THE DRUM ROLL reappeared like a specter out of the past. It burst forth in front of the poolroom at ten o'clock in the morning and held the town balancing on the very center of its gravity until the three energetic warnings were drummed at the end and anxiety was reestablished.
"Death!" exclaimed the widow Montiel, seeing doors and windows open and people pour out into the square from everywhere. "Death has come!"
Having recovered from her initial impression, she opened the balcony curtains and observed the tumult around the policeman who was preparing to read the decree. There was in the square a silence too great for the voice of the crier. In spite of the attention with which she tried to listen, the widow Montiel was only able to understand two words.
Nobody in the house could tell her what it was about. The decree had been read with the same authoritarian ritual as always; a new order reigned in the world and she could find no one who had understood it. The cook was alarmed at her paleness.
"What was the decree about?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out, but nobody knows anything. Of course," the widow added, "ever since the world has been the world, no decree has ever brought any good."
Then the cook went out into the street and came back with the details. Starting that night and until the causes that motivated it had ceased, a curfew was reestablished. No one could go out onto the streets after eight o'clock and until five in the morning without a pass signed and stamped by the mayor. The police had orders to call Halt three times at anyone they found on the street and if they were not obeyed, they had orders to shoot. The mayor would organize patrols of civilians, appointed by him, to collaborate with the police in the nocturnal vigil.
Biting her nails, the widow Montiel asked what the reasons for the measure were.
"They didn't spell it out in the decree," the cook answered, "but everybody says it's the lampoons."
"My heart told me so," the terrified widow said. "Death is feeding on this town."
She sent for Mr. Carmichael. Obeying a force more ancient and deep-rooted than an impulse, she ordered taken from the storeroom and brought to the bedroom the leather trunk with copper rivets that Jose Montiel had bought for his only trip, one year before he died. Out of the closet she took some clothing, underwear, and shoes, and put everything neatly in the bottom. As she did it, she began to get the feeling of absolute repose that she had dreamed of so many times, imagining herself far away from that town and that house, in a room with a stove and a small terrace with boxes where she grew oregano, where only she had the right to remember Jose Montiel, and where her only worry would be to wait for Monday afternoons to read the letters from her daughters.
She had only put in clothing that was indispensable; the leather case with the scissors, the adhesive tape, and the little bottle of iodine and sewing things; and then the shoe box with her rosary and prayerbooks, and she was already tormented by the idea that she was taking more things than God could pardon her for. Then she put the plaster Saint Raphael into a stocking, arranged it carefully among her clothes, and locked the trunk.
When Mr. Carmichael arrived he found her wearing her most modest attire. That day, like a promissory sign, Mr. Carmichael wasn't carrying his umbrella. But the widow didn't notice. From her pocket she took out all the keys of the house, each with its identification typed on a piece of cardboard, and gave them to him, saying:
"Into your hands I place the sinful world of Jose Montiel. Do with it whatever you feel like doing."
Mr. Carmichael had feared that moment for a long time.
"You mean," he struggled to say, "that you want to go off somewhere while all these things are happening."
The widow answered him with a calm voice, but quite decisively:
"I'm going away forever."
Mr. Carmichael, without showing his alarm, gave her a synthesis of the situation. Jose Montiel's estate had not been settled. Many of the possessions acquired in any old way and without time to observe formalities had an uncertain legal status. Until order could be put into that chaotic fortune, of which Jose Montiel himself didn't even have the vaguest notion in his last years, it would be impossible to settle the inheritance. The oldest son, in his consular post in Germany, and her two daughers, fascinated by the delirious fleshpots of Paris, would have to return or give someone power of attorney in order to evaluate their rights. Until then nothing could be sold.
The momentary illumination of the labyrinth where she had been lost for two years didn't move the widow Montiel that time.
"It doesn't matter," she insisted. "My children are happy in Europe and want nothing to do with this country of savages, as they call it. If you want, Mr. Carmichael, make a single bundle out of everything you find in this house and throw it to the hogs."
Mr. Carmichael didn't contradict her. With the pretense that, in any case, certain things had to be prepared for the trip, he went for the doctor.
"Now we'll see what your patriotism is made of, Guardiola."
The barber and the group of men chatting in the barbershop recognized the mayor before they saw him at the door. "And you people too," he went on, pointing to the two youngest. "Tonight you'll have the rifles you've wanted so much; let's see if you're rotten enough to turn them against us." It was impossible to mistake the cordial tone of his words.
"A broom would be better," the barber answered. "For hunting witches there's no better rifle than a broom."
He didn't even look at him. He was shaving the neck of the first customer of the morning, and he wasn't taking the mayor seriously. Only when he saw him checking on who in the group were reservists and could therefore handle a rifle did the barber understand that, indeed, he was one of the chosen.
"Is it true, Lieutenant, that you're going to involve us in this mess?" he asked.
"Oh, shit," the mayor answered. "You spend your lives whispering for a rifle and now that you've got one, you can't believe it."
He stopped in front of the barber, from where he could dominate the whole group in the mirror. "Seriously," he said, shifting to an authoritarian tone. "This afternoon at six, first-class reservists will report to the barracks." The barber faced him through the mirror.
"What if I come down with pneumonia?" he asked.
"We'll cure you in jail," the mayor answered.
The phonograph in the poolroom was twisting out a sentimental bolero. The place was empty, but on some tables there were bottles and half-finished glasses.
"Now, for sure," Don Roque said, seeing the mayor enter, "it really is a mess. We'll have to close at seven."
The mayor went straight to the back of the room, where the card tables were also deserted. He opened the door to the toilet, looked into the storeroom, and then came back to the bar. Passing by the pool table, he unexpectedly lifted the cloth that covered it, saying:
"All right, stop being jackasses."
