Feast of the Innocents

1

Help me to raise the ghost of Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, to unearth the memory of his daughters, from the day the youngest turned seven and the eldest was deflowered in the finca stables, up to the day of the doctor’s death, kicked by a donkey in the middle of the street, but speak to me too of the straying of his wife, Primavera Pinzón, sing of her unsuspected love, give me strength to seek out the exact dreadful day the doctor disguised himself as an ape, by way of an inaugural joke, resolved to surprise his wife with the first fright of the Black and White Carnival. What day was it? Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, day of practical jokes, day of water and purifying baths, December 28, 1966, six in the morning, a fine mist still refusing to abandon the doors and windows of the houses, wrapping itself like white fingers around the willow trees that marked out the street corners; every soul slept, except the doctor’s — pacing about his spacious consulting room, trying on a realistic ape costume he had ordered to be sent in secret from a famous shop in Canada: he had already donned the part of the ape corresponding to legs and trunk, his arms swelled with muscles and fur, coarse fur, authentic orangutan, and he had still to put on the enormous hairy head he clasped hesitantly against his heart.

With the ape head in his hands he went to look at himself in the mirror of the guest bathroom, on the ground floor of his three-storey house, but instead of confronting his yellow, fifty-year-old face once more in the mirror he preferred to cram it straight into the velvety interior of the black ape head, and what he encountered made him almost happy, on perceiving a perfect ape, the reddened eyes — a ruddy gauze covered the eyeholes, so that the doctor’s eyes seemed reddened by rage and he saw everything as if through red clouds — and he was further seduced by the ape teeth that protruded, excessively and dangerously pointed, and then the coat again, which could even be called genuine gorilla fur; he even thought he caught a lingering whiff of ape, and that smelly certainty, of male ape, made him sweat with all the dejection of a male human; he said “hello,” and a mechanism in the ape’s throat immediately transformed the greeting, distorted it, made it sound guttural, a simian grumbling or threat, something like hom-hom, which alarmed the doctor for a second, believing there was perhaps a real ape in his house, or inside himself — could be, he thought, ashamed.

He was not used to playing jokes like this. In fact, he did not joke with anyone or about anything in that city of his which was one perpetual prank, where his forebears had lived and died laughing at themselves, in that country of his which was yet another atrocious joke, but a joke all the same, his city parcelled up between hundreds of great and small pranks that inhabitants suffered on a daily basis, whether they liked it or not, naive jokes and obscene ones, lewd jokes and wry ones, the now-slumbering inhabitants who perhaps at this very moment were waking in their beds dismayed to be facing not just the joke of life, but the pranks of Innocents’ Day, especially the soakings, when everyone in Pasto was free to douse neighbour, friend and enemy with a bucket of cold water, a hosepipe or water bombs — the hard balloons thrown head-on or from behind, with or without the target’s consent — and the other jokes too, accepted with resignation, the tricks and awful pranks to which they all would be subjected, from the wisest to the most ingenuous, young and old, as prelude to the Black and White Carnival.

One December 28, Alcira Sarasti, wife of his neighbour Arcángel de los Ríos, invited him to an Innocents’ Day feast at her house and served some surprise empanaditas, filled with cotton wool, which he ate, the only innocent fool, greedily gullible, unlike the rest of the guests, later suffering from an excruciating stomach ache the entire night, what poison was that cotton wool soaked in? An emetic? An astringent? Homemade cyanide? The pious Alcira Sarasti had dreamed up that mockery made to measure and just for him — he was a tall and dignified man, but podgy and self-important as a piglet, his prominent belly betraying what could otherwise very well be an attractive fifty-year-old body; no doubt about it, that pious woman has hated me ever since I said God was another of man’s bad inventions, he thought.

Frankly, he loathed pranks and pranksters, or was he afraid of them? He considered them peculiar beings who came along to disturb the peace; in general they were men and women who displayed some perfidious facial tic: a half-closed eye, for example, at the precise moment of the prank — or the jeer, which is the same thing, there is no prank without jeering for these unimaginative people, he thought — they were men and women who must have undergone some trauma in childhood, marked out by a certain savage furrowing of the brow, that narrowing of the eyes, the tongue moistening the sibylline lips, the suitably malign voice, because pranks fly close to slander, the wind laden with accusatory lies, a prank — or the jeering in it — could turn out to be more merciless than a shock, any shock was preferable to any prank, he thought. Yet, nevertheless, months earlier he too had started to plot his prank, the ape joke, just like everyone else in Pasto, because each person planned their prank during the year to put into practice on December 28, and then to perform in all its variations over the days of the carnival, January 4, 5 and 6, to keep it up, show it off, recreate it in the frenzy of fun, talcum powder and streamers, monumental floats, rivers of aguardiente and loves, both known and unknown, of the Black and White Carnival.

The simple prank of the simple ape exalted him to the point of freeing him to imagine himself an authentic, terrifying ape, in the early hours of that December 28, waking his wife and two daughters with his black presence and enraged eyes and simian leaps, frightening them out of bed one after another, ending up chasing them all over the house, trampling furniture and toppling ornaments and throwing the order of things into chaos as only an ape can do, exactly as he would never have done had he not found himself disguised as one, scaring the two girls possibly to the point of tears — I couldn’t help it, Floridita and Luz de Luna, forgive me — and then, in the intimacy of the master bedroom, when everything signals the end of the prank and he makes as if to remove his costume, taking his wife, but taking her by force, the sweetest force, something that had not happened in years; standing before the mirror, Doctor Proceso was once again startled at himself, at the idea, the spectacle of envisaging himself on top of his own wife, disguised as an ape, struggling to subdue her by sweet force — what sweet force? — that sweet force had long since disappeared and he wondered whether it might have been better to have drunk a double shot of aguardiente well beforehand, in order to embark on this absurd, truly idiotic prank, which even included conjugal rape, he was out of his mind — what was the matter with him? — he and his wife had nothing to do with one another, either in bed or out of it, on earth or in heaven: the most excruciating boredom, heavy with hatred, had hovered over them for ages. Thinking of that, in front of the mirror, he beat his chest as apes tend to do out of aggression, but he did it so slowly and pitifully that the ape in the mirror looked funny and then sad, he thought, a shit-scared ape.

But the ape rallied, now imagining leaving his house to ingratiate himself with the world, via the shock of his joke, embracing people he did not usually acknowledge, not through silly pride, but because he had forgotten about the world since — recently graduated from medical school, at twenty-five years of age — he had resolved to use his spare time to write the definitive and genuine biography of the never-so-misnamed, so-called Liberator Simón Bolívar.

He had already turned fifty and the biography was not finished, would he die in the attempt? This ingenious prank that would make him friends with the world was indispensable — and, in passing, it would fire him with the enthusiasm to complete The Great Lie: Bolívar or the So-Called Liberator—he would go, for example, dressed as an ape to say hello to Arcángel de los Ríos, his neighbour and chess rival, prosperous dairy producer, one of the richest men in Pasto, “Don Furibundo Pita” they nicknamed him for his furious honking of his car horn, a quarrelsome drunk, but a good man when in his right mind — weren’t they close friends in their youth? — he would walk into houses with open doors and knock on closed doors and poke his ape’s face in through windows, chase women and girls and old ladies, make cats bristle, confront dogs, definitively concoct the story of an impeccable prank in Pasto, a city whose very history was forged from pranks, military or political or social pranks, bedroom or street pranks, as light as feathers or as thumping as elephants, his own would pass through, intimidating martyrs for just a fleeting moment, but a moment of particular shivery fright — is it really an ape escaped from some circus and might it kill me, they would think, didn’t a lorry full of bulls overturn one day and the angriest one charge forward, all set to gouge a notary’s door, which opened at that precise moment with Jesús Vaca right in the way, the old secretary who used to wear a hat and would have retired in three days’ time and of whom nothing was left, not even the hat? Yes, like the furious bull, a gorilla was possible in this life, just around the corner, more than one person would be terrified, sorrowful like a child facing a bloody end at the hands of an older ancestral brother.

And thus, terrorizing citizens in the streets, he would trace his famous route to the chilly centre of Pasto, to the lofty doors of the cathedral, and kneel down and pray before them as only a trained ape is in the habit of doing, convinced by the word of God, repentant, astonishing the faithful, shocking the priests, because not even the Bishop of Pasto — Monsignor Pedro Nel Montúfar, better known as “Obispo Avispa” or “the Wasp,” friend and fellow pupil from childhood — would be excluded from the joke, he would visit him in his palace, pester him, assault him and, if they let him get inside the Governor’s Palace dressed as an ape, he would annoy Governor Nino Cántaro too, another fellow pupil from primary school, but never a friend, top of the class, “the Toad,” it would be splendid to chase him down the corridors of power, but the soldiers who guard the governor’s residence would not allow it, quite likely one of those idiots would take the fact of a crazed ape on the streets of Pasto at face value and shoot not once, but three or five times, to be sure the church-going ape who dared to kneel would not be left alive.

