Read Online The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - Free Book Online Page A

constructed, at the dock they left the old battleship from the landing and on the deck of which the ghost of a lost admiral strolled in the squall of Junenights, but before bearing off that portable paradise of war in their flying trains they decorated him with the medal of the good neighbor, rendered him the honors of chief of state, and said to him aloud so that everybody could hear we leave you now with your nigger whorehouse so let’s see how you shape things up without us, but they left, mother, God damn it, they’ve gone, and for the first timesince his head-down days of occupation ox he went up the stairs giving orders in a loud voice and in person through a tumult of requests to reestablish cockfights, and he so ordered, agreed, that kite-flying be allowed again, and many other diversions that had been prohibited by the marines, and he so ordered, agreed, so convinced of being master of all his power that he inverted the colors of theflag and replaced the Phrygian cap on the shield with the invader’s defeated dragon, because after all we’re our own dogs now, mother, long live the plague. All her life Bendición Alvarado would remember those surprises of power and the other moreancient and bitter ones of poverty, but she never brought them back with so much grief as after the death farce when he was wallowing in the fen ofprosperity while she went on lamenting to anyone who wanted to listen to her that it was no good being the president’s mama with nothing else in the world but this sad sewing machine, she lamented, looking at him there with his gold-braided hearse, my poor son didn’t have a hole in the ground to fall dead into after all those years of serving his country, lord, it’s not fair, and she did not go oncomplaining out of habit or disillusionment but because he no longer made her a participant in his shake-ups nor did he hurry over as before to share the best secrets of power with her, and he had changed so much since the times of the marines that to Bendición Alvarado he seemed to be older than she, to have left her behind in time, she heard him stumble over words, his concept of reality becameentangled, sometimes he drooled, and she was struck with the compassion that was not a mother’s but a daughter’s when she saw him arrive at the suburban mansion loaded down with packages and desperate to open them all at the same time, he cut the twine with his teeth, broke his fingernails on the hoops before she could get the scissors from her sewing basket, dug everything out from the underbrushof debris with flailing hands as he drowned in his high-flying anxiety, look at all this wonderful stuff, mother, he said, a live mermaid in a fishbowl, a lifesize wind-up angel who flew about the room striking the hour with its bell, a gigantic shell in which the listener didn’t hear the sound of the waves and the sea wind but the strains of the national anthem, what fancy stuff, mother, now youcan see how nice it is not to be poor, he said, but she couldn’t feed his enthusiasm and began chewing on the brushes used to paint orioles so her son would not notice that her heart was crumbling with pity thinking back on a past that no one knew as well as she, remembering how hard it had been for him to stay in the chair he was sitting in, but not these days, lord, not these easy times when powerwas a tangible and unique matter, a little glass ball in the palm of the hand, as he said, but when he was a fugitive shad swimmingaround without god or law in a neighborhood palace pursued by the voracious swarm of the surviving leaders of the federalist war who had helped overthrow the general-poet Lautaro Muñoz, an enlightened despot whom God keep in His holy glory with his Suetonius missalsin Latin and his forty-two pedigreed horses, and in exchange for their armed help they had taken over the ranches and livestock of the outlawed former owners and had divided the country up into autonomous provinces with the