"How do you know, Father, that there's nothing true in what the lampoons say?"
"I'd know it from the confessional."
The doctor looked him coldly in the eyes.
"All the more serious if you don't know it from the confessional," he said.
That afternoon Father Angel noticed that in the poor people's houses, too, they were talking about the lampoons, but in a different way and even with a healthy merriment. He ate without appetite, after attending prayers with a thorn of pain in his head, which he attributed to the meatballs for lunch. Then he looked at the moral classification of the movie and, for the first time in his life, felt an obscure pride as he gave the twelve round tolls of absolute prohibition. Finally he put a stool by the street door, feeling that his head was bursting with pain, and got ready to verify publicly which ones were going into the movie contrary to his admonition.
The mayor went in. Sitting in a corner of the orchestra section, he smoked two cigarettes before the film began. His gum was completely normal, but his body still suffered from the memory of the past nights, and the wear and tear of the analgesics and cigarettes brought on nausea.
The movie house was a courtyard surrounded by a cement wall, covered with zinc plates halfway up in the orchestra, and with grass that seemed to revive every morning, fertilized with chewing gum and cigarette butts. For a moment, the mayor saw the benches of unplaned wood floating in the air over the iron grating that separated the orchestra seats from the balcony, and he noticed a vertiginous undulation in the space on the back wall that was painted white, where the film was projected.
He felt better when the lights went out. Then the strident music of the loudspeaker ceased but the vibration of the electric generator set up in a wooden shack next to the projector became more intense.
Before the movie there were some advertising slides. A trooping of muffled whispers, confused steps, and suppressed laughter moved the darkness for brief moments. Momentarily surprised, the mayor thought that that clandestine entry had the character of a subversive act against Father Angel's rigid norms.
Although it might only have been because of the wake of cologne, he recognized the manager of the movie when he passed by.
"You bandit," he whispered, grabbing him by the arm. "You'll have to pay a special tax."
Laughing between his teeth, the manager took the next seat.
"It's a good picture," he said.
"As far as I'm concerned," the mayor said, "I'd like them all to be bad. There's nothing more boring than a moral movie."
Years before, no one had taken that censorship of the bells very seriously. But every Sunday, at the main mass, Father Angel would point out from the pulpit and drive from the church the women who had contravened his warning during the week.
"The back door has been my salvation," the manager said.
The mayor began to follow the ancient newsreel. He spoke, pausing every time there was an item of interest on the screen.
"It's the same with everything," he said. "The priest won't give communion to women in short sleeves and they keep on wearing short sleeves, but they put on fake long sleeves before going to mass."
After the newsreel, the coming attractions for the next week were shown. They watched them in silence. At the end, the manager leaned over toward the mayor.
"Lieutenant," he whispered. "Buy this mess from me."
The mayor didn't take his eyes off the screen.
"It's not a good business."
"Not for me," the manager said. "But on the other hand, it would be a gold mine for you. It's obvious: the priest wouldn't come to you with the business of his little bells."
The mayor reflected before answering.
"It sounds good to me," he said.
But he didn't say anything concrete. He put his feet on the bench in front and lost himself in the turns of a tangled drama which in the end, according to what he thought, didn't deserve even four bells.
When he left the movie he lingered at the poolroom, where they were playing lotto. It was hot and the radio was sweating out some stony music. After drinking a bottle of soda water, the mayor went off to bed.
He walked unconcerned along the riverbank, sensing the flooded river in the darkness, the sound of its entrails and its smell of a huge animal. Opposite the bedroom door he stopped abruptly. Taking a leap backward, he unholstered his revolver.
"Come out where I can see you," he said in a tense voice, "or I'll blow your head off."
A very sweet voice came out of the darkness.
"Don't be so nervous, Lieutenant."
He stood pointing his revolver until the hidden person came out into the light. It was Casandra.
"You escaped just by a hair," the mayor said.
