In Evil Hour (3 page)

“
Tarzan and the Green Goddess
is a movie approved for all,” the manager went on. “You yourself recognized that on Sunday.”

The priest tried to interrupt him, but the manager raised one hand as a signal that he hadn't finished yet.

“I've accepted the business of the bell,” he said, “because
it's true, there are immoral movies. But there's nothing wrong with this one. We intended to show it on Saturday for the children's matinee.”

Father Ángel explained to him then that, indeed, the movie had no moral classification on the list that he received in the mail every month.

“But having a movie today,” he went on, “shows a lack of consideration since there's been a death in town. That, too, is a part of morality.”

The manager looked at him.

“Last year the police themselves killed a man inside the movies and as soon as they took the body out the show went on,” he exclaimed.

“It's different now,” the priest said. “The mayor's a changed man.”

“When they hold elections again the killing will come back,” the manager replied, exasperated. “Always, ever since the town has been a town, the same thing happens.”

“We'll see,” the priest said.

The manager examined him with a look of grief. When he spoke again, shaking his shirt to ventilate his chest, his voice had acquired a tone of supplication.

“It's the third movie approved for all that we've had this year,” he said. “On Sunday three reels were left because of the rain and there are a lot of people who want to know how it comes out.”

“The bell has already been rung,” the priest said.

The manager let out a sigh of desperation. He waited, looking at the prelate face on and no longer thinking about anything except the intense heat in the study.

“So there's nothing that can be done?”

Father Ángel shook his head.

The manager slapped his knees and got up.

“All right,” he said. “What can we do.”

He folded his handkerchief again, dried the sweat on his neck, and examined the study with bitter care.

“This place is an inferno,” he said.

The priest accompanied him to the door. He threw the bolt and sat down to finish the letter. After reading it again from the beginning, he completed the interrupted paragraph and stopped to think. At that moment the music from the loudspeaker stopped. “We would like to announce to our distinguished clientele,” an impersonal voice said, “that tonight's show has been canceled because this establishment also wishes to join the town in mourning.” Father Ángel, smiling, recognized the manager's voice.

The heat grew more intense. The curate continued writing, with brief pauses to dry his sweat and reread what he had written, until two sheets were filled. He had just signed it when the rain let loose without warning. A vapor of damp earth penetrated the room. Father Ángel addressed the envelope, closed the inkwell, and was ready to fold the letter. But first he read the last paragraph over again. Then he opened the inkwell and wrote a postscript:
It's raining again. With this winter and the things I've told you about, I think that bitter days await us
.

F
RIDAY DAWNED
warm and dry. Judge Arcadio, who boasted of having made love three times a night ever since he'd made it for the first time, broke the cords of the mosquito netting that morning and fell to the floor with his wife at the supreme moment, wrapped up in the embroidered canopy.

“Leave it the way it is,” she murmured. “I'll fix it later.”

They arose completely naked from the midst of the confused nebula of the mosquito net. Judge Arcadio went to the chest to get some clean underwear. When he got back his wife was dressed, putting the mosquito netting in order. He passed by without looking at her and sat down on the other side of the bed to put his shoes on, his breathing still heavy from love. She pursued him. She rested her round, tense stomach against his arm and sought his ear with her teeth. He pushed her away softly.

“Leave me alone,” he said.

She let out a laugh loaded with good health. She followed her husband to the other side of the room, poking her forefingers into his kidneys. “Giddy-ap, donkey,” she said. He gave a leap and pushed her hands away. She left him alone and laughed again, but suddenly she became serious and shouted:

“Oh, my God!”

“What is it?” he asked.

“The door was wide open,” she shouted. “That's the limit of shamelessness.”

She went into the bathroom bursting with laughter.

Judge Arcadio didn't wait for breakfast. Comforted by the mint in his toothpaste, he went out onto the street. There was a copper sun. The Syrians sitting by the doors of their shops were contemplating the peaceful river. As he passed by Dr. Giraldo's office he scratched his nail on the screen of the door and shouted without stopping:

“Doctor, what's the best cure for a headache?”

The physician answered from inside:

“Not having drunk anything the night before.”

At the dock a group of women were commenting in loud voices about the contents of a new lampoon nailed up the night before. Since the day had dawned clear and rainless, the women who went by on their way to five o'clock mass had read it and now the whole town was informed. Judge Arcadio didn't stop. He felt like an ox with a ring in his nose being led to the poolroom. There he asked for a cold beer and an aspirin. It had just struck nine but the establishment was already full.

“The whole town has a headache,” Judge Arcadio said.

He took the bottle to a table where three men seemed perplexed over their glasses of beer. He sat down in the empty seat.

“Is that mess still going on?” he asked.

“There were four of them this morning.”

