In Evil Hour (13 page)

Four times a day she saw Néstor Jacob pass by the house. Everybody knew that he was living with another woman, that he had four children by her, and that he was considered an exemplary father. Several times over the past few years, he had passed by the house with the children, but
never with the woman. She'd seen him grow thin, old, and pale, and turn into a stranger whose intimacy of past times seemed inconceivable. Sometimes, during her solitary siestas, she'd desired him again in a pressing way: not as she saw him pass by the house, but as he'd been during the time that preceded Mónica's birth, when his brief and conventional love had still not made him intolerable to her.

Judge Arcadio slept until noon. So he didn't hear about the decree until he got to his office. His secretary, on the other hand, had been alarmed since eight o'clock, when the mayor asked him to draw up the document.

“No matter what,” Judge Arcadio reflected after finding out the details, “it's been drawn up in drastic terms. It wasn't necessary.”

“It's the same decree as always.”

“That's true,” the judge admitted. “But things have changed, and terms have changed too. The people must be frightened.”

Nevertheless, as he discovered later on while playing cards at the poolroom, fear wasn't the predominant feeling. It was, rather, a feeling of collective victory in the confirmation that was in everyone's consciousness: things hadn't changed. Judge Arcadio couldn't draw out the mayor when he left the poolroom.

“So the lampoons weren't worth the trouble,” he told him. “The people are happy.”

The mayor took him by the arm. “Nothing's being done against the people,” he said. “It's a routine matter.” Judge Arcadio was in despair over those ambulatory conversations. The mayor marched along with a resolute step, as if he were on urgent business, and then after much walking you realized that he wasn't going anywhere.

“This won't last for a whole lifetime,” he went on. “By
Sunday we'll have the clown who's behind the lampoons locked up. I don't know why, but I keep thinking that it's a woman.”

Judge Arcadio didn't think so. In spite of the negligence with which his secretary had gathered information, he'd come to an overall conclusion: the lampoons weren't the work of a single person. They didn't seem to follow any set pattern. Some, in the last few days, presented a new twist: they were drawings.

“It might not be a man or a woman,” Judge Arcadio concluded. “It might be different men and different women, all acting on their own.”

“Don't complicate things for me, Judge,” the mayor said. “You ought to know that in every mess, even if a lot of people are involved, there's always one who's to blame.”

“Aristotle said that, Lieutenant,” Judge Arcadio replied. And added with conviction, “In any case, the measures seem extreme to me. The ones who are putting them up will simply wait for the curfew to be over.”

“That doesn't matter,” the mayor said. “In the end we have to preserve the principle of authority.”

The recruits had begun to gather at the barracks. The small courtyard with its high concrete walls spattered with dry blood and bullet holes recalled the times when there weren't enough cells and prisoners were kept outdoors. That afternoon the unarmed policemen were wandering through the halls in their shorts.

“Rovira,” the mayor shouted from the door. “Bring those boys something to drink.”

The policeman began to get dressed.

“Rum?” he asked.

“Don't be a fool,” the mayor shouted on his way to the armored office. “Ice water.”

The recruits were smoking, sitting around the courtyard.
Judge Arcadio observed them from the railing on the second floor.

“Are they volunteers?”

“Fat chance,” the mayor said. “I had to drag them out from under their beds, as if they were being drafted.”

“Well, they seem to have been recruited by the opposition,” he said.

The heavy steel doors of the office exhaled an icy breath on being opened. “That means they're good for a fight,” the mayor said, smiling, after he turned on the lights in his private fortress. At one end there was an army cot, a glass pitcher and a tumbler on a chair, and a chamber pot under the cot. Leaning against the bare concrete walls were rifles and submachine guns. The room had no ventilation except for the narrow, high peepholes from which one could dominate the docks and the two main streets. At the other end was the desk, beside the safe.

The mayor worked the combination.

“And that's nothing,” he said. “I'm going to give them all rifles.”