He had her come to the bedroom. For a long time Casandra spoke, following an irregular course. She sat on the hammock and while she spoke she took off her shoes and looked with a certain candor at her toenails, which were painted a vivid red.
Sitting opposite her, fanning himself with his cap, the mayor followed the conversation with conventional correctness. He had gone back to smoking. When it struck twelve, she lay face down in the hammock, reached out an arm adorned with a set of noisy bracelets, and pinched his nose.
"It's late, boy," she said. "Turn out the light."
The mayor smiled.
"It wasn't for that," he said.
She didn't understand.
"Do you know how to tell fortunes?" the mayor asked.
Casandra sat up in the hammock again. "Of course," she said. And then, having understood, she put her shoes on.
"But I didn't bring my cards," she said.
"Anyone who eats dirt"--the mayor smiled--"carries his own soil."
He took out a worn deck from the bottom of his suitcase. She examined each card, front and back, with serious attention. "The other cards are better," she said. "But in any case, the important thing is the message." The mayor pulled over a small table, sat down across from her, and Casandra laid out the cards.
"Love or business?" she asked.
The mayor dried the sweat on his hands.
"Business," he said.
ASTRAY DONKEY sought shelter from the rain under the eaves of the parish house and it stayed there all night, kicking against the bedroom wall. It was a night without rest. After having managed a sudden sleep at dawn, Father Angel woke up with the feeling that he was covered with dust. The spikenards sleeping in the drizzle, the smell of the toilet, and then the lugubrious interior of the church after the five o'clock tolling had faded away all seemed to be conspiring to make that a difficult dawn.
From the sacristy, where he dressed to say mass, he heard Trinidad harvesting her dead mice, while the stealthy weekday women entered the church. During the mass, with progressive exasperation, he noticed his acolyte's mistakes, his backwoods Latin, and he achieved at the last moment the feeling of frustration that tormented him during the evil hours of his life.
He was on his way to breakfast when Trinidad cut him off with a radiant expression. "Six more down today," she said, shaking the dead mice in the box. Father Angel tried to rise above the confusion.
"Wonderful," he said. "At this rate we ought to find their nests and finish the extermination completely."
Trinidad had found the nests. She explained how she'd located the holes in different parts of the church, especially in the tower and the baptistery, and how she'd plugged them up with asphalt. That morning she'd found a frantic mouse beating against the wall after having looked all night for the door to its house.
They went out into the small paved courtyard, where the first shoots of spikenard were beginning to grow erect. Trinidad took her time throwing the dead mice into the toilet. When he went into his study, Father Angel got ready to eat breakfast, having removed the small tablecloth under which every morning, like a kind of magician's trick, the breakfast that the widow Asis sent him appeared.
"I'd forgotten that I couldn't buy t
he arsenic," Trinidad said when she came in. "Don Lalo Moscote says that it can't be sold without a doctor's prescription."
"It won't be necessary," Father Angel said. "They'll all smother to death in their dens."
He brought the chair over to the table and began to set up the cup, the plate with slices of plain tamales, and the coffeepot engraved with a Japanese dragon, while Trinidad was opening the window. "It's always best to be prepared in case they come back," she said. Father Angel poured his coffee and suddenly he stopped and looked at Trinidad, with her shapeless robe and her invalid's high shoes, as she came over to the table.
"You worry too much about that," he said.
Father Angel hadn't noticed then or earlier any indication of restlessness in the tight tangle of Trinidad's eyebrows. Unable to suppress a slight trembling of his fingers, he finished pouring himself the coffee, put in two spoonfuls of sugar, and began to stir the cup, with his gaze on the crucifix hanging on the wall.
"How long has it been since you confessed?"
"Last Friday," Trinidad answered.
"Tell me something," Father Angel said. "Have you ever hidden any sin from me?"
Trinidad nodded no.
Father Angel closed his eyes. Suddenly he stopped stirring the coffee, put the spoon on the plate, and grabbed Trinidad by the arm.
