In Evil Hour (2 page)

César Montero hadn't seen him until then. With a leap he turned toward him. The mayor tightened his finger on the trigger, but he didn't fire.

“Come get it,” César Montero shouted.

The mayor was holding the rifle with his left hand and was wiping his eyelids with the right. He calculated every step, his finger tense on the trigger and his eyes fixed on César Montero. Suddenly he stopped and spoke with a friendly cadence:

“Toss the shotgun on the ground, César. Don't do anything else foolish.”

César Montero drew back. The mayor continued on, his finger tight on the trigger. He didn't move a single muscle in his body until César Montero lowered the shotgun and dropped it. Then the mayor realized that he was wearing only his pajama bottoms, that he was sweating in the rain,
and that his tooth had stopped aching.

The houses opened up. Two policemen armed with rifles ran to the center of the square. The crowd poured in behind them. The policemen leaped in a half turn and shouted, pointing their rifles:

“Back.”

The mayor shouted in a calm voice, not looking at anyone:

“Clear the square.”

The crowd dispersed. The mayor frisked César Montero without making him take off his raincoat. He found four shells in his shirt pocket, and in the back pants pocket a switchblade knife with a bone handle. In another pocket he found a notebook, a ring with three keys, and four one-hundred-peso bills. Impassively, César Montero let himself be searched, his arms open, moving his body only to facilitate the operation. When he was finished, the mayor called the two policemen, gave them the things, and turned César Montero over to them.

“Take him to the second floor of the town hall,” he ordered. “I'm holding you responsible for him.”

César Montero took off the raincoat. He gave it to one of the policemen and walked between them, indifferent to the rain and the perplexity of the people concentrated on the square. The mayor, thoughtfully, watched him go away. Then he turned to the crowd, made a gesture of shooing chickens, and shouted:

“Break it up.”

Drying his face with his bare arm, he crossed the square and went into Pastor's house.

Collapsed in a chair was the dead man's mother, in the midst of women fanning her with pitiless diligence. The mayor pushed a woman aside. “Give her air,” he said. The woman turned toward him.

“She'd just left for mass,” she said.

“All right,” the mayor said, “but now let her breathe.”

Pastor was on the porch, face down by the dovecote, on a bed of bloody feathers. There was an intense smell of pigeon filth. A group of men were trying to lift the body when the mayor appeared in the doorway.

“Back off,” he said.

The men put the body back down among the feathers, in the same position that they had found it, and withdrew silently. After examining the body, the mayor rolled it over. There was a dispersion of tiny feathers. At waist level there were more feathers, sticking to the still warm and living blood. He pushed them away with his hands. The shirt was torn and the belt buckle broken. Underneath the shirt he saw the disclosed viscera. The wound had stopped bleeding.

“It was with a jaguar gun,” one of the men said.

The mayor stood up. He cleaned off the bloody feathers on a prop of the dovecote, still looking at the corpse. He ended by wiping his hand on his pajama pants and said to the group:

“Don't move him from there.”

“He's going to leave him stretched out there,” one of the men said.

“We have to draw up the removal document,” the mayor said.

Inside the house the wailing of the women began. The mayor made his way through the shouts and the suffocating smells that were beginning to cut off the air in the room. At the street door he ran into Father Ángel.

“He's dead,” the priest exclaimed, perplexed.

“Dead as a pig,” the mayor answered.

The houses around the square were open. The rain had stopped but the heavy sky floated over the roofs without so
much as a chink for the sun. Father Ángel held the mayor back by the arm.

“César Montero is a good man,” he said. “This must have been a moment of confusion.”

“I know that,” the mayor said impatiently. “Don't worry, Father, nothing's going to happen to him. Go inside; that's where they need you.”

He went away with a certain haste and ordered the policemen to call off the guard. The crowd, held back behind a line until then, ran toward Pastor's house. The mayor went into the poolroom, where a policeman was waiting for him with a set of clean clothing: his lieutenant's uniform.

