In Evil Hour (15 page)

The lieutenant said simply: “No.” Then, in a paternal way, he justified himself:

“It's better for you to be safe at home.”

Judge Arcadio lighted a cigarette. He stood contemplating the flame of the match, waiting for the rancor to decline, but he found nothing to say.

“Don't take it so badly,” the mayor added. “Believe me, I'd like to change places with you, going to bed at eight
o'clock at night and getting up whenever I felt like it.”

“Of course,” said the judge. And he added with accentuated irony: “That's all I needed: a new daddy at the age of thirty-five.”

“Judge.” Judge Arcadio turned toward him and they looked into each other's eyes. “I'm not going to give you the pass. Understand?”

The judge bit his cigarette and began to say something, but he repressed the impulse. The mayor heard him going slowly down the stairs. Suddenly, leaning over, he shouted:

“Judge!”

There was no answer.

“We're still friends,” the mayor shouted.

He didn't get any answer that time either.

He remained leaning over, waiting for the reaction of Judge Arcadio, until the door closed and he was alone with his memories once more. He made no effort to sleep. He was sleepless in the middle of the day, bogged down in a town that remained impenetrable and alien, many years after he had taken charge of its fate. On the dawn when he had disembarked furtively with an old cardboard suitcase tied with cord and the order to make the town submit at all costs, it was he who'd come to know terror. His only pretext was a letter for an obscure partisan of the government, whom he was to meet the following day sitting in his shorts by the door of a rice bin. With his instructions and the implacable will of the three hired assassins who accompanied him, the task had been accomplished. That afternoon, though, unaware of the invisible cobweb that time had been spinning about him, he would only have needed an instantaneous burst of vision to have wondered who had submitted to whom.

He dreamed with his eyes open by the balcony lashed by the rain until a little after four. Then he bathed, put on his
field uniform, and went down to the hotel to have breakfast. Later he made a routine inspection at the barracks, and suddenly he found himself standing on a corner with his hands in his pockets and not knowing what to do.

The owner of the poolroom saw him enter at dusk, with his hands still in his pockets. He greeted him from the back of the empty establishment, but the mayor didn't answer.

“A bottle of mineral water,” he said.

The bottles made a loud noise as they were shifted about in the cooler.

“One of these days,” the proprietor said, “they're going to have to operate on you and they'll find your liver all full of bubbles.”

The mayor looked at the glass. He took a sip, belched, and remained with his elbows on the bar and his eyes fixed on the glass, and he belched again. The square was deserted.

“Well,” the mayor said. “What's the matter?”

“It's Sunday,” the proprietor said.

“Oh!”

He put a coin on the table and left without saying goodbye. On the corner of the square, someone who was walking as if he were dragging an enormous tail told him something that he didn't understand. A moment later he reacted. In a confused way he understood that something was going on and he went to the barracks. He bounded up the stairs without paying attention to the groups that were forming by the door. A policeman came out to meet him. He gave him a piece of paper and he needed only a glance to see what it was all about.

“He was handing it out at the cockpit,” the policeman said.

The mayor ran down the hall. He opened the first cell and remained with his hand on the latch, scrutinizing the
shadows until he was able to see: it was a boy of about twenty, with a sharp and sallow pockmarked face. He was wearing a baseball cap and glasses with broken lenses.

“What's your name?”

“Pepe.”

“Pepe what?”

“Pepe Amador.”

The mayor observed him for a moment and made an effort to remember. The boy was sitting on the concrete platform that served the prisoners as a bed. He seemed calm. He took off his glasses, cleaned them with his shirttail, and squinted at the mayor.

“Where have we seen each other?” the mayor asked.

“Around,” said Pepe Amador.

The mayor didn't step into the cell. He kept looking at the prisoner, pensive, and then he started to shut the door.

“Well, Pepe,” he said, “I think you fucked yourself up.”

He turned the key, put it in his pocket, and went to the waiting room to read and reread the clandestine flier.

He sat down by the open balcony, slapping mosquitoes, while the lights in the deserted streets went on. He knew that sunset peace. At another time, during a sunset like that, he'd had the feeling of power in its fullness.

“So they've come back,” he said to himself, aloud.

They'd come back. As before, they were mimeographed on both sides, and they could have been recognized anywhere and at any time by the indefinable mark of hesitation that clandestinity imprints.

He thought for a long time in the shadows, folding and unfolding the piece of paper before making a decision. Finally he put it in his pocket and felt for the keys to the cell.

