Double five – Extract from The Autumn of the Patriarch

He did not find a moment of rest as he sniffed round about to find the hidden enemy who had armed the bogus leper, for he felt there was someone within reach of his hand, someone that close to his life who knew the hiding place of his honey, who had his eye at the keyholes and his ears at the walls every minute and everywhere just like my pictures, a voluble presence who whistled in the January trade wins and he recognised him in the jasmine embers on hot nights, one who had pursued him months on end in the fright of his insomnia dragging his fearful ghostly feet through the most hidden rooms of the darkened building, until one night at dominoes he saw the omen materialise in a pensive hand that finished the game with a double five, and it was as if an inner voice had revealed that that hand was the hand of treason, God damn it, it’s him, he said to himself perplexed, and then he raised his eyes through the flow of light from the lamp hanging over the centre of the table and met the handsome artilleryman’s eyes of my soulless comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar, what a mess, his strong right arm, his sacred accomplice, it wasn’t impossible, he thought, all the more pained as he deciphered more deeply the weave of the false truths with which they had diverted his attention for so many years in order to hide the brutal truth that my lifetime comrade was in the service of politicians of fortune whom for convenience’ sake he had taken from the darkest corners of the federalist war and had made them rich and had heaped fabulous privileges upon them, he had let himself be used by them, he had tolerated the fact that they were using him to rise up to a point that the old aristocracy swept away by the irresistible breath of the liberal whirlwind had never dreamed of and they still wanted more, God damn it, they wanted the place of the elect of God that he had reserved for himself, they wanted to be me, motherfuckers, with the way lighted by the glacial lucidity and the infinite prudence of the man who had managed to accumulate the most confidence and authority in his regime by taking advantage of the privileges of being the only person from whom he accepted  papers to sign, he had read aloud the executive orders and ministerial laws that only I could put through, he pointed out the amendments, he signed with his thumbprint and he stamped it with the ring which he then put away in a strongbox whose combination only he knew, to your health comrade, he always said when he handed him the signed papers, here’s something to wipe yourself with, he told him laughing, and that was how General Rodrigo de Aguilar had succeeded in establishing another system of power within the power as widespread and as fruitful as mine, and not content with that in the shadows he had set up the mutiny of the Conde barracks with the complicity and the unreserved assistance of Ambassador Norton, his buddy in matters of Dutch whores, his fencing master, the one who had smuggled in the ammunition in barrels of Norwegian cod under the protection of diplomatic immunity while he would use balm on me at the domino table with the incense candles saying there was no government more friendly, or just and exemplary than mine, and they were also the ones who had put the revolver in the hand of the false leper along with fifty thousand pesos in bills cut in half which we found buried in the attacker’s home, and the other half of which was to be turned over after the crime by my own lifetime comrade, mother, what a bitter mess…

Extract from The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.

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