Ordinarily the establishment wasn't open at that hour. On that day, before seven o'clock, it was crowded. Around the tables which seated four or against the bar, men were drinking coffee. Most of them still wore their pajama tops and slippers.

The mayor got undressed in front of everyone, half dried himself with the pajama pants, and began to dress in silence, hanging on the comments. When he left the place he was completely informed of the details of the incident.

“Have a care,” he shouted from the door. “Anybody who stirs up the town on me I'll clap in the poky.”

He went down the stone-paved street without saying hello to anyone but aware of the town's excited state. He was young, with relaxed movements, and with every step he revealed his aim of making his presence felt.

At seven o'clock the launches that carried cargo and passengers three times a week whistled as they left the pier, with no one paying the attention they did on other days. The mayor went down along the arcade, where the Syrian merchants were beginning to display their colorful wares. Dr. Octavio Giraldo, an ageless physician with a headful of patent leather curls, was watching the launches go down-stream
from the door of his office. He, too, was wearing his pajama top and slippers.

“Doctor,” the mayor said, “get dressed so you can go perform the autopsy.”

The doctor looked at him, intrigued. He revealed a long row of solid white teeth. “So we're doing autopsies now,” he said, and added:

“That's great progress, obviously.”

The mayor tried to smile, but the sensitivity of his cheek prevented it. He covered his mouth with his hand.

“What's the matter?” the doctor asked.

“A bastardly molar.”

Dr. Giraldo seemed disposed to conversation. But the mayor was in a hurry.

At the end of the dock he knocked on the door of a house that had walls of ditch reeds without mud and a palm roof that came down almost to water level. A woman with greenish skin, seven months pregnant, opened for him. She was barefoot. The mayor pushed her to one side and went into the shadowy living room.

“Judge,” he called.

Judge Arcadio appeared at the inside door, dragging his clogs. He was wearing drill pants, with no belt, held up under his navel and naked torso.

“Get a body removal form ready,” the mayor said.

Judge Arcadio gave a whistle of perplexity.

“Where did you get that novel idea from?”

The mayor followed him slowly into the bedroom. “This is different,” he said, opening the window to purify the sleep-laden air. “It's best to do things properly.” He wiped the dust from his hands onto his pressed pants and asked, without the slightest indication of sarcasm:

“Do you know what a body removal order is?”

“Of course,” the judge said.

The mayor examined his hands at the window. “Get your secretary so he can do what writing there is,” he said, again with no veiled intention. Then he turned toward the girl, the palms of his hands held out. There were traces of blood.

“Where can I wash?”

“In the tank,” she said.

The mayor went out into the courtyard. The girl looked in the chest for a clean towel and wrapped a cake of scented soap in it.

She went out into the courtyard just as the mayor was returning to the bedroom shaking his hands.

“I was bringing you the soap,” she said.

“It's all right this way,” the mayor said. He looked at the palms of his hands again. He took the towel and dried himself, pensive, looking at Judge Arcadio.

“He was covered with pigeon feathers,” he said.

Sitting on the bed, taking measured sips from a cup of black coffee, he waited until Judge Arcadio finished getting dressed. The girl followed them through the living room.

“Until that molar's pulled out, the swelling won't go down,” she said to the mayor.

He pushed Judge Arcadio out into the street, turned to look at her, and touched her bulging belly with his forefinger.

“What about this swelling? When will it go down?”

“Any day now,” she said.

Father Ángel didn't take his customary evening walk. After the funeral he stopped to chat at a house in the lower part of town and stayed there until dusk. He felt well, in spite of the fact that the prolonged rains ordinarily brought on pain in his spine. When he got home the street lights were on.

Trinidad was watering the flowers on the porch. The priest asked her about the unconsecrated hosts and she answered that she'd put them on the main altar. The fog of mosquitoes enveloped him when he lighted the lamp in his room. Before closing the door he fumigated the room endlessly with insecticide, sneezing because of the smell. He was sweating when he finished. He changed the black cassock for the white mended one that he wore in private and went to ring the Angelus.

