I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos

Author:Augusto Roa Bastos
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

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The long caravan of those carrying their children in their arms slowly files past the holy water font for the ceremony of baptism at which General Belgrano is acting as general godfather. They have collectively asked him to do so. He has accepted the imposition with his usual natural goodness, and now the procession of parents, both legitimate and natural, has reached him. They deposit in his arms thousands of offspring that, by virtue of the waters, become godchildren of the general and their fathers and/or mothers compadres and comadres. He has been standing alongside the font, in the atrium, for hours now. The cathedral, leaning like a latter-day tower of Pisa, threatens to topple over at any moment. The mother church creaks, groans threateningly through the countermouths of its cracks and crannies. Nothing daunted, Belgrano goes on holding the babies over the round Jordan. The first one was María de los Angeles, just born. José Tomás Isasi and his wife shed tears over their little bundle from heaven kicking amid yards of lace.

On the stage set up below the Cabildo, a performance of Phèdre*3 is given. Petrona Zabala is admirable in the role of the daughter of the king of Crete and of Pasiphaë. It is as though she is the wife of Theseus in person, incestuously enamored of her stepson Hipólito Sánchez. In the scene in which, overcome with remorse, she hangs herself on Mount Venus with her own girdle of a virgin queen, the verisimilitude of the real borders on hallucination. From the top of the cliffs, seated beneath the orange tree, we contemplate that slender, endless body. Spectral whiteness oscillating on the black mirror of the water amid the gleaming torches. Hair ruffled by the wind veiling her face.

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