The Autumn of the Patriarch

Highlights

Page 44

OVER THE WEEKEND the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

Page 66

We did not have to knock down the door, as we had thought, for the main door seemed to open by itself with just the push of a voice,

Page 195

he had more time available to take care of the armed forces, not because the armed forces were what sustained his power, as we all thought, quite the contrary, because they were his most feared natural enemy, so he made some officers believe that they were being watched by others, he shuffled their assignments to prevent their plotting, every army post received a ration of eight blank cartridges for every ten live rounds and he sent them gunpowder mixed with beach sand while he kept the good ammunition within reach in an arsenal in the presidential palace the keys to which hung on a ring with other keys that had no duplicates and opened other doors that no one else could open, protected by the tranquil shadow of my lifelong comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar, an artilleryman and academy graduate who was also his minister of defense and at the same time commander of the presidential guard, director of the state security services,

Note: Wow he’s read The Dictators Handbook

Page 608

Contrary to what his clothing showed, the descriptions made by his historians made him very big and official schoolboy texts referred to him as a patriarch of huge size who never left his house because he could not fit through the doors, who loved children and swallows, who knew the language of certain animals, who had the virtue of being able to anticipate the designs of nature, who could guess a person’s thoughts by one look in the eyes, and who had the secret of a salt with the virtue of curing lepers’ sores and making cripples walk.

Note: Kim dynasty

Page 611

Although all trace of his origins had disappeared from the texts, it was thought that he was a man of the upland plains because of his immense appetite for power, the nature of his government, his mournful bearing, the inconceivable evil of a heart which had sold the sea to a foreign power and condemned us to live facing this limitless plain of harsh lunar dust where the bottomless sunsets pain us in our souls.

Page 674

she did not go on complaining 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 became entangled, sometimes he drooled,

Page 688

divided the country up into autonomous provinces with the unanswerable argument that this is federalism general, this is what we have shed the blood of our veins for, and they were absolute monarchs in their territories, with their own laws, their personal patriotic holidays, their paper money which they signed themselves,

Page 080

my queen, lost forever in the enigma of the eclipse,

Note: Thank god. Reading this “courtship” has made me physically ill

Page 139

Dionisio Iguarán answered him in a quavering voice it’s yours general, my great honor, and he went home to the applause of the excited people and the noise of the music and the petards showing everybody the six pedigreed cocks he had been given in exchange for the undefeated red one, but that night he locked himself up in his bedroom and drank a gourdful of cane liquor all by himself and hanged himself with the rope from his hammock, poor man, for he was not aware of the string of domestic disasters that his jubilant appearances brought on, nor the trail of undesired deaths he left behind,

Note: The old Marquez-aroo

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