No: a rebel ape would be unsafe; it was risky to attack the government in fancy dress.

He would settle for just being the immortal ape kneeling before the cathedral doors, and that is where the high point, the crowning moment of the prank, would take place: he would remove the ape head, revealing himself to posterity with his real face, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, eminent gynaecologist, receiver of life, secret historian; “It’s Doctor Proceso,” eyewitnesses would cry, “disguised as a gorilla,” and they would say, “the worthy gynaecologist frightened almost everyone, his humour’s not just black, it’s multicoloured, he has a gift for it, he scandalized Monsignor Montúfar, he’s one of our own,” and as in a fairy tale, his prank would turn him into a beloved citizen for ever, the unforgettable ape praying on its knees at the cathedral doors, a parable with many possible interpretations, he thought, the docility of the wild beast before God’s goodness, the violent creature bowing down before celestial authority, the ape, ancestor of the human race, prostrated at God’s doors, an example for that same human race, ever more idiotic, to follow, God, God.

God.

But such a prostration — the doctor foresaw — a chimp praying at God’s doors, would be considered a serious case of ungodliness by many, a blow to Catholicism, a despicable joke that had to be penalized not only with an impossibly high fine, but also excommunication and a dressing-down from a committee of the representatives of decency — no matter, he concluded, the wisdom of the prank would ultimately prevail over the boorishness of the tricked, the news of his disguise would appear on the front page of Pasto’s only newspaper, skilfully interpreted under the byline of the wise Arcaín Chivo, philologist, sociologist and palaeontologist — another of his old friends — better known as “the Philanthropist,” former holder of a professorship in history at the university and holder of another in a subject which he himself dubbed “Animal Philosophy,” with fundamental irony. A photograph of the doctor dressed up as an ape, or one of the ape kneeling at the cathedral doors would give an explicit idea of the historic deed, his wife and daughters would be sure to take him seriously for the first time in their lives, he would exist for them, they would be reconciled, everyone would bring him up in their daily chit-chat, it was possible the Mayor of Pasto, Matías Serrano, “the One-Armed Man of Pasto”—who was not actually one-armed, but a friend of his, unlike the governor — would issue a decree that he replay his practical joke for the fancy-dress parade, and not a single band, troupe or float would be more memorable than his disguise of a kneeling chimp praying at the Black and White Carnival.

Doctor Proceso fled from the mirror as though fleeing a cage.

He went into the living room, where the fireplace was still warm and from the golden walls, in the same photograph, the puzzled eyes of his grandparents judged him, seated around a piano in the sepia-toned atmosphere of an old house. He too sat down, in his easy chair, a sort of throne in the middle of the room, and intended to cross his legs, but the bulky costume prevented him so he remembered again he was an ape, and was reminded once more by his own reflection in the glass protecting a watercolour painted en plein air of his wife, Primavera Pinzón, represented as the country maid with the pitcher of milk, the famous story of “The Milkmaid” down to the last detail, the thoughtful, vigorous girl building castles in the air, barefoot, rosy rounded calves, threadbare skirt ripped at random by the thorns of a bush, in reality shredded by the knowing hand of the watercolourist, who had slashed it almost to the crotch, up to the curve of a buttock, close by the magnificent hips; thus was the beautiful Primavera portrayed, petite rather than tall, with golden plaits, two cherries joined at the stalk over her ear as an earring, artful mouth, shoulder bent under the weight of the jar, fleeting shadows about to obscure the magical road that would lead her to the village to sell the milk and buy the chicks and sell them and buy the hen and then the piglet and sell them and get a shed with two cows and earn more money than she ever dreamed of — before the breaking of the milk jug.

The watercolour of “The Milkmaid Primavera”—or the glass that protected it — reflected his actual appearance, a flesh-and-blood ape sprawled in the easy chair, a pensive beast with its head resting on one hand like “The Thinker,” whatever am I doing as an orangutan? — he said to himself in alarm, and sat up, experiencing a premonition of disaster, his future absurdity in the eyes of his family: his fifteen-year-old Luz de Luna and his seven-year-old Floridita and above all his wife, who would take advantage of the ape joke to remind him of it for the ensuing year, to rub it in day and night, and not as a celebration but pure derision, stressing how much she detested him; it is quite possible I am ill-prepared for an ape costume, better to take off the body and head as soon as possible and chuck this feeble attempt at conquest in the bin, although better still to burn it so not a scrap remains, how to explain a brand-new gorilla suit in the bin? Who brought this nonsense in? What were they thinking? Questions his wife and little Floridita would ask out loud, Floridita who was already beginning to hate him; the last time he tried to give her a paternal goodnight kiss she had turned her face to one side and said, “yuck, mummy’s right when she tells us you smell of pregnant women’s undies,” but what did that little girl know about the smell of pregnant women’s underwear? What kind of language was this? For God’s sake, Justo Pastor — he said to himself — he needed to burn the rubbish, get into his pyjamas on the double and get back into bed with Primavera, who would no doubt get angry at being woken in the middle of the night but who, nonetheless, would be hotter than ever under the covers, her moist crotch almost open, and would fall back into a deep sleep, allowing the gynaecologist’s expert finger to softly graze the tip of each pubic hair and then after an hour of gentle flight to land on one labia and check it over and then straight on to the other, affecting nonchalance, and after another hour of valiant and almost painful effort begin to sink itself into that font and fountain of molten lava that his wife became when she slept, his beloved — beloved in such a way, one thing in real life and another in dreams — until the final climax, hers and his, the never more alone Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, silently masturbating beside his wife’s blazing body, the woman who, were she to wake at such liberties would surely scream, he thought, what have we come to?

He went up the stairs, a thoughtful, irresolute ape, one hand on his chin, the other scratching the shaggy head, more surprised at himself now than when he saw himself in the mirror, he went up as if he were on the point of collapse, to the first floor where the guest bedroom was, along with the laundry room, the toy room and, furthest away, his library, which was also the chess nook, with its rosewood table, marble pieces and two solitary chairs.

He went in there and stopped by the chessboard, where he had last played years before with his neighbour Arcángel de los Ríos, Don Furibundo Pita, winning a bet he could no longer recall. He remembered, yes, they started another game straight away, but did not finish it because they were interrupted by a tremor, the brief but worrying tremor that traversed the city, a terrestrial shudder that made lamps swing and the foundations of the houses creak; tremors were frequent in Pasto, a city wisely wary of its fiery volcano — the age-old Galeras, which poked its nose from under your sheets at the most unexpected moments — they were disturbed by this tremor, which on other occasions lasted a long time, too long, and left its mark by demolishing poorly constructed houses, but God knows how He distributes his earthquakes, he thought, how He metes them out, assigns their victims, how He ends the ones that must end and how He leaves alone the ones yet to begin, but, he wondered, is God really fair? God, God, the tremor — like the heart of the volcano — it would gnaw away at you in the most intimate hours of the soul, it was an unsuspected, unexpected, ill-timed and always-unwanted guest who was dreaded as the city’s worst joke, or worst fright—from Pasto, with love to my children: a volcano is my heart—the city’s immemorial joke, fright and joke simultaneously, it froze hearts while it lasted, thoughts were fractured for the duration of the rocking, hairs rose on the nape of your neck, you went grey, on one occasion, the last, he had had to curtail the climactic embrace with Primavera, the almost-sweet finish in unison, through the singular fault of a a tremor, the fear of dying was that strong, stronger than the culminating embrace, it tore them apart at the peak of the restorative embrace and did not fit itself to the desperate rhythm of their bodies — as the most innocent would think it might — but dangled them from the all-encompassing fear of death, which is stronger than any love.

It had been his last attempt to love and fall in love again.

Finally the ape resolved to tackle the third storey of the house, the octa-gonal floor with wood-panelled walls, large paintings of Christs and Madonnas hanging here and there, intimate and familiar, where his daughters’ rooms and his own marital bedroom were to be found, all three doors open wide.