“Rovira,” he called.

The man he could trust came out of the darkness. The mayor gave him the keys.

“Take charge of that boy,” he said. “Try to convince him to give you the names of the ones bringing clandestine propaganda into town. If you can't get them in a nice way,” he made clear, “try any way you can to get him to talk.”

The policeman reminded him that he was on patrol that night.

“Forget about it,” the mayor said. “Don't worry about anything until you get new orders. And another thing,” he added as if obeying an inspiration. “Send those men in the courtyard away. There won't be any patrols tonight.”

He called to his armored office the three men who on his orders remained inactive in the barracks. He had them put on the uniforms he kept locked up in the closet. While they were doing that, he gathered on the table the blank cartridges that he'd issued to the men on patrol on previous nights and took a handful of live ammunition out of the safe.

“Tonight you people are going to do the patrolling,” he told them, inspecting the rifles so that they'd have the best ones. “You don't have to do anything except let the people know that you're the ones who are on the street.” Once they were all armed, he issued the ammunition. He stood in front of them.

“But listen well to one thing,” he warned them. “The first one who does something foolish I'll have shot against the courtyard wall.” He waited for a reaction that didn't come. “Understood?”

The three men—two Indian-looking, of ordinary appearance, and a blond with a tendency toward gigantism and eyes of transparent blue—had listened to the last words as they put bullets into the chambers. They came to attention.

“Understood, Lieutenant, sir.”

“And something else,” the mayor said, changing to an informal tone. “The Asíses are in town and it wouldn't be at all surprising if you ran into one of them, drunk and looking for some mess to get into. No matter what happens, don't get involved with him.” Nor did he get the expected reaction that time either. “Understood?”

“Understood, Lieutenant, sir.”

“Then you all know,” the mayor concluded. “Keep your five senses on the alert.”

When he closed the church after rosary, which he had moved up an hour because of the curfew, Father Ángel got a whiff of the smell of decay. It was a momentary stench, not enough to intrigue him. Later on, frying some slices of green plantain and warming milk for his meal, he found the cause of the smell: Trinidad, ill since Saturday, hadn't removed the dead mice. Then he returned to the church, opened and cleaned out the traps, and then went to Mina's, two blocks from the church.

Toto Visbal himself opened the door. In the small dark parlor, where there were several leather stools in disorder and prints hanging on the walls, Mina's mother and her blind grandmother were drinking something hot and aromatic in cups. Mina was making artificial flowers.

“It's been two weeks,” the blind woman said, “that we haven't seen you in this house, Father.”

It was true. Every afternoon he'd passed by the window where Mina was sitting making paper flowers, but he never went in.

“Time passes without making any noise,” he said. And then, making it clear that he was in a hurry, he turned to Toto Visbal. “I've come to ask you to let Mina come and take charge of the traps starting tomorrow. Trinidad,” he explained to Mina, “has been sick since Saturday.”

Toto Visbal gave his consent.

“It's a wish to lose time,” the blind woman put in. “After all's said and done, the world is coming to an end this year.”

Mina's mother put a hand on her knee as a sign to be still. The blind woman pushed the hand away.

“God punishes superstition,” the curate said.

“It's written,” the blind woman said. “Blood will run in the streets and there won't be any human power capable of stopping it.”

The priest gave her a look of pity: she was very old, extremely pale, and her dead eyes seemed to penetrate the secret of things.

“We'll be bathed in blood,” Mina mocked.

Then Father Ángel turned to her. He saw her rise up, with her intensely black hair and the same paleness as the blind woman's, from amidst a confused swirl of ribbons and colored paper. She looked like an allegorical vignette at a school pageant.

“And you,” he told her, “working on Sunday.”

“I already told her,” the blind woman put in. “Burning ashes will rain down on her head.”

“Necessity has the face of a dog.” Mina smiled.

Since the curate was still standing, Toto Visbal brought over a chair and invited him again to sit down. He was a fragile man, with startled movements because of his timidity.

“Thank you just the same.” Father Ángel refused. “The curfew will catch me on the street.” He noticed the deep silence in the town and commented: “It seems later than eight o'clock.”

Then he found out: after almost two years of empty cells, Pepe Amador was in jail and the town at the mercy of three criminals. People had shut themselves up since six o'clock.

“It's strange.” Father Ángel seemed to be talking to himself. “A thing getting out of hand like that.”

“Sooner or later it had to happen,” said Toto Visbal. “The whole country is patched up with cobwebs.”