"Kneel down," he said.
Disconcerted, Trinidad put the cardboard box on the floor and knelt in front of him. "Say an act of contrition," Father Angel told her, his voice having managed the paternal tone of the confessional. Trinidad clenched her fists against her breast, praying in an incomprehensible murmur until the priest laid his hand on her shoulder and said:
"All right."
"I've told a lot of lies," Trinidad said.
"What else?"
"I've had bad thoughts."
It was the order of her confession. She always enumerated the same sins in a general way and always in the same order. That time, however, Father Angel couldn't resist the urge to dig deeper.
"For example," he said.
"I don't know." Trinidad hesitated. "Sometimes people get bad thoughts."
Father Angel stood up.
"Did you ever get into your head the idea of taking your life?"
"Holy Mary, Mother of God," Trinidad exclaimed without raising her head, pounding on the table leg with her knuckles at the same time. Then she answered: "No, Father."
Father Angel made her lift her head, and he noticed, with a feeling of desolation, that the girl's eyes were beginning to fill with tears.
"You mean that the arsenic is really for the mice?"
"Yes, Father."
"Then what are you crying about?"
Trinidad tried to lower her head, but he held her chin firmly. She burst into tears. Father Angel felt them running through his fingers like warm vinegar.
"Try to calm yourself," he said. "You still haven't finished your confession."
He let her go into a silent weeping. When he felt that she had stopped crying, he said softly:
"All right, now tell me."
Trinidad blew her nose with her skirt and swallowed thick saliva that was salty with tears. When she spoke again she'd recovered her strange baritonal voice.
"My Uncle Ambrosio chases me," she said.
"How's that?"
"He wants me to let him spend a night in my bed," Trinidad said.
"Go on."
"That's all," Trinidad said. "In God's name, that's all."
"Don't swear," the priest admonished her. Then he asked with his tranquil confessor's voice, "Tell me one thing: who are you sleeping with?"
"With my mama and the others," Trinidad said. "Seven in the same room."
"What about him?"
"In the other room, with the men," Trinidad said.
"Did he ever go into your room?"
Trinidad denied it with her head.
"Tell me the truth," Father Angel insisted. "Come on, don't be afraid: didn't he ever try to get into your bed?"
"Once."
"How did that happen?"
"I don't know," Trinidad said. "When I woke up I felt him inside under the netting, all quiet, telling me he didn't want to do anything to me, but that he wanted to sleep with me because he was afraid of the roosters."
"What roosters?"
"I don't know," Trinidad said. "That's what he told me."
"And what did you tell him?"
"That if he didn't leave I'd holler and wake everybody up."
"And what did he do?"
"Castula woke up and asked me what was going on, and I said nothing, that I must have been dreaming, and then he stayed very quiet, like a dead man, and I almost didn't notice it when he got out from under the netting."
"He had his clothes on," the priest said in an affirmative way.
"He was the way he is when he sleeps," Trinidad said. "Only in his pants."
"He didn't try to touch you."
"No, Father."
"Tell me the truth."
"It's true, Father," Trinidad insisted. "In God's name."
Father Angel raised her head again and looked into her moist eyes and their sad glow.
"Why did you hide it from me?"
"I was scared."
"Scared of what?"
"I don't know, Father."
He placed his hand on her shoulder and gave her some lengthy advice. Trinidad nodded approvingly. When they came to the end, he began to pray with her in a very low voice: "Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true Man ..." He was praying deeply, with a certain terror, making, in the course of his prayers, a mental recounting of his life as far as memory would permit. At the moment of giving absolution, a sense of disaster had come over his spirit.
The mayor pushed open the door, shouting: "Judge." Judge Arcadio's wife appeared in the bedroom door, drying her hands on her skirt.
"He hasn't been home for two nights," she said.
