In Evil Hour (8 page)

Dr. Giraldo watched the unloading of the launches until the end. He was the one who drew the mayor's attention to a vigorous woman of solemn bearing with several sets of bracelets on both arms. She seemed to be waiting for the Messiah under a multicolored parasol. The mayor didn't stop to think about the newcomer.

“She must be the animal tamer,” he said.

“In a manner of speaking, you're right,” Dr. Giraldo said, biting off his words with his double row of sharpened stones. “It's César Montero's mother-in-law.”

The mayor continued on slowly. He looked at his watch: twenty-five to four. At the door of the barracks the guard informed him that Father Ángel had waited for half an hour and would be back at four o'clock.

On the street again, not knowing what to do, he saw the dentist in the window of his office and went over to ask him for a light. The dentist gave it to him, looking at the still swollen cheek.

“I'm fine,” the mayor said.

He opened his mouth. The dentist observed:

“There are several cavities to be filled.”

The mayor adjusted the revolver at his waist. “I'll be by,” he decided. The dentist didn't change his expression.

“Come whenever you want to, to see if my wish to have you die in my house comes true.”

The mayor patted him on the shoulder. “It won't,” he commented, in a good mood. And he concluded, his arms open:

“My teeth are above party politics.”

“So you won't get married?”

Judge Arcadio's wife opened her legs. “No hope at all, Father,” she answered. “And even less now that I'm going to have a child.” Father Ángel averted his gaze toward the river. A drowned cow, enormous, was coming down along the streams of the current, with several buzzards on top of it.

“But it will be an illegitimate child,” he said.

“That doesn't matter,” she said. “Arcadio treats me well now. If I make him marry me, then he'll feel tied down and make me pay for it.”

She had taken off her clogs and was talking with her knees apart, her toes riding the crossbar of the stool. Her fan was in her lap and her arms were folded over her voluminous belly. “No hope at all, Father,” she repeated, because Father Ángel had remained silent. “Don Sabas bought me for two hundred pesos, sucked my juice out in three months, and then threw me into the street without a
pin. If Arcadio hadn't taken me in, I would have starved to death.” She looked at the priest for the first time:

“Or I would have had to become a whore.”

Father Ángel had been insisting for six months.

“You should make him marry you and set up a home,” he said. “This way, the way you're living now, not only leaves you in a precarious situation, but it's a bad example for the town.”

“It's better to do things frankly,” she said. “Others do the same thing but with the lights out. Haven't you read the lampoons?”

“That's gossip,” the priest said. “You have to legitimize your situation and put yourself out of the range of gossiping tongues.”

“Me?” she said. “I don't have to put myself out of the range of anything because I do everything in broad daylight. The proof of it is that nobody has wasted his time putting any lampoon on my door, and on the other hand, all the decent people on the square have theirs all papered up.”

“You're being foolish,” the priest said, “but God has given you the good fortune of getting a man who respects you. For that very reason you ought to get married and legalize your home.”

“I don't understand those things,” she said, “but in any case, just the way I am I've got a place to sleep and I've got plenty to eat.”

“What if he abandons you?”

She bit her lip. She smiled enigmatically as she answered:

“He won't abandon me, Father. I know why I can tell you that.”

Nor did Father Ángel consider himself defeated that time. He recommended that at least she come to mass. She replied that she would, “one of these days,” and the priest
continued his walk, waiting for the time to meet with the mayor. One of the Syrians called his attention to the good weather, but he didn't pay any heed. He was interested in the details of the circus that was unloading its anxious wild animals in the bright afternoon. He stayed there until four o'clock.

The mayor was taking leave of the dentist when he saw Father Ángel approaching. “Right on the dot,” he said, and shook hands. “Right on the dot, even when it's not raining.” Set to climb the steep stairs of the barracks, Father Ángel replied:

“And even if the world is coming to an end.”

Two minutes later he was let into César Montero's room.

While the confession was going on the mayor sat in the hall. He thought about the circus, of a woman hanging onto a bit by her teeth, twenty feet in the air, and a man in a blue uniform trimmed with gold beating on a snare drum. Half an hour later Father Ángel left César Montero's room.

