"Oh, shit!" he exclaimed. "So you're hung up on that mess too."
"It's like reading detective stories," the judge apologized.
The mayor read the list.
"It's a good piece of information," the secretary explained. "The author has to be one of these. Isn't that logical?"
Judge Arcadio took the sheet away from the mayor.
"This one here is such a dumb asshole," he said, addressing the mayor. Then he spoke to the secretary: "If I were putting up lampoons, the first door I'd put one on would be my own, to get rid of any suspicion about me." And he asked the mayor:
"Don't you think so, Lieutenant?"
"That's the people's mess," the mayor said. "And they're the only ones who know how it hangs together. We've got no business getting sweated up over it."
Judge Arcadio tore up the sheet, made a ball of it, and tossed it into the courtyard. "Of course."
Before the reply, the mayor had already forgotten the incident. He put the palms of his hands on the desk and said:
"Well, the mess I want to look up in your books is this: Because of the floods, the people in the lower part of town have brought their houses to the lots located behind the cemetery, which are my property. What must I do in this case?"
Judge Arcadio smiled.
"We didn't have to come to the office for that," he said. "It's the simplest thing in the world: The town government awards the land to the settlers and pays the corresponding indemnification to the person who shows just title to it."
"I've got the documents," the mayor said.
"Then there's nothing to do but name some experts to make the appraisal," the judge said. "The town government pays."
"Who names them?"
"You can name them yourself."
The mayor walked to the door, adjusting the holster of his revolver. Watching him getting ready to leave, Judge Arcadio thought that life is nothing but a continuous succession of opportunities for survival.
"There's no reason to get nervous over such a simple matter." He smiled.
"I'm not nervous," the mayor said seriously. "But that doesn't stop it from being a mess."
"Of course, first you have to name a surrogate," the secretary put in.
The mayor turned to the judge.
"Is that true?"
"In a state of siege, it's not absolutely indispensable," the judge said. "But of course, your position would be cleaner if a surrogate handled the matter, given the coincidence that you're the owner of the lands in litigation."
"Then we'll have to appoint him," the mayor said.
Mr. Benjamin shifted his foot on the boardwalk without taking his eyes off the buzzards that were fighting over some entrails in the street. He watched the difficult movements of the creatures, ruffed and ceremonious as if they were performing an ancient dance, and he admired the representative fidelity of men who dress up as buzzards on Quinquagesima Sunday. The boy sitting at his feet daubed the other shoe with zinc oxide and rapped on the box again to order a change of feet on the boardwalk.
Mr. Benjamin, who in other days had lived by writing briefs, was never in a hurry for anything. The speed of time was imperceptible in that store where penny by penny it had been eaten up until it had been reduced to a gallon of oil and a bundle of tallow candles.
"Even though it rains it stays hot," the boy said.
Mr. Benjamin didn't agree. He wore spotless linen. The boy's back, on the other hand, was soaked in sweat.
"Heat is a mental question," Mr. Benjamin said. "The whole thing is not to pay any attention to it."
The boy made no comment. He gave another rap on the box and a moment later the job was done. Inside his gloomy store with its empty shelves, Mr. Benjamin put on his jacket. Then he put on a woven straw hat, crossed the street, protecting himself from the rain with an umbrella, and knocked at the window of the house across the way. A girl with intensely black hair and very pale skin appeared in the half-open door.
"Good morning, Mina," Mr. Benjamin said. "You still haven't had lunch?"
She said no and opened the window all the way. She was sitting in front of a large basket with pieces of wire and colored paper. In her lap she had a ball of thread, some shears, and an unfinished bouquet of artificial flowers. A record was singing on the gramophone.
"Would you do me the favor of keeping an eye on the store until I get back?" Mr. Benjamin asked.
"Will you be long?"
Mr. Benjamin was following the record.
"I'm going to the dentist's," he said. "I'll be back in half an hour."