He had promised himself he would burn the disguise right away, embark on another session of sleep-love in bed with Primavera Pinzón, but he paused, lost in thought, before the bedroom of the elder of his daughters, Luz de Luna — the name insisted upon by his wife, who had still considered herself a poet on entering into marriage and decreed that if she gave birth to a girl she would be called after the poem she wrote on her wedding night, “Luz de Luna: This day the pure moonlight arrives at my wedding bed / And frees my soul from the dark circus where it wanders / It illuminates and redeems it from the onslaught of the donkey who / With his brutish conquering lance / Pierces my maidenhood.” Doctor Proceso knew it by heart; it was his wife’s last poem because, according to her, she lost not only her virginity on her wedding night, but also her poetic talent, a misfortune not only for her family but for humanity — you were to blame Doctor Donkey, said his wife, who never called him by his name, but only “Doctor Donkey,” with feigned affection, unlike the women who visited the doctor’s consulting room, his utterly faithful patients of all ages who, as a courtesy, and in feminine retaliation, called him “Doctor Gentle.”

Before the charming but everyday scene of Luz de Luna sleeping, the inert ape, slack-mouthed, ran a hand over his jaw, it really was an ape in the doorway, reflecting; he went back over the fifteen years that had gone by since that highly unusual wedding night, the night that had surely engendered Luz de Luna, because many nights would pass before he tangled with Primavera Pinzón in bed again. When they got married, the doctor was thirty-five and his wife twenty: now she was a woman of thirty-five and he was a fifty-year-old. He remembered that first night as if it were this one: as soon as he finished, his wife got free of him with a cry that could have been disgust or defiance and leapt from the bed to the table to write that poem by the light of the moon — and, in fact, moonlight was shining through the window — that poem, he thought, where he ended up, in such a roundabout way, likened to a donkey.

So, his Luz de Luna was fifteen.

The bedroom window was open; it looked onto the garden, where the glossy boughs of the Capulin cherry tree reached upwards; the ape went to the window and closed it. Then, leaning over his daughter, who slept face down — long dark hair, pale profile — he saw her for what she was: already a young woman, her mouth tinged a blueish hue, open, as if she were speaking voicelessly. Stretched over the side of the bed, one of her feet stuck out from under the covers, dangling like something pink and formless, not exactly a foot, he thought, but a piece of something separate from his daughter. He thought the sight of the horrible ape would be a nasty awakening for Luz de Luna, and moved away on tiptoe: it was better to go back to his room, take off the costume and consign the joke to oblivion, the joke he had thought over to the point of exhaustion during nights of insomnia and which exalted him more every day. No. He was no good for jokes — or jokes were no good for him? What sort of man was he? Really, a normal man or a defenceless spirit exposed to the universal waywardness that makes the weak its victims? Then, cautiously, he withdrew, alarmed because his daughter spoke a word in her sleep, a word he could not understand: “stables?”

He was already heading for his bedroom when he discovered, by the half-light of a lamp, that a boy was asleep in the room belonging to his younger daughter, Floridita, in the same bed, what was the world coming to? Who could it be? That December 28, Floridita turned seven, and the boy, that boy — who was it? — seemed a little younger, around six — wasn’t it the son of Matilde Pinzón, Primavera’s sister? Primavera already knew he did not approve of the excessive camaraderie between the boy and his daughter, that constant coming and going together around the house. And now he had to find them sleeping in the same bed. For years now Primavera had utterly tormented him, and the torments he recalled were more serious than two children cuddled up in bed; Primavera, Primavera, he yelled to himself, who would not one day wish to become your murderer?

And at last he entered the marital bedroom. He forgot about the ape he found himself inside, and seeing an ape in the mirror made him swear and jump backwards: he had frightened himself, there he still was, dressed as an ape.

He carried on, hurriedly, so as not to see himself any longer. His bulky silhouette was afloat in the blue light of dawn. In the doorway he had already started to remove the ape head, determined to make it disappear, when he heard the sleeping woman moan, the humid moan of Primavera Pinzón that issued softly from the centre of the bed, her velvety tone, her indecipherable song and, instantly, he forgot about the costume, observing Primavera with delight. Was she dreaming she was making love? Dreaming of love? Or did she not love? And, from his own experience, hearing her murmur “here, here,” he opted for love, and leant over the bed, over his own bed in which this time his wife alone slept, or his wife slept alone with her dream of love: the alpaca mattress moulded itself around her supine position, one arm bent beneath her head, her face, eyes closed, pointed at the ceiling, lips parted, moist, reddened, legs splayed, the inherent scent of heat which could only emanate from her neck, from the blonde hair spread over the pillow, now Doctor Proceso López was not yelling Primavera, Primavera, who would not one day wish to become your murderer, but he promised himself solely to make her fall in love again for a minute, or die, God, God.

God.

He swore he would give his life just for one embrace and an exuberant caress from Primavera at that exact moment of desolation, or to at least get into bed with her and never mind that she would wake against her will and in a bad mood, he thought, he would have her there anyway, all of her, and when she turned over, exasperated, to sleep far away from him — her face towards the other side of the bed, her soul much further off — the light of the dawn would help him appraise at leisure the marvellous rear of the unapproachable Primavera, the rounded whiteness with pinkish sheen, and perhaps later on his medic’s hand — his medicinal hand, his hand well-versed in desperation — would caress her with that lightness of touch akin to fearfulness, persistent in the end, advancing from hair to hair towards Primavera’s most hidden ones, the doctor was just imagining this ritual of sleep-love when Primavera Pinzón woke up, unfortunately for them both, she opened her eyes and first of all saw the ghastly shadow, the shadow in flesh and blood of an ape in her room, both hairy arms raised over her, ready to go for her throat, Primavera screamed noiselessly, her hands shielded her face, she tried to get to her knees under the heavy bedspread but did not manage it, her legs were turned to butter, now she saw that the immense ape was grabbing its head, gripping it as though it were hurting him, Primavera’s eyes goggled, she could not believe it but had to, there was an ape in her bedroom, and in a whirl of panic she was able to remember that apes carried off native girls and took them to their dens in the trees and there they possessed them like female apes, surely this one would be no exception, he would carry her to the garden, take her up to the top of the cherry tree and once there — not only in front of her daughters, but the servants and a neighbour or two — convert her into a female ape crying out, but in terror or pleasure, she was able to wonder, regretting her very question; who knows whether he would take her from the front or behind, Primavera was able to wonder that too in her swoon, now still more horrified to see, incredulous, that the ape was taking off its head and out came the head of, who could it be, my God, my husband, she cried.

With the ape head in his hands the doctor only dared to smile at his wife’s astonished face as if expecting a kiss and begged “forgive me, I’m going to explain” when she interrupted him, stammering “God, but what a beast you are,” and now she could neither stammer nor breathe — out of fear or indignation, the doctor wondered — because Primavera’s mouth gaped open, searching for air, her chest was contracting inside, the vein in her neck was throbbing, her staring eyes finally closed and her head lolled to one side in defeat. Doctor Proceso hurled the ape head onto the pillow and stretched his arms towards his wife; he tried to take her pulse but the ape’s great mitts hindered him.

With considerable effort he took off the ape hands, threw them on the floor as if they were burning, pressed his fingers to his wife’s neck and gave a start; it was necessary to ask for help — he realized — fetch a heart doctor, and he ran from the bedroom as if he were escaping, hurled himself at the staircase and, between the second and first floors, while shouting “Primavera could die of shock” to himself, stopped in his tracks remembering that he was the doctor, so he headed once more for the bedroom to give Primavera mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: cruel sarcasm to kiss his wife in such a manner, he thought, an urgent and desperate kiss, it’s quite possible Primavera is already dead, to think we will have to hold the wake right on Innocents’ Day, and it was during this very brief trajectory, while he painfully ascended the stairs, that he convinced himself his wife would, in fact, die, it was true, Primavera Pinzón would vanish from the earth, innocent victim of a joke more innocent yet, and the news of his joke would not only fly around the city, but take hold of the entire country and maybe the world, it is not very often a man kills his wife with an ape costume the moment she wakes up.

