In Evil Hour (6 page)

While he was coming back, the afternoon began to dry out. It was getting intense and bright. A barge covered with tar paper was coming down the thick and motionless river. From a half-collapsed house a child ran out, shouting that he'd found the sea inside a shell. Father Ángel put the shell to his ear. Indeed, there was the sea.

Judge Arcadio's wife was sitting by the door of their house as if in ecstasy, her arms folded over her stomach and her eyes fixed on the barge. Three houses beyond, the shops began, the showcases with their trinkets and the impassive
Syrians sitting in the doorways. The afternoon was dying with intense pink clouds and the uproar of parrots and monkeys on the opposite shore.

The houses began to open up. Under the dirty almond trees on the square, around the refreshment carts, or on the worn granite benches in the flower beds, the men were gathering to chat. Father Ángel thought that every afternoon at that instant the town went through the miracle of transfiguration.

“Father, do you remember the concentration camp prisoners?”

Father Ángel didn't see Dr. Giraldo, but he pictured him smiling behind the screened window. In all honesty he didn't remember the photographs, but he was sure he'd seen them at one time or another.

“Go into the waiting room,” the doctor said.

Father Ángel pushed open the screen door. Stretched out on a mattress was a child of indefinite sex, nothing but bones, covered all over by yellowed skin. Two men and a woman were waiting, sitting by the partition. The priest didn't smell any odor, but he thought that that creature should have been giving off an intense stench.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“My son,” the woman answered. And she added, as if excusing herself, “For two years he's been shitting a little blood.”

The patient made his eyes turn toward the door without moving his head. The priest felt a terrified pity.

“And what have you done for him?” he asked.

“We've been giving him green bananas for a long time,” the woman said, “but he hasn't wanted to take them, even though they're nice and binding.”

“You have to bring him to confession,” the priest said.

But he said it without conviction. He closed the door
carefully and scratched on the window screen with a fingernail, putting his face close in order to see the doctor inside. Dr. Giraldo was grinding something in a mortar.

“What's he got?” the priest asked.

“I still haven't examined him,” the doctor answered. And he commented thoughtfully, “There are things that happen to people by God's will, Father.”

Father Ángel let the comment pass.

“None of the dead people I've seen in my life seemed as dead as that poor boy,” he said.

He took his leave. There were no vessels at the dock. It was beginning to get dark. Father Ángel understood that his state of mind had changed with the sight of the sick boy. Realizing that he was late for his appointment, he walked faster toward the police barracks.

The mayor was collapsed in a folding chair with his head in his hands.

“Good evening,” the priest said slowly.

The mayor raised his head and the priest shuddered at the eyes reddened by desperation. He had one cheek cool and newly shaved, but the other was a swampy tangle of an unguent the color of ashes. He exclaimed in a dull moan:

“Father, I'm going to shoot myself.”

Father Ángel felt a certain consternation.

“You're getting drunk from so many aspirins,” he said.

The mayor shuffled over to the wall, and clutching his head in both hands, he pounded it violently against the boards. The priest had never witnessed such pain.

“Take two more pills,” he said, consciously proposing a remedy for his own confusion. “Two more won't kill you.”

Not only was that really true, but he was fully aware that he was awkward facing human pain. He looked for the analgesics in the naked space of the room. Up against the
walls there were half a dozen leather stools, a glass cabinet stuffed with dusty papers, and a lithograph of the president of the republic hanging from a nail. The only trace of the analgesics was the cellophane wrappings strewn on the floor.

“Where are they?” he said desperately.

“They don't have any more effect on me,” the mayor said.

The curate went over to him, repeating: “Tell me where they are.” The mayor gave a violent twitch and Father Ángel saw an enormous and monstrous face a few inches from his eyes.

“God damn it,” the mayor shouted. “I already said they don't do me a fucking bit of good.”

