In Evil Hour (17 page)

After convincing himself that there was no wound, the mayor laid the body out face up, tucked in the shirttail, and buttoned the fly. Finally he fastened the belt.

When he stood up he'd recovered his calm, but the expression with which he faced the policemen revealed a beginning of weariness.

“Who did it?”

“All of us,” the blond giant said. “He tried to escape.”

The mayor looked at him thoughtfully, and for a few seconds seemed not to have anything else to say. “Nobody's
going to buy that story,” he said. He advanced toward the blond giant with his hand outstretched.

“Give me your revolver.”

The policeman took off his belt and handed it over. Having replaced the two spent shells with new rounds, the mayor put them in his pocket and gave the revolver to another policeman. The blond giant, who, seen from close by, seemed illuminated by an aura of childishness, let himself be led to the next cell. There he got completely undressed and gave his clothes to the mayor. Everything was done unhurriedly, each one knowing the action that corresponded to him, as in a ceremony. Finally the mayor himself closed the dead man's cell and went out onto the courtyard balcony. Mr. Carmichael was still on the stool.

Led to the office, he didn't respond to the invitation to sit down. He remained standing in front of the desk, with his clothes wet once more, and he barely moved his head when the mayor asked him if he'd been aware of everything.

“Well, then,” the mayor said. “I still haven't had time to think about what I'm going to do, or even if I'm going to do anything. But no matter what I do,” he added, “remember this: like it or not, you're in on the deal.”

Mr. Carmichael remained absorbed in front of the desk, his clothes sticking to his body and a beginning of tumefaction in his skin, as if he still hadn't floated to the surface on his third night as a drowned man. The mayor waited uselessly for a sign of life.

“So take the situation into account, Carmichael: we're partners now.”

He said it gravely and even with a touch of drama. But Mr. Carmichael's brain didn't seem to register it. He remained motionless facing the desk, swollen and sad, even after the armored door had closed.

In front of the barracks two policemen held Pepe Amador's
mother by the wrists. The three seemed to be at rest. The woman was breathing with a peaceful rhythm and her eyes were dry. But when the mayor appeared in the door she gave off a hoarse howl and shook with such violence that one of the policemen had to let her go and the other one pinned her to the ground with a wrestling hold.

The mayor didn't look at her. Bringing the other policeman with him, he confronted the group that was witnessing the struggle from the corner. He didn't address anyone in particular.

“Someone of you,” he said. “If you want to avoid something worse, take this woman home.”

Still accompanied by the policeman, he made his way through the group and reached the courthouse. He found nobody there. Then he went to Judge Arcadio's house and pushing open the door without knocking, he shouted:

“Judge.”

Judge Arcadio's wife, overwhelmed by the thick humors of her pregnancy, answered in the shadows.

“He left.”

The mayor didn't move from the threshold.

“For where?”

“Where else would he go?” the woman said. “Some shitty whore place.”

The mayor signaled the policeman to go in. They passed by the woman without looking at her. After turning the bedroom upside down and realizing that there weren't any men's things anywhere, they went back into the living room.

“When did he leave?” the mayor asked.

“Two nights ago,” the woman said.

The mayor needed a long pause to think.

“That son of a bitch,” he suddenly shouted. “He can hide a hundred feet underground, he can crawl back into
the belly of his whore mother, but we'll haul him out dead or alive. The government has a very long arm.”

The woman sighed.

“May God listen to you, Lieutenant.”

It was beginning to grow dark. There were still groups being kept at a distance by policemen at the corners of the barracks, but they'd taken Pepe Amador's mother home and the town seemed peaceful.

The mayor went straight to the dead man's cell. He had them bring a piece of canvas and, aided by the policeman, he put the cap and glasses on the corpse and wrapped it up. Then he looked in different parts of the barracks for pieces of cord and wire and tied the body in a spiral from neck to ankles. When he finished he was sweating, but he had a recovered look. It was as if physically he had gotten rid of the weight of the corpse.