And after that unlucky death, through which, of course, life’s cruelty, its fatality, its irony would be corroborated, a man wants to make his wife laugh and kills her, he would be “overwhelmed by grief” and attend the burial “dressed in black” although he should go dressed as an ape, he thought, suddenly considering, in the brief time spent going back up the stairs, the other possibility: that Primavera’s death would free him to marry another woman, lusty and warm, more willing than Primavera when it came to caressing, more lenient and generous than Primavera Pinzón — cold, bitter, perpetually unfaithful, and that was the hardest thing to bear, he thought, her ugliness is the terrifying type, the ugliness which hides behind beauty is much more shocking — he cried out imagining another woman in his bed, but it seemed unwise to desire another woman at this juncture, he told himself with remorse, and preferred to consider another possibility, imagining that after so much pain, in the middle of the funeral, right there in the cemetery, his two daughters and the other relatives would unexpectedly begin to laugh, pointing to him as the victim of his own invention; Primavera Pinzón’s death had been a joke on the back of his own unsuccessful prank; the coffin lid would open, Primavera would emerge with a sprightly leap attired as a bride — as she wished to be when she died — a balletic leap, looking tastier than ever — thought the doctor, who used to liken his wife’s beauty to the sampling of an exquisite dish — and meanwhile he, the victim, would be congratulated by the Bishop of Pasto, also an effective partaker in the joke, and his friends, the professor Arcaín Chivo and the mayor Matías Serrano, would greet him, and even the gravediggers and the rest of the mourners, half the city would surround him, because after all was said and done how magnificent that joke was, begun by him, cleverly carried on by his wife and then by the city, the joke would last a thousand years, he said to himself, and now he fervently wished his wife would live, that he would not find her lifeless — as he had left her.

He entered the room, fearful, swallowed up by anxiety — it was quite possible Primavera would be dead from an attack of indignation — he entered at a run, half dressed as an ape, and lurched to a standstill: there, sitting on the edge of the bed that Wednesday, December 28, 1966, Innocents’ Day, happy prelude to the Black and White Carnival, Primavera Pinzón, her mouth open, the tip of her tongue passing over her lips, was contemplating with enormous curiosity the black ape head resting on her knees, she turned it round and round, discovering the seams, tracing the red film over the eyes with trembling fingertips, testing the consistency of the fangs, stroking the wiry fur and then, expressionless, getting to her feet, depositing the hairy head extraordinarily carefully on the bed, in the very place where the doctor used to sleep, his place, and pointing to the great ape head as she breezed past, she said:

“I prefer him.”

2

He woke alone, what time did he succumb to sleep? He did not hear his younger daughter’s shrieking, as was the norm, a delight of childish pandemonium all over the place, but he remembered as if in a fog that Floridita and Luz de Luna, along with their mother, were travelling that morning to the finca to finalize details for the birthday party, what time would they celebrate it? He had forgotten, hordes of children would turn up, the clown company, the puppets, the trio of musicians. He had bought Floridita a Shetland pony as a present, which was being kept hidden in the stables, with a great yellow bow around its neck.

There was no-one in the house, or yes, there was someone: very close beside him, in the bed, looking almost like he was breathing, lay the ape, split in half, the hairy suit stretched out lengthways, the feet and hands; the great black head seemed to sniff at him, what time did he take off the disguise? Or had Primavera Pinzón removed it, taking pity on him? Doctor Proceso gave such a heart-rending sigh that he felt sorry for himself, as only an ape could be, he thought, and let out an incongruous laugh, bitterly sorrowful and strangely joyous, a desolate celebration; he remembered Primavera that morning when she discovered the ape peering into her face, how well she faked her mortal fright, what a great Innocents’ prank had been thrown together in an instant — on the back of his practical joke — what dizzying imagination! She had even seized the chance to say “God, but what a beast you are,” and convinced him, a doctor, of the possibility of a death from heart failure; yes, she had mocked him majestically, as only a woman can: his woman. His wife was enough to make you laugh and cry and die and be born again, never another woman like Primavera, he thought, but where had their love ended, if it ever existed? What had become of their love? A foolish word, among the most foolish of all, an infantile deception, just a physical, carnal attraction that lasted as long as the sowing and harvesting of the corn, no longer.

From the kitchen, the cook Genoveva Sinfín, the old woman who had been with him for years, called him with a yell: “Doctor, are you awake? Can you come down?” An unusual cry in the history of the house: something serious must have happened. He put on his dressing gown and opened the window overlooking the garden. “What’s wrong?” he shouted.

“Come down, for God’s sake.”

He ran to the stairs carrying the ape’s head and the rest of the costume; he meant to have them get rid of that nonsense, and forget about it for ever.

Sinfín was waiting for him in the kitchen, hands on hips, face more wrinkled than ever, pinched mouth turned down at the corners, a great grimace of tribulation. Furious — or did she just look it? — Sinfín perspired, eyes brimming with tears, behind the table upon which a sumptuous roast pig reposed, face down on a serving dish; blue flies were circling its broad ears.

The cook brandished a wooden spoon and buried it in one side of the pig; she took it out, steaming, and held it towards him; the doctor saw the stuffing of toasted rice, the pork meat shredded among peas and kidney beans. Then he heard the cook wail:

“Ground glass, señor.”

Yes. Blue streaks of glass glittered along the edges of the spoon.

“It was Floridita. She ruined my week’s work. And to think this pig was for her very own birthday.”

“She couldn’t have,” the doctor said.

He examined the inside of the pig, digging about with the wooden spoon; now he detected big pieces of glass from a broken bottle. The sausage smell made him feel nauseous. Nearby, there was another serving dish, piled high with roast guinea pigs, corncobs and boiled cassava.

“The guinea pigs too,” Sinfín said. “They stuffed them with pins. I don’t know when I let down my guard. I felt them hanging around me, over here, over there; they lay in wait for me, laughing: it was Floridita and her cousin, that little devil Chanchán. God forgive me, but you had to know about it.”

“Order roast chickens for the party,” the doctor said. “Chorizo, chips, pork crackling. And don’t worry about it any more, Genoveva.”

“And what are you going to do about the prank, if you don’t mind me asking, Doctor? It’s not my place to say, but things can’t end here, or aren’t you going to protest?”

“Of course I am, Genoveva. I’ll speak to Primavera: if Floridita and her cousin are to blame they’ll get their proper punishment, don’t you worry. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

“Doctor, that’s not all. Follow me, please.”

He followed her, displeased, out into the garden. They passed in silence through a large peeling gate. There, sitting on a wooden bench that leant against the trunk of the Capulin cherry tree, where turkeys and hens roamed about, was the gardener, bare chested and with a white shirt tied around his head as a bandage. Even from far away, the doctor could make out the bloody shirt.

“Homero, what’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing, señor,” the gardener answered, blushing. He was a pale, sickly man, around forty years of age, famous for his perpetual silence and because he had long lived in a lonely hut on the edge of the Pasto cemetery. Some said he had killed his wife, burying her under the laundry sink; others that his wife had killed him, even while he lived, because she ran off with the gravedigger, provoking this near muteness in him, that sort of lethargy towards life that was reflected, exactly, in his way of being, just like a corpse, they said: dead to speech, dead to walking about, dead simply to existing at all.

“Nothing?” the cook grew indignant. “Somebody balanced a jug on the top edge of the gate, where Homero comes in every morning. He opened the gate and the jug fell down and cut his head open.”

The doctor walked over to him. “Why didn’t you tell me about this first, Genoveva?”

“Because it had already stopped bleeding,” the cook said.

The doctor untied the shirt carefully. He looked at the wound, touched it.

“Not bad,” he said. “It’s already clotted. No need for stitches, Homero.”

“Of course not, señor. You didn’t have to come,” replied the gardener, bewildered, not losing sight of Sinfín.

A strong smell of human shit, issuing from the gardener’s head, then repulsed the doctor: he took a step backwards.

“The jug was full of it,” Sinfín explained. “Another joke played by Floridita and her Chanchán, celebrating Innocents’ Day in their own fine way, patrón.”

The doctor remembered the ape head he was carrying under his arm, and the rest of the costume: he had noticed his servants’ questioning gaze earlier on.

“Floridita turns seven today,” he said, without looking at anyone. “I won’t say anything today. Tomorrow. Sorry, Homero, I’ll compensate you for that injury, you’ll see. For now, I’m going to ask you a favour.”

And he held out the expensive ape costume he had ordered from Canada.

“Burn this,” he said. “Don’t give it away. I don’t mean hide it, either. Burn it immediately.”

The gardener received the costume without saying a word. He left the garden by the back gate, which led to the garage. He looked strange, weaving his way through pots of geraniums and azaleas with the hairy suit over his shoulder and that enormous gorilla head dangling from his hand: he had half hidden it with the shirt that previously covered his wound, so now the gorilla looked like a hunter’s bloody booty.

Starting to shave, in front of his en-suite bathroom mirror, the doctor was in a position to observe another prank: hanging from the wall behind him, reflected in the mirror, was the scorched body of a black cat spying on him for evermore. It seemed preposterous to him that his younger daughter — just turned seven — should involve herself in such ghastly matters.