“All set?” the mayor asked.

“You people are committing a crime,” he said. “That man hasn't eaten for five days. Only his constitution has allowed him to survive.”

“That's what he wants,” the mayor said tranquilly.

“That's not true,” the priest said, putting a serene energy into his voice. “You gave orders that he wasn't to be fed.”

The mayor pointed at him.

“Be careful, Father. You're violating the secrets of the confessional.”

“That's not part of his confession,” the priest said.

The mayor leaped to his feet. “Don't get all worked up,” he said, laughing suddenly. “If it worries you so much, we'll fix it up right now.” He called a policeman over and gave him an order to have them send some food from the hotel
for César Montero. “Have them send over a whole chicken, nice and fat, with a dish of potatoes and a bowl of salad,” he said, and added, addressing the priest:

“Everything charged to the town government, Father. So you can see how things have changed.”

Father Ángel lowered his head.

“When are you sending him off?”

“The launches leave tomorrow,” the mayor said. “If he listens to reason tonight, he'll go tomorrow. He just has to realize that I'm trying to do him a favor.”

“A slightly expensive favor,” the priest said.

“There's no favor that doesn't cost the person who gets it some money,” the mayor said. He fixed his eyes on Father Ángel's clear blue eyes and added:

“I hope you've made him understand all those things.”

Father Ángel didn't answer. He went down the stairs and said goodbye from the landing with a dull snort. Then the mayor crossed the hall and went into César Montero's room without knocking.

It was a simple room: a wash basin and an iron bed. César Montero, unshaven, dressed in the same clothing that he had been wearing when he left his house on Tuesday of the week before, was lying on the bed. He didn't even move his eyes when he heard the mayor. “Now that you've settled your accounts with God,” the latter said, “there's nothing more just than your doing the same with me.” Pulling a chair over to the bed, he straddled it, his chest against the wicker back. César Montero concentrated his attention on the roof beams. He didn't seem worried in spite of the fact that the damage of a long conversation with himself could be seen on the edges of his mouth. “You and I don't have to beat about the bush,” he heard the mayor say. “You're leaving tomorrow. If you're lucky, in two or three months a special investigator will arrive. It's up to us to fill him in.
On the launch arriving the following week, you'll return convinced that you did a stupid thing.”

He paused, but César Montero remained imperturbable.

“Later on, between courts and lawyers, they'll get at least twenty thousand pesos out of you. Or more should the special investigator see to it that he tells them you're a millionaire.”

César Montero turned his head toward him. It was an almost imperceptible movement, but it made the bed-springs squeak.

“All in all,” the mayor went on, with the voice of a spiritual adviser, “between twists and paper work, they'll nail you for two years if all goes well for you.”

He felt himself being examined from head to toe. When César Montero's gaze reached his eyes, he still hadn't stopped speaking. But he'd changed his tone.

“Everything you've got you owe to me,” he said. “There were orders to do you in. There were orders to murder you in ambush and confiscate your livestock so the government would have a way to pay off the enormous expenses of the elections in the whole department. You know that other mayors did it in other towns. Here, on the other hand, we disobeyed the order.”

At that moment he perceived the first sign that César Montero was thinking. He opened his legs. His arms leaning on the back of the chair, he responded to the unspoken charge.

“Not one penny of what you paid for your life went to me,” he said. “Everything was spent on organizing the elections. Now the new government has decided that there should be peace and guarantees for everybody and I go on being broke on my salary while you're filthy with money. You got yourself a good deal.”

César Montero started the laborious process of getting
up. When he was standing, the mayor saw himself: tiny and sad, face to face with a monumental beast. There was a kind of fervor in the look with which he followed him to the window.

“The best deal in your life,” he murmured.

The window opened onto the river. César Montero didn't recognize it. He saw himself in a different town, facing a momentary river. “I'm trying to help you,” he heard behind him. “We all know that it was a matter of honor, but it'll be hard to prove. You did a stupid thing by tearing up the lampoon.” At that instant a strong nauseating smell invaded the room.

“The cow,” the mayor said. “It must have washed up somewhere.”

