"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 Maria 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 Asis 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 Asis 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 Asis, 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.
"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 Asis 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 Asis 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 Asis 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 Asis 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 Asis 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 Asis nose," she said. After thinking a moment, she asked distractedly: "Who says so?" Roberto Asis 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 Asis, "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 Asises, 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 Ramirez. 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 Asis 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 Asises 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 Asis 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 Asis began to fall asleep. The widow observed his unshaven chin, the long nose made of angular cartilage, and thought about her dead husband. Adalberto Asis, 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 Asis 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 Angel 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 Angel 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 Angel asked about Cesar 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 Angel 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 Angel 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 Angel 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 Angel 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 Angel 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.