He breakfasted, more alone than ever, served by Sinfín, who studied him in silence. And, still overwhelmed by the cat prank, he put on the raincoat hanging from the umbrella stand. He headed for the door, which opened on to the street, feeling sunk in dark presentiments.

“Aren’t we going out in your jeep, Doctor?” Sinfín asked, about to go and open the garage.

“No,” he said. “I’m going to walk.”

“Walk where? They’re expecting you at the finca for the birthday party. It’s getting late, you have to take me, who’s going to cook for them? That’s what we arranged with the señora. Remember Floridita and her Chanchán poisoned the pig: we need to buy some chickens, señor, and the sweet maize dumplings, egg whips, toffee sticks, crumbly alfajores and meringues for the children.”

“I’m just going out to walk. For a bit.”

“You’ll get soaked, Doctor. Remember it’s Innocents’ Day. The ones playing out there have no respect for anybody, can’t you hear them chucking water about? You’ll catch a cold.”

But he closed the door behind him.

He remained lost in thought — as though he did not recognize the world — facing the lonely square block occupied by his house, in that residential neighbourhood known as “Las Cuadras,” its houses as large as they were faded, each with a terrace and front garden.

Then a blue pickup truck flew past him: it was carrying a gang of sprites in the back who were flinging waves of water to left and right with their pointed hats; no wave caught him but, in one second, a girl dancing in the middle of the sprites suddenly shot at him, from her red open mouth, from her throat — as if it were a narrow fountain — shot at his mouth, which was open in astonishment, a blue jet of water, a tiny wave against his face; he felt the droplets, more than warm, splash over his eyelashes and nose and then dash between his lips — he recognized the bittersweet water, its intimacy, drawn from who knows what female depths, he thought, he managed to think.

The pickup disappeared around the corner, with a screeching of tyres.

He asked himself, too late, if it would not have been better to heed Sinfín’s advice. He was revived by Pasto’s wind, whistling icily around. There was no-one else on the street, apart from the heads — the eyes and smiles of those who peeped from terraces to spy on him, innocent victim of Holy Innocents’ Day. But he walked in any old direction, as if it did not matter to him.

Disturbing his tranquillity, on the corner he ran smack into a Pasto pedestrian who was taking, leading or moving himself along by pulling his own nose; at least that is what he saw, or understood: that there was a man hauling himself along by the nose, one of his hands gripping the end, and he was dragging himself who knows where. It must be another Innocents’ prank, he thought, as he watched the passer-by disappear off down the pavement. “Or maybe,” he said aloud, “it’s some idiot who knows me and decided to make fun of me.” Just then he heard a honk, and another: it was his neighbour Arcángel de los Ríos, Don Furibundo Pita, who had just pulled out of the garage in his Willys, and honked at him three, four times. Furibundo Pita’s jeep, with its two-man cab, was carrying six trussed hens and a milk churn in the back that morning.

“Get in, Pastor,” he heard him shout. “Get in quick or they’ll soak you.”

The doctor wondered whether he should jump and hurl himself into the back, among the hens. The hesitation cost him dear: the door of a neighbouring house suddenly opened and a group of monks appeared, each with a bucket of water, who surrounded the doctor and doused him. In spite of having his raincoat on, he felt the water enter under his collar and shiver its way down his back. Don Furibundo had already opened the passenger door and the doctor got in the cab, pursued by further lashings of water at the nape of his neck.

“Get back, you bastards,” came Furibundo Pita’s formidable bellow. Small-framed, but his voice, though shrill, was that of three men. As if by magic, the monks retreated: Don Furibundo Pita was the only person in Pasto capable of crossing the city on foot on a December 28 without anyone daring to soak him, throw a pinch of flour at him, sing him a ditty or dance around him.

Out of danger, soaked to the marrow, Doctor Proceso thanked his neighbour.

“The worst thing about that lot,” Furibundo said, “is that they use dirty water. They are Martínez’s sons, well disguised, they may have soaked you in their urine, the wretches. Did they pee on you, Justo Pastor? Poor Doctor Justo.”

And he laughed, gunning his Willys through the streets, honking left and right for no reason.

“No,” the doctor replied, recalling the gardener’s head. “It’s clean water.”

At least that is what he wanted to believe, without much conviction.

Furibundo Pita was one of the richest men in Pasto. He did not keep his money in the bank; he had it buried under the courtyard of his house, where he raised his guinea pigs. He attributed the origin of his fortune to horse racing: he had bet all his savings on the speedy Cincomil, and won. He did not bet again, and increased the capital. He was the owner of a trucking company and four cheese-producing farms, and had not lost the habit of escaping to relax each morning in the humblest of his fincas, in Genoy. But that morning he was not going to Genoy, and this was the first thing he told the doctor:

“I’m not going to Genoy today. I’m going to defend my honour.”

The doctor did not reply, what was that about defending honour? He was quite familiar with his neighbour’s eccentric way of thinking, his quarrelsome character, especially when he succumbed to his weekly drinking spree.

“If you want me to give you a lift anywhere,” Don Furibundo went on, “I don’t mind delaying the salvation of my honour.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” the doctor said.

“You went out so they could soak you, and they soaked you, Doctor.”

The cab seat, covered in calfskin, was sopping wet all over.

“I forgot what day it was today,” the doctor said.

“Shall we go? Will you come with me?”

“Where to?”

“To defend my honour. I’m going to Tulio Abril’s — the maestro. Do you know him?”

Maestro Tulio Abril was one of the most famous craftsmen in Pasto, who devoted his energy every year to the construction of a carnival float that would compete in the competitions on January 6. Doctor Proceso remembered him: a short, robust man who must be going on seventy and who, one midnight ten years ago, turned up at his house to request his services; he’d brought his wife, Zulia Iscuandé, lying on a handcart: her ninth labour had become complicated in the hands of a midwife. Doctor Proceso managed to save Zulia and the baby. Out of gratitude, Zulia Iscuandé baptised the newborn with the doctor’s names: “Justo Pastor,” adding a third—“Salvador.”

“Let’s go,” the doctor said. He wanted to know how honour was saved.

Now on Avenida de los Estudiantes they saw the truck belonging to Pasto’s firefighters go by like a reddish meteorite, firemen aloft like drunken acrobats, not off to put out fires and dam floods but taking part in the fiesta: they shot great jets of water from the hose, straight at a dense knot of revellers dancing up on the sloping parapet around the Obelisk, the jets denser still, like blows, pushing them to the ground, sweeping them along amid shrieks of delight; one of these white jets, worse than a clout, hit the back of Furibundo Pita’s jeep, instantly drowning the six hens he was carrying; Don Furibundo wanted to brake, but thought better of it. “I’ll charge my hens to the firefighters,” he said. “They’ll pay me for every last feather, dammit,” and he roared with colossal laughter and accelerated, honking at all and sundry.

They left the avenue heading for Chachagüí, near the airport, but soon abandoned the main highway and went up a dirt road, bordered by large brick houses, submerged in mist, facing into the void. Half-dressed children were playing in the mud, celebrating Innocents’ Day in their own way: they threw lumps of sludge in each other’s faces, ran off, returned to the fray. Furibundo Pita’s jeep did not escape the onslaught: it was hard to make out the track through the filthy windscreen; Don Furibundo hurled curses out the window; honked incessantly; on one of the bends he had to get out to clean the windscreen: that was when the children, a dozen or more, surrounded them, perplexed. “It’s him,” they shouted, “it’s really him.” No-one threw any more mud; they looked at Don Furibundo in panicked silence. And when Furibundo set off again they ran behind, escorting them; they managed to catch up to the driver’s window, pointing at him and shouting: “It’s him, it’s really him.”

The doctor looked over at Furibundo enquiringly, but he pretended not to see him. Who does this man remind me of? — the doctor wondered, intrigued, and it was in that instant that Furibundo Pita, with his sharp face, dark sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones, heavy brows, curly hair, slight body — sharp, narrow shoulders and bony knees — reminded him of someone or of the likeness of someone very close to him, very well known, but who? He could not guess.

It began to drizzle.

Sticking his narrow head far out of his window, Don Furibundo asked a peasant approaching on his donkey the whereabouts of Maestro Abril’s workshop. “It’s possible Tulio’s still there behind the church,” the peasant answered, open-mouthed in surprise at encountering Furibundo Pita’s unmistakeable face before him. The peasant’s eyes, his voice, seemed wreathed in unfathomable cunning. Don Furibundo accelerated without saying thank you, leaving behind the leathery, smiling face that scoffed covertly, who knows about whom, or why, the doctor mused.

