Evelio Rosero - Feast of the Innocents

“Let fate decide,” she replied. “My husband can choose with his eyes closed.” And she smiled wearily.

“It’s very simple,” the doctor said, turning to Primavera. “I can’t find the tapes.”

She held his gaze steadily:

“Are you sure?”

The doctor returned the tape recorder to its drawer. He closed the rest one by one, unhurriedly; he went back to his chair and sat down, breathing heavily, without a word — Polina Agrado had already died, he thought, Belencito Jojoa did not leave his bed; he would die soon; it was impossible to get those voices again. He had the recordings transcribed onto paper, but paper was not the same as the voices, the recording of their sufferings, their real turmoil, their bitterness and jokes, their weaving in and out through memory.

Amid the uneasiness, they heard him clear his throat.

“I’ll soon find them,” he said. “Whatever happens, I’ve got them in my notebooks.”

But it pained him to see — was he sure that he saw? — a cruel smile on Primavera’s red mouth. It’s perfectly possible, he thought. And also perfectly possible that the paper transcripts no longer existed either, that they had made them disappear. Was it really likely, he asked himself, and asked again, aghast. He did not believe Primavera had any regard what-soever for Simón Bolívar, nothing would be falser; this was all against him, against his nights of work, his zeal, it was against him alone that Primavera conspired.

But, he wondered, disconcerted, what about General Lorenzo Aipe?

He remembered the robbery the sculptor Arbeláez had undergone. He remembered that the night before, on Thursday, December 29, he had been out of the house until midnight, first with Cangrejito, then with the maestros Abril and Umbría, and that he had not slept with Primavera: he found the bedroom door locked; he had to resort to the couch in his consulting room, the same one where he had ‘operated’ on General Aipe. He carried on sleeping on the divan that Friday morning, and breakfasted there alone, as Primavera and the girls disappeared without saying goodbye, and there in the afternoon he treated an older woman with a tricky pregnancy, and there too he lay to reread the poems of Aurelio Arturo, which had the power to calm him, while his guests were arriving.

He felt panicky.

Was it possible they had stolen the recordings, his documents?

He pulled himself together as well as he could. He showed not one iota of fear as he said:

“I also have the conversations memorized, from beginning to end, with expressions and everything. If you like, I’ll recite them.”

But, notwithstanding, to his surprise, the guests were already beginning to get to their feet and say goodbye. Did no-one want to listen?

“Another day,” the bishop said.

They were leaving, apparently scandalized. They were leaving.

Why?

None of the company could imagine what Doctor Proceso went through in that moment, trailing behind them.

“What’s the matter?” they heard him say.

Polina Agrado and Belencito Jojoa’s testimonies amounted to the most valuable part of his research, how come they were not paying any attention? This is what he was asking himself as he followed them to the front door. At last he caught up with them:

“I’m not going to let you leave, señores .”

His wife stayed behind; she had not got up from her seat of honour in the living room.

In fact, she was the sole cause of the stampede: inadvertently, or on purpose, she had for one implausible moment rearranged her bosoms beneath her sweater, and she did it in such a way that one flawless breast seemed to light up the audience for a second, starting with the bishop, who was the first to get up, blinded, like one who sees hell and flees at the very sight, and then the other guests, who were also dazzled, but accompanied the bishop in his flight — as a moral duty — going against their innermost desire to stay and find out whether it was the natural gesture of a woman who carelessly rearranges her bosom beneath her sweater in public, or a red-hot gesture, fascinatingly frivolous, but deliberate which mocked not just her husband, but all the men in the world, including the Bishop of Pasto.

Like everyone else in Pasto, Doctor Proceso knew that Belencito Jojoa, elderly resident of the San José Obrero neighbourhood, was in possession of a Bolívar memory — a memory that touched the old man’s soul because it had to do with his family.

The doctor knew the memory, all of Pasto knew it, but he needed to hear it from the lips of Belencito Jojoa himself: for months he tried to get an interview and finally Belencito received him, sitting up in the cedar bed he himself had made — he was a carpenter — a large bed, and larger still for Belencito, shrivelled and yellow and creased like parchment, a bed he had not left in three years, he said, because of illness, without specifying which illness it was, and when the doctor asked, in case he could help, Belencito answered that it was the worst, señor , boredom:

“Hell is boredom, señor .”

He belched and, as if to make amends, crossed himself.

“I’m bored while dying, don’t you think that’s depressing? Somebody should distract me, a woman, there are plenty of them out there in the world, but they won’t let me look for one, or even shout out the window to call one over.”

He said his third wife did not sleep with him:

“She’s just a helper, a helper who sleeps elsewhere.”

And then — in spite of his self-absorption — he let out an almighty fart while saying:

“That’s the problem. If she slept with me like she did years ago as well as helping me, a different cock would crow: one can be very old, but still fancy a tickle, or to be tickled.”

And he began to laugh, horribly toothless:

“Before, she used to help me so much. Suffice to say we had six children, which added to the eleven and the ten from my other two wives makes twenty-seven. I’ve buried seven of them, and I have forty-six grandchildren and how many great-grandchildren? I no longer know, and I don’t care either. Why bother to find out? What if I were to set about summoning up all the women I’ve had who disappeared as soon as they appeared? It would be a century of children, señor , but one thing’s for sure: my women wanted to sleep with me, I didn’t make them; grown women, not little girls still wet behind the ears, I never forced them to embrace me. But who are you? You should bring me a little quarter-bottle of aguardiente next time you visit, señor .”

He closed his eyes and fell asleep. Or was he pretending?

On his second visit the doctor took with him, hidden away, the small bottle of aguardiente that Belencito Jojoa had suggested. Facing the bed, seated on a chilly wooden chair, the doctor waited for three or five children, morose and famished-looking, to leave them; they were some of Belencito’s grandchildren and seemed older than their grandfather; only once they left did he proffer the bottle.

“Thank you,” Belencito said in surprise. “Did I ask for this in a dream? Must have done.”

He drank shakily: much of the mouthful ran down his chest onto the covers.

“Your wife’s going to notice,” the doctor said. “This will smell of aguardiente —what if you die on us, Don Belencito?”

“There isn’t a man alive, no matter how old, who doesn’t believe he’ll live to see another day: I heard that here, in Pasto, long before the one who said it told me. I’ll make the effort not to die and tell you what you’re after. You’ve been a friend to bring me this elixir of life, God’s blood; if I got past eighty and am on my way to ninety it’s thanks to this stuff, my secret for putting up with the stupidity of men, the pain of toothache and the woman who suddenly stopped loving, without warning.”