable hotel room. I saw the reddish sparkles of her hair cover her breasts. The beauty of her naked body shone in the semi-darkness. She turned on her side and looked at me with infinite anguish. Very soon it was too late to stop what began to happen. I knew that feminine power was going to carry out its plans till the end without the slightest hesitation. There was no human force capable of impeding it. At least that force did not exist in me or had been blocked in a kind of total impotence. I refused to see, but what was happening was imposed on me with an irresistible force the more I closed my eyes. At first, I didn’t know what to do. It was too alarming a discovery that prevented any reaction on my part. A muffled and growing alienation of my senses overwhelmed me. Merely facing the possibility of what was happening became terrifying. Jimena slept lightly. She knew how to sleep while 91. Moral refers to the fact that he just shut the door, thus eliminating the entrance of the moonlight and causing the house to become totally dark.

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awake. She could wake up at any moment . . . and then what would I do? . . . what would become of me? Of her? . . . . The paroxysm of doubt, nevertheless, did not keep that which was happening, half divined, half sensed, from sickening my imagination to nausea, from colliding with my feelings of honor and fidelity toward Jimena, toward myself, and filling me with bitter self-condemnation. In a final outbreak of disbelief, I thought with effort that when things outside of the ordinary seemed to happen, in certain mind-sets, everything in reality tended to happen naturally outside of our abnormal perception. But there and in that moment it was the other way around: things were even much stranger than what one could imagine with an unsettled mind and a completely confused spirit. I still wanted to convince myself that I was only the prisoner of a nightmare. Enough! . . . I thought with anger. Everything was too ambiguous, phantasmal. Perhaps the phantasmagoria was in me. Perhaps this feminine figure, naked, shaking in spasms because of the yearnings of desire, was nothing more than the projection of a fantasy embodied by the deceptive power of a fever. I touched my forehead. It was burning. But my entire being was burning in a foolish and unhealthy sexual arousal. This doesn’t happen this way in reality, I said to myself. But the shreds of common sense that I was trying to hold on to as a last resort, were not enough to destroy this fantastically unreal, unfortunately real scene. The murmur of doubt still told me that that was another sort of reality, that the world of the possible was full of indecipherable mysteries and that the deceptive power of dreams or fever can plot the most bizarre scenes. In the middle of the vertigo of desperation I mentally reviewed the real possibilities of her presence. The unpredictable and strange girl could have remained in a seedy hotel in Nevers, since that last afternoon together, spied on my movements, and entered the house tonight with the complicity of the Dalmatian (they had become friends), without knowing that Jimena had returned. She could have even returned that same afternoon of her unsuccessful visit; prowled around the house, entered while I was sleeping in the bathtub, and remained hidden in the barn where Jimena is in the habit of hanging strings of dates to dry them. During my sleep in the water, I thought, in fact, that I had the sensation that someone was bending over to look at me. I probably supposed that Jimena had returned and that she entered the bathroom to make sure that I was there. She probably saw me asleep and left without waking me. Then I completely forgot that deceptive vision during the light sleep in the almost frozen water. The girl from the Carpathian Mountains was there. The sentence from her letter “. . . or is it that to spy on the pleasure of others one must enter directly through the chimney . . . ?” now revealed its entire force of intention. She didn’t have the need to spy through the window like the lascivious monk.

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The back door of the house is never locked. While I was bringing her a drink, before furtively leaving, she could have explored this possibility. Later, the slaps and spankings in public probably had exasperated her humiliation and her desire to avenge this punishment, which, on my part, had no other intention than bringing her back to reality, removing her from that violent spell that was possessing her. Was she now also returning to make me pay for murdering her in her dream by stabbing her in the throat, as she accused me in the letter? Never could she have chosen a better moment to fulfill her revenge. I should never have forgotten the strange words of her letter: “Don’t you think that woman is an animal on the verge of becoming a human being and that only love can transform her . . . ?” Like a young animal, like a non-innocent virgin, from the bottom of her natural perversity or from some trauma that had scarred her forever, the reckless girl had instinctively calculated her revenge with the perfection proper to weak animals. My indignation was rising. My repugnance, my rebellion against her, overwhelmingly grew, but they could not break my helplessness. How could she have entered? Fractions of a second. Possibilities that collide and fragment into an infinity of mental splinters. Incoherent ideas. Flashes of probable alternatives like bursts of livid light confuse me even more. They didn’t bring me to any acceptable or revealing clarification. Entering was relatively easy. The difficult, the impossible thing, was everything that happened after. The two doors of the room were half-closed. The sinister girl got in without obstacles, while Jimena and I were traveling the omphallic route in the deepest dream of sleepers who do not sleep: the daydream in flames of amorous transport. The nighttime visitor could contemplate us at her leisure for hours in the darkness of the bedroom. The nature of that deception, I continued stubbornly insisting in order to convince myself, had something of a diabolic spell that left me breathless. A small death wish began to scratch my throat. An incoercible tremor took possession of my limbs and a cold sweat bathed my entire body. I began to oscillate in the middle of a dizziness that rose from my feet as if the earth had begun to suddenly spin in the opposite direction or as if it had split in the tremor of a silent cataclysm. I bent down and touched her head. It was her. Her entire body down to her feet trembled under my hand as if she had received an electric shock. I jumped up and grasped her by the wrists. She was going to say something but I bit her lips with bestial ferocity. The taste of blood invaded my mouth. I dragged her by the hair to the other end of the room until she was hidden behind a screen. I could no longer stand up or separate myself from that body, flexible like that of a ballerina. She had grabbed onto my neck with those long and fine yet enormously strong arms. She glued my face to hers and began to kiss me.

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She kissed me with growing fury. She kissed me infinitely. She kissed me as if to cause wounds on my lips, as if to cut my tongue, cut off my breathing. She took away the rest of my strength with those kisses. She suppressed my will. She sealed my silence. Her devouring sensuality excavated a hole in me, sucking out everything from within and leaving me empty. I felt violated by a phantom from which I could not or didn’t want to detach myself, who kept hold of me with a superhuman force. I felt completely immobile, a prisoner of her arms, of her body that undulated over mine trying to penetrate me. She moved her lips to my ears. She lightly bit the lobe of an ear. A hoarse muttering began with her breath burning me to the bottom of my eardrum. Her breath smelled of dry dates. She scratched my entire body with her long nails as if she had wished to skin me, undress my skin, open a channel to enter inside me. It seemed that she conceded a moment of truce. She tricked me again with an attitude of humble begging, of momentary resignation, which simulated returning to me the right of virile initiation, which was as dead in me as desire. “Ah . . . if a man wants, if you want. . . . A woman can be one . . . and another . . . ,” she muttered from deep inside herself. “You have said that man can see a woman as she is and as he desires her. . . . And that each one is unique and true . . . in the moment in which a man loves her. You have said . . . to abolish sexual egoism and take the body of the other as the center of your own desire . . . You know how I am and I know that you desire me . . . ” “Be quiet, wicked girl!” “Love me now . . . because I am the only one for an instant . . . for this moment that will not repeat itself. . . . If you only think about she who is no longer, you love a fantasy. . . . Think about she who I am now . . . here . . . by your side. Put your finger on my wound so that it bleeds! And if you like, you can drink my last drop of blood that you made flow for you! . . . ” She squeezed my head and mouth on the wound on her neck. But I resisted swallowing that blood that tasted like the acid of a rusty knife. She opened her body for me to possess it by my own choice and desire. She offered herself as if in a sacrificial oblation. In a moment of inattention, I stood up with a jump with the rest of my strength. My weight was greater now because she had climbed up my back straddling me, intertwining her legs with mine and snaring them like pincers. She always kept her arms around my neck. I felt her hard nipples scrape my vertebrae and her burning discharges reached down to the very bone marrow, while I was losing my breath. With the tip of her feet she rubbed and tried to excite my genitals that withdrew and reduced in size, completely empty of

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the last vestige of desire, flaccid with fear, with horror. The aroma of bread that burns at the oven door 92 made the horror more monstrous. In a dance pirouette, she turned on the axis of my hips and faced me. I lost my footing and fell down. She climbed on me and covered me with her body and adjusted her genitals on mine. She began to undulate and swing back and forth with the talent and plasticity of a whore who was very experienced in the magic and manipulations of copulation. She bent down over my genitals and insisted on animating them, helping herself with her tongue, lips, and teeth. I tugged at her long and straight hair that let off small phosphorescent sparks. During the pulling I moved her face toward mine, I babbled another curse into the opening of her mouth and I bit her again on the lips that were on the verge of a shout. A lock of her hair remained in my hands. The horror of fascination had been transformed into the horror of abomination. I suddenly experienced a blind idea. I felt a passionate hate explode inside me, a nameless rancor, a homicidal furor. I brought my two hands to the girl’s neck. I was going to strangle her. Only with her death was I going to be able to remove her body that had adhered to mine as if with suction cups. I couldn’t say that I penetrated her. She made me enter her body with the force of suction that sprouted from hers, each time more powerful. Only with her death was I going to be able to free myself from this diabolical performance of the fish-uterus that Jimena and I had searched for in the immensity of the Sahara and that now was here devouring me through the navel-vagina, panting in an interminable orgasm that was feeding itself on my abstention and my hate. I squeezed my tense fingers around her neck with savage violence. She lost her breath, her eyes began to turn almost outside their sockets. Her body was weakening and the hoarse moans stopped. I looked at my hands. In the turbid light of the moon I saw that they were stained with blood. I lifted her in my arms to take her out of the room and throw her outside, into the night, from which she had come. She stretched her arms around my neck in an agonic sigh. But at that moment I had the sensation that her weight was quickly diminishing and her sticky and cold body was weakening as if unhinged at all its joints. She fell from my arms like something inert and weightless. I bent down to look for her. She had disappeared. I ran to the door, but it was locked. She could not have fled through there.

92. The original Spanish reads “El aroma del pan que se nos quema en el horno.” This can be taken literally or as an idiom that has been translated many ways, including “There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,” “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” or “The worst things can happen close to home.” It is unclear exactly what Roa Bastos meant in this specific passage, but it seems to refer to a sense of impending doom within the context. It may also be an allusion to a poem by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who uses this same expression in his poem “Los heraldos negros” (the black heralds).

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All that remained on my arms, my chest, on my entire body was the matted sweat with the blood from this nocturnal struggle. The unmistakable odor of her skin, her hair, the dampness of her virginal genitals, impregnated my body. The unconsciousness of that moment already seemed like only a memory. I remained immobile, converted into a single tremor from head to toe, exhausted, on the verge of annihilation. I began to fear myself. I feared the repetition of another attack. I feared it more than before. Or did I desire it? She could be there stalking me with demonic tenacity. And I could no longer fight against her. All my strength was extinguished, as if I myself were wiped out in a dark haze. The horror had grown because now I only had emptiness around me. Nothing that would resist my blind eagerness for destruction. I suddenly felt defenseless, abandoned. I could die there at this very moment, and nobody would find the remains of my body in the same way that her body had disappeared. A sudden fear attacked me. And what if she were collapsed, dead in the garden? Between the nausea of anger that filled my mouth with foam and fear of that death whose consequences I had not foreseen, an idea stabbed me in the chest like a knife. I should find at all costs the body of the strangled fugitive and make it disappear. . . . I suddenly remembered an ancient well blocked off in the back of the garden. . . . Jimena’s gazebo! . . . . For tonight I would throw the girl’s body in the well. After, I would seek the way to make it definitively disappear. At that moment, I heard the Dalmatian howl. I opened the door and launched myself outside in search of the infernal girl, who in my estimation must already be dead. The dog continued to howl among the cypress trees. The moon flew over those howls in which there was something of a human shriek, as if gathering them up among the clouds that were beginning to hide the moon. I couldn’t make out any human shadow, nothing that looked like the silhouette of the fugitive. The dog came jumping toward me. He put his paws on my chest. Under the dying lunar light, I saw that his paws were also red and damp. From his tongue dripped long strings of drool stained with blood as if he had licked someone’s wounds. I suggested to him with gestures that he indicate to me where the disappeared girl had escaped. The Dalmatian continued barking at the moon with short and strangled howls. I ran like a demented person along all the garden trails, followed by the dog who no longer was barking. It didn’t occur to me to inspect the barn. With the nighttime cold, the sweat froze on my naked body. I collapsed on the damp grass. I began to rub myself against it to remove the viscous dirtiness that was hardening up on my skin, crystallized under the cold sweat, on my limbs, my hair. I detached with a yank a lock of blond hair that had gotten stuck to my navel with a lump of sperm and blood. I threw it among some shrubs as if it were a poisonous reptile. I fell down exhausted. When I

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recovered consciousness, dawn was breaking. The Dalmatian held vigil at my side. I tried to stand up and remained seated on the grass In the creeping fog of dawn, I suddenly saw a feminine silhouette sheathed in a long, dark tunic and wearing on her head the pointed and conical hat of the witches in Gothic tales. The silhouette was cautiously advancing from the back door with a broom under her arm. I leaped toward her, I carried her in my arms, and ran toward the well. The phantasmal figure had almost no weight. I heard a frightened and faltering voice: “Mr. Félix, where are you taking me . . . ?” Stupefaction paralyzed me for an instant. I opened my arms and allowed the body of the poor woman to fall on the sharp edges of the path. I didn’t have the strength or the courage to apologize to Madame Alves, not even to help her stand up. When I raised her in my arms, blinded with fury, I didn’t know that it was her. I thought it was the other one. I feared a new stratagem of the fugitive. I turned around. I recognized Madame Alves. She managed to get up on her knees. She looked at me terrified as if she were hallucinating. She gathered up her broom and ran away from me. Finally, I was able to free myself from paralysis. My tongue was hard, swollen, incapable of muttering a shout or a word. With my body outside myself, tottering like a drunk, I headed for my house. I entered and I fell down on my knees. I heard Jimena’s voice very far away, as if among the echoes from a basement. Slowly, I emerged from the unconsciousness into which I seemed to be crammed as if in a rubber case. I urgently needed to grab onto something. I stretched my arms out. Jimena came to my rescue and dragged me to the arch of the window, whispering words of affection and asking me questions that were totally unintelligible for me. “What has happened, Felix? Did you hurt yourself?” “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . .” Jimena turned on the light. She was startled. She made me lay down on the bed. “You are stained with blood! What happened, for God’s sake?” “I don’t know. . . . I killed someone. . . . I think that I have killed someone. . . . What was it? . . . What was it? I don’t know. . . . I don’t know. . . . It was nothing . . . nothing . . .” “Nothing . . . ,” I sobbed. “It was nothing . . . nothing.” We looked at each other like two strangers, so divided in the fugaciousness of that look, for the first time in a long time, that neither one of the two were able to understand the feelings of the other, and even less to know and understand the inexplicable thing that had happened. During more than ten days, I burned up in a very high fever that didn’t want to let up. Jimena had Doctor Maurel summoned. He assessed me with

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parsimonious mistrust, and diagnosed pneumonia with bronco-pulmonary complications. “Come on, this man has no cure! He is always on death’s door. Eppur, si muove! 93 . . . ,” he tried to speak ironically. His robust bad health continues giving him special satisfaction, he emphasized. He prescribed some remedies and injections that Jimena herself applied. I was rapidly improving. When I recovered my voice, Jimena had Doctor Maurel called again for a new consultation. “Of course,” Maurel added. “These naturally sick people are those who last the longest. . . until they put a blade to their necks.” He asked Jimena to leave for a minute. He wanted to have a few words with me. Maurel became personal, “man to man,” and spoke to me with the tactfulness and correctness of the purest Frenchman from “vielle France.” 94 He asked me if I was traveling a lot. I said that I didn’t move from the house. Discreetly, he tried to find out my age. “I don’t know,” I said. Maurel became irritated. “You don’t know your age?” “Not exactly,” I babbled. “You are not young anymore,” he exclaimed as if he were reproaching me. “I am not old . . .” I quickly defended myself. “Do you think often of thighs and things like that?” he cryptically inquired. I didn’t understand; I didn’t know where the doctor wanted to go. “Are you referring perhaps to a woman’s thighs?” “Of course!” he hissed. “I am not going to ask you if you think about the thighs of a chicken or turkey or other species of edible animals. I ask you if you think excessively of thighs, asses, women’s genitals, and things of that nature. Of course, you don’t get off,” he insinuated imitating a street accent. “Get off,” I repeated totally disoriented by the haze of the fever. “The penis, come on. The genital organ. Do you know what the penis is, what the testicles are?” he said touching his inner thigh with the palm of his hand as if he were going to hold his own to show me with a concrete example what that thing unknown to me was. “Ah that . . .” I said blinking a lot. “Of course, man!” “That”! “Does yours still swell? Do you still have erections? Do you use it a lot?” Maurel’s classic French had suddenly descended to the argot of the provinces. They were not the terms that I would have employed. I would not even have dared to mention them before the solemn gravity of the doctor. The 93. Italian for “And yet it moves!” This is a famous phrase attributed to the seventeenthcentury philosopher and scientist Galileo when he was forced to retract his claim that the Earth revolved around the Sun. 94. “Old” in French.

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burning from the fever fluttered over me and mixed with the iciness of my extremities. I felt a bitter taste in my mouth. Maurel’s interrogation was producing a muffled resentment of anger, of shame. “Get off.” . . . It was less and more than an insult. His authority as a doctor, although he acted on behalf of the cause of my health, did not authorize this humiliating and obscene interrogation, unbecoming of Maurel. “You have committed excesses,” he said, recovering the diction of Pascal, of Montaigne, in an especially well-constructed sentence. You should save your vital energies if you do not want to get old soon or run more immediate risks. Youth is an act of courage, don’t you think?” “Of courage. . . . Oh yes, doctor! Of course. . . . But I don’t feel totally cowardly . . . ” “An act of courage and abstinence.” “Neither do I feel particularly abstemious, I would say . . .” “Well, well. Let us stop saying idiotic things. Put that penis in a sharkskin case,” he ordered, returning to the coarseness of street dialect. “Did you read Peau de chagrin 95 by Balzac?” “Oh yes, doctor. Of course . . . ” “There are now condoms made of sharkskin with metallic spikes that prevent the solitary vice of sexual molestation, masturbation, and carnal commerce.” “Are you talking to me about kinds of genital cilice?” I asked with total ingenuousness. “That . . . that,” said Maurel. “Remember that you are living a miracle and that there is no reason to force things. Do penitence. Put the tender herb out to dry in the sun in the morning and drink it in infusions at night. Caution, my friend. Discretion and prudence are the best bet. And long term, the one that bestows the best dividends.” He got distracted for a moment. He pushed aside the blankets. He looked me over from top to bottom as if scrutinizing me node by node and bone by bone. He bent over me almost until he touched my forehead with his chin. He was going to add something; probably some final piece of advice on the good use and saving of carnal energies. He desisted, moving his head as if before a useless effort. “Sensational,” he exclaimed and stood up losing his balance. The oak cane slipped from his hand and he fell on the lamp that blew out with the bang of an explosion. I jumped in bed and covered my face with the sheet. Jimena came immediately and calmed me down. She lit the candle from the candelabra and looked at Maurel. The latter outlined a discrete gesture in 95. This refers to a novel by the nineteenth-century French writer Honoré de Balzac whose English translation is The Magic Skin. In the novel, the protagonist finds a magic piece of skin that grants his wishes, but shrinks each time it does so.

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Jimena’s direction indicating that he was leaving. In the middle of the semidarkness, he left with his big body erect, his silvery little Pasteur-like beard shining in the flickering light of the candle. Jimena went ahead of him with the candelabra in order to open the door for him. I didn’t see them anymore. I only heard the murmur of their conversation on the veranda. My greatest fear was that, unconscious because of the fever, that very fever could loosen my tongue and betray me before Jimena with respect to that nocturnal coven, if my own silence were not already in itself a revealing confession. If Maurel had noted its tracks on my body, Jimena could not help but find them in the house. There probably had remained too many clues. Perhaps she had already discovered them and abstained from speaking about it until she had a better opportunity. Time passed and the feared threat did not occur. Jimena’s face and behavior continued to be indulgent. They didn’t show the least distress. They shone for me as usual in the transparence of her affection, in the comforting strength of her company, in the affability of her manner. It was almost evident that Jimena had interpreted the strange event in the night, which happened while she was asleep, as the reminiscence of my suffering in prison, converted into a terrible nightmare of which I didn’t have consciousness or memory. I believe that that was, at least, the explanation that she gave to the terrified Madame Alves, asking her to excuse me for my inexplicable action. With habitual discretion, Jimena declined to mention to me the reasons that Madame Alves gave for quitting her job. They must have been very reasonable and binding for Jimena not to have been able to retain her despite the affection that Madame Alves felt for her and for Jimena to prefer not mentioning them to me. I could see myself converted by Madame Alves’s terror into a naked satyr attacking her in the semi-darkness of dawn. A bearded satyr with horns made from sulfuric acid and a devil’s tail trying to rape the daughter of Rutilio Alves, the poet who died in exile, noble friend of my admired Fernando Pessoa. Oh, forgive me, Madame Alves! . . . So many strange worlds spin and collide between Heaven and earth beyond what are dreamt of in our philosophies. 96 When I felt a little better, I telephoned Clovis, asking him forgiveness for not showing up to our appointment and announcing to him that in a few more days I would go to visit him. I resumed my gardening tasks, not for mere domestic and professional pleasure, but rather for the guilty desire to make any suspicious tracks disappear that might have still have remained on the battlefield. The first thing I did was check the well near the gazebo. The heavy circular cover had been removed and put on again. The cement flange 96. The character is paraphrasing a famous quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

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that had kept it connected to the parapet was cracked and the fragments were found around it. Evidently, Jimena had the same idea as I did and had gotten ahead of me in investigating the closed off depths of the old well. The odor of decay escaped through the cracks; but the stench of the vegetables decaying in the dampness of a century were clearly different from that of a young cadaver. The traces continued appearing and disappearing in startling sequences. That same day (Jimena was at the University), the Dalmatian approached me with a lock of blond hair between his teeth, that one that I had tossed that night among the bushes. I grabbed the lock that with the heat of the sun and dampness had curled into a golden ringlet brilliant with dew. I twirled it between my fingers with a sensation of repugnance, of fear, not anymore of terror, but with that indefinable feeling of melancholy and nostalgia that at times the most terrible nightmares leave us with. I heard the voice of Fulva 97 who murmured in my ears: “This moment is not going to repeat itself . . . I keep my pain in a safe place . . . Don’t allow your heart to turn off . . .” The ringlet fell to the floor. It uncoiled and coiled again as if it had its own life. I picked it up. I didn’t know where to hide it. It wasn’t a question of burning it; the odor of the burnt hair would last for days, it sticks to the air forever. I took it to the bathroom and let it fall into the toilet. I flushed and saw it disappear in the whirl of the running water. A few days later Jimena came to talk to me, laughing. “It seems that there are mice in the barn. Almost all of my dried dates have disappeared and those that are left seem gnawed at.” “We have to put rat poison down.” “The prints seem like human teeth.” Jimena’s words and tone did not reveal the slightest insinuation of a suspicion of hidden intention, or of testing me to see my reaction, beyond the question of the harmful effects of the mice. “The homeless are beginning to appear everywhere. We will have to put a lock on the back door,” I said while I was preparing my suitcase for the trip. “And give the key to the back door to Madame Alves,” I added, forgetting about her flight. “There is no longer any necessity to give it to her,” she replied. “Madame Alves will not come anymore. What happened with her that night, or rather, the dawn of that night? She told me that you had lifted her in the air and had carried her toward the well.” I thought of the incredible power of the monosyllable to relate stories incapable of being narrated.

97. The reader should recall that earlier on in the novel, the other students had given this nickname to Leda Kautner.

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“What Madame Alves told me, very frightened, regarding the well,” Jimena continued, “made your exclamations, in which you obsessively mentioned the well, in the middle of the fever, even more confusing. . . . The well . . . the well! . . . And that ominous phrase: I have killed someone! . . . You cried out exaggeratedly, as if you were still under the effects of a nightmare.” “Oh!” . . . is all I said, without wanting to remember the incident. I arrived in Paris early. While waiting for my appointment with Clovis, I entertained myself walking along some of the places that I know. Spring in Paris is usually incomparable, when the green leaves seem to be reborn and open in a mysterious inner luminosity. I walked along Picpus Street, up to the Rothschild. I went up to the top floor and leaned out the window to contemplate the tomb of the Marquis of La Fayette one more time. I couldn’t see it. They had put a summery-colored awning over it, perhaps because of some unfinished repair, or perhaps to protect it from the rays of the sun. “Do you have a sick acquaintance here?” asked the guard. “I am the sick one,” I stuttered. “Are you here to visit yourself?” he replied with the sour face of someone who believed a bad joke. “It is not visiting time.” The guard ordered me to leave the floor. Only at that moment did I realize that this trip to Paris unconsciously held for me an underlying meaning of ritualistic pilgrimage, indeed, of purification. I did not dismiss the muffled anxiety that an inopportune coincidence might cause me to come across Leda. As if seeking to anesthetize myself against exhaustion, I wandered until La Paix Street and I walked toward the Tuileries. It is one of the few places in Paris that I like. I contemplated the reflections of the sun on the foliage and walked with small steps, feeling the rustle of the sand on the sole of my shoes, the song of the birds, the muffled buzz of the motors. The sun made golden reflections on the excavated eyes of the stone busts. I wandered without direction and without a precise reason. Nonetheless, an anxiety that I could not suppress pushed me toward a particular place. Upon going up Soufflot Street, coming from The Pantheon, I found myself climbing the steps of the Hotel Senlis where Leda Kautner used to lodge during her time periods of study in Paris. I asked to speak with the owner, whom I knew. She dealt with me amiably. Up to the last minute, I hoped that she would tell me that Leda Kautner had not lodged there and that she didn’t even know her.

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“I am here to find out,” I said to her, “about a graduate student of mine, Mademoiselle Kautner, 98 absent from her classes for some time now. I wanted to know if perhaps she is ill. “It is probably about fifteen days since she returned to her country,” the owner responded to me. “Are you sure?” “Completely. Here in the hotel, we took care of handling her plane ticket to Munich. She left on Lufthansa’s midnight flight. There were other flights during the day, but she insisted on the night flight. She seemed ill and surely wanted to sleep while traveling. “Might you specify for me the day she left?” The owner reviewed the guestbook. She ran her index finger over the column of names and stopped over Leda’s. “March 6th.” “She didn’t leave any message?” “None, sir. She only told me, upon saying goodbye, that she was going. She paid her bill and left me some money to pay off her debt with the University.” I thanked the owner for her assistance. I reserved a room in case the meeting with Clovis was prolonged. I asked for the one that the traveler had left vacant, if it was still available. “Yes, it is,” responded the owner with a grimace of pity. “But it is very small for you! We can give you another better one, more comfortable, overlooking the garden.” “No, thank you,” I said. It is only for one night. I will make do with that one.” While I walked toward the Luxemburg Gardens, I mentally coordinated the dates. Suddenly a hiatus of time arose. If the information from the owner of the hotel was true, Leda had left seven days before her bewitched visit to Nevers, the 13th of March. I don’t usually remember dates, but I was never going to forget that one. Something knocked the bottom out from under my feet, sinking me in a new horrible doubt. But at the same time, it strengthened my idea that what had happened that terrible night was nothing more than a phantasmagoria created by the hallucinatory power of a nightmare. I should now doubt even doubt itself. These calendar dates, I thought, marked the natural course of time, and what happened in Nevers had happened in the middle of sorcery that was beyond what is natural. There was no other plausible explanation. I once again weighed the real possibilities of Leda’s presence in Nevers, as I had already done that night. I found it feasible that the reckless girl postponed the date of the airplane ticket and moved from the hotel. The key to the enigma 98. “Miss” in French.

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now resided in this unexpected variation. Nonetheless, one means of partial although not absolute verification was left for me, to go to the offices of Lufthansa and verify for myself if Leda had left on the date indicated by the hotel owner. I did it immediately. I took a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the central offices of the airline company, on the Champs Elysées. They waited on me pleasantly with the sharp courtesy of German functionaries abroad. In effect, Leda had traveled on the nocturnal flight on March 6th. The doubt was only partially lifted. I could not discard the extreme possibility that Leda had returned from Munich, allowing herself the necessary time to fulfill her obsessive objectives. I passed my fingers over my lips still sore from the two fevers 99 and there I felt the natural and the supernatural touch. In any case, I had to accept the hypothesis of the nightmarish fantasy. After all, Leda was laying low again. Her definitive absence erased the footprints of an episode that should never have happened. I walked toward the Left Bank. I breathed the balsamic aroma of the plants and flowers in deeply. I felt weightless. I experienced a certain alleviation of my mental anxiety and distress, as well as the tension caused by angina in my chest. I continued keeping my heart in a safe place. And all my love was for Jimena. Even deeper than before, after the test I had suffered. Now I could say: “Yes, I dreamed.” And, while saying it, I concentrated my entire will on a point of reality. That point was Jimena’s image. And the most intimate image of Morena in the plentitude of her love and beauty arose at the center of my healthy and indestructible dream. I called her softly, as if she could hear me telepathically and I communicated my happiness to her. Oh Morena . . . Morena . . . we are free! . . . I arrived at the doors of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Suddenly, someone took me by the arm and shook it energetically. It couldn’t be anyone other than Clovis de Larzac with his usual gesture of appearing by surprise and disconnecting one’s arm. Former colleague in two or three universities, companion in revelry and the “university licentiousness” that occurred after ‘68, 100 but above all, a friend, the most charming of friends, somewhat eccentric and a little bit of a dandy or snob, for those who do not know him well. In reality, he is the man of most internal rigor that I have known underneath that unpredictable and crazy humor that he uses sometimes pour épater le bourgeois; 101 or perhaps as a mask that allows him to be without being in any place. 99. “Two fevers” appears to be a reference to the “fever” of passion experienced in the episode with Leda Kautner (the supernatural) superimposed on the “real” (natural) fever that Moral experienced during and after this episode. 100. The author refers to events that took place in May 1968 in France. There were student protests against capitalism and American imperialism, as well as general strikes by workers. 101. To impress the bourgeoisie.

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Clovis is now the civil servant of the Quay d’Orsay 102 in the Department for Latin America. I owe no longer being without a country to Clovis. He personally took charge of the process for my nationalization. He doesn’t even remember this favor. With the aura of incredible magnetism that radiates from his persona, he fixes his eyes on me, eyes of an indefinable color that seem to emit reflections striped with agate. “How goes it, wild one!” he greeted me by hitting me on the back. “Damn it!” I said to myself, the same Clovis as always . . . Only a light patina of autumnal snow had fallen over his sideburns and forelocks which made his fine and suntanned face even more attractive. “My dear Felix! Who are you fleeing from?” “Who is it going to be? From myself. I don’t have any other declared or known enemy.” “You are not seen any more around Paris. No one hears anything about you in any dead or living language of the world. Does Jimena continue by your side?” “If appearances do not deceive, I believe so.” “Wow, by God! Poor girl . . . Until when is she going to put up with you! What a masochistic vocation for fidelity. Don’t you come to Paris anymore?” “You know that I don’t appear any more except by necessity due to service. I came here now because of your call.” “You have done well to come. There is a fabulous piece of news for you coming from your country of origin. De ton petit pays de merde 103 . . . But look, today I cannot receive you. I have an unexpected meeting with the minister. Come to see me tomorrow, in my office, at this time. I will show you something that you would never have been able to imagine. It is something terrific, sensational! Kisses to Jimena. I will wait for you.” He hugged me and went, like the stem of a ship, into the middle of a wave of female students who were walking along singing. They didn’t stop bothering him, asking for autographs and throwing kisses with their fingertips; a more audacious one gave them to him right on the cheek. In an ankle twist of a dancer, he dodged the young group of girls who rewarded him with applause and laughter without any one of them being able to identify the strange and handsome personage whom they surely confused with some movie or television actor. Clovis looks a little like Laurence Olivier when he was young and good-looking. Half of the blood that runs through his veins is English and has perhaps contributed to this similarity. To occupy my time in some way, I began to traverse the “illustrious” banks of the Seine. I dallied visiting the kiosks of the bouquinistes 104 on the 102. This is a common way to refer to the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs that is located on that street. 103. French for “from your small, shitty country.” 104. French for second-hand booksellers.

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hunt for that book sought but always unexpectedly found, that at times tends to emerge from the conglomeration of old books pasted with dust, dampness, oblivion. It is as if writing had been invented to forget memory and later to forget itself under the guise of the perpetuity of books that individuals write and that people do not read. Some were familiar and were my clients years ago. They recognized me. They offered me some “novelties,” always the oldest and most inconceivable. I raised my hand and passed by greeting them with courteous nods of my head. I have been searching for Leibniz’s Monadology in one of its first editions. I felt the desire to reread in its original version, that principle of “preestablished harmony,” which is one of the founding principles of the communication of substances. I have spoken to Jimena once about this principle that can be applied to the example of two beings perfectly harmonized in faithful and life-long love, like a jewel mounted on a ring. Leibniz, that German Leonardo 105 of the intellect, is for me an inexhaustible mine of ideas and notions about human beings, the world, animals, and the universe. The mathematical dust that his steps raised in the libraries of the world, like that of an entire caravan of wise men, still floats over his brilliant footprints. I didn’t find the treatise about those mysterious monads of indivisible but distinct beings that compose the universe in a magical harmonia praestabilita, 106 according to the discoverer of infinitesimal calculus. Instead, emerging from a rosy marine shell, the cover of a very old volume stood out, with the stylized sketch of a navel in the abdomen of a woman under the title printed in Gothic letters. They were the “monads” of Bonaventure Des Périers, described in his book Le blazon du beau tétin (The Blazon of the Beautiful Navel), 107 composed a long time before the translations and exegesis of Brother Luis de Leon’s Song, a sacred song of the mystical nuptials between Christ’s Church and the human species redeemed by him; prior to the Spiritual Canticles of Saint John of the Cross; prior to the inflamed theorems of love by Doctor Avila; 108 prior to the other mystical lovers of divine love that took up the Lunar Vase of the Song.

105. Reference to Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian painter and mathematician who lived during the second half of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries. 106. Latin for “pre-established harmony,” referring to the aforementioned concept by Leibniz. 107. French poem by Clement Marot written in 1535.The topic of the navel relates to Moral’s obsession with the search for the Omphale, which the reader observed in an earlier part of the novel. 108. Doctor Avila refers to Saint Theresa of Avila, one of the Spanish mystic poets. Roa Bastos references her here along with Fray Luis de León and San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross), who were the three major mystical peninsular poets of the sixteenth century.

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Margarita de Navarra, the author of the tales of the Heptamerón, 109 was a supporter of the Reformation and embraced the persecuted poets and writers in her court of culture and freedom, even astute and intelligent rogues like that Des Périers. Des Périers gave a noble coat of arms to the beau tétin, but also to the beautiful human androgyne, divided down the middle: A too happy Whole, converted into two languid Half Bodies, which are also too happy, today’s paradigm of our effeminate men and boys, officiants of the new gay religion. I acquired the Blasón at a good price. It was a clandestine facsimile edition, relatively recent, but without a date and the author’s name. I sat down to read in a solitary nook, under the shadow of an aged oak tree that bathed its roots in the dark water. I could not concentrate on the beau tétin. Perhaps through an association of ideas, I began to think of Clovis’s somewhat phantasmagoric life. This postmodern Don Juan, full of inner civilization, takes the fatality of the world and counterbalances it with an orgiastic game that in him is a true ars vitalis, 110 inherited from previous eras. This cajoler from a fine and serene race belongs to a class of men that pleases me, above all because of the facets of his personality that most displease others. Clovis is evidently a love child; he is the illegitimate son of the famous admiral Webster, who was Eisenhower’s guide during the landing of the allies at the La Mancha Canal. Wounded in the battle of Dunkirk, William Webster was named ambassador in France, shortly after the war. In the courtly circles, he met the Marchioness of Larzac, ancient lineage that more than covers and rescues Clovis’s bastardy, the only child of this union. He loved her briefly and intensely with a love at once carnal and metaphysical that only the phlegmatic Englishmen can allow themselves without noting the fire of passion under their parsimonious and cold outer courtesy. The admiral W.W. was transferred as ambassador to the brand-new Republic of India, where he died, assassinated by the violent independence supporters of Pakistan, who probably suspected in him the presence of a new Viceroy for a new empire. The Marchioness, wealthy heiress, shortly thereafter contracted a matrimony of mutual convenience with a Bourbon marquee of Spanish origin, in financial ruin and already getting on in years, one of those who abound in Paris. The seven male children who were born to this “legitimate” union were all different, ugly and deformed, as if Clovis had robbed them in advance of that “small miracle” of natural charm that won for him the sympathy of men and women, in exchange for his bastardy.

109. Margarita de Navarra was a member of the French royalty during the sixteenth century. She wrote a series of novels titled the Heptamerón modeled after Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron. 110. Latin for “the art of living.”

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Clovis never met his father, the admiral, who never took responsibility for him, and the baron, his stepfather, rewarded him with a dry and furtive dislike, full of hate, until his death. But he hated Clovis’s stepbrothers with the same silent rage. “The baron, my Spanish stepfather, was impotent and his French was detestable. He couldn’t speak more than two sentences in a row with anyone and they sounded like barks,” he said without joking. Every night Clovis, elegant and good-looking, has dinner with his friends in the best restaurant in the city. Later he allows himself to be seen in the box avant-scène 111 in the theatre in fashion during the season for ten minutes— not more or less. The women turn toward that apparition. They exchange whispers. Clovis nurses his disguise as a worldly man to the fullest, always alone and with irreproachable habits. Nobody knows how he employs the rest of the nights. Clovis’s privacy is impenetrable, outside of what he himself wants to mention or reveal. He confessed to me one day, without giving much importance to his confidence, that he was writing the story of his family, in which there are, he said to me with his inimitable smile, various poisoners, dissipated women, a Council president, and even a Cardinal. “In mine there was a bishop,” I said without the spirit of competing with that genealogy of a gentleman of the good old days. “But we are not worse for that, right?” “No way! Those cardinal purples are what makes us exquisite without preventing us from being austere,” he replied with his mind already on something else. Despite the tragic history of his mother, he was proud of her but did not take his lineage seriously, the lineage that Balzac had already celebrated in one of his novels with the aristocratic title and the name of the countess slightly modified. “When misfortune reaches its end in a human being,” he said, “one must respect him beyond his vices and defects.” He told us one day during a binge among friends in Amiens that his mother had those children with different lovers during the life of the FrancoSpanish baron because she could not stand that only men could enjoy unconditional sexual freedom. “Then she became a lesbian,” Clovis revealed, with complete spontaneity, a secret that was of course public and notorious among the gossip mills of haute 112 Paris. ‘My mother established a school for physical education that served simultaneously as a gynaeceum and as a source of lucrative income.” “Except for after,” Clovis said without changing tone, “she fell helplessly in love with an adorable adolescent, a true master work of nature. The girl 111. French for “in front of the curtain.” 112. “Haute” is “high society” in French

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suffered this love that took her breath away for a while, but she was in turn in love with a garçon 113 to whom she was engaged. One afternoon she fled the school wearing no other clothing than her gym suit. She never returned. She disappeared forever.” “The countess,” said Clovis with a neutral voice, “did not resign herself to this tragedy. Her world had broken into a thousand pieces. She ended up committing suicide with rat poison. It took them a few days to find the cadaver, despite the stench that was present everywhere because it filtered through the cracks in the doors. The in-love suicide victim had locked herself in the wardrobe where she kept her fur coats in order to drink the potion in a final gesture of modesty and desperation. They found her naked, wrapped in a mink coat, in a fetal position and with the nipple of the baby bottle in which she had drunk the poison still between her lips. People didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, although some truly cried from laughter. The narrator did not conceive of tragedy except as a form of humor, of the grotesque, of the absurd. But that humor woven from truths that seemed like lies, from clever phrases and dramatic effects was among the most tragically truthful things that one could hear coming from the mouth of a man whose appearance hid a sort of permanent trancelike state and whose smiling courtesy was nothing more perhaps than a form of desperation, like that of an animal who emerges to the surface from great depths. Clovis is the only man capable of inviting a woman who has dazzled him, in front of everyone, at a party or meeting of friends, to undress herself immediately and make love behind a screen or piano. And more than once he has been successful at this. Clovis orders the chandeliers turned off. The shocked spectators fidget nervously before the dance movement of the two silhouettes confusedly intertwined in front of a mirror. “It is not the nudity or the explicit mating,” writes my friend Tununa Mercado in her melodious manual of erotic guidelines, Canon de alcoba, 114 but rather the shadowy color, the insolent shapes of unreality, the delicacy of surfaces, the rebellion of matter struggling to arise and penetrate through the eye-organ of the skin to the place of copulation.” As in the ceremony described by Tununa (she has also written Corona de castidad, 115 an austere treatise on the erotic delirium of the mystics), in Clovis’s performances, the surge of desire swells, grows, and becomes progressively more extensive. It makes hands and faces tense. It insinuates itself in the semi-darkness with the luminosity of an unequivocally sexual and flirtatious charm that makes men’s solar plexus and women’s half-closed lips 113. “Garçon” means “young man” in French. 114. This book has not been translated into English, but its English title would be Bedroom Canon. The narrator quotes directly from the book. 115. Crown of Chastity is the English translation. I could find no evidence of this book, which appears to be an invention by Roa Bastos.

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palpitate. There is nothing more than that. But one sees much more than that. Only for a moment. The light is turned on and the couple reappears. Both are impeccably dressed and smiling, holding each other’s hands, as if they were returning after having performed a dizzying silent film parody. The mimetic simulacrum of love has provided a scene of magical perfection in homage to Eros. A melancholic satire of customs that Federico Fellini would have liked to have filmed thirty years ago with the music of Nino Rotta. 116 The good thing about Clovis is that he never leaves victims and is always disposed to do favors. He is a being who likes to be loved “from a distance and sequentially,” those are his words, without promising anything and demanding even less. The Countess of Esterhazy, from Hungarian nobility, with political asylum in Paris, said to Clovis in one of his social gatherings: “You don’t love anyone.” Clarinka of Esterhazy is one of the most trivially perverse women in the elegant world of Paris. She couldn’t leave her era in peace, which had already changed without her realizing it, and was not able to adapt to the new one either. Even so, her almost intact beauty shines over that of many young women who envy her charme 117 and her almost demonic ingenuity for hunting down the prey that she fancies when she fancies it. “You don’t love anyone because you love yourself too much,” she said to Clovis lightly squeezing his hand. “Oh yes,” he replied, laughing with radiant sympathy. “I love myself madly . . . but I always love myself in another. I am permanently in love, only in a very particular way. What they call being in love, ultimately, only occurs once. One can love various women at the same time as long as each one is loved differently but with the same intensity, concentrating all your vital energy in one as if she were the only one, while the others wait in succession to each be the only one when it is her turn. The virtue of the inlove gentleman is to treat them all with strict impartiality. “That virtue hides an abominable egoism,” smiled the countess. “Don’t believe it, Clarinka. The proud animal man does not have a better time of it. As virile and seductive as he might be, he is in the same situation. He must wait and surrender himself submissively to the desires of the woman who selectively makes him the only one, for the moment. The millions of years of his archaic and supposed superiority are worthless. And homosexuals, bisexuals, pedophiles, and sexual hermits are half way between everything and nothing.”

116. Nino Rotta was a twentieth-century Italian musical composer known for the film scores he wrote for film director Federico Fellini’s motion pictures. 117. “Charm” in French.

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“Your charitable boudoir 118 gospel is pretty superficial: all that matters are the quantity and dosage of willing opportunities between men and women and their diverse species and manners of making love,” said the autumnal countess. Such is your distributive justice: quantities in equal parts to one and the other so that no one complains and the party peacefully continues.” “Quantity doesn’t exist, Clarinka,” said Clovis. “Only the unit is unique. One loves even more those whom he does not know yet but of whom he already has an unrepeatable image intuited in a deep premonition.” “And, if upon falling in love with one of these future lovers, she confesses, before the surrender, that she is HIV-positive, would you distance yourself from her?” “On the contrary, I would never let go of her. It would be the supreme sublimation of love. Unique and unrepeatable love. Love and death have always traveled together. They are two Siamese twins that live under the same skin. That is why love has the aroma of death. Love is death. Death accepted with its inevitable taste of fatality. After all, what lives is what dies. The small death of love, that of the ephemeral orgasm, is too little. But what greater pleasure can there be than the definitive sentence of two bodies bound in long death throes? What greater proof of love can two lifelong lovers, who can only be separated by death, give to each other? He took a very young friend of ours, who was crazy for him, to his boudoir. They were naked in the bed all night, drinking and talking about trivialities amid a nebulous music of Hindu zithers. Clovis, affectionate and tender, but without the slightest amorous impulse, did not make the slightest attempt to possess her. He squeezed her hand the entire time. He suddenly got up toward dawn and began to dress her in his own sporty attire. Florence was almost as tall as Clovis. His clothing fit her as if they had been made for her. Clovis danced a few dance steps with the “boy” to the rhythm of Bach’s Sarabande. Florence was terrified. “I shed tears of love, sadness, desperation,” she related. Clovis, without losing his smile, returned her to her house in his convertible Lancia. Clovis was happy with his “love in shifts and at a distance.” Florence could not contain her sobbing. Clovis stopped the car in front of her house, wiped each one of her tears away with his kisses, and accompanied her to the door. “You are free,” he said to her. “I will never forget you. You are the woman whom I would have wanted to marry and live with forever, but I am not the man you need. We cannot grant ourselves a marvelous night outside of time and then muddy ourselves in the tedium of routine and habit that would end up separating us forever.”

118. Boudoir is an antiquated term for “lady’s lounge” in French.

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This was what Florence related. Surely it was not exactly what Clovis said to her. His conversations cannot be reproduced. Only perhaps his words, not the vital pulse, the silence charged with energy, the heart of each conversation. Florence remained immersed for a long time in a type of somnambulist misfortune. “It was worse than a bad dream in which for a moment I felt like the happiest woman on earth and straight after the most unfortunate,” the poor girl said to us. “A dream can be told. But I cannot even have a reality that I can remember as other than something phantasmagoric. An unreal scene with the most adorable man in the world!” she whined and began to cry again. Clovis is that way. Neither God nor devil. And his strength resides in that he has taken a considerable distance from himself. I see myself in others more clearly the more different and far away I feel them from myself. When the distance that separates me from them is the same that separates me from myself. The only mirror that does not deceive is the mirror of sex in the dark, the book of Ecclesiastes teaches; it says this at times as if it were alluding to an unattainable fact. Clovis is a pure hedonist who nonetheless does not allow himself the slightest concession regarding his principles of extreme purity. He has his feet firmly planted in reality, but in a reality that he devises every passing minute while he takes from it the stimuli that he needs. As soon as those stimuli decline, Clovis disappears; he takes the shape of darkness. The smoke from his blackout is not lost. It leaves the magnetic space of his presence toward which women turn their shining eyes, hoping that the bright and dark comet might reappear at any moment. I think that once Jimena also was unconsciously in love with Clovis. Once I said so to her in a completely innocent joke. “I am not in love with Clovis,” she responded to me in a murmur without any acrimony. “I am in love with his natural refinement, his inner freedom, which are a small miracle in these times in which ugliness, dirtiness, and self-contempt are the supreme values everywhere and at all levels of life. Otherwise, you already know his natural inclinations,” she marked the word “natural” by making a funny face indicative of condescendence. “Clovis is not particularly interested in women.” And Jimena was right about this. Clarinka, the Hungarian countess was in love with Clovis in the twilight of her life. But Clovis was in love with her husband, a young ephebe that could be the countess’s son. He died of pneumonia saving Clovis from cuckolding the filicidal countess. I don’t know why I am pausing over these memories of Clovis’s life that his sudden presence has awakened in me. Perhaps because I am unaware of how I am going to react faced with this unforeseen encounter; above all because I have discerned from the beginning in Clovis’s somewhat sarcastic smile that in that very instant he began to weave for me the plot of a com-

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pletely unexpected destiny. He probably has also perceived my brusque mood change and postponed for tomorrow what he was about to say to me. I spent the entire afternoon in the National Library. I reviewed some chapters of the Monadology. After departing, I went to the movies to see, for the third time, a film by Michael Cimmino on the war in Vietnam with Robert De Niro in the fabulous role of the hunter. 119 After I left, I ate dinner heartily in a restaurant that I found while walking slowly along the Latin Quarter. I walked to the Senlis Hotel. I had to wake up the night watchman. He gave me the keys and I went up to attic room. I phoned Jimena. She was still awake working on Sahagún’s Florentine Codex. “I was waiting for your call,” she told me with the usual affectionate tone, between one yawn and another. “I am staying in Paris for tonight,” I said to her. “Clovis can only see me tomorrow.” “Your voice sounds better.” “Yes, it seems that the Paris air cured my loss of voice.” “Take care of yourself. Stay at a good hotel.” “I am lodged at the Senlis. Tomorrow I will return on the night train.” Jimena’s kiss sounded like the murmur of an echo from the other side of the wire. She received mine. Two fruits that dissolve at a distance into a soft and delightful sound in the mouth of each one of us. I got startled. The moon, always ridiculous, was on the other side of the ugly glass window, watching me like a lascivious monk who spies on lovers, the one that Leda mentioned in her letter. I stood up to close the shutter and I closed the curtain. I locked and chained the door. I contemplated for an instant the former bedroom of Leda Kautner, without any emotion. Its ascetic aspect, its laughable size, gave me the impression of a monastic cell. I thought that a tormented and nocturnal soul like that of the girl from the Carpathian Mountains could not have fit in this small loft. Here she had been enclosed, a prisoner, fearing herself, unaware of herself in her solitude. Why was I carrying out this stupid theatrical act, half deliberate, half unconscious? What had induced me to this new questionable activity, sufficiently ambiguous so as to not make me feel abject or ridiculous? Was I trying to deceive myself again? What was I seeking to affirm or destroy with this pantomime of an impotent and frustrated voyeur? Perhaps I wanted to verify, with a final proof, apparently childish, that everything was in order, that the tie to a bad memory, the one that memory unleashes without hurry and with all naturalness, had been left behind. I thought that the space of definitive absence left by Leda Kautner was going to contribute to smoothing over, once and for all, the turbid waters of the unfortunate episode. 119. This is a reference to the movie The Deer Hunter, which premiered in 1978.

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The repugnance and rebellion that I experienced when I received the letter with which the strange and unpredictable girl tried to use me as a sexual guinea pig, the homicidal fury that devastated me the night that I discovered her presence in the room, the muffled and persistent rancor and resentment that overwhelmed me during many days while I was recovering my senses, and that got worse faced with the parade of accusatory evidence, all had been completely extinguished. These contradictory feelings of condemnation of her and myself, this rabid anger because of the senseless deviation of that girl, now formed a part of my good conscience, my current wellbeing. And this well-being had been accentuated from the moment in which I entered her abandoned room. I passed my hands over the absurd wallpaper, which was predominantly the colors of fuchsia and dark blue, almost black in the scarce light of the nightstand. I opened the wardrobe and a whiff of Leda, perhaps imaginary, enveloped me in its subtle and evanescent emanation. I breathed it in with the naturalness of something expected, without the slightest discomfiture of my senses, or any moral malaise. The image of Leda had disappeared completely. I could not remember any of her features; in my imagination, they had been converted into an anonymous face of absolute beauty. I could not see her in any way. And not even this faded emanation from her body brought me her image. The horror of fascination did not return to my memory. Nor did I feel myself abandoned again as I did when she fled and disappeared from Nevers, leaving me alone with my homicidal furor as if with a twopronged knife. The only thing that surprised me a little, in a purely mental or sensorial reaction, given that I was tranquil and reconciled with myself, was to not want desire, not recover the desire that died that night. Perhaps it might have revived here, in the abandoned bedroom, now that everything had passed. That whiff of a present absence that came from the closet seemed exciting. It was the odor of brazen desire, of the delirious passion of the young woman, of her intransigence, of her imperious necessity to reach the end of herself even when it was at the cost of her death, without measuring the consequences that her senseless act could have for others. In a somewhat violent impulse, I began to open the drawers of the chest that were jammed because they were disjointed. They were empty without any other odor than that of lacquered wood. I opened the drawer of the nightstand. In the cracks of the bottom I saw a small piece of paper. I removed it with my fingers. There was nothing on it, nothing more than a truncated line of some handwritten letters, those characteristic of Leda, big and unequal. The remains of a word in German, probably the fragment of a draft that remained there like the vestige of something that no longer had any importance.