The priest continued to the door.

“Haven't you seen the clandestine fliers?”

Father Ángel stopped, perplexed.

“Again?”

“In August,” the blind woman put in, “the three days of darkness will begin.”

Mina reached out to give her a flower she'd begun. “Be still,” she told her, “and stop that.” The blind woman recognized the flower by touch.

“So they've come back,” the priest said.

“About a week ago,” said Toto Visbal. “Because there was one here, without anybody's knowing who brought it. You know what it's like.”

The curate nodded.

“They say that everything's just the same as before,” Toto Visbal went on. “The government changed, they promised peace and guarantees, and at first everybody believed them. But the officials are the same ones.”

“And it's true,” put in Mina's mother. “Here we are with the curfew again, and those three criminals on the street.”

“But there's one thing new,” Toto Visbal said. “Now they're saying that they're organizing guerrilla groups against the government in the interior again.”

“That's all written down,” the blind woman said.

“It's absurd,” said the curate, pensive. “We have to recognize that the attitude has changed. Or at least,” he corrected himself, “it had changed until tonight.”

Hours later, lying awake in the heat of his mosquito netting, he wondered, nonetheless, whether in reality time had passed during the nineteen years he'd been in the parish.
Across from his very house he heard the noise of the boots and weapons that in different times had preceded rifle shots. Except this time the boots went away, passed by again an hour later, and went away once more without any shots being fired. A short while after, tormented by the fatigue of sleeplessness and the heat, he realized that the cocks had been crowing for some time.

M
ATEO
A
SÍS
tried to calculate the hour why the location of the roosters. Finally he rose to the surface of reality.

“What time is it?”

Nora Jacob stretched out her arm in the shadows and picked up the clock with its phosphorescent dial from the night table. The answer, which she still hadn't given, woke her up completely.

“Four-thirty,” she said.

“Shit!”

Mateo Asís jumped out of bed. But the pain in his head and then the mineral sediment in his mouth obliged him to moderate his drive. He felt with his feet in the darkness for his shoes.

“Daylight might have caught me,” he said.

“How nice,” she said. She turned on the small lamp and recognized his knotty spine and pale buttocks. “You'd have
had to stay shut up here until morning.”

She was completely naked, only covering her sex with an edge of the sheet. Even her voice lost its warm impudence when the light was turned on.

Mateo Asís put on his shoes. He was tall and sturdy. Nora Jacob, who had received him occasionally for two years, felt a kind of frustration at the bad luck of having in secret a man who seemed to her to be made for a woman to talk about.

“If you don't watch out you're going to get fat,” she said.

“It's the good life,” he replied, trying to hide his displeasure. And he added, smiling: “I must be pregnant.”

“I wish you were,” she said. “If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.”

Mateo Asís picked the condom up off the floor with his underdrawers, went to the bathroom, and threw it into the toilet. He washed, trying not to breathe deeply: at dawn any smell was her smell. When he went back into the room he found her sitting up in bed.

“One of these days,” Nora Jacob said, “I'm going to get tired of this hiding and I'm going to tell the whole world.”

He didn't look at her until he was completely dressed. She became aware of her firm breasts and without stopping talking she covered herself up to the neck with the sheet.

“I can't see the time,” she went on, “so let's have breakfast in bed and stay here until afternoon. I'm capable of putting up a lampoon myself.”

He gave a broad laugh.

“Little old Benjamín would die,” he said. “How's that going?”

“You can imagine,” she said. “Waiting for Néstor Jacob to die.”

She saw him wave goodbye from the door. “Try to make it back on Christmas Eve,” she told him. He promised. He
tiptoed across the courtyard and went out into the street through the main door. There was an icy dew that just dampened the skin. A shout came up to meet him as he reached the square.

“Halt!”

A flashlight was turned on into his eyes. He averted his face.

“Oh, shit!” the mayor said, invisible behind the light. “Look what we've found. Are you coming or going?”

He turned off the flashlight and Mateo Asís saw him, accompanied by three policemen. His face was fresh and washed and he had the submachine gun slung.

“Coming,” said Mateo Asís.

The mayor came forward to look at his watch in the light of the street lamp. There were ten minutes left till five. With a signal directed at the policemen, he ordered an end to the curfew. He remained in suspension until the end of the bugle call, which put a sad note into the dawn. Then he sent the policemen away and accompanied Mateo Asís across the square.

“That's that,” he said. “The mess with the papers is over.”