He lifted a stool above his head and flung it with all the might of his desperation against the glass case. Father Ángel only understood what had happened after the instantaneous drizzle of glass, when the mayor began to rise up like a serene apparition in the midst of the cloud of dust. At that moment there was a perfect silence.

“Lieutenant,” the priest murmured.

In the door to the porch stood the policemen with their rifles at the ready. The mayor looked at them without seeing them, breathing like a cat, and they lowered their rifles but remained motionless beside the door. Father Ángel led the mayor by the arm to the folding chair.

“Where are the analgesics?” he insisted.

The mayor closed his eyes and threw his head back. “I'm not taking any more of that junk,” he said. “My ears are buzzing and the bones of my skull are going to sleep on me.” During a brief respite in the pain, he turned his head to the priest and asked:

“Did you talk to the tooth-puller?”

The priest said yes silently. From the expression that
followed that reply the mayor learned the results of the interview.

“Why don't you talk to Dr. Giraldo?” the priest proposed. “There are doctors who pull teeth.”

The mayor delayed in answering. “He'll probably say he hasn't got any forceps,” he said. And he added:

“It's a plot.”

He took advantage of the respite to rest from that implacable afternoon. When he opened his eyes the room was in shadows. He said, without seeing Father Ángel:

“You came about César Montero.”

He didn't hear any answer. “With this pain I haven't been able to do anything,” he went on. He got up to turn on the light and the first wave of mosquitoes came in through the balcony. Father Ángel was surprised at the hour.

“Time is passing,” he said.

“He has to be sent off on Wednesday in any case,” the mayor said. “Tomorrow arrange what has to be arranged and confess him in the afternoon.”

“What time?”

“Four o'clock.”

“Even if it's raining?”

In a single look, the mayor liberated all the impatience repressed during two weeks of suffering.

“Even if the world is coming to an end, Father.”

The pain had become invulnerable to the analgesics. The mayor hung the hammock on the balcony of his room, trying to sleep in the coolness of early evening. But before eight o'clock he succumbed again to desperation and went down into the square, which was in a lethargy from a dense wave of heat.

After roaming about the area without finding the inspiration he needed to rise above the pain, he went into the
movie theater. It was a mistake. The buzz of the warplanes increased the intensity of the pain. He left the theater before intermission and got to the pharmacy just as Don Lalo Moscote was getting ready to close the doors.

“Give me the strongest thing you've got for a toothache.”

The druggist examined the cheek with a look of stupor. Then he went to the rear of the establishment, past a double row of cabinets with glass doors which were completely filled with porcelain vials, each with the name of a product written in blue letters. On looking at him from behind, the mayor understood that that man with a chubby and pink neck might be living an instant of happiness. He knew him. He was installed in two rooms behind the store and his wife, a very fat woman, had been paralyzed for many years.

Don Lalo Moscote came back to the counter with a vial that had no label, which, on being opened, exhaled a vapor of sweet herbs.

“What's that?”

The druggist sank his fingers into the dried seeds in the vial. “Pepper cress,” he said. “Chew it well and swallow the juice slowly: there's nothing better for rheumatism.” He threw several seeds into the palm of his hand and said, looking at the mayor over his glasses:

“Open your mouth.”

The mayor drew back. He turned the vial around to make sure that nothing was written on it, and returned his look to the pharmacist.

“Give me something foreign,” he said.

“This is better than anything foreign,” Don Lalo Moscote said. “It's guaranteed by three thousand years of popular wisdom.”

He began to wrap up the seeds in a piece of newspaper. He didn't look like the head of a family. He looked like a
maternal uncle, wrapping up the pepper cress with the loving care one devotes to making little paper birds for children. When he raised his head he'd begun to smile.

“Why don't you have it pulled?”

The mayor didn't answer. He paid with a bill and left the pharmacy without waiting for his change.