Only then did he turn on the light in the cell. “Get the shovel, the pick, and a lantern,” he ordered the policeman. “Then call González, go to the rear courtyard, and dig a good, deep hole in the rear, where it's drier.” He said it as if he'd been thinking up each word as he said it.

“And remember one messy thing for the rest of your life,” he concluded. “This boy never died.”

Two hours later they still hadn't finished digging the grave. From the balcony, the mayor realized that there was nobody on the street except for one of his men who was mounting guard from corner to corner. He turned on the stairway light and went to relax in the darkest corner of the anteroom, hearing only the spaced cries of a distant curlew.

Father Ángel's voice drew him out of his meditation. He heard him first talking to the policeman on guard, then to someone who was with him, and lastly he recognized the other voice. He remained leaning over in the folding chair,
until he heard the voices again, inside the barracks now, and the first footsteps on the stairs. Then he reached his left arm out in the dark and grabbed the carbine.

When he saw him appear at the head of the stairs, Father Ángel stopped. Two steps behind was Dr. Giraldo, in a short jacket, white and starched, and a satchel in his hand. He displayed his sharpened teeth.

“I'm disappointed, Lieutenant,” he said in a good humor. “I've been waiting all afternoon for you to call me to do the autopsy.”

Father Ángel had his transparent and peaceful eyes fixed on him, and then he turned them on the mayor. The mayor smiled too.

“There'll be no autopsy,” he said, “since there's no dead body.”

“We want to see Pepe Amador,” the curate said.

Holding the carbine barrel down, the mayor continued talking to the doctor. “I do too,” he said. “But there's nothing we can do.” And he stopped smiling when he told him:

“He escaped.”

Father Ángel came up another step. The mayor raised the carbine in his direction. “Stay right where you are, Father,” he warned. In his turn, the doctor advanced a step.

“Listen to one thing, Lieutenant,” he said, still smiling. “It's impossible to keep secrets in this town. Ever since four in the afternoon on everybody knows that they did the same thing to that boy that Don Sabas did with the donkeys he sold.”

“He escaped.”

Watching the doctor, he barely had time to put himself on guard as Father Ángel came up two steps all of a sudden with his arms uplifted.

The mayor released the safety catch with a crisp blow by
the edge of his hand and remained planted with his legs apart.

“Halt,” he shouted.

The doctor grabbed the priest by the sleeve of his cassock. Father Ángel began to cough.

“Let's play clean, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. His voice hardened for the first time in a long while. “That autopsy has got to be done. Now we're going to clear up the mystery of the fainting spells prisoners have in this jail.”

“Doctor,” the mayor said, “if you move from where you are, I'll shoot you down.” He barely turned his glance toward the priest. “And that goes for you too, Father.”

The three remained motionless.

“Besides,” the mayor went on, addressing the priest, “you ought to be pleased, Father. That boy was the one who was putting up the lampoons.”

“For God's love,” Father Ángel began to say.

The convulsive cough wouldn't let him go on. The mayor waited for the attack to pass.

“Now just listen to this mess,” he said to them. “I'm going to start counting. When I reach three, I'm going to fire at that door with my eyes closed. Just be aware of that, now and forevermore,” he warned the doctor explicitly. “The little jokes are over. We're at war, Doctor.”

The doctor dragged Father Ángel away by the sleeve. He began his descent without turning his back on the mayor, and suddenly he began to laugh out loud.

“I like it this way, General,” he said. “Now we really are beginning to understand each other.”

“One,” the mayor counted.

They didn't hear the next number. When they separated by the corner of the barracks, Father Ángel was demolished and had to turn his face away because his eyes were wet. Dr. Giraldo gave him a pat on the shoulder without ceasing to
smile. “Don't be so surprised, Father,” he told him. “All of this is life.” On turning the corner by his house, he looked at his watch in the light of the lamppost: It was a quarter to eight.

