Tag: Gregory Rabassa

A run-on sentence on Gabriel García Márquez’s delirious novel The Autumn of the Patriarch

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Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t so much a novel as it is a delirium, a swamp fever, a sun-bleached hallucination stretched across centuries, a beast that coils and uncoils, bloated with its own rot, a thing that does not begin or end but only festers, looping back on itself in great, heaving tides of unpunctuated or undepunctuated or mispunctuated thought, García Márquez dragging us under, drowning us in the mind or minds of the titular dictator, a paranoid consciousness so swollen with its own power that it warps reality itself, a man who reigns forever and is always dying, whose past rewrites itself with every breath, whose power is infinite and yet always slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers like the stolen sea, parceled off and shipped to Arizona, because why not, because what is truth if not what he declares it to be, because when you have lived for centuries, when your general is served up at a Thyestean feast, when your nation’s children are disappeared to an island, never to return, when the cattle are branded with your mark, when the very hour itself is subject to your whim, then nothing is real, nothing but the fear, the violence, the rape, the predation, the endless grinding machinery of power that must sustain itself, and so we cycle, we spiral, we convulse through six sections, six deaths, six endless iterations of his reign, six grotesque confirmations that absolute power is an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, devouring itself, erasing itself, until nothing is left but the silence of his ruin, the empty palace where his corpse will be found again and again, where his legacy is nothing but absence, and translator Gregory Rabassa—mad saint, linguistic necromancer—renders it all in English without breaking the spell, his translation a relentless incantation that doesn’t just mimic the novel’s crushing, hypnotic cadence but becomes it, suffocating, pressing, forcing you to inhabit the mind of this eternal, rotting god-tyrant, this cosmic mistake, this doomed and doom-dealing beast whose power, no matter how total, will crumble, will fade, will rot, will vanish into nothing, just like everything else.

An end to the infamy of mules terrified by the edges of precipices as on their backs they carried grand pianos for the masked balls | A sentence from Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch

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He was right, because during our time there was no one who doubted the legitimacy of his history, or anyone who could have disclosed or denied it because we couldn’t even establish the identity of his body, there was no other nation except the one that had been made by him in his own image and likeness where space was changed and time corrected by the designs of his absolute will, reconstituted by him ever since the most uncertain origins of his memory as he wandered at random through that house of infamy where no happy person had ever slept, as he tossed cracked corn to the hens who pecked around his hammock and exasperated the servants with orders he pulled out of the air to bring me a lemonade with chopped ice which he had left within reach of his hand, take that chair away from over there and put it over there, and they should put it back where it had been in order to satisfy in that minute way the warm embers of his enormous addiction to giving orders, distracting the everyday pastimes of his power with the patient raking up of ephemeral instants from his remote childhood as he nodded sleepily under the ceiba tree in the courtyard, he would wake up suddenly when he managed to grasp a memory like a piece in a limitless jigsaw puzzle of the nation that lay before him, the great, chimerical, shoreless nation, a realm of mangrove swamps with slow rafts and precipices that had been there before his time when men were so bold that they hunted crocodiles with their hands by placing a stake in their mouths, like that, he would explain to us holding his forefinger against his palate, he told us that on one Good Friday he had heard the hullabaloo of the wind and the scurf smell of the wind and he saw the heavy clouds of locusts that muddied the noonday sky and went along scissoring off everything that stood in their path and left the world all sheared and the light in tatters as on the eve of creation, because he had seen that disaster, he had seen a string of headless roosters hanging by their feet and bleeding drop by drop from the eaves of a house with a broad and crumbling sidewalk where a woman had just died, barefoot he had left his mother’s hand and followed the ragged corpse they were carrying off to bury without a coffin on a cargo litter that was lashed by the blizzard of locusts, because that was what the nation was like then, we didn’t even have coffins for the dead, nothing, he had seen a man who had tried to hang himself with a rope that had already been used by another hanged man from a tree in a village square and the rotted rope broke before it was time and the poor man lay in his death throes on the square to the horror of the ladies coming out of mass, but he didn’t die, they beat him awake with sticks without bothering to find out who he was because in those days no one knew who was who if he wasn’t known in the church, they stuck his ankles between the planks of the stocks and left him there exposed to the elements along with other comrades in suffering because that was what the times of the Goths were like when God ruled more than the government, the evil times of the nation before he gave the order to chop down all trees in village squares to prevent the terrible spectacle of a Sunday hanged man, he had prohibited the use of public stocks, burial without a coffin, everything that might awaken in one’s memory the ignominious laws that existed before his power, he had built the railroad to the upland plains to put an end to the infamy of mules terrified by the edges of precipices as on their backs they carried grand pianos for the masked balls at the coffee plantations, for he had also seen the disaster of the thirty grand pianos destroyed in an abyss and of which they had spoken and written so much even outside the country although only he could give truthful testimony, he had gone to the window by chance at the precise moment in which the rear mule had slipped and had dragged the rest into the abyss, so that no one but he had heard the shriek of terror from the cliff-flung mule train and the endless chords of the pianos that fell with it playing by themselves in the void, hurtling toward the depths of a nation which at that time was like everything that had existed before him, vast and uncertain, to such an extreme that it was impossible to know whether it was night or day in the kind of eternal twilight of the hot steamy mists in the deep canyons where the pianos imported from Austria had broken up into fragments, he had seen that and many other things in that remote world although not even he himself could have been sure with no room for doubt whether they were his own memories or whether he had heard about them on his bad nights of fever during the wars or whether he might have seen them in prints in travel books over which he would linger in ecstasy for long hours during the dead doldrums of power, but none of that mattered, God damn it, they’ll see that with time it will be the truth, he would say, conscious that his real childhood was not that crust of uncertain recollections that he only remembered when the smoke from the cow chips arose and he forgot it forever except that he really had lived it during the calm waters of my only and legitimate wife Leticia Nazareno who would sit him down every afternoon between two and four o’clock at a school desk under the pansy bower to teach him how to read and write, she had put her novice’s tenacity into that heroic enterprise and he matched it with his terrifying old man’s patience, with the terrifying will of his limitless power, with all my heart, so that he would chant with all his soul the tuna in the tin the loony in the bin the neat nightcap, he chanted without hearing himself or without anyone’s hearing him amidst the uproar of his dead mother’s aroused birds that the Indian packs the ointment in the can, papa places the tobacco in his pipe, Cecilia sells seals seeds seats seams scenes sequins seaweed and receivers, Cecilia sells everything, he would laugh, repeating amidst the clamor of the cicadas the reading lesson that Leticia Nazareno chanted to the time of her novice’s metronome, until the limits of the world became saturated with the creatures of your voice and in his vast realm of dreariness there was no other truth but the exemplary truths of the primer, there was nothing but the moon in the mist, the ball and the banana, the bull of Don Eloy, Otilia’s bordered bathrobe, the rote reading lessons which he repeated at every moment and everywhere just like his portraits even in the presence of the treasury minister from Holland who lost the thread of an official visit when the gloomy old man raised the hand with the velvet glove on it in the shadows of his unfathomable power and interrupted the audience to invite him to sing with me my mama’s a mummer, Ismael spent six months on the isle, the lady ate a tomato, imitating with his forefinger the beat of the metronome and repeating from memory Tuesday’s lesson with a perfect diction but with such a bad sense of the occasion that the interview ended as he had wanted it to with the postponement of payment of the Dutch debts for a more propitious moment, for when there would be time, he decided, to the surprise of the lepers, the blind men, the cripples who rose up at dawn among the rosebushes and saw the shadowy old man who gave a silent blessing and chanted three times with high-mass chords I am the king and the law is my thing, he chanted, the seer has fear of beer, a lighthouse is a very high tower with