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I tried to divine the mutilated word. Perhaps it said . . . wie . . . der . . . se. . . . hen . . . , or something like that. The broken piece of a long . . . long goodbye. I entered the bathroom carrying the piece of paper between my fingernails. I threw it in the toilet and flushed. I sat down on the stool to watch the squall of water accelerate, pulling the miniscule scrap of paper. The shine of the white tile lightly hypnotized me. I babbled any word and confirmed that my hoarseness had disappeared and my voice was clear and deep as usual. I got up and went to look at myself in the mirror. Perhaps I desired inwardly that a different face than mine would look at me from the full-length mirror, or that a strange face would be superimposed on mine. I was prepared to see whatever it was with complete calm. Even the worst, which was exactly what I saw: my face, which was not mine, with its thick grayish beard and falsified features. Well as Lichtenberg 120 says: “When an ape looks at a mirror, he cannot see any apostle looking at him from the innocent glass . . .” This was also definitive progress, not a mere coincidence. In Nevers, until yesterday, I was afraid of the mirror. I shaved my beard without looking at myself in it. The face of a macaque could appear at any moment, especially here. The sensation of physical and moral calm made me feel more and more tranquil and at peace with myself and above all with Jimena. Underneath that feeling of serenity, the chilly spot of a light and nameless sadness was working its way through me. But even this undefinable feeling contributed to my relaxation. I thought about Leda. Perhaps I was sad because of her, because of the ruined destiny of an exceptional being destroyed by life. I lamented not having been able to help her to bridge the gap between her phantasmagoric world and natural reality. Things of an old soul that had arrived already at the mortal end of a body that had hardly begun to live. Ah . . . if there existed the possibility of a soul graft. . . . If they had been able to graft a corresponding soul onto the body of Leda. . . . She would have been the most adorable of women, something new and unusual, incredibly desirable because of her very eccentricity. A man worthy of her, and free, would have loved her with madness, would have made her happy. The two of them would have been able to be happy in an absolute and essential happiness as I am with Jimena. . . . But in her personal Hell, where she lives in proud intimacy with rebellion and fear, the poor girl chose in a twisted fashion. She chose me, deceived by the falsified being that I myself am. Sleep and fatigue were slowly conquering me little by little. I looked toward the half-closed wardrobe. I no longer perceived the tenuous emanation. I got undressed and got into the narrow bed naked. I lay down on my 120. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an eighteenth-century German scientist who said, “A book is a mirror. If an ape looks into it, an apostle is hardly likely to look out.” Roa Bastos has appropriated and changed the citation to fit the meaning of this novelistic passage.

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stomach with my face stuck to the blankets. I began to rub myself mechanically against the sheets. Leda told me in her letter that she did that when she thought about me. I restrained myself and contained the idiotic swaying. The odor of recently washed laundry nauseated me a bit. I removed the blankets and sunk and rubbed my face into the pillow again. Only later did I realize that I was searching for the smell of Leda’s head, the indefinable perfume of her hair, of the soft skin of her neck. But only the acrid odor of the synthetic rubber of the cushion plagued me. I turned around and lay on my back. Before falling asleep, I tried to find the unexpected faces, without succeeding, that I usually search for on the roof and walls, in the grain of the wood, an infantile habit to escape reality that has lasted in me more than the memory of that age. I glanced diagonally at the pages of Le Monde. In some headline, I read the announcement of the execution of Ceaucescu and his wife, condemned to death for crimes against humanity. I let the newspaper drop. I turned off the light. A modesty from other times immobilized my hands crossed over my chest, impeding them from recognizing a certain renewed turgidity. In the darkness everything continued in order, and it was not possible to expect or desire more than that sedating distension to which sleep disposed me. I think that I fell asleep immediately with a heavy dream without images. A noise launched me into a sudden leap into wakefulness. My own foot had slipped from the bed, stepping on the crumpled newspaper at the foot of the bed. The stab of a painful thought that had not occurred to me before kept me awake. Jimena’s voice on the phone had a slightly unusual tone. Perhaps her throat was irritated by sleep and the effect of the yawns. The sudden suspicion that Jimena was informed about what had happened crossed me. She could not not be. At least she might have a suspicion during twilight. Too many tracks of the horror had remained for her extraordinary capacity for intuition and perception to have not been able to detect my entrance into the garden, covered with blood, the aftereffects of the terrible sexual struggle stuck to my body, and everything else. If that night of fright or whatever it was hid the evidence from her, she was able to discover it gradually, or in the sudden revelation that she tends to often have. If she knew, she concealed it with a discreetness that honored her and that increased my indignity and abjection. The hypothesis of Leda’s presence in Nevers took possession of me again, annulling all alternatives and possible extenuating circumstances of an oneiric, parapsychological or spell-like character. And this possibility, that what happened was real, continued being for me the most acceptable, the least guilty, the most desirable. Unless, in the final analysis, I was going crazy. Jimena’s comment about the dates “chewed by human teeth” came to mind. Didn’t that implicate an indirect but intentional comment? I recalled

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the long conversations that she had had with Doctor Maurel on the veranda, when he left from his last visit. She never related to me what they had spoken about. It was evident that a very fine crack had been produced between us. But, why did she have these scruples and until when would she be able to stand the burden of a simulated ignorance? Anguish squeezed its tourniquet around my head and my chest. I couldn’t fall asleep anymore, hounded by a new wave of horror that covered me and flooded me like a second tide, even more delirious than the first one. Now I didn’t have anything to exhaust my desperation, tossing and turning in the narrow bed of a cheap little prostitute, in that miserable room in which the whiff of hidden and ferocious sensuality still found itself lodged. The horror of that night of abomination, under the sulfurous light, accentuated again the haze in which I had tried to live since then. Their misty halos became visible again under the spectral illumination of the lunar clarity. I heard some muffled sobs. It took me a while to realize that they were mine. I lay down squeezing my face and mouth on the pillow, drenching it with the foam of my anxiety, my anger, of a guilt that I resisted admitting in all its plenitude. What was happening to me? That Nothing. . . . It was nothing. . . . Nothing, that I babbled, more dead than alive, was not simply the sinister echo that bounced back, late, toward me. Now all the horror of that night returned to me as if spinning backward in slow motion. And in the middle of the lethal slowness of those scenes, which I had believed to be over forever, trimmed with a livid light, the image of Leda appeared, naked and covered in blood, looking at me fixedly with her golden eyes in her habitual expression of absence and distance. A shout escaped me. I lit up the nightstand blindly and the image disappeared. I unhooked the telephone to call Jimena, without knowing why. I desisted and let the earpiece fall on the marble of the nightstand. From now on I would live like those who are condemned without hope, only waiting, fearing the instant in which rejection, indignation, condemnation would fill Jimena’s words, demanding separation, definitive rupture. Her judgment would be implacable, although against her conviction that just justice is impossible. I heard her words again. “ . . . You are full of remorse. . . . True fidelity demands a loyalty that disallows any ruse, as refined as it might be, to betray it. . . . The only fidelity that counts is the one that is sure of itself. . . . There is no other authentic fidelity than that which accepts the love of another without demanding reciprocity and judging another when he or she breaches one’s love. . . . Would you demand that from me? . . .” Jimena does not condemn the radical infidelity of abandonment, a definitive separation as a matter of life and death for each one. She hates the small and evil infidelities that are hidden in the small folds of small and aberrant lies, in the small and miserable silences of the confessions that are indefinite-

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ly postponed in the search of that moment of total sincerity that will never arrive. It was useless to tell myself that I did not find myself guilty, of what happened in the least bit, except by omission. I am full of regrets, it is true, because of all the failures of my life, but not because of what happened that night. That which was forbidden imposed itself on me. I didn’t know how to prevent it, as you cannot impede the devastating force of delirium. Certain acts are not chosen or accepted. Incidents produce them. By any luck, did Jimena consider this exemption in my favor? Is this what helps her to suffer in silence the presumable knowledge of what has happened? Did she consider me the victim of a mysterious conspiracy of circumstances that she herself could not decipher or explain? If so, it must be a very heavy burden for her and I cannot help her in the slightest. The sophism did not produce any relief. My suffering did not come from my feeling guilty even in the slightest measure, but rather from the fact that I could not devise the way in which to reveal to Jimena what happened with all naturalness, without this revelation engendering in her spirit a chain of presumptions and suspicions that would in any case end up converting me in her eyes into the completely responsible one for what happened, without possible absolution. By remaining silent, I accepted and made myself an accomplice to the nocturnal assailant, to the bitter end, including her death. Could I, in turn, make Jimena into an accomplice? If I had awoken her that night, what would have been her most immediate reaction before the horrific scene? At some moment, in my desperation, I was on the brink of doing it. Having called her then or having revealed afterwards what had happened was the same thing, front and back of the same horror. Postponing the revelation did not attenuate or diminish my guilt. I resisted the seduction with all my strength. But resisting the seduction does not mean not being seduced. The other hypothesis existed, that of the phantasmagoria concocted by the plot of dreams. And even in this almost improbable extreme, wouldn’t this phantasmagoria reveal but another deeper and more subtle reality, the fact that I am fascinated and in love with the beautiful and strange girl, and that I hide this disgraceful truth like a secret illness? Dream or reality, just the same, I remain empty like the sea when it is without its drop of eternity. I firmly believe that everything that happened was real. The vestiges that remained are inevitably revealing. In the event that she is still unaware of it, morally she is implicated in an indirect way in this horrible occurrence. And this is like being already informed about everything, even without knowing it, perceiving it in that limbo of intuition that Jimena’s love (and that of women like Jimena) possesses, regarding both the past and the future. Her perceptive power includes the memory of the present, which does not exist

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except as time that passes and in which one cannot secure or record anything, just as you cannot write with your finger in running water. This talent for divination in women in love consists of two lobes like those of the brain. The most brutal facts are partially charged with dreams, with delicate spiritual shades that only the feminine instinct knows how to perceive. The imagination of these women is made of the desires and intimate experiences of the people they love, which they assimilate and convert into their own intuition. Unworthy truths live in time like unworthy human beings, in other words, like almost everyone. The shadow of that malignant truth accompanies Jimena, day and night, with the shadow of its ominous secret. When she sleeps, it curls up at her feet, incorruptible, like a dog. She doesn’t see it yet. In some moment she will discover it, if my silence does not confess unconsciously, in the meantime, like all guilty silence. . . . “Seeing for real,” she usually says, “is nothing more than an unripe truth that will not mature except in its final putrefaction . . .” I am telling you the truth now, Jimena. Time has not passed since guilt lingers. I have not postponed the confession, I have retained it in myself like a punishment. The seeing for real is now in your hands for it to mature within you. From the past, these papers will reveal the accursed truth to you in all the plenitude of its final decomposition. I was the one who was stinking at the bottom of the well in your gazebo. In any case, that well is in me, it reeks in me like a centuries-old void. You will look for me in the future to judge me. But I will no longer be here or anywhere to accept and receive your condemnation. Just justice does not exist, you usually and rightfully affirm. In this way, time transpired in the ignorance of the unworthy truth will multiply for you the weight and horror of this concealment. It will make it a thousand times more contemptible and cruel. And then I will no longer be only guilty of omission but also be the self-confessed guilty one convicted of the worst crime against fidelity: the premeditated and treacherous lie in an endless postponement of the truth. Silencing the truth for fear or by calculation is the worse deceit because it is deliberate. Behind an unconsciously or voluntarily deferred confession, there is something true that cannot be betrayed. And I have betrayed it since I delegate my confession to writing, whose system of signs is the most deceitful of all. I always thought, Jimena (and this I wish to repeat to you from the deepest part of me) that your love infinitely surpasses mine because the gift of yourself is the essence of your authenticity. And that the nameless misery of my love is that it has always limited itself as a gift and reached a limit through egoism. Your love is not a long-term and low interest “loan” as you yourself once remarked ironically when defining it. It is, like mine, a feeling like those that last an entire lifetime, and for that reason one cannot expect that it be perennial since life is made of fleeting moments in which every-

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thing, even the most intense and loved, sinks suddenly and without a reason to justify it, and many, almost all, die before our lives are finished. Jimena, soon I will be nothing more than a faded memory for you. Those future children are waiting for you who will give your existence its most noble justification. I no longer expect or am worthy of this gift, that springlike splendor of the sprouts of our blood that would have renovated and saved my life. I recall at this moment the people whom I have abandoned at some time or who have abandoned me and I don’t understand how one can leave the people that one truly loves and who are irreplaceable. You are irreplaceable for me, and I would not separate from you if it were not for a cause superior to my own life. You know this cause. It is a wordless pact that we have sealed between the two of us. And that pact is not subject to appeal. In my youth, I used to believe that life is greater and more powerful than destiny, and that life itself conquers all dilemmas when one puts determination into it. I was never sure of myself. Perhaps I maintained that doubt for a while. But since that night, my blood knows that it inhabits a lost man . . . and it wants to leave . . . it seeks to dispossess itself of you, of me . . . to divest me of everything that still has a sense of expiation and salvation in the action that I am proposing and that in some way I am going to fulfill. In the torpor of my arteries, I feel that my blood does not believe me, despite all the proofs that I provide it, of my will to allow it to leave as soon as possible. It is a suspicious and mistrustful blood. My blood knows me. It knows that it cannot expect from me the slightest gesture of honor or loyalty. I can no longer demand from it now: “Calm down. Have a little patience. I want to free you in a warm stream as the final suppuration of my hate for the face of the tyrant . . . or for myself before the firing squad. . . . if I fail again in the only act that could have justified me as a man, as a citizen of a nation oppressed and brutalized to the ultimate extreme of degradation . . .” To you, Jimena, yes, I can say from now on and I will shout it at the final moment: At least maintain your friendship for me. A friendship like yours is for me identical in value to your love. I know that I have inevitably lost your love . . . I know . . . I always knew. . . . The actress Cytheris writes to her friend and confidant Lucius Mamilius Turrinus 121 a letter in which she tells him about her farewell from Marc Anthony, a little before the death of Julius Caesar. I cannot find more moving and true words to express my sentiments. I should also say to you: From now on I should learn to live, for a little while more, without the amorous look of your eyes that filled my nights and days with an intolerable sweetness . . . those eyes by whose brightness I dreamed of dying. 121. Lucius Mamilius Turrinus is a character in the epistolary novel The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder published in 1948 about the assassination of Julius Caesar.

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The buzz of the unhooked telephone pierced my ears, my thoughts. I threw the earpiece angrily on the cradle. Within the noise that the breaking of the microphone produced, I heard a voice that was calling my name. And that voice was the distant voice of Leda Kautner. I left, rather, I fled the room. I finished getting dressed in the hallway and went downstairs. I rang the concierge’s bell. I heard snores that were interrupted, then the grinding of springs of some portable bed from the other side of the counter. At long last, the watchman appeared. An ageless man, gaunt, pale, one of those beings that continue living with a permit from death, or that seem to be searching, disoriented, for the tomb of which they have been robbed. Upon leafing through the register, the bluish and bony hands betrayed acceptance of mortality. I paid the bill for that night out of a fairy tale in which love had played with me like the cat with the mouse. The phone rang again at that moment. The night watchman lowered the volume on the small radio receiver that he was wearing across his chest like a banner and he tended to it. “It is a long-distance call for you. Booth three, please,” he indicated to me with a deep voice. A wave of blood whipped my chest. I answered him almost shouting: “Tell her that I am not here . . . that I have left. . . .” My words got mixed up with the final verse of Alfonsina y el mar, the melancholic song by Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna, which at that moment was playing on the night watchman’s Walkman. The voice of Mercedes Sosa with the scent of deep valleys lulled the eternal sleep of Alfonsina. 122 The taciturn Alfonsina Storni entered the sea walking, searching for the drop of eternity that she lacked and that she didn’t find in her poetry about absent love. I am drowning not in the sea of absent love, but rather in the sea of demented passion where carnivorous pirate mermaids sail. I leaped down the stairs toward the main door. It was locked with a key. I had to wait what seemed like an eternity for the night watchman to come to open it. . . . He advanced step by step punching himself on the legs to silence the monotonous squeak of his joints. Mercedes Sosa lulled the sleep of Alfonsina on the concierge’s chest on the aphonic receiver, from the cliff in Mar del Plata. “Quickly . . . hurry up!” I shouted harshly. “I am coming, friend, . . .” the night watchman shouted angrily. “Less hurry, dude. Don’t you see that I am disabled . . . ?” Each word smelled of wine from the tavern, misfortune, misery. The squeaks of his legs stopped near me. The man adjusted them giving more punches to the jammed springs

122. Moral refers here to Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938), Argentine poet who committed suicide by drowning herself.

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of his joints. He finally succeeded in standing, he bent over and opened the door in slow motion. I passed him a luca. 123 “Old man, for you . . .” I said with remorse seeing him in such bad shape. He said, “merci, musiú . . .” 124 It was not from the Senlis of Paris that I was leaving. It was not the hotel where I had slept in Leda’s former bed. Her voice continued waiting on the phone receiver from Munich. I was leaving a murky hotel in La Boca in Buenos Aires and I walked toward nowhere. 125 I sat down on a stone bench in the plaza. With the first light of dawn, two paths presented themselves to me: to throw myself under the wheels of a train, or to go to the appointment with Clovis. The dilemma was not viable. The bitter satisfaction of a bet with the absurd invaded me: to permit this destiny, in which I did not believe, to decide for me which of the two roads I should take. I don’t know how much time passed. I had forgotten my wristwatch on the nightstand. It remained in payment for the broken telephone. I went to the street and walked toward the metro station. The sun was shining strongly on me but I walked in the dark. Upon descending the escalator, a little Algerian or Tunisian girl of a young age was climbing in the opposite direction, crying bitterly. Evidently, she had gotten lost in the crowd and was looking for her family. She grabbed my hand and said to me “poppa” . . . but continued shouting for her mother. I asked where she had left her. She pointed in some direction. I ended up getting off with her and we traversed the station in search of her lost parents. The mother soon appeared, a young Maghrebi woman who was also crying, very grief-stricken and frightened. She recovered the girl almost pulling her from my hand and giving me a look of repulsion and hate that betrayed her suspicions. They ran away from me toward the exit. A train was arriving. I pushed my way to the site where many people crowded together fighting to get on, and I approached the very edge of the station. Was I waiting still for the providential push? I saw the brilliant wheels that were swiftly approaching. The brakes ground to a halt brusquely before I expected. The movement of an arc initiated by my body to launch itself on the tracks collided against the wagon still in motion. Its doors opened at that moment. I was forced into the car by the human avalanche. Everything continued existing with the same indifference as always. Compressed by the vociferous mass, I felt more alone. The loneliness that I myself had constructed around me. Alone in the multitude but without the 123. A luca is coin worth 1,000 pesos. 124. “Thank you, sir.” Musiú is a phonetic spelling of the French Monsieur. 125. This may be an allusion to Roa Bastos’s period of exile in Buenos Aires in which he worked, among other things, as a waiter in a hotel (http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/ suplementos/cultural/el-impacto-del-exilio-en-la-obra-de-roa-bastos-1570515.html). Since Buenos Aires, like France is a site of exile for Roa, and Moral is an autobiographical character, this may be the connecting thread between the hotel Senlis and the allusion to La Boca, a district in Buenos Aires.

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multitude within. A woman’s hand touched my hand. I turned around and looked at an unknown face, worn and disturbed. She had made a mistake. She withdrew her hand and apologized. But in that same instant, by the swaying of a pendulum that we carry inside us, calm returned to me. Under the stimulus of a presentiment, I thought that something important was waiting for me in the piece of news that Clovis was going to give to me. He swept away the files that he had on his table, ready for a long conversation. He handed a document to me. It was an invitation from the President of the Paraguayan Republic. Through the intermediary of the Ministry of Culture, recently created, he invited the democratic countries of the world to send representatives in art, science, and letters to the Great Conference that was going to take place in Asunción during the month of September, with the generic title of History, Culture, and Society in Latin America in the Twentieth Century. The invitation printed on fine sheets of authentic parchment trimmed with gold and with raised letters, adorned in purple, was endorsed by the president himself of the Republic, General Alfredo Stroessner and carried the date of January 1, 1987. “The chancelleries of Europe and the United States, except those of Communist China, of the declining Soviet Union and its satellites to the East, are shrieking with laughter,” said Clovis, serious but mordacious. I noticed the calendar that was on the table. It showed March 27, 1987. My mind worked rapidly like when solving those riddles that appear in newspapers. “Continue reading. It’s worth it,” said Clovis. At a glance, I found out about the marathon Congress that was going to be celebrated in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the General President’s ascendance to power. Other functions of no less importance were going to be the free issuing of land, houses, agricultural implements and generous credit to the immigrants of European, Far Eastern and Asiatic countries (except Communist China and North Korea), who wanted to inhabit the western region of the country, exempt from taxes and duties of any kind for thirty years. Stroessner’s government offered to defray all the costs of the trip, move, and lodging and to grant a temporary stipend of two thousand dollars a month until the definitive settlement in the houses that they were going to provide in the places chosen by the interested parties. “European, Oriental, and Asiatic immigrants in Paraguay . . . in the Chaco, among the military forts and under the rule of the military authorities. . . .” I couldn’t help but laugh. “Free transfer of land. Generous credit, tax exemption for thirty years. . . . Come on, Clovis! More than one hundred thousand peasants are without land and as many thousands of indigenous people are machine-gunned when they invade the immense empty estates in the power of the military and bigwigs of the regime . . .”

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“That’s okay,” Clovis interrupted me. “It is a stimulus for future proprietors. The defense of property is sacred. On the other hand, the problem of the one hundred thousand peasants without land has already been resolved by the dictator. He has put them to work en masse on the construction of the highspeed trains between Asunción and Brasilia.” “Toward the north of the eastern region are the colonies of the Brazilians that have established a new state in full Paraguayan territory with Brazilian laws, authorities, money and languages, their own tribunals and lower courts. They are already about a million. The “peaceful” invasion of the new “bandeirantes” 126 from Sâo Paulo is advancing toward Asunción with flags unfurled and are going to extend their dominion throughout the country. Paraguay has sufficient experience with the Brazilian macaques for more than three hundred years. Clovis was wrinkling his nose. He detests discourses that smell of social or political propaganda. I was going to continue my informative enumeration. “All of this doesn’t matter much for now,” Clovis stopped me. “Leave the macaques in their place. No one can act against the right of the fittest. As far as Stroessner is concerned, it is evident that he wants to change the population of the country since he cannot change the country. He is sick of stupid Paraguayans. He doesn’t give a damn about racial purity. He is not an Aryan of pur sang. 127 He is not an Indian, a Creole or a Mestizo. He is a man from nowhere whose only country is power. Let’s continue with the Conference,” he said with a metallic voice. I read that the invitation expressly urges the chancelleries to form preparatory commissions for the selection of representatives who will attend the Conference. It even invites the anticipatory sending of observers to verify the amplitude, seriousness, and future projections of the Conference. In addition to taking charge of the lodging and transfer in first class of the guests, whatever their number might be, the invitation commits to paying ten thousand dollars to each one of the participants for their respective presentations and reports. I continue reading. The invitation also recommends to the chancelleries inviting prominent representatives from banking, commerce and industry for a parallel conference on trade, economic-financial expansion and property and capital investments in Paraguay. A prize of one million dollars has also been instituted for a competition of investment proposals of various types, of which a jury of national and international experts will be in charge. In a printed box decorated with the Paraguayan flag I read: The electric energy of

126. Portuguese for “pioneers.” 127. “Pure blood” in French.

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Itaipú signifies the industrialization of the country and helps the neighboring countries that are less developed. 128 “What do you say to this?” Clovis inquired. “The obvious thing,” I said. “The tyrannosaur is breathing his last breath. The cold war is ending and the United States has had to discard the oftenmentioned doctrine of national security in the basement of old junk.” “We are going to send an advance party of observers for them to sniff out trouble.” “Son of a Bavarian father and Paraguayan mother, Stroessner is a committed and practicing Nazi. During the course of military training in Germany, he met Hitler in Munich and still boasts that he drank a pitcher of beer in the pub where the future Führer was preparing his power sweep.” “All that is ancient history,” he interrupted me again with a slight gesture of boredom. “It doesn’t interest anyone anymore, not even those who were saved from the ovens.” I didn’t need to expound upon my anti-dictatorial propaganda. Clovis had a very complete dossier on Paraguay’s situation, the activities of its supreme master and an exhaustive report on the repressive system, methods of espionage, persecution, and systematic and massive practice of torture as an element of compulsion, intimidation, and extermination extending to the furthest boundaries of the country. He handed me one of the bulky folders. There was a list of prisoners killed in the most horrible tortures of the chambers of the National Management of Technical Matters, popularized in the rumors of collective fear simply with the name “The Technical” or “The Secret Police.” In one of the files, the salary of the principal torturers appeared, as well as that of the Taiwanese consultants, and, at the beginning, even the North American “technicians” that were assigned to “The Technical,” when Stroessner was still a useful prop for the United States. I also saw an extensive list of “undesirables” and of “government enemies.” My previous name and address appeared on it. “Don’t you think that faced with this picture of horrors, attendance at this conference would be like supporting and in a certain way legitimizing this apparent ‘democratic’ turn in the dictatorship?” “That conference, if it is carried out, will be the beginning of the end for Stroessner.” “On what do you base your confidence in the sudden conversion of a decaying totalitarian regime into protector of intelligence and culture? Or is it that you now believe in the humanistic “values” of an implacable regime like that of your tyrannosaur?” 128. The book is referring to the hydroelectric power plant that was established on the border between Brazil and Paraguay under Stroessner’s government.

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Clovis made the movements of a magician with a pencil between his fingers. After a reflective pause, looking at me fixedly, he asked me: “In sum, do you believe that this invitation is acceptable?” “Fifty-fifty.” “We need to verify all of this on site. We are going to send observers. Later we will study if the attendance at the conference is possible and useful.” A moment before I had read something in a footnote on the program that captured all of my attention. “In that case,” I said, recovering my voice, “I beg you to include me on the list of guests.” “I don’t think it is in your interest to attend,” said Clovis twisting his lip a bit. “Your name continues to figure on the list of the worst enemies of the government.” “I have another name. I am someone else. The two times Jimena and I were in Paraguay, the most renowned bloodhounds of the regime did not recognize me.” “We’ll see. Let’s not make plans yet.” The telephone rang. He said goodbye to me with a gesture. While going down the stairway of the palace, I contemplated with sympathy for the first time the gilded riffraff that was sleeping on the banks of the Seine. I took a taxi to return to the Orly Airport. During the journey, I thought again about the prominent footnote at the bottom of the invitation that awoke in me a sudden interest, to the point that I did not hear what Clovis was saying to me. The note said: “In the inauguration ceremony of the Conference, the Honorable Mr. President of the Republic of Paraguay will have the pleasure of personally greeting the illustrious guests in the White Room of the Governmental Palace, where a reception will be held in their honor.” Shake the hand of the tyrannosaur! Wow, what an honor! Wasn’t this one of the incredible figures that chance tends to weave? No. It was something very concrete and defined, a situation squarely marked in a well-defined time and place. This could be the unique and exceptional instant that I have been thinking about for quite some time. All my being stretched itself toward that definitive moment in which, in an infinitesimal flash, one becomes what he should be and does what he should do. The supreme adventure, success or catastrophe. I felt that my pulse had accelerated considerably. My mouth was dry. I didn’t stop drinking throughout the flight, which did nothing other than increase the dizziness of an almost obsessed anxiety that dominated me since I had read the note about the “handshake” on the presidential invitation. The first thread from Paris to Asunción began to contract. And the spider web could reach colossal proportions even when for the moment I could treat the absurd event as a joke. I saw the immense legs of the red spider shake

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feverishly at a distance. Can one write a real or imaginary story about events that have not yet happened or that are beginning to happen? Perhaps it is the only thing that one can do. All real or imaginary stories are nothing more than an anticipation of the present. When I related to Jimena my encounter with Clovis, the piece of news about the grotesque conference, and the possibility of traveling to Asunción among the guests, her face became troubled. “You should not attend that conference,” she said squeezing my hand with hers in her usual gesture of warning me against something, knowing in advance, nonetheless, that my decision was made. I abstained from telling her that Clovis’ judgment coincided with hers. She intuited it anyway. “I suppose that Clovis did not encourage you to go,” she said firmly. “There is no personal risk,” I insisted with a certain irritated assurance, digressing from the issue. “It is not a question of personal risk, Félix,” Jimena softly replied. “All the more reason, although there may be no risk, your presence alone in that ‘conference on culture,’ although it may not be known by anyone but you, will be a triumph for the regime. And worse yet if they discover and acclaim you. And worse yet . . . ,” Jimena bit her lips and contemplated the void that seemed to spread out interminably at her feet. “I will not go. Félix Moral will go, ‘that stranger woven by the plot of exile,’ as Ricardo Piglia defined in one of his novels, 129 those who, like you and I or other millions of foreigners, live with our schizophrenic nature. Thus we blunder about with our two halves.” “That name is a pseudonym. A false name. It has not changed you. It hides you.” “I cannot enter any other way.” “Oh dear, Félix, don’t make difficulties more difficult. Don’t let the anxiety you have to take advantage of an apparently easy return disturb your good judgment! When you set foot on your homeland, the fragile mask of Félix Moral will disappear and you will be yourself again openly. Even if the tyrant’s police do not discover you, you will feel that a stranger has usurped your own place, your own person, your own being by an act of treason. How will you behave before your own countrymen whom you will be deceiving as if you were deceiving yourself? You will not deceive them. They will know that you are you.” “Well, Jimena, you are right, but it is not necessary that we become so serious before an option that has not yet been taken, quite unrealistic in other respects. The two of us will analyze, as we always do, this problem in all its 129. This is a reference to Piglia’s novel about exile, Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration) published in 1980.

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implications and consequences and then we will make a decision of mutual agreement.” Jimena moved her face closer to mine and gave me a kiss. Her lips trembled slightly. In that kiss, and also in advance, I felt the taste of goodbye, not in Jimena’s spirit, but in mine. Suddenly an infinite sadness overpowered me as if suddenly everything had already been carried out. Jimena has not recovered her usual vivacity. We have not spoken again of the conference, but it is evident that its shadow has interposed itself between the two of us and it has superimposed itself on the story of Leda, aggravating things. There are stains that cannot be erased or scraped off with fingernails. My wisecracks sound hollow and no longer receive the prize of that fresh laughter which is one of Jimena’s greatest charms and that now does not manage to show the grace of her dimples or light up the sparkle of her pupils. She has retreated an indeterminable distance from me. We have not made love again. There is the excuse of the thrombosis, but it is an implicit excuse that neither one of the two wants to mention. I feel as if I were lying in a bird coup, trampled by geese that deafen me with their cawing. Two hens lay two immense eggs between my legs of a glanderous rooster. I see Jimena preparing her classes in the middle of books and papers that are the visible protection of her estrangement, of her confinement deep within herself. I would like to converse with her as before, or simply be together in that silent communication that united us more than words. There is nothing else for me to do but to pass the downtime with my shadowgraphs. I make silhouettes with a pencil onto which I copy the images projected by the shadow of that volatile light that spins under my eyes in a colored mixture of red, green and yellow. The fixed idea badgers me again during nights of insomnia. What can that mysterious and inscrutable act be? To suddenly experience an idea, an impulse, toward which one feels inexorably launched to die for something that surpasses us beyond all limits, and that we cannot understand but that illuminates us while it fulminates us like a bolt of lightning. I feel that that idea or that impulse is not going to suddenly sprout as in the heroes of romantic novels who rescue yesterday’s anti-hero. That idea has to have been born with one, it waits and explodes in one when the moment has arrived. And almost always they fail. As in the revolutions of our America, where yesterday’s victorious heroes end up assassinated and defeated. I think of Che 130 like a Christ hanging in the laundry room of the little school in Yacanguazu. I think of Bolívar in his final pilgrimage toward Santa Marta, in José Martí dead in combat with the Spaniards, in Marshal López himself, the maximum hero of our nation assassinated at Cerro-Corá by the Brazilians. 130. Reference to Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967), an Argentine Marxist who fought beside Castro in the Cuban Revolution.

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I recall, ashamed, a foolish gesture of mine that still makes me grind my teeth. In an Open Letter to the Paraguayan People 131 that was published in the newspaper in Asunción, I proposed a challenge to the tyrannosaur: Use your sovereignty and your absolute power in a liberating act for all the people of your country and for yourself; the only and final act of salvation that can still free you from the infamous abomination of posterity. Renounce your dictatorship and return power to the citizenry of the republic in free elections, without the repression and coercion of arms. In sum, the idiotic ingenuousness of the challenge only served as the theme of one of his “patriotic” discourses. “One of the subversive bandits,” the Great Tembelo 132 said, “demands from exile that I renounce and leave. Of course! Done deal. I give over power to the communists and I leave. Let that bandit come occupy my position if he has the balls! Let Stalin himself come with his Red Army!” One hundred thousand throats howled in the Plaza of Heroes for hours under the torrid sun: “Homeland or death! President Stroessner! . . .” The tyrannosaur couldn’t care less about the judgment of history and posterity. In almost half a century of absolute power, he legitimized the saying coined by a renowned public man: “Paraguay is the only country where nobody loses or gains reputation.” And you could add: “Paraguay is the only country where the only hereditary, perpetual and valid reputation is that of the crooks, assassins and infamous traitors to the nation.” This is the great “national tradition” that is perpetuated in a country that deserves another destiny, a country full of heroes and anonymous martyrs buried wherever without a cross or marker to commemorate their names, as The Supreme Francia 133 decreed over more than a century ago. Can’t you do something less stupid for your country than an open letter to the Great Manitou? 134 my conscience rebelled. Faced with the slap in the face of that question, an outlandish idea suddenly occurred to me: And if I were to dedicate myself to the most difficult thing, to commit the most absurd and harebrained act? The most inconceivable act would then be the fulminating and definitive act. The idea of killing the tyrant relaunched in me with more force than before. But many inside and outside the country have 131. This is a reference to a letter written by Roa Bastos to the Paraguayan people on February 1, 1986. 132. Roa Bastos explains later in the novel that this is a nickname given to Stroessner because of his large hanging lip. 133. This is a reference to Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay from 1814 to 1840. Dr. Francia is also the subject of the second book of the trilogy, I The Supreme, in which the dictator is simply referred to as The Supreme. 134. A Manitou is either a good or evil spirit according to Guaraní culture. In this case, since the narrator is referring to Stroessner, it is used in the negative sense. Moreover, Roa Bastos is referring to an open letter he himself wrote to Stroessner, in which he implores him to abdicate power for the good of the Paraguayan people. He here attributes this same action to the protagonist Moral, who is in many ways an autobiographical character.

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attempted it, and all have been wiped out by terrible tortures or have disappeared without leaving traces. I have read about all the trials regarding assassination of leaders from all times that I could find in libraries and specialized archives. Rome in decadence, the England of Cromwell and Renaissance Italy win the prize for leader assassinations. But the success of the Brutuses of all times was always a product of chance. I had more than one thousand formulas written down in a notebook with a faded cover that I keep hidden in a gap in the lamp of my study. The always warm notebook impelled me to imagine endless variations, but did not ignite in me the inspiration of that unique act that was sleeping in me with the light of an extinguished star, or one that has not been born yet. The idea of leader assassination, if one is to execute it with some possibility of success, should be conceived as the most difficult and foolish act, I noted in the notebook. And it was only possible under the appearance of the most extreme facility and naturalness. Was this a new trap of bad conscience? Or was it really a supreme act that I expected from myself, but that no one except me should know and wait for, until it was executed? Clovis phoned to announce to me that my attendance at the “cultural” conference has been decided and the trip to Asunción will be made on September 1st. It is the best news that they could give me; somehow it compensates for the frights and anguishes of recent times and clarifies the nebulous confusion, from which I have not been able to completely recover. From now on, all my thoughts are concentrated on a central objective focused on a dazzling, almost blinding point: The death of the tyrant! The imminence of that Conference in Asunción, the possibility of that trip, moves the opportunity that I thought was already almost unrealizable closer to me: that of fulfilling my project through any method that I might have at hand. I repeated, at hand, without realizing at first, the meaning that these two words implied, key to a strategy about which I only had a vague idea that was enveloped in presages and uncertainties. The role that that secret weapon can play in such a plan emerges in my consciousness, the most inconceivable and miniscule weapon, of which I spoke to Jimena in more propitious days. A mortal microcosm, I told her, which could not be imagined by the most distrustful person, but that is worn on the finger and that explodes without noise and with a delayed action. I believe that those were my words. Jimena thought that I was joking. She didn’t know, she still doesn’t know, that upon telling her this (I have the sensation that it was already an enormous time ago), I was thinking about the great ring of the Count of Villamediana that she keeps, among her family heirlooms, in a red velvet jewelry box sealed with the noble coat of arms of the count.

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I listen to her laughter, the caustic comments into which she would have broken out at that time if I had revealed to her what the “secret weapon” was about which I was thinking. Nothing more puerile, indeed, nothing more ridiculous or absurd than this thought that would seem to correspond to the mental level of an elementary school child, stimulated by crime novels and science fiction. It was initially ridiculous and absurd for me, and in principle, it continues to be that way. Jimena is ignorant of or has forgotten that the great silver ring, in the form of an asp that bites its tail, can become a terrible offensive weapon in the assassination plan. One must go back a little to the origins of this simultaneously historic and legendary object in order to understand what I expect from it in the future, a future already almost “at a hand’s reach.” The Tarsis and Peralta families begin to appear in the annals of the kingdom at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The founder of one of the branches was the first count of Villamediana who accompanied the King in Portugal as Postmaster General. His son, Don Juan de Tassis y Peralta, was born in Lisbon. From the time he was very young, he showed signs of a certain literary talent and a festive and ardent character, but at the same time was docile and discreet. Philip II took him to the court of Madrid and put the most capable preceptors in charge of him. He especially remembered the lawyer don Luis de Tribaldos de Toledo who uncovered for him the endless and mysterious world of nature and animals. Juan de Tassis and Peralta was educated in the environment of culteranismo 135 of the era. He valued poetry as the emblem of perfection in literature, and the pure-blooded horse of Arabic origins trained for tournaments, in the world of animals domesticated by man. This horse was the only one with whom a man, a gentleman, could unite to form a single body, that of a demigod. The myth of the Centaur was for don Luis de Tribaldos, the most beautiful emblem of Creation. He lowered his voice to say to Tassis: “Pindar gives the Centaur a divine genealogy. And great poetry always tells the truth.” So that poetry and horses (above all, racehorses) formed an indissoluble unity in the mind of the young Tassis. The future count soon frequented the social gatherings of the Academy in which Lope, the Argensola brothers, Mira de Amescua 136 and other great men of the epoch participated. His literary talent was satire, but his true passions were women, gambling, collecting jewels and paintings, and his love of horse races. He risked enormous bets that his salary as Postmaster 135. Culteranismo is a term that refers to a baroque writing style that was highly metaphoric, with many cultural, mythological, and Latin references. It was popular in the seventeenth century. 136. Bartolomé and Lupercio Argensola were famous sixteenth-century Spanish poets and historians; Antonio Mira de Amescua was a sixteenth-century dramatist, as was Félix Lope de Vega.

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General, although high, could not cover. As a result of these excesses, he was exiled to Valladolid where he founded another branch to which, according to the always imaginative family genealogies, the ancestors of Jimena’s mother belonged. There is no certain evidence of this lineage, except perhaps the count’s great ring, of which Jimena is the last custodian. The ring disappeared for a long time. Because of gambling debts, the count was forced to pawn it with one of the children from the Tasso dynasty, founded by Don Francesco Tasso, from Bergamo, the true czar of postal couriers in all of Europe. The sum to recover the ring was enormous and thus unpayable. When Don Juan de Tassis y Peralta succeeded his father in the title of count, he did not renounce his agitated life. He was a friend of the Count of Lemos, who appreciated his poetic ingenuity, adopted him and took him to Naples with him. The letter that he wrote to his wife Doña Ana Mendoza, whom he married while they were both adolescents, is from that epoch. He spoke to her in that letter about the two great sorrows that he was suffering: the first, of having robbed Don Miguel de Cervantes, without knowing it, of the position by the side of the Count of Lemos, to which the great writer aspired. The second grief was related to the pawning of the ring. He finished giving precise clues about whom from the Tasso family was the possessor of the jewel, and exhorted the necessity of recovering it at any price. Doña Ana flatly refused to take charge of the recovery of the ring, even more so because the ring of doubtful origin had provoked their first matrimonial conflict. When the count returned to Madrid, he sold some properties at a loss and recovered the ring but lost the young and beautiful Doña Ana, who was already a little fed up with the noble nomad. Don Juan de Tassis y Peralta then dedicated himself with greater zeal than before to launching the poison darts of his satires against eminent but corrupt people from the court, which cost him a new exile to a village in Andalusia. This did not temper his fervent desire to criticize the immorality of the administration and its principal agent with very caustic epigrams and musical verses. When Philip IV ascended to the throne, he had Villamediana called and ordered him to leave the people of his court in peace and to dedicate himself to his poems and comedies, in which he excelled as one of the best culterano poets of the court. The rehabilitation of the second count of Villamediana occurred in Aranjuez and in the presence of the king, with the debut of his comedy The Glory of Niquea, represented by the ladies of the court. The piece by the count even preceded The Golden Fleece by Lope de Vega, who was in second place on the program. The piece by Lope was interrupted when the first act had hardly begun, due to the fire in the theater. In the middle of general panic, the count of Villamediana took the Queen out in his arms to free her from the flames. The admiration that the count professed for Isabel of Bourbon was not a

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secret and he allowed it to be glimpsed in some of his most intricate poems. Gossip from the era circulated the rumor that, as proof of her gratitude, the Queen had removed the royal ring from her finger and had given it to him. Slander is never owner of its twisted tongue. The certain thing, according to chronicles worthy of credit, is that the count had barely deposited the Queen in a safe place, when, with his knees on the ground, he bent over in an exaggerated fashion, sweeping the rug with the feathers of his hat, to yield his respect. When he stood up, the Queen had already turned her back and was moving away with her singed tulles, surrounded by her frightened entourage. Comments abounded that accused the count himself of instigating the fire that had afforded him the incredible gallant feat. That same night, upon returning in his car to the palace on Mayor Street, he was stabbed by a stranger. Both the origin of the fire and the count’s assassin were never discovered. Lope de Vega composed an epigram that revealed to a certain degree what he wanted to hide: --Gossip mill of Madrid: Tell us: Who killed the Count? --They say that The Cid killed him Because the Count was healthy. Tasteless crazy idea The truth of the case has been That the killer was Bellido And the instigator, sovereign. 137

The mystery of the ring remains. It could not be the Queen’s ring. The great silver ring was worthy of a corpulent chamberlain of the court, but not of her Serene Highness. It also could not be hers because of its nature as a secret weapon. In his collection of jewels, Don Juan de Tassis had various pieces with similar characteristics, some of them, like the ring in question, resulting from the sacking of Rome. Throughout four centuries, the count’s ring slid through branches of the lush genealogical tree of the Tassis y Peralta, until by the law of chance, which also dominates in dynastic glades, it fell into the oak jewelry box of Clara Tarsis, Jimena’s mother. This trajectory of wandering objects is sometimes more mysterious than the itineraries of human beings. It suggests small imbalances in the cosmos. Orbits that bite their own tail. The Count of Villamediana’s ring precisely 137. These verses were not written by Lope de Vega, but by Roa Bastos himself. Bellido refers to a traitor who killed king Sancho II of Castile and who was pursued by the Cid. The implication of the verses is that Lope killed the count by instigation of the king himself, who was possibly jealous of the Count, as was Lope. Among the many dramatists who have focused on the figure of Bellido is Lope de Vega, in his play Las almenas del toro. See “The Dramatic Tradition of Bellido Dolfos” by Robert R. La Du.

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assumes the shape of a serpent whose tail enters in the mouth of the silver ophidian under the opal mount that crowns it. There is also an inexplicable connection in the last names of those that compose the extensive conglomerate of postmasters. Thus, the Tassis of Castile are tied to the Tasso of Bergamo. The latter, in turn, become the branch of the Thurn und Thaxis, in which Alessandrina de Rye stands out, one of the greatest figures of the postal couriers. The postal centers were in Frankfort, Cologne, Hamburg, Rheinhausen, and Venice, without excluding the pontifical seat. In the postal empire of the Tasso family, the right of succession extended to the feminine branch. Later this right was adopted by all the Postmasters’ businesses. “If the empire had survived,” I once said to Jimena, regarding that, “the right to be empress of the postmasters would have fallen to you.” She didn’t find these genealogical blunders very amusing. The Tasso family did not turn their nose up at modifying their last name according to the demands of the different languages and of the countries to which their postal empire was extending itself. One can observe the principal etymological and phonetic roots. Thus, the Tassos became Daxen, Taxis, Thaxis, Thassis, Thassus, and hence, the Tassis of the first count of Villamediana. The famous poet Torcuato Tasso did not belong to the noble sect of the General Postmasters. He limited himself to writing Jerusalem Delivered in which he celebrates the crusade of the magnificent Godfrey of Bouillon. 138 If you believe the family chronicles, it seems that Don Torcuato was fascinated by traveling for the great mail transactions (“ships on dry land,” he called them in his poems), whose rocking put him in a state of trance. Some of his biographers assure—all of us tend to discover the unpublished angle of reality—that the poet wrote some of the cantos of Jerusalem during the postal transactions on the frequent trips from Sorrento to Rome. He carried his great poem in his own hands like a letter to the future in the progression of time. The Tassos, moreover, were so numerous, so illustrious, and so rich in Europe, that a poet of the stature of Don Torcuato did not add much in their opinion. The Tassos of Bergamo dated their origins back to Paulo de Tarso himself, cornerstone of the Roman Catholic Church. The postal couriers constitute the first great epic of universal postal communication achieved through the legs of horses, through the ingenuity and tenacity of the messengers, through the vision of the founders of an empire that Mercury 139 would have envied. It is a magnificent story worthy of Homeric poems. In Spain, in the branch of the Tassis of Valladolid, the last name changed one of its s’s for an “r,” becoming Tarsis, Jimena’s maternal last name. She tends to be very reluctant to speak of this genealogy that seems false and 138. Godfrey of Bouillon was a Frankish knight, the leader of the first Crusade in 1096. 139. Mercury was a Roman god, patron of messages and communication.

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moreover presumptuous to her. I have researched on my own within the postal annals, as well as in the family history of the Peralta Tassis. And the conclusion seems irrefutable. Legend or historical chronicle, these avatars do not deny the preeminence that the offspring of the Villamedianas had among the General Postmasters of the King, and even less so, the real existence of the ring. After many hesitations and with a feeling of committing a desecration, I have removed the ring from Jimena’s sewing basket. I was observing it last night under the microscope. The head that bites the tail has an orifice invisible to the naked eye. If you put a certain amount of pressure on the opal that pretends to be the eye of a cyclops, it shoots a needle through the orifice that is one hundredth of a millimeter. It does not do it regularly; it is evident the mechanism must be stuck due to an excess of dust and rust, perhaps because of lack of habit. I must have it inspected by an expert without awakening any suspicions. The argument is simple: I must sell it in Sotheby’s auctions. The ring fits divinely on the middle finger of my right hand, as if I myself had ordered it from a silversmith in Rome, four centuries ago, for the present emergency, which is about to occur in a month, at the latest. The strange thing is that the coat of arms inscribed on the case and that is microscopically reproduced on the inside of the ring, does not correspond to the coat of arms of the Villamediana family. There is a badger (badger in Italian is tasso), crowned with the postal horn. In the blue field of the lower part there is another silver badger, but on the upper golden part, a royal eagle, black as coal, spreads his wings. The ensemble is dominated by a hunting horn carved in gold. And this is the extraordinary thing: it is the coat of arms of the Tasso family, but not of the Villamediana family. I think that when Don Francesco’s son returned it to the count or his wife, when they were still living together, he pulled the wool over their eyes. But the wool from this sheep, 140 or rather, the black eagle of the coat of arms, is valuable because it is unique. I will wear it poised on a finger without anyone noticing it. The sharp point, harder than topaz, will make the tyrant’s head explode like a lightning rod. It turned out to be pretty difficult to find one of those silversmiths knowledgeable about Renaissance jewels. I finally found an Italian jeweler settled in Marseilles, a true artist and erudite in the history of jewels. He told me the history of the ring with precise details, and he promised to get it working in a few days. 140. The original Spanish contains the wordplay “gato por liebre. Pero esta liebre, o mejor dicho el águila negra.” “Dar gato por liebre” means to con someone, while liebre is a literally a rabbit. Roa Bastos makes a wordplay based on the figurative and literal means of rabbit in this context. I have conveyed the wordplay here using the idiom “to pull the wool over one’s eyes”/ wool of this sheep (versus the black eagle).

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“These microscopic mechanisms,” he diagnosed, “are very sensitive to the illness of time, sometimes for lack of use. I will have it ready in three days. To what address should I send it?” “I live in Paris. I will return to pick it up myself,” I said to the jeweler. I gave him a fake address. He signed a receipt in due form. I returned one day after the agreed time period. The silversmith from Marseilles received me with a cordiality that seemed to me excessive. “The ring is in perfect condition,” he said. It is one of those that some of those crazy noblemen of the fourteenth century used to strike down their rivals or enemies with a handshake with the greatest impunity. He showed me with X-rays the inner depository that served to store the poison. The moving opal produced the shot of the mortal arrow about the thickness of a newborn’s lock of hair. He tested it with distilled water. He shook my hand and with his thumb pressed the opal. The very thin tongue of the silver snake penetrated the palm of my hand, without my feeling the slightest sign that this had occurred. There was no trace of the prickle. I asked him for the repair bill. I noticed that the jeweler hesitated a little; then he directly proposed to me: “I will buy it from you for whatever you ask.” “Impossible, Signor,” I responded. “It is a family heirloom. My mother would not part with it for all the money in the world.” “Then you don’t owe me anything,” the jeweler said with devious courtesy. “Objects like these belong to the artistic patrimony of the country,” he insinuated as if to intimidate me with the possibility of confiscating it and to persuade me into an advantageous clandestine sale. “Oh. Don’t worry. It is appropriately registered,” I replied. “My mother has lifetime possession of the ring.” “If someday you change your mind, visit me again with the ring. I will offer you one hundred thousand francs in cold hard cash for it.” “It is worth a lot more,” I said to him with a smile. “But we will see. There are jewels that go out of fashion or that collectors reject, and then they are less . . . precious, and one must get rid of them or donate them to museums that specialize in these marvels of love and death.” From Marseilles to Turin. A countryman of mine lives in this city, exiled as I am, a long time ago, also a declared enemy of the tyrannosaur. Julio Miñarro, a specialist in microbiology and toxicology, works as a researcher in the famed Institute X of Turin. He was very glad to see me. I explained my plan to him confidentially. He weighed the difficulties and the risks to which I exposed myself, but, upon noticing my determination, he did not try to dissuade me. Miñarro spoke to me of a relative of his, Doctor Agustín Goiburú, who also attempted to assassinate the tyrant but who had the misfortune of falling into the hands of the henchmen of the regime, while he was peacefully fishing on the shores of the Paraná, on the other side of the border.