“The one everybody read,” one of the men said, “was the one about Raquel Contreras.”

Judge Arcadio swallowed the aspirin and drank his beer from the bottle. The first swallow was distasteful, but then his stomach adjusted and he felt new and without a past.

“What did it say?”

“Foolishness,” the man said. “That the trips she took this year weren't to get her dentures fitted, as she said, but to get an abortion.”

“They didn't have to go to the trouble of putting up a lampoon,” Judge Arcadio said. “Everybody was going around saying that.”

Even though the hot sun hurt him in the depths of his eyes when he left the establishment, he didn't feel the confused queasiness of dawn then. He went directly to the courthouse. His secretary, a skinny old man who was plucking a chicken, received him over the frames of his glasses with a look of incredulity.

“To what do we owe this miracle?”

“We have to get this mess in order,” the judge said.

The secretary went out into the courtyard, dragging his slippers, and he handed the half-plucked chicken over the wall to the cook at the hotel. Eleven months after taking over his post, Judge Arcadio had settled himself at his desk for the first time.

The run-down office was divided into two sections by a wooden railing. In the outer section there was a platform, also of wood, under the picture of Justice blindfolded with a scale in her hand. Inside, two old desks facing each other, some shelves with dusty books, and the typewriter. On the wall over the judge's desk, a copper crucifix. On the wall opposite, a framed lithograph: a smiling, fat, bald man, his chest crossed by the presidential sash, and underneath a
gilt inscription:
Peace and Justice
. The lithograph was the only new thing in the office.

The secretary wrapped a handkerchief around his face and began to clean the desks with a duster. “If you don't cover your nose, you'll get a coughing attack,” he said. The advice wasn't taken. Judge Arcadio leaned back in the swivel chair, stretching out his legs to test the springs.

“Will it fall over?” he asked.

The secretary said no with his head. “When they killed Judge Vitela,” he said, “the springs broke, but they've been fixed.” Without taking off the kerchief, he went on:

“The mayor himself ordered it fixed when the government changed and special investigators began to appear from all sides.”

“The mayor wants this office to function,” the judge said.

He opened the center drawer, took out a bunch of keys, and went on opening the drawers one by one. They were full of papers. He examined them superficially, picking them up with his forefinger to be sure that there was nothing to attract his attention, and then he closed the drawers and put the items on the desk in order: a glass inkwell with one red and one blue receptacle, and a fountain pen for each receptacle, of the respective color. The ink had dried up.

“The mayor likes you,” the secretary said.

Rocking in his chair, the judge followed him with a somber look as he cleaned the railing. The secretary contemplated him as if he never meant to forget him under that light, at that instant, and in that position, and he said, pointing at him with his finger:

“Just the way you are now, exactly, was how Judge Vitela was when they shot him up.”

The judge touched the pronounced veins on his temples. The headache was coming back.

“I was there,” the secretary went on, pointing to the typewriter, as he went to the other side of the railing. Without interrupting his tale, he leaned on the railing with the duster aimed at Judge Arcadio like a rifle. He looked like a mail robber in a cowboy movie.

“The three policemen stood like this,” he said. “Judge Vitela just managed to see them and raise his hands, saying very slowly: ‘Don't kill me.' But right away the chair went in one direction and he in the other, riddled with lead.”

Judge Arcadio squeezed his skull with his hands. He felt his brain throbbing. The secretary took off his mask and hung the duster behind the door. “And all because when he was drunk he said he was here to guarantee the sanctity of the ballot,” he said. He remained suspended, looking at Judge Arcadio, who doubled over the desk with his hands on his stomach.

“Are you having trouble?”

The judge said he was. He told him about the night before and asked him to go to the poolroom and get an aspirin and two cold beers. When he finished the first beer, Judge Arcadio couldn't find the slightest trace of remorse in his heart. He was lucid.

The secretary sat in front of the typewriter.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“Nothing,” the judge said.

“Then if you'll allow me, I'll go find María and help her pluck the chickens.”

The judge was against it. “This is an office for the administration of justice and not the plucking of chickens,” he said. He examined his underling from top to bottom with an air of pity and added:

“Furthermore, you've got to get rid of those slippers and come to the office with shoes on.”

The heat became more intense with the approach of
noon. When twelve o'clock struck, Judge Arcadio had consumed a dozen beers. He was floating in memories. With a dreamy anxiety he was talking about a past without privations, with long Sundays of sea and insatiable mulatto women who made love standing up behind the doors of entranceways. “That's what life was like then,” he said, snapping his thumb against his forefinger at the clamlike stupor of the secretary, who listened without speaking, approving with his head. Judge Arcadio felt dull, but ever more alive in his memories.

