Evelio Rosero - Feast of the Innocents

Thinking about it today, I imagine my ancestor did not know whether precisely that fact — that it was Bolívar and not some other chance assassin — was better for them or worse. “Worse,” she should have yelled, “it’s worse.” Or would it help them? In spite of herself, she would still wonder that, and hate herself for thinking it. “Worse, worse,” she had to tell herself, “everything’s worse with this horrible Zambo son-of-a-bitch.”

“Tell him, by God, tell him to come for her himself,” Hilaria Ocampo said to the fixer, with a sort of happy amazement. Would she kneel down? She spoke as if she were in church, the fixer thought, and rightly so: anyone would think Hilaria Ocampo had waited for that proposition her whole life and had anticipated having to answer “tell him to come for her himself.”

“That cannot be,” the fixer said.

He was unnerved by that peculiar hindrance, this request which was not really an impediment: you could even interpret it as a genuine entreaty, an invitation. What to do? He smiled for the first time in years. After all, they were asking an elegant favour of him. Not gold. Not offices. Not passports. Not recommendations. This woman was simply requesting the pleasure of the Liberator’s presence. Was this for real? He must tread carefully. It was true that he had a sweet-voiced old lady in front of him, but she was a dark horse, he thought. Her stature, her conviction, the intensity of her gaze — these things disconcerted him, and not just him, his soldiers too, who still, he was embarrassed to see, pointed their rifles at her chest, the idiots, but immediately he felt sorry for them: they were bewildered like him, and not one of them knew why. The smell? There was something about this gigantic old woman: the penetrating eyes, lips clamped shut, the two enormous hands hanging open, as if she would be prepared to kill and die at any moment.

With a gesture, the fixer made the soldiers lower their rifles:

“Do you know what you’re asking of me?”

“That the Liberator come and get her.”

“Impossible.”

“I will have to bathe her and dress her,” the grandmother said, “I will have to fix her up as she should be fixed up.” And then, harshly: “I will have to instruct her, as is right and proper. Go, and bring him back with you.”

No-one responded.

She raised her hands in the air:

“We’re talking about His Excellency the Liberator here. He deserves every consideration.”

The four soldiers exchanged a look of alarm. The fixer retreated, almost overpowered.

“Tell him, by God, tell him to come. It will be an honour for this humble woman to receive him and personally hand over her only granddaughter; he’s doing me a kindness, I know His Excellency will look after her, help her.”

Of course he was not going to come back with His Excellency, thought the fixer. But he acquiesced. Now he knew what the old lady was after. He had uncovered it at last among her final words: “look after” and “help.” He would return with the offering, the payment, the gold: that was all the old woman was asking, what her good common sense was demanding. He had been wrong about her.

“Yes,” he said, “the Liberator will come, why not?”

And he left two watchmen posted on the door.

“What is certain, definitively so, was that news of Fátima had also reached the Liberator’s ears.”

“That’s never been proved.”

“It has.”

“It’s never been proved that Bolívar had heard from anyone but the fixer.”

“He did hear, and long before the fixer told him. He knew about Fátima’s extraordinary beauty when he dismounted in the middle of the main square, and got straight back on his horse again. ‘Where is she?’ they say he said.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“There is some discussion over whether or not the Liberator knew, from earlier on, about the dove living in Pasto, the dove his diligent fixer was already preparing for him. How can any of the possibilities be proved? Maybe the Liberator didn’t know. Maybe he did, and later, extremely gratified to hear about the grandmother’s impassioned plea, went along with the fixer.”

“According to Doña Polina, the Liberator arrived minutes after the fixer. First came the fixer, with a little chest of gold, white robes and food. Then the Liberator, Simón Bolívar. Nobody knows if they reached an agreement between them.”

“When the fixer got back to Hilaria Ocampo’s house, the reports the watchmen gave him were almost normal: they’d seen the old woman leave the house with the girl, and followed them. The two women went to the wash house, at the back of the dwelling, and they’d followed. They’d seen the old woman undress the girl, soap her, scrub her, and rinse her over and over in front of them, as if they did not exist, and as if that would never matter to them, nor to the old woman or to the girl. The fixer could not get over his astonishment: you saw the girl naked? We saw her, señor: fit for His Excellency .

“And they saw them enter the house and bolt the door: that’s where they were, señor, inside, there was no way they could escape .

“They waited another moment in the dreadful silence, because all of a sudden nobody dared bang on the door. But time, for the women, ran out, and they knocked. The door did not open. Their eyes ached, glued to the door; the door did not open. The frightening thing was that they felt other eyes, the old woman’s eyes, coming at them from deep inside the walls of the house, spying on them. Then the gallop of approaching horses was heard. The Liberator dismounted.”

“It’s not known for sure whether Bolívar dismounted. They say he waited on horseback, and that what happened there took place with the Liberator up on his white horse.”

“He dismounted: ‘Let them bring her out,’ the Liberator said.”

“That voice, like a bird’s, could only be Bolívar’s.

“There was the Liberator, halfway up the stone path that led to the door: hands on hips; chin up; eyes ‘like a hawk,’ as his chroniclers describe him. The fixer stepped aside, discreet but wary. Bolívar’s voice was enough; it was not necessary to knock on the door again, it opened in an instant. And the burly widow Hilaria Ocampo appeared before the Liberator, the same woman who had crossed the Cariaco ravine under enemy fire on the Sunday of Bomboná and had climbed the hill, defeating him — the same woman. Only now she carried no weapon other than a girl. She held her up in just one arm: dressed in white, Fátima’s long black hair dripped water over her shoulders.”

“Here you are, Liberator,” Hilaria Ocampo said, and she offered her up.

It’s not me, Polina Agrado, telling you this. The soldier Fabricio Urdaneta tells it, the barber-soldier who was actually there, born in Riohacha and raised in Ocaña; he would stay on to live in Pasto, with the passing of the years; in Pasto he would have children; in Pasto he would die, of old age; I heard him tell the tale myself, as a girl. He told it, the first record of the story passed by word of mouth, and you, Doctor, you tell me whether or not it’s true, he told us that the Liberator came up to receive Fátima “without a doubt in his mind,” and that he held out both arms “without hesitation,” he went to receive her “even rather impatiently,” and they saw him lean in and then take a sudden step backwards and stride rapidly in the direction of his horse, ashen-faced: “Christ,” they were able to hear him say, “she’s dead.”

And he told us that Bolívar set upon a tree, kicking it, and that afterwards he knelt behind that same tree and started to vomit. Fabricio Urdaneta, barber-soldier, says he does not know how it was he didn’t have them shot. The whole lot of them.