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He needed to constantly have his native land in view as an incentive to his obsession. I knew the incident well, since I had all the antecedents of this conspiracy, frustrated among so many others. Goiburú suffered horrible tortures. Perhaps he was “sent packing,” that is, buried alive or thrown from a military plane over the virgin forest. When I explained to Miñaro the mechanism and philosophy of the assassination project, he celebrated its originality and the meaning of the attempt. “Kill the tyrant with a handshake seems sensational to me!” . . . he said laughing with a nervous and tense laugh. “If your attempt is successful, it will make history as the act that ended infamous tyranny with a gesture of courtesy.” “You hit the nail on the head,” I replied. “I usually say that courtesy is nothing but a form of desperation.” “Agustín and other heroes who were sacrificed like him will be avenged,” said Miñarro. “Give me that thingamajig and we will see what substance would be advisable for it. It must be a toxin or a virus with delayed action, at least three days, to give you time to put yourself out of the reach of the claws of the thugs of The Technical. I left him the ring. He observed it with curiosity. “I have never seen anything like it!” he said with a whistle of admiration. “I will expect you in a week.” I said goodbye with a hug. Julio Miñarro probably feels the tension of anxiety and of happiness that overwhelms me. I arrived in Nevers at sundown. Added to the satisfaction of having recovered the ring safe and sound is the happiness of an obvious change in Jimena’s attitude. She welcomed me with her usual affection. She has become the same as before again. It was a cool day and it was raining. She invited me to have tea in the kitchen. The smell of freshly baked chipá brought to the fore the taste of other happier days that seemed to have returned. She didn’t ask me anything about my short absence. She perhaps supposed that I had gone to Paris to present papers for the trip to Asunción. We spoke about various insignificant matters. After a silence in which she was looking for the way to propose something, Jimena said to me: “Since you are decided to travel to attend a . . . that conference, I would like to accompany you. Is this possible?” I hugged her and gave her a kiss, radiant. “Absolutely!” I responded without hesitating. “I am going to call Clovis right now to ask him to include you in the list of official guests. You are giving me immense happiness, Jimena.” I found Clovis in his office and not only did he accept Jimena’s request, cheerfully and amiably, but also he applauded her decision to accompany me to Asunción.

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Jimena’s unexpected proposal has put me once again before an iron-clad dilemma. If on the one hand, her gesture of support, of solidarity, of affection, has given me immense and genuine happiness, on the other, it creates a serious problem that I do not know how to solve. Jimena’s company means that I should abandon my assassination plan. Her decisions never respond to trivial motives, and this last one has all the signs that she has determined to gamble everything. It is evident that her intentions go beyond accompanying me on a “touristic” or “cultural” excursion, above all, considering her radical opposition, from the beginning, to this gambler’s move regarding the tyrannosaur, and her insistence on making me desist from the trip to Asunción. Is this what she proposes? The means is very similar to blackmail with the best possible intentions, of course. Her proposition should fill me with pride and happiness, but at the same time, it plunges me into a limitless desperation. I cannot reveal to Jimena the real motive of my trip. If I were to do it, she would put into play all means within her reach to prevent me from it. On the other hand, it is also almost certain that she has already noticed the removal of the ring, which has allowed her to connect the dots and have a clear idea of my intentions. She knows that I would never involve her in an act of this nature. Her apparently ingenuous joy to accompany me barely hides her decision to convert me into a “hostage” of my own life, putting hers as a shield against the execution of a foolish act whose consequences, I know, are inevitable. The date of departure is near. The only thing left is for me to retrieve the ring that Miñarro will fill with the lethal substance. Everything is resolved, but what should I do about Jimena’s decision to accompany me? I have thought about all possible variants to resolve squaring the circle. I cannot find any, except canceling the trip and using the ring against myself. The ring implicates her in the enterprise as well and unites us in an inescapable vicious circle. This circle, infinite like the turn of the ring itself, situates the two of us before and beyond the end of everything. It is true that inanimate objects do not have anything in common with human beings, except that human beings make them the object of their life and death. I have stolen this ring from Jimena, and I intend to use it to kill the tyrant. This obliges me, through an elementary principle of loyalty toward her, to reveal the theft. Which means, inevitably, also revealing to her the plan in all its details. Which determines, ultimately, in turn, its annulment. Would she succeed in making the tyrannosaur escape from my hands? I don’t know. . . . I don’t know. I only know that I have just contracted a debt with her regarding another postponed revelation once again. I attempt in silent misfortune to not think about the passage of time. Sleeping exacerbates my anguish even more. I cannot renounce my plan, but I cannot renounce Jimena’s company either, which she gives to me perhaps

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as the final proof of her true love. The dilemma has torn me into two halves that fight between themselves with identical fury. Perhaps my anguish is nothing more than the desperation of an individual isolated in his own egoism. Is this unique and heroic act, with which I hope to define myself once and for all in a lightning flash, nothing more than the expression of that egoism? I cannot stop the march of time. I cannot resign myself to living half a day, not even a single minute, apart from that obsession that dominates my thoughts, my will, all my being. Is it that one cannot get passionate about anything other than the absurd? In certain cases, as in the dilemma that I am facing, one cannot choose: it is the rest of eternity or nothing. Three days later upon returning from the University, Jimena’s accident occurred. In the collision of her automobile with a heavy truck, she suffered fractures in her left leg and arm and a deep wound on her face. They telephoned me from the trauma clinic to which the emergency workers had transported her. I was by her side during the day from the time they began treating her. She could not move. They put her arm and leg in a cast. They raised the latter with a pulley and the weight of various lead disks for an unspecified time. I felt great emotion being able to help her and accompany her now that she needed me. I relived the days in the Rothschild Hospital in which Jimena’s help produced the miracle of my “resurrection,” celebrated by Doctor Maurel, when she kidnapped my almost-cadaver while they were taking it to the morgue. I remained in silence by the side of her bed squeezing her hand. The effect of the tranquilizers kept her in a state of crepuscular lethargy for three days. It was not the “waking” dream that the elderly woman from the Guairá taught her. She had a diffuse notion of what was happening around her, but later she wouldn’t remember anything that had happened to her, not even the crash. I found out that she had awoken from this painful erroneous dream when she smiled at me for the first time and called me softly with the voice of a totally unprotected little girl. “A shame,” I said, caressing her forehead beaded with sweat, “that I cannot in turn kidnap you and take you to our Window on the West.” She smiled at me sadly. When she could speak, she looked me in the eyes with the intensity of other times and asked forgiveness for having thwarted “our” trip. “Don’t worry, Morena,” I told her in a murmur close to her ear. “I will stay here to take care of you. Soon you will be well and we will be able to travel as we have planned. I felt in her weakened voice the tone of resignation. She and I knew that that trip was not going to take place. It was better not to speak of it and to not mention the matter anymore.

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Two weeks later I was able to take her home. But in the interim the sad episode of the Dalmatian occurred. It happened thus. I made a quick trip to Turin. Julio Miñarro gave me the ring and a hermetic bottle containing the viral toxin. “The toxic substance, calculated for one hundred kilograms of weight, acts in seventy-two hours,” he told me with the certainty of a scientist, but also with the unconcealed concern of he who is providing a contraband weapon for a criminal action, however just or avenging that it might claim to be.” “The species of the Tyrannosaurus Rex weighs more,” I specified just in case. “Oh, the action of the substance covers the double of the expected weight.” Miñaro explained to me that the end is fatal and that it happens suddenly without any symptom anticipating it, the same as a syncope. There is, he said, total paralysis of the circulatory and the nervous system. The body of the “patient” will remain rigid and twisted as if it had been bitten by a snake. It could even happen that it becomes reduced to half its size. He showed me how to load the ring, the way to sterilize it after its “use” and he wrote down the precautions that I should take to avoid the dangers of leakage. He also gave me a little sack made of unbreakable material, the kind used in toxicology, in which to keep the ring and the bottle to avoid escape of the toxic molecules. “Once it is used,” he urged, “you should hide all this in a safe place where not even the devil can find it. Erase any trace. Investigations might arise. I know I am getting involved in a huge mess. But in a way, I am doing it to avenge the memory of Agustín and all those like him who were sacrificed in atrocious tortures. The tyrannosaur at least will not suffer any pain. The mountain of pain that he has caused our poor nation will fall on him converted into a little stream of hundredths of millimeters. He will be reduced to the size of his boots. They will have to bury him in a child’s coffin. Good luck and courage. May everything go well.” We said goodbye in silence like two accomplices that walk with their hands tied toward the plank of a scaffold. I returned to Nevers. The next step was to try out the test of effectiveness. When I returned from the clinic, where I spent several hours with Jimena, I took a long time preparing the ring for the first try out. I put it on my finger. I felt like the ring was at least double my weight. I called Yaguareté with the usual whistle. The noble Dalmatian entered, parsimonious and solemn, as if he carried on his back the white and black crowns of the river Paraguay, and began to lick my hand. Precisely the hand on which I was wearing the ring. I saw the two-faced serpent reflected in his eyes, shining and understanding. The dying light of sundown reflected the shine of the small and faraway

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bonfires in his pupils. We conversed for a while. He moved his head as if he understood what I was saying to him. “Let’s go,” I said to him and I left carrying him by the collar. I sat down on the bench in the gazebo and began to speak to him again, as if I were the one who needed to be convinced that the barbarity that I was going to commit was an innocent and just act. “We are nothing,” I said to him finally, petting his head. “And we are not even masters of our own life. You and I are going to die for the same cause. You are going to die with the death reserved for the tyrant. But you are not going to die like he, a ferocious beast, will. You are going to die like a man. I am going to die like a dog. We cannot avoid it. You have been for me a great friend and I love you a lot. . . . What I am going to do pains me a lot. I ask you for a lot of forgiveness . . .” My eyes were moist. My voice was broken. I no longer saw the ring reflected in his eyes. They were covered with reddish fibricular rheums, like broken veins. He looked at me with a very sad, faraway look. “Give me your hand,” I asked him, humble, guilty. He extended his right paw with the good behavior, patience, and limitless confidence that a dog feels toward his owner. I squeezed it strongly while I lightly displaced the trigger of the opal with my thumb. The Dalmatian observed me as if anticipating my thoughts. He didn’t move a millimeter but upon feeling the toxin penetrate his blood, with a human voice he cried out “NO!” . . . From his half-closed jaws hung two fine threads of saliva. He went away slowly and threw himself down in his usual place, before the storm door where he fulfilled his function of sentry and guard. He was not going to move from there anymore. I told Jimena that the Dalmatian was sick. “He won’t take a bite, he doesn’t want to drink. He is rolled up on himself, as if asleep. . . . Perhaps he is ill with sadness . . .” Jimena bent her head to one side. Tears fell from her. They slid down and were reabsorbed on the cast. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t ask anything. She allowed herself to sink into one of those impenetrable silences that sometimes suddenly happen and that seem to suddenly move her an indeterminable distance away. When the Dean’s wife gave him to us, when he was still a puppy, she warned us. “It is a very strange breed,” she said. “They seem like humans. They only lack speech. They divine things. The mother of this little one died in childbirth and in the middle of the delirium of fever her groans clearly expressed her fear of death, her yearnings to have her life saved. While she could, she kept her front paws raised as if defending herself against something that was threatening her,” the Dean’s wife said. “She died with her face between her paws, bunching herself into a hard ball that no one could undo.”

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That is how the Dalmatian died exactly thirty-six hours after our handshake. It was the time that corresponded to his weight, his space, his life, his death. He died like his mother, raising his front paws before an invisible enemy. His fifty or so kilos were reduced to much less than half and the body of the Dalmatian was reduced to that of a puppy who had just been born. I gathered him in my arms. I rocked him a little while I carried him to be buried in the hole that he had seen me dig in the back of the garden when he was still alive and his body was still big and grown-up. The hole seemed enormous for that little diminished body. I had to throw a lot of dirt on top of it.

SECOND PART Today, at two p.m., within twenty minutes, I will arrive in my home town, if I can still call it that. Under the strong and seemingly artificial light I cannot see the landscape. From the moment in which the airplane began to descend, after flying over the great dam, I pressed my forehead against the window. At an altitude of nine thousand feet, I was not given the opportunity to admire the jewel of the lake, shaped like a polyhedron and mounted like a diamond on the skirt of the mountain range. The seven waterfalls of the Guairá, the biggest in the world, tamed, domesticated, now flowed to feed this liquid gem whose energy moved the fifty turbines. At half of that height, the vision continues the same. The binoculars do not improve it. Above and below everything is opaque and bright at the same time. There are no clouds, no sky, no land. In these lower layers of the atmosphere, a colorless immensity floats. The light of day and the darkness of night seem to have joined together in a mist of hybrid phosphorescence. Unless memory itself betrays me, submerged in this cottony fog that changes its hues in its simultaneously vertiginous and motionless swirls, nothing makes me suppose that we are flying over my homeland. The immense airplane splits the turbulence with a light swinging that increases the headache that is pressing against my temples and the sensation of dizziness in my diaphragm. My left arm has fallen asleep in a painful tingling sensation, and I feel my mouth full of a metallic taste from an unknown acidity. At first, I thought the strange optic effect was due to the refractory material of the window. But the fiberglass oval, with a false bottom, allows me to see, with total clarity, the wing of the apparatus on the left side, the whirlwinds of air in the turbulences, the gas jets in flames of the turbojets. In the turbid and seemingly artificial light, I failed to see the landscape through the peepholes, even though the Boeing 747 is now flying at a low height. Perhaps the atmosphere covered with cirrus and nimbus clouds does not corre-

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spond to the subtropical sky. The savage felling of the virgin forests over a surface of more than eight hundred thousand hectares for the construction of the hydroelectric power plant is perhaps responsible for these disturbances in the atmosphere. It could be that the flight is following another direction to enter the capital through an unusual route to land in some new airport with extreme security. The airplane is descending spirally. Inside, the commotion of the passengers is growing. From my observatory I continue not seeing anything. Above and below everything is opaque and bright at once. The machine cuts open the flap of white shadow. The electric blue of the whirls of gas becomes purple and the purple fades again in the luminous darkness streaked with violet spots. The change of light must have begun precisely upon entering the zone of the hydroelectric power plant. As far as my vision can reach, it fixes on the horizons drowned by that luminosity that is not diurnal or nocturnal; nothing allows me to glimpse the near or distant perspective of the city. I search in vain for the sparkle of the national river, which seems strange at this time of year, when the interminable August rains make the huge river lose control and floods destroy the coastal populations. I do not see the sea of rough and muddy waters that usually destroy in slow swirls, ranches, islands of water hyacinths, thousands of enormously swollen dead cows. In good weather, from the airplane that is descending, one usually finds the sensual curve of the bay, belly of the city’s water, crowned by the swollen naval of the government house. One might rather say a carbuncle about to explode. With its crenellated little towers and its air of fake Mudejar, 141 the ancient house from López’s dynasty resembles the palace of a sultan from the Thousand and One Nights. Formerly, the palace honored its origins. Now it is repainted red. During the day it emits a bluish ashen color. At night, the red floats in the dark and phosphoresces, rubbed in chalk by the invisible moon. In the light of the floodlights, the palace sparkles like a bath of bloody mica. One sees it cut horizontally in two halves, from the base up to the dome and the buttresses of the cupola. The marble staircases and the minarets float in the air. The impression gets worse when the rotating movement of the floodlights makes the entire mass oscillate. It then looks like an immense galleon anchored in the bay. But that is not why it deserves the pejorative nickname that the slandering aversion of its opponents have given it. The

141. Mudejar refers to a style of architecture resulting from the mingling of Christian and Muslim cultures on the Iberian Peninsula during the twelth century.

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casa rosada or pawnshop, 142 as they call the ancient palace of the López family, is related to that story of the buried treasure of the wife of the president of Paraguay that they told us the last time we were in Asunción. Perhaps the satirical nickname is also related to the auction of the country’s land to foreigners by the tyrannosaur who treats the Paraguayan people who lose their lands like mere pawns. 143 They have popularized his nickname of Gran Tembelo because of the immense hanging lip that blends together with his double chin. When the airplane begins to descend, I glue my forehead to the window. I try in vain to watch from above the tall palm trees, very small still because of the height of the plane, the old country villas, the small villages outside the city. In one of them, in the middle of the wooded fringe of Villa Morra, the houses of the family clan are situated. In that zone with the country villas and farm houses from the beginning of the century, the lavish mansions of the new oligarchy rise up. There are some residences copied from the model of the governmental palace and even from the castles of Loira. The nouveau riche, leaders and public servants with power who arose through the deluge of contraband, from the great trade deals, have replaced the former landowners of the twelve tribes of the patriarchy. And the thing has only changed for the worse. I remember our first trip, also clandestine like this one, in which we were coming to search, you, for a country, me, for the recovery of mine. When you saw from up high the soft hills of Asunción, you observed with ingenuous enthusiasm that there were seven hills and that they resembled the seven hills of Rome. Now they are no longer here, or at least I do not manage to make them out. They have been erased by the steamroller of shadows that fill the space, those that nonetheless obfuscate the eyes with their dark luminosity. After the expulsion, the same day in which we arrived, we no longer had the opportunity or the desire to look at or admire the hills of Asunción. It was a beautiful day, with morning splendor and a lot of sky; one of those days capable of bewitching the migratory birds and making them turn back in full flight. This layer of somber light that doesn’t change color did not yet exist. That morning, I did not turn my face toward the city blurred in the luminous vapors of dawn. Much time has passed, but that scene continues alive in me, full of the happiness and misfortune shared by the two of us. At that time the 142. La Casa Rosada is the name of the Argentine presidential palace. Pawnshop appears to be an allusion to the way in which Madame Lynch attempted to protect her inheritance, burying the gold given to her by López along her exodus route. The analogy, although not entirely clear, seems to point to the idea that one pawns an item with the intent of later recovering it, which was Lynch’s intention when she buried the treasure. 143. The original Spanish employs a wordplay on two meanings of “empeño”—pawn or insist. I have rendered this in English by the two different meanings of “pawn” in English—to deposit as security versus a person who is used to further the gain of another (or a piece of little value in a chess game).

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light was natural. Now, from the peephole, it feels as if we are flying on the inside of a great opalescent bubble. I should have written this initial fragment at the end. I wanted to begin by asking you how you are, how the recovery process of your health is going after the ill-fated fracture of your leg. Condolences and conventional words of interest for the health of another have always seemed to me a little hypocritical. Such support is beyond words. But, in addition, something similar to an innominate anguish about what for me is at once clear and obscure, was delaying my desire to mention this theme . . . and others. A different reason impels me to write these uninterrupted words to you that do not cease flowing even when I stop writing. I began to do it much before the take-off, during the seven hours in which I was obliged to wait at the airport in Barajas for the plane coming from Frankfort, in order not to travel from Paris, where the greater part of the guests were concentrated. We thought that this would be for the best. Clovis approved this measure of caution. Barely had the immense and super-modern Boeing, specially accommodated for this trip, stabilized in the Madrid sky, I continued scribbling sheets of paper in order to send you this perhaps incoherent and slightly tumultuous message. It is perhaps the last one that I can send you securely. Clovis, who will return after the inauguration of the conference, will get it to you. He is a suitable messenger, up to a certain point. No one knows to what extent one can trust these slightly mythomaniacal Mercuries. I trust him fully. It was also established between you and me, that in case we did not have an absolutely secure messenger, we would use the relatively insecure services of the diplomatic pouch. But this would be only in a situation of extreme necessity, because it is certain that in any case our correspondence will be inspected, censored, and used in the confidential reports between governments. The necessity of communicating with you in our private language touches me to the quick, urgently. I should reveal to you, everything, as much as possible. Everything that up until now I have not said to you, although you knew it already deep within yourself. If I am silent about something, you will not recognize me in what I write to you. The erosion of the trip will have begun to act on me until my complete disappearance. After, only the dreaming memory of forgetfulness will remain. Until that happens, if I am not frank up to the last drop of my truth, the risk endures that everything I tell here will be contradicted by what I do not tell. I must thank you one more time (and if I had faith I would bless you) for all you have suffered for the sake of loving me. You have given me the perfect transparency of your understanding in which I could see reflected all my obscurity. Your wisdom, your woman’s feelings made the very danger of love the essential reason for our love, and converted carnal passion into the religion of two bodies that burned in the same fire without fear of forbidden

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pleasures, except that of falling into the ashen monotony of tedium. How will I forget that afternoon in which after having overstepped the bounds of what is permitted, you fell into a deep sleep for various days? I watched over that sleep that protected you and transfigured you in the deep innocence of your sleeping body. When you woke up, I looked at you, taking you in completely and I asked you, “Do you see yourself reflected in my pupils?” “I see myself reflected in the way that you look at me,” you responded. Life is not long; human beings are not strong. You taught me how to live in the manner of simple people, of the people from the first age of the world who were coming out of caves and who were kneeling before the rising sun. You taught me to not think about tomorrow except as a today prolonging itself. You taught me to not fear the power of the final hour and to enjoy the happiness of the last minute. This dimension into which I am numbly entering is treacherous and is distancing me from you. It has nothing to do with the hours that pass, nor with the latitudes that are obstructing their successive although invisible horizons, as the airplane devours distances. I am traveling in the unknown toward the unknown without any other certainty than that of an act that I must fulfill at all costs and without knowing how or when, or where. This uncomfortable sensation of finding oneself tied by the seatbelt to an armchair (that looks like that of a theater) and knowing that one travels at a fantastic speed without noticing it. One cannot abandon the performance in the moment that one pleases, but in the moment in which it finishes and finishes one off. We have agreed on a determined code for the exchange of our coded messages. Remember: your nom de guerre 144 is Morena. Jimena is no longer here. She left to fight against the Moors. I will call you Morena again, as in our Window on the West. This name used to sound like an amorous incantation in moments of happy intimacy. Now it sounds like Andromache’s 145 goodbye during a very sad farewell, now that you are married to me not through nuptials but through separation. Something remained suspended between us. It is what I am going to attempt to tell you in these pieces of paper. They form part of and are the continuation of the posthumous papers of a man who is still alive and who will continue loving you until his last breath. You know why I am going to Paraguay. We have discussed the project of the mission that I have imposed upon myself. I thought that you and I should not discuss my decision to go to fulfill it. We would not have been able to do it with the frankness that we have always put into our confidences. We 144. French for “pseudonym.” 145. Andromache was married to Hector and separated from him during the Trojan War, according to Greek mythology. Andromache and Hector were happily married until Hector was killed by Achilles. Thus, Moral makes a parallel between this couple from The Iliad and his own relationship with Jimena.

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perhaps felt that what we most wished to clarify and reveal was precisely what slipped away from us with the most ambiguity and astuteness. We intuitively knew that the meaning of those confidences was found (and is found) outside of ourselves. Every story seeks its center, but our scales of life and experience are decentered. It is not a question of an essential misunderstanding; it is rather, a question, in my judgment, of reasons for life that are complemented and sustained even at a distance, that mutually illuminate one another for the very reason that they are different. I think that each one understands the reasons or unreasons of events in the same manner, yes, but from different angles and, in some cases, opposite ones. Each one of us said yes and no, in the moments in which each should have said the opposite. We decided in these cases to leave the problem free to the solutions that the events themselves forge, instructing us about what we should do. Had these angles been identical, the vision of these events would have imposed itself on them, confused and destroyed them. Geminis watch over our binary natures from different houses in the cosmos. Thirteen days separate us and at the same time unite us without our being fraternal or identical twins. This divergence of our minds within the affinity of our feelings is precisely what most unites us in a love with an impossible ending, as long as one of the two of us breathes on this earth. This planet, simultaneously marvelous and miserable, will only have some meaning while people like you are in it. Yes, Morena. You already knew it. I am going to Paraguay to kill the tyrant. Let this declaration by my own hand serve as my testimony, if I cannot personally give it to the prosecutors of tyranny. I have tried the secret weapon I spoke to you about. The tiny orbicular cosmos that I wear on a finger comes with me; the ring in the form of a snake, from the Count of Villamediana. I have taken it from you. You will not lament it too much. It did not even form a part of your memories anymore and even less so as an heirloom from the lineage that you denied as yours. Forgive me for this material robbery, less serious than the emotional robberies that I have inflicted on you without wishing to, and that even so are unpardonable and irreparable. It will be almost a judgment from God, if he really exists, that this ring from a dissolute aristocrat and poet achieves an event for the public good, the salvation of a country. And that it does so four centuries later, after having been carved by a prophetic silversmith almost at the same time that this country was founded on the recently discovered continent. For the moment, the ring is unloaded, without its lethal magic. I carry it hidden in the double lining of my jacket in its hermetic case. It is sewn to the lining of my destiny. The metallic capsule with the potion is in the suitcase, disguised as a spray bottle for baldness. For now it will serve to refresh my beard and memory from time to time with its very gentle avenging perfume. I

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could say to you now that the ring in the shape of a snake and its load of poison are me myself. The identification is total, and does not allow for any fissures if it wishes to be effective. There is only one path to know in reality what one is, what one should be, and that path is, I already told you, to risk everything in one act. The executor of an atrocious enterprise, stated Sallust, 146 should imagine that he has already fulfilled it. When one discovers a thought of this nature, fears, fatigues end. Even the presentiment of failure dissolves. I am mortally sick with happiness. There is an irrefutable truth: there does not exist in the world one thing that is inferior to another. Only power is inferior to weakness. I am going to destroy with my weakness the sinister power that oppresses my country. I must do it now since I will not be able to reach the age of eagles. Feelings like mine certainly have their madness, but it is this madness that engenders happiness. I feel deep within my spirit that incredible happiness of potential criminals, only comparable and perhaps superior to the idiotic happiness of tyrants in action, who have at their disposal, with total impunity, the life of a nation. There is also the pleasure of imposture. There is a heady happiness in the idea that one is lying and tricking an entire society for its own good, when it is accustomed to being deceived and subjugated for its own harm. At the bottom of the collective soul, the necessity of this deceit exists in a latent state. It enjoys and consoles itself with the most execrable infamies that are committed against it. This also justifies its fear, which is the only form of public conscience that exists in a country crushed by tyranny, degraded by misery, during centuries of suffering. You expressed it very well in the only dialogue of “political” nature that we had that afternoon in which we got involved in an argument over “just justice.” The inhumane situation in which the collectivity lives justifies its fear, its passive acceptance of the yoke, since that tyrant is the product of its consent, its resignation, its almost joyful acceptance of suffering and abjection. I say, “I am going to kill the tyrant to liberate my people.” But it is an empty phrase, devoid of history, of common sense. Because who can liberate a country that does not want to be free, that loves being enslaved? Only the free can be liberated. In any case, I am going to do it. I am the judge, the criminal, and the executioner. The absolute trinity. Assuming this trinity in its entirety does not make me blink. You probably understand that I am not speaking about vague theologies but rather simple common sense, that common sense that is the essence of deliriums. Common sense gives us to understand that that which is good is useful even when it seems bad. How could a story be told if there were not a virtuous antihero? I will try to be one to the extent that I can. 146. Sallust was an ancient Roman historian.

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I admit, I have said it to you various times, that what pushes me toward this ridiculous “misericide” (the execution of a miserable person should have some name), may be one of those stupid obsessions that make the human mind rave against the evidence itself of common sense and destiny. But these obsessions form a part of the most solid and pedestrian common sense. They are its hidden face. The moon has its own, invisible one, behind its back; but without that hidden face it would not be able to move seas or madden men, who for that reason are called lunatics. “Nothing destroys lucidity like the obsession of misfortune,” you told me with the greatest justification in the world, knowing me to be sad and full of remorse. You sought to free me from these blots that are the worst that a human being can suffer. You have said, be yourself, live and suffer until the gift arrives that will leave you clean of impurities. I have not been able to do it, and now the hour of longing that only calms itself in its final expiration has arrived for me. I rely on your mature capacity for intelligence, fidelity, suffering, generosity. The bad thing about these letters in the middle of a trip is that they predispose one to sugary effusion and verbosity that is the most flagrant negation of loving sentiment that is unsayable. Read me with sobriety because I am incapable of having it in what I write. Do not withdraw your confidence from me, Morena. Help me with your presence that always surrounded me like an impregnable wall. It will help me when I can no longer push aside the chalice full of bitterness. The only thing that absolves me, to a certain degree, is knowing almost certainly that you made the supreme effort to grant me the gift of understanding and finally accepted my decision. The accident that you suffered was not a coincidental accident. It was perhaps an unconsciously pre-meditated means of allowing me to leave alone so as not to impede my plans. How can I not thank you for this gesture that bears your stamp, in favor of my nation that you love twice as much as I do. As far as the other confidences or revelations are concerned that also remained suspended, they are now said and written. You will find them— you probably have already read them—in the note files. I left them for you furtively on the facsimile copy of the Florentine Codex that you have on your desk. May Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, the purest hero of the Spiritual Conquest, wind up being my guarantor. The omissions or eliminations that I announce on one of its pages were not done. What I wrote there for you is written, and I left it in your hands in its entirety. Final confessions do not allow for any veneer. They are the confidences that I did not dare to make aloud, because of shame, because of cowardice, because of the twisted inclination of my nature. I ask you for forgiveness once again. I will not incur more disloyalties. Concentrated on an iron-clad idea, the most innocent of permitted pleasures is forbidden to me. I must deny my own animal nature of

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man, I must continue being half a man, on the verge of converting himself into a complete and definitive human being. I will always hear your words: “I have been very happy . . . very fortunate. . . . I have much to be proud of. Too fortunate. Too happy during a brief time. I am now unhappy for . . . for the rest of my life.” I see your distressed head upright against the light of sunset as if you felt proud of your pain, as if you still were saying: “I . . . only I know how I am going to mourn your absence. . . . But far or near, I will be with you until the end . . .” In your face there was such a desolate air that I had the sensation that you had already mourned all that you could mourn for an anguish like yours, for a man like me who does not deserve your tears. I saw your eyes shine full of tears, of those tears that will not fall, of those tears that were going to dry behind your eyes. . . . As the moment approaches in which we must touch down in the disappeared or invisible city, my refusal to arrive increases until I feel almost nauseated. It must have produced a sudden deafness in me. I no longer hear the racket of the other passengers, the buzz of the motors, the voice of the captain who is giving some information through the loudspeakers. A mineral landscape flees backwards. A deserted landscape, desolate, rapidly swept by the heavy light, stained with darkness that evokes the gleams of phosphorus dissolved in the oil of black resins. A city seated on a mountain cannot disappear . . . , I think, unconsciously remembering some passage from the Scriptures. Asunción is not here! . . . , I hear myself murmur. After a violent lurch of sudden turbulence, the airplane is turning around a full 180 degrees. I feel that I have lived, worked and dreamed my whole life for this minute of the final hour. And it is thus how one tries to suddenly want everything that he has not wanted when everything is now denied to him. I feel that the arc of long-term trauma tightens its rope, which must be woven with the fibers of all my nerves . . . and that it shoots my being backward, backward . . . So intense is its impulse, that I experience the sensation that that inconceivable energy is transmitted to the airplane and drags it in a backward movement. I understand that it is only a question of some disturbance of my senses; or perhaps, more simply, of a sickness of gastric origin. From the very moment of take-off the food has been sumptuous. I have ingested my punctual Alka Seltzer pill. Plane trips have never sat well with me. I owe to them more than one awful, difficult moment, and this flight seems interminable. The effects of my indisposition continue, each time with more force. From the peephole, I observe a change in the mechanism of the jets. The flaming gases emit a very intensely red and compact light, like the light of traffic lights. It occurs to me that the turbines have stopped for a few seconds, producing the effect of jamming on the brakes, and that they have started

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moving again, this time in the opposite direction, as they do in order to slow down the landing. It is not yet the landing. The flight continues. Only now the trail of light is projected forward. The mineral landscape flees forward. The plane is receding like birds that fly backwards according to the indigenous legend. I think I let go a breath of relief. I prefer to return rather than to arrive. Or what is more probable, to never arrive. In the rural district of my childhood my sharp vision saw birds pass by in their migratory pilgrimages announcing winter. I threw myself on the grass and contemplated them with my eyes turned backwards. Herons, swallows, birds from the jungle and the desert. It seemed to me then that they were flying backwards. I felt like going after them. I followed them with my vision. I could almost touch them with my hands. I saw their little half-closed eyes fixed on their course without tracks. Their feathers rubbed by the wind emitted very small electric sparks. Without the biological compass that guides those creatures in their flight, I have only managed to advance against the current of events, against the tide of life outside of its natural orbits. I now know that “intimate and ultimate freedom” does not exist except as the dream of a prisoner, of the tortured one who wants to die and cannot. . . . Only the one paralyzed since birth can conceive of the perfection of dance; only the congenitally deformed one, the irremediably excluded one, can conceive of absolute beauty. The airplane has stopped going backwards. We are landing in the Rio de Janeiro airport, the next to the last layover of the trip. Another fifty conference guests coming from the Iberian American countries and the Caribbean (except Cuba, naturally), the Guianas, Haiti, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the United States, and Canada, have boarded there. We are now more than one hundred guests: women and men of science, writers, professors from the most important universities, businessmen, industrialists, investors. Also, of course, the great sharks of international finance. The Japanese delegates, another one hundred, will arrive in Asunción in a direct flight from their country. The crew has descended to be replaced. Before leaving the airplane, the captain has amiably bid farewell in four languages through the loudspeakers, wishing us a happy end to the trip. The sight of the two crews that cross on the footbridge is lively; a changing of the honor guard in front of the plane that brings us. The fatigue and monotony of the trip have been interrupted in the unprecedented spectacle of beauty and splendor. Ah, the pleasure of the observer! The Boeing painted in purple must have the appearance of an imperial ship, anchored on a sea bluer than that of Capri, with the African silhouette of Corcovado in the background and the sparkling beaches of Guanabara.

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Officers in aeronautical white dress uniform with decorative braids and laces exchange military greetings. They are followed by svelte Valkyries 147 in tight-fitting Amazonian suits and with fuchsia-colored berets crowning their long and blond hair. The Paraguayan Valkyries stand out among their German colleagues because they are blondes with black hair. Instead of the golden skin of the Germans, they have a matte and glossy skin like the Hindus and the summertime guavas. They greet each other smiling and throwing kisses as they pass each other. I think about Odin’s messengers, whose mission was to pour mead for the warriors who were leaving for combat and then in homage to the heroes killed in it. The delay is prolonged, however, more than usual. Clovis ironically comments that they are perhaps waiting for the representatives of the Eskimo villages and the redskin Indians from the United States and Canada. The indigenous inhabitants of the prairies and polar regions do not appear. Instead, a strange person has entered our cabin, sheathed in an old and long clergyman’s jacket, tied with a wide black leather belt. The shiny alpaca material, very dulled, is full of grease spots and mends. I took him for a protestant pastor, or from some other similar congregation. He is wearing a felt hat with a very wide and stiff brim that obscures his very pale face, from which his jaws and sharp cheekbones stand out. The long hair that hangs down his back, burnt by the sun, is completely white. Above the very shabby plastic collar his Adam’s apple appears equally prominent and bony. Hanging from an ordinary metal chain, a pectoral cross of exaggerated size hangs down on his chest. He has a dark briefcase that he carries in front of himself with a lot of care, as if to avoid any collision. He searches for the number corresponding to his place and he takes his seat in the row of seats in front of the one that I occupy. He is evidently not a guest from the conference. He is one of those people whom one would not want to encounter anywhere and even less so in this hermetic flying bell. It is impossible to disengage from the presence of this traveler. He possesses a very special aura and magnetism. He deposits his briefcase on the sharp edge of his knees. He crosses his hands over it as if it were an object of worship, or something extremely sensitive and delicate. It annoys me that our briefcases are almost identical. This indefinable feeling gets worse when I realize that we look a lot alike, even when his hair and beard of an ashen white seem to make him older. He is very thin, almost transparent. He gives the impression of a wax figure in the middle of his garrulous neighbors. Someone has knocked his hat over his face with an involuntary movement. The bald patch on the top of his head reveals marks from old scars. The 147. Valkyries are handmaidens of the Norse god Odin, who have the power to decide who lives and dies in battle. The term is used here to refer to the flight attendants.

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man is not perturbed in the slightest. Without hurry, without annoyance, with the tip of his index finger, he has returned the hat to its natural position. His expression is not haughty, nor scornful, or disdainful, but simply apathetic, that apathy of someone to whom nothing that happens around him interests or touches him because he feels himself already outside the world. He opens the briefcase, he takes from its interior what must be a worn Breviary or Book of Hours, and he immerses himself in a deep meditation. His immobility is so absolute that he gives the sensation of a faded silhouette, as if the man himself had disappeared in his shadow. It surprises me that this clergyman with worn-out clothing can travel on such an exclusive flight. Inexplicably, the churchman is here completely out of place although not like an intruder or stowaway. No one has detained him or asked him anything. He is simply a piece that does not fit in the puzzle. It was at that moment when it occurred to me that the religious man could belong to the congregation of the Mennonites established in the far confines of the Northern Chaco region at the beginning of the century. They have formed militarized communities in various zones. I recalled that the Mennonite colonies in Paraguay are very rich and count on official protection in some way. It became evident to me that this man, that this almost inexistent shadow, is a son of the sect of Menno Simon. A man of the sun, of the rain, of the dust from the West, in whose breast burns the pallid and fanatical fire of those Quakers from the desert, originating from Europe in search of the Promised Land, in no way like the Franciscans and Jesuits. During the entire journey he has not tasted the food or drink that the stewardesses serve in large quantities. He doesn’t pronounce a word. When they offer him something, he lightly raises his hand and thanks them with a slight inclination of the head, without looking at the person to whom he speaks, only to relapse immediately into the attitude of silence, isolation and meditation into which he is submerged. I expected him to at least drink water. He didn’t do that either. That man only drinks the water of his quaking and his trembling according to the Scriptures. 148 The same as me, although I allow myself the normal things and even some excesses so as not to raise suspicions. The Mennonite pastor must be very ill, I conjectured. His impassible agony was only reflected in his sickly paleness that the gray beard and dark hat made even more livid. I felt that the man wore over his countenance, which allowed itself to be seen scantily, the paleness not of a dead man but of death itself.

148. This is a reference to the book of Ezequiel which states “Son of man . . . Eat thy bread with quaking, and drink thy water with trembling . . . ,” which is also part of the epigraph to Roa Bastos’s novel Son of Man.

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The noisy local tribe also travels. They are returning from golden touristic trips from diverse countries of the world. Native well-heeled bourgeois men, chiefs and high officials of the regime read the newspapers or converse among themselves, shooting their voices like bullets. Their women, very bejeweled, perfumed and made-up, resemble models from fashion magazines, which makes them look a little grotesque, like maids on vacation who were disguised as their employers. They speak like parrots, all at the same time, in the infectious dialect of yopará, that obscene mix of Spanish that is no longer Spanish and a Guaraní that insults Guaraní, yoked together against nature. The spaces that correspond to them are filled up with parcels from which stick out the blades of fans, Venetian glass, jade statuettes, the feet of ancient furniture, ceramic pedestal tables, box-cages with dogs and cats of the finest breeds. One of the ladies, who martially occupies the row adjacent to the seats near mine, describes to her neighbors the new acquisitions that she has made for the mansion that she is having built. She picks up an album of architectural jewels, covered in vellum. She shows diverse reproductions of the castles in France and Italy. “See . . . Look . . .,” she passes her fingers over her tongue and turns the pages of the album. “My mansion will be like this one. The most caté. 149 This one . . . look. . . .” she points to the lavish illustration with her long fingernail polished cinnabar. “Julián has contracted a French architect, a famous specialist in questions of castles and Renaissance palaces. He will come to Asunción next month to begin the work. Our architects, ningó, 150 the poor souls, are hardly master builders. They are still too chu’i. 151 Why not tell the truth?” She extracts from one of her big bags a bulky package and begins to unwrap it. Various pairs of finely carved objects that jangle and shine with golden radiance begin to appear before the amazed eyes of the others. “What is that, Felisa,” asked one of the more curious and restless of the companions. “The handles for the bathrooms in our mansion in Villa Aurelia,” answered the one who was questioned with the false modesty of pride. “They are pure gold.” “You mean the doorknobs. . . . How precious.” “I had them carved by my jeweler in Paris. We received many important visits afterward. Powerful Germans, French, Italians. Last time a sheik from Saudi Arabia and another one from Kuwait. They are accustomed to these things. Moreover, we live in the presidential neighborhood. I am bringing 149. “Caté” is Guaraní for “elegant.” 150. “Ningó” is a Guaraní oral form that emphasizes verisimilitude (like I say or declare) 151. “Chui” signifies “small” in Guaraní (insignificant in this context).

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other silly little things. You will soon see, you will see. The greater part of the cargo is coming by ship, let me tell you!” The friends didn’t stop caressing those chiseled, vaguely phallic forms. They passed from hand to hand, lighting up the admiring, envious, false, smiling faces. A true gathering of high society on board. The stewardesses, acting like equals, participated in and enjoyed this golden moment. They listened, assented, smiled with the charming superiority of inferiors who know how to occupy their place with undisguised sovereignty. At that moment, the screeching alarm bells rang and the red alert lights lit up over the drawing of a bomb with the wick lit. The voice of the captain urgently ordered that everyone return to their seats and fasten their seat belts. The oxygen masks fall before the faces of the passengers. The stewardesses hurry to help the clumsiest ones who are not able to imagine what is happening and less so what they should do with those gadgets that oscillate before their terrified faces inflicting light flicks against their noses. In the silence that smells like catastrophe, only the electrical controls buzz in a muffled way like angry wasps. Evidently, they seek to detect and localize some mysterious flaw or artifact. I note that the Mennonite pastor is not in his seat. The mask oscillates before the empty seat. I close my eyes, ready for the worst. As if in a subliminal evocation, I hear the voices of the actors in the farewell scene of Hector and Andromache, in Euripides’ play that we saw in Paris, a little before your accident. “Goodbye, love, a long goodbye . . .” I indistinctly hear Andromache whisper over Hector’s cadaver. And the voice of the play-actress, rather mediocre, has nonetheless the force of a genuine tragic pain, perhaps more profound than that which the true Andromache must have felt, more than two thousand years ago, on her knees before the inanimate body of her husband, killed in the combat from which she tried to remove him, as if it were possible to betray or avoid destiny. The horrifying wait did not last long. The red sign of alert was replaced by the green “danger over.” The voice of the captain, this time forcibly amiable and sweet, apologized and reassured the passengers explaining that it had only been a case of a false alarm. Mass applause lasting various minutes exploded in the two cabins. Various exalted “hurrahs!” saluted the captain and all the members of the crew. The captain expressed gratitude for the homage and announced that immediately appetizers and lunch would be served. The lively and syncopated rhythm of a popular galop inflamed the enthusiasm of the elegant tribe that continued with their shouts and with their applause each time more energetic, accompanying the rhythm of the music. The bubbling champagne, served by the stewardesses with the movements of a random but disciplined ballet, sparkled again in the toasts and the cheers for the Reconstructor. The effigy with the enormous horse-like lip, pretty retouched on the lithographs, was repeated throughout the two cabins in golden

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frames and panels as if in a multiplication of mirrors. The chubby-cheeked face seemed to take on stereoscopic prominence celebrated by the sharp commotion of the women and the barks of the little dogs in their cages. The guests observed, stupefied, the indescribable racket. “This is the civilization of barbarity,” commented my neighbor, the Belgian professor Jan Kleenewerk, professor of Amerindian culture and civilization in Louvain. Eugène Ionesco stood up and with many grimaces and in a stuttering voice gave a speech that no one understood but that we all applauded like crazy. His work, Death of a King, is going to be staged in the Municipal Theater as one of the numbers on the program of festivities on behalf of the conference. I saw the man in black advance along the corridor, always with the briefcase in front of him. He occupied his seat again. I hadn’t seen him get up. Probably, in the middle of the brouhaha of the alarm, he had gone to lock himself up in one of the bathrooms. He was now wearing dark glasses that made his greenish and weak countenance even paler. He carried the briefcase with less meticulous movements. The pastor, I said to myself, has had a biliary colic and has freed his briefcase of some dangerous cargo in the bathroom. At that moment, something altered the course of and beclouded my attention. In some part of the cabin flashed a blue spark, and I perceived in the middle of the racket the hissing of a smothered breath. I turned my eyes and saw the silhouette of a person whom I felt I knew. Standing, she conversed with a passenger, leaning toward him. I could not suppress a shock. There, twenty meters from me, was Leda Kautner in person, with her back to me. “Something incredible and diabolical! Are you not to leave my soul in peace in this world?” . . . I murmured biting my words in a sudden attack of indignation and anger. I refused to continue looking. But I could not withhold my gaze. Refusing to contemplate a vision that we believe to be supernatural does nothing but increase the spell of its irresistible attraction. I was not sure that it was her. I had not seen her get on the airplane during the crew change in Rio de Janeiro. Someone could be disguised with her appearance. Perhaps it was a new hallucination. I saw her in profile, but a profile is the half mask of a face and hides its beauty or its ugliness. I did not distinguish her face but that bare back, bended in a bow, the perfection of that waist, also had a physiognomy. And that unmistakable physiognomy was that of Leda. I perceived her again like a silhouette of smoke in the moonlight. I discerned in those thin and soft hindquarters the spectral beast of the fearsome girl. I again saw in her the animal-woman in all its varieties of species and races, in its depraved innocence, in its natural perversity, one of whose characteristics was that incon-

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ceivable and almost miraculous ubiquity that made her be in all places, above all in the least opportune ones. The tremor that possessed me allowed night to enter my ribs. . . . Once again, that scene of fascination and horror penetrated me. When I managed to calm down I advanced along the corridor toward that apparition to confront it and deny it. I stopped very close to her, seeing her long and straight head of hair shine like spun gold. She was a step away. I could touch her with my hands. At that moment the silhouette turned its face toward me. She had no similarity to Leda. Beauty is multiple and no one looks like another. Only ugliness is unique and that is why it is atrocious. The attractive and graceful figure of one of the stewardesses with her uniform and fuchsia-colored beret stood before me with an expectant and courteous attitude, with a face like the ones drawn by the genius Dürer. 152 She asked me in German if I needed something. Her amiable smile seemed sarcastic. I denied with a gesture and returned defeated to my seat. With a nervous laugh, I discharged the tension that had overwhelmed me in front of that mirage. My neighbor, Professor Kleenewerk, touched my arm. “What is the matter?” he asked me sincerely interested. “Nothing . . . ,” I said. This light . . . this lack of light . . . this noise . . .” “Are you worried perhaps because of the incident of the false alarm?,” he questioned me transferring his own concern to me. “Not particularly,” I responded without yet entirely coming out of the confusion that I had just suffered. “What is happening with the flight?,” Professor Kleenewerk asked, worried, almost overwhelmed. “I heard you say, a little while ago, something like that we were not flying in the direction of Asunción.” I took a long time to comprehend. The Belgian professor’s facial expression was ruddy, almost apoplectic; his sparse hair wet with sweat. He appeared truly worried, frightened. “Do you suspect a kidnapping?,” he insisted, blinking a lot. I responded that I did not think it was a diversion or a kidnapping by inopportune air pirates. “What are your reasons for your being sure?,” he inquired grabbing my arm. I told him that evidently security does not exist anywhere today. Man is exposed more each time to terrible errors. I myself just . . . I interrupted myself, biting my tongue. I felt the necessity to speak, to say anything to avoid anguish. Professor Kleenewerk gave me that opportunity without knowing it. “There is no security anywhere,” I repeated. “In any case, on very special flights like this one, they usually maximize precautions. A control system 152. Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German Renaissance painter.

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rigorously selects and limits its local and foreign clientele. You probably noticed,” I said, “that this airplane has no tourist class. In the two lavish cabins, first-class passengers travel exclusively. In addition to the usual passengers are the guests of the Conference, more than one hundred representatives of the scientific, literary and artistic Western world.” “For that very reason the risk of reprisal is greater,” muttered Kleenewerk angrily. “To the extent that it is possible, they have taken the necessary precautions,” I said with the faith of the incredulous. “The tyrannosaur wants to come out of his cave, tidy up the appearance of his bloody regime, breath the air of the new times. It would be disastrous for him if the slightest mishap were to befall this immense intellectual capital that he has brought to his domain with the pretext of the conference.” I laid out with attention to detail the obvious elements of security, perhaps to unload my own anxiety. My voice and my attitude were sufficiently impassive to simulate a certain neutrality. “Read that.” I pointed at the posters. On the image of an airplane from the Air Paraguay Fleet on the oval of the national flag, a diagonal inscription in big red and black letters assures: “International terrorism does not occur here.” And the inscription was multiplied and distributed along all the cabins on the luminous panels. “I hadn’t seen them,” said my neighbor. “It’s incredible!” “It is known,” I said, lowering my voice, “that these apparatuses for official use have electronic mechanisms for the ejection of seats, provided with parachutes. One imagines that there are, also, laser detectors for all kinds of explosives and weapons.” “Ah . . . !” murmured Professor Kleenewerk without much conviction. “One never knows what can happen in these backward and primitive countries.” “The secret of the efficiency and security of these airplanes,” I continued, “like all secrets, is public and notorious. The rumor circulates, the company itself takes charge of divulging it, that the government of this country has ‘negotiated’ the license for the commercial exploitation of these security mechanisms from the United States government, or that they have already sold the license for an astronomical sum to a great multinational consortium of airlines.” They were serving lunch. Kleenewerk and I returned to reality. Following the general trend, we attacked our respective trays full of appetizing food and wines of the most prestigious seals. The country’s music continued setting its syncopated and rhythmic background to that slightly legendary lunch. “Look at the stewardesses,” I made my neighbor note. In the majority, they are German girls, from Bavaria, the region where the dictator was born. Tell me, don’t they all seem like twins? He himself has ordered them to be selected according to a single model and image. I found out in Munich that

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these beauty pageants are very particular. The girls are subjected to a rigorous training course and later hired with salaries as high as those of the most valued actresses of North American cinema. The dictator himself supervises these beauty contests, which are not inferior to the European beauty queen competitions.” “It seems incredible,” said Kleenewerk with an indignant voice; his little myopic eyes blinked a lot behind the thick glasses. “That isn’t everything,” I continued in a neutral voice. “Rumors worthy of credit affirm that, in fact, twin sisters abound in the tyrannosaur’s harem. Also, girls of a young age are adopted and kept under the vigilance of special nurses until they reach puberty and adolescence. The lewd tyrannosaur exercises the feudal droit de seigneur 153 with singular delight on these vestal virgins.” Professor Kleenewerk sought to change the topic that evidently was disagreeable to him and that tested his conscience as a guest of the Conference on History, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Latin America. “In reality, in Paraguay anything can happen at any moment,” he commented with an expression of malaise close to nausea. I responded that effectively, it was so. “Anything can happen at any moment, but never what one expects to happen. And what happens is always more unreal than one can conceive of, and that moment can last for centuries. The key to Paraguayan reality, in my understanding, is that you always encounter an impossible event, interpolated into the fabric of supposedly normal or plausible events. The existence of the tyrannosaur, for example. An infinitely mediocre man, converted into the absolute master of a country that has had leaders of extraordinary mettle.” “Why do you call the President of the Republic ‘tyrannosaur’?” “I do not call him that. The oppressed Paraguayans themselves call the dictator by that name for more than thirty years. You probably know, moreover, that the most ferocious dinosaurs that have lived on the earth have received the name tyrannosaurus rex in the encyclopedias. The Paraguayan tyrannosaur is also the most ancient and bloody tyrant of Latin America. And the grotesque and cruel nickname is not poorly chosen. I do nothing more than repeat it with due respect.” Clovis approached and called me over to the corridor. His face was serious and somewhat tense, completely different from his usual demeanor. “I have bad news for you. I just spoke with the captain,” he said lowering his voice and speaking to me almost in my ear. “Regarding the alarm. He related to me confidentially that he has received a message from Asunción. The experts from the Technical think that among the guests of the conference 153. Droit de seigneur is the term used to refer to a feudal lord’s right to have sex with a vassal’s bride on their wedding night.