When one o'clock sounded in the belfry, the secretary showed signs of impatience.

“The soup's getting cold,” he said.

The judge wouldn't let him get up. “A person doesn't always come across a man of talent in towns like this,” he said, and the secretary thanked him, worn out by the heat, and shifted in his chair. It was an interminable Friday. Under the burning plates of the roof, the two men chatted a half hour more while the town cooked in its siesta stew. On the edge of exhaustion, the secretary then made a reference to the lampoons. Judge Arcadio shrugged his shoulders.

“So you're following that half-wit stuff too,” he said, using the familiar form for the first time.

The secretary had no desire to go on chatting, debilitated by hunger and suffocation, but he didn't think the lampoons were foolishness. “We've already had the first death,” he said. “If things go on like this we're going to have a bad time of it.” And he told the story of a town that was wiped out in seven days by lampoons. The inhabitants ended up killing each other off. The survivors dug up the bones of their dead and carried them off to be sure they'd never come back.

The judge listened with an amused expression, slowly unbuttoning his shirt while the other talked. He figured
that his secretary was a horror-story fan.

“This is a very simple case out of a detective story,” he said.

The underling shook his head. Judge Arcadio told how he'd belonged to an organization at the university that was dedicated to the solving of police enigmas. Each one of the members would read a mystery novel up to a predetermined clue, and they would get together on Saturdays to unravel the enigma. “I didn't miss a single time,” he said. “Of course, I was favored by my knowledge of the classics, which had revealed a logic of life capable of penetrating any mystery.” He offered an enigma: a man registers at a hotel at ten at night, goes up to his room, and the next morning the waiter who brings him his coffee finds him dead and rotting in his bed. The autopsy shows that the guest who arrived the night before has been dead for a week.

The secretary sat up with a long creaking of joints.

“That means that when he got to the hotel he had already been dead for seven days,” the secretary said.

“The story was written twelve years ago,” Judge Arcadio said, ignoring the interruption, “but the clue had been given by Heraclitus, five centuries before Christ.”

He got ready to reveal it, but the secretary was exasperated. “Never, since the world has been the world, has anyone found out who's putting up the lampoons,” he proclaimed with tense aggressiveness. Judge Arcadio contemplated him with twisted eyes.

“I bet you I'll discover him,” he said.

“I accept your bet.”

Rebeca Asís was suffocating in the hot bedroom of the house opposite, her head sunk in the pillow, trying to sleep an impossible siesta. She had smoked leaves stuck to her temples.

“Roberto,” she said, addressing her husband, “if you
don't open the window we're going to die of the heat.”

Roberto Asís opened the window at the moment in which Judge Arcadio was leaving his office.

“Try to sleep,” he begged the exuberant woman who was lying with her arms open beneath the canopy of pink embroidery, completely naked under a light nylon nightgown. “I promise you I won't remember anything again.”

She let out a sigh.

Roberto Asís, who had spent the night walking about the bedroom, lighting one cigarette with the butt of another, unable to sleep, had been on the point of catching the author of the lampoons that dawn. He'd heard the crackle of the paper in front of his house and the repeated rubbing of hands trying to smooth it on the wall. But he grasped it all too late and the lampoon had been posted. When he opened the window the square was deserted.

From that moment until two in the afternoon, when he promised his wife he wouldn't remember the lampoon again, she'd used every form of persuasion to try to calm him down. Finally she proposed a desperate formula: as the final proof of her innocence, she offered to confess to Father Angel aloud and in the presence of her husband. The very offering of that humiliation had been sufficient. In spite of his confusion, he didn't dare take the next step and he had to give in.

“It's always better to talk things out,” she said without opening her eyes. “It would have been a disaster if you'd stayed with your belly all tight.”

He fastened the door as he went out. In the spacious shadowed house, completely shut up, he perceived the hum of his mother's electric fan, as she slept her siesta in the house next door. He poured himself a glass of lemonade from the refrigerator, under the drowsy look of the black cook.

From her cool personal surroundings the woman asked him if he wanted some lunch. He took the cover off the pot. A whole turtle was floating flippers up in the boiling water. For once he didn't shudder at the idea that the animal had been thrown alive into the pot, and that its heart would still be beating when they brought it quartered to the table.

“I'm not hungry,” he said, covering the pot. And he added from the door: “The mistress won't have lunch either. She's had a headache all day.”

The two houses were connected by a porch with green paving stones from where one could see the wires of the henhouse at the back of the common courtyard. In the part of the porch that belonged to his mother's house there were several birdcages hanging from the eaves and several pots with intensely colored flowers.

From the chaise longue where she had just taken her siesta, his eleven-year-old daughter greeted him with a grumbling greeting. She still had the weave of the linen marked on her cheek.