"Oh, hell," the mayor said. "Yesterday he didn't show up at the office. I was looking for him everywhere on an urgent matter and no one could tell me anything about him. Don't you have any idea where he might be?"
"He must be with the whores."
The mayor left without closing the door. He went into the poolroom, where the jukebox was grinding out a sentimental song at full volume, and he went directly to the back room, shouting: "Judge." Don Roque, the owner, interrupted the operation of pouring bottles of rum into a demijohn. "He's not here, Lieutenant," he shouted. The mayor went behind the partition. Groups of men were playing cards. Nobody had seen Judge Arcadio.
"God damn it," the mayor said. "Everybody in this town knows what everybody else is doing and now that I need the judge, nobody knows where he's off to."
"Ask the one who puts up the lampoons," Don Roque said.
"Don't bug me with those pieces of paper," the mayor said.
Judge Arcadio wasn't at his office either. It was nine o'clock, but the secretary of the court was already taking a nap on the porch. The mayor went to the police barracks, had three policemen get dressed, and sent them off to look for judge Arcadio at the dance hall and in the rooms of the three clandestine women known to everybody. Then he went out onto the street, following no determined direction. At the barbershop, his legs spread apart in the chair and with a hot towel wrapped around his face, Judge Arcadio was sitting.
"God damn it, Judge," he shouted, "I've been looking for you for two days."
The barber removed the towel and the mayor saw a pair of bleary eyes and a chin shadowed by a three-day beard.
"You get lost while your wife is giving birth," he said.
Judge Arcadio leaped from the chair.
"Shit."
The mayor laughed noisily, pushing him back into the chair. "Don't be a fool," he said. "I've been looking for you for a different reason." Judge Arcadio stretched out again, with his eyes closed.
"Finish that up and come to the office," the mayor said. "I'll wait for you."
&n
bsp; He sat down on a step.
"Where in hell were you?"
"Around," the judge said.
The mayor didn't patronize the barbershop. At one time he'd seen the sign nailed to the wall: Talking Politics Prohibited, but it had seemed natural to him. That time, however, it caught his attention.
"Guardiola," he called.
The barber cleaned the razor on his pants and remained waiting.
"What's the matter, Lieutenant?"
"Who authorized you to put that up?" the mayor asked, pointing to the notice.
"Experience," said the barber.
The mayor took a stool over to the back of the room and stood on it to remove the sign.
"Here the only one who has the right to prohibit anything is the government," he said. "We're living in a democracy."
The barber went back to his work. "No one can stop people from expressing their ideas," the mayor went on, tearing up the piece of cardboard. He threw the pieces into the wastebasket and went to the stand to wash his hands.
"So you see, Guardiola," Judge Arcadio proclaimed, "what happens to you for being such a toad."
The mayor sought out the barber in the mirror and found him absorbed in his work. He didn't lose sight of him while he dried his hands.
"The difference between before and now," he said, "is that before politicians gave the orders and now the government does."
"You heard him, Guardiola," Judge Arcadio said, his face all daubed with lather.
"Of course," the barber said.
On leaving he pushed Judge Arcadio toward the office. Under the persistent drizzle the streets seemed paved with fresh soap.
"I always thought that place was a nest of conspirators," the mayor said.
"They talk," said Judge Arcadio, "but it doesn't go beyond that."
"That's precisely what makes me suspicious," the mayor replied. "They act too tame."
"In the whole history of humanity," the judge proclaimed, "there's never been a single barber who was a conspirator. On the other hand, there hasn't been a single tailor who wasn't."
He didn't let go of Judge Arcadio's arm until he sat him in the swivel chair. The secretary came yawning into the office with a typewritten page. "That's the way," the mayor said. "Let's get to work." He pushed back his cap and took the sheet of paper.
"What's this?"
"It's for the judge," the secretary said. "It's a list of people who haven't had any lampoons put up on them."
The mayor looked at Judge Arcadio with an expression of perplexity.