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is someone, an infiltrated international terrorist agent, whom they propose to detain. They imagine that he is armed with explosives. I am afraid that they suspect you. Be careful. I will not take my eyes off of you. Try to be cautious in your conversations. There are hidden microphones in the arms of the seats.” He returned to his place. I saw him move away as if overwhelmed with the weight of something foreseeable and inevitable. I then understood the presence of those men with dark glasses and all dressed in the same gray, distributed strategically among the passengers. Some pretended to sleep; others appeared to read newspapers. It was noticeable that the stewardesses themselves did not stop listening to the passengers’ conversations. My good appetite had completely disappeared. I contemplated the tray with the succulent lunch as if it were the cornucopia suddenly empty. The lively and syncopated music continued to be heard. The marble cauldrons poured forth tenuous curls of smoke with balsamic essences. Lunch had concluded and the ballet of flight attendants endeavored to clear the tables, cleaning from them the most minute particles of food and leaving them shining like mirrors. The crew and light technicians sprang into action. In the spacious center of the cabin they raised a transparent circular pedestal, illuminated from below, that began to turn among the smoking cauldrons and the details of the horrendous scenery. In the dazzling cabin of the Boeing, the flight attendants moved weightlessly serving the coffee and liquor, in the middle of the wailing rhythms of the boleros that scattered their syrup through the loudspeakers. The intoxicating odors of the food still floated in the air. The passengers fully kept up their racket. The congested and apoplectic faces disappeared in the aromatic mist. The polka of the party in power broke out. Thunderous hurrahs and applause exploded for the Reconstructor, the Colorado party and the Armed Forces, the tripod of absolute power. A beautiful girl, stylishly thin, emerged from a grossly allusive huge seashell, climbed up the turning podium, and began to dance the bottle dance. 154 A bottle of champagne, recently uncorked, was balanced on the crown of her fuchsia-colored beret. The podium of colored crystal spun on powerful spotlights that turned the body of the dancer translucent in its flexible and rapid turns. The applause and shouts increased in her homage. The nearest men launched compliments of drunken sensuality; some strove to touch her undulating and fleeting hips. The passengers crowded together in a circle as if in an improvised amphitheater.

154. The bottle dance is a traditional Paraguayan dance in which a woman balances one or more bottles on her head.

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With provocative wiggles, and with the bottle as if screwed on to the top of her head, the dancer was removing her serge tunic, like that of a novitiate, fastened with a thick white initiation belt. The flexible contractions of her body allowed the tunic to fall until she remained completely naked, with no other attire than a necklace of black pearls around her long neck. From the spiked belt at her waist hung a small gold plate over the pelvis tied to the thighs. Sun-catchers made of the same metal adorned her nipples and navel, ringing with the excited crackle of rattlesnakes. At times, the black head of long hair down to the back of her knees enveloped her body and face as if pretending to hide her. The low lights of the spotlights made her seem much taller and more naked. The hairs of her pubis stood out on the triangle of gold. The full light showed that her waist and abdomen began to bleed under the spikes of the spiked belt. Red threads flowed toward the thighs. As if in a state of trance, her eyes closed, her mouth half-open in an intermittent and eager respiration, the girl was dancing without failing to point her tremulous chin in a determined direction before her. I followed that direction. By chance or joke, that point was none other than the place where the Mennonite pastor was seated, lost in reading his Breviary, without realizing what was happening. The girl danced for him in that feigned or real transport. Her movements were decreasing. With tremors in her entire body, the white of her eyes shining between the slits of her eyelids, the girl finally remained completely extenuated and immobile. She crossed her arms over her chest, petrified like a living statue, stained with blood. The manly delirium exploded in a wail of hoarse throats. The women laughed and applauded, avenged by that successful Venus from space. The bottle fell on the dancer’s shoulder projecting frothy streams in all directions. As if awakening from a painful dream, the girl passed the back of her hand over her forehead sprinkled with sweat, but her whole body was wet and shining. She pulled the sun-catchers off her breasts and navel, the pelvic platelet, the horsehair belt bristled with bloody spikes and threw them on the rug. She bent over herself to hide the dark triangle of her pubis and let herself fall into a seat. She folded her legs and curled up into a fetal position. With damp hands she pressed down on her eyes. The convulsive movement of the shoulders revealed that she was attacked by sobs. The stewardess approached her and covered her with a red cape. She collected the bloody accessories. The doctor and two nurses came running and carried her away on a stretcher. A little later, owing to the disloyal act of one of the stewardesses, word spread that the girl had died, struck down by a heart attack. The lady with the golden latches commented with regret: “Poor María Luz Noguer! I knew her. The innocent girl was from a good family. She used to dance during our private parties. It was her turn to dance her swan song here. She was one of the ex-concubines of you know who. He had dismissed her. He doesn’t hold onto them more than a year. For the

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Karaí, 155 woman ends her life at eighteen years old at the most. Each one with his own tastes. And he who can, can, che ama kuera! 156 What pikó 157 are you going to do? We, at forty, can still hope for the third youth. Two ladies from the tribe were seated in the row behind ours. I heard her tell one of them in Guaraní about another one of the phallic escapades of the Karaí. Apparently, the death of the dancer had stimulated, above all in the women, the itch to whisper among themselves the gossip about the aberrant intimacies of the Great Man, surely known and repeated to death in the sewers of the vox populi, always clandestine and malicious. The lady spoke in a foul-mouthed manner with great naturalness, believing that the foreigners in front of her did not understand the mixed-up creole dialect. I sharpened my ear in any case to not lose a thread of the Dracula-like tale. It was a horrifying story, an incredible variant on sexual vampirism. One of the wards from the nursery of pubescent virgins, a girl of thirteen called Purificación Capilla, of extraordinary beauty (“she seemed like an angel fallen from the throne itself of the Creator,” said the woman yoked in spirals of pearls, diamonds and emeralds) was the Karaí’s favorite. From time to time he came to the asylum for girls who had not yet committed any sin. The Karaí has a private room there. They say that he ordered her brought, undressed, and while he took his interminable flasks of cold yerba mate tea, he spent the time caressing her to confirm that the primitial gift remained intact. The lady said simply “he put his finger in her to find out if she continued being a virgin.” “When Purificación found out what was the destiny that awaited her, she fled from the ‘nursery.’ In addition to being beautiful she was very intelligent and resolute. She hid in the house of an acquaintance’s mother for several months, who coincidentally was the friend of one of my cooks, the priceless Candelaria de Jesús,” said the lady lowering her voice. “Poor Candé, trembling with fear, could not stand it anymore and told me about the girl’s misdeed. The fear passed on to me. It was a very delicate matter, my friend,” mused the lady. “I could not get involved and even less, involve Juan Bautista, whom the general had just named general director of the gold mine that is the Institute of Social Care. There, Doctor Godoy in a short time became one of the richest men of Paraguay. I told everything to Juan Bautista after. He passed the information on to the Secretariat of the Presidency. In a police jeep, the guardians of the asylum went to search for her, among them a nun, or one that made herself pass for a nun, because that asylum was a type of Good Shepherd for girls. That same night, the girl committed suicide taking rat poison. That is what happened as far as I know. My cook was imprisoned 155. Guaraní word for chief. 156. Che ama kuera is Guaraní for “my ladies.” 157. Pikó is a Guaraní interrogative word meaning what or what for.

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and I didn’t find anything else out. It was said that later, I do not know if it is true or not, that the Karaí ordered the still warm body of Purificación Capilla brought to his private retreat and that there he raped the little dead girl. They say that he was not content until he saw the blood run between her legs.” The lady laughed a little nervously in a kind of tired resignation. “These are falsehoods,” said the other one. “The girl could have had her period. At that age they already have periods.” “Eh, Benedicta,” protested the other one. “You are not a good person then! One should not make fun of someone else’s misfortune.” “I am not making fun, che ama,” the incredulous one defended herself. “I am only saying that this seems like an exaggeration of the gossipy opponents. The smallest detail does not escape them to discredit the Karaí however they can. What he does not allow is for anyone to make fun of him. And there was this rebellious girl throwing her cadaver in his face as if the miserable living ones had allied themselves with the miserable dead ones in her to oppose him.” “You are right. They say that after he ordered them to send the girl’s cadaver to her mother,” said the lady with the necklaces. “Candé, my cook, the security guard, and other people involved in the matter disappeared forever, so I didn’t have anyone to tell me those things any more. The matter was covered up and only the rumors of the foul-mouthed continued.” I am concentrated on the man from the colonies. He seems each time stranger and at the same time more transparent to me, as if his physical destiny were irremediably united to mine in a sort of obscure identity and complicity. I again attributed these crazy ideas to the special state of mind that very long trips tend to produce in me. The confusion between the stewardess and Leda, the bomb alarm and Clovis’s confidence about the suspicions that the Secret Police in Asunción probably held about me as an infiltrated international terrorist, have of course not been the best incentives for lifting my mood. The figure of the Mennonite pastor simultaneously perturbs and calms me. Little by little, in the stupor that I tried to suppress, I have felt that a barely perceptible thread of communication was establishing itself between us. That sensation has been affirming itself and making itself increasingly more natural. At some point, I had the clear and simultaneously hazy impression that I knew that man and that he knew me. The man with the pectoral cross observes me as if through an almost impenetrable mask with that vague look of a dying person who seeks impossible help in the eyes of those who witness his painful transit. When he turned toward me, I tried to look at him in the center of his forehead between the two eyes darkened by the tinted glasses. I only vaguely distinguished some spots like granules of dust or sesame seed scattered among the eyebrows and in the cheeks burned red by the sun or by fever. It

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seemed to me that he made a slight gesture wishing to make me understand something. He had not done anything but raise the pectoral cross and squeeze it for an instant in his hand in my direction. I seemed to hear a lifeless sigh escape, forgotten some time ago in some corner of his soul. The tremor of an eyelid and a grimace in the corner of his mouth betrayed his failure or despair. Only later was I to remember that signal that we used to have in prison: The little stick squeezed in the fist that signified danger. Perhaps at that moment the sensation of a visceral, fraternal identity of crossed destinies was introduced between us. I sought to not complicate this ambiguous situation further. I did not allow the slightest sign of my feeling myself affected by those signals to be glimpsed. They were phantasmal, because they came from a phantom or from someone who soon was going to become a phantom. I perceived his disappointment. He looked fixedly before himself again with the fatigued resignation of a private upheaval, like those that impede all communication. That man, that religious man, did not seem marked by the seal of any recognizable Church, although yes perhaps by that of a disguised and, up until a moment ago, unshakeable faith. I thought that secret symmetries existed between his skinny briefcase and my brand-new one. Among the things he kept inside, except for some toiletries, some vague and perhaps false documents of identification, and the thick ring with the flask of poison that I carried hidden in mine, there was probably nothing but a difference of form, of nature. I remembered at that moment what you had said to me once regarding Leda: “One has the right to lie about appearances but not about what is essential.” Those were the appearances of the pastor; the essential thing was hidden. That moment was when the strident timbres of the alarm rang. On all the panels of the cabin signals lit up with a very vivid and intermittent red light. And that was when I lost sight of the Mennonite pastor, until once the alarm signal has passed, he reappeared furtively with his briefcase evidently lighter because he no longer took care to protect it from some likely collision. Lunch having finished, the captain is announcing through the loudspeakers that the airplane is going to cross the border between Brazil and Paraguay and that in a few minutes it will fly over the area of the hydroelectric power plant. The largest hydroelectric plant in the world, he specifies, softening his voice a lot. There is a murmur of disappointment when the captain warns that at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet the passengers are only going to be able to contemplate the beautiful blue lake of Itaipú, shining with its own light. The aerial light of the sun is nothing more than the white shadow of noon. But it is covered and overshadowed by the brilliance of the millions of kilowatts that the power plant generates. I again return to my powerful Zeiss Ikon whose field of vision seems to flounder in the cottony fog of the atmosphere.

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“The reservoirs of Niagara, in the Great Lakes, that of Aswan on the Nile,” the captain calls out with a booming voice, “are small puddles compared to this lake of ten thousand square kilometers that you have there below. . . . The generating force of Itaipú triples the force of the two together.” The cavernous voice of the captain continues explaining that the enormous power of the power plant extends throughout the country providing light even to the humblest ranch on the borders. He has put on the voice of command of a military parade, swollen with national pride, while repeating the informative mantra about the turbines and the megawatts, stuffed with technical vulgarizations. No one understands anything, except perhaps the fact that the light from Itaipú never goes out. “It is one of the great works of the Reconstruction, inaugurated by President Stroessner November 5, 1982! . . . Barely five years ago! . . .” the captain harangues. A general applause rewards the captain’s nationalistic fervor. “Why this waste?” asks my neighbor. Immediately, as if he had heard him, the captain responds, making the cabin vibrate with the reverberation of the loudspeakers: “In Paraguay nothing is wasted! The force of nature is inexhaustible! . . . The light of the Itaipú power plant illuminates more than the sun does, but it does not go out like the sun when night falls. The nocturnal sky and the daytime sky are no longer seen in Paraguay. One no longer sees the sun, the moon or the stars. . . . Perhaps they continue to exist, but they are not missed. . . . The light of Itaipú that never goes out illuminates Paraguay in a perpetual day like the power of the Great Reconstructor . . .” New applause, this time somewhat ironic or incredulous on the part of the guests. That old voice of the captain, which sounds like he has a cold, worries me. It trips over the hurdle of an enormous hanging lower dinosaur lip that extends into a double chin. It seeks to imitate the voice of someone who infinitely surpasses him in the great obscurity of the night of Power. He puts on a cassette with the dictator’s greeting directed at the guests upon entering Paraguayan land. It is the same voice as that of the captain. The latter imitates to perfection that sort of Teutonic, Spanish, Guaraní dialect, with unclear diction, full of syntactical errors, but above all filled with ignorance, like the sound and fury of Macbeth, the voice of an idiot who wants to say something but means nothing. The stewardesses endeavor to complete the information without achieving anything but to confuse the native and foreign travelers even further. A corpulent and fat chief, a more or less drunk seducer, grabs one of them by the waist and stamps two resounding kisses on her cheeks. The girl undoes the hug with a very agile genuflection and a charming smile. The more curious ones stumble over each other and crowd together around the win-

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dows to contemplate the darkness of the sun and the brilliance of the power plant. The woman with the gold handles and her companions go up into the captain’s cabin in a group with shrieks of Patagonian parakeets. To remove myself from the monotonous but hypnotic effect of the flight attendants, I have unconsciously immersed myself in a painful memory: that of the interrogations and tortures to which a companion in prison and I were subjected after a failed attempt against the tyrant, twenty years ago. In the “operating rooms” of the Technical, nothing had changed. The set of instruments dedicated to acts of brutality, except for some advances, continued to be the same. The same old radio apparatuses were there to deafen the screams or amplify them to paroxysmal scales and timbres, the same chipped bathtub (that strange excremental baptistery), with the water up to the edges thick with filth, covered on the outside with crusts of dried blood among the spots of grime. In that era, the “persuasive” methods of the torturers were still pretty rudimentary, but no less efficacious and terrible. Those contraptions, the “purifying ritual” baths in water from that nauseating River Styx, the rusty instruments of that panoply, had taken thousands of lives and had broken as many others, transformed forever into subhuman residues. In the middle of incoercible vomit and a slow dizziness, the victim looked at the water in the bathtub full of filth and excrement, in which the body of a man barely fit and before which the next “submarine” waited his turn, with tied hands. The torture, in itself, is nothing but the continuity of the moral and psychological torments that had begun long before. We feel the fear that takes the shape and size of the face of the tormentors and confuses us with them in a demonic fraternity of mutual delirium, whose boundaries no living being will ever be able to discover: that hate of the tortured one, transformed into unnatural love toward the tormentor in this moment of absolute impotence and pain. As if among the echoes of an aqueduct that reverberates through the entire crushed body, under the skull roof on the point of exploding, the faraway shouts of the hooded torturers are heard in a reddish mist. In the total solitude of suffering, the power of the torturer converts him into the only and supreme master and makes the victim feel violated, crushed. The infinite humiliation of the torture is transformed into a trance of love and death. From this moment on, the victim does not desire anything more in the world than to reach the end of this surrender. The most notorious technological advance of the torture chambers was a small apparatus no bigger than a radio receiver. Perhaps they still use it, since its results were infallible. Perhaps they have perfected it even more. It was a precursor to an instrument of optic torture, less known than the “electric prod” but much more efficacious, even when the lethal risks of its application were also greater.

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It is a projector of blinding white and infrared rays that burn the retinas and simultaneously produce atrocious pains, cerebral disturbances, and a complete paralysis of the body and respiratory system. The cut-off eyelids prevent closing one’s eyes. A myriad of tiny particles similar to fine ashes envelop the black beam. Each particle moves madly around the nucleus, surrounded, at the same time, by the halo of a diminutive rainbow. There is nothing more terrible than that gloomy light perceived as if through a powerful magnifying glass within one’s self, embodied in infinitesimal filaments, in the middle of a pain that is not from this world. The tortured person remains in a cataleptic state, with asphyxiation and dyspnea, rigid and hard like iron but, at the same time, more sensitive to pain, to moral suffering, to humiliation. From time to time, they throw streams of salt water on him that make the wounds and sores burn, draining a bit the accumulation of the rays. The electrocuted person revives halfway. Upon returning, dragged to the cells like a bundle of drenched garbage, he suffers the additional torment of a burning thirst. One has the sensation of having been completely run through from the brain to the heels by the “black bone of the light,” the invisible light that makes darkness visible. I have never spoken to you about this. The memory of torture had hidden from me in the shadow of an involuntary forgetfulness stronger at times than voluntary memory. “You forget to remember to flee your phantoms,” you reproached my sudden and prolonged amnesias. Without a doubt, it was that way. From then on, that “black skeleton,” without my knowing it, without my concerning myself about it at all, accompanies me incrusted in my own skeleton. It only makes itself felt on occasions of extreme tension. It sleeps within one’s nerves the rest of the time, sure of its presence and latent energy, like a sinister larva that nests in the bone marrow. My companion, Pedro Alvarenga, 158 alias Pyxäï (Piquento), a young man of twenty-seven, the most daring of the potential assassins who emerged at that time, gave this nickname to the apparatus that produced the rays: black skeleton of light. And the truth is that the expression defined with terrible precision the beacon of the rays. Within the paraphernalia of the torture utensils, it is the supreme instrument of the Technical, just as the violin is the king of the string instruments. The violin of the rays is the true Stradivarius, particularly persuasive in the “solos” of invisible rays that make visible the darkness of death. And in the concert hall there were various virtuosos who could rival Paganini. From where did this marvel emerge? They spoke of a North American technician who came to advise the Technical in times of 158. The character Pedro Alvarenga may be based on a well-known Paraguayan historian, Pedro Alvarenga Caballero who was a victim of political persecution under the Stroessner dictatorship and who was a church seminarian. See Freddie Rojas, “Ayer falleció el historiador Pedro Alvarenga,” http://www.abc.com.py/espectaculos/fallecio-ayer-el-historiador-pedro-alvarenga-caballero-886456.html.

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Dan Mitrione, 159 in Uruguay. Nobody knows for certain. Perhaps it was Dan Mitrione himself who found his own death in a foreign land after having formed outstanding disciples. Pedro Alvarenga (Pyxäï), with his hair completely white before he was twenty years old, and with his feet more than ever eaten away by the electric prods, left prison almost completely blind. I did not see him again because I also lost part of my vision and my memory. Once, years ago, I received a message from him, from Brazil, in which he invited me to plan new “adventures.” I did not answer him. I was already fully cured by isolation and disinfection from everything that smelled of exile, of clandestine struggles, of the flesh in decomposition of the homeland on whose carrion the tyrannosaur feeds. I have asked myself many times what has become of Pedro Alvarenga, the courageous and spirited boy who was educated in the hard school of sacrifice and was an example of cool-headedness and courage during these incredible episodes of the resistance, the same as the Candias, the Solers, the Derliz Villagras, the Agapito Valientes, the Agustín Goiburús, and so many others, men and women, thousands and thousands of anonymous heroines and heroes who gave their lives in the clandestine fight for liberation. It takes a great effort, you know, for me to remember their facial features. I prefer to imagine them approximately, like a nebulous sketch, and allow those blurry countenances to recover their own features, their particular acuteness. However, I will not be able to ever remember the sinister faces of my torturers. A curious thing: one succeeds in forgetting them entirely, without the least hint of rancor or even those anguished and impotent feelings of revenge. I know cases in which a close friendship and at times, even the most tender love, has bonded torturers and their former victims. A friend of mine and of my mother, intelligent, combative and beautiful at forty years old, had a terrible time in the torture chambers of the Secret Police. She was the contact between some resistance groups. They did not let her go until after they had pulled out of her everything she knew about the clandestine action of those groups and even the names of all the responsible parties. After years of prison, Marina (that was her combat alias) destroyed, unrecognizable, old, and floating in the midst of a placid madness, obtained her freedom. My mother visited her from time to time to keep her company. For much time after, until her death, she maintained a platonic and melancholic love for one of her torturers. A little before dying, she gave my mother her private diary, which she had begun upon leaving jail. Those pages of a 159. Dan Mitrione was a United States FBI agent who allegedly taught torture techniques to the Uruguayan government and was kidnapped and assassinated by the revolutionary group Tupamaros in the 1970s.

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desolate autumnal delirium were entirely filled with the presence of the hooded phantom whose face she discovered in the flash of lightning of a revelation, between one and another tap of the electric prod, between one and another burn from the “black skeleton of light” apparatus, between the first and the last rape by the hooded man when he dragged her naked to her cell. The confession of that love arisen from suffering and hate, perpetuated like a feeling of salvation and transfiguration, is a chilling and moving testimony. The poor woman sublimated her love in the intensity of a maternal, almost religious feeling. She lived in total isolation with the fantasy of having had a child with her torturer. In that solitude, she took care of her child like a jealously guarded secret. In the semi-darkness of the room, my mother only managed to discern the crib of the silent child, hidden by a canopy of lace and shabby silks. So intense was her obsession that eventually we were convinced that that child really existed. My mother brought food and clothing for the child who was probably growing, and who at the age of two must already be walking around the house. When the woman died, the empty crib was next to her bed. On the patio they found a small tomb recently dug. Inside a tiny coffin painted white, there was nothing more than the femur of a three-year-old child, which nobody dared to send for analysis. Pedro, as the others like him, has probably already disappeared in the vortex of violence in which he chose to live and die, just as others choose the nightmare that they wish to dream. The last time that we saw each other in the Emboscada prison, in the ancient castle of Arekutacuá, he said to me: “If I escape from here, I will return to the armed struggle, alone or with the liberation army . . .” Pedro Alvarenga escaped and without a doubt returned alone to the risk and fascination of death. That liberation army was never formed. Bah! . . . Liberation! The most beautiful words become bitter like milk when nobody drinks it! How can you liberate a country that does not want to be liberated? Only the free can be liberated . . . the maleficent incantation resounds within me. Liberty . . . democracy! What do these two falsely mythological words mean that despots and the oppressed proclaim as their exclusive religion? After all, as miserable and corrupt as the lips that pronounce them may be, those words are the expression of some type of belief for which the multitudes and entire nations have sacrificed themselves and will continue being sacrificed by the insatiable Moloch 160 of power. Although it might be full of infamy and cowardice, that expression maintains a muted note of rebellion, enveloped in a strange mixture of desire and hate, of despair and fascination.

160. Moloch was a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice.

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I am stretched out in the darkness awaiting death. The mass of lead of the impenetrable darkness spectrally traversed by a ray of livid light, weighs upon me. I am, so to speak, calculating myself among the dead, whether in first place or last, it matters very little. But they did not bury me then. I have survived like another, in place of another. Perhaps in this and only in this is found all the difference that separates me from Pedro Alvarenga, if he still exists. . . . Perhaps all the knowledge, all the truth, and their final bedazzlement, are concentrated in that moment in which we take the last step and we cross the threshold of the invisible. I am still alive, loaded with many deaths for which I cannot pay any ransom, not even with my blood, because my blood will only serve to destroy a tyrant. The corrupt is only killed with the corrupt. Pedro is probably no longer of this world. Without a doubt, he probably has taken his last step. He probably has passed on to the other shore already, while I was allowed to withdraw my hesitant foot from the edge of that bottomless abyss. . . . . No, I was not buried then. But since that moment I survive in a time that I spectrally recall as the passage through a world that does not contain any hate, any hope, any desire . . . the same as this trip that lasts already a day and an eternity and that should perhaps be the grotesque representation or the premonition of the last stretch of my life. I want to think that the recapitulation that I am writing to you of things that have already happened and others that are about to happen is not a tale of feigned and carefree contempt. If I have survived, it has been at the cost of innumerable defeats, nameless terrors, abominable satisfactions, loathsome capitulations. I cannot consider this as a moral victory. But in any case, it is a victory: the victory of corruption over corruption. Can I call it anything else? I observe the pastor who observes me with the same astonishment. Between the two of us, the apparatus of the rays, our two briefcases, the hazy emptiness of twenty years. And it is not that extreme situation that I suffered in the torture chamber, a blinding vision, full of physical pain and moral misery that I remember best. It is the extreme situation of Pedro Alvarenga that I seem to have lived in those atrocious sessions. It is the one I am reliving now, at the sight of the pastor. Through the oval I have discerned the purplish rectangle of the landing field. The airplane is gliding already almost touching the cement track. Everything happens very rapidly, so that there are few who notice at first what is really happening. After the landing and the rapid taxiing along the central track, the immense Boeing has abruptly braked, a few meters before the control tower. A little further and it would have collided with it. They shut off the motors. In the silence that follows the grinding of the turnbuckles, three muffled blows resound at the front door of the airplane that is still swinging because of the effects of jamming the brakes. Rhythmic blows of a

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staff, like those in the theater announcing the beginning of the spectacle before the curtain rises. The commotion and disorder among the passengers increases to the point of frenzy. The violent and strange landing unleashes fear in the commotion of more than three hundred people. The blows are repeated more violently and urgently. At a curt and authoritative order from the captain, the chief flight attendant and the stewardesses rush to the board with electronic controls. The circular door, like the heavy door of a bank vault, begins to open but stops, barely leaving a crack for a person to pass. An armed man enters through the orifice. He opens a path among the human hodgepodge and climbs by leaps up the seashell staircase toward the airplane’s command post. The dense rows of passengers crowd the corridors attempting to exit in an indescribable tide of breathless and tense bodies, in the middle of shoves, insults and shouts of terror. With hysterical screams, the women throw themselves along the corridor where they are trampled by those who are behind them. Some roll themselves up in the thick rugs, others cover their heads with the packages and bags. The robotized door grinds and completely opens. Armed men in combat uniform with faces smeared in black burst in and surround the cabin as in the assault of a trench. The avalanche of “painted faces” with a team of dogs prevents the human tide from jumping into the void. The angry voice of the captain shouts through the loudspeakers trying to impose order. The stewardesses and officials summon all their forces, trying in vain to contain that commotion of furious and frightened people. Nobody pays attention to anything other than his or her own panic and hurry to leave. The armed men prevent any of the passengers from deplaning. The machine guns weave a menacing fence in the round opening. I move backwards and wait expectantly. It is always advisable to do so in case of a sudden commotion. Through the hatchway, against the current of the crazed passengers, more “painted faces” burst in. I recognize in them the Asiatic features of the mercenaries hired in Taiwan, famous for their ferocity and fulminating speed in riot police actions. The racket has become infernal. The Mennonite pastor is one of the first to stand up with a jump with his black briefcase. With an agility that one did not expect of him, he makes his way toward the exit. An enormous German pastor jumps on him and attacks him by biting him. The Taiwanese subdue the pastor with a reprimand of blows. They show no mercy to him with kicks and punches. They pull off his fake beard. At that moment I recognize him. It is he! Pedro Alvarenga is there. He makes some vague and tetanic gestures toward me like those of a drowning man. I cannot do anything for him. Against the turbid circular luminosity of the exit, I see that they drag him away, without his attempting the slightest gesture of resistance or defense. When he tries to grab on to one

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of the door bars, they detach him with kicks and throw him into the empty space. It is the last time that I see Pedro Alvarenga alive. One of those rapid and bright internal visions that sometimes suddenly happen to me anticipated what I was going to see. I heard that someone was calling me “Professor.” I turned as if under an electric shock and I saw Leda Kautner in a stewardess’s uniform with the fuchsia-colored beret over the brilliance of her golden hair. She looked at me fixedly with her eyes shining on that infinitely beautiful and hated face. In my astonished stupefaction, I did not know how to immediately react. Once again, my entire body trembled under the horror of fascination. Leda was taking an elderly woman and a little girl of a young age by the arms. She ordered me in German to take responsibility for them and help them to descend from the plane. She handed them over to me and upon doing so her hand brushed against mine. I tried to grab it, but her hand escaped and pointed at the exit. Hurry up, she ordered me in her unmistakable voice. I obeyed like an automaton, without being able to recover my speech. I took the old woman and the girl by the arm and turned to speak to that human or phantasmal being: “Leda!” I murmured with tremulous anguish. She had disappeared. I had the sensation that that presence, which had showed itself to be so close that it could speak to me and I could speak to her, so close that I could try to take her by the hand and never again let go, had jumped back into the darkness at an inaccessible distance. I looked for her everywhere with my eyes. She had vanished again. Would I relive that haunted night in Nevers in each one of its details of desire, temptation, cowardly terror, renunciation, involuntary resignation, intense and irremediable desperation? I ran my eyes in vain, one by one, over the silhouettes of the stewardesses who with rapid movements helped the last groups of terrorized passengers to deplane. The elderly woman and the little girl were crying. I tried to calm them down and we advanced toward the door. Why had Leda entrusted me with the old woman and the girl when she could well have done it herself with less risk than I? But to this question others even stranger and more incomprehensible were joined. How was Leda there? How had she obtained a position as a stewardess on a plane, precisely this one, with the Air Fleet of the Paraguayan State? How did she know that I was going to travel on this flight? The fact that the selection and recruitment of the stewardesses preferentially was done in Bavaria, the dictator’s region of origin, and that Leda lived in Munich, did not entirely explain it. I refused to take these answers with which I tried to deceive myself seriously. On the other hand, I hate inquiring, and even less explaining the ultimate causes of what is happening to me. In fiction, as in life, the smallest events are inexplicable. The mysterious, the strange, constitute their nature and reason for being.

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An intuition, however, illuminated my mind with respect to the first question. Leda did not seek to protect the elderly woman and the little girl with my supposed immunity as a guest of the official conference. She knew that that immunity, in addition to being false, was ridiculous in situations and places like this one. She sought to protect me with the shield of the old woman and the girl, transforming me into the image of a respectable paterfamilias, equally false but at least inoffensive. Should I thank her or curse her once again? We were among the last to exit. We began to descend the platform under the crossed rays of the powerful floodlights. Squads of security forces crowded around the airplane. There were various jeeps belonging to the president’s security guard and even two bullet-proof armored cars, with the motors running. Hunters with leather gauntlets restrained the team of dogs that sniffed the passengers who were deplaning with stifled and furious barks. One of these beasts climbed the steps by leaps and jumped at my hand where I was wearing the ring. A guard pulled on his leash forcing the dog to step back. I felt that the finger swelled under the ring. I took it off and reinstated it in its hiding place in the double lining. I put my bleeding hand in the pocket of my jacket. The pain of the bite, dulled to a certain extent by the thick ring, revealed to me that I was a hair’s length from being discovered. The shield devised by Leda worked. While we descended step by step, I searched with my binoculars for Pedro Alvarenga’s cadaver among the bodies scattered near the plane. Suddenly, I saw him on the side of the platform. With his clothing ripped to shreds, Pedro was lying face down in his final disguise. They had strangled him with the chain of the pectoral cross. The cross was completely buried in his back. The skinny, skeletal body had expanded in death. He seemed immensely long, almost interminable. He had his mouth pressed to the ground as if asking it if he could enter. I only managed to see the destroyed and empty briefcase, the crushed hat under the armored car. The patrols that guarded the cadaver forced us to continue advancing with the butts of their automatic rifles and their screeching shouts. The elderly woman and the little girl were hopelessly crying. I helped them to descend the last step. I bent down as much as I could, trying to see from the corner of my eye, for the last time, the profile of that face that I had had before my eyes the entire time without recognizing it and that now was even more unrecognizable since Pedro had passed to the other side of the threshold of the invisible. Gusts of wind or gas from the exhaust pipes stirred his beard and long hairs matted by the blood. I focused the binoculars on the Boeing, feeling the beating of my heart. But the airplane was becoming deserted. In a disorganized row, the crew, with the captain at the head, hurried toward the central building, carrying their dark suitcases with the phosphorescent wing on the sides. I riveted the binoculars on the row of stewardesses. Leda was not

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among them. The porters transported mountains of luggage in their vans, watched by the Taiwanese. I oriented the binoculars once more toward the airplane. Then I saw her, leaning on the handrail of the platform, contemplating the barbarous spectacle that moved to and fro at her feet with a pensive attitude. The wind made her hair flutter around her head, forming a sort of helmet. Her attitude of indifferent placidness disturbed me and made me sad without knowing why. She didn’t seem to suffer. Perhaps she was used to violence and terror from the time she was born. That silhouette, at the top, seemed satiated and peaceful, perhaps even satisfied and amused, as if her capacity for emotion were permanently saturated. I contemplated her bare arms on the bannister, her eyes half-closed and reluctant to receive the tenebrous light. The little girl, crying, pulled on me, and I could not detach myself from the tawny and immobile silhouette that surely also saw me. She gently straightened up and entered the cabin. I lowered the binoculars and a time disappeared that seemed to have not existed. I asked myself, rather, a doubt that came from faraway asked in me if I had really seen and known that girl at some time; if it was possible that I had encountered such a being. I picked the little girl up with one arm. With the other, I grabbed the elderly lady by hers, and we walked toward the resplendent glass building. I felt like an intolerable weight pressed down on my chest; the smell of the earth soaked in gasoline and oil from the motors cut off my breathing. I had never breathed in such a vile environment. The infection of an imbecilic rapacity invaded everything like emanations from a field sown with invisible cadavers in a place where no battle had been waged. It was the pestilent stench of victorious corruption. I find myself once again in the sepulchral city, offended by the presence of the Asiatic mercenaries, like spectral figures camouflaged as human beings, armed to the teeth. Nonetheless, I feel more like a foreigner than they are. The semi-darkness overlaid with the perpetual artificial light conceals innumerable and subtle horrors. There are enemies, criminals who wear a collar and tie, personages of flamboyant presence. One does not see common people, workers, the women who sell fruit, chipá, children who shine boots, rebels, beggars, who existed before. Where are those ardent political, social, and union leaders, the combative women from another time? Where is the young crowd, of both sexes, less than fifteen years old, that age that marks the border between the old that must die and the new that should exist, grow and live? Where is that which we call the people of the nation, tied for more than a century to voluntary servitude? What would happen if this nation “bewitched” by power managed to be pulled out of its abject spell? Wouldn’t it suffer this like a double mutilation,

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as the nostalgia for the great Father who watched over the country and who has suddenly disappeared by the prick of a ring? In any case, the atrociously savage spectacle produces a certain relief since clearly it is the only thing that has the right to exist here; the only thing that can be expected to prevail in this country as the normal expression of its monstrosity. The rest of the world is nowhere. There is nothing more than this region isolated from the world, immersed in its own miasmas and horrors, proud of them. And this is nothing more than a visible presage of everything that is hidden behind it. The little girl refused to enter the lavish reception room. I raised her in my arms again, I invented a name for her, I caressed her a little, I said affectionate words to her. She pressed her small freckly face against mine and smeared my face with her snot. Little by little, she calmed down and stopped crying. A row of nurses waited with strollers on the side of the room. I handed the girl over to one of these smiling officials. I noticed that the girl’s dress was stained with the blood from my finger bitten by the dog. I asked the nurse to change her clothing. “Don’t worry sir,” she said to me. I introduced the elderly lady as the girl’s grandmother. She also took charge of her. I joined the row of the guests. At that moment, I remembered the story of Purificación Capilla, victim of the tyrannosaur’s vampirism, which the wife of the director of Social Care had recounted to her friend on the plane. I hurried to recover the girl but the helpful nurses from the Good Shepherd of Little Girls had already taken her away through a private door. On the marble staircases, the official reception committees paid homage to the guests of the conference. They gave us our respective documents and luxurious conference folders, together with our corresponding room numbers. I read the thick silver disk: Room number 13, Hotel Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, which did not cease to surprise me. What was Don Domingo still doing in Asunción, at this point, lending his name to the conference sponsored by the dictator on the topic of civilization and barbarism in twentiethcentury Latin America? Women dressed in tight-fitting scarlet-colored tunics, with dizzying hairstyles and their chests crossed with the golden sashes of the presidency, preceded us and flanked us as we walked toward the gardens of the exit rotunda. Beneath the shade of the avenue of palms, which formed the dictator’s initials with their curves so that they could be glimpsed from space (a useless scenography), various armored limousines were waiting, dark and shining, surrounded by guards wearing hussar uniforms in the manner of the Grand Army. They touched their tall helmets adorned with plumes and opened the doors for the conference participants. A dull explosion shattered the air, shook the building and produced a deluge of metal fragments and broken glass. I turned around in a circle and oriented the binoculars toward the field. I saw that the Boeing was exploding

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into pieces. Enormous tongues of fire began to project themselves in all directions from the combustion tanks. Taken by surprise, the assault cars and the squads of Taiwanese did not delay in reacting. They began to angrily shoot their automatic rifles against the remains of the apparatus in flames. Hand grenades, mortars, and bazookas reduced what remained of the burning plane to rubble in a few minutes. I thought about Leda Kautner transformed into a wisp of smoke among the rubble that was increasing in size in a burning sphere. I thought about Pedro Alvarenga, at the moment in which the bomb alarm rang. I intuited him entering the bathroom and hiding the artifact on the shelf with ñandutí 161 napkins and perfume flasks. The ball of fire began to roll with increasing speed over the plain of cement propagating a widespread combustion to the hundreds of parked apparatuses. In the half-light of the afternoon, turbid with that light that was not diurnal or nocturnal, the immense ball of fire took flight leaving a trail of brightness and smoke. It was becoming smaller and smaller until it disappeared in the horizon reduced to the glow of a wandering star. The sea of waves of fire higher than the control tower faded and transformed without transition into a green and undulating plain. One could discern herds of animals of all species since the beginning of time grazing in the primordial fog. They moved about, blurry in the middle of the tatachiná 162 of origin, among the flutter of the grass covered with dew, under the sun that was beginning to shine as in the first day of creation. Through interminable corridors, I am trailing behind the bellhop who goes before me with my suitcase. The room is sumptuous; better said presumptuous, immense, full of goods in poor taste that is the distinctive sign of the Second Reconstruction in the style of the Third Reich and the Italy of Mussolini. Acromegalic architecture. There are two beds with lace and satin canopies. The suite has an antechamber, the best VIP type. I observe with suspicion this gigantic, lavish room appropriate for businessmen, the nouveau riche on vacation, drug and arms traffickers, and participants of international cultural congresses. I am one of the Reconstructor’s guests of honor. It has been difficult for me to enter the lavish hotel constructed over the house of Don Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the civilizing patriarch who came to die in Asunción in the house that the Paraguayans gave to him as a gift, as a reward for his intervention in the Great War as an exterminator of López’s last soldiers who were boys of ten and twelve. I studied the bellhop with a retrospective look. “They were probably the age of this one . . . ,” I say to myself. 161. This is traditional Paraguayan embroidered lace. 162. This is the Guarani term for a mist that covers northeast Argentina and southeast Bolivia. See http://microscopia2007.blogspot.com/2009/12/la-bruma-y-la-tatachina-por-carlos.html.

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“I am already fourteen years old,” responds the groom 163 without knowing to what I am referring. He informs me that the house of the hero has been conserved intact, like a relic, in the center of the hotel, which covers an entire block. I hand a big tip to him with feigned indifference. The tanned ephebe slips it with astute indolence into one of the pockets of his purple and gold embroidered uniform. His beret is fuchsia-colored, which seems to be the heraldic color of the servants in this country. The ironic frown of his lips means without a doubt to tell me “Ah . . . you are of those who pay when they arrive, so as not to give anything after . . . .” I feel terribly fatigued. I sat down to furtively observe the boy camouflaged in a bellhop’s uniform. I had not focused on him carefully before. Slender like a reed, he has a face of marvelous beauty. I could not imagine him except naked on a marble base. I recalled the statue of Antinous, the ephebe slave of Bithynia whom we admired in the museum in Naples. I don’t doubt that the emperor Adrian would have immediately taken him in his service as the understudy or substitute for his favorite slave. In his androgynous features, the characteristics of Antinous and Nefertiti are mixed. This lackey is both prior and subsequent to them, he has completely turned around the phenomenon of human beauty. His dark skin shines, made glossy by the tropical sun and moon when they still shined in these uncultured places, devoured now by the leprous light of Itaipú. He observes me from the corner of his eye with a certain maliciousness. It is his weapon of seduction. I have here, I tell myself, the extreme and ultimate brilliance of the beauty of a disappeared race, the product of the genetic slippage that produces changes but also preserves continuity and contributes to the perfection of the species, beyond the hecatombs and cataclysms, as if the mirror of human beauty could never break. This wheedling servant is the descendent of the most beautiful people that were in America. His face, his vestigial body of a mutant, take your breath away. He is a fistful of ashes from the ancient fire, reincarnated in this sexless being who grows in beauty in the middle of corruption. Full of life, health, but also with a precocious and innate natural depravity. He is standing before me, his arms crossed behind his back, like a little prince in a slave’s clothing. He is unaware of his origin, but knows that the universe belongs to him precisely because he was dispossessed from it without his consent. I have here, I tell myself, the heir of the Caballeros, of the Genes, of the Valdovinos, of the Talaveras, 164 beautiful and imperishable 163. French for bellboy. 164. Moral mentions a series of famous Hispanic heroes, possibly referring to Pedro Caballero, who was an important figure in Paraguayan independence, and Natalicio Talavera, a nineteenth-century poet. Valdovinos is a heroic figure from the medieval Spanish ballads. It is unclear to whom the “Genes” refers.

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like demi-gods, mixed in with the lineage of El Cid Campeador, with the indigenous warriors who wore on their foreheads the star of the Land without Evil. 165 A cynical and petulant voice like that of an old pimp interrupts my impassioned reflection. “Are you going to sleep alone here?” he asks me. “Yes, why?” I ask him in turn. With a movement of the head he points to the two wide beds. “Half of my body in one, the other half in the other,” I tell him winking my eye. “Don’t you want another body in the middle?” I didn’t understand him at first. “If you want, I can get you a very young and pretty girl to keep you company. You won’t be sorry.” “I don’t want anything. And less so, girls.” “Look, sir, if you want, I can return when I finish my shift,” he proposes to me with a cunning gesture of complicity. “For what?” I ask him, guessing already what he is going to say to me. “For whatever you want,” the voice adopts the intonation of a street savvy kid. “Since you don’t like girls, perhaps you would like to play awhile with me. For twenty dollars, I fulfill all your little pleasures. Some men pay me much more for some little tickles. Others, to take naked photos of me.” He looks at me as if seeking my acquiescence. “Undress,” I order him. “I am going to take some photos of you.” He did so in a flash like a gymnast used to exhibitionist contortions. He himself chose the positions in which “I am the most photogenic.” I took various shots of his face, front torso and from the back. He also wanted me to photograph his legs, buttocks, and genitals. “The old men are delighted. They say that they are the most beautiful photos in the world. In the end, a dozen photos costs you the same. Those you have just taken are covered by the tip you just gave me. Later we can talk and I can give you a price.” “Go already,” I ordered him in a commanding tone. “I get off my shift at ten p.m. I will bring you a whisky, or whatever, and I will stay. I mean, hypothetically, if you want . . . .” I look at him dumbfounded. Is everything in decomposition? Are there no longer limits between good and evil, not even for these young sprouts of prodigious physical perfection from the old race? “What is your name?” I ask him in a paternal tone, seeking an empathic attitude.

165. The Land without Evil (La Tierra sin Mal) refers to a terrestrial paradise in which the Guaraní Indians believed and which they sought during various migrations. For more information, see Héléne Clastres, The Land-Without-Evil: Tupí Guaraní Prophetism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

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“Odiseo Aquino,” he responds, unfazed. “I am the son of Ramón Aquino, the chief of the railway brakemen.” “Look, Odiseo,” I say, trying to defuse the brothel-like impudence of the boy without upsetting him. “I could be your father, I cannot be your lover.” “That depends on the taste of each one,” said the voice of a gambler with a picaresque smile, not yet completely corrupt. “I don’t think your father would approve of what you are doing.” “He could not give a fuck about what I do. He does not concern himself with me.” “Let’s be friends, eh? And I will give you twenty dollars for another little job that I will ask you to do later. I am not from here and you will be able to help me to orient myself a little in the city.” “However you like, sir,” his pimp’s voice becomes almost infantile again. “I live in la Chacarita. They are going to have a wake tonight for the terrorist whom they killed on the airplane on which you came.” “Where?,” I ask, disguising the pang of anxiety that his words have produced in me. “In la Chacarita, in his mother’s house, near my house. It was a great triumph of the security forces,” he went on praising. “They must burn all these bandits!” “I will call you when I need your services.” “Then I am going. When something arises, just have me called at the concierge’s desk.” I slip him another five-dollar bill. Odiseo salutes, martially touching his patent leather visor with his fingers, and departs with the flexible movements of a young puma. The self-confident bellhop had barely closed the door when I flopped down on the bed in a state of the most extreme exhaustion. Ah, the terrible shadow of Facundo! 166 . . . I am going to evoke you, so that by shaking off the bloody dust that covers your ashes, you rise to explain to me the secret life and internal convulsions of this noble nation…I found myself mentally muttering the first hexameter of Don Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s book, which they forced us to recite from memory in the “Argentine Republic” school. Three discrete knocks on the door resounded. I got up to open it. “Hello, Clovis.” “I lost sight of you,” he said whispering loudly with his lips closed. “Luckily we were saved! By fractions of a second. The dead terrorist had managed to obtain an invitation as observer to the congress from the diocese 166. In 1845, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento published Facundo: O civilización o barbarie en las pampas argentinas, a seminal essay that interprets the life of Facundo Quiroga, a caudillo (local chief) from the provinces of Argentina, as a symbol of the barbarism embodied by the Argentine gaucho.

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in Sâo Paulo. He had himself pass as a member of the sect of Jesus of the Great Power. It all seems very strange. Those from the Technical suspect that the terrorist believed that the president was going to be present at the reception for the guests. The bomb that set fire to the plane was destined for the tyrannosaur.” I was as silent as a dead man. “How do you feel?” “Mortally tired.” “I saw you writing the entire time during the trip.” “Yes, when you cannot do anything, you write.” “A love letter to Jimena, right?” “Could you get it to her when you return?” “Man, of course. I return to Paris as soon as the opening events are over.” “When does the Great Man receive us?” “They don’t know anything yet. Probably at the closing of the conference, or at any time. You know that your dictator is fond of unexpected dramatic effects.” He lowered his voice a lot. “It seems that you are abnormally anxious to shake the hand of your tyrannosaur. They will want the terrible impression of the arrival to calm down a little. The guests are terrified. Many have manifested their desire to return immediately. The authorities are trying to present the accident as a legitimate defense against international terrorism.” Clovis has not lost his equilibrium or his good humor. He feels as if he is living one of the most extravagant adventures, in a very strange environment. Very strange, he repeated. But instead, he notes that I am very depressed and he tries to encourage me with his witticisms. “I suppose you will want to continue writing to Jimena,” he hands me his fountain pen ‘that writes invisibly in the dark.’ “I will lend it to you. That way you will not have to turn on the light.” I grab it without being able to suppress a certain instinctive impulse of repulsion. It is a thick black pen, with batteries, but incredibly light. “Don’t be afraid,” he tells me, taking it again. “It is made with the amorphophallus root, a kind of millenary plant, from ancient Indochina. It is a souvenir from the Cambodian War, the symbol of the sacred plant in the form of a fish. Look at these superimposed layers in the form of turbot scales, the fish from the depths of the sea. The handle of the pen is rifled with veins that seem to dilate and contract under the pressure of the hand.” Clovis makes the pen turn between his long and fine fingers. “The artifact is alive and active,” he comments with enthusiasm. “Doesn’t it perhaps seem to be the well-crafted member of a well-endowed black man? I suspect that the taxidermist from Pnom Penh who made the pen did not tell me the entire truth. The good thing is that it is efficacious.”

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He turns out the light and gives a demonstration in the darkness. The pen shines with the bluish sparkle of a match. “Look,” says Clovis, “it writes with nice ink. The traces last an instant and dry without leaving prints. There is nothing better for writing love letters to a faraway wife . . . or top-secret documents.” He turns on the light and gives me the pen. “Make good use of it. I remember that the first sentence that I wrote with it was the sentence to my teacher Marcel Schwob: ‘The people from that faraway country gave the name torture to day and the name ecstasy to night.’ Doesn’t it seem like a description of your own country? I am leaving you. I must go to my embassy.” Clovis left. I turned the light out again. I took the binoculars and drawing back the curtains a little, I started observing the movement in the street. The window panes, opaque on the outside, allow me to see without being seen. Women pass by who appear to be wearing a headdress with the Muslim veil. I do not see children in this country of old people, over which the weight of collective decrepitude has fallen. Perhaps the children are also attacked by precocious senility and are mixed up with the elderly adults. People hug the wall as if avoiding the risks of the road where imperial triple decker buses roll by, crammed with passengers. Motorcycles and luxury automobiles pass by in the blink of an eye. The pedestrians, whose faces I cannot see, walk bent over, their heads down, obstinately looking at the vitrified slabs of the sidewalks. One or another, upon lifting his eyes toward the dome of the hotel (which in reality is a gigantic clock whose luminous sphere reflects the likeness of the Reconstructor), allow one to glimpse an impersonal, lifeless, inexpressive face. A pedestrian quickens his step dragging a leash. The leash collar is behind the man at the height of a dog. The hoop with an invisible dog stops and approaches the wall. The man pulls on the rope two or three times, uselessly. He doesn’t have any choice but to wait. A long yellow stream is projected against the black marble base of the building. I read the sign: “Agency of Guaraní Exchange.” 167 Only when the stream ends, the hoop allows itself to be dragged again evidently against its will. The owner of the dog loses patience. He rolls up the leash with the hoop and puts it in his briefcase. He rapidly leaves with his body bent over by the weight. I drop the binoculars. The street remains deserted, blurry. I remember that phrase from Stevenson’s fable: “The wind blew with such force that it tore the hand from the face and there was nothing there . . . .” Behind those hands, those silhouettes, there is nothing . . . there is nothing . . . I confront these shadows from the past and I discover myself suddenly more aged than them, stripped of that seemingly limitless time that was in excess when I was in exile. I, who lost while abroad my language, my 167. Guaraní is the name of Paraguayan currency.

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physical appearance, and my character, do not recognize myself in these people. I do not recognize the city that I loved in my youth. My life that enjoyed the sun and the moon here seems like something that has not happened. Asunción has also changed a lot. Cities where many calamities have occurred are mistrustful. This city is astute and suspicious of intruders and foreigners, above all, of transgressors of what is forbidden. I am trying not to give in to those small behavioral tics proper to a sociable community whose former character is deformed and degraded. They create a species of atavistic mimicry that I do not control or that no longer controls me. A similar thing happens to me regarding the expressive turns of my native language, but above all with the horrendous yopará dialect derived from it, which seems like the idiotic speech of collective senility, the ñe ë tavy 168 of the mentally weak, of an ill society, massively attacked by Alzheimer’s syndrome. This shows that collective senile dementia (a phenomenon of nervous immune deficiency, related to AIDS) is due to the degeneration of certain neurotransmitter systems. The pressure of repressive factors of the physical and psychosocial environment block and inhibit the mechanisms of reaction and defense of the nervous system. Neuronal synapses cease to function, as was discovered by Ramón y Cajal 169 from Aragon. The pathological element that unleashes the syndrome is acetylcholine (called the toxin of anguish and fear) which can generate a very strange sort of cancer of the nerves. Its principal symptoms are collective deliriums. Isn’t that what is happening here? For now, only the present and the unknown count for me. They say that where the unknown exists, promise also exists. I do not believe in it, except for what one can do for himself. There is no day that is certain for anyone. Perhaps with a little bit of skill and making virtue out of necessity, one can avoid the next day’s mishaps. Except that for me, the “next day” is a single fixed and determined day. The knowledge of when that day is going to be fulfilled is still denied to me. Until that precise instant, I must concentrate all my thoughts and will on the most extreme austerity. The most innocent of permitted pleasures is forbidden to me. I must deny my own animal quality as man, be nothing more than half a man on the verge of transforming into a definitive and full man. It has always been difficult for me to be tolerant of those who scorn themselves, lose their self-esteem, deny or hide in themselves. Now it is my turn to be all this. I ask you to be tolerant of this forced and inevitable humiliation of mine, of despising myself, denying myself, and hiding myself.