a bright beam which guides sailors at night, he chanted, conscious that in the shadows of his senile happiness there was no time but that of Leticia Nazareno of my life in the shrimp stew of the suffocating gambols of siesta time, there were no other anxieties but those of being naked with you on the sweat-soaked mattress under the captive bat of an electric fan, there was no light but that of your buttocks, Leticia, nothing but your totemic teats, your flat feet, your ramus of rue as a remedy, the oppressive Januaries of the remote island of Antigua where you came into the world one early dawn of solitude that was furrowed by the burning breeze of rotted swamps, they had shut themselves up in the quarters for distinguished guests with the personal order that no one is to come any closer than twenty feet to that door because I’m going to be very busy learning to read and write, so no one interrupted him not even with the news general sir that the black vomit was wreaking havoc among the rural population while the rhythms of my heart got ahead of the metronome because of that invisible force of your wild-animal smell, chanting that the midget is dancing on just one foot, the mule goes to the mill, Otilia washes the tub, kow is spelled with a jackass k, he chanted, while Leticia Nazareno moved aside the herniated testicle to clean him up from the last love-making’s dinky-poo, she submerged him in the lustral waters of the pewter bathtub with lion’s paws and lathered him with Reuter soap, scrubbed him with washcloths, and rinsed him off with the water of boiled herbs as they sang in duet ginger gibber and gentleman are all spelled with a gee, she would daub the joints of his legs with cocoa butter to alleviate the rash from his truss, she would put boric acid powder on the moldy star of his asshole and whack his behind like a tender mother for your bad manners with the minister from Holland, plap, plap, as a penance she asked him to permit the return to the country of the communities of poor nuns so they could go back to taking care of orphan asylums and hospitals and other houses of charity, but he wrapped her in the gloomy aura of his implacable rancor, never in a million years, he sighed, there wasn’t a single power in this world or the other that could make him go against a decision taken by himself alone and aloud, she asked him during the asthmas of love at two in the afternoon that you grant me one thing, my life, only one thing, that the mission territory communities who work on the fringes of the whims of power might return, but he answered her during the anxieties of his urgent husband snorts never in a million years my love, I’d rather be dead than humiliated by that pack of long skirts who saddle Indians instead of mules and pass out beads of colored glass in exchange for gold nose rings and earrings, never in a million years, he protested, insensitive to the pleas of Leticia Nazareno of my misfortune who had crossed her legs to ask him for the restitution of the confessional schools expropriated by the government, the disentailment of property held in mortmain, the sugar mills, the churches turned into barracks, but he turned his face to the wall ready to renounce the insatiable torture of your slow cavernous love-making before I would let my arm be twisted in favor of those bandits of God who for centuries have fed on the liver of the nation, never in a million years, he decided, and yet they did come back general sir, they returned to the country through the narrowest slits, the communities of poor nuns in accordance with his confidential order that they disembark silently in secret coves, they were paid enormous indemnities, their expropriated holdings were restored with interest and the recent laws concerning civil marriage, divorce, lay education were repealed, everything he had decreed aloud during his rage at the comic carnival of the process of the declaration of sainthood for his mother Bendición Alvarado may God keep her in His holy kingdom, God damn it, but Leticia Nazareno was not satisfied with all that but asked for more, she asked him to put your ear to the lower part of my stomach so that you can hear the singing of the creature growing inside, because she had awakened in the middle of the night startled by that deep voice that was describing the aquatic paradise of your insides furrowed by mallow-soft sundowns and winds of pitch, that interior voice that spoke to her of the polyps on your kidneys, the soft steel of your intestines, the warm amber of your urine sleeping in its springs, and to her stomach he put the ear that was buzzing less for him and he heard the secret bubbling of the living creature of his mortal sin, a child of our obscene bellies who would be named Emanuel, which is the name by which other gods know God, and on his forehead he will have the white star of his illustrious origins and he will inherit his mother’s spirit of sacrifice and his father’s greatness and his own destiny of an invisible conductor, but he was to be the shame of heaven and the stigma of the nation because of his illicit nature as long as he refused to consecrate at the altar what he had vilified in bed for so many years of sacrilegious concubinage, and then he opened a way through the foam of the ancient bridal mosquito netting with that snort of a ship’s boiler coming from the depths of his terrible repressed rage shouting never in a million years, better dead than wed, dragging his great feet of a secret bridegroom through the salons of an alien house whose splendor of a different age had been restored after the long period of the shadows of official mourning, the crumbling holy-week crepe had been pulled from the cornices, there was sea light in the bedrooms, flowers on the balconies, martial music, and all of it in fulfillment of an order that he had not given but which had been an order of his without the slightest doubt general sir because it had the tranquil decision of his voice and the unappealable style of his authority, and he approved, agreed, and the shuttered churches opened again, and the cloisters and cemeteries were returned to their former congregations by another order of his which he had not given either but he approved, agreed, the old holy days of obligation had been restored as well as the practices of lent and in through the open balconies came the crowd’s hymns of jubilation that had previously been sung to exalt his glory as they knelt under the burning sun to celebrate the good news that God had been brought in on a ship general sir, really, they had brought Him on your orders, Leticia, by means of a bedroom law which she had promulgated in secret without consulting anybody and which he approved in public so that it would not appear to anyone’s eyes that he had lost the oracles of his authority, for you were the hidden power behind those endless processions which he watched in amazement through the windows of his bedroom as they reached a distance beyond that of the fanatical hordes of his mother Bendición Alvarado whose memory had been erased from the time of men, the tatters of her bridal dress and the starch of her bones had been scattered to the winds and in the crypt the stone with the upside-down letters had been turned over so that even the mention of her name as a birdwoman painter of orioles in repose would not endure till the end of time, and all of that by your orders, because you were the one who had ordered it so that no other woman’s memory would cast a shadow on your memory, Leticia Nazareno of my misfortune, bitch-daughter.

From Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch in translation by Gregory Rabassa.

Blog about some February acquisitions

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A weeks-long back-and-forth with a colleague about certain flavors of Modernist novels led to this colleague, a friend really, to come by my office with a stack of about 80 pages he’d printed, front and back, demanding that I take a look at some utter nonsense, probably the kind of nonsense I’d abide. This particular nonsense was a printed .pdf of Camilo José Cela’s 1988 novel Cristo versus Arizona in the original Spanish. “It’s all just one long sentence!” my colleague declared. I was immediately intrigued, and am still on the lookout for Martin Sokolinsky’s 2007 English translation. Wikipedia, cribbing the Publisher’s Weekly review of that translation describes Christ Versus Arizona as “set in the American Old West during the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881. It consists of a monologue in one long sentence, inside the head of Wendell Liverpool Espana, who is the son of a prostitute and observes the gunfight.” I expressed my delight with the concept. My colleague then reverted to his argument, which, I will badly summarize as something like, All these Modernists tried this nonsense and some point just to show off at the expense of the reader. He extolled again the virtues of Dubliners over Ulysses, a book with its head in its ass; he decried Faulkner’s worst tendencies—a gifted writer who could offer up a perfect novel and then birth an abomination like The Sound and the Fury. Cristo versus Arizona, he assured me, was Cela’s abomination; he then urged me to read Cela’s masterpiece, La colmena, which he translated as The Beehive. And then I had an 11:00am class to attend to.

Driving home I realized that I might actually have a copy of an English translation of La colmena. I did: Anthony Kerrigan’s translation, The Hive. I pulled it out, started reading, and kept going. I love it! The next day my colleague brought in two Cela novels he’d read (and annotated the hell out of) in graduate school: La colmena and La familia de Pascual Duarte. I think that was on a Thursday. On Friday I browsed a used bookstore and picked up Kerrigan’s translation of Cela’s The Family of Pascual Duarte (with a cool Milton Glaser cover). I also picked up Ivan Ângelo’s novel The Celebration (in translation by Thomas Colchie); I’ve gotten to the point where I just scoop up any of the Avon Bard Latin American translations when I come across them — which is what I did a week later when I browsed a different used bookstore (or, really, a different location of the same booksellers; I was right next to this location because several of my son’s paintings were exhibited in a gallery nearby as part of a contest he had entered a few months ago without telling us (these details are not important to the story; my son is a talented painter though and I am proud).

Which is what I did a week later, scoop up another Avon Bard Latin American translation — this time Macho Camacho’s Beat by Luis Rafael Sánchez, in translation by Gregory Rabassa. I also picked up Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (trans. Lysander Kemp), which I’ve been meaning to read for a while now, and another Cela — Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son (trans. by J. S. Bernstein).

And so well back to Camilo José Cela then–I’m almost finished with The Hive, delayed at times by checking in against the original La colmena, mostly to get a sense of some of choices the translator made, a process I’m looking forward to repeating again with The Family of Pascual Duarte, a process that’s included riffing on the writing with my colleague, my friend who brought by a big stack of papers, a ridiculous pile of papers, that one-word sentence of a novel, Cristo versus Arizona, the novel I would love to acquire soon.

He saw the three caravels | A sentence from Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch

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On another distant December when the house was inaugurated, he had seen from that terrace the line of the hallucinated isles of the Antilles which someone pointed out to him in the showcase of the sea, he had seen the perfumed volcano of Martinique, over there general, he had seen the tuberculosis hospital, the gigantic black man with a lace blouse selling bouquets of gardenias to governors’ wives on the church steps, he had seen the infernal market of Paramaribo, there general, the crabs that came out of the sea and up through the toilets, climbing up onto the tables of ice cream parlors, the diamonds embedded in the teeth of black grandmothers who sold heads of Indians and ginger roots sitting on their safe buttocks under the drenching rain, he had see the solid gold cows on Tanaguarena beach general, the blind visionary of La Guayra who charged two reals to scare off the blandishments of death with a one-string violin, he had seen Trinidad’s burning August, automobiles going the wrong way, the green Hindus who shat in the middle of the street in front of their shops with genuine silkworm shirts and mandarins carved from the whole tusk of an elephant, he had seen Haiti’s nightmare, its blue dogs, the oxcart that collected the dead off the streets at dawn, he had seen the rebirth of Dutch tulips in the gasoline drums of Curacao, the windmill houses with roofs built for snow, the mysterious ocean liner that passed through the center of the city among the hotel kitchens, he had seen the stone enclosure of Cartagena de Indias, its bay closed off by a chain, the light lingering on the balconies, the filthy horses of the hacks who still yawned for the viceroys’ fodder, its smell of shit general sir, how marvelous, tell me, isn’t the world large, and it was, really, and not just large but insidious, because if he went up to the house on the reefs in December it was not to pass the time with those refugees whom he detested as much as his own image in the mirror of misfortune but to be there at the moment of miracles when the December light came out, mother—true and he could see once more the whole universe of the Antilles from Barbados to Veracruz, and then he would forget who had the double-three piece and go to the overlook to contemplate the line of islands as lunatic as sleeping crocodiles in the cistern of the sea, and contemplating the islands he evoked again and relived that historic October Friday when he left his room at dawn and discovered that everybody in the presidential palace was wearing a red biretta, that the new concubines were sweeping the parlors and changing the water in the cages wearing red birettas, that the milkers in the stables, the sentries in their boxes, the cripples on the stairs and the lepers in the rose beds were going about with the red birettas of a carnival Sunday, so he began to look into what had happened to the world while he was sleeping for the people in his house and the inhabitants of the city to be going around wearing red birettas and dragging a string of jingle bells everywhere, and finally he found someone to tell him the truth general sir, that some strangers had arrived who gabbled in funny old talk because they made the word for sea feminine and not masculine, they called macaws poll parrots, canoes rafts, harpoons javelins, and when they saw us going out to greet them and swim around their ships they climbed up onto the yardarms and shouted to each other look there how well-formed, of beauteous body and fine face, and thick-haired and almost like horsehair silk, and when they saw that we were painted so as not to get sunburned they got all excited like wet little parrots and shouted look there how they daub themselves gray, and they are the hue of canary birds, not white nor yet black, and what there be of them, and we didn’t understand why the hell they were making so much fun of us general sir since we were just as normal as the day our mothers bore us and on the other hand they were decked out like the jack of clubs in all that heat, which they made feminine the way Dutch smugglers do, and they wore their hair like women even though they were all men and they shouted that they didn’t understand us in Christian tongue when they were the ones who couldn’t understand what we were shouting, and then they came toward us in their canoes which they called rafts, as we said before, and they were amazed that our harpoons had a shad bone for a tip which they called a fishy tooth, and we traded everything we had for these red birettas and these strings of glass beads that we hung around our necks to please them, and also for these brass bells that can’t be worth more than a penny and for chamber pots and eyeglasses and other goods from Flanders, of the cheapest sort general sir, and since we saw that they were good people and men of good will we went on leading them to the beach without their realizing it, but the trouble was that among the I’ll swap you this for that and that for the other a wild motherfucking trade grew up and after a while everybody was swapping his parrots, his tobacco, his wads of chocolate, his iguana eggs, everything God ever created, because they took and gave everything willingly, and they even wanted to trade a velvet doublet for one of us to show off in Europeland, just imagine general, what a wild affair, but he was so confused that he could not decide whether that lunatic business came within the incumbency of his government, so he went back to his bedroom, opened the window that looked out onto the sea so that perhaps he might discover some new light to shed on the mix-up they had told him about, and he saw the usual battleship that the marines had left behind at the dock, and beyond the battleship, anchored in the shadowy sea, he saw the three caravels.

From Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch in translation by Gregory Rabassa.

Mass-market Monday | Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch

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The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez. Translation by Gregory Rabassa. Avon Bard (1977). No cover artist credited. 251 pages.