César Montero remained at the window, indifferent to the stench of putrefaction. There was nobody on the street. At the dock, three anchored launches, whose crews were hanging up their hammocks for sleep. On the following day, at seven in the morning, the picture would be different: for half an hour the port would be in a turmoil, waiting for the prisoner to embark. César Montero sighed. He put his hands into his pockets and, with a resolute air, but without haste, he summed up his thoughts in two words:

“How much?”

The answer was immediate:

“Five thousand pesos in yearlings.”

“Add five more calves,” César Montero said, “and send me out this very night, after the movies, on an express launch.”

T
HE LAUNCH
blew its whistle, turned around in midstream, and the crowd clustered on the dock and the women in the windows saw Rosario Montero for the last time, sitting beside her mother on the same tin-plate trunk with which she had disembarked in the town seven years before. Shaving at the window of his office, Dr. Octavio Giraldo had the impression that, in a certain way, it was a return trip to reality.

Dr. Giraldo had seen her on the afternoon of her arrival, with her shabby schoolteacher's uniform and men's shoes, ascertaining at the dock who would charge the least to carry her trunk to the school. She seemed disposed to grow old without ambition in that town whose name she had seen written for the first time—according to what she herself told—on the slip of paper that she picked from a hat when they were drawing among the eleven candidates for the six positions available. She settled down in a small room at the
school with an iron bed and a washstand, spending her free time embroidering tablecloths while she boiled her mush on the little oil stove. That same year, at Christmas, she met César Montero at a school fair. He was a wild bachelor of obscure origins, grown wealthy in the lumber business, who lived in the virgin jungle among half-wild dogs and only appeared in town on rare occasions, always unshaven, with metal-tipped boots and a double-barreled shotgun. It was as if she had drawn the prize piece of paper again, Dr. Giraldo was thinking, his chin daubed with lather, when a nauseating whiff drew him out of his memories.

A flock of buzzards scattered on the opposite shore, frightened by the waves from the launch. The stench of rottenness hung over the wharf for a moment, mingling with the morning breeze, and even penetrated deep inside the houses.

“Still there, God damn it,” the mayor exclaimed on the balcony of his bedroom, watching the buzzards scatter. “Fucking cow.”

He covered his nose with a handkerchief, went into the room, and closed the balcony door. The smell persisted inside. Without taking off his hat, he hung the mirror on a nail and began the careful attempt at shaving his still rather inflamed cheek. A moment later the impresario of the circus knocked at the door.

The mayor had him sit down, observing him in the mirror while he shaved. He was wearing a black-and-white checkered shirt, riding breeches with leggings, and carried a whip with which he gave himself systematic taps on the knee.

“I've already had the first complaints about you people,” the mayor said as he finished dragging the razor over the stubble of two weeks of desperation. “Just last night.”

“What might that be?”

“That you're sending out boys to steal cats.”

“That's not true,” the impresario said. “Every cat that's brought to us we buy by the pound, without asking where it comes from, to feed the wild animals.”

“Are they thrown in alive?”

“Oh, no,” the impresario said. “That would arouse the animals' instinct of cruelty.”

After washing, the mayor turned to him, rubbing his face with the towel. Until then he hadn't noticed that he was wearing rings with colored stones on almost all his fingers.

“Well, you're going to have to think up some other way,” he said. “Hunt crocodiles, if you want, or take advantage of the fish that are going to waste in this weather. But live cats, don't mess with them.”

The impresario shrugged his shoulders and followed the mayor to the street. Groups of men were chatting by the dock in spite of the foul odor of the cow beached in the brambles on the opposite bank.

“You sissies,” the mayor shouted. “Instead of standing around there gossiping like women, you should have been busy since yesterday organizing an expedition to float that cow away.”

Some men surrounded him.

“Fifty pesos,” the mayor proposed, “for the one who brings me the cow's horns within an hour.”

A disorder of voices exploded at the end of the dock. Some men had heard the mayor's offer and were leaping into their canoes, shouting mutual challenges as they cast off. “A hundred pesos,” the mayor doubled, all enthusiastic. “Fifty for each horn.” He took the impresario to the end of the dock. They both waited until the first craft reached the dunes on the other shore. Then the mayor turned to the impresario, smiling.

“This is a happy town,” he said.

The impresario nodded. “The only thing wrong is something like this,” the mayor went on. “People think too much about foolishness because there's nothing to do.” A small group of children had slowly been forming around them.

“There's the circus,” the impresario said.

The mayor was dragging him along by the arm toward the square.

“What do they do?” he asked.

“Everything,” the impresario said. “We've got a complete show, for children and for adults.”

“That's not enough,” the mayor replied. “It's got to be within the reach of everybody.”

“We've kept that in mind too,” the impresario said.

Together they went to a vacant lot behind the movie theater, where they'd begun to raise the tent. Taciturn-looking men and women were taking cloths and bright colors out of the enormous trucks plated with fancy tin-work. As he followed the impresario through the crush of human beings and odds and ends, shaking everybody's hand, the mayor felt as if he were in the midst of a shipwreck. A robust woman with resolute movements and teeth that were almost completely capped with gold examined his hand after shaking it.

“There's something strange in your future,” she said.

The mayor drew his hand back, unable to repress a momentary feeling of depression. The impresario gave the woman a tap on the arm with his whip. “Leave the lieutenant alone,” he said without stopping, escorting the mayor to the back of the lot, where the animals were.

“Do you believe in all that?” he asked him.

“That depends,” said the mayor.

“They've never been able to convince me,” the impresario said. “When a person gets mixed up in things like that he ends up believing only in human will.”

The mayor contemplated the animals, who were drowsy with the heat. The cages exhaled a bitter, warm vapor and there was a kind of hopeless anguish in the measured breathing of the wild creatures. The impresario stroked the nose of a leopard with his whip as it twisted like a mime, growling.

“What's the name?” the mayor asked.

“Aristotle.”

“I meant the woman,” the mayor explained.

“Oh,” the impresario said. “We call her Casandra, Mirror of the Future.”

The mayor put on a desolate expression.

“I'd like to go to bed with her,” he said.

“Everything's possible,” said the impresario.

The widow Montiel opened the windows of her bedroom, murmuring: “Poor men.” She put her night table in order, returned her rosary and prayer book to the drawer, and wiped the soles of her mallow-colored slippers on the jaguar skin laid out in front of the bed. Then she took a complete turn about the room to lock the dressing table, the three doors to the wardrobe, and a square cupboard on which there was a plaster Saint Raphael. Finally she locked the room.

As she was going down the broad staircase made of stones with carved labyrinths on them, she thought about the strange fate of Rosario Montero. When she saw her cross the corner of the dock with the determined composure of a schoolgirl who has been taught not to turn her head, the widow Montiel, looking out through the chinks of her balcony, sensed that something that had begun a long time ago had finally ended.

On the landing of the stairs, the country-fair bustle of her
courtyard came up to meet her. To one side of the railing there was a scaffolding with cheeses wrapped in fresh leaves; farther on, in an outside gallery, sacks of salt and skins full of honey were piled up; and to the rear of the courtyard, a stable with mules and horses, and saddles on the crossbeams. The house was impregnated with a persistent beast-of-burden smell mingled with another smell, of tanning and the grinding of cane.

In the office the widow said good morning to Mr. Carmichael, who was laying out bundles of banknotes on the desk while he jotted down the amounts in the ledger. When she opened the window onto the river, the nine o'clock light entered the living room, which was overloaded with cheap decorations, great overstuffed chairs upholstered in gray, and an enlarged portrait of José Montiel, with a funeral wreath around the frame. The widow noticed the whiff of rottenness before she saw the boats on the dunes of the far shore.

“What's going on on the other bank?” she asked.

“They're trying to float a dead cow,” Mr. Carmichael answered.

“So that's it,” the widow said. “All night long I was dreaming about that smell.” She looked at Mr. Carmichael, absorbed in his work, and added: “Now all we need is the deluge.”

Mr. Carmichael spoke without raising his head.

“It started two weeks ago.”

“That's right,” the widow admitted. “Now we've reached the end. All that's left to do is to lie down in a grave in the sun and the dew until death comes for us.”