More than satisfaction, there was weariness in his voice.

“Did they catch the one who was doing it?”

“Not yet,” the mayor said. “But I just made the last rounds and I can assure you that today, for the first time, not a single piece of paper will see the light of dawn. It was a matter of tying up their pants.”

On reaching the main door of his house, Mateo Asís went ahead to tie up the dogs. The servant women were starting to move about in the kitchen. When the mayor entered he was greeted by an uproar of chained dogs, which, a moment later, was replaced by the steps and sighs of peaceful animals. The widow Asís found them sitting
and drinking coffee on the stone bench in the kitchen. It had grown light.

“An early-rising man,” the widow said, “a good spouse but a bad husband.”

In spite of her good humor, her face revealed the mortification of an intense night vigil. The mayor answered her greeting. He picked the submachine gun off the floor and slung it over his shoulder.

“Drink all the coffee you want, Lieutenant,” the widow said, “but don't bring any shotguns into my house.”

“On the contrary.” Mateo Asís smiled. “You should borrow it to go to mass with. Don't you think?”

“I don't need junk like that to defend myself,” the widow replied. “Divine Providence is on our side. The Asíses,” she added seriously, “were people of God before there were priests for many miles around.”

The mayor took his leave. “I've got to get some sleep,” he said. “This is no life for a Christian.” He made his way among the hens and ducks and turkeys who were beginning to invade the house. The widow Asís shooed the animals away. Mateo Asís went to his room, bathed, changed clothes, and went out again to saddle up his mule. His brothers had left at dawn.

The widow Asís was taking care of the cages when her son appeared in the courtyard.

“Remember,” she told him, “it's one thing to look after your hide and something else to know how to keep your distance.”

“He only came to have a mug of coffee,” Mateo Asís said. “We walked along talking, almost without realizing it.”

He was at the end of the porch, looking at his mother, but she hadn't turned when she spoke. She seemed to be addressing the birds. “I'm just going to tell you this,” she replied. “Don't bring any murderers into my house.” Having
finished with the cages, she occupied herself entirely with her son:

“And you, where have you been?”

That morning Judge Arcadio thought he'd discovered ominous signs in the minute episodes that make up daily life. “It gives you a headache,” he said, trying to explain his uneasiness to his wife. It was a sunny morning. The river, for the first time in several weeks, had lost its menacing look and its raw-meat smell. Judge Arcadio went to the barbershop.

“Justice,” the barber received him, “limps along, but it gets there all the same.”

The floor had been oiled and the mirrors were covered with brushstrokes of white lead. The barber began to polish them with a rag while Judge Arcadio settled into the chair.

“There shouldn't be such things as Mondays,” the judge said.

The barber had begun to cut his hair.

“It's all Sunday's fault,” he said. “If it weren't for Sunday,” he stated with a merry air, “there wouldn't be any Mondays.”

Judge Arcadio closed his eyes. That time, after ten hours of sleep, a turbulent act of love, and a prolonged bath, there was nothing to reproach Sunday for. But it was a thick Monday. When the clock in the tower struck nine and in place of the pealing of the bell there was the hiss of a sewing machine next door, another sign made Judge Arcadio shudder: the silence in the streets.

“This is a ghost town,” he said.

“You people wanted it that way,” the barber said. “Before, on a Monday morning, I would have cut at least five heads of hair by now. Today God's first gift to me is you.”

Judge Arcadio opened his eyes and for a moment contemplated
the river in the mirror. “You people,” he repeated. And he asked:

“Who are we?”

“You people.” The barber hesitated. “Before you people this was a shitty town, like all of them, but now it's the worst of them all.”

“If you're telling me these things,” the judge replied, “it's because you know I haven't had anything to do with them. Would you dare,” he asked without being aggressive, “say the same thing to the lieutenant?”

The barber admitted he wouldn't.

“You don't know what it's like,” he said, “getting up every morning with the certainty that they're going to kill you and ten years pass without their killing you.”

“I don't know,” Judge Arcadio admitted, “and I don't want to know.”

“Do everything possible,” the barber said, “so that you'll never know.”

The judge lowered his head. After a prolonged silence, he asked: “Do you know something, Guardiola?” Without waiting for an answer he went on: “The lieutenant is sinking deep into this town. And he sinks in deeper every day because he's discovered a pleasure from which there's no turning back: little by little, without making a lot of noise, he's getting rich.” Since the barber was listening to him in silence, he concluded:

“I'll bet you that he won't be responsible for a single death more.”

