In Evil Hour (4 page)

“It's going on three,” he pointed out in a very low voice. And he added melancholically: “Try to keep track of things.”

“I dreamed about a glass cat,” the child said.

He couldn't repress a slight shudder.

“What was it like?”

“All glass,” the girl said, trying to give form to the dream animal with her hands, “like a glass bird, but a cat.”

He found himself lost, in full sunlight, in a strange city. “Forget about it,” he murmured. “Something like that isn't worth the trouble.” At that moment he saw his mother in the door of her bedroom and he felt rescued.

“You're feeling better,” he asserted.

The widow Asís returned a bitter expression. “Every day
I'm getting better and better so I can vote,” she complained, making a bun of her abundant iron-colored hair. She went out onto the porch to change the water in the cages.

Roberto Asís dropped onto the chaise longue where his daughter had been sleeping. The back of his neck in his hands, he followed with his withered eyes the bony woman in black who was conversing with the birds in a low voice. They fluttered in the fresh water, sprinkling the woman's face with their happy flapping. When she had finished with the cages, the widow Asís wrapped her son in an aura of uncertainty.

“You had things to do in the woods,” she said.

“I didn't go,” he said. “I had some things to do here.”

“You won't go now till Monday.”

With his eyes, he agreed. A black servant, barefoot, crossed the room with the child to take her to school. The widow Asís remained on the porch until they left. Then she motioned to her son and he followed her into the broad bedroom where the fan was humming. She dropped into a broken-down reed rocker beside the fan with an air of extreme weariness. On the whitewashed walls hung photographs of ancient children framed in copper. Roberto Asís stretched out on the sumptuous, regal bed where, decrepit and in a bad humor, some of the children in the photographs, including his own father last December, had died.

“What's going on with you?” the widow asked.

“Do you believe what people are saying?” he asked in turn.

“At my age you have to believe everything,” the widow replied. And she asked indolently: “What are they saying?”

“That Rebeca Isabel isn't my child.”

The widow began to rock slowly. “She's got the Asís
nose,” she said. After thinking a moment, she asked distractedly: “Who says so?” Roberto Asís bit his nails.

“They put up a lampoon.”

Only then did the widow understand that the dark shadows under her son's eyes weren't the sediment of long sleeplessness.

“Lampoons are not the people,” she proclaimed.

“But they only tell what people are already saying,” said Roberto Asís, “even if a person doesn't know.”

She, however, knew everything that the town had said about her family for many years. In a house like hers, full of servants, godchildren, and wards of all ages, it was impossible to lock oneself up in a bedroom without the rumors of the streets reaching even there. The turbulent Asíses, founders of the town when they were nothing but swineherds, seemed to have blood that was sweet for gossip.

“Everything they say isn't true,” she said, “even though a person might know.”

“Everybody knows that Rosario Montero was going to bed with Pastor,” he said. “His last song was dedicated to her.”

“Everybody said so, but nobody knew for sure,” the widow replied. “On the other hand, now it's known that the song was for Margot Ramírez. They were going to be married and only they and Pastor's mother knew it. It would have been better if they hadn't guarded so jealously the only secret that's ever been kept in this town.”

Roberto Asís looked at his mother with a dramatic liveliness. “There was a moment this morning when I thought I was going to die,” he said. The widow didn't seem moved.

“The Asíses are jealous,” she said. “That's been the great misfortune of this house.”

They remained silent for a long time. It was almost four
o'clock and the heat was beginning to subside. When Roberto Asís turned off the fan the whole house was awakening, full of female voices and bird flutes.

“Pass me the bottle that's on the night table,” the widow said.

She took two pills, gray and round like two artificial pearls, and gave the bottle back to her son, saying: “Take two; they'll help you sleep.” He took them with the water his mother had left in the glass and rested his head on the pillow.

The widow sighed. She maintained a pensive silence. Then, as always, generalizing about the whole town when thinking of the half-dozen families that made up her class, she said:

“The worst part about this town is that the women have to stay home alone while the men go off into the woods.”

