I the supreme.

• Author: Roa Bastos, Augusta
• Position: Fiction

I pass my hand across my face in the darkness. I do not recognize it. Seeing in a lamp two focuses of light. One black, the other white. In a man, two faces. One alive, the other dead. HE loses interest. Feigns indifference. Opens the door. Heads toward the entrance. Goes outside. I see his silhouette in the passageway, haloed with that filament of white and black light, phosphorically streaking the darkness. I hear him give the password to the head of the guard detail: THE FATHERLAND OR DEATH! His voice fills the whole night. The last watchword I will hear. It remains sewed to the lining of the destiny of my fellow citizens. The earth trembles with the vibration of that outcry. It is passed on from one sentinel to another through all the confines of the night. I is HE, definitively, I-HE-SUPREME. Immemorial. Imperishable. The one thing left for me to do is swallow my old skin. He molts. I molt. He mute. I mute. Only the silence listens to me now, patient, without a word, seated beside me, atop me. Only the hand goes on writing endlessly. Animal with a life of its own, wriggling, writhing endlessly. It writes, writes on and on, impelled, shaken by the violent agitation of convulsionaries. Ultima ratio, last rat escaped from the sunken ship. Enthroned upon the...