Evelio Rosero - Feast of the Innocents

The shot rang out and a flock of pigeons flew up over the wheat fields.

They fled with the float, they fled.

When General Lorenzo Aipe found out, he did not order the reprisal his men were expecting: this time he would not play cat and mouse; he would wait until the carriage materialized and impound it immediately, “They’ll have to appear sooner or later,” he said, and ordered the official starting point of the floats to be monitored, as well as the route, in case they had to intercept it. He was worrying needlessly, because after that morning Bolívar’s carriage vanished; nothing more was ever heard of it: few early risers saw it cross Pasto, wrapped in canvas, and go up the highway to Lake Cocha. And in that jungle chasm, in the solitude of the plains, the makers hid it — in a cave? — underground, they say, waiting for next year’s carnival.

EVELIO ROSERO is the author of seven novels and two collections of short stories. In Colombia his work has been recognized by the National Literature Award. He won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Tusquets International Novel Prize for The Armies .

ANNE McLEAN is a translator of Latin American and Spanish literature by authors including Julio Cortázar, Javier Cercas and Enrique Vila-Matas. Her translation of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Sound of Things Falling won the 2014 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.

ANNA MILSOM is an academic and translator currently living in Ecuador. This is her second co-translation with Anne MacLean.