Juan Vasquez: The Secret History of Costaguana

My father had never seen Presbyter Echavarría: the news of his excommunication had reached him by way of third parties, and the dispute, until that moment, had gone no further than the confines of the printed page. Looking up, he found himself facing a long, perfectly dry cassock and a closed black umbrella, its tip in a puddle of water shiny and silver like mercury, the handle easily supporting the weight of effeminate hands. The soprano spoke again: “The chair, heretic.” I must believe what my father would tell me years later: that if he did not respond it was not out of insolence, but that the vaudevillian situation — the priest entering a café, the dry priest where all were wet, the priest whose womanly voice undermined his imperious manner — surprised him so much that he didn’t know how to do so. Echavarría interpreted the silence as disdain and returned to the attack:

“The chair, heathen.”

“Come again?”

“The chair, blasphemer. The chair, murderous Jew.”

Then he hit my father lightly on the knee with the tip of his umbrella, once, maybe twice; and at that moment all hell broke loose.

Like a jack-in-the-box, my father swatted away the umbrella (the palm of his hand was left wet and a little red) and stood up. Echavarría let some reaction out from between incensed teeth, “But how dare you,” or words to that effect. As he said it, my father, who had perhaps experienced a fleeting second of good sense, was already turning around to collect his jacket and leave without a glance at his companions, and did not see the moment when the priest went to slap him; nor did he see — this he would say many times, begging to be believed — his own hand, closing of its own accord and landing with all the strength of his pivoting shoulders, on the indignant and pursed little mouth, on the hairless and powdered lip of Presbyter Echavarría. The chin emitted a hollow crunch, the cassock swept backward, as if floating, the boots beneath the cassock slipped in the puddle, and the umbrella fell to the floor a brief second before its owner.

“You should have seen,” my father told me much later, facing the sea, brandy in hand. “At that moment the silence was louder than the downpour.”

The actors stood up. My father’s radical comrades stood up. And this I have thought every time I remember this story: if my father had been alone, or if he had not been in a place frequented by university men, he would have found himself confronted by a furious crowd ready to skewer him on the spot for the affront; but in spite of the odd isolated and anonymous insult emerging from the crowd, in spite of the lethal looks from the two strangers who helped Echavarría to his feet, who recovered his umbrella for him, who brushed off his cassock (with an extra pat or two on the ministerial buttocks), nothing happened. Echavarría left the Boulevardier hurling insults that no one had ever heard a clergyman in Santa Fe de Bogotá say, and threats worthy of a sailor from Marseille, but there ended the latest run-in. My father reached up to touch his face, confirmed that his cheek was hot, said good night to his companions, and walked home in the rain. Two days later, in the early morning before first light, someone knocked on his door. The servant opened the door and saw no one. The reason was obvious: the knocks were not those of someone coming to call, but those of a hammer nailing up a notice.

The anonymous tract did not carry an imprint, but in other respects its contents were quite clear: all the faithful who read those lines were exhorted not to speak to the heretic Miguel Altamirano, to refuse him bread, water, and shelter; it declared that the heretic Miguel Altamirano was considered to be possessed by demons; and it proclaimed that killing him without qualms, as one would a dog, would be a virtuous act, worthy of divine favor.

My father tore it off the door, went back inside, looked for the key to the storage room under the stairs, and took out one of the two pistols that had arrived in my grandfather’s trunk. On his way out he took care, thinking to eliminate any revealing traces, to pull off all the scraps of paper still stuck to the wood of the door under the nail; but then he realized the precaution was useless, because he came upon the same notice ten or fifteen times in the short walk from his house to the printing press that turned out La Opinión . More than that, along the way he also came upon accusing fingers and voices, the powerful prosecution of the Catholics who now, without any actual proceedings taking place, had declared him their enemy. My father, accustomed to attracting attention, was not quite so used to attracting malevolence. The public prosecutors appeared on the wooden balconies (crosses dangling over their chests), and the fact that they did not dare to shout at him was not a relief to my father, but rather confirmation that darker fates than mere public disgrace awaited. He walked into the printer’s with the crumpled notice in his hand, asking the brothers Acosta, the owners of the press, if they could identify the machines responsible: to no avail. He spent the afternoon in the Commerce Club, tried to find out what his comrades thought, and heard that the radical societies had already reached a decision: they would respond with blood and fire, burning down the church and killing every cleric, if Miguel Altamirano was to suffer any attack. He felt less alone, but he also felt that the city was about to suffer a catastrophe. And so that night he made his way to Santo Tomás Church to look for Father Echavarría, walking beneath yellow street lamps that lit up the gleaming white walls of the houses, thinking that two men who had exchanged insults can, just as easily, exchange apologies; but the church was deserted.

Or almost.

Because in one of the last pews was a shape, or what my father, blinded as he entered by the sudden darkness, for the time the retina with all its rods and cones takes to accommodate to the new conditions, had taken for a shape. After strolling up one of the aisles toward the chancel, after going behind — into areas where he was an intruder — and looking for the door to the presbytery and descending the two worn stone steps and stretching out a prudent and polite knuckle to knock a couple of times, my father selected a random pew, one that had a view of the gilding on the altar, and sat down to wait, although he really did not know what words he could use to convince that fanatic.

And then he heard someone say: “That’s him.”

He turned around and saw that the shape was dividing into two. From one side, a cassocked figure that was not Father Echavarría already had his back to him and was leaving the church; from the other, a man in a poncho and hat, a sort of giant bell with legs, began to walk up the center aisle toward the chancel. My father imagined that, beneath the straw hat, in that black space where human features would soon emerge, the eyes of the man were scrutinizing him. My father looked around. From an oil painting he was being watched by a bearded man who was sticking his index finger (well covered with flesh and skin, unlike the one on his Chinaman’s dead hand) into Christ’s open wound. In another painting was a man with wings and a woman who kept her page in a book with another finger just as fleshed out: my father recognized the Annunciation, but the angel was not Chinese. No one seemed prepared to get him out of this fix; the man in the poncho, meanwhile, approached silently, as if sliding over a sheet of oil. My father saw he was wearing rope-soled shoes, saw the rolled-up trousers, and saw, hanging beneath the edge of the poncho, the dirty point of a knife.

Neither of the two spoke. My father knew he could not kill the man there, not because at the age of thirty-four he had never killed anybody (there is always a first time, and my father handled a pistol as well as anyone), but because to do so without witnesses would be like condemning himself in advance. He needed people to see: to see the provocation, the attack, the legitimate defense. He stood up, went out to the side aisle of the nave, and began to take big steps toward the front door; instead of following him, the man in the poncho returned down the central aisle, and pew by pew they walked, tracing parallel lines, while my father was thinking what to do when they ran out of pews. He counted them quickly: six pews, now five, now four.