168. Guarani for “language of the ignorant.” 169. Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was a Spanish pathologist and forerunner of neuroscience, who won the Nobel Prize in 1906.

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I am writing to you in the dark with Clovis’s pen. There is barely a rectangle of watery, pale, insidious light, under the bed. I don’t know where that sleepy ray of light comes from. Perhaps it filters in through the window, although I closed it airtight. Or perhaps it is always there, tenuously cast over the rug, like the shadow of an electronic dog that spies on me from underneath the bed. It must be the reflection of some hidden monitor. I have not been able to discover it. I am writing to you, hardly seeing what I write. I hope that Clovis’s pen avoids the hidden detection monitors. In compensation, I have the feeling of conversing with you. In the darkness, I feel or imagine the strength of your hand in mine. I will cease writing to you for a while. I am drowning in this room similar to an immense pneumatic bell. I will go to visit the house that belonged to the hero, stuffed into the entrails of the immense hotel that carries his name. I knew that the house had been converted into a school. In the shadow of the flowering jasmines, in the middle of the dense aroma, I perceived the very strong emanations of two animals in heat, like that produced by the copulation of two cats. I heard the screams of savage paroxysm like the cries of two babies that are being decapitated. I was going to flee. In a bend, I bumped into the bodies of a waiter and a waitress, occupied in a robust and disheveled fornication. The sexual stench was almost palpable, repugnant. Privately, without wishing to interrupt their panting moans, covering my nose, I bent over the two-backed beast and asked where Sarmiento’s house was. The boy stretched out his arm, ill-humored and damp as if he was shaking off an insect and splashed me with thick drops of sperm. I was in the hallway of the patriarchal house and I had not realized it. I could only see it from the outside. At night, it is locked up like a tomb. In the morning, toward the end of the school year, the best students, boys and girls from the schools in the capital, visit it as a prize. Many of these students, above all the girls, the most attractive, begin their career in hospitality here, as waitresses, receptionists, “nymphets,” companions for bored men who are bloated from the heat. From this Sarmiento school, two Miss Worlds have already emerged and various Miss Paraguays. The beauty pageants are the dictator’s favorite thing; the honor of serving as president of the judges belongs fully to him for the last forty years. My grandfather Ezequiel Gaspar met the great man from San Juan who became a resident of Buenos Aires. He even became his friend. He took him to his ranch in San Ignacio and made him visit the ruins of the Jesuits, whom the hero admired a lot. “One night,” my grandfather recounted, “the old mason stayed at the Trinidad ruins to sleep with the prettiest Indian woman from the ranch whom I myself chose for him. They tied two hammocks with ropes to the shafts of the columns and slept there under the light of the stars. They returned the next day at noon.”

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“How did that go?” I asked the hero with respect, rather out of courtesy, seeing happiness shine in his wide face. “It was the best,” responded the spirited elderly man, very elegant still for his age. “I would have liked to be the Provincial Priest in the time of the Missions and live in that City of God.” “He was a whoremonger,” my grandfather used to say. “He couldn’t see a young woman without his immense double chins trembling and without losing his breath. He suffered from erotic asthma. He then began to talk nonsense and recount his amorous feats, very exaggerated, in order to plug up the holes of the present, judging that any past time was better.” It is true that one could not take all of Ezequiel Gaspar’s anecdotes seriously, because he was loose-tongued and marinated his gossip in devil’s salt without any fear of God or the Sacred Gospels. For the inauguration of Don Domingo’s house, he invited his friend and “Egerian nymph,” Mary Mann, the sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and various well-bred North American friends, writers, financiers, entrepreneurs, with whom he had established a relationship during the time in which he was the Argentine ambassador to the United States, and later as president of the nation. The inauguration transformed into a true national celebration with groups of musicians, popular galops, and fireworks. The horrible “Yankee,” according to my grandfather, spoke ill of Paraguay and tried to convince Sarmiento to visit the United States. Mary Mann returned immediately, disgusted by the horde of barefoot women, “in this country of savage slaves that well-deserved to be scraped from the face of the earth.” Don Domingo felt like a fish in the water and nobody was going to take him from his glorious retirement in Asunción. He was delighted by his coterie and the jocund festivity of friendly chatter, an art in which he stood out as a conversationalist without equal. He had social gatherings in his house on Saturdays that were magnificent and very well-attended. Presidents, senators, deputies, influential politicians, rich men, and patrician ranchers with their wives or their mistresses, intellectuals and artists, all gathered around the charismatic host who hypnotized everyone with his humor and inexhaustible verbosity. “Oh, the Eleusinian rite of social gatherings!” Domingo Faustino used to admiringly repeat. He officiated over them like an extroverted and affable guru. The refined intellectual, writer and politician, don Manuel Gondra, president for a month and a few days, the only one in America who dared to criticize Rubén Darío’s poetry in an admirable essay, embarrassed Don Faustino one night. “Look, Your Excellency,” he said. “I want to ask you a question, pardon my audacity.”

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“Just ask, Excellency,” responded the one troubled by the question, with a sense of humor. “Questions are the only interesting thing that there is in the world of ideas.” “Where did you get the phrase ‘Don’t shoot or decapitate ideas,’ sculpted on the frontispiece of your house?” “If you read my book Civilización y Barbarie you would have noted that the sources of that citation are indicated there: the great Republicans Fortoul and Volney, the two of them also solid and honest masons like me.” “Well I read that unequivocal phrase in a text by Diderot, published in the Revue Encyclopédique,” said the erudite don Manuel with a calm disposition. “Later I read it as if it were yours in an article in your newspaper El Progreso. I had this question . . .” “Get it out of your head, my dear President Gondra,” Don Domingo interrupted him; his low voice and his resounding guffaws resonated in the room. “Who has said something for the first time in this world? We repeat what others have already said. Everything has been seen, read, known. We don’t do anything more than try out feeble variants. Which is why literature is destined to disappear. Don’t you believe that, Your Excellency?” Don Manuel Gondra bent his head in a sign of courteous compliance. His fine and well-trimmed beard touched his white starched shirt front on which three diamond gold buttons shined. “Literature perhaps may disappear,” added Don Domingo, the ex-professor addressing the competition. But the green tree of life will always be green, as has just been said by Rubén Darío, the great Assyrian poet of Nicaragua, who is really named Félix Rubén García Sarmiento and is even half relative of mine, if the great poet allows me this honor.” Don Domingo Faustino was proud to count himself among the eminent foreigners whom Paraguay had the honor to admit. From Bonpland to himself, passing through Artigas, the Robertson brothers, the Swiss doctors Rengger and Longchamp, the famous translator of A Thousand and One Nights, Sir Francis Richard Burton. He named all of them with the familiar treatment that exists among old acquaintances. “The noble count and great Polish pianist Erwin Brinnicky is for me the paradigm of voluntary exiles,” said Don Domingo with sincere admiration, looking as if in ecstasy at Brinnicky’s daughter, the countess Malwida. “He gave his life for Paraguay.” He missed naming (Don Domingo lacked the gift of prophecy) General Juan Domingo Perón, and the bloodthirsty dictator Somoza, whom the terrorists blew up with a bazooka when he returned to his residence. He missed naming other generals and dictators, transitorily discharged, who also would

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gain asylum in the purple land. 170 He missed naming consular figures from Nazism, the Martin Bormanns, the Klaus Barbies, the angelic Dr. Mengele, called the Angel of Death, the tyrannosaur’s personal doctor, and other illustrious nomads, whose names I do not want to remember at this moment. Caged, they were carried away from Paraguay to be judged for their crimes. Not only the war criminals from Nazism. The heroes of the Great War were also taken prisoner in cages made of tree trunks to Rio de Janeiro. I thought of Ezra Pound transported in an iron cage to the country that he had repudiated and that had repudiated him. Curious destiny, that of these fallen archangels. They plow the skies of the planet, caged, searching for their prosecutors and executioners. My grandfather Ezequiel Gaspar, to whom I owe these reminiscences (I have not had to do anything more than verify the dates, the orthography of the proper names and add a few), was of course, one of the assiduous patrons of Sarmiento’s social gatherings. The taciturn state prosecutor, José Segundo Decoud, 171 always dressed in mourning, a pale and transparent figure of cracked crystal, was frequently present, before Chico Diavo, the murderer of Solano López, raped and agreed to marry his only daughter Cordelia. Doctor José Segundo Decoud hardly spoke. “He is an upright man who always finds himself tipping the scales,” the host used to praise him. Don José Segundo quickly retired without being noticed, leaving a halo of sadness and almost spectral elegance among the motley crew. My grandfather knew the story of the Decoud family by heart and felt great admiration and friendship for them. He denied indignantly, for example, the statement that the English publicist Cunninghame Graham makes in his book A Tyrant in Paraguay. In that infamous and mendacious piece of libel, said my grandfather, Cunninghame (his English pronunciation was unfortunate) attributes to the father of the Decoud family the million-dollar fraud against President Don Carlos Antonio López, Solano’s father. In those times, the elder López did not have so much money. “Pure calumnies!” exclaimed Ezequiel Gaspar. “The Decouds were an unfortunate family, but respectable and distinguished! I knew them first hand. A son of the first Decoud, who was the boyfriend of the beautiful Carmen Recalde, was also sought after by Francisco Solano and assassinated in a nocturnal ambush. Young Decoud’s decapitated head was found at daybreak on the door of Carmelita’s house. She went mad and died. Here ideas are not decapitated, here men and women are decapitated in view of all the

170. The Purple Land was a novel set in Uruguay that was written by William Henry Hudson in 1885. Although the purple land should thus refer to Uruguay, Roa Bastos appears to use it to refer to Paraguay here, since that is where the Nazis mentioned in this passage were hidden for many years. 171. Decoud was a nineteenth-century Paraguayan politician and journalist.

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world. . . . “Damn it! And everyone so calm!” hissed Ezequiel Gaspar. Nobody paid attention to him. It is the advantage of the simple-minded. The countess Malwida Brinnicky-Niëtzky came from her castle in San Bernardino, built on the cliff over the blue lake of Ypacará. Don Domingo made them bring her and take her back to her castle in the landau which he himself used to travel around the outskirts of the city during the spring evenings. The Castilian woman from San Bernardino came and went in the landau like a queen, guarded by ten burly stable boys dressed in blue. “My abundant slaves,” Don Domingo called them. They marched in rows behind the landau on their saddled horses as if in a tournament, responsible for the countess’ safety. The figurine, old and small, but beautiful and precious like a bibelot, 172 climbed into the landau smiling, without help, and disappeared into the intangible and luminous darkness, as if she were throwing from her hands fistfuls of fireflies. The countess was the daughter of the Polish pianist the count Erwin Brinnicky, the big cultural hero of the Great War, to whom they have not yet given the honors that that illustrious foreigner deserves. The count, a pianist of world fame, fled all hubbub and vainglory, and preferred to exile himself in Paraguay in the middle of the past century. Ten years later, after the war and the defeat, he accompanied Madame Lynch in her exodus to Cerro-Corá with Chopin’s piano. He was the central figure of her entourage in that pilgrimage of retreat toward some part outside this world. The disgraced empress rode off following her beloved concubine husband, the indomitable chief of the nation, the most stubborn defeated man in history. She could not abandon him; he was half of her life. She could not separate herself from the piano, the instrument that was half of the life of the survivors of that sepulchral exodus. She could not separate herself from the coffers in which was enclosed the treasure from the devastated country, sacked by blood and fire, that treasure that must be restored to the safes of the State when it recovered its sovereignty after the merciless holocaust. The count Brinnicky followed her with the piano. In the rough journey through jungles, mountain ranges, rivers and deserts, the transport of the piano sometimes ended up being more difficult and produced more victims than the passage of the heavy gauge cannons, of the provisions and, above all, of the hundreds of coffers with the treasure. These, at least, were being buried in inaccessible places throughout the hideous march. During the rains, the piano was covered with the sticky fabrics of the tents. But, at times, it fled like a rebellious vessel floating over the overflow of the floods. They had to rescue it, at the cost of many drowned men. The English engineer Thompson was the official tuner of the piano. When he deserted and carried

172. A bibelot is a small, decorative object, like a bauble or trinket.

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away part of the treasure, surrendering to the allied powers, the count contrived to tune the instrument himself, at times in the middle of an execution. “My father possessed a perfect ear for music,” the countess said with a faint pride, caressing the cameo made of sardonyx on which the bust of the count was carved in relief and whose face appeared blurry among the dark veins of the agate. While the count was alive, the piano had to follow. And it followed until the end. In certain situations, certain objects seem furnished with unprecedented virtues, almost of a supernatural nature. The piano rose in the air lifted by ropes and various invented apparatuses. It glided along the cliffs on hanging bridges, among cannons, boxes of projectiles, big bundles of provisions and the holy grail of the coffers. The great amber-colored bird soared, flew, landed in the new campsites, without any other wings than its strings. At each one of the stations of the interminable via crucis, the hands of the count, disciple and friend of Chopin, unleashed those intangible wings. The music flowed like a mystery of nature. The romantic sonatas sounded then among the Marshal’s and empress’ hordes like war hymns. The host astutely avoided these topics related to the Great War, but encouraged the elderly and tiny countess to relate her remembrances and to play the piano. She did it marvelously well. The genius of her virtuoso father had been reborn in her, except that they had to give her a very high chair, so that her arms were at the level of the keyboard. While she was playing, her youthful and well-modeled figure looked like that of a fifteen-year-old girl. Malwida recalled when she arrived, very young, to the city of San Bernardino, founded by Lutheran pastors and by people from German nobility. Those were the times of the search for Madame Lynch’s treasure in the lake of Ypacaraí. She pronounced the Guaraní name of the sacred lake very badly, but she narrated those nights of floating fires over the lake marvelously, as if she were telling a dream. The treasure hunters brought piles of dry straw and deposited them over the water, setting fire to them so that they would serve as lights. As if in a magic scene, the Polish girl contemplated the naked men feverishly probing the waters in the middle of the islands of fire. The only things that they succeeded in extracting from the deep and muddy bed were great blocks of iron, winches, pots, and cannons, sunken by the Paraguayan army in the retreat from Caacupé and Piribebuy. At times, rival groups confronted each other in bloody clashes over the possession of the nonexistent treasure. In the morning, Malwida, aided by her father’s theater binoculars, saw hundreds of cadavers floating among big blood stains. “They were the last combats of the Great War twenty years after it had ended,” commented the countess with irony and sorrow. Mad combats for Madame’s gold that did not appear anywhere!

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“Ah yes,” commented Don Domingo Faustino. “The key to any human enterprise, the most altruistic as well as the cruelest, is the search for a treasure. Without this mysterious key, the temptation of utopia would not have existed, empires would not have been built, religions would not have emerged, nor the great art of all times. The history itself of humanity would have been seriously flat and boring. What happens is that at times certain great men, artists, warriors, religious apostles, and illustrious government officials die and take to the tomb the brilliance of El Dorado that was living in them without their knowing it . . .” An attempt at applause insinuated itself somewhere. “Silence, damn it! . . . We are not in a chicken coop . . . ,” boomed Don Domingo Faustino’s uncontainable roar of anger, shooting daggers at the ignorant and coarse flock that flooded the room. In the absolute silence that was produced, even the gnats seemed to buzz in a humbled whisper. On the high chairs, the ladies, barefoot, rocked their feet, their toes full of rings incrusted with chrysolite. “Wow,” said Don Domingo in a conciliatory fashion. “I see fireflies fly over the feet of the ladies, who are like barefoot Carmelites . . .” Everyone celebrated the host’s witticism with brazen laughter, without understanding it in the least. “This Don Domingo, for God’s sake, always so funny and affectionate…Comparing us to the Carmelites, for God’s sake!” one of the webfooted ladies ingratiated herself, making her pedestrian rings shine in the reflections of the candelabra. In a fit of fine irony, but cruel with herself, Malwida Brinnicky-Niëtzsky recounted the story of Chopin’s piano that Lynch had ordered purchased in a Sotheby’s auction. “My father traveled to London to inspect the instrument. He maintained,” said Malwida with a childlike voice, “that the piano was not Chopin’s. It was a fraud concocted by the lad Cándido Bareiro, in charge of business in Paris. In any case, my father said, the piano had a good sound. Without saying anything to Madame Lynch, so as not to disillusion her, he brought the instrument to Asunción. My good father did not even remotely suspect the destiny that was waiting for him. Thus, Chopin’s false piano was authentic for Madame Lynch and ended up being fantastic for the inhabitants of the region, survivors of the war, who had never seen a piano or knew what the strange instrument abandoned in the amphitheater of Cerro-Corá was. Many years later, they told me that the Indians of Amambay transported the piano to the peak of their sacred hill and transformed it into an object of worship in their ritual ceremonies.” “Ah, Paraguay . . . my South American Poland,” murmured the countess, greatly agitated deep within her soul; one could hear it clearly in the silence that fell over the gathering. The dark ribbons of the cameo that hung on her

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alabaster neck had become very tight. One could see her blue veins throbbing with rapid beats under them. She softly lowered the cover of the piano and supported her head on it as if she had fallen into a faint or a deep and painful meditation. After a few minutes the countess recovered, she dried her damp eyes with a lace handkerchief and set about playing her favorite polonaise until the end with incredible energy. The tight ribbons of the cameo made the pin come off and the likeness of the count rolled over the rug with dark sparkles. Don Domingo approached, picked up the piece of jewelry as if it were a sacred relic, and handed it to the countess. She gave a soft kiss to the image and fastened the cameo to her throat again. Clearer and more real were Malwida’s memories of Elisabeth FosterNietzsche, the sister of the author of Zarathustra, who arrived in San Bernardino in 1886. “During five years at my house,” Malwida said with her tremulous and cascading voice, “Elisabeth suffered various attacks of anger about her brother’s manuscripts in which he insulted his mother and sister. Like a possessed woman, Elisabeth dedicated herself for hours to correcting, crossing out, falsifying, and even ripping out pages of the manuscripts.” The countess remembered that Elisabeth Foster-Nietzsche brought the drafts of Ecce Homo, which would be transformed into one of the posthumous works by Friedrich Wilhelm. She recounted that Father Fidel Maíz, who used to visit her in her castle in San Bernardino, read that manuscript. The priest, ex-prosecutor of the blood court, was the promoter of the idea of exalting Solano López as the Paraguayan Christ. The prediction fulfilled itself with López’s crucifixion at Cerro-Corá by the Brazilians. The countess related that Father Maíz had exclaimed, “The great German philosopher understood and portrayed Solano López very well in his autobiography, without knowing him. . . . Only a man who called himself the Crucified One could do it . . .” In another one of her social gatherings, picking up the loose threads of the fabric that she was spinning like a fantastic story without a beginning or end, the countess related that Maíz had been getting carried away by an idea that was tormenting him. “The Superman!” he said. “The homo viator 173 . . . the man of the vía crucis 174 who assumes his destiny. . . ! The suicide of God in the Golgotha. . . . Mr. Nietzsche understood very well what happened in Paraguay, a country with which he was not familiar. He divined the mystic and patriotic impulse that led me, a poor priest from a country in ruins, from a Church in ruins, to proclaim Solano López, between the temporal and the eternal, the Paraguayan Christ. . . . There is only one True Christ, one who is 173. This is Latin for “traveling man.” 174. Latin, literally meaning the road of the cross, but used as a religious reference for Stations of the Cross.

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both God and Man. But the human Christ is reproduced in all men who sacrifice themselves for the redemption of their people. Solano was the Paraguayan Christ sacrificed at Cerro-Corá.” The countess wrote to Lou Andréas von Salomé, Nietzsche’s last lover. Malwida did not know Lou, and Lou mixed her up with Malwida von Meysenburg in the beginning. But from this initial muddle, a close friendship between the two would arise. The countess, at the time in the flower of youth and intelligence, traveled to Europe. She was very worried about the fate of Nietzsche’s manuscripts. She visited Lou Andréas Salomé and told her what had happened in San Bernardino, begging her to intervene to prevent the shameful robbery of a genius by his own mother and sister. Lou showed her the correspondence that she had maintained with Friedrich Wilhem, and confidentially recounted the motives for her rupture with him because of the violent quarrel that arose between Nietzsche and Wagner. In Triebschen, near the lake of the Four Cantons, Mr. and Mrs. Wagner had embraced the unstable Friedrich Wilhem with cordiality and affection. But the latter was hopelessly in love with Cósima Listz, daughter of Franz Listz and wife of Richard Wagner. It was one of his frequent coups de foudre. 175 Soon the conflict exploded given the tremendous character of the two masculine protagonists. “One should not forget,” said Lou to Malwida, “that Nietzsche and Wagner gave life, between the two of them, in ideas and in music, to the myth of the Superman after the death of God.” Richard threw his disloyalty into Friedrich Wilhem’s face. The latter defended himself, affirming that his feelings toward Cósima were of the purest admiration and friendship. But the most sublimated platonic love ceases to be just that when the beloved is the wife of an also admired and respected friend and when this friend becomes the most detested enemy. Nietzsche’s “practical” philosophy (he himself wrote it in one of his books) resided in the axiom that when he didn’t find what he needed, he should obtain it in any way possible, albeit artificially, through falsification or invention, even at the cost of others’ pain. He thus invented the sophism of the “free spirits.” He wanted to make Cósima a “free spirit”; that is, he wanted to separate her from Richard Wagner and enslave her under his powerful will as his platonic lover. Friedrich Wilhelm attempted a final crafty blow. Under the pseudonym of Dionysius, the old Hellenic god whom he had converted into a prophet, he sent a delirious message to Cósima. The text of the clandestine note said, “Ariadne, I love you! . . .” Cósima and Richard told him to go to hell. Friedrich Wilhelm began to attack Wagner furiously. Wagner went from hero to traitor in Nietzsche’s mythology, since Nietzsche was passionate about Dionysius, while the composer of the Nibelungs declared himself in 175. Love-at-first sight in French.

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favor of Apollo, and began to conceive his music inspired in Humanism and Christian morals, based on the idea of compassion. “You are also a loser . . .” was the last insult that Nietzsche launched at Wagner over his love for Cósima-Ariadne. He continued loving her desperately, but could no longer get to her. The thread of the labyrinth split into a thousand pieces. Friedrich Wilhelm collapsed into a tormented crisis. The mental collapse did not delay in sinking that ingenious mind, the most elevated of the century, into the definitive night of madness. The death of God, extolled by Nietzsche, was nothing more than the death of the man, victim of his own furies. “My dear Malwida,” Lou said to her, squeezing her in a strong embrace that made her soar in the air. “I cannot do anything in this war of phantoms.” Lou Andréas Salomé, the platonic lover carnally passionate with so many famous men, was there, beautiful, tall, stunning. The small and generous Malwida contemplated her as if she were the image itself of Eros, intangible, ethereal, eternal. “In a level-headed woman, sex reaches the maximum spirituality that is denied to hunter-man,” wrote Malwida in her Intimate Journal. Malwida succeeded in convincing Lou to visit her in Paraguay. She managed to bring her to her castle in San Bernardino. They visited the rural zones. They arrived at the poorest ranches where they were received with the generosity of absolute misery. Lou was left bewitched by the vital magnetism of the land, of those barefoot and faceless women, covered by a dark and ragged cloak, but whose feet were their true physiognomy, dragging on the ground and showing what they were from head to toe. “Here in Paraguay,” Malwida had said to her, “women endlessly reconstruct what the men destroy . . .” Malwida and Lou were received in the palace by General Bernardino Caballero, war hero, at that time president of the Republic. They explained to him the dramatic situation of the manuscripts and asked for his intervention. Don Bernardino had never read a book. He didn’t have the slightest idea of who that German genius was of whom the women spoke with an almost religious devotion. General Caballero was not a cultured hero. He was something much better. He was a human hero, generous and charismatic. He ordered the authorities to intervene immediately. Foster could not do anything in defense of the supposed legal rights of his wife over the unpublished work. Elisabeth was forced to hand over the manuscripts to a judge. The judge returned them to the Tribunal of Weimar, the city in which Nietzsche found himself, paralyzed, and where a little later he was to die. Thus, the manuscripts of Ecce Homo were saved in Paraguay, the country of lost causes. “I cannot forget your Paraguayan women covered with that cape similar to the chador of Persian women,” wrote Lou to Malwida, upon her return. “I did not see anything of them except their bare feet, but those feet are their true face. In those feet, the history of a country lives and walks. Those

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women are like Janus with two-faced feet. They take a step toward the future, another one toward the past, in a present that is immobile for them.” (I am trying to transcribe by memory the words of Lou Andréas Salomé and Malwida Brinnicky-Niëtzsky. I know that they will move you. From such different angles, the life experiences of these two people from ancient and upper class European culture coincide in a certain way with yours when you were in Paraguay. You lived among the village women and that elderly woman from Guairá taught you to sleep awake . . .) “Your chateau 176 on the sacred lake of the Indians is beautiful,” said Lou’s letter to Malwida, in another paragraph. “It has a certain similarity to the castle of Duino where my poor Rainer María wrote his famous Elegies.” “I will not be able to forget either,” concluded the letter, “the figure of the legendary president Bernardino Caballero, whom you introduced to me in that Mudejar palace that seemed to have emerged from the fantasy of a follower of Allah. Nobody ever will know that that uncultured warrior saved those manuscripts that the world will rave about. “Herrn Bernardin [sic] is one of the most beautiful men I have seen in my life,” whined Lou from far away with her heart in perpetual amorous combustion. He could personify one of the mythical characters of Wagner. It does not surprise me that when they took him prisoner in a cage and they had him on exhibition on the Main Square in Río de Janeiro, the Brazilian women of all social classes and even the wife herself of the emperor came to contemplate that ‘monster’ of masculine beauty in amazement . . .” Throughout more than a century, the history of the Great War (called the Triple Alliance) continues to be the subject of controversy and discussions, arguments and interminable sorrows. Although books that could fill entire libraries have been written about it, it continues to be totally unknown. The official history of the victors has done nothing but obscure it even more and make it unbelievable, like a tragedy that did not occur and could not have occurred. There is, nonetheless, a foreign witness, in a certain way neutral, who raised one of the corners of the veil over the tragedy with humor and fantasy: Sir Richard Francis Burton, the most famous translator of The Thousand and One Nights, tireless traveler, adventurer of the breed of the Marco Polos, hero of the British colonial campaign in Egypt, author of almost one hundred books, half of which his wife, Lady Effie destroyed and burned with implacable anger. The Book of the Sword and Anatomy of Melancholy are books that will endure like the books of Pliny, Joyce, or Jorge Luis Borges, despite their distinct genres, nature, length and the different eras in which they were conceived and written. They are part of the Single Book that continues to be 176. “Castle” in French.

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written throughout the ages by the same author with different names. One writes so that those individuals who come after will read them. Sir Richard was in Paraguay at the beginning and end of the battle. He saw the end of the war over the land. He became the friend of Francisco Solano López and Eliza Alice Lynch. He spoke with, met, and interviewed the leaders of the allied forces, with whom he attempted to negotiate peace on his own, although this ended in complete failure. Toward the end of 1870, a little after the end of the war but not of the destruction and sacking of the country under the forces of occupation, Richard Francis Burton published his book Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay, very inferior to his other books in literary quality and creative magic, but superior to all the others as a chronicle of the holocaust of a people. “A nation that is going to disappear without traces,” affirms the author in the preface. With picturesque and imaginative language, he relates episodes of life in López’s camps and contributes elements about the debated and never clarified end of the conflict not dealt with by professional historians. From the rough places of the mountain range, he used his telescope to follow the final combats between a fistful of spectral and bearded pygmies armed with lances made of tacuara, 177 against super-armed squadrons from the Brazilian cavalry, supported by heavy gauge artillery. When Burton arrived, on his second visit, only women, the elderly, children, and disabled people survived in Paraguay. Where did Solano López still get those troops from that Burton saw fighting with such valor and heroism? Those combats were reproduced everywhere, in the middle of mirages and whirlwinds of dust in the desert, in labyrinthine jungles, in the impassable mountain ranges, under the iron sun of summer, under the torrential downpours of winter. “I had the impression,” says Burton in one of his Letters, “that a single and unique handful of men appeared and disappeared in all places at once. Those pygmies were not adult men. They were nothing more than pubescent boys that had stuck to their faces bristly beards “fabricated” with horse manes and tails with the indestructible latex made of mangaisy (in Guaraní in the original). 178 Many of these boys were accompanied by their mothers, disguised in the same way. These two thousand boys who were ‘left over,’ were going to be crushed by the hooves of the allied horses. This was so ordered in a famous proclamation, toward the end of the war, by Colonel Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the successor to Bartolomé Mitre in the presidency and director of the war.” Burton transcribed the proclamation in the

177. A type of bamboo 178. This is a Guarani word for a type of resin.

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appendix. He left in Spanish the word “sobraban,” 179 referring to the boysoldiers that were to be crushed by the hooves of the allied cavalry. At times, one doesn’t know if Sir Richard is relating what he really saw, or if he is translating into words, necessarily poorer than images, and thus grossly deformed, the delirious visions of Cándido López, the painter of the tragedy. Burton saw and admired those paintings that were coming “from life” but also from a vision from beyond the grave; he even saw Cándido López paint, seated among the dead, at the end of the war. “He seemed like a deaf mute or a sleepwalker, completely outside the real world,” he writes in one of his letters (the thirteenth one), totally dedicated to the painter. Burton, at that time, was consul to his country in the Brazilian court. He had complete freedom to go across the country during the war. He brought confidential instructions from the emperor to convince Solano López to accept giving up his investiture as chief of state and his command of the armed forces so that the allied high command could negotiate the cease-fire with the successor he designated. The emperor promised to use his authority to assure López full guarantees of protection for himself, his family, and his assets, with the only condition that he abandon the country and choose the most convenient place for himself to solicit asylum outside of South America. The consul, traveler and English captain, impertinent seeker of worlds and strange beings, visited the Marshal President and his consort Madame Lynch in the nomadic general headquarters in full retreat when their end was already near. He conversed a lot with both during the long after-dinner conversations of the camp under the light of the nearby stars and in the agitation of the faraway battles. In his office, Solano explained to the consul, documents in hand, that the unfair war that was devastating the country had been instigated and financed by the British Empire, determined to expand free trade. In the good pirating tradition of the Queen of the Sea, Burton writes in his First Letter that Solano said to him: “The Empire exchanged the pirate flag of Sir Francis Drake and others like him for the letter of marque 180 of “protected independence,” an invention of the new neocolonial pact concocted on the spur of the moment by the Foreign Office and the Chancellor’s Offices in Buenos Aires and the Brazilian Empire.” The consul translates the insults that the marshal bellowed in a true explosion of fury. According to the consul, in that explosion were mixed expressions in the purest Castilian that had ever been heard in America, as well as the Paraguayan dialect of the vernacular language. Burton did not understand the Marshal’s bilingual speech very well, even though he had already been in the country for long 179. As seen above, “sobraban” means “left over.” 180. A letter of marque is a license awarded to arm a private vessel and use it to capture merchant ships, which would otherwise be illegal piracy.

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periods of time. The consul bragged about speaking thirty-five languages, including their dialects, and of dreaming in seventeen. “That man addressed me,” he writes, “in an impenetrable slang.” Burton recounts that he smiled before the uncontrollable tirade. He knew everything that Solano knew. He knew things that Solano didn’t know. He transmitted them to López obliquely, without compromising himself too much. Burton’s passion was being well-informed about things. He knew that one could not twist the course of already completed events, but that one should know their principal causes, and above all, the imperceptible and apparently humdrum elements that had triggered them. He found it to be natural that the Paraguayan Marshal fought like a tiger cornered by a pack of dogs. He understood that words like “renouncement,” “abdication,” and “surrender” did not make any sense for this relentlessly pursued wild animal. His motto was “conquer or die.” But victory was nothing more than a mirage that was extinguished, five years ago, with the fires of the first battle. Death already fluttered ominously over the aura of that man who felt the corrosion of time and of the universe day and night. “From the beginning I gave,” writes the English captain, “ample credit and justification to all his excesses and I kept the emperor’s ridiculous proposal to myself. I knew that the principal leaders of the federal forces of the Argentine Mesopotamia and northeast Argentina, at war against Buenos Aires, had repeatedly proposed to Solano to incorporate their troops into the Paraguayan army and fight together against the alliance.” “Why didn’t you accept that help?” I asked him. Solano responded a little violently to me. “First,” he said, “because the Paraguayan army is sufficient in itself to fight against those pirates. Second, because the regular army of a civilized country cannot admit the concurrence of irregular forces. Anarchy and mixture are never good in any case, and less so here. State and nation, people and army are, in this country, an organic and disciplined body. A single body and a single mind! This one!” He hit his hat and showed his teeth, yellowed by tobacco. Deep within the thick beard that almost looked blue because it was so black, that grimace of arrogance only lasted a minute. Solano’s hand stretched out toward the maps and the battle plans that studded the canvas of the tent, affixed with pins. “The new pirates,” muttered Solano, “want to annihilate me to convert Paraguay, the only free and sovereign nation of South America, into a country of slaves. The alliance is at war with me based on such an unfair pact that they do not dare to publish it. I have declared war on them as one should, before the face of nations, when I armed Uruguay’s defense expedition against the invasion by Brazil. I complied with all the norms of international law. I did President Mitre the honor of asking permission from his government for this expedition to cross Argentine territory. But he was already

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allied with Brazil, and, in the interior, with general Urquiza, 181 who pretended to maintain strict neutrality. Soon I found out that Urquiza had already captured the principal federal leaders to prevent their military support of Paraguay.” Uriquiza’s betrayal and the sale of “neutrality” in the conflict were worth three hundred thousand horses for the remounting of his army and the million dollars that the Mauá bank sent to him in advance. “My tactical and strategical error,” Solano acknowledged, “was not attacking and crushing Urquiza while my forces, very superior to those of the alliance, closed a grip with pincers of iron and fire over Brazil in the north toward Mato Grosso, and in the south toward the Plata over Buenos Aires. Both the humanistic General Mitre and the rancher General Urquiza owed great favors to my father (he was even the buddy of the victor of Caseros) 182 and to me. I was the mediator in the unification of Argentina. I was carried on people’s shoulders through the streets of Buenos Aires. They gave me a Book of Gold in homage from the most eminent women and men of that country. Mitre and Urquiza were considered loyal friends of Paraguay. The magical wand of English gold transformed them into sworn but hidden enemies. I could have crushed them without reprisal as they did to us and made them eat the dust of defeat from the first moment. I did not want to commit this felony which would have made me equal to my enemies.” He showed a copy of the secret treatise of the Triple Alliance to the consul. “Of the triple infamy!” muttered Solano, smacking the wrinkled paper. “They hope to annex my country, to be divided equally between the enslaving Brazilian Empire and the Vice-Empire of England in the Plata region, which enslaves the Argentine provinces. 183 They will only be able to impose that on my cadaver, in the final combat, at the final frontier.” “It was not a boast,” commented Sir Richard. “That man went mad at that moment. He already was. He was not evil. He was a man of honor. The consul asked the Marshal about why he had this useless obsession faced with the evidence of an inexorably sealed destiny, while he consummated the destruction of his country. He recounts that Solano responded to him with fire in his eyes, “What they call destiny is an excuse of the weak and fainthearted. I don’t know any other destiny than the one forged by my will. While I tread this earth, my country will exist and its enemies will not prevail against it.” Solano had sat up in his chair. It seemed to Burton that he had suddenly grown, without getting up, until he touched the roof of the tent with his head. The faraway thundering of the canons of the Brazilian artillery was heard 181. José Justo Urquiza was President of the Argentine Federation from 1854 to 1860 and governor of Entre Ríos in Uruguay until his death in 1870. 182. Caseros was a battle in 1852 in which Juan Manuel Rosas, governor of Argentina was overthrown by Urquiza, governor of Entre Ríos in Uruguay. 183. This is a reference to Buenos Aires.

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toward the south. A muffled tumult was heard in the bustle of the headquarters. Shots began to sound. Solano stood up and left, taking Burton by the arm. “Come see the allies’ globe.” “Globe,” is an idiom from Buenos Aires that means trick, inflated lie. Carried by the breeze, a balloon with the colors of Brazil was flying over the camp, manned by two men who observed the position of the rearguard with telescopes. “See the voyeuristic pirates!” he commented, amused. The sparking rifles and Congreve projectiles could do nothing against that mirage that reverberated in the sun with the colors of a ghost. Softly, like a soap bubble, the sphere disappeared behind the crest of the mountains. “It will not be long before it falls into my hands and then I will give it a different use!” said Solano. “That man,” commented Burton, “hated defeat with an implacable and absolute hate. He hated that furious and slow war that already was lasting a century; a war that had no equal to any other in the history of the New World. Defeat was not to be avoided, but rather had to be prolonged in the duration of eras. But perhaps that hate was the only voluptuousness that could still penetrate the iron fortitude in which his soul was sheathed. He needed to continue spilling blood, that of his entire country, to calm the apoplexy of his superhuman furor. Taking himself as destiny was his worst mistake.” Richard Francis Burton’s prose forgot, at times, the descriptive and jovial tone of English travelers and was fired up in a tragic second-hand outburst. Sir Francis recounts his trip to Asunción to interview the allied leaders and persuade them to concede a decorous exit for the defeated marshal. The consul notes that the Brazilian Supreme Commander drily responded to him: “The armistice will be made over the death of that monster.” He found, on the other hand, that the Argentine Supreme Commander felt great respect and even a certain admiration for Solano. “That man is a tyrant,” he translates ad literatum 184 Mitre’s words. “A tyrant crushed by the mountain of absolute power, but also a man who loves his country and defends it in his own way.” Burton adds on his own that “there is definitely nothing more terrible than the spectacle of a nation sacrificed by the stupidity of history. Perhaps that was, he adds, what fascinated Mitre, military man, politician, intellectual, and poet, in the indomitable ferocity of the Paraguayan leader. Dazzled by the Napoleonic utopia, the Paraguayan president believed himself made for war, but for a war tailor-made from his fantasies. One could say that his own fantasies were those that had defeated him and that these same fantasies forced him to maintain in defeat the plumes of his glory as long as he lived and fought, since he knew better than anyone that victory was impossible.”

184. Literally, in Latin.

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The consul describes the bombarded houses of Asunción, whose conflagration served to illuminate the nights of sacking. Burton does not mention the white palace, worthy of a Moorish palace. He didn’t focus on it except to recount the fact that the saddled horses of the allied leaders nibbled their ration of alfalfa in the great reception hall. Secured by the halter to the marble and alabaster columns, they chewed their ration of fodder. “The horse also says, ‘I think therefore I am,’” he writes sarcastically. “On the bundles of fodder, that smelled like green plains, like inexhaustible abundance, like bucolic peace, the stable boys were dozing, swarming with flies.” He adds in a note, “although they might dig until they reach the center of the earth, they will not find the ruins of a city here, nor will they in the centuries and millennia to come. The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann just discovered three years ago, after more than three thousand years, the eight cities of Ilion 185 superimposed like the memories of a man, like a palimpsest of stone prior to Priam and Hercules. 186 Here, in Paraguay, in IlionAsunción, the sacred is not going to confuse itself with antiquity but rather with the absence of time, with the perpetuity of human sacrifice.” War was everywhere. Sir Francis smelled it with delectation in the burnt forests, in the burned down houses, in the filth, in the carrion scattered everywhere, in the terror of the decimated populations. Upon reading the Letters of Richard Francis Burton, one has the sensation that the warrior of Egypt anticipated the war philosophy of Erich von Ludendorff by a century. For von Ludendorff and Burton, war is the highest expression of the life will of nations. “War,” he writes, “cannot be waged without an iron-clad military dictatorship. It demands absolute tyranny. The world cannot move without the state of permanent war. All countries are belligerent and cannot cease fighting a single instant against others. The entire territory of the planet is an immense and interminable battlefield. When all warlike hustle and bustle has ceased, humanity itself will have disappeared.” In missing notes in the diabolic rhythm of his “travel impressions,” Burton the womanizer returns time and again, as if furtively, to the image of the Marshal’s wife. He does not hide the strong impression that her beauty and her strong personality have produced in him. “I met many women,” he notes, “of a similar beauty. But that of Ela was unique. Beauty is multiple, but the multiplicity of the paradigms of beauty do not allow one to distinguish its limit of perfection. The beauty of Ela reached that limit, or perhaps transcended it. Her hair, the color of copper warmed to red-hot, was combed like a diadem around her head; her face, veiled by a tenuous luminosity, gave 185. Ilion is another name for Troy. 186. In Greek mythology, Priam was a good king placed on the throne of Troy by Hercules prior to the Trojan wars.

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the feeling of being far away, of absence. She seemed like a being from another world. And she was. The pure forms of that woman were her only purity. Her body was her only soul.” Burton dedicates a long paragraph to her hairdo, her jewels, to Madame Lynch’s fine manners as a hostess during the social gatherings at the camp, that made one forget the war and that in one’s imagination transferred the scene that was being played in the savage jungle to the courtly environment of Paris. He ironically emphasizes the contrast between the grande dame of the court by night and her elegance as a horsewoman by day, her orders in the velvety contralto voice identical to the marvel of her body, her spirited gallops during military tasks, tightly sheathed in her uniform of the marshal’s wife, the color of a dried leaf, cocked hat made of black satin, high shiny boots of a grenadier and her parasol with a gold handle, set with fine stones, that she held in the sun and the shade. When she rode, she carried it hung from her belt like a golden sword sheathed in white satin. “At the birth of their first son, Panchito,” writes the consul, “Solano had given her the gift of the gold staff encrusted with diamonds (lavish homage, in turn, from the ladies of Asunción, at the beginning of the war). Eliza despised those patrician ladies with horrible attire, who walked barefoot with their toes shining with rings. She scorned them with aggressive ostentation in the same way that those caricature-like ladies from the upper class had scorned her, in their coarse ignorance and lowly manners, since her arrival in Paraguay. She ordered her goldsmith to convert the gold staff into the handle of her parasol. The Marshal’s annoyance and anger, when he found out about this nonsense, were Homeric; but the marshal’s wife, with her skill for harmonizing opposing tensions, like making the lyre play and shooting the bow, won the first and only battle that occurred between them. The Marshal did not master the art of war (Solano López, hélas!, 187 was an awful strategist), and the marshal’s wife’s talent could not substitute for the absolute leader’s ineptitude on the battlefields without risking making things worse. “The parasol with the handle made from the staff of command was held like a scepter by the marshal’s wife, with which the President Marshal’s will was obeyed above and beyond all appearances,” noted Burton with benevolent sarcasm. The first edition of the Letters appeared decorated with various drawings by Burton himself. One of them shows the equestrian image of Eliza with her famous parasol, posing for him, on the edge of a wooded cliff. The letter concludes with a banality: “The abyss calls the abyss . . .” 188 Burton portrays Solano with a single stroke. He sees him as short, with a fat gut, the snub nose of a leopard, his quartz eyes trimmed with a border of blood, his face enormously swollen by a toothache. “He has it bandaged,” 187. French for sadly, unfortunately. 188. This is a biblical reference to a sentence in Psalm 41.

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writes the consul, “with a red handkerchief, from which a thread of drool stained with tobacco flows.” With typical British humor, Burton refers to the bouts of pain that wake Solano up and make him roar like a tiger. “He drank then,” he adds, “outrageously, and whisky submerged him in stupefying intoxications.” He got out of them only to enter an even more brutal drunkenness: that sinister atmosphere of conspiracies. The Marshal President ordered the repression of those attempts with atrocious punishments and mass executions by firing squad of the supposed conspirators. His own brothers, the bishop, his most loyal employees and bravest officers paid with their lives for these attacks of rabid madness that unleashed unprecedented bloodshed. “The blood courts,” says Burton, “then redoubled their activity under the direction and zeal of the priest Maíz, transformed into a creole Torquemada. 189 Maíz himself was the one who glorified Solano as the Paraguayan Christ. When the features of an evil man are described, sarcasm or indignation do not have a place, even less so when the subject of the disintegration of his character is developed. And Solano,” I already said, “was not an evil man but a visionary who believed himself to be betrayed by his friends.” Burton finds this attitude and others of the same sort held by the main priest of the army and the principal prosecutor of the blood courts, to be justified. “Before the tragedy that the nation was suffering,” reasons the consul, “the priest needed to convert the military leader into a charismatic Messiah, surrounded by the halo of immortality of religious faith.” In contrast with the monstrous traits that Burton attributes to Solano, the consul admits that Solano possessed small, white, almost feminine feet, “the smallest and best cared for that I had seen on a man.” Those feet obliged him to walk with very short steps, balancing himself on the high heels of his boots, Burton caricaturizes. “In moments of repose, one of his assistants kneeled before those feet, washed them, massaged them with perfumed vegetable ointments and polished the nails. Finally, he deposited them with utmost care on a scarlet pillow in an act of true adoration toward the master, deeply asleep, who complained in his dreams of this monumental blight.” The author of the Nights is not always sarcastic with the pair that lived in “concubinage.” In his Letters, he makes a case for Solano López and Eliza Alice Lynch with exalted enthusiasm: “A man so manly and a woman so womanly that in them the equilibrium of the species was reestablished at the top. A man of immense energy, Francisco Solano López had surrendered to all the excesses of that terrible war and had surpassed them, knowing that he was doing so for no reason. More than master of his nation, he was their vicegod. He knew that he was laboring in vain, as Bolívar had said of his action in the wars of independence, but this diminished neither his faith nor his 189. Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498) was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.