Back in the room, he put a pan on the fire and started frying a piece of meat while he sliced an onion. Then he put everything on a plate where there was a piece of marinated cassava and some cold rice, leftovers from lunch. He took the plate to the table and sat down to eat.

He ate it all at the same time, cutting little pieces of everything and piling them on his fork with the knife. He chewed conscientiously, grinding everything down to the last grain with his silver-capped molars, but with his lips closed. While he did so, he left the knife and fork on the edges of the plate and examined the room with a continuous and perfectly attentive look. Opposite him were the shelves with the thick books of the parish archives. In the corner a wicker rocking chair with a tall back and a cushion sewn on at head level. Behind the rocker there was a screen with a crucifix hanging on it next to a calendar advertising cough medicine. On the other side of the screen was his bedroom.

At the end of his meal, Father Ángel felt asphyxiated. He unwrapped a morsel of guava paste, filled his glass up to the brim with water, and ate the sugary sweet looking at the calendar. Between each mouthful he took a sip of water, without taking his eyes off the calendar. Finally he belched and wiped his lips with his sleeve. For nineteen years he had eaten that way, alone in his study, repeating every movement
with scrupulous precision. He'd never felt ashamed of his solitude.

After rosary, Trinidad asked him for money to buy arsenic. The priest refused for the third time, arguing that the traps were sufficient. Trinidad insisted:

“It's just that the littlest mice steal the cheese and don't get caught in the traps. That's why it's best to poison the cheese.”

The priest admitted to himself that Trinidad was right. But before he could express it, the noisy loudspeaker at the movie theater across the street penetrated the quiet of the church. First it was a dull growl. Then the scratching of the needle on the record and immediately a mambo that started off with a strident trumpet.

“Is there a show tonight?” the priest asked.

Trinidad said there was.

“Do you know what they're showing?”

“
Tarzan and the Green Goddess
,” Trinidad said. “The same one they couldn't finish on Sunday because of the rain. Approved for all.”

Father Ángel went to the bottom of the belfry and tolled the bell twelve slow times. Trinidad was puzzled.

“You're wrong, Father,” she said, waving her hands and with an agitated glow in her eyes. “It's a movie that's approved for all. Remember, you didn't ring the bell once on Sunday.”

“But it's a lack of consideration for the town,” the priest said, drying the sweat on his neck. And he repeated, panting: “A lack of consideration.”

Trinidad understood.

“All you had to do was to have seen that funeral,” the priest said. “All the men fighting for a chance to carry the coffin.”

Then he sent the girl off, closed the door to the deserted
square, and put out the lights in the church. On the porch, on his way back to his bedroom, he slapped his forehead, remembering that he'd forgotten to give Trinidad the money for the arsenic. But he'd forgotten about it again before he reached his room.

A short time later, sitting at his desk, he got ready to finish the letter he'd begun the night before. He'd unbuttoned his cassock down to his stomach and was putting the writing pad, the inkwell, and the blotter in order on the desk while he reached in his pockets for his glasses. Then he remembered having left them in the cassock that he'd worn to the funeral and got up to get them. He'd reread what he'd written the night before and started a new paragraph when three knocks sounded on the door.

“Come in.”

It was the manager of the movie house. Small, pale, very clean-shaven, he wore an expression of fatality. He was dressed in white linen, spotless, and was wearing two-toned shoes. Father Ángel signaled him to sit in the wicker rocking chair, but he took a handkerchief out of his pants, unfolded it scrupulously, dusted off the step, and sat down with his legs apart. Father Ángel saw then that it wasn't a revolver but a flashlight that he wore in his belt.

“What can I do for you?” the priest asked.

“Father,” the manager said, almost breathless, “forgive me for butting into your affairs, but tonight it must have been a mistake.”

The priest nodded his head and waited.