Horacio Castellanos Moya - Dance With Snakes

Ms. Cuevas asks her if the President is still in his office with the ministers. She says yes, they’re waiting for a commando unit to escort them out.

“Oh God, I hope they haven’t got in,” says Víctor, who ran upstairs with the employees in all the confusion.

“Everyone go down to the basement!” the Colonel orders from the bottom of the staircase. “You’ll be safe there while they search the gardens and evacuate the President!”

The staff members look at one another, fearful and indecisive.

“None of the snakes has got in! It was a false alarm!” shouts the colonel, trying to calm them down.

The office door opens, the Commissioner comes out and hurries down the stairs. Rita runs after him as if she’s suddenly forgotten about the snakes.

“Who’s responsible for this attack?”

But the President’s entourage is following right behind them.

She moves to the side.

A Special Forces unit has split into two lines on the lawn for the President and his men to hurry between.

The helicopter’s engine is on.

As soon as the cabinet ministers are aboard, it takes off.

Colonel Martínez leaves the lawn and orders the commando unit to comb the gardens.

Rita leans on the doorjamb. Surely the reptiles are coiled on some nearby garden path, but will they attack now that the president has left the building and a military commando unit armed with flamethrowers has taken up the search?

The employees have cautiously returned to the ground floor. Few of them go back to work, most are standing around the windows and the front entrance, curious and whispering, waiting for the slightest sign that they should run down to the basement.

Rita again tries to turn on her walkie-talkie, but the frequency is still jammed.

Víctor asks her what they should do now.

“Let’s wait here a little while,” she says, biting her nails.

Ms. Cuevas walks up beside her.

“Do you think they’ll call a state of emergency?” Rita asks.

She doesn’t know, this kind of situation is unheardof; there are a ton of different accounts of what’s happened and the president is extremely nervous. This crisis could paralyze the whole country.

The Special Forces unit has combed through even the most secluded parts of the gardens, and hasn’t found any trace of the snakes. A calm begins to spread inside the building.

“I’ve got to get back to the office,” Rita says, but she still doesn’t feel brave enough to cross the lawn and head for the parking lot, even though the entire area is teeming with men in uniform armed with high-powered weapons.

She wonders why the Chevrolet didn’t take the opportunity to follow her into the Presidential Palace. What stopped it? Maybe it was just a reconnaissance mission. She’s in Ms. Cuevas’s office now, drinking a Coke, thinking she won’t write an article, but rather a first-person account of the events, a testimonial that’ll make her colleagues drool with envy. A piece that will expose the effects of the snake attacks on the country’s political leadership. Assistant Press Secretary Cuevas tells her to be cautious, moderate, and not to put the President in an awkward position. He’s having enough trouble dealing with this crisis and doesn’t deserve to have his image further damaged. Matías will disagree completely: he’ll push her to write an article exposing the panic and chaos that’s spreading so rapidly among the political leadership that the President doesn’t even feel safe in the Presidential Palace.

She turns on the walkie-talkie. The frequency is clear. She tells Matías about spotting the yellow Chevrolet, about the chaos in the building, the cancellation of the emergency cabinet meeting, and the evacuation of the President and his ministers by helicopter.

“Do you know where they went?’ Matías asks.

No idea. Maybe to Police Headquarters or the National Defence Building, she speculates.

He tells her to try and find out the President’s whereabouts and get back to the office.

She leaves the Assistant Press Secretary’s office and looks for Colonel Martínez. She finds him on the lawn, talking with two Special Forces lieutenants. The colonel claims not to know where the helicopter went.

Rita calls Víctor and tells him to bring the Volkswagen around. The search has been called off and they’re authorized to leave the premises. They drive through the front gates at ten after eleven. There are groups of reporters outside waiting, proof that word of a possible snake attack at the Presidential Palace has filtered out to the city’s news outlets. She waves to them without stopping. The heat outside is oppressive and sticky, as if there’s an afternoon storm brewing. They drive in silence, exhausted by the morning’s bizarre events, falling into the relaxed state that follows extreme stress.

“It’s too bad there weren’t any photographers there,” she murmurs when they get to the office.

Her colleagues question her as she walks by, hungry for details, but before she can tell them anything, she has to report to Matías. She hangs her jacket over the back of her chair, takes a quick trip to the washroom, and goes into the boss’s office.

Arturo sent the good news from Police Headquarters. They found the old, yellow, American car that drove past the Presidential Palace, but it was a Ford, not a Chevrolet, and the driver was a respectable engineer as terrified of snakes and reptiles as anyone else.

Rita falls back on a chair.

“It can’t be,” she says.

Matías’s breath has gotten considerably worse, as if he’s spent the last hour shoving coffee and cigarettes in his mouth.

“At least you created a story for yourself,” he says. “Not all reporters can do that.”

She lets out a nervous giggle and bites her nails. What will her colleagues think of her? What will the officials at the Presidential Palace say when they find out?

Matías tells her she’s got two jobs to do: write an article as quickly as possible about the disturbance at the Presidential Palace, placing a special emphasis on how the President fled, then finish up her in-depth report.

Rita goes back to her desk, calls Roger to explain what happened and to tell him it’ll be impossible for them to have dinner together. She turns on her computer and starts writing, just like that, with no outline. She already knows what she wants to say and if she stops to think about it, she might get stuck.

But she finds it impossible to write the article in first person, to confess how terrified she was after she saw the wrong yellow car, to explain the chaos she caused in the building. The two pages she’s written scarcely explain the details of the President’s evacuation.

She prints it out, rereads it and walks over to Matías’s office.

“This is no good,” he says, throwing the paper on the desk. He uses the butt of his cigarette to light another. “I asked you for a first-person account, something about your own experience, something with colour, something strong, not a press release.”

Rita is standing in front of the desk. She feels an unbearable urge to pee.

“But I can’t write that I caused all that commotion because I thought it was the car with the snakes,” she stammers.

“Why not? That’s what you have to write!” Matías shouts. “You say you were going inside to cover the emergency cabinet meeting when you saw an old yellow car. You told the chief of security and that’s when the ruckus started! Stop pussyfooting around! This is garbage!” he says, pointing at the paper. “You didn’t even need to be there to write that!”

She doesn’t answer. Red-faced and gritting her teeth, she leaves. Who does that foul-breathed, bald-headed fool think he is, screaming at her like that? He wants to make her look ridiculous, to burn her, to get an exclusive at her expense.