I The Supreme - pg. 225

Take Benjamin Franklin, steel-engraved, down from the wall. The Porteno pettifogger gazes, frowning, at the inventor of the lightning rod. Manuel Belgrano opens his eyes. This, my friends, is the first democrat of these new worlds. The model that we must imitate. Forty years from now, our countries may have men like him. If and when, naturally, the great country of the north continues to produce men like Franklin. If it does, we may enjoy in the future of the freedom for which we are not prepared today. By some misfortune, it may so happen that North America will not produce more men of the stamp of the inventor of the lightning rod and that in our countries the lightning bolt of anarchy will strike down our best men. It may so happen that they will invent the Big Prod up there and that down here we'll all die of the croup, carbuncle, and tick, like the cattle in our fields. We must take care not to fall into the hands of master-butchers.

I The Supreme - pg. 207

Above all, senor dean, if we do not observe the formalities of an elementary urbanity. Is the bathroom door a proper place to enrue that all our disagreements will come out in the wash? We are in accord on that point, doctor. Let us proceed to the salon d'a-grement.

I The Supreme - pg. 197

I believe that at one time the pen must also have possessed a third function: reproducing the phonic space of writing, the sound-text of the visual images; which could have been the spoken time of those words without forms, of those forms without words, that allowed El Supremo to conjoin three texts in a fourth intemporal dimension turning around the axis of an undifferentiated point between the origin and the extinction of the writing; that thin shadow between tomorrow and death.

I The Supreme - pg. 196

The figure of the typical Brazilian macaque stands out against the whiteness of the wall. I study it from my window. Unknown animal: lion in front, ant behind, pudenda inverted. Leopard, more pard than leo. Illusory human form. Its most amazing particularity, however, lies in the fact that when the sun strikes it, it casts the shadow of a human being and not that of its bestial figure.

I The Supreme - pg. 195

Not enough. Not red enough. Not as red as real blood. Perhaps it suffices to simulate it beneath the marginal sun of Brazil, to the west of Africa. The incendiary sun of Asuncion is another matter. Continually beating straight down, splitting stone. The glare bares, betrays, bleaches out the treasures of this card-board carnival. Blurs the dancing girls, the capoeiras. The white hand against the black lacquer of the carriage clutching the ibis of the hat. Royal-heron. Bird-of-Paradise. Alchemical buttons. Colored sequins. Wear more if you like. Pile on as much as you please. To me it will be mere theater. To me the imperial envoy is just another messenger boy. An empty-headed suitor come to seek my hand. But I don't give my hand away to anyone.

I The Supreme - pg. 194

There comes forth from the souvenir-pen another reception that I shall offer the envoy from Brazil, fifteen years later. I can allow myself the luxury of mixing up the facts without confusing them. I thus save myself time, paper, ink, and the trouble of searching through almanacs, calendars, dusting shelf lists. I don't write history. I make it. I can remake it as I please, adjusting, stressing, enriching its meaning and truth. In the history written by publicans and pharisees, they invest their lies at compound interest. Dates to them are sacred. Particularly if they are erroneous. To those rodents, error consists precisely of gnawing holes in documented truth. They turn into rivals of moths and rats. As for this perpetual-circular, the order of the facts does not alter the product of the factors.

I The Supreme - pg. 193

A plain chicken done up in fancy dress. A monocular chicken. Any creature of the animal kingdom except a man to be trusted. No, doctor, this was the setting for another performance. The thing is that in Paraguay time is so hard-pressed that it slows way down, mixing up facts, shuffling things about, misplacing them. Fortune is born here every morning and by noon it's already an old lady, according to an old saying that's new and true all over again each day.

I The Supreme - pg. 193

[(In the margin): The catfish of Takuary had turned into a prickly bone. The fish is born of a thorn. The monkey of a coconut. Man of the monkey. The shadow of Christopher Columbus's egg wheels round and round above the Land of Fire. The shadow is not more difficult than the egg. The shadow flees before itself. Everything eventually gets to where it's going. Merely to be on the way is already to be arriving. ]

I The Supreme - pg. 190

On this mission Belgrano represented candor, good faith, loftiness of character. Vicente Anastasio Echevarria cleverness, knowledge of the ways of men and things, easy and persuasive eloquence. I saw in this jackanapes only a varicose, viperine tongue; I heard in him only the tumult of his outlandish ideas peeking out of his reptilian eyes. Belgrano, on the other hand, was a man of much greater worth than the description of him by the Tacit Brigadier. A transparent soul, that of this man unacquainted with evil, peeping out through the pupils of his clear blue eyes. A man of peace condemned to be different from what he was in the depths of his being.