They went up the muddy track until they reached the top of the hill, the children who had followed them now outdistanced, and began to descend, slipping in the mire, honking loudly at every bend. And thus they burst, hooting, onto a lane as slippery as glass, with dilapidated houses set around a circular plaza, where a tiny church stood.

“I won’t believe it till I see it,” Don Furibundo said.

Doctor Proceso was beginning to regret the riotous outing. He no longer felt any curiosity to discover his neighbour’s disputes over honour. How did I end up here, he wondered, shouldn’t I be celebrating Floridita’s birthday?

Beneath the increasingly heavy drizzle, which seemed never-ending there, on one side of the church, they could just make out Maestro Abril’s workshop, looking as though it was huddled in a nest of fog on the narrow street. Don Furibundo stopped the jeep beside the large metal door, slick with rain, almost a mirror; through a hole in the middle, where a chain and an old padlock stuck out, they thought a face peeped for a moment, an almost wooden-looking face that saw them and vanished. Don Furibundo gave two, three, four honks on his horn, but everything remained as it was, no-one came.

In that brief time, the children caught up with them, running, but without shouting, without a sound.

The doctor and Furibundo got out.

On either side of the door was a long, crumbling wall that surrounded the workshop where Maestro Abril worked. And protruding above the wall, jagged against the sky, the formidable shrouded skeleton of a carnival float could be made out, its vague silhouette, the mystery Maestro Abril had been assembling, step by step, for months, in order to compete in the procession of floats on January 6. Only the monumental proportions of the form could be seen, not its spirit, it was covered with huge tarpaulins that protected it from rain and curious glances. Every so often, from inside, they could hear the hammering of labourers hard at work, occasional voices or laughter, a woman’s complaints. Maestro Abril worked alongside his inseparable comrade Martín Umbría — also a master craftsman — and was helped by Zulia Iscuandé, their sons, daughters in-law and grandchildren, and others from the neighbourhood, sporadic apprentices who put their faith in the maestro’s imagination year after year. Many years earlier, Tulio Abril had won, and this was a matter of sufficient pride to encourage him to build floats every subsequent year of his life. He invested all his time and savings in the construction of the yearly float, and went on building it in sickness and in health, with unassailable determination; from time to time Zulia Iscuandé threatened to leave him — because the paltry and rigged prizes handed out by the government did not repay even half the investment — nevertheless, after the annual arguments, the domestic setbacks, no-one was interested in anything but the contest on January 6, and went on every year underpinning what they had dreamed up: another carnival float. It was the same for the rest of the artisans, alone or in company, alive or dead — the doctor mused — because for time immemorial, even from beyond the grave, they would go on competing, making floats for a carnival of the dead — he thought, as he observed the bare bones of the half-built float, bandaged in coloured cloths.

He regained his curiosity when he heard Furibundo Pita using the pad-lock to pound on the door.

The voices inside stopped talking.

“It’s Arcángel de los Ríos,” Don Furibundo said. “I need to see Maestro Abril.”

The silence continued, then came more pounding with the padlock.

“Get Maestro Abril,” Don Furibundo reiterated.

The drizzle got heavier. At the summit of Galeras a band of fog, rough with grainy sleet, seemed to start to fall.

“Open up, you pricks, it’s Don Furibundo Pita himself,” Don Furibundo Pita himself shouted in the end.

“It is him,” the children confirmed, in unison. “It really is.”

Don Furibundo rounded on the children, who retreated, startled; even so, like the peasant on his donkey, they harboured a dark, biting mockery. Clearly — the doctor realized — that underlying jeer reminded Furibundo Pita of something that had reached his ears, some gossip: news about the spirit of the float Maestro Abril was preparing. Don Furibundo was about to knock again when a strong hand poked out through the hole in the door, grabbed the chain and padlock and opened up without hesitation; the door creaked on its hinges; on the other side, Maestro Tulio Abril appeared, bushy-moustached, as short as Don Furibundo, but feisty and holding himself erect. He was wearing overalls, had a dark scarf around his head, and held what looked like the door of a jeep, six times larger than life, made from papier mâché.

Behind him, like shadows scattered under the zinc roof, craftsmen young and old were working away, Zulia Iscuandé too, all seated on tree stumps and rocks, polishing the components of a colossal jeep: one had a tyre, another the rearview mirror, over here a lit headlamp made of sheet aluminium, over there the exhaust pipe, the bumper, the mudguards, the enormous windows.

The maestro and Furibundo Pita contemplated one another for what must have seemed to them a never-ending moment, for they both appeared painfully overwhelmed; it was as if they were meeting face to face for the first time — after thinking about it day and night for years.

And both, ultimately, seemed disappointed.

“Let us in,” Don Furibundo said.

“By all means,” Maestro Abril replied.

He put the papier-mâché jeep door to one side and held out his calloused hand to the two men. He did not recognize downcast Doctor Proceso, sunk inside his raincoat, but he greeted him deferentially.

But before the men could follow him, the children, of one accord, and without anyone inviting them, darted into the workshop and dispersed to every corner like watchful birds.

In the murky drizzle, they saw Furibundo Pita suddenly run off, go up to the skirts of the float and pull urgently on one of the tarpaulins as if someone were trying to stop him, and no-one did stop him, but he could not get the cloth off: after several tugs he was just able to tweak apart a fold. What did he discover? Only a papier-mâché woman’s calf, voluminous and white, not yet painted. The next tarpaulin was tangled around one of the protrusions. The impossibility of exposing the float with a single jerk made Don Furibundo turn pale: he dithered painfully, working out the best way to uncover it, then seemed about to attack it tooth and nail on a grand scale when, at a signal from the maestro, the children scrambled up and with a “one, two, three” laid it bare, revealed its vast outline, white as frost, exposed to everyone the spirit of the float, which Don Furibundo contemplated open-mouthed, eyes goggling, as did his companion Doctor Proceso and the rest of those present — as if they too were seeing it for the first time.

Way up high, whiter and a hundred times more massive, was Furibundo Pita himself, seated at the wheel of his still-unfinished jeep — a jeep with a spectacular flatbed, crammed not only with pigs and hens, but tigers biting polystyrene arms and legs; there were dragons breathing fire between overflowing cardboard milk churns — it was a contraption imbued with life that leapt forward rather than rolled along on four monstrous wheels, Furibundo’s vast hand steering it, the other hand bearing down on the horn or klaxon or hooter, which was like a giant trumpet reaching up to the sky and, fleeing terrified in front of Furibundo and his Willys jeep — desperation on her face, flamboyant skirt flying above her waist, exaggerated buttocks — was Furibundo Pita’s own wife, the pious Alcira Sarasti, the kind-hearted, languid woman who went to Mass at the Franciscan church every evening and who, any day of the week, on leaving the church, had to face her husband, the brawling Arcángel de los Ríos, “father of my children” as she called him, who stalked her, chased her in his jeep, caught up with her, overtook her, came back at her and confronted her, fenced her in, and honked and accelerated and slowed down and honked and harassed until he had her cornered, after along and shameful pursuit, up against the front door of their house.

There was no-one in the whole of Pasto who had not seen this happen at some point.

Tulio Abril and Zulia Iscuandé knew the devout Sarasti very well, and not only felt sorry for her, but complained — as did many others — about this weekly abuse, and they also visited the grounds of the Franciscan church from time to time, as Mass was ending, just in case they should come across the pursued woman, suffering the Stations of her Calvary at a trot, across the twelve ill-fated and scandalous blocks that separated her from salvation.

“So you wanted to surprise me, Tulio,” Furibundo Pita said slowly, his gaze now fixed on the dirt floor while he shook his head, “and not just me, but Pasto too, the whole of Pasto, but at my expense, no?”

He gave the mud a kick.

No-one said anything. Martín Umbría and the oldest craftsmen positioned themselves around the maestro, as though they were protecting him. Only Zulia Iscuandé had opened her mouth and she was approaching him with a silent smile when Don Furibundo cut her off: “I didn’t come here to speak to women.”

And he stood firm in front of the maestro.

“You can’t do this to me,” he said. “Not to me, not to my wife. Who gives you the right to make fun of others, Tulio? Who do you think you are — God?”

The maestro did not answer.

“You succumbed to temptation. I know they call me Furibundo Pita because I like honking the horn too much, but so what? Who am I hurting? Have I ever run over my wife?”

He looked again at each and every one of them around him, as if scolding them all. Now he shouted: “Who’s to say she doesn’t like it? Who’s to say that the fact I chase her isn’t a game for her? It is a game, gentlemen, a game between me and her, between the two of us, so mind your own business, you utter bastards, you swine.”

