Chapter 16
The Rotten Wife of the Soriator
The Soriator of Soria, on the first month after Luz Soledad Ferreira Perfecta's death, holed himself up in the Soriatorial Chamber and began defecating inside an empty urn, like those used to contain the ashes of the dead. He had promised himself that he would never leave his confinement until he filled it. His plan was to have her buried with pomp in the exact spot where his astrologers had told him the tomb of Almoanzor was located. The cloistered dictator's guards passed food to him through a slit. These delusions remained so jealously hidden that his lieutenants and close associates never found out. Such was the fear the other Sorias had of him that no one dared to judge or even record his antics. They could hardly draw any conclusions then. Each eccentricity of the Soria Soriator caught the spectator in the moment with a blank mind, completely virgin.
Strange as it may seem, it was only a month after her death, and when she was completely rotten, that it occurred to the Soriator to have her dug up for emblazonry. He then suspended his meditation on the eschatological process and emerged from his confinement.
When the coffin was opened in the Soriatorial Chamber, the vapors of putrefaction were so fetid that the Sorias themselves fled in terror, forgetting, for once in their lives, their fear of the Soria Soriator. He was left alone with his beloved, all green. The lava or liquids from the corpse, deposited at the bottom of the coffin, turned the dead woman into a kind of Soria Alphrodite, born from the foam—though not from the sea, precisely. "Cockroaches," some telephone operator, and even the technocratic Kratos of Tongues, would have said, had he been present. Horrifying. Horrifying. He climbed onto the coffin, but no matter how hard he tried, there was no way to loosen his sphincters. All he knew was: he wasn't eroticized. It was too much, even for him. So, cursing himself and the hated, nameless being entrenched in Monitoria, he had his soldiers place the corpse in a cube of clear plastic resin. When the monstrosity had hardened, he placed it on an altar of high worship—or a small chapel—in a corner of the Soriatorial Chamber, next to her bed.
She, then, appeared beautiful. Completely naked, she would lie on the floor, face down, moaning.
While the Soriator was at it, the tension between Sorias and technocrats was mounting. Soon, the danger zone would be reached.
The technocratic inhabitants of the Soria border launched, on their own, without the government's prompting, an ideological offensive. On the technocratic side, but facing Soria, they had painted trench and combat slogans on the back walls of their houses. In very large letters, so that their enemies could read them. They read more or less the following: "People from Soria like yogurt because they're faggots," "Long live wine," "Anyone who eats yogurt is a fucking whore," "I shit on the Excellent Provincial Council of Soria," "We must go and kill all the inhabitants of Soria," "Chichis" . . . Etc. . . All of this went on for miles.
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