Evelio Rosero - Feast of the Innocents

“It’s carnival,” the doctor said.

Sarasti let out a deep sigh, as if she agreed.

“And in any case, pick up your things from the street, put your shoes on while you’re there. See? No problem.”

Sarasti finished dressing as well as she could, arranged her hair. She looked distressed, and was trembling so much the doctor felt sorry for her: after all, she was the only one who did not drink a single drop to relax; they had operated on her without anaesthetic. They opened the bedroom door: no-one. They went down the stairs; the doctor went first, naked, on the lookout for further surprises: Primavera might hurl herself at him, fingernails at his eyes, as had happened once before.

To Sarasti’s relief, they found no sign of Primavera. Complete silence. But once at the front door they heard her sibylline voice anew:

“My clothes don’t suit you, señora. You could hardly squeeze into my dress. In general, they say, thick calves mean a big bum.”

“Primavera,” the doctor said.

“And you, Doctor Donkey, you should see how you wobble along, with all that belly of yours. But no cow-fat mattress would have borne you better than she did.”

“She’s plump, but a real woman,” the doctor said. It seemed incredible to him to be having such a conversation, and yet, it was true: there he was arguing over these details with two women. He gave way to laughter, albeit brief, bitter, like he was crying. And he concluded: “Every inch a woman.”

“Watch out, little Alcira,” Primavera went on, undaunted, “if your blessed husband sees you arriving without shoes he’ll go into orbit.”

“Oh, don’t you worry,” Alcira Sarasti said, startling them with her cathedral voice. “He’s not there. He won’t even notice. He doesn’t want me, not like Doctor Justo Pastor wanted me here in his bed, God bless him.”

And she left.

There they remained, frozen, looking into one another’s eyes, Primavera Pinzón and her naked husband, the church voice still exerting its hold over them.

And the doctor had already embarked on his retreat to the consulting room, crossing the living room naked, when Primavera came towards him, tottering, bewildered, and knelt down, circling him with her arms, pressing her cheek to his sex, as if recognizing him for the first time. He put his hand on her hair and stroked it; she jumped as if she had been shot, leapt backwards:

“Don’t touch me.”

She really was drunk, worse than the widow Chila Chávez, worse than the student Puelles, worse than me, the doctor thought. He listened to her like he would a sleepwalker:

“Don’t touch me. I only wanted to tease the hypocrite. To see how she cried, I bet she was praying. Did you hear how she said goodbye? You think it’s funny? She pulled up her skirt at last, the holy little whore.”

The doctor kept quiet. He still felt wrapped in his wife’s ill-timed embrace. Primavera turned him upside down, pushed him to the point of insanity: he would never understand her, or only after death, he thought, when I kill her, if I kill her, best have another aguardiente and the sooner the better, go and sleep in the consulting room. Do I hate her? But what shamelessness, he thought — hating her — you come and humiliate me because of Sarasti, yet you open up your hidey-hole to generals and labourers even in your dreams; ah, but what a beautiful rosy bum you have, Primavera, after all is said and done any of your lovers would envy me, I worship you.

Primavera observed him, scrutinizing him; she did not manage to guess everything that was going through his mind. How could she?

It’s very late for everything that might happen between us, the doctor carried on thinking: we’ll never get back to what possibly never existed in the first place. But Mandarina would bring him back to life, this Black Day, black Mandarina would appear like the explanation of his life, a black solution, the blackest, and yet, a solution. No: the solution was in front of him, in Primavera’s living flesh, he thought, in your eyes my darling, looking at me with love; he imagined her once more on her knees, embracing him, and now all he wanted was to fold her in his arms, do anything for a kiss, get her pregnant for the third time, multiply her; if they were both on board they would achieve it, he thought.

“Where did you leave the girls?” he asked as a show of concern, a truce.

“In their beds,” she barked, and her voice descended into bitterness, “where they should be. I had to sleep with Floridita, your frightened daughter. Neither they nor I ever want to see you again, I want a divorce.”

The doctor, who was coming to embrace her, stopped in his tracks; he pulled himself up to his full height; suddenly his face was stony, unfamiliar.

“It’ll be after the sixth,” he said.

Seeing him like that, as if teetering on the brink of rage, she thought he might take her by the arm again, open the front door, throw her out and close it. He was capable of it. Suddenly she thought he could kill her, above all he was capable of that, she believed she had discovered he actually wanted to kill her, and the dreadful thing about it all was that, right at that moment, sorry for everything she herself had done, she would have liked him to, she did not care, at the very least she would have liked him to throw her out on the street, pushing and shoving, so she could roar, laughing, “kill me if you want to,” but suddenly she thought she would have preferred him to rape her, best of all would be if he raped her first and then killed her, but he would do nothing of the sort; when would you ever be capable of killing me, Doctor Donkey? — she wondered pityingly — pity for him, that he did not kill her, pity for herself that she wanted him to.

And she heard him say wearily:

“We’re not going to spoil the carnival with a divorce. Nobody would take any notice of us anyway.”

They looked at each other one last time before parting. But not as if sizing up their respective strengths: only with a sort of sadness; in the end, nothing they wished for had come to pass.

A dream woke him: he knew he was the only passenger on a train, and he knew it painfully, certain of his own loneliness. The landscape that flashed quickly past the window was lonely too: a single tree repeated itself ad infinitum on the horizon, the same tree bereft of leaves, dry, grey. But two more passengers arrived. Two passengers who blew his loneliness clean away with their impossible presence: he not only felt saved but freed from loneliness for ever. The passengers were a man and a woman, all in black, with black suitcases, and they sat down opposite him without saying anything; the woman’s knees were almost touching his. The man had his eyes shut as if he had been sleeping for ages: despite the closed eyes he recognized his father’s unmistakeable grey gaze, looking at him, and he discovered the woman at the man’s side was his mother, also looking at him. And the limitless loneliness returned because he remembered at once they were both dead (in the dream and in real life). Astonished, he asked: “What are you doing here, if you’re dead?” and his mother turned to face him, as natural as could be, almost as if she were congratulating him: “You are too.”

He had not slept more than three hours; it was nine o’clock in the morning, Thursday, January 5, Black Day. He remembered his clothes had been thrown out of the window in the early hours of that day, but he also remembered his consulting room was a bedroom too, ever since things had started to go wrong in his marriage: he had bedclothes and pillows. He took a change of clothing from a drawer and got dressed, trying to make as much noise as possible to kill the lonely silence crushing him — and it was the same silence as in his dream. The consulting room’s calendar clock sounded loud: the silence intensifying around its tick-tock. He touched his eight-day beard, and was grateful to hear Genoveva Sinfín’s voice on the other side of the door: