Evelio Rosero - Feast of the Innocents

And he drank another long swig: half for him, half for the covers.

“You already know what I’ve come for, Don Belencito, you know what I want you to tell me. You couldn’t do it last week because you fell asleep and also because the nurse arrived to wake you up. I took it all in, how could I not? It so happens I am a doctor; as far as I can see, you are not just suffering from boredom, Don Belencito, but why tell you what you’re suffering from again? I’m a contrary doctor: I think the worst thing is to go around repeating such things to patients. But don’t forget, please, what I’m asking you to tell me.”

“I remember, I remember, and you should bring me another little bottle for that, there’s not much of a kick in this one, poor wee thing. Smoke a cigarette, and pass it to me every so often.”

“I don’t smoke, I don’t have any cigarettes.”

“I do. Inside that black shoe, there behind the door, you’ll find cigarettes. Get one out, light it with the candle by the Christ statue, and give me a puff when I tip you the wink, okay?”

Doctor Proceso did as he was told. The shoe was at least fifty years old, full of filterless cigarettes, dried out like the shoe, almost fossilized. And he had not yet finished lighting the cigarette when in came Belencito Jojoa’s third wife, Doña Benigna Villota, fat and spry at her seventy years of age:

“Is that cigarette for you, Doctor? Don’t let him smoke, or he’ll die on us. You’ll see. Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor?”

Had she been eavesdropping on their conversation? Whether she had or not, she left them, after flinging open the window of that shadowy room: a narrow window, which gave onto the front garden; birds could be heard singing in the street. Ever since he was a child, the doctor had been familiar with that single-storey corner house, with a dark garden full of Capulin cherry trees, which reputedly harboured the wailing of ghosts. They also said it was the wailing of Belencito, when he was drunk — whatever the case, he thought, no wailing had been heard for a long time.

It was six o’clock, getting dark.

He passed the cigarette to Belencito, who was madly winking a bright eye: he inhaled vigorously, two, three, six times. The doctor was afraid he would choke, so he sat on the edge of the bed and stretched out his arms as if the old man were already starting to fall and he alone, with a providential lunge, could save him. Nothing happened: Belencito gave back the cigarette and he bent down to put it out on the floor; a guitar lay under the bed, still golden and with all its strings. At last Belencito finished the aguardiente. The last swig was uproarious.

“Who are you?” he said next. “What are you doing sitting on my bed?”

And he fell fast asleep again.

“An opportunistic Belencito,” Matías Serrano interrupted, helping himself to another shot of aguardiente.

They were once again seated in the living room, with Primavera. She had gone to the front door herself to help convince them to come back. What’s more, while she was pleading with the men, she repeated the movement of arranging her bosom beneath her sweater, and did it so fleetingly it seemed to support the conclusion that her earlier gesture had been entirely innocent; and was it really? — the professor wondered, thanking Heaven the bishop had agreed to return to the sofa, followed by the mayor. That would be all we needed, he thought, that we should abandon you, you delicious creature, unruly Primavera, what a face, what a cloud-like breast, oh, what inescapable beauty.

He did not hear Proceso’s talk, he did not manage to pay attention to it: Primavera Pinzón’s every move, position, imposition, sign of approval, grand gesture and display of indifference made it impossible, bedazzling him. It is, he thought, as if I were hearing her and her alone singing me Nariño’s unofficial anthem, “La Guaneña.”

Primavera Pinzón, however, was paying avid attention to the talk. Flushed in the cigar smoke, damp with the heat of the men’s glances, she knew — she felt — that it was not only the professor who was swiftly examining her face, her neck, the erect nipples under her sweater, her rounded knees crossed one over the other, but that all eyes, even the bishop’s, prostrated themselves in suffering at the centre of her, her oracle, in the ardour of the aguardiente.

And, nonetheless, Primavera could only marvel at her husband’s conversation, not recognizing him — and she did not recognize him simply because he had seduced her. She was seduced hearing him recall the details of his visits to Belencito Jojoa, above all that third visit, when even before saying hello the doctor had solemnly warned that he would hand over aguardiente and cigarettes only to the extent that Don Belencito remembered what he had to remember.

“You’re a crafty one,” Belencito had said. “But you’re right. If I drink and smoke I’ll forget about you and sleep. Those are the best dreams when you sleep after drinking, when you go off into a dream right there, just after, you’re a boat floating free, and you dream the strangest things, but it’s lovely, try it, you’ll remember me.”

“Remember about Simón Bolívar, about what you’ve told everyone so many times,” the doctor said.

“Everyone? I don’t remember having told it to everyone, dammit. The thing is that everyone knows everything in Pasto. But me, tell all of them?”

“Alright then, nearly all.”

“In that case why tell it again, if you already know it?”

“I want to hear it from you yourself, Don Belencito, and after that I’ll come back and visit you, just for fun. We’ll talk about whatever we like. I won’t fail to bring you your aguardiente , light your cigarette, and, if you really want, I’ll smuggle in the woman they won’t let you call from the window, really I will, Don Belencito.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Doctor Proceso hurried to admit to his audience that he never did keep his promise.

“A dreadful oversight, an unpardonable mistake,” Primavera said unexpectedly.

“Which I’ll take care to put right one of these days,” the doctor declared immediately. “Begging the pardon of those present.”

This time the bishop did not respond.

That rainy afternoon, Belencito Jojoa, spurred on by the promise, ignoring the recording equipment that was humming on top of the bedside table, asked a question into the air, into space, into the murmur of dark rain among the trees, asked as if asking for forgiveness, and without the doctor understanding the reason he asked it:

“Why bother them?”

And he took up the bottle and drank:

“Anyone from Pasto could talk about the disgracing of Chepita del Carmen, an ancestor of my family, when Bolívar passed through here,” he said, and drank. “Walk over every inch of Nariño province — do it on foot, if you can, if you’ve got the strength to crack the mountains — there are signs all over the place: ‘Bolívar was here,’ ‘Bolívar slept here,’ ‘he woke up here,’ ‘he took a step here,’ ‘he retreated here,’ ‘he retreated some more here,’ ‘he carried on retreating here.’ If there’s a stone that says ‘Bolívar wept here’ there must also be one in every place where we remember he lay down here, he got up here, he spoke here, he shut up here, he shat here, he pissed here, but with fright, he was here and he was not here, what a goddamned prick, on our house they could also put Simón Bolívar stole Chepita del Carmen Santacruz here, and he brought her back here, pregnant.”

He drank some more.

“That bastard ended up victorious, right? It was tough for him, it seems, but he won; he entered Pasto, where the family of the man you see before you, a very humble carpenter, was then among the most powerful, they were people who read more than you do, señor , and you’re a doctor, one of those clever doctors who helps people live longer; it’s very obvious that you’re interested in my story, not all doctors are contrary, as you say you are, and give their patients aguardiente , cigarettes and a woman, do they? That’s why you deserve to hear me tell it, for being like the Devil. Why not bring a full bottle instead of a quarter? Oh, but you’re going to get me a woman, aren’t you? Past eighty, the only beautiful woman we’ll be able to get will be a whore; make her dress up as a nurse, that’s the only way they’ll let her in, and we three will have to shut ourselves in, Doctor, nurse and future corpse, and double-lock the door and shut the window and swear to me on your mother’s grave that you’ll shut your eyes too.”