“Do you think so?”

“I'll bet you a hundred to one,” Judge Arcadio insisted. “At this moment there's no better business for him than peace.”

The barber finished cutting his hair, tilted the chair back,
and shifted the sheet without speaking. When he finally did, there was a thread of uneasiness in his voice.

“It's strange that you should be the one to say that,” he said, “and to say it to me.”

If his position had allowed it, Judge Arcadio would have shrugged his shoulders.

“It's not the first time I've said it,” he stated.

“The lieutenant's your best friend,” the barber said.

He'd lowered his voice and it was tense and confidential. Concentrating on his work, he had the same expression a person not in the habit of writing has when he signs his name.

“Tell me one thing, Guardiola,” Judge Arcadio asked with a certain solemnity. “What impression do you have of me?”

The barber had begun to shave him. He thought for a moment before answering.

“Until now,” he said, “I'd have thought that you're a man who knows that he's leaving and wants to leave.”

“You can keep on thinking that.” The judge smiled.

He let himself be shaved with the same gloomy passivity with which he would have let his throat be cut. He kept his eyes closed while the barber rubbed his jaw with a piece of alum, powdered him, and brushed off the powder with a very soft brush. When he took the sheet from around his neck, he slipped a piece of paper into his shirt pocket.

“You're only mistaken about one thing, Judge,” he told him. “There's going to be a great big mess in this country.”

Judge Arcadio checked to see that they were still alone in the barbershop. The burning sun, the hiss of the sewing machine in the nine-thirty silence, the unavoidable Monday, indicated something more to him: they seemed to be
alone in the town. Then he took the piece of paper out of his pocket and read it.

The barber turned his back to him and put his shelf in order. “ ‘Two years of speeches,' ” he quoted from memory. “‘And still the same state of siege, the same censorship of the press, the same old officials.'” On seeing in the mirror that Judge Arcadio had stopped reading, he told him:

“Pass it around.”

The judge put the paper back in his pocket.

“You're very brave,” he said.

“If I'd ever made a mistake about anybody,” the barber said, “I'd have been full of lead years ago.” Then he added in a serious voice, “And remember one thing, Judge. Nobody's going to be able to stop it this time.”

When he left the barbershop, Judge Arcadio felt his palate was all dry. He asked for two double shots at the poolroom, and after drinking them, one after the other, he saw that he still had a lot of time to kill. At the university, one Holy Saturday, he'd tried to apply a jackass cure to uncertainty: he went into the toilet of a bar, perfectly sober, threw some gunpowder on a chancre, and lighted it.

With the fourth drink, Don Roque moderated the dosage. “At this rate”—he smiled—“they'll carry you out on their shoulders like a bullfighter.” He, too, smiled with his lips, but his eyes were still extinguished. A half hour later he went to the toilet, urinated, and before leaving flushed the clandestine note down the toilet.

When he got back to the bar he found the bottle next to the glass, the level of the contents marked with a line in ink. “That's all for you,” Don Roque told him, fanning himself slowly. They were alone in the place. Judge Arcadio poured himself half a glass and began to drink slowly. “Do you know something?” he asked. And since Don Roque showed
no signs of having understood, he told him:

“There's going to be a great big mess.”

Don Sabas was weighing his bird breakfast on the scale when he was told of another visit by Mr. Carmichael. “Tell him I'm sleeping,” he whispered into his wife's ear. And indeed, ten minutes later he was asleep. When he awoke, the air had become dry again and the house was paralyzed with the heat. It was after twelve.

“What did you dream about?” his wife asked.

“Nothing.”

She'd waited for her husband to awaken without being roused. A moment later she boiled the hypodermic syringe and Don Sabas gave himself an injection of insulin in the thigh.

“It's been about three years now that you haven't dreamed anything,” his wife said with slow disenchantment.

“God damn it,” he exclaimed. “What do you want now? A person can't be forced to dream.”

Years before, in a brief midday dream, Don Sabas had dreamed of an oak tree which, instead of flowers, bore razor blades. His wife interpreted the dream and won a piece of the lottery.

“If not today, tomorrow,” she said.

“It wasn't today and it won't be tomorrow,” Don Sabas replied impatiently. “I'm not going to dream just so you can act like a jackass.”

He stretched out again on the bed while his wife put the room in order. All types of cutting or stabbing instruments had been banished from the room. When a half hour had passed, Don Sabas arose in varying tempos, trying not to excite himself, and began to dress.