Doctor Proceso was astonished by the words, and Don Furibundo confronted him too, as if railing against him.

“What would become of carnival,” he asked, “if we devoted ourselves to airing the sins of others? Or their humiliations? Or their embarrassments?”

The doctor immediately thought of Primavera. Don Furibundo kicked the ground again.

“I came here as a friend,” he said. “I brought half a dozen hens in the Willys, Tulio. The firemen drowned them with a hosing down, but there’s nothing wrong with them: they’ll make a good stew. Let’s eat and drink as friends.”

He looked at the float again out of the corner of his eye.

“But first,” he said, stressing his words, “first I want you to destroy this travesty with your own hammer, by God, Tulio, or I’ll get drunk right here, right now, Tulio.”

These last words, uttered as a terrible threat, made everyone freeze. Don Furibundo was getting hoarse, no more air in his lungs.

“You can be sure that if I’m drunk things will go rather differently,” he managed to say. “Who knows what I might take it into my head to do.”

He took a deep breath, let it out:

“So? Friends?”

“Friends,” the maestro said, with a sigh.

And he looked up at the foggy grey sky, and put his hands in his pockets and lowered his head.

“But I will finish my float,” he said.

Don Furibundo sagged. The maestro went on unperturbed: “I’m nobody’s enemy. I show what this year has seen, what we’ve all seen in Pasto for ages. That’s why we make floats, to remember the years, señor.”

Don Furibundo moved still closer to the maestro.

“You haven’t understood me,” he said. And he ordered the children to fetch the chickens. In no time at all, six appeared at the maestro’s feet.

“Those are not even worth the float’s hooter,” Zulia Iscuandé said.

“Very good, Señora Zulia,” Don Furibundo replied. “I should have let you have your say from the beginning. You’re right. I didn’t come here to offer these chickens in exchange for your goodwill. These are for you to cook and for us to sit down to eat and talk like friends and negotiate. Now,” he said, scratching his head, “if you are not decent enough to negotiate like this, I’m going to stop wasting your time: either you take the float apart or I’ll get drunk and tear it apart with my bare hands and then I’ll shoot the lot of you. I’m only too aware you’ve worked all year on this mockery, but is it my fault I only just found out about it? Just yesterday a little bird came to my window and asked me to please pop in to Maestro Abril’s workshop, as they were preparing a nice carnival surprise for me. I didn’t believe it at first, but I came along, and what do I see? I see that anything’s possible in Pasto when it comes to making fun of your fellow man and that it’s me who’s the victim. No, Tulio. I won’t allow it. I’ll blow you to bits, float and all, right now, all by myself, unaided.”

“No-one, not you, not anybody will make me take this float apart,” Maestro Abril said, unmoved.

And then:

“Fire as many bullets as you like.”

It was as if he considered the conversation over.

“Your wife has more common sense,” Don Furibundo replied. “She said six chickens aren’t worth the hooter. And she’s right.”

Zulia Iscuandé opened her mouth, but did not say a word.

“How much is first prize?” Don Furibundo asked everyone.

No-one answered.

“How much did the winning float get this past January?” he asked again, encouraging them. And as they still did not answer he added: “I’m playing my last card here, gentlemen, how much?”

“Lots of pesos,” came the sudden voice of one of the men who worked with Maestro Abril.

“Lots of pesos?” Don Furibundo laughed. “Well, find out how many there are in lots and I’ll sign you a promissory note for the same amount right now, and Bob’s your uncle, we all live happily ever after.”

Tulio Abril looked reproachfully at the artisan who had spoken. Then he sought out his wife, and, lastly, Don Furibundo. With great sadness in his voice, he said: “It can’t be done, señor, forgive me.”

“It can be done, Tulio. It can. Everything in this life can be done. In the next life, I don’t know. In this one, it can. Remember what our grandmas used to say: Yesterday came the dressmaker, tomorrow comes the undertaker. That means, in pure Pasto-ese: eat, drink and be merry. Think again, Tulio. Here, in front of my friend Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso Lopéz, I give my word of honour that you will get the same amount of money as the winning float in the carnival. Isn’t that enough for you? This is the money I pay for the work you have put into mocking me this year, it’s me that comes out the loser, dammit, don’t you get it? Where has this been seen before? Paying so as not to be made fun of? In Pasto, of course. You’re the one who should be paying me, you great prick, for mocking me.”

He did not manage to say any more. He could not. But he left the workshop unhurriedly, like someone going for a walk, and got into his Willys. Doctor Proceso wondered if he should accompany him, speak to him, calm him down, leave with him, but Don Furibundo did not start the engine: he simply sat behind the steering wheel, sighed, scratched one cheek, smoothed down his hair, leant towards the glove compartment.

“He’s taken out a bottle of aguardiente,” one of the smallest boys reported, perched on top of the wall, right at the corner by the doorway. “He’s drinking it, he’s still drinking it, he’s drinking it all up, he’s started to get drunk.”

“Are you Doctor Justo Pastor?” Maestro Abril asked meanwhile. His wife and the artisans had already gathered around the doctor.

“God bless you again,” his wife said, “forgive us for not recognizing you, would you like a nice cup of coffee?”

“Salvador, Salvador, where’s Salvador?” Maestro Abril asked all around.

One of the children came forward; he was just like all the others: ragged, face black with mud.

“Say how do you do to Doctor Justo Pastor, who helped you come into the world,” the maestro said, and Salvador held out his hand. At that same moment they heard from the boy up on the wall. A sort of delighted astonishment was apparent in his voice.

“Now he’s drinking another bottle. He’ll get even drunker.”

They all turned to look at the Willys: Furibundo Pita was slugging down what was left of a second bottle of aguardiente, as if it were water.

“If he carries on drinking at that rate he’s going to die,” Zulia Iscuandé said.

“And now what are we going to do?” the maestro asked his wife. “What are we going to do with that bastard? By God, I’m not about to wreck my float, Zulia, not for all the money in the world.”

“You should consider it,” his wife said.

Her husband’s steadfast gaze dissuaded her.

They heard the shattering of a bottle against the pavement: it was Don Furibundo, who had just smashed the bottle and got out of the Willys. His budding drunkenness clouded his eyes, he came straight towards the maestro, faced him once more:

“So?”

After an encouraging silence, came the maestro’s voice:

“No.”

And, very earnestly:

“Go back where you came from, señor. If you don’t want to see the float, don’t see it: don’t go out that day, pretend you don’t exist. Sooner or later everyone will forget all about it.”

“Dammit!” Don Furibundo was stunned. “I’m offering you what you’d win for first prize, and all because you’re making fun of me. What more do you want, Tulio, tell me what more you could possibly want? Tell me!”

Zulia Iscuandé sighed deeply.

The other artisans were also noticeably rattled: the thing was, hand on heart, during that whole year working on “Don Furibundo Chasing his Wife”—that was what the float was called — they had never imagined getting first prize. Maybe third, if God was on their side. So the offer unsettled them to the point of exasperation.

“Convince this pig-headed fool,” Don Furibundo urged them.

“No,” the maestro replied, “Nobody here is going to convince me of anything, and nobody comes here to shout at me either.”

“Well I won’t shout any more then,” Don Furibundo shouted. His voice had changed. He had become someone else.

And again they saw him run off towards his car.

Instinctively, they all took a step backwards.

This man is truly insane, the doctor thought, witnessing Furibundo Pita dash off, get in the jeep and poke about in the glove compartment again. They thought he might be looking for another bottle. He was not.

“He’s got out a gun,” the watchboy exclaimed, his delight now running over.

And so he had: Furibundo Pita came at them flat out, brandishing the weapon, his face ablaze. Maestro Abril set off at a run too, and could think of no better direction to head in than where the float was being built: he disappeared behind the monumental shape, closely followed by Furibundo.

And it was while watching Furibundo Pita pelt past that Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso Lopéz suddenly realized who it was he looked like.

“Simón Bolívar,” he said out loud. “He’s identical.” He was able to confirm this by lifting his eyes to the colossal figure on the float—“It’s Simón Bolívar himself”—because, in fact, the Furibundo Pita on the float looked even more like Simón Bolívar, but a hundred times bigger, he really was just as portrayed by the artists of the time, the selfsame so-called Liberator, Simón Bolívar, he thought.

But that amazement was to be surpassed by what followed, when the critical moments took place, the fleeting seconds while the two men were invisible behind the float; just as Zulia Iscuandé started to cry out “protect him, Our Lady of Perpetual Help” they heard a shot, then a second, and a third. It was as if the silence that followed made everything go cold.

“My God, he’s killed him,” the woman shouted now, raising her arms to heaven.