"Oh, fine," Mina said. "The blind woman doesn't want me to hang around the window."
Mr. Benjamin stopped listening to the record. "All the songs today are the same thing," he commented. Mina picked up a finished flower at the end of a long piece of wire wrapped in green paper. She twirled it in her fingers, fascinated by the perfect correspondence between the record and the flower.
"You're a music hater," she said.
But Mr. Benjamin had left, walking on tiptoes so as not to scare off the buzzards. Mina didn't pick up her work until she saw him knock at the dentist's.
"To my way of seeing it," the dentist said, opening the door, "the chameleon has his sensibility in his eyes."
"That's possible," Mr. Benjamin admitted. "But what's that got to do with anything?"
"I just heard on the radio that blind chameleons don't change color," the dentist said.
After placing his open umbrella in a corner, Mr. Benjamin hung his jacket and hat on the same nail and got in the chair. The dentist was mixing a pink paste in his mortar.
"They say a lot of things," Mr. Benjamin said.
Not only in that instance, but under any circumstances, he spoke with a mysterious inflection.
"About chameleons?"
"About everybody."
The dentist approached the chair with the finished paste to take the impression. Mr. Benjamin took out his chipped false teeth, wrapped them in a handkerchief, and put them on the glass shelf beside the chair. Without teeth, with his narrow shoulders and skinny limbs, he had something of the saint about him. After adjusting the paste to the palate, the dentist made him close his mouth.
"That's how it is," he said, looking him in the eyes. "I'm a coward."
Mr. Benjamin tried to find some profound inspiration, but the dentist held his mouth shut. "No," he answered inside. "That's not it." He knew, like everyone, that the dentist had been the only one sentenced to death who hadn't abandoned his house. They'd perforated the walls with shots, had given him twenty-four hours to leave town, but hadn't succeeded in breaking him. He'd moved his office into an inner room and without losing his control, worked with his revolver in reach until the long months of terror passed.
While the procedure lasted, the dentist saw the same response, expressed in different degrees of anguish, appear in Mr. Benjamin's eyes. But he held his mouth shut, waiting for the paste to dry. Then he pulled off the impression.
"I wasn't referring to that," Mr. Benjamin unburdened himself. "I was referring to the lampoons."
"Oh," the dentist said. "So you're hung up on that too."
"It's a symptom of social decomposition," Mr. Benjamin said.
He'd put his false teeth back in and was starting the meticulous process of putting on his jacket.
"It's a symptom that everything's known sooner or later," the dentist said with indifference. He looked at the cloudy sky through the window and proposed: "If you want to, you can wait until it stops raining."
Mr. Benjamin hung his umbrella over his arm. "The shop's all alone," he said, observing in turn the heavy cloud loaded with drizzle. He waved goodbye with his hat.
"And get that idea out of your head, Aurelio," he said from the door. "Nobody has the right to think you're a coward because you pulled a molar for the mayor."
"In that case," the dentist said, "wait a second."
He went to the door and gave Mr. Benjamin a folded sheet
of paper.
"Read it and pass it around."
Mr. Benjamin had no need to unfold the paper to know what it was about. He looked at him with his mouth open.
"Again?"
The dentist nodded his head and remained at the door until Mr. Benjamin had left.
At twelve o'clock his wife called him to lunch. Angela, his twenty-year-old daughter, was darning socks in the dining room, which was furnished in a simple and poor way with things that seemed to have been old from their very origins. On the wooden railing that faced the courtyard there was a row of red pots with medicinal plants.
"Poor little Benjamin," the dentist said the moment he took his place at the round table. "He's hung up on the lampoons."
"Everybody is," his wife said.
"The Tovar women are leaving town," Angela put in.
The mother collected the plates to serve the soup. "They're selling everything in a rush," she said. On breathing in the warm aroma of the soup, the dentist felt alien to his wife's worries.
"They'll be back," he said. "Shame has a short memory."
