Tag: The Autumn of the Patriarch

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.

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.