The policeman came in behind them. The mayor gave him a few bills, saying, “Bring each one two packs of cigarettes too.” When they were alone once more, he addressed Judge Arcadio again.

“What do you think of the mess?”

The judge answered pensively:

“A useless risk.”

“People will stand with their mouths open,” the mayor said. “I think, besides, that these poor fellows won't know what to do with the rifles.”

“They may be confused,” the judge admitted, “but that won't last long.”

He made an effort to repress the feeling of emptiness in his stomach. “Be careful, Lieutenant,” he reflected. “Don't
be the one to ruin everything.” The mayor took him out of the office with an enigmatic gesture.

“Don't be a damned fool, Judge,” he whispered in his ear. “They'll only have blank cartridges.”

When they went down to the courtyard the lights were on. The recruits were drinking sodas under the dirty light bulbs, against which the horse flies hurled themselves. Strolling from one end to the other of the courtyard, where there were still a few puddles of stagnant water, the mayor explained to them in a paternal tone what their mission for that evening consisted of: They would be stationed in pairs on the main corners with orders to fire on anyone, man or woman, who disobeyed the three commands to halt. He recommended valor and prudence. After midnight they would be brought food. The mayor hoped that with God's help, everything would come off without any trouble and that the town would know how to appreciate that effort of the authorities in the interests of social order.

Father Ángel was getting up from the table when eight o'clock struck in the belfry. He turned out the courtyard light, threw the bolt, and made the sign of the cross over his breviary: “In the name of God.” In a distant courtyard a curlew sang. Dozing in the cool of the porch beside the cages covered with dark cloths, the widow Asís heard the second toll and without opening her eyes asked: “Did Roberto come in yet?” A maid squatting against the doorframe answered that he'd been in bed since seven o'clock. A little while before, Nora Jacob had turned down the volume on the radio and was in ecstasy over some tenuous music that seemed to be coming from a clean and comfortable place. A voice too distant to seem real shouted a name on the horizon and the dogs began to bark.

The dentist hadn't finished listening to the news.
Remembering that Ángela was doing a crossword puzzle under the bulb in the courtyard, without looking he ordered her: “Close the main door and go finish that in your room.” His wife awoke, startled.

Roberto Asís, who in fact had gone to bed at seven o'clock, got up to look at the square through the half-open window, and he only saw the dark almond trees and the last light that was going out on the widow Montiel's balcony. His wife turned on the night light and with a muffled whisper made him go back to bed. A solitary dog continued barking until after the fifth toll.

In the hot bedroom piled high with empty cans and dusty bottles, Don Lalo Moscote was snoring with the newspaper spread out over his belly and his glasses on his forehead. His paralytic wife, shaken by the memory of other nights like that, shooed mosquitoes with a rag while she mentally counted the hour. After the distant shouts, the barking of the dogs, and the stealthy running, silence took over.

“Make sure there's Coramine,” Dr. Giraldo instructed his wife, who was putting emergency drugs into his bag before going to bed. They were both thinking about the widow Montiel, rigid as a corpse under the last load of Luminal. Only Don Sabas, after a long conversation with Mr. Carmichael, had lost his sense of time. He was still in his office, weighing the next day's breakfast on the scale, when the seventh bell tolled and his wife came out of the bedroom with her hair in disarray. The river stopped. “On a night like this,” someone murmured in the dark at the instant the eighth bell tolled, deep, irrevocable, and something that had begun to sputter fifteen minutes before went out completely.

Dr. Giraldo closed the book until the curfew bugle stopped vibrating. His wife put the bag on the night table, lay down with her face to the wall, and put out her lamp.
The doctor opened the book but he didn't read. Both were breathing fitfully, alone in a town that the measureless silence had reduced to the dimensions of a bedroom.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” the doctor replied.