Mr. Carmichael listened to her without interrupting his accounts. “For years we've been complaining that nothing ever happened in this town,” the widow went on. “All of
a sudden the tragedy starts, as if God had fixed everything so that what had stopped happening for so many years would begin to happen.”

Mr. Carmichael turned to look at her from the safe and saw her with her elbows on the window, her eyes fixed on the opposite shore. She was wearing a black dress with long sleeves and was biting her nails.

“When the rain stops, things will get better,” Mr. Carmichael said.

“It won't stop,” the widow predicted. “Misfortunes never come alone. Didn't you see Rosario Montero?”

Mr. Carmichael had seen her. “All this is a meaningless scandal,” he said. “If a person pays attention to lampoons he ends up going crazy.”

“The lampoons,” sighed the widow.

“They've already put mine up,” Mr. Carmichael said.

“Yours?”

“Mine,” Mr. Carmichael confirmed. “They put it up, quite large and quite complete, on Saturday of last week. It looked like a movie poster.”

The widow pulled a chair over to the desk. “This is infamous,” she exclaimed. “There's nothing that can be said about a family as exemplary as yours.” Mr. Carmichael wasn't alarmed.

“Since my wife is white, the kids have come out all colors,” he explained. “Just imagine, eleven of them.”

“Of course,” the widow said.

“Well, the lampoon said that I'm only the father of the black ones. And they listed the fathers of the others. They even involved Don Chepe Montiel, may he rest in peace.”

“My husband!”

“Yours and those of four other ladies,” Mr. Carmichael said.

The widow began to sob. “Luckily my daughters are far
away,” she said. “They say they don't ever want to come back to this savage country where students are murdered in the street, and I tell them that they're right, that they should stay in Paris for good.” Mr. Carmichael turned his chair half around, understanding that the embarrassing daily episode had begun once more.

“You've got no reason to worry,” he said.

“Quite the contrary,” the widow sobbed. “I'm the first one who should have packed up her goods and got away from this town, even if this land and the business that are so tied up with our misfortune are lost. No, Mr. Carmichael: I don't want gold basins to spit blood into.”

Mr. Carmichael tried to console her.

“You have to face up to your responsibilities,” he said. “You can't throw a fortune out the window.”

“Money is the devil's dung,” the widow said.

“But in this case it's also the result of Don Chepe Montiel's hard work.”

The widow bit her fingers.

“You know that's not true,” she replied. “It's ill-gotten wealth and the first to pay for it by dying without confession was José Montiel.”

It wasn't the first time she'd said it.

“The blame, naturally, belongs to that criminal,” she exclaimed, pointing to the mayor, who was going along the opposite sidewalk on the arm of the circus impresario. “But I'm the one who suffers the expiation.”

Mr. Carmichael left her. He put the bundles of bills, fastened with rubber bands, into a cardboard box, and from the door to the courtyard, he called out the names of the peasants in alphabetical order.

While the men were receiving their Wednesday pay, the widow Montiel heard them pass without answering their greetings. She lived alone in the gloomy nine-room
house where Big Mama had died and which José Montiel had bought without imagining that his widow would have to endure her solitude in it until death. At night, while she went about through the empty rooms with the insecticide bomb, she would find Big Mama squashing lice in the hallways, and she would ask her: “When am I going to die?” But that happy communication with the beyond only managed to increase her uncertainty, because the answers, like those of all the dead, were silly and contradictory.

A little after eleven o'clock, through her tears, the widow saw Father Ángel crossing the square. “Father, Father,” she called, feeling that she was taking a final step with that call. But Father Ángel didn't hear her. He had knocked at the door of the widow Asís, on the opposite sidewalk, and the door had opened partway in a surreptitious manner to let him in.

On the porch that overflowed with the song of birds, the widow Asís was lying on a canvas chair, her face covered with a handkerchief soaked in Florida water. From the way he knocked on the door she knew it was Father Ángel, but she prolonged the momentary relief until she heard the greeting. Then she uncovered her face, devastated by insomnia.

“Forgive me, Father,” she said. “I didn't expect you so early.”