The Autumn of the Patriarch Read Online Free PDF Page A

thousands of bits of paper over the city, a blizzard of broadsides which the coachman took advantage of in order to slip through the tumult of the public market without anyone’s recognizing the coach of power, because everybody was busy in the scramble for the papers from the balloons general sir, they were shouting out the words on them from the balconies, from memory they repeateddown with oppression, they shouted death to the tyrant, and even the sentries along the corridors of the presidential palace were reading aloud about the union of all without distinction of class against the despotism of centuries, patriotic reconciliation against the corruption and the arrogance of the military, no more blood, they shouted, no more pillaging, the whole country was awakening fromits age-old sleep at the moment he was going through the coach house door and he ran into the terrible news general sir that Patricio Aragonés had been fatally wounded by a poisoned dart. Years before one night of bad moods he had proposed to Patricio Aragonés that they gamble their lives on heads or tails, heads you die, tails I die, but Patricio Aragonés made him see that they would both meet deathin a tie because all coins had both their faces on both sides, he then proposed that they gamble their lives at the domino table, the best out of twenty games, and Patricio Aragonés accepted with great honor general sir, with the proviso that you grant me the privilege of being allowed to beat you, and he accepted, agreed, so they played one game, they played two, they played twenty, and PatricioAragonés always won because he only used to win because it was forbiddento beat him, a long and bloody battle was joined and they reached the last game without his having won a single match, and Patricio Aragonés dried the sweat of his brow with his shirt sleeve sighing I’m deeply sorry general but I don’t want to die, and then he went about picking up the pieces, placed them in order in thelittle wooden box while he said like a schoolmaster chanting a rote lesson that he had no need to die at the domino table either but in his own time and his own place from natural causes in his sleep as had been predicted ever since the beginning of his days by the sibylline basins, and not even that way, when you come to think of it, because Bendición Alvarado didn’t bring me into the world to payany heed to basins but to command, and after all I am what I am, and not you, so give thanks to God that this was only a game, he told him laughing, not having imagined then or ever that the terrible joke was to come trite the night he went into Patricio Aragonés’s room and found him facing the demands of death, hopeless, with no chance of surviving the poison, and he greeted him from the door withhis hand outstretched, God save you, stud, it’s a great honor to die for your country. He stayed with him during his slow agony, the two of them alone in the room, giving him the spoonfuls of anodyne with his own hand, and Patricio Aragonés took them without gratitude telling him between spoonfuls I will leave you here for a while my general with your world of shit because my heart tells me thatquite soon we shall meet again in the depths of hell, I all twisted up worse than a mullet because of this poison and you with your head in your hand looking for a place to put it, let it be said without the least bit of respect general sir, that I can tell you nowthat I never loved you as you think but that ever since the days of the filibusters when I had the evil misfortune to chance into yourdomains I’ve been praying that you would be killed, in a good way even, so that you would pay me back for this life of an orphan you gave me, first by flattening my feet with tamping hands so that they would be those of a sleepwalker like yours, then by piercing my nuts with a shoemaker’s awl so I would develop a rupture, then by making me drink turpentine soI would forget how to read and