He didn't concentrate any more until eleven o'clock, when he went back to the same page where he'd been when eight began to strike. He turned down the corner of the page and put the book on the table. His wife was sleeping. In other times they had both stayed up till dawn, trying to figure out the place and circumstances of the shooting. Several times the sound of boots and weapons reached the door of their house and they both waited, sitting in bed, for the spray of lead that would knock down the door. Many nights, after they had learned how to distinguish among the infinite varieties of the terror, they had stayed awake with their heads on a pillow stuffed with clandestine fliers to be distributed. One dawn they heard the same stealthy preparations that precede a serenade, and then the mayor's weary voice: “Not there. He's not mixed up in anything.” Dr. Giraldo turned out the lamp and tried to sleep.

The drizzle started after midnight. The barber and another recruit, stationed on the corner by the docks, abandoned their post and sought shelter under the eaves of Mr. Benjamín's store. The barber lighted a cigarette and examined the rifle in the light of the match. It was a new weapon.

“It's a madeinusa,” he said.

His companion lighted several matches in search of the brand on his carbine, but he couldn't find it. A gutter by the eaves burst onto the butt of the weapon and produced a hollow impact. “What a strange mess,” he murmured, drying it with his sleeve. “The two of us here, each with a rifle, getting wet.” In the extinguished town no sounds could be perceived other than that of the water from the eaves.

“There are nine of us,” the barber said. “Seven of them, counting the mayor, but three of them locked up in the barracks.”

“A while back I was thinking the same thing,” the other one said.

The mayor's flashlight made them brutally visible, crouched against the wall, trying to protect their weapons from the drops that were bursting on their shoes like bird shot. They recognized him when he put out the light and came in under the eaves. He was wearing a trench coat and had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. A policeman was with him. After looking at his watch, which he wore on his right wrist, he ordered the policeman:

“Go to the barracks and see what's happened to the food.”

With the same energy that he would have given a battle command, the policeman disappeared in the rain. Then the mayor sat down on the ground beside the recruits.

“Any messes?” he asked.

“Nothing,” answered the barber.

The other man offered the mayor a cigarette before lighting his. The mayor turned it down.

“How long are you going to keep us at this, Lieutenant?”

“I don't know,” the mayor said. “For now, until curfew is over. We'll see what happens tomorrow.”

“Until five o'clock!” the barber exclaimed.

“Oh, no,” the other one said. “Me, who's been on his feet since four in the morning.”

A dogfight reached them through the murmur of the rain. The mayor waited until the tumult was over and there was only one solitary bark. He turned to the recruit with a depressed air.

“Don't tell me; I've spent half my life in this mess,” he said. “I'm collapsing from lack of sleep.”

“For no reason,” the barber said. “This hasn't got any head or tail to it. It's like something women do.”

“I'm beginning to think the same thing,” the mayor sighed.

The policeman returned to inform them that they were waiting for the rain to stop to give out the food. Then he delivered another message: a woman, caught without a pass, was waiting for the mayor at the barracks.

It was Casandra. She was sleeping in the folding chair, wrapped in a rubber cape in the small room lighted by the mournful bulb on the balcony. The mayor tweaked her nose. She gave a moan, shuddered in a start of desperation, and opened her eyes.

“I was dreaming,” she said.

The mayor turned on the light in the room. Protecting her eyes with her hands, the woman twisted, grumbling, and for an instant he suffered her silver-colored nails and shaved armpits.

“You're a fine one,” she said. “I've been here since eleven o'clock.”

“I expected to see you at the room,” the mayor apologized.

“I didn't have a pass.”

Her hair, copper-colored two nights before, was silver gray now. “I forgot completely.” The mayor smiled, and after hanging up his raincoat, he took a seat beside her. “I hope they haven't thought that you're the one who's putting up the papers.” The woman had recovered her relaxed manner.

“I wish they had,” she replied. “I adore strong emotions.”

Suddenly the mayor seemed lost in the room. With a defenseless air, cracking his knuckles, he murmured: “You have to do me a favor.” She scrutinized him.