I started in on The Autumn of the Patriarch this afternoon, soaking into its initial pages, which seemed to me at first a grand revision of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and then coasted on the sentences through its first section. Here are the first nine sentences:

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute had wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed, because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave way. It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light. All across the first courtyard, where the paving stones had given way to the underground thrust of weeds, we saw the disorder of the post of the guard who had fled, the weapons abandoned in their racks, the big, long rough-planked tables with plates containing the leftovers of the Sunday lunch that had been interrupted by panic, in shadows we saw the annex where government house had been, colored fungi and pale irises among the unresolved briefs whose normal course had been slower than the pace of the dryest of lives, in the center of the courtyard we saw the baptismal font where more than five generations had been christened with martial sacraments, in the rear we saw the ancient viceregal stable which had been transformed into a coach house, and among the camellias and butterflies we saw the berlin from stirring days, the wagon from the time of the plague, the coach from the year of the comet, the hearse from progress in order, the sleep-walking limousine of the first century of peace, all in good shape under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag. In the next courtyard, behind an iron grille, were the lunar-dust-covered rosebushes under which the lepers had slept during the great days of the house, and they had proliferated to such a degree in their abandonment that there was scarcely an odorless chink in that atmosphere of roses which mingled with the stench that came to us from the rear of the garden and the stink of the henhouse and the smell of dung and urine ferment of cows and soldiers from the colonial basilica that had been converted into a milking barn. Opening a way through the asphyxiating growth we saw the arches of the gallery with potted carnations and sprigs of astromelias and pansies where the concubines’ quarters had been, and from the variety of domestic leftovers and the quantity of sewing machines we thought it possible that more than a thousand women had lived there with their crews of seven-month runts, we saw the battlefield disorder of the kitchens, clothes rotting in the sun by the wash basins, the open slit trench shared by concubines and soldiers, and in back we saw the Babylonian willows that had been carried alive from Asia Minor in great seagoing hothouses, with their own soil, their sap, and their drizzle, and behind the willows we saw government house, immense and sad, where the vultures were still entering through the chipped blinds. We did not have to knock down the door, as we had thought, for the main door seemed to open by itself with just the push of a voice, so we went up to the main floor along a bare stone stairway where the opera-house carpeting had been torn by the hoofs of the cows, and from the first vestibule on down to the private bedrooms we saw the ruined offices and protocol salons through which the brazen cows wandered, eating the velvet curtains and nibbling at the trim on the chairs, we saw heroic portraits of saints and soldiers thrown to the floor among broken furniture and fresh cow flops, we saw a dining room that had been eaten up by the cows, the music room profaned by the cows’ breakage, the domino tables destroyed and the felt on the billiard tables cropped by the cows, abandoned in a corner we saw the wind machine, the one which counterfeited any phenomenon from the four points of the compass so that the people in the house could bear up under their nostalgia for the sea that had gone away, we saw birdcages hanging everywhere, still covered with the sleeping cloths put on some night the week before, and through the numerous windows we saw the broad and sleeping animal that was the city, still innocent of the historic Monday that was beginning to come to life, and beyond the city, up to the horizon, we saw the dead craters of harsh moon ash on the endless plain where the sea had been. In that forbidden corner which only a few people of privilege had ever come to know, we smelled the vultures’ carnage for the first time, we caught their age-old asthma, their premonitory instinct, and guiding ourselves by the putrefaction of their wing flaps in the reception room we found the wormy shells of the cows, their female animal hindquarters repeated many times in the full-length mirrors, and then we pushed open a side door that connected with an office hidden in the wall, and there we saw him, in his denim uniform without insignia, boots, the gold spur on his left heel, older than all old men and all old animals on land or sea, and he was stretched out on the floor, face down, his right arm bent under his head as a pillow, as he had slept night after night every night of his ever so long life of a solitary despot. Only when we turned him over to look at his face did we realize that it was impossible to recognize him, even though his face had not been pecked away by vultures, because none of us had ever seen him, and even though his profile was on both sides of all coins, on postage stamps, on condom labels, on trusses and scapulars, and even though his engraved picture with the flag across his chest and the dragon of the fatherland was displayed at all times in all places, we knew that they were copies of copies of portraits that had already been considered unfaithful during the time of the comet, when our own parents knew who he was because they had heard tell from theirs, as they had from theirs before them, and from childhood on we grew accustomed to believe that he was alive in the house of power because someone had seen him light the Chinese lanterns at some festival, someone had told about seeing his sad eyes, his pale lips, his pensive hand waving through the liturgical decorations of the presidential coach, because one Sunday many years ago they had brought him the blind man on the street who for five cents would recite the verses of the forgotten poet Ruben Dario and he had come away happy with the nice wad they had paid him for a recital that had been only for him, even though he had not seen him, of course, not because he was blind, but because no mortal had ever seen him since the days of the black vomit and yet we knew that he was there, we knew it because the world went on, life went on, the mail was delivered, the municipal band played its retreat of silly waltzes on Saturday under the dusty palm trees and the dim street lights of the main square, and other old musicians took the places of the dead musicians in the band.