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ferocity. The “marshal’s wife” controlled him as if she had cast a spell on him. The green eyes, the impenetrable look of the Irish woman, had more power than the eyes injected with blood of the human beast.” Burton does not recount that Eliza Alice, divorced from the French doctor Quatrefages, whom she had repudiated, could not marry Solano according to the regulations of the law and the rites of the Roman Catholic Church. She loved him in her own way. Eliza Alice surely could not love any man in the trivial terms of conjugal love. She could only love him as a mediator and achiever of her excessive ambition. This excess was the nature and measure of her love for Solano López. The magnificent reason for their love was the very adventure of that love, the mad endeavor of constructing together the empire that love had inspired in this woman of vigorous fortitude, born to be an empress. In certain states of concentration and complexity, the coldest material always has a soul. Ela’s ambition had the soul that her body was lacking. Ela’s body fascinated Sir Richard; he knew that her soul had a master, and that soul interested him much less. The ringing of the bell was heard among the muffled buzz of the camp. “Let’s have dinner,” said the Marshal. They returned to the spacious tent where Madame Lynch was waiting as if in a palace. “The social gathering at the table was more animated than ever,” writes Burton in Letter XVII. “Sumptuous table, fine wines from France, plates and cutlery made of silver with the intertwined initials of Eliza and Francisco mounted in gold on the national coat of arms (a lion standing on the field of Gules, with a paw leaning on a royal palm tree and the red star of Mars shining over one of the barracks.)” “It seemed to me that I was living the night of nights: the Night of Power, but also the Night of misfortune and of luck, of tragedy and of happiness. I recounted a few episodes of the campaign in Egypt, embellishing them a little to raise the Marshal’s depressed spirit. He didn’t eat a bite. He only ordered that they unknot the handkerchief that was binding his face, more and more swollen, to drink pure brandy with which he made large bubbles before swallowing them. Fatigue and pain obscured the powerful quicktempered fortitude of that man whose destiny was nothing more than the strength of his will.” “Madame Eliza asked me to tell some stories from the Thousand and One Nights. I began with some of the dullest. Not very fond of fiction, the Marshal, overcome by sleep, began to snore, shaken from time to time by malarial tremors. The Marshal’s wife, completely immobile, was listening, contemplating the sky lit up with all its fires.” “In respectful silence, the servants also were listening in the semi-darkness, kneeling on their knees on the grass. Those truncated shadows made me think that my own stories lacked legs. I invented other racier and more

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deliberate tales in a delicate progression. I felt that I was entering a territory full of mines, but I neither could, nor wanted to go back. I could not forget that morning in which, walking around the camp, I caught Madame Lynch by surprise, coming out of the bath naked, attended by her maids, in the improvised bathroom raised among thick trees. Inside myself, I was living the adventure of another story that did not belong to the Book of the Nights, an adventure in which the risk of seduction was its greatest incentive.” “I invented the tale of the dervish in love with one of the seven maidens of Scheherazade. The dervish tricks the gardener of the palace to enter it secretly. The dervish seeks the way to get himself into the palace of Arún AlRachid, white like the frost and the mist, in search of the maiden of his dreams. The gardener sweeps the dead leaves of the garden. The dervish calls him and through the bars shows him a mirror that reflects on one side licentious scenes, and on the other the way to enter the mirror and participate in them. He tells him that he is going to make a gift of the mirror to him if he allows him to enter. The gardener allows him to enter and goes off with the mirror pressed against his chest, in a frenzy because of the anticipated joy of those forbidden pleasures. It is a night with a full moon. The dervish knows that his love moon-bathes on the terrace of an inner wing of the palace, protected against indiscreet looks by a screen of aromatic smoke. The dervish wanders around the gardens all night without being able to enter the palace which is under lock and key under the silvery glow of the moon. With the first light of dawn, he ends up in a sort of aquarium and sees the nude back of the maiden, beaded with little drops of water, coming out of an immense washbasin made of black marble. The dervish discerns the face of the houri whom he loves through the statuesque beauty of that back. He is about to rush toward her with open arms. But when she turns to put on her bathrobe, the dervish discovers that the naked woman is Scheherazade herself . . .” “I stopped for an instant, seized by the originality of the unexpected narrative discovery (the narrator transformed into a character of a story unknown to her, of a story that is not in the Book). I was going to continue. . . . A sharp blow, like the crack of a single-stringed fiddle that is breaking, interrupted what I was going to say. I looked around blinking. The Marshal continued snoring in his dream shaken with frights. The hostess was standing. With an imperious gesture, she ordered the table cleared, bringing the gathering to an end. ‘The world is slippery,’ I said to myself. One trips without wishing to. My heart paled. I looked at her as if seeking an explanation for her untimely behavior. She was very serious. Lucky beings are serious, I thought. But that seriousness did not hide happiness, but rather something deeper. ‘People like Ela,’ I said, ‘scorn any emotion because they think it is unworthy. Those feelings freeze inside her.’ Her frosty silence made me sneeze. With her arms crossed over her chest, the expression on her face had become impenetrable. An adamantine mask had surfaced from

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underneath that face. She appeared more arrogant and scornful than Tintoretto’s Queen of Sheba. She only seemed to expect that I would have the dignity to leave. I could not separate myself from that spell. The suppression of some dark impulse made her tense countenance even more beautiful. I closed my eyes. In fractions of a second, I saw the female animal in all the varieties of its species and races walk by in that woman, from the mythical siren to the no less mythical Siamese twin lovers joined at the belly. I tried to imagine that naked body made for love, but that face of somber ferocity could paralyze the most ardent desire. I said ‘Good night, Madame’ . . . and I retired softly and smiling with an air of the most candid innocence.” Sir Francis, as one observes through the non-elliptical sentences that I have just transcribed, was fascinated by Madame Lynch. He continues remembering her with constant allusions. In two other letters (XIX and XX), he speaks of certain love affairs that he had in Harrar “with an Ethiopian princess who looked a lot like the divine Ela.” He wrote, lying hypocritically, “except that she is a version with silky and dark skin the shade of cardamom coffee . . .” Burton was a skillful manipulator of narrative subterfuge. He possessed the art of cunning insinuation in his way of saying things without saying them. It would be reasonable, nonetheless, to not excessively trust the consul’s chatter. War and forbidden pleasures were his favorite topics. It is natural that Lady Effie, Sir Richard’s timid wife, felt herself with every right to destroy the centos of “erudite obscenities” that her adventurous husband wrote. The Letters were saved because he had them printed secretly by his editor Tinsley of London. The first edition appeared under the vicarious protection of a pseudonym. Sir Richard Francis Burton’s erotic fantasies did not stop, as one sees, before obstacles such as the fragile dream wall of the Marshal or the impregnable dignity of the Marshal’s wife in her condition as a woman. But apart from those fantasies, the consul’s intervention, in its purely cultural aspect, should not be dismissed. Paraguay, an island surrounded by land, by misfortune, by frozen time, is a country completely closed to indulgent and harmful foreign influences. There are no traces or memories of the stories from the Thousand and One Nights in Paraguay before the Great War. The consul’s intervention could be this: to serve as a bridge through which the stories of the Nights in the Orient passed on to the collective Paraguayan imagination through the women who were in the Marshal’s wife’s service. Sir Richard himself recounts in one of his Letters that he heard one of those women repeat the story of the Eleventh Night, in a very strange and disfigured version. (He had already learned Guaraní.) Burton is not surprised. For him, there is a single myth of origin that bifurcates and that crosses the cultures of all nations and all ages in a constant mutation and proliferation of narratives. “The memory of an individual or a people, under the spell of death,” he notes in a digression, “suddenly recovers the memories

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of the past and the future, even the most remote and unknown occurrences, as negligible as they may be, a character, a word, a dream, the face of evil, which is the only thing that remains when everything else has been lost.” One must probably agree with Sir Richard that the stories of the Thousand and One Nights entered in Paraguay by Madame Lynch’s service door, not from her burned down palace in Asunción but rather through the tents of the headquarters. The most terrible wars, even those of the holocaust of an entire nation, always leave a cultural residue that with time is refined and incorporated into the essence of its identity. In the documentary appendix of the Letters, Burton recounts, retrospectively, the capture of the allied reconnaissance balloon, perhaps the same one that the Marshal showed him placidly navigating over the Paraguayan dell. This inane triumph, barely inflated with hot air, produced great happiness at headquarters. The crew members, two Argentine officers, confessed that they had fled from the Brazilian forces of whom they were sick because of their humiliating and inconsiderate treatment. With evident pleasure, they communicated all the information that they had that was militarily useful to Solano López’s assistants. This information, unfortunately, was no longer useful to the Marshal. Their reports, spontaneous and complete, did not alter the atmosphere of the following day. Sir Richard conversed with the deserters and found that they were two cultured men who had been educated in Europe. The capture of the balloon also reestablished the relationship between Sir Richard and the Marshal’s wife, which because of the tale of the enamored dervish, damp from the night dew, remained somewhat cold. The consul does not spare his subtle darts against “the woman from a limited and arbitrary but singularly tense universe.” He recounts, as if it were a question of a personal triumph, that Madame Lynch invited him to a new dinner followed by a social gathering. “Also, we, in our own way,” he writes, “were making history in the style of Paris or London in a squalid and savage environment.” This time, Sir Richard relates, the hostess spent the evening event preoccupied and silent, dressed completely in black, with a pleated ruff and cuffs of white lace. The very image of melancholy. “My book Anatomy of Melancholy was inspired by that image. I spent the night relating the successive incarnations of Buddha as successive spiritual degrees in the state of chastity and total purification to which Gautama aspired. The adamantine mask appeared again under the very beautiful face. I suppose that the mysterious and unpredictable Eliza took my Buddhist fables as a punitive retribution on my part, although they were nothing but an act of urbanity and courtesy. The

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universe of women is vast and impregnable like a night without stars. But Allah knows more.” 190 The notable thing about the portrait that Sir Richard constructs of Madame Lynch at this Last Supper corresponds, a century in advance and with magical precision, to the portrait that the great artist Rothstein will make of Virginia Woolf. For her part, Virginia Woolf portrayed Sir Richard Francis Burton, whom she evidently was unable to meet, in Orlando, a century later. What inextricable bonds united these related spirits through time and space? I do not believe much in pantheistic symmetries or asynchronies. I think that the most flagrant do not go beyond being simple coincidences. Thus, just as historians write their works not to explain the past but to justify the present, writers and artists are always searching for their precursors in the future, trusting the substance of the future. It is a faith with many apostles but without any martyrs. I suspect that it is a question of mere cunning on the part of these creators of imaginary worlds to chronologically protect that highly valued but nonexistent property of absolute originality, of the unprecedented, the untouched. And here we again touch upon the myth of unpolluted virginity that does not allow one to go any further and that does not exist in literature because it doesn’t have a hymen although it produces hymns. 191 With respect to the captured balloon, Sir Richard relates: “A few days were enough for the English Colonel Thompson (pampered by López, and a future deserter) to form a group of balloonists and instruct them in the use of the artifact. The Argentine deserters collaborated with great enthusiasm and good will. The balloon was ready to be used. Solano López ordered a nighttime raid on the Brazilian command post. The two crew members, excellent guides and scouts, who knew the enemy position like the back of their hands, made the balloon descend on a nearby islet. They audaciously crossed the security zone of the camp and dragged themselves along the underbrush toward the pavilion of the Marquis of Caxías, supreme commander of the empire, carrying their sabers between their teeth. The naked bodies of the raiders, dyed with black annatto, were invisible, except that their eyes and the gleam of their sabers gave away their presence and alerted the sentinels. The two men fell wounded. Still alive, the Brazilians skinned the Argentine deserters for pleasure to see if they were really black and to pull out of them 190. The words attributed to Burton parody Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos” (“The Two Kings and The Two Labyrinths”), which ends with the words “But Allah knows more” (Pero Alá sabe más). 191. The original Spanish contains the wordplay “no tiene himen aunque produzca himeneos” (it doesn’t have a hymen although it produces wedding poems). I have captured that here by changing “himeneos,” which literally means “epithalamia,” or wedding poems in honor to a bride or groom, to the word hymns, another type of song.

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some military information. The prisoners, mute under the torture, died suddenly by asphyxiation. They were trained to swallow their tongues and die in such an emergency. Under the flags of Parliament, the Brazilian high command had the skinned cadavers brought to Solano’s general barracks. They received Christian burial. The Marshal fastened military medals of valor to the crude crosses. Before the flagpole with the flag raised at half mast, the rest of the ragged troops, formed in a square, could hardly stay on their feet and hold their weapons while they were making the regulation gunshots.” One of the attackers, however, had succeeded in penetrating the Brazilian supreme commander’s antechamber, where he decapitated his secretary. The Marquis of Caxías was saved by mere chance, since he found himself doing intimate business on the toilet. There is irrefutable testimony of this feat, which is not an invention of the foggy Sir Francis. Among the scenes of war painted by Cándido López, two paintings with somber colors exist; in the first, the spherical form of the balloon stands out in perspective against the vague luminosity of the night. In the basket, only the livid gleam of two machetes travels (“two criminal sabers with life of their own,” says the Count of Orleans). One does not see more of the crew than the shine of their sabers stealthily entering the pavilion of the Brazilian supreme commander, who is writing by the light of a candle. An imperceptible optic effect produces the impression that the chief’s head, altered by horror, is found separated from its trunk by a thin groove. He has turned, imploringly, toward his invisible assailants, that is, toward the gleaming of the sabers, weightless in the air, one of them blotted with blood. The scene seems taken from life. The space is focused around the groove that divides the neck, around which the internal dynamics of the picture revolves. A gust of wind has entered the tent and stirs the spiral of smoke from the cigar fallen on the floor. Through it, like two ghosts, the opaque silhouettes of the two men that are going to die are sketched, bordered by a halo. Cándido López painted the picture of the balloon toward the end of the war, when his body was reduced to half its size, mutilated by shrapnel. The painter was already nothing more than a corporeal metaphor for the decimated nation, exterminated by war. But Sir Richard Francis Burton didn’t write anything, did not make the slightest allusion to the ending of that painter who was tearing himself slowly apart while he was painting. In these living waste products, burned by the distillation of evil, the prescience of justice usually resides. Cándido López painted the tragedy of the war in memorable paintings, but his own body was the most terrible commentary. The painter took charge of the collective martyrdom in his art and “passed it on” to the pictures of the second period. These deny the martial splendor of the first paintings, still somewhat rhetorical. Perhaps these pictures, according to an enigma that has still not been clarified, were

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the work of another painter, a Paraguayan also called Cándido López. The Argentine painter painted the triumphal advance of the troops plumed in purple and gold, the uncontainable wave of ships and heavy arms, the gallop of squadrons with their dazzling lances and their banners blazing in the winds, the equestrian figures of the allied leaders, erect in the summits and signaling with their bent sabers the direction of victory. The Paraguayan Cándido López occupied himself with the vast and dark swarming of the defeated. A piece of shrapnel pulls out his right arm. Soon he learns to paint with the left one, aided by his friend and protector, the Guayaki Indian Jerónimo, the same person who taught him to weave his canvases with wild fibers and to grind colors from the dye-bearing plants mixed with mineral powders and the fire crushed from the fireflies. The indigenous person brings him the honey from wild bees, partridge eggs, water with medicinal plants, and even roasted pigeons. He greases his body, already half its size, with the fat from wild pigs and river tapirs, which cures his wounds. With riggings made of mountain vines every night, Jerónimo even raises López’s bed made of branches, which Jerónimo prepares for López at the top of the trees. Straddled among the neighboring branches, the Indian with his bow and arrows watches over the sleep of his friend, who reposes protected from vermin and insects, from the glance of the enemy patrols, and even the sniff of the tigers. At the first light of dawn, Jerónimo transports López on his shoulders, on the same web of vines, to the places where Cándido must paint, to those places where suffering and death do their work: the passing of the caravans of fugitives, the combats, the ambushes, the tortures in the blood courts, the brief executions, the infamous spearing of conspirators, deserters, and traitors. Cándido López is the only real figure, but invisible, in the middle of the spectral trituration that mixes dawn with night, living beings with minerals, and horror, hardships and death with the unconquerable power of life. The constant and silent presence of the diminishing painter has been transformed into an anodyne element of the landscape. Not, of course, for the implacable eye of the Hunter who guards him. A mortar shell blows up his left arm, which was already beginning to be the right one. Jerónimo takes him to the caverns where the indigenous medicine men attend to him. He learns to paint with the brush embedded in his toes. In succession, he loses both legs at the height of his knees. He learns to paint with the brush squeezed between his teeth. All this happens as if the amazing aim of the invisible hunter were sculpting, little by little, that inexhaustible body, that human fodder animated by an indomitable spirit. His head no longer rises more than a palm above the ground. This is an advantage for him, since now he can paint hidden in the underbrush, sheltered from that hunter of death who pursues him. The painter

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diminishes to the same extent that the survivors are being hunted and decimated. But an immense work grows from that incessant mutilation under the sign of irredeemable human madness. The final image is one of a nation reduced to its last dying man, who is similar to all dying men. The capture of the balloon and its crew members was the last and final successful action of the war that chance afforded Solano López in his final days. But the caprices of chance were equally those that converted this miserable triumph into a sarcastic requiem for his arms. A little later, Colonel Silvestre Carmona, 192 aide-de-camp to the Marshal, former blood court prosecutor, and one of his most valiant officers, joined the ranks of the deserters, giving themselves up to the enemy forces. He took a big part of the coffers of treasure to pay for the asylum that the Brazilians offered him, with the pretext of burying them in a safe place. Silvestre Carmona himself, after having been the one who suggested to the Marshal the location of the general barracks near Echo Cavern, would guide the Brazilian troops in their attack on the bastion at Cerro-Corá, which ended with the assassination of Solano López. The day before, the Marshal had gathered the depressed officers of his Joint Chiefs of Staff for the last time. Solano told them that he had received the great chief from the Caynguá tribes. Followed by a numerous entourage of warriors and servants, the chief had brought food and offers to hide Tendotá, 193 his officers and the rest of his troops and armaments in the deep and impenetrable caverns of the Amambay mountain range. From those impregnable refuges, they could continue guerrilla warfare indefinitely. He needed everyone’s opinion. Someone asked him if the women in exodus also would be permitted to take refuge in the caves. Solano López did not respond. But his silence was the answer. 194 After a long ominous pause, Solano López again demanded the opinion of each and every one of them. General Aveiro said slowly and pessimistically: “Our duty as soldiers imposes upon us obedience to the orders of our Supreme Leader. What Your Excellency says will be done. But, in my opinion, hiding in the caves of the mountain would do nothing but prolong, a few days more, a few days less, our determination to die for the country . . .” Everyone applauded the words of the new aide-de-camp. Solano López, pleased, accepted the decision of his subordinates. He recalled and ratified his oath to not abandon the nation while a soldier remained to defend it with weapons in his hand, without giving or asking for a truce. He condemned traitors and deserters. 192. Silvestre Carmona was a historical figure who did in fact betray López to his enemies. He is the subject of Roa Bastos’s short story “El sonámbulo.” 193. Guaraní for president. 194. Note that in the original the author employed the present tense in this paragraph. It has been corrected to the past tense for readability in English.

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“I myself would have destroyed with whiplashes that miserable Carmona, a thousand times a traitor!” he shouted, furious, slapping with his heel the red sandstone of the amphitheater. A shout of unanimous repulsion and condemnation inflamed the throats of the officers and multiplied into a thousand thunderous echoes in the cave. “We will wait here, and we will all die down to the last man in the last combat,” he exclaimed with an inexorable and energetic voice. It was sunset of the 28th of February 1870. Solano López rallied and showed himself cordial and festive. He told jokes about boastful cowards who carry all the scars from their wounds on their backs. “Let’s see,” he ordered. “Who has the most scarred back! I am going to decorate you with the red insignia of valor!” The officers take off their combat jackets in tatters and show their backs to the Marshal with respectful modesty. The Marshal discharges severe blows with his lizard’s tail whip on them that mark bloody bruises on their bent backs. “This is so that you do not show your back to the enemy,” he shouts among resounding guffaws, and the echoes spread through the bends in the amphitheater. In an obsequious manner, the chaplain and prosecutor Fidel Maíz recalls Julius Caesar’s decision, advised by the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandra, to add one more day to the twenty-eight-day month. His fawning and erudite gesture is celebrated by the Marshal and acclaimed by everyone. “Thus,” Father Maíz learnedly declares, “the shortest month of the year transformed the Roman calendar into a leap year.” And addressing the Marshal: “With more power than Julius Caesar, Your Excellency can remodel the calendar! Solano, between solemn and sparkling, accepts with good humor the advice and, patting Maíz on the shoulder, parodies him: “Let us take then from time a little bit of its precious substance. Thus, we will have a day more in our Mount of Olives, as Father Maíz, our specialist in Golgothas and Crucifixions likes to repeat.” Everyone stood up and hailed the Marshal at length. The labyrinths of Echo Cavern that lead into the amphitheater, began to echo the voices, laughter, and shouts, the barely audible murmurs, and even the puffing and panting of breaths. The Marshal sneezed at that moment and the cave amplified it into a noise like thunder that spread through the cliffs. At night, during the vigil of arms, the Marshal handed out decorations. The brass medals, pounded in a hurry by the ironsmiths, carried the inscription: “To those who conquered hardships and weariness in the Amambay campaign.” They hung from tricolor ribbons with bows and crests sewn by the hands of Madame Lynch. The Marshal signed the corresponding decree with the date of February 29, 1870, transferring to the decorations the day gained in calendar time suggested by Father Maíz. Covered with saintly

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vestments, Maíz blessed the medals and pronounced a brief but passionate patriotic prayer. The Marshal fastened the medals to the chests of about thirty officers according to a rigorous order of seniority, services and merits. Almost all of them had begun their military career as chiefs of police in Asunción and had formed a part of the blood courts as prosecutors. The Marshal named them one by one and they responded “Present!” The multiplication of the echoes suggested a military staff of a thousand officers although they did not even reach thirty. “These medals of despicable brass are worth more than gold and silver because they are made with the metal of your honor and your military bravery,” said Solano, casting fire from his eyes and spitting yellow drool from his swollen lips. In the privacy of the supreme command tent, the Marshal ordered the elderly vice-president Sánchez to write up his will. In it, he bequeathed to Madame Eliza Lynch “for ever and ever,” five thousand leagues of land. “In this space,” he made the document state, “are included the hundreds of thousands of hectares of mate plantations, 195 small farms and ranches of the nation, that should not fall into foreign hands. Eliza Lynch reminded him that she was a foreigner. Solano responded vigorously and with love that her loyalty and sacrifice had already earned her the right and honor of being Paraguayan. He signed the testament with the date of February 29th and handed it to her with a kiss. Madame Lynch returned the document to him and asked him to correct the date. “It is not advisable to do things on a day that does not exist . . . ,” she said with gentle dissent but inflexible conviction. Solano corrected the date, signed again ratifying the change, and handed it to her with martial pride. The merry drum roll of the enemy macumba 196 did not cease to ring on the other side of the mountain. It seemed to say that defeat leaves you orphaned. You, sons of the devil, long-tailed and with teeth, were born without father or mother in times in which animals were no longer men and you remained complete mountain hogs . . . A dust cloud fell, whitening the warm February night that burned with fireflies and stars. What happened after isn’t worth telling anymore because there was nothing more than a curse word that was going to last for one hundred years. Defeat lasted a time that could not be counted in years. The defeated but unconquered marshal tried to transform that retreat into a war of resistance, with only a fistful of faithful generals and an army of old men, disabled soldiers, and little boys. From the successive stops of the exodus, the new capital of the nomadic country emerged around the great red tent of the 195. Mate is a South American shrub whose leaves are used to make tea. 196. The macumba is a type of drum.

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headquarters. A nation converted into phantoms that moved as if in an unsettling dream tried to resume a normal rhythm of life in the camp. During the day, the count pianist played polonaises and mazurkas. His hymns and triumphal marches sounded like a combat paean. The marshal appeared in the opening of the tent, demanding more spirited and marshal tones with imperious gestures. His enormous face swollen by a toothache turned purple in his shouts. The count then pounded the keys like a madman fighting hard against death itself. His furious toccatas pierced the dead air of the camp with the sound of cracking bones that clink together. The macabre dance thus had the virtue of making even the dying stand up, who grabbed their lances and attacked imaginary enemies. At night, the waltzes of Chopin rose, softly, evanescently, and made the nomadic empress sigh dreamily evoking the love affair that the great taciturn and tubercular musician had had with the energetic and dazzling George Sand 197 in Palma de Mallorca. Later, when everything became quiet in the rustic amphitheater, one began to hear a mournful drum whose monotonous sound lasted until dawn. The Marshal and Marshal’s wife could not sleep, driven crazy by this funereal drum roll that made the earth shake in a muffled manner. All the patrols that they sent to seize the drummer returned defeated or did not ever return. They could not locate him. The drum always sounded in front of them or behind them, anywhere, in the most unexpected place, attracting the patrollers into ambushes. The members of the last patrol returned wounded and were shot. But the ubiquitous drummer continued beating the leather skin harder and better. And that happened until the very day of the Marshal’s death. In the Brazilian camp, the macumba buzzes noisily evoking Padre Echú. The corporal in command, master of capoeira 198 and circus horseman, the mulatto Chico Diavo, whom the Gran Changó, the Padre Echú, and other afro-Brazilian deities grease with savage oils of the Great Power, officiates as “priest.” 199 Chico Diavo will be the one who succeeds in delivering the mortal blow to Solano López with his lance, earning with that the one hundred sterling pounds of the bonus offered by the chief of the vanguard, General Núñez Tavares da Silva, but which will never be paid to him. The great drum entered the amphitheater with the invading forces. On his piano whose history has been recounted, the count was lanced by the Brazilians a few minutes before they lanced Solano López. When the latter heard the terrible racket of the keys and strings that exploded like the sound of an alarm of “every man for himself,” they say that he exclaimed: 197. The pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804–1976), a nineteenth-century French writer. 198. Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art combining dance, acrobatics and music originating in Africa. 199. This passage describes rites associated with the Yoruba religion.

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“Oh dear! . . . They have killed my musician! Everything is already lost . . . ” He mounted on his war steed and fled toward the river. He passed in front of the cart where his mother and sisters were held prisoners for the crime of conspiring and attempt at assassinating the Marshal with poisoned chipá. “For God’s Sake, Solano! Save us, my son! We are women,” shouts doña Juana in chorus with the shouts of the poisoning sisters. Without stopping his race, the man addressed responded: “Count on your sex, lady! . . . It is the only thing that can save you!” . . . He continued his terrified gallop, followed very closely by the horse of his bugler. Chico Diavo finally succeeds in catching up to him, goes before him and spears him with his lance in the abdomen. The out of control horse stops suddenly before the ravine, throwing the rider into the air who rolls to the deep riverbed. From these muddy waters emerge the golden sword and bloody head of the Marshal. The mouth full of mud launches a hoarse roar of “I die with my Country . . .” They finish him off with gunshots. The thick water and red earth of the stream turn purple. The macumba drum booms madly among the shouts of jubilation of the fifteen thousand throats and the salutes of victory. From the cages put together with branches in which the surviving leaders of Solano’s Joint Chiefs of Staff have been locked up, they contemplate, impotent, with tears in their eyes, that phantasmal burial of the man who has died with the shout “I die with my country!” In humiliating contrast with them, Father Maíz, on his knees in his cage, asks for clemency from the Count D’Eu, Supreme Commander of the Brazilian forces. Between sobs, he proffers the same praises in Count D’Eu’s honor that until a little while ago Father Maíz had offered to the assassinated Marshal. Only now, instead of consecrating the Count D’Eu as the Brazilian Christ, he proclaims him the Redeemer of Paraguay and the human race. Eliza Alice Lynch, dressed in strict nuptial white, climbs into the wagon that is to carry her into exile. Her condition as a foreigner saves her from being executed. On the destroyed piano, she sees the cadaver of Count Brinnicky, pierced through by a lance. His dislocated jaws show his dentition, which through an optic effect of the sun glare, extends disproportionately onto the toothless keys of the piano. Eliza Alice Lynch has an astonished face under the bloodstained parasol. The wagon starts up. The drivers must bite the nape of the neck of the oxen and spur them on their backsides to make them advance. The clouds of red dust of that earth loaded with iron obscures the white silhouette amid the indifference of a fiery sun and the lascivious curiosity of the soldiers. The Queen of Paraguay, erect among the dust and the reverberations, is disappearing in the scarlet mist.

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The Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay by Sir Richard Francis Burton were published a month after the war ended. It is a book of history, but at the same time, of fiction, of delirious creative fantasy, very superior to the simple translation of the Book of the Nights. The stylized vignette that embellishes the bookplate (and perhaps exorcizes Burton’s feelings) exhibits on the watermark a foreshortened figure of a woman who replicates the image of Eliza Alice Lynch, sketched by Burton himself. The nebulous body, surrounded by a long head of hair, ends in a mermaid’s tail and has at its foot the following inscription: Ex nihilo nihil . . . 200 One must return to the book by the translator of the Thousand and One Nights to know something more about some of the strange characters from the Great War. The local and foreign chroniclers, perhaps for some motive of historical modesty, have preferred not to concern themselves with them. Or they have done so with such ambiguity that the characters resemble apparitions from a fantastic story. In the extensive notes of the appendix, the author of the Letters justifies what appear to be the most aberrant acts of the powerful chaplain and prosecutor. Sir Francis Richard Burton mentions, for example, the memo that Father Maíz sent at the end of the war to the army chaplains exhorting them to foment “patriotic prostitution” of women in the battle camps. “Priests should not hesitate,” transcribes the consul, “in exercising their ministry from the pulpit or in their daily rounds along the rearguard to incite young women to live with the soldiers and give them all the pleasure they need. This will not be moral disorder or an act of lust when it is in favor of the defenders of the nation whose happiness in this world is the first duty of the female citizens.” It is not a question of a mystification by Burton. The French consul Laurent Cochelet, in an extensive report that he sends to his government about the final events of the war, confirms the existence of said memo and qualifies it as a truly demonical deviation on the part of the prosecutor and principal chaplain. “From the places still free from the invader,” Sir Francis informs and Cochelet confirms in almost exact agreement, well-stocked caravans of young women arrived, an entire battalion of young women from Concepción and other localities in the North. These battalions of “patriotic prostitutes” were sent to live with soldiers in the intervals between battles, and to give them a little “happiness” on the edge of death. They were not professional prostitutes. They were lactating mother volunteers. The priest Maíz correctly interpreted the inversion of the nutritive myth. Those woman-mothers should go voluntarily to provide the final nourishment for these man-boys who were

200. Latin for “Nothing comes from nothing.”

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going to die: the happiness of pleasure, the extreme ecstasy of sex as the only antidote against the anguish of the final end. “The priest Maíz didn’t do anything,” argues Burton, “but introduce, as a necessity of war, on the combat fronts, the sexual traffic that in fact existed in the “liberated” zones: the massive rapes, the brutal orgies that the Paraguayan women were in fact forced to suffer by the invaders in the conquered territories.” But Cochelet condemns this censurable act with fiery indignation. During the five years of war and seven of occupation by the conquering forces, Paraguayan women had to assume prostitution, an extreme form of servitude, sexual servitude, as the only way to escape mass rapes and survive in the rearguard. “The price in foodstuff for copulation was ridiculous but magical: two crackers, a little bit of salt and sugar, a strip of dried beef. The prettiest and least skeletal, chosen by the officers, were the most fortunate. Sometimes they received rations of recently slaughtered cow meat. Such was the variable price at which their sex was valued. This commerce allowed them to feed themselves and their children, the handicapped and elderly. A sort of matriarchy arose: that of the mother prostitutes. The oldest profession on earth imposed itself on them as a dilemma of life or death from which they could not escape. The nation no longer existed. The motherly prostitutes survived.” “The forced and mandatory prostitution imposed by the enemies, contrary to the ‘patriotic voluntary prostitution’ in favor of the defenders who were going to die, did not impede the flourishing of romances and engagements of true love between the matriarchal prostitutes and yesterday’s enemies. This love, true revenge of life against death, was going to engender indissoluble couples, dynastic families with last names from Rio de Janeiro-Paraguay, homes and children sealed by blood pact in the new miscegenation forged in the terrible melting pot. “Why did this matriarchy from genuine social roots not prosper?” With this burning question launched at posterity, but that posterity could not, did not know or want to answer even today, the foreign consul closed the chapter of his Letters regarding patriotic prostitution and its other face: the voluntary prostitution of the matriarchal whores in the middle of general corruption and depravity, another of the stigmas that mark the conquered nation. One must ask, in addition, if such a destiny does not influence the future life of the Paraguayan nation regarding the impossibility of future extinction, as has occurred so many times in the chaos of human societies crushed by violence and horror, by the stupidity of history, which is midwife, accomplice, procuress, and brothel of the pimps of power. Some exiled politicians had returned with the Paraguayan Legion to “free” the country from the tyrant, colluded with the allies, with the miser-

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able living and the miserable dead. The rest of this demolition team arrived when the war had barely ended. The officers that survived Solano López allied themselves with these “redeemers” anointed by exile in La Plata or in the Old World. These groups restarted the government under the aegis of the occupation forces and continued the final destruction of the country. The Patriotic Prostitution extoled by Father Maíz was transformed into the masquerade of Patriotic Reconstruction, which in reality was nothing more than a demolition of ruins. They began to sell public lands for crackers, women continued selling themselves for crackers. It was the law of those condemned for life to the corruption of voluntary servitude. The tyrants, satraps, countrysellers, who are first cousins everywhere, mounted the backs of the slaves. A compact and complex historical figure like Father Maíz, a man like him, forged in the image of this country and fed with its perfume and its dregs, has still not been understood. In his degradation, in his crimes, in his sins, he is the purest and most virtuous antihero of Paraguay. He was a genuine soldier of Christ, the Judas of the Last Supper, an apostle who swore falsely an infinity of times, an anti-saint without the crown of martyrdom arisen from the Christianity of the catacombs that had its final refuge in Paraguay. No one understood this man, this priest, who chose to commit sins and the most execrable sacrileges, offering himself as a scapegoat, a black and sensual sacrificial lamb, the most infamous and miserable, in order that the blood of Christ, spilled in the Golgotha, would make some sense outside of impossible human redemption. Otherwise, one would have to take seriously the atheistic joke made by Stendhal 201 that God’s only excuse is that he does not exist. This virtuous antihero, this anti-saint without a crown, tried to gather in his bloody hands the breath of life that still remained in his dying people. He tried to save his Church, prisoner of the machinations of a sect of killers of the Faith that he did not want to recognize as a congregation worthy of Christ. The Capuchins, first, and later the obscure and obscurantist throne of the Vatican, through the mediation of its internuncio in Rio de Janeiro (a true satrap of the Roman Catholic religion), interposed all their power and declared implacable war on the rebellious and revolutionary priest. They tried to crush him, but they did not prevail over the rebellious and indomitable lamb. They had to return the Church to Paraguay that had been taken hostage as a suffragan diocese of the Church of its enemies. The victory of the little priest Maíz is there, shining in the darkness like a candle wick over the tombstone of an immense grave. Only where there are graves are resurrections possible. The blasphemer sinned. He dragged the apostate into extreme degradation, so that the justice of God, if it really exists, could shine among the just. May his sins be forgiven . . . 201. Pen name for Marie-Henri Beyle, (1783–1842), a nineteenth-century French writer.

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Forgive me the Socratic interlude on Sarmiento, Morena, and this last, extensive military intermezzo on Sir Richard Francis Burton. They probably are not of any interest to you. Nonetheless, I did not want to omit them. I am writing to you based on the train of thought of the moments that I am living. There are things about the history and the people of this country that only now, when it is too late for me, are being revealed to me in depth and complexity. The curious thing is that I see them and understand them better through the slightly specular prism of the accounts by foreigners. Perhaps because I myself am a foreigner and I can no longer see what was mine except from outside of myself. In the double lining of my Scotch dress coat, over the beats of my heart, the small bag with the ring and the little bottle of poison barely bulge. I do not separate myself from them for a single moment. And when I put my hand on my heart, the ring and the bottle are what I touch. I also take the pages I am writing to you in my briefcase wherever I go, which thus serve me as a memento and a shield. It does me good to write to you in the dark. I don’t see anything except the phosphoric point of the pen in the moment that it prints the line that dries and disappears. My love for you is like this spectral writing; it is inscribed and dies to resuscitate in your reading. I feel you by my side, although you may be very far away. I write to you as if in a very sweet coagulation of time. This long and uninterrupted letter will come to you from the past when the future no longer has any meaning for me and these lines are nothing more than the short memory of a present that disappears like the lines of the pen. What more can I hope for than that everything will be accomplished? While I was commenting to you a little while ago about the words of Malwida Brinnicky-Niëztsky and of Lou Andréas Salomé, regarding Nietzsche’s drama, The Crucified, I recalled what the deceased genius wrote in Ecce Homo about the poem that Lou composed for him to put to music. The treachery of his sister Elisabeth could not falsify or erase this epitaph. Nietzsche says: “Some time, in the future, this hymn will be sung in my memory. It is the amazing inspiration of a young Russian woman, a universal, stateless person, with whom I then maintained a friendship without possible equal. When I left Lou because I felt that I could not offer her happiness, she said to me: You still have your suffering. . . .The magnificent girl did not consider suffering as an obstacle against life. But, on the edge of death, I could not give her life, or happiness, or suffering . . .” I notice, while I write to you, I don’t know if with happiness or sadness, that my exile’s language, grafted on to my native tongue throughout so many years, is being erased. But my native tongue does not reappear. Language is the final refuge of fugitives but is also the first thing that one loses. My style seems to lessen more and more. It faces me and contradicts me, denying me

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but still also including me. You will recover in your reading what is missing of me in my writing. From outside I hear strangely exaggerated harp music rise in waves. I go out on the balcony with binoculars. The reception committee is pulling out all the stops. A group of more than one hundred harp players dressed in popular white typoi, 202 located on the staircases of the esplanade, brings us the greeting of the classic serenade. This performance does not figure in the reception program, so that it should be taken as a premiere and a surprise. The beautiful and striking harpists form the word “Welcome!” in spiraling letters with their bodies and instruments. They belong to the National School of Creole Harp, the most important musical conservatory in the country. Projectors of special lights give a weightless air to the harpists. They seem to float in a cloud of smoke from the huge censers that mix the aroma of jasmine and mignonette with the music. The binoculars allow me to have the musicians within the reach of my hand, as if they were seated on the flower beds of the balcony. The national tunes follow one after the other without any sense of continuity. The guests crowd together in the loggia. They are as if in suspense, dazzled and seduced by the fairy tale-like spectacle that surpasses, if not in its magnificence, at least in its exoticism, the best world festivals of light and sound, common on the stages of the millenary ruins of Greece, Italy or Spain. We saw something similar in Avignon last year. But this one is, by far, the most surprising and original. Suddenly I discover my old friend, the very beautiful Fulvia Marcia. Her harp has a gold-plated arm with silver scales and a crown carved in the shape of a serpent’s head. Fulvia is the director of the school, and at this moment is the director of the group that offers the recital in our homage. With the changes of rhythm, everyone follows the movement of her arms, the soft but imperative swinging of her head encircled by a garland of jasmines over her long hair which is the color of wild honey. The metallic sound of her instrument is equipped with a special resonance. I suppose that she does not see me. Nonetheless, I feel her gaze fixed on me through the cordage of her instrument. In an instinctive gesture, I smooth my hair down and touch up the knot of my tie. I see her almond-shaped eyes, her black and very long lashes because of the mascara made of henequen, her silvery eyelids as if covered by frost, a fashion that Madame Lynch imposed one hundred years ago in Paraguay, and Cleopatra in Egypt and Rome, two thousand years before. Fulvia Marcia is there like the very image of youth. The best in the class, always, the flag bearer during the parades, the charm of our university, beauty and greatness together, intelligence embodied in a woman. She has not changed. She is the same as always. Time works in her favor. She seems as if she has forgotten herself, swept along in her immobility by the turns of the 202. Typoi is a traditional female dress.

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rhythmic and sensual music. Aphrodite playing the harp that the Jesuits taught the neophyte Guaranís to carve and play. I see her march, elegant, in the mornings of the great parades, wrapped in the folds of the national flag. I contemplate again her static figure defined by the sash of her bathrobe when she appeared on the balcony of her bedroom to show gratitude for the serenades that her classmates brought her on summer nights silver-plated by the full moon. With the tip of her fingers, she made kisses fly and we fought for them in the air as if they were really physical kisses, throbbing pieces of her own breath. We were all crazy for her and that rivalry united us in the brotherhood of the excluded ones, since Fulvia set her sights beyond poor boys like us who were destined to become pharmacists, accountants, or second-rate lawyers. Odiseo Aquino appeared suddenly by my side. “It seems that you like señora Fulvia,” he said, becoming intimate. “She is the wife of the Minister of the Interior.” I pretended not to understand. I didn’t feel the slightest emotion. That presence of the idol from my youth didn’t count for me except as a detail of the unrealistic scenery. I must say you are right, Jimena, once again. The past does not exist. Nothing more than the memory of the present exists, as ephemeral as the present itself. The music of the harps and the chorus of feminine voices filled the turbid and starless night with soft resonances. The fountains of light and sound were turned off. In the semi-darkness still filled with vibrations, the white silhouettes were descending in a row along the ramp and disappeared in the esplanade like the ascetic silhouettes of penitents. The last one to disappear, hugging her harp like a great silver fish, was Fulvia Marcia. Silence reigned again around the lavish hotel. Only then did I turn toward the bellhop. “I want you to guide me to la Chacarita.” “At your service, sir. It is not far away. We can go on foot.” I took my camera, I hung it from the strap, and we left. “Do you want to go to the terrorist’s wake? I do not understand why.” “I am going to take some pictures of him.” “Ah, now I understand . . .” Having passed the cathedral, we walked for a good while along narrow dirt streets bordering on Bernardino Caballero Park. We climbed down the ravines of the bay and entered that pit of floods and misfortunes. In the middle of the jungle of aquatic plants, the ranches were spread out, sustained by weak piling. Skeletal dogs barked cavernously as we passed. Here, the place had also changed in appearance, although it remained elusive, impenetrable. We passed in front of a modern building with two stories, unthinkable in that place. “It is my father’s house,” Odiseo said with undisguised respect.

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A barbed wire fence surrounded it, sustained by posts similar to and symbolic of the heavy cudgels of the paramilitary battalions led by Don Ramón, from Chacarita. “You cannot touch the wires,” said Odiseo. “They are electrified with high voltage currents. In the beginning, in the mornings, my father had to disconnect the wires and come with his guards to detach drunks and dogs that had been fried from being stuck to them there. I thought about Don Ramón, the hero of those gorges who had begun to stand out purely by dissolving political and student demonstrations by the cudgel blows of his legions, by attacking the convent of Cristo Rey, by his dismantling of opponents’ houses, and by the bludgeoning assassination of resistance leaders. The only act in which he had been defeated was the strike at the Clinical Hospital. The students, physicians, and nurses took him hostage. They kept him drugged in an operating room for forty days, making his people believe that he had had a heart operation and was in serious condition. They should not bother him. In the end, the management had to reach an agreement and give up. Ramón recovered and left the hospital like a discharged patient. The postoperative diet made him lose forty pounds of weight and his courage. When he left, he was the mere shadow of a man. The medical students and the nurses were supporting him so that he would not fall. For a while Don Ramón remained secluded in his winter quarters by order of the dictator. Odiseo became tired of trying to resume the conversation. Absorbed in my thoughts, I didn’t pay any attention to him. He finally had to adapt himself to my silence. The creaking of the soles of my shoes on the hard crust of the slopes and the sand beaches was immediately reabsorbed in the spongy atmosphere of the place reeking of fish remains and putrefying plants. A mangy dog jumped on Odiseo and licked his face. “It is Floro, my dog,” Odiseo said without excessive pride but with evident affection. “Before he was called Manfloro 203 because he has bad habits. Floro is shorter and prettier and nobody makes fun of us when he is called.” Through the aperture in the hut, I discerned the flickering glimmer of candles. “Here it is,” said the bellhop. “I will not enter the wake of an assassin.” “Stay here, to wait for me,” I ordered and entered. “Or rather, go home.” “No, sir. I am going to wait for you.” Some women were crying or praying their monotonous and muffled litanies for the dead around the reclining body. At the head of the dead man, a woman who must be his mother, kneeling down on her knees, immobile, almost spectral, was murmuring a funereal chant with her teeth clenched. The glimmer of the candles lit up the part of her thin and angular face that her 203. Manfloro is a slang term meaning homosexual.

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cloak allowed one to see, and made the lock of short and coarse hair that had grown exaggeratedly on her chin stand out. I approached and asked her permission to take a picture of her son’s cadaver. She assented with a gesture of extremely sad resignation. I promised to give her a copy of the shot when it was developed. The woman didn’t hear me or did not understand; in any case it was not important for her. She returned to her muffled chant. I approached the cot where the cadaver had been placed. It was hard for me to unite the three faces of the dead man: the almost adolescent face of Pedro Alvarenga in the torture chamber, the bearded face of the Mennonite pastor on the Boeing, hidden by the fake beard and dark glasses, and the present face deformed by blows, purple from death. Those faces, separated in time and in different experiences, resisted joining together. They rejected that monstrous alliance of the night, of solitude, of the silence of the dead man himself, immobile, extricated from everything that was not that impassiveness that occupied him. The face of Pedro Alvarenga, dead, was different now, above all because his ardent valiant blood had been disarmed of its sword forever. The inequality was too great. The courage of a man like Pedro was not made for such rough usage. But that face there, the last one, preserved a smiling serenity, despite its deformities and bruises. He was there with his eyes closed, as if asleep in an infinite peace. That reclining man allowed himself to ignore the universe, and if there was some thought in his silence, that thought that we attribute to states of life after death, it could not be anything but the expression of an absolute and essential happiness. I approached a little more. A very dense shadow crossed the face of the dead man. It made it luminous. It passed over it again and darkened it the way the clouds hide the cratered moon. I pressed the shutter button and the lightning of the flash vividly lit up the poor room. The triple face had joined into one and that fusion produced the effect that the dead man had abruptly moved at the very moment of taking the shot, so that I took another two as back-ups. The faces of the women were immobilized like stone carvings in the burst of the flash. The sight of the dead, with their faces of greenish clay, their bodies rigid as if suddenly they had fossilized, the crack of white from their eyes between the eyelids, their beyond-the-earth immobility, has always seemed intolerable to me. I feel an irrational antipathy toward them, something more than the vulgar repugnance that one commonly experiences. I have always been incapable of looking at a cadaver without repugnance and a deep disgust. Only death can be hated. But now, before Pedro Alvarenga’s cadaver, these feelings fight against my memories, against my feelings of comaraderie, of fraternal affection. A blow of the wind extinguished some of the candles. A dense semidarkness fell over the face of the dead man. Suddenly, I seemed to see in it

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the angular face of his mother, who now had an extraordinary resemblance to her son, as if the dead man had suddenly aged into the face of his mother, and as if he had also suddenly grown a coarse lock of gray hair on his chin. From his mother’s face, Pedro looked at me with his eyes closed. He continued to observe me with more force than twenty-four hours ago from his seat on the Boeing. He looked at me with the same suffering of twenty years before in the torture chamber of the Technical. The sinister conspiracy of night seemed to assume new forms of stalking and entrapment at every turn. The entire universe was a mystery of darkness, above all in this darkness plated with that artificial luminosity that hid the nighttime sky. 204 The silence was full of whispers, like echoes of sounds that had been dead for a long time. There were also living sounds, indeterminable, indefinable, the light whip of the air by the wings of the bats. Why those shrieks of strange nocturnal birds that seek their prey, shouts of small animals in sudden encounters with more powerful, furtive enemies? Why the low and terrified flapping of wings of that brush full of invisible birds? . . . There was suddenly something like a power outage of the turbid and reddish light. The night suddenly emerged, splendorous up above, studded with stars, the arc of the moon riveted in the blue of the sky. It invaded the ranch. It darkened the praying faces under the shabby cloaks. An indescribable shout arose from the chorus of women and broke into sharp voices of incredulous ferocity and deep reproach. The blurry faces turned unanimously toward me with frenetic and sparkling eyes, as if holding me responsible for the eclipse that just occurred. “Be quiet,” shouted the mother in Guaraní, and her voice resonated throughout all of the wasteland, among the lacustrine ranches, over the gorges full of putrefaction and garbage. Odiseo’s silhouette appeared from outside the opening that functioned like a door. The dead man’s mother burst into anguished shouts again. The other women pounced on him, scratched his face with the fury of dark Eumenides 205 and threw him outside, filling him with insults. Outside the trees bent, blown by the wind, a wind that was there in an immobile whirlwind that seemed to come from nowhere and to blow in no direction. When the power outage was over, the turbid and reddish light was relaunched and reigned again. The blue and starry curvature, the waning moon disappeared, blocked, eaten by that luminosity that was neither diurnal nor nocturnal. Among the muttering of the prayers, the sign of relief exhaled by many throats arose behind my back, as if everything had returned to normal.

204. This is a reference to the constant light of the hydroelectric plant created by the construction of the Itaipú Dam on the Paraná River between Brazil and Paraguay. 205. Eumenides refers to the twelve furies in a poem by the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus.

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I left. I tried to orient myself among the brush. Odiseo caught up with me on the dirt road. He tried to explain the attack by the women in the wake. “Those women hate me because I am the son of Ramón Aquino,” he said scornfully. “They are all the worst terrorists. More than once, my father had to hit them with cudgels and put them in jail.” I did not come out of my silence. He asked me if I had noticed the short circuit that had been produced a little while ago. I shook my head no. It is the first time that an interruption of light has occurred in Itaipú. “El Karaí is not going to like this failure, considering how expensive the dam has turned out to be . . . ,” he said with a pessimistic air, as if thinking of concrete responsible individuals who were going to receive a punishment for something as grave as a seismic phenomenon. During the trajectory of the nocturnal excursion, some soft and fragrant particles fell like drops of an intermittent rain. My head, beard, and shoulders were covered with those little pods that the wind spread in its swirls. I gathered a fistful of those seeds and showed them to Odiseo. “What is this?” I asked him. “They are sprouts from ferns. There are also from other trees. They still fly night and day. They fall anywhere and take root again wherever they find good earth.” I thought that the young man was inventing another one of his stories. I asked him where these sprouts came from. “From the forests of Alto Paraná. In order to build the dam they had to knock down the forests. They knocked down millions of hectares. There is no more virgin forest. Those sprouts from ferns and other species of trees escaped the death of the woods. They escape and fly with the winds from the East and the North in search of the lands that they lost. But they have no memory. They fly blindly. The wind carries them where it wants. It’s a good thing that only the sprouts fly. If the trees had flown, they would have crushed all of us already.” A squad of armed men ordered us to halt. The sergeant who commanded them asked for my documents. I handed him my passport. “The gentleman is a guest of the official congress,” Odiseo interceded, as if a mosquito had buzzed. Nobody noticed him. “What did you come to do here?” the sergeant asked me. “I came to take pictures of the terrorist whom they had killed at the airport. I have to make a report for the conference.” “Show me the authorization from the Police Chief.” I told him that I didn’t have one, that it did not occur to me either to solicit one in a free country like this one. The sergeant demanded that I hand over the camera. I gave it to him. He extracted the roll of film and returned the apparatus to me. I saw them disappear in the same way that they had appeared.

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“They are very rigorous about these things,” Odiseo commented. “I will speak with my father. Perhaps he can get them to return the negatives. He is a good friend of Mr. President.” I told the boy that he could stay, that I already knew the route and that I was going to return alone to the hotel. “As you wish, sir,” the boy accepted. I gave him the twenty dollars that I had promised. “If you get the negatives for me, I will give you another twenty.” He thanked me, putting his hand to his hat, and left with the stride of a champion. Among the traces of faraway barks and the tremors of the wind, a very soft melody came from somewhere. A vague feeling penetrated me. It wasn’t fear. It was rather the feeling of the supernatural that I have experienced more than once, but that I always considered with mistrust as an irrational or imaginary reaction before the unknown. The vision of Pedro Alvarenga’s cadaver made the memory of Leda Kautner resurface in me. My doubts persisted from the very moment of the tragedy, less than twelve hours ago. I rebelled against the idea that the girl from the Carpathian Mountains had been incinerated in the explosion of the Boeing. The fact that she had come on that plane was strange. It seemed to me even more inexplicable that she had stayed on it to await death. Against all evidence, the feeling persevered in me, the dark but imperious presentiment that Leda was alive. Since I saw the airplane explode and burn, I am pestered by the thought that she must have descended a moment before. She couldn’t have not done so, although I did not see her deplane. At no point had I lost sight of the stairs and the landing platform. I didn’t see her disembark, it is true, but she could have done it in a moment in which I was distracted. Millimeter by millimeter, second after second, I relived that anxious interval. There only remained a lapse of thirty seconds in which I could have taken my eyes or the binoculars off of that place: the moment in which I handed the little girl to the nurse and I introduced her to the elderly woman, those two unprotected beings whom Leda herself had put in my charge to help them to disembark. In those thirty seconds, the agile mountain girl could have abandoned the cabin on the verge of transforming into a burning mass. Such was my certainty that I have decided to make inquiries about the case. I have an efficient mediator: one of the monitors responsible for our floor, Dalila Mieres. The young woman has shown herself to be very amiable with me from the beginning. The monitors reside in the same hotel on permanent duty. She has given me her name and the telephone number of her room, begging me to call her in any emergency in which I might need her, at any time of day or night.

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The melody continued playing somewhere like the sound of those flutes that poor kids make for themselves out of the tubes of giant reeds. They were now reproducing the three notes of the funeral song from the wake. I covered my ears and quickened my pace. I climbed the ravine and left through an excavated drain pipe through the torrents of water at the foot of the cathedral. Those torrents of water had already twice collapsed the old cathedral that now was new, although one might not notice it, and had swept away the town hall itself a century ago. The natural furies also impose their dictatorship. I took Independence Street toward Sarmiento. As soon as I went up to my room, I called Dalila Mieres. She answered the phone. I apologized because of the lateness of the hour. She said that she was not sleeping and that she was at my service with much pleasure, asking me in which language I preferred that we continue talking. In Spanish, I said, barely avoiding the slip of answering “in our language.” I explained to her, summarizing as best I could, the case of Leda Kautner, my graduate student in France and now a stewardess on the Air Fleet of the State. I gave her Leda’s biographical data, her address and telephone number in Munich. I presented a cunning pretext as an element of psychological pressure, that of having given her a bottle with a vaccine against yellow fever, which I must apply since it was a question of the second dose. I insinuated that the bottle had not been returned to me by the aforementioned stewardess, perhaps, I excused her, because of the incidents at arrival. I confided, moreover, the worry that I had after having seen her enter the plane again, when the entire crew had already disembarked, a moment before the explosion. With an attentive and worried voice, the monitor told me that she had noted down everything that I had revealed to her. She committed herself to making the pertinent inquiries as soon as it was morning and assured me that the bottle of vaccine would be immediately returned to me. Dalila Mieres’s professional assurance, but above all the human tone of her voice, with a warm and pleasant quality, seemed a good sign to me. There are lively sounds, I said to myself before falling asleep. Today, Thursday the 28th, the ceremonies of the congress have begun. At nine o’clock in the morning, we were driven to the Pantheon of Heroes to deposit our floral gift. The official retinue, headed by the Minister of Culture, awaited us at the foot of the monument. The official retinue was quite reduced in size to allow the passage of the three hundred local and foreign guests. Before the astonished curiosity of the crowd assembled in the vicinity, those who remained outside entertained ourselves by wandering along the streets of Palma and Estrella, taking pictures. I recognized those places as if they were inside me. The band of police musicians, famous in the historical annals of the country, martially played the national hymn. The greatest musicians in the

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country had come out of that band. A squadron of riflemen, from the troops that were paying homage, advanced a step and shot the regulation discharge into the air. After the warlike note, 279 floral crowns, one for each guest, were deposited on the peristyle. The Minister of Culture, representing the President, uttered an interminable and soporific address on the obligatory subjects. He emphasized the cultural, social and political importance of the Congress on History, Culture, and Society in Latin America in the Twentieth Century, the first of its kind to take place, he affirmed, on our continent. He stressed that the event was destined to present itself as a call to the peaceful coexistence of nations, an alliance and integration between countries of the region, and as a message of peace and friendship to the countries of Europe, the United States, and Canada. From artistically constructed cages, the minister was taking out, one by one, 279 messenger pigeons, and was releasing them into the turbid morning air. On their pink feet, they carried metal rings with greetings from the national authorities, the Church, the Armed Forces, the Reconstruction Party, the guests of the congress, and all the people of the nation. They flew in directions of the departments and regions of the country. Some pigeons lost their way and entered the ventilation shaft of a restaurant called El Lido. The extractor fan began to sprinkle the ceremony with a fine drizzle of blood, sauces, and soft drinks of all colors. The complicity between the hosts and guests, between the living antiheroes there present and the heroes from the historical past, there buried, between the democratic intelligentsia of the West and the falcons of totalitarian barbarism from the Southern Cone, was sealed in this way with the blood of the pigeons and the substances from the kitchen at the foot of the most solemn and austere national monument. This incident was commented on at the press conference afterwards, with all the tones of irony, humor, deference, and irate condemnation. Among the conference participants, a strange personage now stood out, totally paralyzed, who seemed to be nailed to a resplendent chrome wheelchair. He was the blaring instrument of indignation that emerged during the ceremony of the floral offering. The metallic and screeching voice of the paralyzed man filled the immense room with reverberations. An apparatus emerged from his mouth, a mixture of a microphone and a megaphone. The paralyzed man, with a vague human appearance, tensed up in a knot of veins, nerves, and muscles, was holding a small computer on his knees. With a long and crooked nail, he composed sentences that he wanted to utter on the keyboard. The small but powerful megaphone resounded with deafening power. He was probably the disabled man with the most strident voice in the world. I asked one of the monitors who the paralyzed person was. They told me that he was known as The Bastard. I found out later that he was the great grandson of Francisco Lacerda, nicknamed Chico Diavo, the corps’ bugle player who lanced Solano López at Cerro-Corá. General Correa da Cámara,

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chief of the vanguard of the Brazilian army that pursued López, had instituted a bonus of one hundred sterling pounds for whoever captured the fugitive Marshal dead or alive. Correa da Cámara’s bugle player, chosen by chance to hunt López, never could collect the bonus. Correa da Cámara kept it like an honorific blazon, crediting himself with the assassination of the Paraguayan leader. When the war was over, Chico Diavo remained in Paraguay in the forces of occupation that the empire of the Braganzas 206 maintained for seven years over the devastated country. Nothing more than invalids, women, and children were left, but the country still had some natural riches of which the conquerors wanted to take advantage, making the crushing machine of the occupation function to the maximum. On the other hand, Argentina and Brazil, the two greatest allies, were also on the edge of war and the division of booty and territory was not yet resolved. Mitre had retired, leaving an open field for the empire. The Brazilian Supreme Commander received strict orders to maintain military and political dominion over the conquered. Another of the great feats of the bugler was to rape the daughter of a patrician family from Asunción. The father of the girl, who at the time was the general prosecutor of the State, not being able to stand the insult from the Brazilian macaque, committed suicide. Francisco Lacerda had the nobility to unite in matrimony with the raped and orphaned maiden, who inherited the castle of Arekutakuá, current prison of Emboscada. Moreover, Chico Diavo became an adopted Paraguayan citizen. From this union, which had many descendants, the only surviving one was The Bastard, disabled and mute, but possessor of a fortune that he inherited from his parents. Now we had him before us, seated in his wheelchair, overwhelming everyone with his enormous intelligence and his thundering larynx. The great-grandson of López’s assassin is the only living being immune and invulnerable to the rigors of absolute power. Master of a powerful intelligence and a truly amazing theoretical formation in astrophysics and particle physics, he is the corresponding member of various world technological centers and institutes, including NASA. A child prodigy, a natural genius capable of presiding over an assembly of wise men, but also capable of transforming into a diabolical genius of evil. They took us in armored limousines to get to know the city, “mother of nations and wet nurse of cities.” It seemed exotic and full of mystery to the guests. As a perfect golden (or bronze) 207 ending to the afternoon excursion, 206. This is a reference to Dom Pedro of Braganza, who declared himself Emperor of Brazil in 1822. 207. The original wordplay “broche de oro o bronce” (rendered here as golden or bronze perfect ending) is a reference to the visit to the bronze statue of the dictator that caps off the afternoon events.