Past midnight he was still twisting in his hammock without daring to chew the seeds. Around eleven o'clock, at the high point of the heat, a cloudburst had fallen that had broken up into a light drizzle. Worn out by the fever, trembling in a sticky and icy sweat, the mayor, lying face down in the hammock, opened his mouth and began to pray mentally. He prayed deeply, his muscles tense in the final spasm, but aware that the more he struggled to make contact with God, the greater the force of the pain to push him in the opposite direction. Then he put on his boots, and his raincoat over his pajamas, and went to the police barracks.

He burst in shouting. Tangled in a mangrove of reality and nightmare, the policemen stumbled in the hallway, looking for their weapons in the darkness. When the lights went on they were half dressed, awaiting orders.

“González, Rovira, Peralta,” the mayor shouted.

The three named separated from the group and surrounded the lieutenant. There was no visible reason to justify the selection: they were three ordinary half-breeds. One of them, with infantile features, shaven head, was wearing a flannel undershirt. The other two were wearing the same undershirt under unbuttoned tunics.

They didn't receive precise orders. Leaping down the stairs four steps at a time behind the mayor, they left the barracks in Indian file. They crossed the street without worrying about the drizzle and stopped in front of the dentist's office. With two quick charges they battered down the door with their rifle butts. They were already inside the
house when the lights in the vestibule went on. A small bald man with veins showing through his skin appeared in his shorts at the rear door, trying to put on his bathrobe. At the first instant he remained paralyzed with one arm up and his mouth open, as in the flash of a photograph. Then he gave a leap backward and bumped into his wife, who was coming out of the bedroom in her nightgown.

“Don't move,” the lieutenant shouted.

The woman said: “Oh!” with her hands over her mouth, and went back to the bedroom. The dentist went toward the vestibule, tying the cord on his bathrobe, and only then did he make out the three policemen who were pointing their rifles at him, and the mayor, water dripping from all over his body, tranquil, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat.

“If the lady leaves her room they have orders to shoot her,” the lieutenant said.

The dentist grasped the doorknob, saying to the inside: “You heard, girl,” and he meticulously closed the bedroom door. Then he walked to the dental office, observed past the faded wicker furniture by the smoky eyes of the rifle barrels. Two policemen went ahead of him to the door of the office. One turned on the light; the other went directly to the worktable and took a revolver out of the drawer.

“There must be another,” the mayor said.

He had entered last, behind the dentist. The two policemen made a quick and conscientious search while the third guarded the door. They dumped the instrument box onto the worktable, scattered plaster molds, unfinished false teeth, loose teeth, and gold caps on the floor. They emptied the porcelain vials that were in the cabinet and, making quick stabs with their bayonets, gutted the oilcloth cushion on the dentist's chair and the spring cushion on the revolving chair.

“It's a long-barreled thirty-eight,” the mayor specified.

He scrutinized the dentist. “It would be better if you said outright where it is,” he told him. “We didn't come prepared to tear the house apart.” Behind his gold-framed glasses the dentist's dull and narrow eyes revealed nothing.

“There's no hurry on my part,” he replied in a relaxed way. “If you feel like it, you can go right on tearing it apart.”

The mayor reflected. After once more examining the small room made of unplaned planks, he went over to the chair, giving sharp commands to his men. He stationed one by the street door, another at the entrance to the office, and the third by the window. When he was settled in the chair, only then unbuttoning his soaked raincoat, he felt surrounded by cold steel. He breathed in deeply of the air, rarefied by creosote, and rested his skull against the headrest, trying to control his breathing. The dentist picked some instruments up off the floor and put them in a pot to boil.

He remained with his back to the mayor, contemplating the blue flame of the alcohol lamp with the same expression that he must have had when he was alone in the office. When the water was boiling, he wrapped the handle of the pot in a piece of paper and carried it over to the chair. His way was blocked by a policeman. The dentist lowered the pot, to look at the mayor over the steam, and said:

“Order this assassin to go someplace where he won't be in the way.”