The Autumn of the Patriarch Read Online Free PDF Page B

sobbing with tears of pain and shame I’m so sorrygeneral but I’m shitting in my pants and he thought he meant it in a figurative sense that he was dying of fear, but Patricio Aragonés answered him no, I mean real shit shitting general and he managed to beseech him hold on Patricio Aragonés, hold on, we generals of the fatherland have to die like men even if we pay for it with our lives, but he said it too late because Patricio Aragonés fellface down and on top of him kicking with fear and soaked in shit and tears. In the office next to the hearingroom he had to scrub the body with a dishrag and soap to get rid of the bad smell, he dressed it in the clothes he was wearing, he put the canvas truss on, the boots, the gold spur on the left heel, feeling as he did it that he was changing into the most solitary man on earth, and lastof all he erased all traces of the farce and reproduced the perfection down to the tiniest details that he had seen with his own eyes in the premonitory waters of the basins so that at dawn on the next day the cleaning women would find the body as they did find it stretched out face down on the floor of the office, dead for the first time of natural causes in his sleep with his denim uniform withno insignia, boots, the gold spur, and his right arm folded under his head as a pillow. They did not spread the news immediately that time either, contrary to what he expected, but many prudent hours passed with clandestine investigations, secret agreements among the heirs of the regime who were trying to gain time by denying the rumor of death with all manner of contrary versions, they brought hismother Bendición Alvarado out into the commercial district to show that she was not wearing a mourning face, they dressed me in a flowered dress like a chippy, sir, they made me buy a macaw-feather hat so that everybody would see me happy, they made me buy every piece of junk to be found in the stores in spite of my telling them no, sir, it wasn’t a time for buying but for crying because even Ibelieved that it was really my son who had died, and they forced me to smile when people took full-length pictures of me because the military men said it had to be done for the good of the country while he wondered confused in his hiding place what’s happening out in the world since nothing had changed with the trick of his death, how was it that the sun had risen and had risen again without stumbling,why that Sunday look, mother, why the same heat without me, he was wondering in surprise when a sudden cannon shot sounded from the fortress on the harbor and the main bells of the cathedral began to toll and all the way up to government house came the surge of the crowds that were rising up out of the age-old morass with the greatest piece of newsin the world, and then he half-opened the bedroomdoor and peeped into the audience room and saw himself laid out more dead and more decorated than all the dead popes of Christendom, wounded by the horror and the shame of his own body of a military stud lying among the flowers, his face pale with powder, his lips painted, the hard hands of a dauntless young lady crossed over the chest armored with military decorations, the showy dress uniformwith the ten pips of general of the universe, a rank someone had invented for him after death, the king-of-spades saber he never used, the patent leather boots with two gold spurs, the vast paraphernalia of power and the lugubrious martial glories reduced to his human size of a fagot lying in state, God damn it, that can’t be me, he said to himself in a fury it’s not right, God damn it, he saidto himself, contemplating the procession that was parading around his corpse, and for an instant he forgot the murky reasons for the farce and felt raped and diminished by the inclemency of death toward the majesty of power, he saw life without him, he saw with a certain compassion how men were bereft of his authority, he saw with a hidden