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we climbed the peak of Tacumbú, the sacred mountain of the ancient Guaraní, sentinel of the Río-de-las-Coronas 208 that gave its name to the country. The mountain, round and ample like a breast, now serves as the pedestal of the great statue of the Reconstructor, built there by a Spanish architect, the same one who by order of General Franco designed and constructed the new palace in the Valley of the Fallen. The symmetries could not be more fortunate. The still alive man was there, in the statue, more magnificently dead than all of those whom he had ordered killed and would continue having killed. His straight right hand pointed north as if reaching out to a colossal interlocutor. Eugène Ionesco, without being able to contain his sarcastic temperament, bowed humbly before the statue and kissed the rock of the base just as the Pope usually does on his apostolic visits to the poorest nations of the earth. “Why did you bend down to kiss the feet of the tyrant?” someone asked him, celebrating the Romanian’s insolence. “I didn’t bend down. The feet of the tyrant climbed up to my mouth and made me swallow all my teeth,” answered the dramatist with his usual sense of humor. Jan Kleenewerk communicated his surprise to me upon seeing this pedestrian statue and not an equestrian one as those of generals usually are. I pointed out the huge bronze cannon, also life-size, to the right of the Reconstructor. The tyrannosaur is an artilleryman,” I explained. He preferred the cannon, symbol of his weapon, in place of the great heraldic horse of the commanders. There is a ñe’engá 209 that maliciously affirms like any vox populi, that here the army horses have more breeding than the backside of their horsemen. The near-sighted eyes of Kleenewerk made out the cannon. “They should have mounted him on top of it,” he said. From the top of the mountain, one spies in the distance as far as one can see, an interminable row of ants that is moving on the horizon blinded by the burning of the reverberations. They are part of a legion of one hundred thousand men who are building tracks for the high-speed trains that are going to cover the three thousand kilometers between Asunción and Brasilia. On the crossties, the two parallel straight lines of the rails that join in the horizon over bridges, banks, tunnels, mountain ranges, hills, and rivers, shine like knife blades. The tyrannosaur is proud of this immense work, on par with the hydroelectric plant. He himself has chosen the name for the rockets that are going to circulate on those tracks: Tatá-vevé or Flying Fire. The name forms 208. The River-of-Crowns refers to the Paraguay River. It gives its name to the country because in Guaraní, “para” means “water” and “guay” means “born.” It is the country’s largest river. 209. Proverb or popular saying in Guarani.

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the initials TAV (which stands for high-speed trains). Over a hanging bridge, more than ten kilometers long and one hundred meters high, those flying fires are going to cross over the dam at 300 kilometers an hour, fed by the electric energy of its turbines. I thought of the rattling ruin of the Paraguayan Central Railway company, built a century ago by the bridge and roads engineer Sir Charles Percival Farquhar I. His trains still circulate with the persistence of fossils from the Industrial Revolution. On those trains of the Southern Railway, I came to Asunción from my village of Iturbe del Manorá to continue elementary and high school. I only remember the appealing aroma of the chipás from Pirayú from those trips. The TAV is the work of Sir Charles Percival Farquhar II, great- grandson of the first. Three additional conquests increase the pride and satisfaction of the dictator. The first is the astronomical credit that he has obtained from world banks for the fulfillment of that overambitious enterprise. This represents the return of the Paraguayan region to the fold of the countries most favored by the help from BID, 210 the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, under the sign of imperial democracy, in connection with the other European and Asiatic finance centers. The motto of the dictator, “Open arms to foreign capital,” is generously fulfilled in this manner. It is the only foreign element to which entry is permitted. A second achievement of a social nature deservedly feeds his complacency as an upright and modern statesman: that of having suddenly resolved the problem of the one hundred thousand peasants without land, permanent cause of a superfluous expense of repressive energy. He has put them all to work on the construction of the TAV under the vigilance of army troops. Ten thousand men with tanks and helicopters to “watch over” the one hundred thousand men armed with shovels, picks, misery and impotence, fed with one hundred daily tons of beans and provisions, is not a bad deal. Along the tracks, the families of the new railway slaves have formed a traveling village. In cardboard or straw huts, the women prepare meals for their men. Columns of smoke, wires with washed clothing put out to dry, skinny dogs, children with enormous bellies due to hookworm, all follow the advance of the tracks. Enormous trucks from army administration come and go, rumbling after the wandering caravan, which seems more like a mass pilgrimage like that of Caacupé, the 8th of December, 211 and that of CerroCorá, every March 1st, to the sanctuary for Francisco Solano López erected on the site of his death. The tyrannosaur reestablished the date of March 1st for the annual pilgrimage to the supreme Hero’s sanctuary. Previously, it was 210. The BID is the acronym for the Interamerican Development Bank. 211. Reference to the pilgrimage made to the Virgin of Caacupé who resides in the basilica in Caacupé, which was inaugurated on December 8, 1765.

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made every four years according to the false leap year of February 29, 1870, suggested to Solano López by Father Maíz, a damaging and weakening pause for the patriotic spirit. The two great binational companies, the hydroelectric plant and the TAV, thus sealed the military-economic alliance between Paraguay and Brazil. The secret dream of the dictator is to incorporate Paraguay into the United States of Brazil as a new and blooming state. More than one million Brazilian settlers have already established the draft of this new state on their own on the best lands of the eastern region with their own flag, language, schools and laws, under the monetary sign of the Brazilian cruzeiro. Finally, the true balance had been found, by the genius of the Reconstructor. This was the suitable counterbalance to the equilibrium of the Plata region, neutralizing the permanent Argentine threat. Posterity had reserved for him the seat of honor for distinguished heroes. The dictator thanked and blessed the arrival in Paraguay of the English engineer, Sir Percival Farquhar II, who had presented to him the detailed project design. Now Sir Percival directs the work, strong, compact, weightless, from his private helicopter. He has just passed swiftly toward his command post. He does not detach his lips from the microphone that keeps him in communication all the time with a web of radio and closed-circuit television stations. Years before, Sir Percival had succeeded in recovering the national treasure and what remained of Madame Lynch’s private treasure, buried during the Great War in inaccessible places, with a method of exploration using an invention with laser beams. The exhumation of those treasures lasted five years, under the direction of a body of bridge and road engineers hired from England, under the protection of the presidential escort detail. Some rumors leaked by Sir Percival’s Chief of Staff claimed that the collection of these recovered treasures was equivalent to or surpassed the volume and value of the treasure buried by General Yamasita in enormous subterranean pyramids made of cement and steel during World War II on one of the islands of Japan. That imaginative and pragmatic genius, Sir Percival, handed over that fabulous treasure that a woman’s hands had buried one hundred years before in the mysteries of the Paraguayan earth to the dictator, deducting the one third negotiated in his favor as professional fees. Madame Lynch, despite her friendship with Eugenia de Montijo 212 and the diplomatic patronage of Napoleon III, did not succeed in recovering this new and secret El Dorado, 213 which incited national and international greed. Neither did she retrieve the five thousand leagues of land that the Marshal gave to her in an almost 212. Wife of Napoleon III. 213. A legendary country of gold that was sought by the conquerors who came to America.

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posthumous legacy, just as previously he had given her the princely present of his command staff, which she had converted into the handle of her parasol. When she returned to regain the rights and possessions of which she had been divested, they threw her out like a common and loose woman. She was on the point of being lynched by a gathering of thousands of women who reviled her with insults, shouting “For Madame Lynch, the lynch law. . . . Let’s kill the Madame!” Protected by the occupation forces, she managed to flee and took refuge on the ship that had brought her. She returned to Paris. She lived and died in poverty. The municipal funeral parlor buried her like a beggar in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. All of this is ancient history. Madame Lynch’s ashes now lie in the Pantheon of Heroes next to those of her beloved Marshal. From that glorious throne, as if from beyond the tomb, the legendary woman witnesses the rebirth of Solano’s nation, the same nation which she had seen succumb with the Marshal in the muddy stream of Aquidabán-nigüí. The perpetually lit chandeliers of the Pantheon illuminate their coffins embroidered with gold and precious stones. Thinking about the idiotic convolutions of history has caused me to have a huge headache. I approached the statue. The Reconstructor held out his bronze hand. I took the ring out of the small bag, I put it on my middle finger and I tried out the assassinating handshake. The metal of the ring rang against the metal of the gloved hand. That figure was put there with the single and exclusive purpose that I could practice the liberating gesture of the prick and poison. A faraway shout made me turn my head. I withdrew my hand with the confused swiftness of a criminal caught red-handed with the dagger in his hand. I looked around. There was nobody. From below, miniscule, emaciated, inopportune, the limousine driver shouted that he was waiting for me if I wished to return to the hotel. Slowly, bumping into the rocks, I began to climb down the side of the doubly sacred hill. In the afternoon, after a countryside lunch on the shores of lake Ypacaraí, The Minister of Culture invited us to visit the art galleries of the National Museum, for which he himself served as guide. Very few volunteers dared to digest the heavy meal consisting of the most famous typical dishes of the country in the presence of the foreseeable horrors that we were going to contemplate. The entrance hall bears an inscription that reads: Cándido López paints the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1865–1870). This legend, like all legends, only says half-truths. The great room houses the one hundred paintings of this pictorial chronicle of the first international war in Latin America. The Minister, verbose, boring, completely ignorant on the subject of pictorial art, explained that during the exhibition that took place in Asunción many years ago, on the occasion of the inauguration of Sarmiento’s House, a great Paraguayan painter (whose name is kept a secret), slaved

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away at night, while the exhibition was open, to copy the one hundred paintings and substitute the copies achieved through his industrious ingenuity for the authentic ones. The Minister’s interpreters, having difficulty with certain sounds and lisping for all they were worth, plunged the foreign guests into an inextricable confusion. Ionesco went from one picture to another, observing carefully with an immense magnifying glass that he carried hanging on his chest and taking pictures of those that caught his interest. “Cándido López had come to the Paraguayan war as a favorite of General Mitre and, to a certain extent, his administrative assistant,” the minister maintained. “However, against what official Argentine history maintains, the painter did not return to Buenos Aires with his chief when Mitre abandoned the theater of operations in 1868. Take note: Two years before the end of the war that produced the total ruin of Paraguay!” the Minister was getting worked up with national fervor. “The museum of Buenos Aires sued the Paraguayan State in international court for the falsification and wrongful appropriation of artistic patrimony, to no avail,” informed the Minister with scornful pride. “Such an extreme act proved nothing. Neither did the accusation of massive plagiarism take hold. The best experts of the time confessed themselves incapable of deciphering the enigma. They spoke of a marvelous phenomenon of creative coincidence and other more or less theoretical and technical variations, but the matter did not go further than these completely sterile ramblings,” averred the know-itall and ecstatic guide. “The strangest thing about the case,” said the Minister, “is that the museum of Buenos Aires had only sent about thirty pictures. One hundred were returned to it with the same themes as those thirty: nature, the war environment, the landscape after the battles, the impenetrable melancholy of the dead. That is, the museum of Buenos Aires received a gift of seventy more paintings on other battles and combats that Cándido López didn’t paint. Among them there were paintings that could not be originals of the Argentine painter, among them that of the crucifixion of Marshal López at CerroCorá. We have stated that Cándido López was not at that far and final scenario of the tragedy. Such a crucifixion of Solano López simply did not exist. It was a bluff of the eternal enemies of the supreme hero of the Paraguayan nation.” “On the other hand, although the technique, the style, and the impasto used by the Paraguayan painter were very similar to those of Cándido López, including the evolution of his painting over the five years of the war, the medium and painting materials, the oils of vegetable and mineral origin that the Paraguayan used in the greater part of his paintings, are different than the ones used by the Argentine painter.” It was noticeable that the Minister was reciting from memory a tourism pamphlet that had been prepared for him, with total ignorance of pictorial jargon.

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“Paintings exist,” said the Minister pointing at an oval pavilion, “that are not reproductions of battles. They are paintings, done on the spot, during the blood courts. Some register scenes of torture in the ‘Uruguayan dungeon,’ one of the most terrible of the Great War. In these, Father Maíz and the other war prosecutors appear: Centurión, Aveiro, Resquín, Goiburú, Carmona, ordering and witnessing the torture. The prosecutor Juan Crisóstomo Centurión, who had studied in London academies, was a novelist and painter.” The minister spoke of the attacks and conspiracies against Marshal López and of the very brief trials that were held for those guilty of these attacks and conspiracies. He ignored one of the most famous trials that ended with the execution by firing squad of the elderly bishop Palacios and the other twenty defendants for the crime of treason of their country. “Look, there are the fathers Maíz and Román, who led the trial of the bishop. From a corner of the painting they contemplate the execution. These paintings could not have been painted by the Argentine Cándido López either, for he did not have access to such areas of extreme security.” The minister also modestly omitted mentioning such tortures as peeling the skin off the soles of the feet of the recaptured deserters, that of the cutoff eyelids in order to leave eyes unprotected before the scorching sunlight during the staking of prisoners, and the slow crushing of the defendants, with each turn of the bars, in the tobacco presses. Shouts and screams of horror arose. “Shuddering from terror is the greatest happiness of humanity . . . . !” affirmed the Apollonian genius Goethe in the second part of Dr. Faustus,” exclaimed Ionesco in French. Nobody paid the slightest attention to him. The interpreters opted for not attempting the translation of those sentences that were unintelligible because of the stutter of the author to whom the minister attributed over and over again the work Waiting for Godot. “Part of the apocryphal copies from the Buenos Aires museum,” said the minister, continuing, “was reproduced not long ago by an Italian editor of art books. It is a beautiful edition for bibliophiles. It has the name of the Argentine painter as its title and belongs to a collection produced under the generic title of The Image of Man. The book, of great artistic and polemical value, has a prologue by a writer who is a compatriot of ours. 214 Cándido López returned with Mitre to Buenos Aires before the end of the war, affirmed the guide. The legend exists that there was another painter, also called Cándido López, this one a native of Paraguay. He must have remained on the battle fields until he finished his pictorial chronicle of that war, the bloodiest and cruelest in the history of our America. The Crucifixion of Cerro-Corá is 214. This is a reference to Cándido López: Immagini della guerra del Paraguay con un testo di Augusto Roa Bastos, edited by Franco Maria Ricci (Milan: 1976). Roa Bastos wrote a “prologue” to the edition in the form of the short story “El Sonámbulo.” He is the “compatriot of ours” mentioned.

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attributed to this painter. But, as I say, it is a question of a legend invented by the enemies of the Marshal.” “Elle est où cette fameuse Crucifixion?” 215 asked Eugène Ionesco. “It is not here or in Buenos Aires,” stammered the Minister. “Et alors,” 216 protested the dramatist of the absurd. The minister found himself in a bind to explain the absence of that unique piece. With a series of evasive circumlocutions, he said that when President Perón, a little before his fall, came to Paraguay to return the trophies of that unfortunate war from about a century ago, he was fascinated by the painting. General Perón, before a crowd of one million people, solemnly handed his sword to the Paraguayan army as a symbol of an everlasting alliance. The gesture was against Brazil, but strengthened the position of Paraguay. President Stroessner, confessed addict of everything Brazilian, found himself morally obligated to offer the painting of the crucifixion of Marshal López to his Argentine colleague. Sometime after, General Perón was overthrown by the so-called Liberating Revolution that freed the conservatives from Peronist populism. President Stroessner sent a gunboat to the port of Buenos Aires in search of him. The liberating Admiral tried to prevent his exit. He ordered the battleship Belgrano to bombard and sink the Paraguayan warship. The generals succeeded in dissuading this violent and inappropriate act. “The battleship Belgrano was sunk in the Malvinas War against the English in 1982, in a sort of posthumous punishment and like a slap in the face to the council of military men and admirals,” said the minister with a vindictive tone. “The gunboat was able to finally set sail,” said the impassive Minister. General Perón gave the finger to the liberators and came to take refuge in Asunción for many years. Among the rusty historical trophies of the Military Museum, his sword, which no longer even served to cut roast beef, was waiting for him. Poor General Perón, as great as he was, arrived only with what he had on, and I would almost say to you, in his shorts. He did not bring the Crucifixion. General Perón’s private house, not the Quinta de Olivos, 217 was burned down. The painting burned with everything that was inside. “Eh bien, quelle belle connerie!” 218 snorted Ionesco. The Minister’s speech was not absurd. The Crucifixion is in reality a painting by Cándido López, but not that of the Argentine painter but of his Paraguayan namesake. Legend or myth, the painting of the Crucifixion is real. I had seen it in the National Museum of Asunción, but not in the Mitre Museum of Buenos Aires during the years of exile that I spent in that city that I love so much. There are then two Cándido Lópezes. Or in any case, 215. 216. 217. 218.

French for “Where is this famous Crucifixion?” French for “Then what?” One of the official residences of the president of Argentina. French for “Oh, well, what a beautiful screw-up!”

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there are two different stories of Cándido López and his paintings: one, that of the Argentine painter who was in the Great War, until 1868 as an assistant to General Bartolomé Mitre, and who returned with him; the other, that of the Paraguayan painter with this same name who imitated to perfection the paintings of the first, or who divined them without knowing them, to the point of transfusing himself with their style and the mysterious world of their images. A small artistic difference exists between them: The Argentine painter preferred that which was picturesque; the Paraguayan, what was picture-like. 219 And a small logical obstacle regarding their identity: the two similar painters, almost twins in their names and works, could not have met each other or had the slightest idea about each other. The paintings by the Argentine Cándido López were never in Paraguay. The Minister is wrong in his reference to an exhibition that probably took place in Asunción during the years of the placid retirement of Sarmiento in this city. The Paraguayan Cándido López was in Cerro-Corá on March 1st, 1870, or February 29th of the false leap year invented by Maíz and decreed by Solano López. He witnessed the assassination of the Marshal and subsequent simulacrum of the crucifixion of his cadaver. He painted that terrible scene on an inexistent day. He painted it without knowing that he was copying not the nonexistent Crucifixion of the Argentine painter, but another older and more remote crucifixion: that of Mathias Grünewald, which he had not seen neither in its original nor in reproductions of the center panel of the altarpiece. These cultural luxuries did not exist in the Paraguay of that era, nor in the present either, except in the cultural catacombs of the resistance. The certain thing was that the obscure hiatus of that day messed up real history and even gave rise to doubt that that atrocious war had taken place. Through the crack of a day, centuries can disappear. When I was working as a journalist in Asunción and Buenos Aires, I carried out an in-depth exploration of this enigma without arriving at any valid conclusion. No journalistic mention, no study from the most accredited art critics exists on this second Cándido López; on this sort of mysterious pictorial “transmigration.” But his paintings are there, magically identical to those of the first Cándido López. The similarity that indissolubly unites the two contemporaneous painters, almost still anonymous at the beginning of the century, is astonishing because it is inexplicable, but also because of their perfection (beyond their relative pictorial values). The Minister dragged us at lightning speed through the gallery called “The garden of the assassinations of leaders.” It is, in a certain way, the continuation of the first gallery in the current epoch. It houses murals and 219. The original Spanish contains the following wordplay: pintoresco versus pictoresco. Pintoresco means “colorful, picturesque,” while pictoresco is a neologism. The point is that the Argentine painter sought the colorful or picturesque while the Paraguayan imitator sought the picture-esque, in the sense of picture-like, or pictorial imitation of the original Cándido López.

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paintings that reproduce the attacks (some fifty) perpetrated against the tyrannosaur and the punishments imposed on the frustrated assassins. It is a sort of infernal circle where the condemned continue suffering the tortures to which they were subjected in life. These scenes have been painted, engraved, or sculpted by mercenary artists from the country or abroad, inept and obsequious amateurs. The Minister did not make any comments about this black and red series of paintings. One notices that these paintings and murals are grossly imitated from the paintings by Bosco and Peter Huys; some of them copied directly from life. The atmosphere of horror was really unbearable. Many women fainted and even had hysterical crises that filled the high and resonant dome of the museum with screams. The most determined women urgently demanded that the minister take them back to the hotel. Some representatives of a certain age, those from Puerto Rico and Mexico, among others, were taken away on stretchers. The beautiful and young representative from Brazil, who was taller than everyone, got her very high heels caught on the steps of a landing and fell head over heels, ripping her flimsy dress, leaving her naked and with a trail of pieces of very vivid colors in her wake. They covered her with a curtain and took her away on a stretcher. “This visit has been barbarous and aggravating,” said a Spanish sociologist next to me, whom I confused at first with Fernando Savater. “I think that it was a good demonstration of the kindness of the regime,” I shyly insinuated. Ionesco cited Goethe: “The shuddering of terror is the greatest happiness of humanity . . . ” It could be the epigraph of this collection of assassinations of leaders. “If Goethe’s saying were true,” the sociologist who looked like Savater continued rambling, “there should be a great art of concentration camps, of crematory ovens, of the collective massacres of all times.” “There isn’t,” I said naturally turning the word “art” into a feminine noun. 220 “There cannot be,” sentenced the dead-ringer for Savater. “There cannot be an art of death. The imagination cannot penetrate that reality from beyond the tomb and produce a genuine art. Bosco, Peter Huys, Goya, and Picasso have revealed in their paintings, not the physical horror of the tortured, but rather the moral horror of the torturers: the cannibalism of the monotheism of political or religious power, the atrocious indifference of the universe before the species condemned to live in it.

220. In the original Spanish, the sociologist uses the noun “el arte.” When Moral replies, he changes this to “la arte.” The noun “arte” can be either feminine or masculine in Spanish.

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In the middle of the sharp semi-consciousness produced by the waves of ether, 221 we arrived at the hotel. They transported us in stretchers to our respective rooms. When I woke up from I don’t know how many hours of heavy dreaming without images, Odiseo Aquino was at my bed with the roll of film of the pictures taken at the wake. “My father got the Technical to return your pictures,” he triumphantly handed the roll to me. The negatives had been developed; some of them, the clearest ones, were marked in pencil with a red cross. So were those that showed the faces of the women at the wake. Without wishing to, I had transformed myself into an unofficial police informant. While I was looking at the photos, the bellhop informed me, without interest, that the Minister of Culture had been relieved of his position and was in prison. “It seems that there were complaints from the organizing commission of the congress,” he said raising his eyebrows a lot and wrinkling his nose. The supposed photos of Pedro Alvarenga’s cadaver were not such. One only saw in them the jumble of a body destroyed by torture and photographed from diverse angles: they were nothing more than reproductions of some picture that we had just seen in the “Garden of the Assassins of Leaders.” I took this pointed attention as a warning from the secret police. I had to pay the bellhop the agreed upon sum in any case. He put his arm around my neck and made me bend my head. I thought he was going to whisper some confidential warning. He introduced his tongue into the orifice of my ear with the butterfly kiss of the whorehouse tarts, and dashed off. I thought that he crossed the door like a ghost. I didn’t see him open it or close it again. While I stanched the saliva with repugnance, I remembered that the suite had various emergency exits hidden by the curtains. I threw the damp Kleenex in the toilet, pressed the flusher, and cursed the lewd bellhop. I collapsed onto the immense bed, humiliated, defeated, full of repugnance. The telephone rang. It was Dalila Mieres. She asked me if I could see her for a few minutes so she could talk to me about the matters that I had brought to her. “Yes,” I said, “with great pleasure,” I think with a tone of excessive amiability perhaps to hide my anxiety. She arrived immediately. “Good day, sir,” she said bowing enchantingly. “I bring you good news. Here is your vaccine bottle. You should use it immediately. We have a good medical office in the hotel with the best specialists in the country.” 221. One presumes that medics used ether to sedate the hysterical museum visitors and transport them more easily back to their hotel rooms.

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When I recovered my voice, I invited her to take a seat. She chose the furthest corner of the luxurious suite. She reviewed her notebook. “Regarding the stewardess mentioned by you as Leda Kautner, in effect, the information you gave me coincides with that of a new special service stewardess who joined the crew of yesterday’s flight, FAE 747-27th of September 1987. It was her first flight to Paraguay. But this stewardess is registered with the name of Paula Becker. What you observed is also true. The stewardess Paula Becker was the last one to disembark. She dallied in the plane because of lack of experience. She gathered her hand luggage and descended from the machine moments before the explosion was produced.” “I am grateful for your assistance . . . ,” I said, stuttering. “I hope that the good news about your ex-student Paula Becker has calmed you down. This morning, she took the regular service flight to Frankfort. She will return in two days. If you want to speak to her, I myself will transmit the message that she should communicate with you.” “Oh . . . thank you . . . thank you very much,” I murmured, having difficulty pronouncing the words. The monitor Dalila Mieres softly got up. She said, “Always at your service.” She took leave of me with a bow of her head, and left with the satisfaction of a duty completed. I saw her walk away through the hallway, erect and with almost martial steps. Dalila Mieres had come not to cut my hair but to produce a total baldness 222 with her “good news.” I continue being at the mercy of Leda Kautner. Now she is called Paula Becker. I am persecuted by appearances and pseudonyms. She will return in two days. I contemplate the little bottle that contains the vaccine against yellow fever. Should I take it as an ironic wink from Paula Becker? The monitor does not have reason to believe that my pretext was false. Her work is to watch out for the reputation of the services provided. These vaccines always exist in hotels. I wonder if there is a vaccine against the plague of girls with golden hair who are everywhere and nowhere? A fatal worry invades me. I now understand why, when I occupy the suite, I double lock the doors with the safety chains. I decided to confide the hellish problem to Clovis. Always the master of himself and kind sustainer of the anguished spirit of other people, I had faith that he would help me to find a solution. I called him in his room. He had just gotten in. He told me to come up. “Let me see,” he said when I had summarized the story of Leda Kautner, avoiding some of the episodes like the one of the night in Nevers.

222. Moral uses a metaphor for the effect caused by the news that Mieres brought him: the news does not simply satisfy his curiosity about Leda Kautner (cut his hair), but rather totally shocks him (produces a total baldness).

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They brought us two glasses of whisky. On the surface of the liquid two pieces of burning charcoal with a blue flame were floating. Here, in appetizers, instead of ice cubes, they use prisms made of frozen hydrophane, a variety of opal that burns in the water and whose frozen fire pleasantly tickles the lips. They sparkled iridescently like small lenses on fire. I glimpsed my upset and gloomy face in them, my red beard, my frosted hair, my pale and somber expression. “You are speaking to me of a story that seems to be more like a hallucination. There are feminine caprices that are more obsessive and stubborn than this one. I know of some, such as that of my excellent mother, may God keep her in his glory. When a woman believes she is truly in love, she is harder than obsidian and burns in the water like these small ice floes of fire. Above all, when it is a young woman without the antibodies that experience provides. The madness of love invades her with all its poison, transforming itself into a terrible hate. She thinks that the man whom she loves has robbed her of her body, her place in the world, her passion to live and even her right to die. She will not leave him in peace until she sees him dead or until she herself dies.” While Clovis was speaking, I felt that he suspected the existence of a deeper cause that I had not managed to realize. He was killing time to discover it through what I myself would tell him. “You told me that your ex-student and persistently enamored one, Leda Kautner, is now called Paula Becker.” “It is what the monitor has concluded,” I replied. Precisely because I left it out, it seemed to me that he intuited my experience in Nevers. Clovis’s instinct is infallible. “Have you slept already with your ex-student?” “No,” I responded without vacillating. He scrutinized me with a sibylline smile. After reflecting for a moment, between two sips of whisky, he asked me if I had personally conversed about or touched on the German poet Rainer María Rilke in my courses with Leda Kautner. The question surprised me. But immediately I recalled that, in effect, Leda Kautner on two or three occasions, had spoken to me with interest about Rilke and his book the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I gave her Rilke’s biography, written by Lou Andréas Salomé, one of his ex-lovers, as a gift, because she had finished her thesis. “I probably have here the tip of the iceberg,” said Clovis categorically. He mentioned the fact that in the colony of artists at Worpswede, Rilke met Paula Becker and fell hopelessly in love with the blond and beautiful painter. Rilke was not “made” for carnal love, said Clovis with a smile. As compensation, he invented the archetype of the virginal maidens. Paula’s beauty induced him to identify her with these platonic and ethereal lovers with the goal of possessing them exclusively “far from the gross fits of

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sexuality,” in the kingdom of pure poetry. Once Rilke had confirmed that Paula was a virgin, which was strange and unheard of in a community of artists who had specifically congregated under the banner of free love, he condemned her to die with her virginity intact and constituted himself as the guardian of that “jewel that is only lost once.” It happened, nonetheless, continued Clovis, after draining the glass, that Paula Becker became tired of being a virgin and the passive vestal of this poet whom the thorn of a rose was going to kill. She abandoned him. She forgot about Rilke, who married Clara Westhoff, and united in matrimony with Otto Modersohn. Paula died upon becoming a mother. This produced a profound depression in Rilke for two reasons: for losing one of his vestal virgins and also because the end of Paula contradicted and discredited his doctrine of “a death of one’s own.” Paula was killed by carnal cohabitation, ergo, the pregnancy, ergo the birth of her daughter. Rilke had already wanted to do the same thing with Camille Claudel, continued Clovis, when he was in Paris as Rodin’s secretary. He tried to convert her into one of his vestals. But Camille was the exclusive vestal of the sculptor. The powerful faun watched over her and kept her very “occupied” in the slavery of his love. Camille did not even realize the existence of the secretary-poet; she did not conceive of an existence other than that of her booming Jupiter. “My mother,” said Clovis, as if closing an episode without importance, “knew the story of the famous trio well.” He laughed a little and observed me with the fixed irony that was characteristic of him. “Leda Kautner has identified herself with Paula Becker, but not with Camille Claudel,” said Clovis. “She has taken the name of Paula and has consecrated her virginity to you. If this story is real and not a hallucination, only one alternative remains for you, my dear Félix Moral,” said Clovis, patting me understandingly on the shoulder. Either you forget her or you sleep with her, which is what she has been desiring since she met you.” “I could never do it. There is Jimena. I could not insult her with this completely gratuitous and absurd act of infidelity, now that I am far away from her, perhaps forever.” “You have become sentimental. You take very seriously the meaning, the ethical “sound” of your name. There is no infidelity in carnal transport. Only if you also love Leda Kautner or Paula Becker would you betray Jimena. If you allow yourself to submit to the caprices of this crazy girl, divided now in two, then you also love a false and dangerous fantasy. This eroticized nymph is not nor can become a normal relationship in your life. You know my philosophy of love: a single woman each time. If Jimena is the only woman in your life for once and for all, do not gamble her for a mirage. Leda

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Kautner and Paula Becker are nothing more than phantoms of an exasperated and exhausted libido like yours. Be strong and forget them. The simultaneously reasonable and slightly irrational but deeply wise judgment made by Clovis has done nothing but confuse me even more, precisely because his opinion coincides point by point with my own. Leda’s words that night in Nevers came to me at that moment like a faraway echo: “Ah . . . if a man wants . . . if you want . . . I am here as I am and as you desire me . . .” Would the scene and the horror and the fascination repeat themselves? Shortly after our brief conversation, Clovis called me to give me, according to him, a “piece of good news.” “The organizing commission has just announced to me that tomorrow, after the inaugural meeting of the congress, your tyrannosaur will receive us at noon in the Government Palace for the planned royal reception. Your courtly yearnings will finally be satisfied. With respect to your obstinate Little Fuchsia Riding Hood transformed into a ferocious wolf, don’t worry. She will have to move out of the way and keep the necessary composure. Now the hustle and bustle begins. May it go well for you. I will return to Paris the day after tomorrow. Prepare for me what I must bring to Jimena. I restrained the blow of bitter emotion that the announcement produced in me, I called the operator to block any calls, I locked and chained the doors and got ready to prepare the ring. I saw the rectangle of a watery light under the bed. I threw two thick quilts over it, but the rectangle similar to a hidden screen of closed circuit television continued floating over them. I shrugged my shoulders and locked myself in the bathroom, fastening the latch. It has taken me an hour to install the mortal substance into the ring. I kept a reserve dose in the little bottle in case of any emergency. I might need it myself. During this simultaneously simple and complicated operation, I have not been able to get out of my sight the understanding eyes of the Dalmatian, his noble head, the question mark of his long and fine neck, the moment in which at my request he extended his hairy and obedient paw. I dedicated a few words of affection and gratitude to him again. His shadow disappeared. I put the ring on my finger, I reclined on the bed, and I began looking at it fixedly until a sort of slightly hypnotic drowsiness invaded me. Someone lightly knocked at the door. I got up suddenly and there was a rush of blood to my face. “Take care to not make her a baby,” Clovis had said to me, “because it is evident that that girl from the Carpathian Mountains was not born to be a mother. Teach her at least to be a good lover.” The discreet call repeated itself twice more. Ready for everything, I walked toward the door, determined to use the ring, a first time, if it was her. Dalila Mieres had told me that today was her day of return. After a racket of locks and chains, I opened the door. Nobody was there. I quickly went through the long hallway from end to end. I only bumped into a waiter from

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room service. The collision was on the point of knocking down the little cart full of bottles and dishes covered with shining covers. Some of them fell. The smell of appetizing food spread through the hallway. The waiter gathered the covers. He went over them and polished them with his napkin. “Didn’t you run into a blond girl?” I asked him, feeling a little ridiculous. “I didn’t see anyone, sir,” the waiter responded to me obsequiously. We mutually apologized and I returned to my suite. I put the ring away in the protective bag and I lay down on the bed again knowing that I was not going to be able to sleep. I decided to get up and continue writing to you. I do not know what is going to happen. A sort of fatum, 223 too infallible and often repeated to be considered like a type of miracle (if God exists, he must not feel special sympathy toward tyrants) has always saved the dictator from chance ambushes. It is probable that the inauguration of the congress will be the day of my final end. In such case, Clovis will tell you what I cannot at this moment yet foresee. In any case, I will remain here, “at the front line,” waiting for the events. I will follow them with the stubborn faith of the incredulous which is made of the substance of the future according to Saint Paul’s definition. I have at hand a period of seventy-two hours while the delayed action of the ring produces future changes and simultaneously creates a legend. In addition to these pages in “my own writing,” “with beats of my heart,” I am sending you a video in which I have recorded the striking scenes of the week since our arrival. I am including a copy of the luxurious album-program for you to amuse yourself awhile with the facts about the congress and the guest list. You will recognize among them old acquaintances of ours, the members of that perpetual fauna of self-invitees to colloquia, anxious for good food, for the always possible “one-night stands,” for the intellectual exhibitionism. In a special container into which I have put a little bit of the earth from these parts, some sprouts from the “migrating forest” will come to you, of which I spoke about in another part of this letter. They are seeds and buds that have escaped from the native forests sacrificed on the altar of civilization and for the progress of this country that “progresses backwards.” The sprouts that I am sending you are already a miniature forest. If you grow fond of them, plant them in one of the flowerpots that hold the humus of the native land on our Window of the West. You will be able to give the gift of a forest of gigantic ferns to Nevers. I hope that the city will know how to house them in one of its beautiful parks, despite the norms against clandestine immigration. I will continue tomorrow with the latest news of the inauguration and the presidential handshake.

223. Latin for “fate.”

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Friday, September 1st. The inaugural meeting unfolded like the scene from a piece by Ionesco. Decidedly, this congress of rhinoceroses 224 and dinosaurs is custom-made for the creator of the theater of the absurd. I will summarize it for you. After a very prudent and excessively laudatory speech by the new Minister of Culture in honor of the participants and in favor of the objectives of the month-long congress, voting took place to elect the president of the first of three terms. The election fell to a Mennonite Paraguayan pastor, resident of Sâo Paulo, Brazil, Filomeno Simón, in honor of his evangelization and cultural work in the regions of the Northern Chaco. He was not present among the attendees of the meeting. He was totally unknown. The general suspicion spread that such a name and person were fabricated. After hurried inquiries the organizing commission that works in conjunction with the leadership’s intelligence service arrived at the stunning conclusion that Filomeno Simón, the alleged and fraudulent Mennonite pastor, was none other than the international terrorist Pedro Alvarenga who had traveled from Rio among the guests, supplied with false documents and also a false invitation to attend the congress as an observer. You already know the story of Pedro Alvarenga and his tragic end. The moment of astonishment having passed, and calm having been reestablished, Eugène Ionesco was named president of the assembly by popular acclamation. As if coming out of a nightmare, he gave thanks for the honor that was being conferred on him. He confessed his satisfaction to know a country that he believed to be nonexistent and that according to all appearances, continued to be nonexistent for him. He formulated wishes that such a beautiful and mysterious country would exist in the future from the moment of the Congress on History Culture and Society in Latin America in the First Century of the New Era and onward. “In the hallucination of history underway,” he said, citing his compatriot Cioran 225 and closing his address, “nations, countries, and people only exist in the imagination of a violent demiurge who is full of hate against humanity. It is necessary, he said, to destroy the demented demiurge so that humanoids can ‘humanate.’” (He employed the verb “humanate” as a neologism.) He received an ovation. The Bastard was in charge of the bravura performance. The paralyzed man presented his theory of the destruction of the world by culture and art, illustrating it with numerous diagrams and physical-mathematical formulas that were incomprehensible to the attendees. He gave various examples of a horrific pragmatic pro-babilism 226 with other data relating art to cybernetics, 224. This is an allusion to the play Rhinoceros published by Eugene Ionesco in 1959. 225. Emil Cioran was a twentieth-century Romanian philosopher who wrote in both Romanian and French. 226. The philosophical doctrine that probability is sufficient basis for action because certainty is impossible. The narrator makes fun of the theory by hyphenating the word probabilism into pro-babilism, implying that the theory is incomprehensible babble.

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bordering on the most delirious imaginings of science fiction. He made a flock of electronic pigeons and miniature satellites fly around the ceiling of the room in amusing maneuvers. By remote control, he projected on the ceiling of the room something like a very subtle layer of cirrus and metal innervated with pores and spores of beating luminosity. Lacerda’s scientific theory maintains that, using the layers (he gave the name) of the biosphere as a refractor of sound, one can project a permanent emission of music over the surface of the planet, immune to any attack of defense or reprisal. The sounds of this emission would be of such a high volume that in ten days it would have erased any vestige of human life without harming in the slightest the mass of material civilization, cities, buildings, temples, nuclear power stations, etc. He spoke of “a surgical operation of mathematical precision, exclusively dedicated to remove the tumor of the miserable human race.” He chose the first two bars of Beethoven’s Eroica and carried out a blaring test with his vocal prosthesis for a few seconds at full volume, using as a refractor the dome of the room covered in porous fabric. The attendees were on the point of going crazy. There were many who threw themselves on the floor, covering their ears and producing terrible shouts that the tremendous sonorous mass impeded hearing. The Bastard smiled with an expression of unspeakable happiness. He opened his completely strabismical eyes and interrupted his burlesque ordeal. The silence that followed was almost as terribly deafening as the power of the decibels that had made the overcrowded room shake. The Bastard condescended to explain that what had just happened had only used some one hundred millionth of the volume that Beethoven’s Eroica would be able to reach in the loudspeakers of the cosmos. During the coffee break, I approached Fulvia Marcia. She observed me attentively but did not recognize me, which gave me a good feeling regarding the efficacy of my pseudonymous appearance. Fulvia, the idol of our youth, the romantic girlfriend of the socially excluded, did not recognize me despite the small rub on the back of her hand that I made with my index finger. It was our password during our secret encounters or in the middle of a large gathering. To forget something like the back of your hand is a pretty accurate saying. 227 In addition to being an excellent musician, Fulvia is the founder and president of the Center of Geopolitical Studies for the Southern Cone. During tomorrow’s session, she will present her paper on “The Geopolitical Function of the Paraguay-Uruguay-Bolivia axis in the Equilibrium of the Plata Region.” Next it was the North American anthropologist Edward Jensen’s turn to take the floor. With an exhaustive analysis, computerized statistics and field 227. This is a sarcastic rendering or play on the axiom “to know something like the back of your hand.”

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studies, Professor Jensen demonstrated the possibility and imminence of the simultaneous extinction of Paraguayan society and the indigenous peoples. He established very precise parameters for this symmetry. Professor Jensen and his colleague and compatriot Professor E. R. Wolf collaborated a little while ago on the writing and publication of the book The Human Condition in Latin America. Look for it among my anthropology books. It is a fundamental work. It will be very useful for the composition of your essay on Hegel and America. The presentation by the North American anthropologist produced an evident malaise among the members of the organizing commission. The top brass of the university authorities twisted in their seats with apparent disgust and hostility. At the end of his lecture, among the applause of the guests, whistles and insults in Guaraní were heard against the North American Professor, world authority on the subject. There wasn’t time for more. There were barely thirty minutes until the presidential audience that was strictly planned to last sixty minutes. The armored limousines drove us to the Mudejar palace. We climbed the stairs and we passed underneath the arch of honor. One clearly saw that it was nothing other than an X-ray and laser detector, analogous to the ones in airports although amplified and camouflaged with baroque ornamentation. . . . It also fulfilled the function of taking photos of those who were entering. The slender monitors introduced us into the vast red audience hall. With gentle and amiable gestures, they distributed us and put us into three rows, in alphabetical order by last name, before a platform onto which one ascended by three velvety steps. On one side was the box seat of the ministers and secretaries of State, on the other, that of the ambassadors, the apostolic nuncio and the representatives of the hierarchy of the local clergy. When the first chimes of midday rang in the cathedral, the doors to the private office opened. Preceded and followed by his disciplined cohort of assistants and aides, slowly and majestically, the tyrannosaur appeared, in gala dress. His puffy chest was cobbled with crosses and medals down to the no less bulky abdomen. His military uniform fit him very loosely, which increased the disproportion of his big and flabby hunchbacked body. The loose combat jacket made it possible to discern the bullet-proof vest underneath the medals and the presidential banner. At first, one had the feeling of seeing the image of the tyrannosaur reflected in the convexity of a distorting mirror. His head, crowned with thin and almost gray hair, showed his half Teutonic blood. Old age did not treat him well. His typical Bavarian features were jumbled together over the hanging thick-lip that was mixed-up with the voluminous double-chin with locks of hair dyed blond, so that he seemed to have a mustache underneath his mouth. His chubby-cheeked face was fixed on an indeterminate point in front of him. At no time did he say a single word, and he was not going to say anything because he couldn’t. Standing

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and in a pretty forced martial stance, his figure copied the posture of his statue that crowned the summit of Tacuambú hill. The Minister of Culture said a few words and the ceremony unfolded with mathematical precision. The anguished countdown of minutes and seconds began for me. Each handshake lasted an average of thirteen seconds. The 279 guests would fill up one hour and thirteen seconds. To that time, one had to add the slow movement of the rows, the ascending and descending of the steps to the platform, the delay of some because of a stumble and even the fall of the representative from Puerto Rico. This supposed an excess of fourteen minutes, six and a fraction of seconds. My calculations gave me evidence that the ring was not going to arrive in time to that immobile hand, rigid in its gesture, identical to that of the statue. I suspected with horror that that hand, that that arm were really prosthetic limbs. I found myself in the middle of the second row and needed to gain the time of at least five spaces ahead to have a remote probability of using the ring. With the will of making myself invisible, which at times has worked for me, I slipped out of the row and got seven places ahead, placing myself behind the beautiful representative from Brazil, which brought me certain guarantees of tactical camouflage. As I was approaching the platform, the figure of the tyrannosaur became clearer and clearer. I noticed then that the jumbled and blurry face was protected by an almost impalpable veil of anti-bacterial protection. At that moment, I realized with horror that he was wearing some very thick white gloves. The ring’s needle had the possibility of penetrating the thickness of one tenth of a millimeter. Making the handshake more vigorous or pressing the trigger of the opal with more force were not going to be useful at all. With that protective attire, the tyrannosaur seemed to me like an extraterrestrial being, or in any case, more or less like the first man who landed on the moon, covered in a spacesuit made of selenite and with oxygen tubes on his back. I remembered at that very moment that I had not brought with me the security folder where I keep my papers. I had forgotten it and left it in the hotel suite. A sudden cold sweat broke out on my back. In any case, I would have had to leave it at the entrance, in the control office at the entrance, where the risk of eventual scrutiny and seizure were even greater. I hope that my folder with an unbreakable seal has not been stolen or broken into . . . scrutinized, but my confidence is not very firm. I gathered the rest of my strength and waited; or rather, I advanced step by step, with very brief steps that each time were shorter and farther away, toward whatever destiny, necessity or chance would decide. We were arriving. I wished that the woman whose height was a head taller than mine would stumble and fall on the steps catching her high heels, like what already had happened to her in the museum while we were going

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across “The Garden of the Leader Assassins.” Something even better happened. The representative from Brazil climbed elegantly onto the platform erect on those heels that seemed to make her weightless. Upon seeing her, the Gran Tembelo, the great friend of Brazil, recognized her and smiled for the first time with affability that allowed one to see the elements of his facial protection. He took off his glove and shook the hand of the beautiful Brazilian. The woman straightened up and moved her head near the face of the president. I thought that she was going to give him a kiss and that that kiss would scratch the veil of protection. She limited herself to saying two words in his ear with the most enchanting of smiles. The woman descended or jumped agilely down the steps. I was already in her place and I was able to shake the bare hand, still extended, of the tyrannosaur, with the most fervid handshake that I had given in my life. I felt the soft and flabby hand. I was going to withdraw my hand but he retained it and observed me fixedly under his thick, drooping eyelids. I riveted my gaze on the center of his forehead, between the eyebrows, where his skin cancer showed its red granules. He raised my hand to the height of his eyes and observed the ring with curiosity. His gesture was almost friendly. I finally felt that he was letting go of my hand. I descended the steps as if I were not treading on them. I followed those who were leaving. In the box seat of the diplomats, I saw Clovis who winked an eye of festive approval at me. I will have lunch with him and will give him my package. Within seventy-two hours, Clovis will have already given it to you in Nevers and I will know here if the noble count of Villamediana’s ring has honorably fulfilled the assassination mission that has been entrusted to it. Now the only thing left is for me to wait for the results. . . . I will continue, if I can, writing to you until Clovis’s departure. It is the only thing that comforts me and makes me feel as if we are together. . . . If this is impossible, Morena, a long, long goodbye . . . From Jimena Tarsis to Félix Moral’s mother Dear Mrs. Moral: My long silence undoubtedly must seem strange to you. I have just returned from Paraguay after two years of absence. As I told you in a letter before my departure, I could not accompany Félix on the trip he took at the end of August 1987 because of the accident I suffered. You probably already know the worst, so I will limit myself to outlining the story of that unfortunate trip. I am sending you Félix’s manuscripts, and the balance of the assets from our joint account in a bank remittance from Madrid. I have only kept the final letter that he wrote to me, of which I am sending you a copy. Félix attended the first two meetings of the Congress, inaugurated on September 1, 1987. He disappeared two days later (the 3rd of September) without leaving any traces. Clovis de Larzac, upon returning from Asunción,

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gave me a package of letters and personal effects that Félix sent through him as an intermediary; even a small container with seeds and sprouts from the “migrating forests” (as he called them), which the warm north wind sweeps and spreads along and across the Paraguayan territory. Clovis de Larzac extended his stay in Asunción by two days to find out about the fate of Félix, a dear friend of his and a nationalized French citizen. He was faithful to his affection for Félix and the tradition of this country, to not deprive any person in danger of help, which is incorporated into the penal code and rights of its people. Clovis de Larzac told me and showed me proof of all the means he used to find Félix at any cost. He conversed a long time with the Minister of the Interior, who steered him through the corresponding governmental and police petitions with a special recommendation. As was foreseeable, he did not obtain any results and could not clarify anything. Clovis was harassed by telephone calls and anonymous notes with news and evidently false information about the whereabouts of the disappeared man, with the purpose of throwing him off track. The sources of this interference, he said, were foreseeable, and one could not take from them any useful information. What was obvious was that Félix had been recognized by the security organizations. He was detained in an indeterminate location. No contact with him, even indirect, was possible. He was held “incommunicado” in one of the branches of the secret police, called their National Management of Technological Matters, or more briefly, The Technical, the most sinister den of investigations and torture. Clovis presented a vigorous protest to the Paraguayan Chancellor’s Office and entrusted the following of the matter to two lawyers of proven honesty and great international prestige, one Paraguayan and the other Swiss, both members of the Organization of Human Rights for the South American region, with its seat in Geneva. The participants of the congress endorsed an urgent complaint, directed at the president of the nation and sponsor of the congress, demanding the immediate freedom of Félix as an official guest, and making the Paraguayan government responsible for any harm that he might have suffered. This public declaration did not merit any response. In an also public statement, the official organizers exempted themselves from all responsibility in the presence of conclusive evidence that Félix, in presumed complicity with international terrorists, was preparing an attack on the head of state. The investigating judges of the trial based the case precisely on the letter that Félix had written to me and of which you have received a copy. Just after they removed the cast from my leg and I could move with the help of a crutch, I traveled to Paraguay, after announcing my departure to the organization of Human Rights of Geneva and consulting with the Swiss lawyer who had taken charge of Félix’s case. I arrived in Asunción on September 27th. I immediately contacted the Paraguayan lawyer. Very disheart-

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ened and intimidated, he had not been able to advance a single step in the clarification of the disappearance. He communicated to me that he had received various telephone death threats if he did not quit the case and that, for this reason, he was forced to abandon it, handing over to me all the petitions, testimonies, and evidence that he had managed to gather in favor of Félix’s cause. Clovis de Larzac had given me the address of a colonel in the intelligence service, by the name of Pedro Abad Oro. I visited him in his office and he dealt with me with excessive and false cordiality. From the first moment, his behavior barely hid his clumsy flirtatious intentions, and even those of extortion. I played along with him and was able to take advantage, in turn, of the weaknesses of Colonel Abad Oro. He began by giving me a copy of a bundle of all the papers that were seized from Félix. I expressed my desire to see him immediately. He told me evasively that I had to wait, that he would handle the authorizations from the judges and would notify me the moment that I could do it. In the following days, Colonel Pedro Abad Oro accompanied me to the castle of Arekutakuá, current prison of Emboscada. After a long walk through patios and cells in a true labyrinth of subterranean pits, in which thousands of prisoners were found heaped in a state of extreme consumption, the colonel pointed out to me a man who was dragging himself on all fours. It was a piece of human fodder, half-naked and mutilated, with traces of savage punishment and tortures. Since he was not able to use his hands, he carried between the corners of his lips the dented tin plate from the “communal meals” of the prisoners. “That’s him,” said Abad Oro with an inexpressive voice. “Do you recognize him?” I assented. It was him without a doubt. I approached and called him by his name. I did not receive any response. His turbid and lifeless eyes looked at me and didn’t recognize me. He emitted a confused sound, something like a strangled groan. He dropped the plate. I kneeled and raised his filthy and leonine face. I discovered that they had pulled out all his teeth. The vestiges of outrages and tortures were visible all over his body. I discovered with horror that they had skinned the soles of his feet, the punishment that they inflict in the Technical on prisoners of the greatest danger so that they cannot escape. I took various pictures without Abad Oro displaying inordinate reluctance. At times, I had the impression that he was even acting under instructions that the case be made public, through me, in order to simultaneously offer flagrant proof of subversive action to international opinion and as a dissuasive and chastising example. I demanded to Colonel Pedro Abad Oro that Félix be transferred to the hospital as an emergency to receive the necessary attention. With the photos taken, I presented a pretty complete report on his situation to the congress of

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intellectuals and writers that was reaching its conclusion. Of the 279 conference participants, only 13 remained, in their greater part old intellectuals and local writers of marked fascist tendencies who were confirmed as staunch supporters of the government, so that I could not obtain the slightest support from them. On the contrary, these “intellectuals” of the regime published a full page in the newspapers that same day, declaring their gratitude to the government for the celebration of the congress and a fervent manifestation of adherence to “its illustrious action as a government and its resolute antisubversive and anti-terrorist fight.” Dear lady, understand me. It is very difficult for me to write you this letter full of horror and condemnation, while sensing that I am offending your most intimate feelings. I will try to abbreviate when possible this painful chronicle, leaving for a later encounter in Madrid the details of the nightmare that continues being real for me as it must be for you. Félix was transferred to a police hospital with a large deployment of security forces, but also of advertising media. Among a great throng crowded together in front of the hospital, they lowered the stretcher in which Félix was being transported from the ambulance, while he was being bombarded with the flashes from the multitude of local and foreign photographers. I did not leave his side for a single moment, and I made sure that they gave him all possible aid. In the days that followed, faced with my urgent insistence, they grafted tissue that they were taking from my own flesh onto the soles of his feet. From that day on, they chained his legs to the iron bed embedded in the cement floor. During the day, despite the hostility and the humiliating restrictions that the nurses on call, including the doctors on duty, imposed on me, I contrived to not abandon him. At night, I went to the hotel where I had to put up with the permanent harassment of Abad Oro who invited me to dinner and insisted on taking me to the discotheques in vogue. I never accepted these invitations, which were attempts to exhibit me as a fan of the intelligence service and a prosecution witness in Félix’s lawsuit, after presenting me as his informer and principal accuser without allowing me to attend the masquerade of the trial. Little by little, I at least succeeded in making Abad Oro respect me. I felt that I was gaining a certain influence over him, much like a spell. It was not personal merit. The phantasmagoric circumstances that surrounded the case, I thought, had contributed to producing in him that “state of his soul,” if that is possible in a soulless person who is astute, and morally depraved. Five months passed. They were about to release Félix from the hospital and return him to prison. He had barely recovered the vestiges of his most elementary faculties, and still was not able to stand up on those atrociously cut soles, which were healing slowly. From that moment on, I only had one precise and simultaneously obsessive objective: flight. I secretly made a plaster mold of his feet. I made a craftsman manufacture a pair of shoes with

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elastic but firm soles and very soft inner linings made of crepe that would serve as shock-absorbers. I had the fraternal help of young doctors from the resistance. Flight by plane was absolutely unthinkable. One and only one possibility existed: the pilgrimage of March 1st to the shrine of Solano López in CerroCorá and from there to Brazil. My idea was to blend with the crowd and cross the border through the city of Pedro Juan Caballero in the north. The proximity of the date (we were at the end of February) made me think of that remote possibility for escape, one in a million. I gathered all the information that I could and put together a plan whose realization was only relatively possible because it was totally implausible. I managed to get Abad Oro to transfer Félix to prison on February 27th since I had to return to France during the first days of March. I am going to save you the details of the last seven days of tremendous tension, frights and anguish, the terrible fight against the unforeseeable machinations of chance. I could not share it with Félix, who was still submerged in an almost crepuscular mental and emotional state, almost absent in in his lack of thought and movement. He was an almost inert mass supported by me, against the wall, on the head of the stretcher. I managed the complicity of two nurses on night duty, incentivizing them with large payments. The two previous nights, supplied with a small file, I had been stealthily sawing off, little by little, one link after the other of the chain which fastened Félix’s ankles to the iron bed embedded in the floor. The night of the 26th, with an apron and cap like the doctors on duty, I entered the room. I approached Félix’s bed, I made the half-sawed-off links spring loose, I managed to stand him up and I carried him step by step toward the toilets. With the help of the nurse-accomplices, we loaded him into the ambulance, I climbed behind the wheel and drove at full speed, making my way thanks to the strident sound of the siren and the revolving headlights that were blasting tenebrous light, passing the traffic, the groups of pedestrians, and the police posts, one after the other, in the blink of an eye. I entered the port zone. I parked in front of the customs warehouses, where at that hour the traffic of trucks and vehicles that take out batches of minor contraband was beginning. I slowly took Félix to the wharf, where a small ship of passengers and cargo that were traveling to the north was docked. The steward was waiting on board. He conducted us to the cabin that he had set aside for us. I put Félix on the trundle bed and went out again. I told the steward that I was returning immediately and I handed him half of the promised sum of money. I took the ambulance and left it parked in front of the government palace with the lights on. I returned on foot and found Félix asleep and peaceful in the bed. I stretched an air mattress on the floor and went to sleep by his side. The high sun, although invisible because of the invariable and thick light of Itaipú, woke me up. I went to bring breakfast.