Two boys came out from under the table, shaking the dust off their pants. One of them was pale. The other, younger, had his ears all red. The mayor pushed them gently toward the tables at the entrance.
"So you already know," he told them. "Six o'clock at the barracks."
Don Roque stayed behind the counter.
"With this mess," he said, "a person will have to turn to smuggling."
"It's just for two or three days," the mayor said.
The manager of the movie theater caught up to him on the corner. "This is all I needed," he shouted. "After twelve bells, one bugle." The mayor patted him on the shoulder and tried to continue on.
"I'm going to expropriate you," he said.
"You can't," the manager said. "The movies aren't a public service."
"In a state of siege," the mayor said, "even the movies can be declared a public service."
Only then did he stop smiling. He ran up the barracks stairs two steps at a time and when he got to the second floor he opened his arms and laughed again.
"Shit!" he exclaimed. "You too?"
Coll
apsed in a folding chair, with the insouciance of an Oriental monarch, was the circus impresario. He was ecstatically smoking a sea dog's pipe. As if it were he who was in his own home, he signaled the mayor to sit down.
"Let's talk business, Lieutenant."
The mayor pulled over a chair and sat down opposite him. Holding the pipe in the hand paved with colored stones, the impresario made an enigmatic sign to him.
"Can we speak with absolute frankness?"
The mayor nodded that he could.
"I knew it yesterday when I saw you shaving," the impresario said. "Well--I'm accustomed to knowing people, and I know that this curfew, for you ..."
The mayor was examining him with a definite aim at amusement.
"For me, on the other hand, having paid for the installation and having to feed seventeen people and nine animals, it's simply a disaster."
"So?"
"I propose," the impresario replied, "that you set the curfew for eleven o'clock and we'll split the profits from the evening performance."
The mayor kept on smiling, without changing his position in the chair.
"I suppose," he said, "that it wasn't hard for you to find someone in town who said I'm a thief."
"It's a legitimate business deal," the impresario protested.
He didn't notice at what moment the mayor took on a serious expression.
"We'll talk about it Monday," the lieutenant said in an imprecise way.
"By Monday I'll have hocked my very hide," the impresario replied. "We're oh so poor."
The mayor took him to the stairs, patting him softly on the shoulder. "You don't have to tell me," he said. "I know all about the business." Once by the stairs, he said in a consoling tone:
"Send Casandra to me tonight."
The impresario tried to turn around, but the hand on his shoulder exercised a decided pressure.
"Of course," he said. "That's deducted."
"Send her," the mayor insisted, "and we'll talk tomorrow."
Mr. Benjamin pushed the screen door with the tips of his fingers, but he didn't go into the house. He exclaimed with a secret exasperation:
"The windows, Nora."
Nora Jacob--mature and large--with her hair cut like a man's, was lying in front of the electric fan in the half-dark living room. She was waiting for Mr. Benjamin for lunch. On hearing the call, she got up laboriously and opened the four windows to the street. A gush of heat entered the room, tiled with the same angular peacock indefinitely repeated, and its furniture covered with flowered cloth. Every detail bespoke a poor luxury.
"What's true," she asked, "in what people are saying?"
"They're saying so many things."
"About the widow Montiel." Nora Jacob was more precise. "They're going around saying that she's gone crazy."
"I think she's been crazy for some time now," Mr. Benjamin said. And he added with a certain disillusion, "That's how it is: this morning she tried to jump off her balcony."
The table, completely visible from the street, was set with a place at either end. "God's punishment," said Nora Jacob, clapping her hands for lunch to be served. She brought the fan into the dining room.
"The house has been full of people ever since this morning," Mr. Benjamin said.
"It's a good chance to see the inside," replied Nora Jacob.
A black girl, her head full of red bows, brought the steaming soup to the table. The smell of chicken invaded the dining room and the temperature became intolerable. Mr. Benjamin tucked his napkin into his collar, saying: "Your health." He tried to drink from the scalding spoon.
"Blow on it, don't be a fool," she said impatiently. "Besides, you've got to take your jacket off. Your scruples about not coming into the house with the windows closed is going to make us die of the heat."
"It's more indispensable than ever now," he said. "No one will be able to say that he hasn't seen from the street every move I make when I'm in your house."
She opened up her splendid orthopedic smile, with sealing-wax gums. "Don't be ridiculous," she exclaimed. "As far as I'm concerned, they can say whatever they want." When she was able to drink the soup, she went on talking during the pauses.
"I might be worried, true, about what they'd say about Monica," she concluded, referring to her fifteen-year-old daughter, who hadn't been home for vacation ever since she'd gone away to school for the first time. "But they can't say anything about me that everybody doesn't already know."
Mr. Benjamin didn't give her his usual look of disapproval. They drank their soup in silence, separated by the six feet of the table, the shortest distance he would ever permit, especially in public. When she had been away at school, twenty years before, he would write her long and conventional letters, which she answered with passionate notes. During a vacation, at a picnic, Nestor Jacob, completely drunk, had dragged her into a corner of the corral by the hair and declared to her without alternatives: "If you don't marry me I'll shoot you." They got married at the end of her vacation. Ten years later they'd separated.
"In any case," Mr. Benjamin said, "there's no reason to stimulate people's imaginations with closed doors."
He stood up when he'd finished his coffee. "I'm going," he said. "Mina must be desperate." From the door, putting on his hat, he exclaimed:
"This house is burning up."
"That's what I've been telling you," she said.
She waited until from the last window she saw him take his leave with a kind of blessing. Then she brought the fan into the bedroom, closed the door, and got completely undressed. Finally, as on every day after lunch, she went into the adjoining bathroom and sat on the toilet, alone with her secret.
Four times a day she saw Nestor 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 Monica'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?"