Roberto Asís began to fall asleep. The widow observed his unshaven chin, the long nose made of angular cartilage, and thought about her dead husband. Adalberto Asís, too, had known despair. He was a giant woodsman who had worn a celluloid collar for fifteen minutes in his lifetime so they could take the daguerreotype that survived him on the night table. It was said of him that in that same bedroom he'd murdered a man he found sleeping with his wife, that he'd buried him secretly in the courtyard. The truth was different: Adalberto Asís had, with a shotgun blast, killed a monkey he'd caught masturbating on the bedroom beam with his eyes fixed on his wife while she was changing her clothes. He'd died forty years later without having been able to rectify the legend.

Father Ángel went up the steep stairs with open steps. On the second floor, at the end of a corridor with rifles and cartridge belts hanging on the wall, a policeman was lying
on an army cot, reading face up. He was so absorbed in his reading that he didn't notice the presence of the priest until he greeted him. He rolled the magazine and sat up on the cot.

“What are you reading?” Father Ángel asked.

The policeman showed him the magazine.

“
Terry and the Pirates
.”

With a steady look the priest examined the three cells of reinforced concrete, without windows, closed up on the corridor with thick iron bars. In the center cell another policeman was sleeping in his shorts, spread out in a hammock. The others were empty. Father Ángel asked about César Montero.

“He's in there,” the policeman said, nodding his head toward a closed door. “It's the commandant's room.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“He's incommunicado,” the policeman said.

Father Ángel didn't insist. He asked if the prisoner was all right. The policeman answered that he'd been given the best room in the barracks, with good light and running water, but he'd gone twenty-four hours without eating. He'd refused the food the mayor had ordered from the hotel.

“They should have brought him food from home,” the priest said.

“He doesn't want them to bother his wife.”

As if speaking to himself, the priest murmured: “I'll talk about all this with the mayor.” He started to go on toward the end of the corridor, where the mayor had built his armored office.

“He's not there,” the policeman said. “He's been home two days with a toothache.”

Father Ángel visited him. He was prostrate in a hammock, next to a chair where there was a jar of salt water, a
package of painkillers, and the cartridge belt with the revolver. His cheek was still swollen. Father Ángel brought a chair over to the hammock.

“Have it pulled,” he said.

The mayor spat a mouthful of salt water into a basin. “That's easy to say,” he said, his head still leaning over the basin. Father Ángel understood. He said in a very low voice:

“If you'll authorize me, I'll talk to the dentist.” He took a deep breath and ventured to add: “He's an understanding man.”

“Like a mule,” the mayor said. “You'd have to break him down with bullets and then we'd be back where we started.”

Father Ángel followed him with his eyes to the washstand. The mayor turned on the faucet, put his swollen cheek under the flow of cool water, and held it there for an instant, with an expression of ecstasy. Then he chewed an analgesic tablet and took some water from the spigot, throwing it into his mouth with his hands.

“Seriously,” the priest insisted, “I can talk to the dentist.”

The mayor made a gesture of impatience.

“Do whatever you want, Father.”

He lay face up in the hammock, his eyes closed, his hands behind his neck, breathing with a wrathful rhythm. The pain began to give way. When he opened his eyes again, Father Ángel was looking at him silently, sitting beside the hammock.

“What brought you over here?” the mayor asked.

“César Montero,” the priest said without any preamble. “The man has to confess.”

“He's incommunicado,” the mayor said. “Tomorrow, after the preliminary hearing, you can confess him. He's got to be sent off on Monday.”

“He's got forty-eight hours,” the priest said.

“And I've had this tooth for two weeks,” said the mayor.

In the dark room the mosquitoes were beginning to buzz. Father Ángel looked out the window and saw an intense pink cloud floating on the river.

“What about the meal problem?” he asked.