Blowing on his spoon before drinking his soup, he waited for his daughter's comment. She was a girl of somewhat arid aspect, like him, whose look nevertheless exhaled a strange vivacity. But she didn't respond to his expectation. She talked about the circus. She said there was a man who sawed his wife in half, a midget who sang with his head in a lion's mouth, and a trapeze artist who did a triple somersault over a bank of knives. The dentist listened to her, eating in silence. At the end he promised that that night, if it didn't rain, they'd all go to the circus.
In the bedroom, while he was putting up the hammock for his siesta, he could see that the promise hadn't changed his wife's mood. She, too, was ready to leave town if they put up a lampoon about them.
The dentist listened to her without surprise. "It would be funny," he said, "if they weren't able to get rid of us with bullets, that they could get rid of us with a piece of paper stuck to the door." He took off his shoes and got into the hammock with his socks on, calming her:
"But don't you worry: there isn't the slightest danger that they'll put one up."
"They respect no one," the woman said.
"That depends," the dentist said. "They know that with me the thing has got a different price."
The woman stretched out on the bed with an air of infinite fatigue.
"If, that is, the one who's putting them up knew."
"The one who's putting them up knows," the dentist said.
The mayor was accustomed to go for days without eating. He simply forgot. His activity, feverish on occasions, was as irregular as the prolonged periods of idleness and boredom with which he wandered through the town without any aim or shut himself up in his armored office, unaware of the passage of time. Always alone, always a little adrift, he had no special interests, nor could he remember any time when he was governed by regular habits. Impelled only by an irresistible haste, he would appear at the hotel at any hour and eat whatever they served him.
That day he had lunch with Judge Arcadio. They spent the whole afternoon together until the sale of the lots was legalized. The experts did their duty. The surrogate, named on an interim basis, held his post for two hours. A little after four, as they went into the poolroom, both seemed to be coming back from a painful invasion by the future.
"So we're done with it," the mayor said, rubbing his hands.
Judge Arcadio didn't pay any attention to him. The mayor saw him feeling around on the counter and gave him an analgesic.
"A glass of water," he ordered Don Roque.
"A cold beer," Judge Arcadio corrected him, leaning his forehead on the counter.
"Or a cold beer," the mayor amended, putting the money on the counter. "You earned it working like a man."
After drinking the beer, Judge Arcadio rubbed his scalp with his fingers. The establishment was in a festive mood, waiting excitedly for the circus parade.
The mayor watched it from the poolroom, shaken by the coppers and brasses of the band. A girl with a silvery costume passed first on a midget elephant with malanga ears. Then the clowns and trapeze artists passed. It had cleared completely and the last rays of the sun were beginning to warm up the well-scrubbed afternoon. When the music stopped so the man on stilts could read the proclamation, the whole town seemed to rise up from the earth in a miraculous silence.
Father Angel, who watched the parade from his study, kept time to the music with his head. That feeling of well-being brought back from childhood stayed with him during his meal and then into the early part of the evening, until he stopped his surveillance of entry into the movie and found himself alone in his bedroom. After praying, he remained in a grumbling ecstasy in the wicker rocking chair, not realizing when it struck nine or when the loudspeaker from the movie turned off and there remained in its stead the note of a toad. From there he went to his desk to write a summons to the mayor.
In one of the seats of honor at the circus, which he occupied at the insistence of the impresario, the mayor witnessed the opening number by the trapeze artists and an appearance of the clowns. Then Casandra appeared, dressed in black velvet and with her eyes blindfolded, offering to guess the thoughts of the public. The mayor fled. He made his routine rounds through the town and at ten o'clock went to the police barracks. There, waiting for him on notepaper in very meticulous handwriting, was the call from Father Angel. The formality of the request alarmed him.
Father Angel was beginning to get undressed when the mayor knocked on the door. "Golly," the curate said. "I didn't expect you so soon." The mayor took off his cap before entering.
"I like to answer my mail." He smiled.
