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uneasiness those who had only come to decipher the enigmaof whether it really was or was not he, he saw a very old man who gave the masonic salute from the days of the federalist war, he saw a man in mourning who kissed his ring, he saw a schoolgirl who laid a flower on him, he saw a fishwife who could not resist the truth of his death and strewed her basket of fresh fish all over the floor and embraced the perfumed corpse sobbing aloud that it was him,my God, what’s going to become of us without him, she wept, so it was him, they shouted, it was him, shouted the throng suffocated by the sun in the main square and then the bells of the cathedral stopped tolling their knell and those of all the churches announced a Wednesday of jubilation, Easter rockets exploded, Roman candles, drums of liberation, and he watched the assault groups that came inthrough the windows in the face of the silent complacency of the guard, he watched the ferocious leaders who dispersed the procession with clubs and knocked down the inconsolable fishwife, he watched theones who attacked the corpse, the eight men who took it out of its immemorial state and its chimerical time of agapanthus lilies and sunflowers and dragged it down the stairs, those who guttedthe insides of that paradise of opulence and misfortune thinking they were destroying the lair of power forever, knocking over the papier-mâché Doric capitals, velvet curtains and Babylonic columns crowned with alabaster palm trees, throwing birdcages out the window, the throne of the viceroys, the grand piano, breaking the funeral urns with the ashes of unknown patriots and Gobelin tapestries ofmaidens asleep in gondolas of disillusion and enormous oil paintings of bishops and archaic military men and inconceivable naval battles, annihilating that world so that in the memory of future generations not the slightest memory of the cursed line of men of arms would remain, and then he peeped into the street through the slats in the blinds to see what degree the ravages Qf defenestration hadreached and with just one glance he saw more infamy and more ingratitude than had ever been seen and wept over by my eyes since the day I was born, mother, he saw his merry widows leaving the building through the service entrance leading the cows from my stables by the halter, carrying off government furniture, the jars of honey from your hives, mother, he saw his seven-month runts making music ofjubilation with kitchen pots and treasures from the crystal set and the table service for pontificial banquets singing with street-urchin shouts my papa is dead, hurray for freedom, he saw the bonfire that had been lighted on the main square to burn the official portraits and the almanac lithographs that had been in all places and at all times ever since the beginning of his regime, and he saw hisown body dragged by as it left behind along the street a trail of medals and epaulets, dolman buttons, strands of brocade and frog embroidery and tassels from playing-card sabers and the ten sad pips of the king of the universe, mother, look what they’ve done to me, he said, feeling in his own flesh the ignominy of the spitting and the sickbed pans that were thrown on him from the balconies as hewent by, horrified with the idea of beingquartered and devoured by dogs and vultures amidst the delirious howls and the roar of fireworks celebrating the carnival of my death. When the cataclysm had passed he still heard the distant music of the windless afternoon, he went on killing mosquitoes and with the same slaps trying to kill the katydids in his ears which hindered him in his thinking,he still saw the light of the fires on the horizon, the lighthouse that tinted him with green every thirty seconds through the slits in the blinds, the natural breathing of daily life which was getting to be the same again while his death was changing into a different death more like so many others in the past, the incessant torrent of reality which