The Carnival

…well, it no longer looked like a presidential house but a market where one had to force one’s way through the barefoot orderlies who unloaded vegetables from donkeys and wooden crates of chickens in the corridors, jumping over godmothers with starving godchildren who slept crowed together on the stairs waiting for the miracle of official charity, one had to avoid the streams of dirty water from the foulmouthed concubines who changed the night flowers in the vases for fresh ones and who mopped the floors and sung songs of illusory loves in time to the dry branches with which they aired the rugs on the balconies, and all that amid the scandal of the civil servants for life who found hens laying in desk drawers, and the coming and going of whores and soldiers in the bathrooms, and the racket of birds, and fights between stray dogs in the middle of the court hearings, because no one knew who was whom nor on the behalf of whom in that palace with open doors within whose extreme disorder it was impossible to ascertain where the government was.

The Autumn of the Patriarch