The Autumn of the Patriarch

The narrator, still unsure whether the corpse found in the beginning of the novel is the dictator, states that no one is old enough to remember the first death of the dictator (who was actually Patricio). Recounting the lore, the narrator reflects that numerous nameless bodies had been found with signifiers similar to those found on this body. When exploring the house, there was still nothing that could identify the body as the General’s; not his mother’s room nor the bridal bedroom which still housed the many possessions of Leticia Nazareno, a nun kidnapped by the General from a convent in Jamaica and the mother of the only one of his 5,000 children who carried his surname.

The clothes and armor that they find don’t fit the body. Furthermore, some lore says that the General grew in size until he was 100 years of age and grew a third set of teeth by the time he was 150; the body that they find doesn’t match these proportions, but it does have a massive, herniated testicle and feet. The origins of the dictator have been lost to history by the time the narrator finds the body, but oral tradition and mythology says that he was conceived without a father by Bendición Alvarado.