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We were arriving at the port of San Pedro. In one more day we would arrive in Concepción. By telephone I had rented there, from a car rental agency, the vehicle that would take us to Horqueta. And from that town we would join the pilgrimage of the people from Concepción on their way to Cerro-Corá in the convergence of the caravans that come from every part of the country. I chose a four-wheel drive Toyota, and we began the route toward the foothills of the mountain range. Everything was happening with an exasperating slowness but without big problems, except with small snags in the marching plan. I remember this trip like a dream and I am relating it like a dream from which everything escapes me except the anguish and desperation. Félix, absorbed in his own obsession, allowed himself to be taken as if in another dream more unreal than mine. For your well-being and my own, I should soon end the tale of this via crucis. In the middle of the crowd of travelers who were hoarsely singing martial and religious chants, we were arriving at the gorge of Cerro-Corá, at nightfall. From the top of the mountain we saw the plateau illuminated by hundreds of campfires. Powerful spotlights and apparatuses like television cameras focused on the amphitheater where the confused scene was taking place. Something like the semi-unconsciousness of a memory was awaking in Félix. He waved his arms and made an effort to continue advancing. In an imprecise amount of time, we arrived on the edge of the amphitheater. One could not go further forward. A human mass surrounded the sacred space. A strange rite was being celebrated in it. Possessed by a tremulous and nameless anxiety, Félix tugged on my arms to continue advancing. From the nearby hill, we contemplated the inexpressible scene: the crucifixion of Solano López executed by men disguised as “Brazilian macacques.” At the feet of the cross was Madame Lynch, dressed in white, erect like a character from an ancient tragedy who receives the body of the crucified husband in her arms. The principal actress looks extraordinarily like Madame Lynch, according to the iconography that we know of her. But that actress was no other than Leda Kautner, Félix’s strange ex-student. I observed her with astonishment. I intuited that he had also recognized her. He raised his arms toward her and vaguely called her. He advanced a few steps but stumbled on what seemed like a thick vine and fell on his face on the rocky ground. It was a thick cable of the many that fueled the filming apparatuses. A military man in battledress approached, followed by a firing squad of “painted faces,” It was Colonel Pedro Abad Oro. With a grimace of scornful mockery, he saluted me militarily. He said, “I have followed all your steps since the flight from the hospital. I traveled with you on the ship to Concepción. . . . I have only wished to prolong a little more the illusion of flight. . . .” He turned his face toward Félix’s reclining body and spat on him. This poor devil is already dead before dying . . .” He raised his hand and the squad riddled Félix’s body with bullets from their automatic weapons. Félix

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shook as if in a tetanic convulsion and remained quiet, his face sunk into the brush. I tried to rush to him. They knocked me down with a pistol-whip. From that moment on, it absolutely didn’t matter anymore what could happen to me. They transported me, handcuffed, in a helicopter to Asunción. I was briefly judged and condemned to life in prison for association with terrorists and the crime of an attempt against the life of a head of state. Félix died without knowing that the scene of Solano López’s crucifixion was not a real fragment from history that he believed he was reliving, but the fictitious scene of the shooting of a film, just as he himself had imagined and captured it in the script that was half-filmed a long time ago and that caused his first imprisonment. For two years, I was held in the women’s prison of The Good Shepherd. They assigned me to cleaning drains and toilets. The director asked me one day what other tasks I knew how to do. I thought that she had taken pity on me, or something worse. “I know how to embroider,” I told her. They transferred me to the prison workshop. There I began to embroider from memory the long border of the tapestry of Queen Mathilde, which is at the Museum of Bayeux. In my time as a high school student in that city, I had grown fond of that mystical work that recalled the conquest of England by the Norsemen. In a year, the fringe, which was rolling over itself, had reached more than one hundred yards in length. The director confessed to me, with an obsequious trembling in her voice, that she had the idea to present it, when it was finished, to the very excellent Mr. President of the Nation. “Perhaps,” she said, “that gesture will be worth a reduction in the time of your sentence although you are now nothing but a Nacht und Nebel.” 228 I desperately wished that the work would never end and that I would remain forever dominated, invisible, forgotten in the basements of the prison. At dawn on February 3, 1989, a military insurrection overthrew the dictator. Two days later, I was freed by order of the new President of the Republic. The palace coup came if not to legitimize, then at least to justify Félix’s obsession to murder the tyrant that had dragged him to his horrible death. They told me that the ex-dictator himself, when they enjoined him to surrender, was on the verge of being blown away by a hand grenade from the officer who commanded the operation. The chief of the insurrection, in the proclamation launched that same day, committed the armed forces to the inauguration and defense of the process of democratic transition, to defend public liberties and human rights. At the end of this process, according to the proclamation, elections will be convoked and the provisional government of the armed forces will hand over power to the civil candidates that end up 228. The Spanish original reads “N.N.” which is a reference to the German “Nacht und Nebel,” which means “Night and Fog” and was a directive from Hitler to take care of anyone who was a threat to German security. I owe this translation to François Maspero’s excellent French translation of Roa Bastos’s El fiscal, titled Le Procureur. See page 363.

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being elected. Let’s hope that the deadlines and words are fulfilled in favor of this community that has already suffered too much. The deposed dictator, until yesterday all-powerful throughout more than forty years of absolute and discretionary power, was forced to leave the country. In the company of his oldest son, a few loyal people, and a strong guard, he was driven to the high-speed train station, inaugurated with great pomp during the last day of the congress. The ex-dictator was the first user of this service in a direct trip to Brazil, where he was granted asylum. They welcomed him, honoring him as the current chief of state. The military coup was followed by a peaceful civil insurrection that launched a call for municipal elections. The independent movements of the resistance took over the municipality of the capital together with the principal local governments of the country. A wind of popular justice has begun to blow strongly throughout all the country. The new communal authorities in Asunción, followed by an immense multitude, climbed to the top of the Tacumbú hill. They dismantled the bronze statue of the dictator and made it roll down the hill in a great explosion of collective jubilation that lasted three days. It was a gigantic celebration of an almost ritual character. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from all social sectors in fraternal union with the indigenous villages dragged the statue through the streets of the city to the rhythm of various musical bands, folkloric ensembles and indigenous drums, coming from the furthest corners of the country. In the Plaza of the Heroes, next to the National Pantheon, the statue was hung from immense gallows, a relic from the old days. Forty-three lit candles illuminated it, one for each year of absolute power that the dictator exerted. A National Constitutional Convention has just been celebrated from which a new Constitution has emerged. The new Supreme Court of Justice has solicited the extradition of the exdictator so that he could be tried in Asunción. He will not come. It is difficult to reach this necessary legal step as a final end to the dictatorship and to the insurgence of new military regimes. If the ex-dictator were to come to face the judges of the recently installed but still too fragile democracy, the popular voice predicts that the bronze statue will have a companion. I do not share this desire. Feelings of hate or revenge have never improved “the hallucination of history that is underway.” Félix was a victim of this hallucination. The misfortune that we suffered pains me, and I commiserate with your sorrow with all my heart. Keep me in your memory and affection as I keep you in mine, in memory of Félix.

Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR TRANSLATION NOTES Balzac, Honoré de. The Magic Skin. West Columbia, SC: 2016. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New York: New Directions Publishing Company, 1946. Buchner, Georg. Danton’s Death. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2011. Borges, Jorge Luis. El Aleph. Madrid: Editorial Alianza, 1971. Claustres, Héléne. The Land-Without-Evil: Tupí Guaraní Prophetism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History. Translated by Williard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Encyclopedia Brittanica. http://www.britannica.com. Ezquerro, Milagros. “Prefacio.” Pancha Garmendia y Elisa Lynch by Augusto Roa Bastos. Asunción: Servilibro, 2011. Flecha, Víctor-Jacinto. “El impacto del exilio en la obra de Roa Bastos. http://www.abc.com. py/edicion-impresa/suplementos/cultural/el-impacto-del-exilio-en-la-obra-de-roa-bastos1570515.html. Hudson, William Henry. The Purple Land. Rookhope (England): Aziloth Books, 2016. Huysmans, J. K. Grünewald: The Paintings. London: Phaidon, 1958. Ionesco, Eugene. Rhinoceros: A Play in Three Acts. Translated by Derek Prouse. New York: Samuel French Inc., 1960. La Du, Robert R. “The Dramatic Tradition of Bellido Dolfos.” Hispania 46.4 (1963): 693–99. Lezama, José Navarrete. “Antonine Artaud en el país de los tarahumaras.” Mito: Revista Cultural (mayo 2017). https://revistamito.com/artaud-en-el-pais-de-los-tarahumaras-lamontana-de-los-simbolos/. Marot, Clement. “La blazon du beau tétin.” http:// Le%20blason%20de%20beau%20tetin%20by%20clement%20marot%20sonnet.html. Masotta, Carlos. “La bruma y la tatachina: un comentario en torno al documental de Enrique Acuña. http://bibliotecadelcentrodescartes.blogspot.com/2010/01/la-bruma-y-la-tatachinaun-comentario.html. Mercado, Tununa. Canon de Alcoba. Buenos Aires: Booket, 2013. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Piglia, Ricard. Artificial Respiration. Translated by Daniel Balderston. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Rengger, J. R. Viaje al Paraguay. Asunción: Editorial Tiempo de Historia, 2010.

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Rilke, Rainer Maria. Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Translated by M. D. Herter Norton. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1949. Ricci, Franco Maria, ed. Cándido López: Immagini della Guerra del Paraguay con un testo di Augusto Roa Bastos. Milan, n.p., 1976. Roa Bastos, Augusto. El fiscal. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1993. ———. El fiscal. Mexico: Alfaguara Hispánica, 1993. ———. El fiscal. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1993. ———. El fiscal. Madrid: Club Internacional del libro, 1995. ———. El fiscal. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2008. ———. El fiscal. Asunción: Servilibro, 2009. ———. Moriencia. Caracas: Monte Avila, C.A., 1969. ———. Pancha Garmendia y Elisa Lynch. Asunción: Servilibro, 2011. ———. Le Procureur. Trans. François Maspero. Paris: Editions Seul, 1997. Rojas, Freddie. “Ayer falleció el historiador Pedro Alvarenga.” http://www.abc.com.py/ espectaculos/fallecio-ayer-el-historiador-pedro-alvarenga-caballero-886456.html. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Smith, Colin, ed. Poema del mío Cid. Madrid: Cátedra, 2006. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Mariner Books, 2005. Weldt-Basson, Helene C. “The Genesis of Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo El Supremo.” Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispanica 29–30 (1989): 49–64. Weldt-Basson, Helene C. “The Legacy of Guaraní in the Fiction of Gabriel Casaccia, Rubén Bareiro Saguier and Augusto Roa Bastos.” Mester XXIV.2 (1995): 65–80. Wilder, Thornton. The Ides of March: A Novel. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003. Vallejo, César. Los heraldos negros. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1961.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE PROSECUTOR Albonico, Aldo. “Si conclude con un tonfo la Trilogía Paraguaya” di Augusto Roa Bastos” Quaderni Ibero-americani 75.6 (1994): 103–9. Albonico questions the premise that Roa Bastos destroyed the first version of The Prosecutor that he wrote in 1989. He thinks that much of the original novel was used in the second version because most of the new version is still written from the perspective of dictatorship, and not the post-dictatorship (which was Roa’s reason for rewriting the work]. He claims that only the epilogue evokes the future of Paraguay and speaks against killing Stroessner. Albonico also discusses the novel’s proposal of the problem of obtaining absolute justice. He claims, however, that this question is poorly developed in the novel and that the theme of exile is more predominant that that of justice. He also compares the novel to I The Supreme and “El Sonámbulo.” In comparison with the previous two works, he criticizes The Prosecutor for not offering Stroessner’s perspective or forming a more complete judgment of Stroessner, in the way that the author provides Dr. Francia’s perspective and a more balanced portrait of the dictator in I The Supreme. He claims that the only part of the novel that “comes alive” is the part that deals with Francisco Solano López and the painter Cándido López, although he finds the latter’s presence in the novel incomprehensible because he has a totally different conception of history (more fixed and traditional) than that of Roa Bastos. In Albonico’s view, the only thing that these three works (I The Supreme, El Sonámbulo, and The Prosecutor) have in common is the revision of Paraguayan history, although The Prosecutor is highly ambiguous in its ethico-political message. Benisa, Carla. “Dos versiones de Judas. Acerca de dos novelas del exilio: Respiración artificial de Ricardo Piglia y El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos. Revista Paraguay desde las Ciencias Sociales 2 (2013): 45-64. This article examines how the theme of exile in two novels by exiled writers, Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia and The Prosecutor by Augusto Roa Bastos, reflect the intellectual

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debates that emerged during the period of transition to democracy in each country. With regard to El fiscal, Benisa illustrates how the novel reflects the author’s ideas about Paraguayan literature as an “absent literature” (by exiled writers) or one of interior exile (written by writers within Paraguay subject to dictatorship). Benisa sees the novel’s focus as political condemnation with the aim of planting the question of how to judge totalitarianism. Buffery, Helena. “Roa Bastos and the Question of Cultural Translatability (or how does one get to Paraguay?). Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. 1.1 (2005). http:// digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=dissidences. Buffery’s article focuses on the question of how to translate Paraguayan culture for other cultures to comprehend it. She borrows the concept of “translatability” as employed by Walter Benjamin to discuss how Roa Bastos articulates this issue in his later novels The Prosecutor and Madama Sui. With regard to The Prosecutor, Buffery views the protagonist Moral as embodying the issue of translatability. As an exiled Paraguayan intellectual living in Europe, Moral seeks to stand for the people of Paraguay, understanding his role as committed intellectual to be one of translating their needs (through his goal to assassinate Stroessner). According to Buffery, Jimena, his partner, is constructed as the ideal reader, the only one capable of reading between the lines of Félix Moral’s narration. Thus, she embodies complicity with the “other” as the only possible way of recovering “otherness.” Cárcamo, Silvia Inés. “El prodigio en la “maldita guerra”: El mito del Cándido López paraguayo de Roa Bastos. In Monstruos y prodigios en la literatura hispánica. Ed. Mariela Cerceda Insúa and Lygia Rodrigues Vianna Peres (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2009): 51–60. This article examines the myth of a Paraguayan Cándido López in several interrelated texts by Roa Bastos: the story El ojo de la luna [The Eye of the Moon]; the novel El fiscal [The Prosecutor] (1993); the texts Frente al frente argentino [In Front of the Argentine Front], Frente al frente paraguayo [In Front of the Paraguayan Front] in Los Conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco (2001) [The Conspirators of the Shanty of the Greater Chaco]; and the apocryphal essay titled “Transmigración de Cándido López” [Transmigration of Cándido López] included in the book Cándido López, a reproduction of his paintings from on the war of the Triple Alliance. Cándido López was an Argentine painter with a very traditional, strict view of history, who painted scenes from the war, without capturing the tragedy of the Paraguayan side. Roa Bastos imagines a second Cándido López who paints the war scenes from a Paraguayan perspective, thus illuminating what is absent in the real paintings. Cárcamo examines the dialogue between Mitre and Cándido López, interpolated with verses from Dante’s Inferno in Frente al frente argentino, the portrayal of an antiimperialistic Cándido López who criticizes the role of England and Argentina in starting the Triple Alliance war, and the role of the Triple Alliance in destroying Paraguay in the story “El ojo de la luna.” The author shows how these texts are precursors to the development of the figure of a Paraguayan Cándido López. In “El ojo en la luna,” it is this Cándido López who paints the crucifixion of Francisco Solano López reproducing that of Grünewald. The author concludes that the Cándido López who appears in El fiscal is inspired by the one in “El ojo de la luna.” In The Prosecutor the myth of a Cándido López who argues for the Paraguayans is appropriated as a nationalistic discourse and strategy by the Stroessner dictatorship because it is one of Stroessner’s ministers who boasts about the falsification of the Argentine painter’s paintings. However, Roa presents the interplay of the myth of a Paraguayan Cándido López as a form of popular resistance at the same time that it is a propagandistic discourse of dictatorship. Courthes, Eric. “Una trilogía paraguaya tras otra.” Escritural 3 (2011): n.p. https:// eroxacourthes.wordpress.com/tag/el-fiscal/. Courthes traces the hypotexts or earlier versions of the novel The Prosecutor. He mentions three one-page stories that appeared in the Sunday supplement of ABC Color titled Cerro Corá 1870, I, II, III, which later became part of “El sonámbulo,” a short forty-five-page

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novel. He also mentions the fictitious prologue to the Italian edition of Cándido López’s paintings and a deposition by Father Fidel Maíz that Bartolome Meliu claims to have sent to Roa Bastos, as well as the story “El país detras de la Lluvia,” which appeared in Hispamérica. Courthes indicates that these hypotexts barely appear in the final version of The Prosecutor and that the Triple Alliance War (present in the former) is hardly a central motif of the novel. He also stresses the shift from the focus on Maíz to the protagonist Moral. He suggests that Jimena is a central figure and that perhaps the novel is more a love-letter than anything else, although criticism on the novel has ignored this aspect and Roa Bastos has denied the novel’s autobiographical character. He also indicates that originally, Roa planned to use Contravida instead of Son of Man in the trilogy until he rewrote Son of Man, indicating that Contravida did not fit because of its retrospective narrative viewpoint. De Chatellus, Adelaide. “Le peintre Cándido López dans l’oeuvre de Roa Bastos.” Escritural: Ecritures d’Amerique Latine 3.2102-5797 (2011): http://www.mshs.univ-poitiers.fr/crla/ contenidos/ESCRITURAL/ESCRITURAL3/ESCRITURAL_3_SITIO/PAGES/De_ Chatellus.html. De Chatellus examines the role of the Argentine painter Cándido López in several of Roa Bastos’s works, including The Prosecutor. According to the author, in The Prosecutor, Roa’s representation of Cándido López reflects his conception of the producer based on oral modes of production characteristic of Paraguayan culture, where the teller speaks from memory and transmits a narration of which he was first the receiver; he is not the author but a simple transmitter. In oral folklore (such as that of the Guaraní), the work is a semantic texture in perpetual elaboration. This is what the figure of the painter does in The Prosecutor. An anonymous painter copies López’s paintings, thus illustrating that all painting is a reinterpretation of previous paintings, the pillage and deformation of previous work, similar to the constant retelling in Guaraní oral culture. Ezquerro, Milagros. “Genealogía de la trilogía paraguaya de Roa Bastos.” http://www.crimic. paris-sorbonne.fr/actes/sal3/ezquerro.pdf. Ezquerro traces the origins of Roa Bastos’s trilogy back to his first short story, “Lucha hasta el alba,” written when Roa was thirteen years old. It is the generating nucleus of the trilogy because it contains an authoritarian Spanish father and a Guaraní mother (the absent text of Guaraní referred to in Roa’s fiction). It contains a parricidal son and tyrannical father and these figures are also incarnated by The Supreme (who is both) and the figures of López and Stroessner (tyrants) in The Prosecutor. Females are frequently the ethical beings that transmit Guaraní culture, as do María Rosa, Natí and Salu’i in Son of Man. Ezquerro also traces the first mention of the trilogy to an interview in 1983 with Bareiro Saguier where Roa explains that he needed to rewrite Son of Man to make it fit in the trilogy that he conceived as he was writing I The Supreme. This means that the plan for the trilogy dates back to 1968–1973, which was the time period during which he wrote I The Supreme. The rewritten version of Son of Man contains the seed for the trilogy because it portrays both the figures of Dr. Francia (who will appear in I The Supreme) and Solano López (who will appear in The Prosecutor). Both are mythico-historical figures. All of these texts fit within Roa Bastos’s “poetics of variations.” Ezquerro emphasizes that Son of Man began to be read differently after the publication of I The Supreme, and the insertion of the chapter on Melitón Isasi in the 1982 version of the novel can be seen as a precursor to the figure of Stroessner in The Prosecutor. She also hypothesizes that Fidel Maíz was the central figure of the original destroyed version of The Prosecutor and that this figure clearly shows the impossibility of judging another. Roa has also stated in an interview that each book of the trilogy is built on a distinct impossibility: Son of Man on the impossibility of a metaphysical paradise; I The Supreme on the impossibility of the absolute; and The Prosecutor on the impossibility of judging another. Fernandes, Carla. “Francisco Solano López: “El héroe máximo de la nación paraguaya” in Caravelle 72 (1999): 57–71.

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According to Fernandes, Francisco Solano López is a key figure in Paraguayan history in the second half of the nineteenth century. López has a growing presence in the fiction of Roa Bastos, starting with Son of Man (1960) and then in “El sonámbulo” (1976), and finally, in the novel The Prosecutor (1993). Fernandes traces the presence of Francisco Solano López and the “blood-court prosecutor,” Father Fidel Maíz in these three works. She points out the parallels constructed between Maíz during the War of the Triple Alliance and Miguel Vera during the Chaco War (both are traitors). She traces the history of López and Maíz (the conspirators against López and the blood courts of San Fernando in which Maíz was prosecutor, and Maíz’s subsequent repudiation and betrayal of López after his capture by the Brazilians). According to Fernandes, Maíz was a double traitor because he first betrayed respect for human life putting the defense of the nation first, during those trials, and then subsequently betrayed López. According to Fernandes, López oscillates in Roa’s fiction between a Christlike and diabolic figure. In The Prosecutor, López is seen through various modalities: film, narrative, and painting, to present a vision of history. During the filming of the movie on López, the narrator shows progressive identification with López’s character. The description of López is heroic, epic, and hyperbolic. There is no distance between López and the narrator. The subsequent screenplay writer (who replaces Moral) has no regard for historical fact and carnivalizes Paraguayan history, giving a privileged place to the role of women (Lynch and Pancha Garmendia) in the truncated movie version. Fernandes also discusses the role of Sir Richard Burton’s letters in the portrayal of López. He is presented supposedly as a neutral foreign witness, but in reality his perspective is personal and apologetic. Moral questions Burton’s writings. There are many dissenting viewpoints. Finally, in “El sonámbulo,” Roa presents the Argentine painter Cándido López and invents a Paraguayan Cándido López as well. In the episode in which Moral visits the National Museum during his trip to Asunción, parallels are established between the conspirators against López and those against Stroessner. The past is necessary to understand the present. Finally, Fernandes cites a passage from the history of Paraguay written by Julio César Chaves that confirms that López was the victim of exterior aggression. Figueroa, Armando. “Cuando solo queda imaginar: El Fiscal, última novela de Roa Bastos.” Quimera 121 (1993): 54–57. Figueroa offers a brief overview of The Prosecutor within the context of the two other novels of Roa Bastos’s trilogy. In contrast with Son of Man, The Prosecutor does not narrate immediate events, or recount a concluded epic feat, but rather narrates the process of imagining one. Figueroa emphasizes the novel’s focus on exile as a daily tragedy and how Moral’s lack of a collective experience reduces him to an insufferable individualism. His only real communication is through his dialogue with Jimena, with whom he shares one cultural connection: that of Spanish, since she is an exile from Spain. The novel is also a commentary on the role of the writer in modern society, and although Figueroa prefers Son of Man, he signals The Prosecutor’s importance because it reflects on the problem of social commitment within exile, as well as the exile of the writer within modern society. Goloboff, Mario. “El fiscal y la imposibilidad de juzgar.” In Coloquio Internacional Augusto Roa Bastos: La obra posterior a Yo el Supremo. Poiters: Centre de Recherches LatinoAméricaines CRLA-Archivos, Université de Poitiers, 1999, 73–80. Goloboff examines the connections between The Prosecutor and the other novels in Roa Bastos’s trilogy, particularly Son of Man. Goloboff traces the seeds of the main topic of The Prosecutor, the impossibility of judging another, in the rewritten version of Son of Man published in 1982. In particular, he examines the passages about Father Fidel Maíz that were inserted into the revised version of the novel. These passages indicate that despite Maiz’s role as “blood-court prosecutor” during the Triple Alliance War, and his subsequent betrayal of Solano López, his actions are to some extent justifiable because much of what he did was aimed at saving the fate of the church in Paraguay. Goloboff points out that Félix Moral possesses the same initials as Fidel Maíz and thus functions as a double for Maíz in the novel.

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Gómez, Leila. “Viaje a los campos de batalla: Augusto Roa Bastos y la Guerra de la Triple Alianza.” MLN 125 (2010): 305–25. Gómez sees the novel The Prosecutor as important in Roa Bastos’s narrative trajectory as a “meta-narrative of exile” that sheds light on the aspect of “foreignness” in Roa Bastos’s writing. The protagonist, Moral, claims that he can see his country better through the writings of foreigners than from those of Paraguayans. Thus, in The Prosecutor, as well as in previous texts, such as “El ojo de la luna” and “El sonámbulo,” Roa Bastos uses two “foreign” figures (the Argentine painter Cándido López, and the nineteenth-century British traveler Sir Richard Burton) as “prisms” through which the history of Paraguay can be examined and the recovery of national identity can be achieved. Roa creates doubles of these historic figures—the Paraguayan Cándido López as the double of the Argentine painter, for example, who can see events from both sides. Paraguayan writers portrayed Solano López as a sublime patriot. Roa Bastos acquires a critical distance from this history through exile. The author goes on to examine the figure of Cándido López, his real biography and role in the novel. Gómez sees the adoption of the Paraguayan perspective in some of López’s paintings. She shows how the painter is transfigured into a double in “Transmigración de Cándido Lopez.” The mutilated painter (who loses both arms and legs in this text) becomes a metaphor for the defeated Paraguayan nation. Roa Bastos reencounters Paraguay through his paintings. Gómez then analyzes Burton’s Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay, stating they are ambiguous. That although in parts he sympathizes with López and the Paraguayans, his perspective is Orientalized—he idealizes the defeat of Paraguay and López’s tragic destiny which is an Orientalized view of the Other needed to establish imperial distance between being a traveler and being an exiled person. Roa Bastos manipulates the order of Burton’s letters and the content (adding paragraphs), but ultimately identifies with his admiration of López and his orientalism. Guerrero, Jorge Carlos. “Rewriting in Roa Bastos’s Late Fiction.” In Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature: The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos. Ed. Helene Carol Weldt-Basson. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010, 189–209. Guerrero examines the intertextuality between Roa Bastos’s story “El ojo de la luna,” the novel The Prosecutor, and the collective writing project in which Roa Bastos participated, titled Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco. Guerrero examines the story “El ojo de la luna” as a parody of historical revisionism in Paraguay. Sir Richard Burton (a diplomat who traveled to Paraguay) and Cándido López (a soldier during the Triple Alliance War and Argentine painter who captured scenes from the battles) are eye witnesses to the Triple Alliance War. Burton carnivalizes the historical figure Francisco Solano López who led Paraguayans to certain death in the war. Moreover, the proliferation of different narrations within the story mimics the multiplication of contending histories about the war and leads to the blurring of history and fiction. In The Prosecutor, one of the letters that Moral writes to Jimena is a rewriting of “El ojo de la luna.” In this letter, Moral adopts a viewpoint completely opposite to that of the previous short story, emphasizing the historicity of the historical characters and the documentation. Burton’s account of events as transmitted through Moral’s letter largely coincides with Moral’s own viewpoint on Solano López and the war. He adopts the authoritarian nationalist myth of Solano López. Finally, in Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco, a group of officers and soldiers from the armies of Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Paraguay form a community of deserters who conspire to end the War of the Triple Alliance. This project reflects a spirit of regional integration in the 1990s and 2000s, encapsulated by such events as the Treaty of Asunción. According to Guerrero, in this work, literature is a medium to posit alternate worlds to historical impasses. Roa Bastos’s two contributions to the book (“Frente al frente argentino” and “Frente al frente paraguayo”) reject notions of difference and nationalism. “Frente al frente paraguayo” is almost identical to one of Moral’s letters to Jimena in The Prosecutor, with six additional pages at the end under the subtitle “El guerrero y su doble” (The Warrior and His Double). This addition focuses on how the painter Cándido López transcends nationalism through the

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legend of a Paraguayan double who paints the Paraguayan perspective on the war. This legend is aimed at creating a sense of fraternity between different nations. Honorio, Gisela Paola. “Se escribe cuando ya no se puede obrar: el rol del intelectual en la trilogía de Augusto Roa Bastos.” Cuadernos de CILHA 14.18 (2013): 45–69. This article examines the role of the intellectual in Roa Bastos’s trilogy (Son of Man, I The Supreme, The Prosecutor). The author provides historical background on how Stroessner rose to power in Paraguay, and examines the concept of hegemony (as opposed to ideology) as the operative principle in history. Honorio examines how Roa Bastos has created a literature that attempts to understand Paraguayan reality from a historical materialist perspective. Writing in Roa Bastos is charged with creating utopia. The first novel of the trilogy, Son of Man, is one of the first novels written to express a lack of confidence in modernization and development. Roa Bastos writes as an author who accepts a political engagement in his writing, focusing on the role of the intellectual in revolutionary processes through the figure of Miguel Vera. This process continues in I The Supreme through the figure of Dr. Francia and in The Prosecutor through the protagonist Félix Moral. All three of these protagonists are writers who write obsessively to the end of their days and continually question the purpose of the act of writing. Yet it is the intellectual who recovers testimonies and impedes total forgetting. In The Prosecutor, the intellectual Moral appropriates writing to denounce state terrorism. He is a protagonist in exile and questions how to narrate this experience and how to maintain his identity. Moral surpasses Miguel Vera from Son of Man because he realizes that writing is useless as a revolutionary instrument against Stroessner and takes action by attempting to assassinate the dictator. Moral is also capable, through the distance of exile, of questioning symbols that have been idealized by the dictator. Irwin, Amanda Lee. “El texto ausente y la experiencia del desarraigo en El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos.” Hispania 86.1 (March 2003): 26–31. This article analyzes the theme of exile in The Prosecutor. The author’s thesis is that the linguistic exile suffered by bilingual Paraguayan writers who must write in Spanish, with the result that the polyphonic, oral Guaraní voice is lost in their fiction, is the paradigm for other types of exile in the novelist’s work. Guaraní is a form of absent text, and Irwin sees all of Roa’s writing as being based on the notion of the absent text. She points out that The Prosecutor consists of three types of writing: a memoir, letters written by Moral to Jimena, and a letter from Jimena to Moral’s mother. Letters are an example of another type of absent text, since they are displaced in time toward the future and thereby annul the possibility of dialogue in the present, as does authoritarian discourse. Irwin examines the concepts of uprootedness, displacement, and absence as the basis of Roa Bastos’s fiction, and The Prosecutor, in particular. Kraniauskas, John. “Retorno, melancolía, y crisis de futuro: El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos.” In Las culturas de fin de siglo en América Latina: Coloquio de Yale. 8 y 9 de abril de 1994. Edited by Josefina Ludmer and Carlos J. Alonso. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1994. 209–17. Kraniauskas states that Roa Bastos structures his trilogy around three elements that are mentioned in Son of Man and I The Supreme, but only fully developed in the last volume of his trilogy, The Prosecutor: The Triple Alliance War, the Stroessner government, and the theme of exile. According to Kraniauskas, Roa Bastos presents the discourse of an idealistic, exiled intellectual who feels the loss of his ability to direct the future or align himself with a movement of historical change. The simultaneous need for and impossibility of judgment lead the narrator to death through “return.” In The Prosecutor, this return is double. On the one hand, there is the attempt to return to the pre-oedipal state through the search for the omphalos, which is the history of sexual desire. On the other, there is the protagonist Moral’s return to Paraguay to assassinate the dictator, which is tantamount to a suicide that is paralleled by Francisco Solano López’s suicidal battle against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay during the Triple alliance War. This is the history of political desire. Thus, the mythic structure of return is key to the novel’s comprehension.

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Marinone, Mónica. “La pasión de narrar: A. Roa Bastos.” Celehis: Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas 7.10 (1998): 95–106. Marinone discusses The Prosecutor’s techniques that erase limits, show the quality of relativeness, the intersection of different discourses and codes, the dissolution of rigid identities and stable categories, and the destruction of a linear narrative progression that reflects Roa Bastos’s personal, bicultural history, but provides a site of enunciation that is an “in-between zone.” Marinone also focuses on the novel’s parody of detective fiction, but mentions other aspects such as the role of pictorial art, the exaltation of the feminine, and the reflection on truth, justice, and commitment, which takes the form of montage. Marinone also notes that descriptions by Moral frequently are verbal transpositions of pictorial or cinematographic scenes. The crucifixion is a cultural and ideological image that recurs in Roa’s novels and the motifs of eyes and the look are important vehicles for textual production and interpretation. In summary, The Prosecutor presents “the crisis of the future” but suggests that woman may play a key role in saving Paraguay from this crisis. The true hero of the novel is Jimena, Moral’s partner because she reenacts the salvation of Paraguay by women after the war of the Triple Alliance when she attempts to save Moral. The novel questions and illuminates reality from diverse angles. Matamoro, Blas. “El mito, alegoría de la historia: El Paraguay de Roa Bastos.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. 709-710 (2009): 53–62. Matamoro theorizes that Roa Bastos’s trilogy (Son of Man, I The Supreme, and The Prosecutor) is an allegory of Paraguayan history through the myth of death and resurrection in an eternal cycle. In Son of Man, he cites the death of Gaspar Mora who resuscitates through the figure of the wooden Christ; later other characters, like Casiano Jara, are taken for dead but resurrected. Similarly, in The Prosecutor, Félix Moral is taken for dead after an operation but saved and resurrected by his girlfriend Jimena. Also in that novel, Francisco Solano López is resurrected in the form of the Christ of Cerro Corá who is crucified. I The Supreme resuscitates the figure of Napoleon in Latin America. Ultimately, in The Prosecutor, Roa Bastos carnivalizes López’s tragedy. He is more like a serial novel character, and Stroessner is a postmodern iteration of Solano López. Finally, the place of Cerro-Corá is seen in the novel as the critical place for the allegory of Paraguayan history, that of constant death and resurrection. Pascual de Pessione, María Teresa. El fiscal o la memoria dicotómica del exiliado. Saarbruken (Germany): Editorial Académica Española, 2012. This short book was a chapter of Pessione’s dissertation on Roa Bastos’s trilogy. The study examines the book from a series of dichotomies that include: quiet versus movement; authority versus the people; reality versus magic; water versus thirst, pilgrimage versus going astray; Spanish versus Guaraní; Indigenism versus Hispanism; and place versus no place. Pessione particularly focuses on the protagonist Moral’s role as a suffering man in exile, embodied by the Christ figure in Mathias Grünewald’s painting. Ravetti, Graciela. “Escribir la pasión: El fiscal, de Augusto Roa Bastos.” Caligrama 11 (2006): 101–9. Ravetti sees the novel The Prosecutor as a contemplation of morality and the necessity of breaking with moral principles, which incurs unusual consequences with regard to representation and language. The novel considers the relationship between legality and morality, and responsibility and sacrifice. The protagonist Moral is driven by hate, all his future illusions destroyed by exile. The figure of Francisco Solano López emerges as a demigod around which reflections on morality, barbarism and heroism occur in the novel. Memory, history, and passion are central themes and melodrama and sentimentalism are used to deal with existential problems. The plot is symbolic and no solutions are provided to enigmas such as the crucifixion of Solano López or the Paraguayan double of the painter Cándido López.

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Renaud, Maryse. “La erotización del discurso en El fiscal.” In Coloquio Internacional Augusto Roa Bastos: La obra posterior a Yo el Supremo. Poiters: Centre de Recherches LatinoAméricaines CRLA-Archivos, Université de Poitiers, 1999. 113–21. According to Renaud, eroticism is associated with the protagonist Félix Moral, but also with Paraguayan history through the “magical realist” couple, Solano López and Madame Lynch. The novel displays a variety of types of eroticism, running the gamut from the most prosaic forms of copulation attributed by the narrator to inexperienced youth, the ardent intricacies of the adult love between Jimena and Félix, the devastating, fatal passion of Leda Kautner and the poet Alfonsina Storni, to the perverse sexuality of the dictator who rapes little girls. Frequently the erotic theme is focused through a mythical perspective that includes biblical intertextuality and that ultimately connects with the novel’s political theme. Renaud concludes that the entire novel is an “obstinate questioning” of the notion of uniqueness (understood as the limit to one). The condemnation of Stroessner’s monopoly on power has a correlate in the idea of “one faithful, lifelong love.” Thus, eroticism becomes an instrument for a radical questioning of the established order. Rohena, Ricardo. “Notas sobre la verdad y el poder en El fiscal de Augusto Roa Bastos.” Exegesis 9.26 (1996): 70–72. Rohena views The Prosecutor as an examination of the messianic role of the intellectual. The dilemma of the protagonist Félix Moral is whether he should “drown himself in the silence of otherness” (another identity, country, destiny) or immolate himself through a certain conception of absolute justice. In his dialogues with Jimena, Moral confronts the fact that there is no unique and exclusive truth that would justify his plan to kill Stroessner, yet he undertakes this mission in the novel, contemplating the dilemma of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to do it. Sicard, Alain. “El fiscal o la sublimación de lo ominoso” in Coloquio Internacional Augusto Roa Bastos: La obra posterior a Yo el Supremo. Poiters: Centre de Recherches LatinoAméricaines CRLA-Archivos, Université de Poitiers, 1999. 123–48. Sicard examines multiple aspects of The Prosecutor that include the myth of the omphalos, the theme of guilt as experienced by the protagonist Moral, and the novel’s intertextuality, including references to Tununa Mercado, Nietzsche, and Rilke. He also examines the concepts of the abject and sublimation, applying the ideas of Julia Kristeva. Sicard sees the novel as an enactment of the oedipal complex. Moral feels guilty because at the same time that his partner Jimena is his lover, she also functions like his mother. Sicard traces the oedipal myth throughout the text, including such details as Jimena’s ring, which is in the shape of a serpent biting its own tail, a symbol of original sin and guilt. He also analyzes the presence of various doubles: Moral as a double of the dictator and as a double of the prosecutor Father Fidel Maiz who prosecuted conspirators during Solano López’s blood court during the Triple Alliance War. Tello Casao, Juan Antonio. “El mito como paradigma de la novela El fiscal.” In Coloquio Internacional Augusto Roa Bastos: La obra posterior a Yo el Supremo. Poiters: Centre de Recherches Latino-Américaines CRLA-Archivos, Université de Poitiers, 1999. 149–58. Tello Casao analyzes The Prosecutor as a text that demystifies two myths: the myth of absolute justice and the myth of the “pure virginity” of written discourse. The novel exposes both the dilemma of the protagonist, Félix Moral, who is unable to judge himself and thus cannot judge the dictator. Similarly, the novel deconstructs the concept of original writing, illustrating that all writing is repetition. Both plots turn on Mircea Eliade’s idea of “eternal return,” since not only is every piece of writing a repetition of previous works, but also Moral’s plight is a repetition of that of others, such as Solano López who, like Moral, acted as both a hero and a martyr. He also examines other myths, such as those of the centaur, biblical myths, and the myth of origins in the search for the omphalos.

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Tovar, Paco. “El fiscal de Roa Bastos: escenas del “Cristo paraguayo” y su guerra grande.” Confluenze 7.1 (2015): 85–106. Tovar’s article examines how Roa Bastos employs the figures of Sir Richard Burton and Cándido López, both eyewitnesses to the War of the Triple Alliance, to create a vision of the war and of Francisco Solano López as a symbol of Christian triumph. These figures incarnate metaphors and justify legends. He also examines the Christ paintings by Grünewald and how they interface with the novel. Turner, Brian, and Christina Turner. “Guaraní Language Usage in the Trilogy by Roa Bastos.” https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brian_Turner8/publication/267382426_Guarani_ Language_Usage_in_the_Trilogy_by_Roa_Bastos/links/56f1489d08aec63f4c9b53df.pdf? origin=publication_detail. This article focuses on the use of Guaraní and code-switching between Guaraní and Spanish in the works of Roa Bastos’s trilogy. The authors conclude that from the first book of the trilogy, Son of Man, to the last, The Prosecutor, the use of Guaraní words diminishes. Whereas in Son of Man, Guaraní highlights the primary plot and characters, in I The Supreme it is relegated more to musical references and mythology. Finally, in The Prosecutor, Guaraní is limited to the shortest common expressions and according to the authors, Roa expresses his conflicted stance toward Guaraní as a writer who writes in Spanish and has become a literary giant. Thus, code-switching undergoes a metamorphosis from early revolutionary idealism and a desire to maintain the language of Paraguay, to an alignment with the educated and powerful. The article also presents a compendium of Guaraní words in each of the three novels. Weldt-Basson, Helene C. “Augusto Roa Bastos’s Trilogy as Postmodern Practice.” Studies in 20th Century Literature 22.2 (Summer 1998): 335–55. This article examines the postmodern characteristics of Son of Man, I The Supreme, and The Prosecutor, and their various interconnections. Among other elements, Weldt-Basson discusses how the contemporary era of the Stroessner dictatorship and the nineteenth-century time period of Francisco Solano López and the War of the Triple Alliance are fused through the character of Moral. This is achieved both through Moral’s role as screenplay writer of a film on Solano López and his death at the end of the novel during the annual reenactment of Solano López’s death at Cerro-Corá through during a pilgrimage to that site. Weldt-Basson also points out the symmetry between Moral as a “prosecutor” who seeks to bring Stroessner to justice, and the figure of Father Fidel Maíz, who was the prosecutor who brought the conspirators against López to justice. The article further discusses The Prosecutor’s postmodern use of historical sources (fictitious claims to cite directly from Sir Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay that confuse history and fiction); a constant reflection on the writing process where a lack of faith in the written word is expressed (in all three novels), and the use of a special pen in both I The Supreme and The Prosecutor to encapsulate the need to restore authenticity to writing. The article concludes by drawing parallels between Moral and Miguel Vera in Son of Man and showing how each novel deals with the question of the future of Paraguay and its endless cycle of submission to dictatorship and rebellion. Weldt-Basson, Helene C. “Postmodernism and Genre in El fiscal by Augusto Roa Bastos.” Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 77-78 (2013): 383–402. This article applies the concept of postmodern genre (the mixing of various genres) to The Prosecutor. Weldt-Basson examines The Prosecutor as a piece of metaphysical detective fiction that presents various unresolved mysteries, such as what happens to Leda Kautner (Is she really killed by Moral? Is it actually she who resurfaces in Paraguay both as a stewardess and as the actress who plays Madame Lynch during the pilgrimage to Cerro-Corá?), as well as what happens to Moral when he returns to Paraguay given that his version of events (administration of the poison to Stroessner) do not coincide with Jimena’s version of events (Moral’s assassination by the Stroessner authorities). Weldt-Basson also discusses The

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Prosecutor as a historical novel that reexamines the figure of Francisco Solano López as both a hero and a foolish martyr. She then discusses The Prosecutor as an existential novel that employs Rilke’s ideas of “a death of one’s own” and Nietzsche’s ideas of a Superman in Ecce Homo as lenses to comprehend the actions of both Moral and López throughout the novel. Finally, Weldt-Basson examines The Prosecutor as an autobiographical novel in which Moral shares many traits with Roa Bastos himself, including the similarities between his partner Jimena and Roa Bastos’s real-life partner, Iris Giménez. Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol. “Historical Justice: Masquerade and Trauma in Augusto Roa Bastos’s El fiscal, Mayra Santos-Febres’s Fe en disfraz, and Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del imperio.” In Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. 147–78. This chapter deals with the relationship between Félix Moral’s disguise as an International Conference participant in Paraguay after he has received plastic surgery and a new identity in exile. The portion of the chapter on The Prosecutor considers how the novel attempts to fill in the gaps of history on the Stroessner dictatorship to achieve historical justice, while Moral simultaneously employs masquerade to attempt to achieve political justice for Paraguay through Stroessner’s assassination. The link between The Prosecutor and the other novels discussed in this book chapter is their reliance on individual traumas to connect to the broader cultural and national traumas that these novels portray. Moral’s personal trauma (his near-death experiences, his rape by Leda Kautner, his belief that he has committed murder, his infidelity to Jimena, his feeling of uselessness as an exile) is a departure point from which the national trauma of the Paraguayan nation under dictatorship is projected.

About the Author and Translator

Augusto Roa Bastos is Paraguay’s most famous writer. Born in Asunción in 1917, he lived most of his life in exile from political dictatorships in Paraguay. Forced to flee the government of Higinio Morínigo in 1947, Roa Bastos lived in Buenos Aires from 1947 to 1976. In 1976, he left Argentina for Toulouse, France, where he was offered a professorship from the University of Toulouse. After the fall of the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner in 1989, Roa Bastos was finally able to return to visit Paraguay. In 1996, he permanently returned to his country, where he died after a fall in his home on April 26, 2005. Roa Bastos has written six novels, several collections of short stories, and numerous plays, essays, and poems. He was awarded the prestigious Cervantes Prize in Literature in 1989. The Prosecutor, published in Spanish in 1993, is the third and final volume of his trilogy on the “monotheism of power,” that began with the novel Son of Man and was followed by his master work, I The Supreme. Helene Carol Weldt-Basson is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of three books: Augusto Roa Bastos’s I The Supreme: A Dialogic Perspective (1993), Subversive Silences: Nonverbal Expression and Implicit Narrative Strategies in the Works of Latin American Women Writers (2009), and Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction (2017). She is also the editor of two essay collections: Postmodernism’s Role in Latin American Literature: The Life and Work of Augusto Roa Bastos (2010) and Redefining Latin American Historical Fiction: The Impact of Feminism and Postcolonialism (2013). In 2012, she received the title of Doctora Honoris Causa from Universidad del Norte in Asunción, Paraguay in honor of her work on Augusto Roa Bastos. 255