The mayor left his hammock to close the balcony door. “I did my duty,” he said. “He doesn't want to bother his wife or have food sent from the hotel.” He began to spray insecticide around the room. Father Ángel looked in his pocket for a handkerchief so as not to sneeze, but instead of the handkerchief he found a wrinkled letter. “Agh,” he exclaimed, trying to smooth out the letter with his fingers. The mayor interrupted his fumigation. The priest covered his nose, but it was a useless effort: he sneezed twice. “Sneeze, Father,” the mayor said. And he emphasized with a smile:

“We're living in a democracy.”

Father Ángel also smiled. Showing the sealed envelope, he said: “I forgot to mail this letter.” He found the handkerchief up his sleeve and blew his nose, irritated by the insecticide. He was still thinking about César Montero.

“It's as if you had him on bread and water,” he said.

“If that's what he wants,” the mayor said, “we can't force him to eat.”

“What bothers me most is his conscience,” the priest said.

Without taking his handkerchief away from his nose, he followed the mayor around the room with his eyes until he finished fumigating. “He must be very upset if he thinks he's going to be poisoned,” he said. The mayor put the spray can on the floor.

“He knows that everybody loved Pastor,” he said.

“César Montero too,” the priest replied.

“But it so happens that it's Pastor who's dead.”

The priest contemplated the letter. The light was becoming hazy. “Pastor,” he murmured. “He didn't have time to confess.” The mayor turned on the light before getting into the hammock.

“I'll feel better tomorrow,” he said. “You can confess him after the proceedings. Does that suit you?”

Father Ángel agreed. “It's just for the repose of his conscience,” he repeated. He stood up with a solemn movement. He recommended to the mayor that he not take too many painkillers, and the mayor answered back reminding him not to forget the letter.

“And something else, Father,” the mayor said. “Try in any way you can to talk to the tooth-puller.” He looked at the curate, who was beginning to go down the stairs, and added as before, smiling: “This all contributes to the consolidation of peace.”

Sitting by the door of his office, the postmaster watched the afternoon die. When Father Ángel gave him the letter, he went into his office, moistened with his tongue a fifteen-centavo stamp, for airmail and the surcharge for construction. He kept on digging in his desk drawer. When the street lights went on, the priest put several coins on the counter and left without saying goodbye.

The postmaster was still searching in the drawer. A moment later, tired of rummaging through papers, he wrote on the corner of the envelope in ink:
No five-centavo stamps on hand
. He signed underneath and put the stamp of the office there.

That night, after rosary, Father Ángel found a dead mouse floating in the holy water font. Trinidad was setting the traps in the baptistery. The priest grabbed the animal by the tip of the tail.

“You're going to cause trouble,” he told Trinidad, waving the dead mouse in front of her. “Don't you know that some of the faithful bottle holy water to give their sick to drink?”

“What's that got to do with it?” Trinidad asked.

“Got to do with it?” the priest answered. “Well, just that the sick people will be drinking holy water with arsenic in it.”

Trinidad reminded him that he still hadn't given her the money for the arsenic. “It's plaster,” she said, and revealed the method: she had put plaster in the corners of the church, the mouse ate some and a moment later, desperately thirsty, it had gone to drink at the font. The water solidified the plaster in its stomach.

“In any case,” the priest said, “it would be better if you came and got the money for arsenic. I don't want any more dead mice in the holy water.”

In the study a delegation of Catholic Dames was waiting for him, headed by Rebeca Asís. After giving Trinidad the money for the arsenic, the priest commented on the heat in the room and sat down at the desk facing the three Dames, who were waiting in silence.

“At your service, my distinguished ladies.”

They looked at each other. Rebeca Asís then opened a fan with a Japanese landscape painted on it, and said without mystery:

“It's the matter of the lampoons, Father.”

With a sinuous voice, as if she were telling a fairy tale, she recounted the alarm of the people. She said that even though Pastor's death could be interpreted “as something entirely personal,” respectable families felt obliged to be concerned about the lampoons.