I The Supreme - pg. 186

... wait patiently because they will reign here again. They are the Old Ones because they are wise. You must not ask questions, the Voice-of-Before says to you. You must not ask questions because there is no answer. Do not try to get to the bottom of things. You will not find the truth that you betrayed. You have lost yourself after having caused the failure of the very Revolution that you sought to make. Do not try to purge your soul of lies. All this prattle is futile. Many other things you have not thought of will go up in smoke. Your power has no power over them. You are not you but others ... (the following folio is missing...)

I The Supreme - pg. 184

A future hero may be forgiven certain present vices.

I The Supreme - pg. 178

(4) What about Senora Pureza? Has she already arrived there? Have you offered her asylum, cordial hospitality, as I ordered you to do in my previous dispatch? Treat her with all the respect that so eminent a lady deserves, for the country owes her many services that I alone have any knowledge of. You need not play high and mighty with her or launch into those lofty diatribes of yours which in your stupidity you fondly believe enhance your authority. Authority that is not yours, but merely conferred upon you as a deputy of the Supreme Power.

I The Supreme - pg. 174

Inform the parish priest of Encarnacion of my sovereign will and decree:

He is to declare where the soul of the late Jose Custodio Arroyo ended up. If he find him in hell, he is to leave him there. Should this prove impossible to verify, he is to proceed immediately to give the corpse sacred internment, after a funeral with the body lying in state. Without charge. Pass the dossier on to the vicar general. Order is also hereby given to transport the priest of Encarnacion to the penal colony of Tevego.

I The Supreme - pg. 171

So that I too, according to the diagnostic powers of this agnostic savage, have soul-eggs that are all broken. All he sees is emptiness amid the bones. But emptiness is still something; everything depends on what a person makes of it. No? Yes. The pamphleteering fetuses of the chivosis are twisting the wet rag of my body underground. They're drinking maize beer. They keep on twisting me, their pockets bulging with calumnies. They drink more beer. They throw me into the fire. My body smolders in the tremors of being-dead-continually. But they won't put an end to me. I'm water that boils outside the pot, a schoolgirl will say of me. Being dead and remining on my feet is my forte, and even though for me it's all a return trip, it's always adios and onward, and I never come back, right? Right! Do trees grow downward? Do birds fly backward? Does a word that's spoken get wet? Can all of you hear what I don't say, see clearly in the dark? What is said is said. If you only listen to the half of it, you'd understand the double. I feel like a fresh-laid egg.

I The Supreme - pg. 169

Here in my bedroom, the muffled tick-tock of the watches, among them the one Belgrano presented to Cavanas at Takuary. The faint flutter of moths in the books. The stealthy minute hand of the wood borer in the timbers. Every so often the weary sounds of the cathedral bell, marking not hours but centuries. How long a time I haven't slept! Everything is repeated, in the image of what has been and will be. The infinitely great and the infinitely small. Absolutely true that there is nothing new under the sun, and this very sun the repetition of innumerable suns that have existed and will exist. The ancients knew the sun was two thousand leagues distant and were surprised that it looked to be two hundred paces away. They knew the eye could not see the sun if the eye were not somehow a sin itself. More than necessary to know how not to fall sick, to make oneself invulnerable to everything. According to the Jesuit Montoya, the Indian chieftain Avaporu chewed the magic herb of the Yayeupa-Guasu he sneezed three times and became invisible. So that even if I were dead I wouldn't be, since I would be my repetition. Only the shell of my first soul would be broken or dead after having incubated the others.

I The Supreme - pg. 167

I'm tired of their clowning. I don't intend to answer them. Nothing enhances authority so much as silence. My patience has a very wide turning circle.

I The Supreme - pg. 165

From the people-multitude I picked the men who formed the skeleton organization of the army of the people. An even more invincible support than that of cannons and rifles in the defense of the Republic and the Revolution.

I The Supreme - pg. 161

The cardboard figures of the Junta became more and more unsteady. In the Yegros mansion, band, orchestra, elegant soirees, roistering, revelry, night after night.

I The Supreme - pg. 160

We cannot oblige our citizens to sleep in peace with a river on the rampage. You alone, as officers of the General Staff, named by the Governing Junta, paid by it in the country's money, are not the people. By acting in this fashion, you are, rather, the counterpeople. By your very profession as military officers, you ought to be the first to set an example of faithful performance of your duties; of respect for the dignity of the Junta; of decency and honor to citizens, protecting those who are most defenseless, ignorant, and humble, those who have been taught to welcome blows as though they were a blessing from God.

I The Supreme - pg. 152

The only thing I'm asking you is your permission to incubate in your incubus-cube. I don't want to be engraved in a woman's womb. I want to be born in a man's thought. Leave the rest to me.