Where was this found? Nailed to the door of the cathedral, Excellency. A patrol of grenadiers discovered it early this morning and brought it in to headquarters. Luckily no one had time to read it. I didn’t ask you that, and it’s a matter of no importance. Your Grace is right. The ink of pasquinades turns sour more quickly than milk. But it’s not a page from the Buenos Aires Gazette, nor is it one torn out of a book, Sire. What books would there be around here outside of my own! The aristocrats of the Twenty Families turned theirs into playing cards ages ago. Have the houses of the antipatriots searched. The dungeons, down in the dungeons, go have a look in the dungeons. The guilty party might very well be among those rats with tangled dangling locks and foot-long fingernails. Tighten the knots in those notorious forgers’ iron neckties. Peña and Molas especially. Bring me the letters in which Molas pays me homage during the First Consulate, and then later during the First Dictatorship. I want to reread the speech he delivered in the Assembly of the year ’14, proposing that I be elected Dictator. His handwriting is very different in the draft of the speech, in the instructions to the deputies, in the statement to the authorities years later in which he accuses one of his brothers of having stolen cattle from him at his estancia in Altos. I can repeat what those papers say, Excellency. I didn’t ask you to recite by heart the thousands of documents, dossiers, and decrees in the archives. I merely ordered you to bring me the file on Mariano Antonoi Molas. Bring me the pamphlets by Manuel Pedro de Peña as well. Cantankerous sycophants! They boast of having been the Word of Independence. The rats! They didn’t even begin to understand it. They think they’re still masters of their words in the depths of their dungeons. But all they know how to do is squeal. They haven’t shut up to this day. They keep finding new ways of secreting their accursed poison. They get out pamphlets, pasquinades, lampoons, caricatures. I am an indispensable figure for slander. For all I care they can manufacture their paper from consecrated rags. Write it, print it, with consecrated letters on a consecrated press. Go print your drivel on Mount Sinai if that will unshrivel your souls, you cacogenic latrinographers!

Hum. Ah! Funeral orations, pamphlets condemning me to be burned at the stake. Bah! They’re daring to parody my Supreme Decrees now. They imitate my language, my handwriting, trying to infiltrate by way of it; to get me from their lairs. Shut my mouth with the voice that thundered against them. Bury me in words, in effigy. An old trick of tribal witch doctors. Post more guards to watch over those who labor under the delusion that they can replace me once I’m dead. Where is the file of anonymous libels? It’s right there, Excellency, by your hand.

It is not wholly unlikely that those two sly scribble-scrabblers Monas and de la Peña were the ones who dictated this squib. The joke is altogether in the style of those two infamous Porteñista partisans, out to further the cause of Buenos Aires. If it is their doing, I shall immolate Molas, pen Peña in for life. One of their ignoble blind tools could well have learned it by heart. A second one written it down. A third goes and pins it to the door of the cathedral with four thumbtacks. The guards themselves are the worst traitors. Your worship is more than right. In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie. I’m not asking you to flatter me, Patiño. I’m ordering you to seek and find the author of the pasquinade. The law is a bottomless pit, but I expect you to be able to discover a hair in that hole. Search the souls of Peña and Molas. Sire, they can’t be the ones. They’ve been confined to utter darkness for years now. And so? After Molas’ last Outcry was intercepted, Excellency, I ordered the skylights, the cracks in the doors, the chinks in the walls and ceiling filled in with stone and mortar. You know that the prisoners continually train rats to carry their clandestine communications. And even to bring them food. You’ll remember that was how the ones from Santa Fe stole my ravens’ rations for months. I also ordered all the holes and runways of the ants, the culvers of the crickets, the sigh holes of the crannies plugged up. No darker darkness possible, Sire. They don’t have anything to write with. Are you forgetting memory, you of all people, you memorious lout? They may not have even a pencil stub, a little end of charcoal. They may not have light or air. But they have memory. A memory just like yours. The memory of an archive-cockroach, three hundred years older than homo sapiens. The memory of the fish, of the frog, of the parrot that always cleans its beak on the same side. Which doesn’t mean they’re intelligent. Quite the contrary. Can you state categorically that the scalded cat that flees even cold water is possessed of good memory? No, merely that it’s a cat that’s afraid. The scalding has penetrated its memory. Memory doesn’t recall that fear. It has become fear itself.

Do you know what memory is? The stomach of the soul, someone wrongly called it. Though nobody is ever the first to give things a name. There is nothing but an infinity of repeaters. The only things ever invented are new errors. The memory of one person alone is useless.

Stomach of the soul. That’s too clever by half. What sort of soul could those pitiless, inhuman slanders have? The quadruple stomachs of quadrupeds. Ruminant stomachs. That’s where the perfidy of those successive incurable scoundrels ferments. That’s where they cook up their potfuls of infamies. What sort of memory do they need to remember all the lies they’ve cranked out with the one aim of defaming me, of slandering the Government? A memory of cud-chewers. A ruminant’s memory. Ingestive-digestive. Repetitive. Disfigurative. Sulliative. They prophesied that they would turn this country into the new Athens. The Areopagus of the sciences, the letters, the arts of this Continent. What they were really out to do with their chimeras was to hand Paraguay over to the highest bidder. The areopagites came within a hair of doing just that. I managed to get rid of them. I picked them off one by one. I put them in their rightful place. Off with you, areopagites! To jail with the lot of you, blockheads!

The worst offender, Manuel Pedro de Peña, parakeet number one of the patriciate, I disblazoned. Cured of his cock-a-hoop habits. Took him down his heraldic perch. Caged him in a prison cell. He there learned to recite by heart, without a single mistake, the hundred thousand words in the Royal Academy dictionary, from A to Z. That’s how he exercises his memory in the cemetery of words. I wouldn’t want the enamel, the metal of his word-pipes to rust. Dr. Mariano Antonio Moas, Attorney Molas, or to put a fine point on it, Molas the pen-pusher, recites nonstop, even in his dreams, bits and pieces of a description of what he calls the Former Province of Paraguay. For these last surviving areopagites, the Fatherland continues to be the former province. They make no mention whatsoever, not even in the decorous euphemisms to which their colonized tongues were accustomed, to the Giant Province of the Indies, the one that in the last analysis was a grandmother, mother, aunt, poor relation of the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, which grew rich at her expense.

It is not only the patricians and vernacular areopagites who use and abuse their ruminating memory here. Their foreign marsupials who stole from the country and buried the memory of their ladronicides in the stomach of their souls do so as well. There’s the Frenchman Pedro Martell. After twenty years in prison and as many more of madness he still thinks of nothing but his chest full of gold pieces. Every night he furtively removes the chest from the hole he’s dug underneath his hammock with his fingernails; he counts yet again the gleaming coins, one by one, proves them with his toothless gums, puts them back in his chest, and buries it in the hole again. He then stretches out in his hammock and sleeps in bliss above his imaginary treasure. Who could feel better protected than he? This was the sort of life lived in the cellars for many years by another Frenchman, Charles Andreu-Legard, ex prisoner of the Bastille, chewing over his memories in my republican bastille. Can it be said that those dildelphians know what memory is? Neither you nor they know. Those who do know have no memory. Those with prodigious memories are almost always mentally retarded imbeciles. Besides being scoundrels and very clever tricksters. Or something even worse. They use their memory to harm others, but have no idea how to do so for their own good. No comparison with the scalded cat. Parrot-memory, cow-memory, ass-memory. Not sense-memory, judgment-memory, possessed of a lusty imagination capable of engendering events in and of itself. The things that have come back into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.