He tossed his cap, making it spin like a disk, onto the wicker rocking chair. In earthen crocks were several bottles of soda put to cool in the water from the tub. Father Angel took one out.
"Would you like a lemonade?"
The mayor accepted.
"I bothered you," the priest said, getting directly to the point, "to tell you about my worries concerning your indifference to the lampoons."
He said it in such a way that it might have been interpreted as a joke, but the mayor took it literally. He wondered, perplexed, how concern over the lampoons had been able to bring Father Angel to that point.
"It's strange, Father, that you're hung up on that too."
Father Angel, as he searched in the drawers for a bottle-opener:
"It's not the lampoons as such that worry me," he said, a little confused, not knowing what to do with the bottle. "What worries me is--let's put it this way: a certain state of injustice that's in all this."
The mayor took the bottle from him and opened it on the buckle of his boot with a left-handed skill that drew Father Angel's attention. He licked the overflowing foam on the neck of the bottle.
"There's a secret life," he started to say, without managing any conclusion. "Seriously, Father, I don't see what can be done."
The priest sat down at his desk. "You ought to know," he said. "After all, it's nothing new to you." He covered the room with a vague look and said in a different tone:
"It would be a matter of doing something before Sunday."
"Today's Thursday." The mayor was precise.
"I'm aware of the time," the priest replied. And he added with a hidden impulse, "But maybe it's not too late for you to fulfill your duties."
The mayor tried to twist the neck of the bottle. Father Angel watched him go from one side of the room to the other, serious and slim, with no sign of physical aging, and he felt a definite sense of inferiority.
"As you can see," he stated, "it's not a question of anything exceptional."
It struck eleven in the belfry. The mayor waited until the last resonance had dissolved and then he leaned toward the priest, his hands resting on the desk. His face had the same repressed anxiety that his voice was to reveal.
"Look at one thing, Father," he began. "The town is calm, the people are beg
inning to have confidence in the authorities. Any show of force at this time would be too big a risk for something of such small importance."
Father Angel approved with his head. He tried to explain:
"I'm referring, in a general way, to certain means of authority."
"In any case," the mayor went on without changing his stance, "I'm taking the circumstances into consideration. You know, I have six policemen here locked up in the barracks, drawing a salary without doing anything. I haven't been able to get them replaced."
"I know that," Father Angel said. "I'm not blaming you for anything."
"Actually," the mayor went on vehemently, indifferent to interruptions, "It's no secret to anybody that three of them are common criminals, released from jail and disguised as policemen. The way things are, I'm not going to run the risk of putting them out on the streets hunting ghosts."
Father Angel opened his arms.
"Of course, of course," he acknowledged decisively. "That, naturally, is out of the question. But why not have recourse, for example, to the good citizens?"
The mayor stretched, drinking from the bottle with listless swallows. His chest and back were soaked in sweat. He said:
"The good citizens, as you call them, are dying with laughter over the lampoons."
"Not all of them."
"Besides, it's no good alarming people over something that in the long run isn't that important. Frankly, Father," he ended good-humoredly, "until tonight it hadn't occurred to me to think that you and I would have anything to do with this mess."
Father Angel assumed a maternal attitude. "Up to a certain point, yes," he replied, and began a laborious justification employing ripened paragraphs from the sermon he had been ordering mentally since the day before at lunch with the widow Asis.
"It's a question, if one might say so"--he came to the high point--"of a case of terrorism in the moral order."
The mayor gave an open smile. "Fine, fine," he almost interrupted him. "And it's not a case of putting philosophy onto the pieces of paper, Father." Leaving the unfinished bottle on the desk, he acceded in his most agreeable manner:
"If you put things to me this way, we'll have to see what can be done."
Father Angel thanked him. It wasn't at all pleasant, as he revealed, to go up into the pulpit on Sunday with a worry like that. The mayor had tried to understand him. But he realized that it was getting late and he was making a night owl out of the curate.