Father Ángel couldn't eat. After curfew sounded he sat down to write a letter, and he was leaning over the desk until after midnight while the thin drizzle erased the world around him. He wrote in an implacable way, forming even letters with a tendency toward preciosity, and he did it with such passion that he didn't dip his pen again until he'd scratched out as many as two invisible words, scraping the paper with the dry pen.

On the following day, after mass, he put the letter in the mail in spite of the fact that it wouldn't go out until Friday. During the morning the air was damp and cloudy, but toward noontime it became diaphanous. A lost bird appeared in the courtyard and spent almost a half hour giving little invalid leaps among the spikenards. It sang a progressive note, rising up an octave each time until it became so sharp that one could only imagine it.

On his twilight walk, Father Ángel felt certain that all afternoon he'd been followed by an autumnal fragrance. At Trinidad's house, while he kept up a sad conversation about the infirmities of October, he thought he identified the smell that Rebeca Asís had exhaled in his study one night.

On his way back he'd visited Mr. Carmichael's family. The wife and eldest daughter were disconsolate, and whenever they mentioned the prisoner's name they hit a false note. But the children were happy without their papa's severity, trying to make the pair of rabbits that the widow Montiel had sent them drink from a glass. Suddenly Father Ángel had interrupted the conversation and, making a sign in the air, had said:

“Now I know: it's wolfsbane.”

But it wasn't wolfsbane.

Nobody talked about the lampoons. In the hubbub of the latest happenings they were nothing but a picturesque anecdote of the past. Father Ángel had proof of it during his evening walk and after prayers, chatting in his study with a group of Catholic Dames.

When he was alone he felt hungry. He prepared himself some fried green banana slices and coffee with milk and accompanied it with a piece of cheese. The satisfaction of his stomach made him forget the smell. While he was getting undressed to go to bed, and then inside the netting, hunting the mosquitoes that had survived the insecticide, he belched several times. He had acid, but his spirit was at peace.

He slept like a saint. He heard, in the silence of the curfew, the emotional whispers, the preliminary testing of the chords tempered by the icy dawn, and lastly a song from another time. At ten minutes to five he realized that he was alive. He sat up with a solemn effort, rubbing his eyelids with his fingers, and thought: Friday, October 21. Then he remembered aloud: “Saint Hilary.”

He got dressed without washing or praying. Having corrected the long buttoning of his cassock, he put on the cracked boots for everyday wear, whose soles were becoming detached. On opening the door to the spikenards, he remembered the words of a song.

“‘I'll be in your dreams till death,' ” he sighed.

Mina pushed open the door of the church while he was giving the first ring. She went to the baptistery and found the cheese intact and the traps still set. Father Ángel finished opening the door onto the square.

“Bad luck,” Mina said, shaking the empty cardboard box. “Not a single one fell today.”

But Father Ángel didn't pay any attention. A brilliant day was breaking, with pure, clean air, like an announcement that in that year, too, in spite of everything, December would be punctual. Pastor's silence had never seemed more definitive to him.

“There was a serenade last night,” he said.

“Of lead,” Mina confirmed. “There was shooting until just a little while ago.”

The priest looked at her for the first time. She, too, extremely pale, like her blind grandmother, wore the blue sash of a lay congregant. But unlike Trinidad, who had a masculine air, a woman was beginning to mature in her.

“Where?”

“All over,” Mina said. “It seems they were going crazy looking for clandestine fliers. They say they lifted up the flooring of the barbershop, just by chance, and they found guns. The jail is full, but they say men are going into the jungle to join up with guerrilla bands.”

Father Ángel sighed.

“I didn't notice anything,” he said.

He walked toward the back of the church. She followed him in silence to the main altar.

“And that isn't anything,” Mina said. “Last night, in spite of the curfew and in spite of the shooting …”

Father Ángel stopped. He turned his parsimonious eyes of innocent blue toward her. Mina also stopped, with the empty box under her arm, and she started a nervous smile before finishing the sentence.

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

COLLECTED STORIES

INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

LEAF STORM

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

STRANGE PILGRIMS

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

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