Don Furibundo emerged then from the bowels of the float, ran past the doctor, got into the jeep quick as a flash, pulled away and went honking off down the track.

Everyone ran to peer behind the float.

There was Tulio Abril, more alive than dead, without a scratch on him.

3

The vision of Simón Bolívar riding high on the float was just what Doctor Proceso needed as a better reason for living than his wife’s indifference and the raising of two contrary daughters. Before him lay the extraordinary possibility of showing, with a puff in papier mâché, what he had unsuccessfully planned to reveal twenty-five years ago, when he started writing The Great Lie: Bolívar or the So-Called Liberator, a Human Biography.

He based his own work on the foundations laid by Nariño historian José Rafael Sañudo, who was born in Pasto in 1872 and died in the same city in 1943. Sañudo had been the first historian in Colombia and practically the first on the continent — as Doctor Proceso used to stress enthusiastically — who dared irrefutably to unpick Bolívar’s historic image, without the false patriotic sentiment or the exaggerated style of flattery (ears deaf and eyes blind) that the great majority of historians have traditionally bestowed upon Bolívar since his death.

“A courageous biography,” the doctor wrote on the subject of José Rafael Sañudo. “Published in 1925, Estudios sobre la vida de Bolívar provoked the contempt and condemnation of his supporters, not just in the country at large, but in Pasto, among his fellow Pastusos, who professed ‘profound surprise and indignation at his abominable lampoon.’ In Manizales they hollered for him to be hanged, in Bogotá he was declared a traitor, the Colombian Academy of History called him an ungrateful son, the Bolívar Society also called him a son, but one unworthy of Colombia, and if on publication his book found one or two moderately serious commentators, all of them, without exception, discussed it in tones of sheer panic, and one, despite acknowledging that Sañudo committed no slander and each of his assertions was well founded, did not hesitate to label him a retrograde Pastuso, hirsute theologian, convoluted prose stylist and old casuist. These labels did nothing to dampen the spirits of the Pasto historian, a man who was also a mathematician and philosopher, a reader of authors in Greek and Latin, and who stirred up the storm in advance by giving his book the words of Lucian of Samosata — in Greek — as an epigraph: ‘do not write merely with an eye to the present, that those now living may commend and honour you; aim at eternity, compose for posterity, and from it ask your reward; and that reward? — that it be said of you, This was a man indeed, free and free-spoken; flattery and servility were not in him; he was truth all through.’”

“Lamentably,” Doctor Proceso wrote, “the statue of José Rafael Sañ-udo does not preside, as it should, over the portico of the Nariño Academy of History, which he founded: the statue of José Rafael Sañudo does not even exist.” But he added: “What do statues matter? The work endures.”

The only thing Doctor Proceso granted Sañudo’s detractors was that his style really was convoluted — amalgam of philosopher, mathematician and polyglot that he was — regrettably more suitable for consumption by other historians than by the general public. And for this very reason Doctor Proceso had proposed a volume that would describe, with crystal-clear clarity, not just the political, economic and military deeds of the so-called Liberator, but his other deeds of more human aspect, which would end up shedding light on the monumental historical mistake of conferring upon Bolívar a noble leading role in the independence of the Latin American peoples, a leading role which he did, of course, play, thought the doctor, but of the most atrocious kind.

This objective, however, this book he had spent half his life struggling to write, had turned out to be beyond his powers. Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, whose work (running his practice, the two or three women who were his occasional lovers as well as being his patients, the management of his finca in Sandoná, his considerable reading, various obligations at home or to do with his two daughters, and his genuine concerns about Primavera Pinzón, who did not cease to plague him with excessive expenses and assail him with other worse tribulations) took up the majority of his time, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López admitted to himself that he would never really perfect his Great Lie of Bolívar, that a Sañudo is born but once every hundred years, and that he himself was no writer, no historian, no musician, no poet by any stretch of the imagination.

But he held on to certain expectations concerning what he called “Human Investigations,” interviews he had obtained over the years, with people from all walks of life in Pasto and in various towns in Nariño province, about the so-called Liberator’s shameful passage across southern Colombia. Of those interviews, some on paper, some recorded, his hopes were centred on the ones he carried out, on tape, with two direct descendants of people who had suffered Bolívar’s rage: a woman, Polina Agrado, recently deceased in Pasto at ninety-three years of age, and Belencito Jojoa, still alive, an old man of eighty-six who lived in the Obrero neighbourhood with his third wife and numerous children and grandchildren.

Something which piqued the doctor’s curiosity, and troubled him, was that both testimonies had to do with the so-called Liberator’s lust rather than with any of the other passions — anger, cowardice, ambition, vanity — he had possessed in such abundance. But testimonies as truthful as these did not grow on trees, so he transcribed them just as he recorded them, even though they seemed like discordant voices in the work he had planned, a work which would wipe the dust and lies from the face of history — or historians, he said — and guide the youth of the day through the Latin American wars of independence under the banner of truth.

And now, eager as a child, in front of Maestro Tulio Abril’s shot-up float, “Don Furibundo Chasing his Wife,” Doctor Proceso threw himself into imagining, represented over three or four carnival floats — or on a single, huge one — each and every one of Bolívar’s most troubling exploits: troubling because they were false and because, even being so, they continued to circulate in schools and colleges as if flowing from the fountain of truth. With this float, he thought, Simón Bolívar would plainly and simply be exposed as a myth, an utter myth, each of his most infamous and obvious manoeuvrings woven together — Simón Bolívar, he said to himself, revealed at last, Simón Bolívar just as he was: his extraordinary capacity to convince his contemporaries and, in passing, generations to come (with letters and proclamations that were bombastic, scheming, raving and wily, pompous and pedantic, passionately wordy, pastiches of Alexander the Great and Napoleon) that he was someone he was not, that he had achieved things he had not, and that he should pass into history as the hero he was not.

Maestro Tulio Abril’s teeth were still chattering, not so much from the cold as from what he had just been through. Seated on a bench, he was drinking a cup of hot aguapanela; Doctor Proceso was doing the same beside him, while Zulia Iscuandé handed out more aguapanela to the workers.

“Not a scratch,” the doctor said. “It seems the avenging Arcángel shot more at heaven than at you.”

“At heaven?” The maestro became angry. “He shot at me, I felt a bullet warm my ear.”

“Well, thanks be to Our Lady of Perpetual Help he only warmed your ear,” Zulia Iscuandé said. “Drunk as he was he could have shot us too, not just you, or shot himself, all with the same damned rotten nerve.”

“Check the float,” the maestro ordered. He trembled with anger and shock. “Check it over inch by inch to see what damage that devil did. Salvador, check the float.”

Salvador ran to the float, followed by the rest of the children.

“I’m never going to destroy it,” the maestro said, “even if they offer me paradise on earth.”

“You’re not going to destroy it,” Doctor Proceso responded, and added, after an expectant pause: “You’re going to convert it.”

They looked at him without understanding, without recognizing him. And it was because the doctor looked like someone else, very different from the man who first arrived (soaked through, in a bad mood and longing to leave); now he shivered, not with cold, but emotion, he was constantly raising his eyes to “Don Furibundo Chasing his Wife” and going off into raptures: had he gone mad? He was jabbering and whispering, blurting out exclamations and biting them back, like someone prey to the most profound illusions.

“And how do you want me to convert it?” the maestro asked. He asked out of politeness, because he was still grateful for the help he had received from the doctor ten years before, but his pride was hurt: he never liked anyone to come along and suggest changes to his floats. Had it not been the doctor he would have thrown him out of the workshop long ago: after all, he had arrived in the company of the drunken devil.

The doctor steadied his voice. Now or never, he thought. He was well aware they were waiting for his answer. He had to tread carefully.

“Maestro Abril,” he began, “we’ll make Arcángel de los Ríos pay what he promised, but three times over. We were witnesses here: attempted homicide, wasn’t it? Tomorrow, when he wakes up after his binge, the avenging Arcángel will be like putty in our hands. I’ll speak to him, I’ll tell him I will use my good offices so that none of the artisans file a suit against him, but I’ll warn him, on your behalf, that he’ll have to pay triple what he promised, I mean three times the prize money for the winning float.”

There was an eerie silence.

And a piercing whistle was heard from Iscuandé.

“Sounds good,” she said.

“Many a slip…” Martín Umbría said. He was the master craftsman who had been working with Tulio Abril the longest, and they listened to him respectfully. “The main thing is that the drunkard pays up and doesn’t come here again, plastered, and shooting every which way.”

“I’ll take care of it,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell him he won’t be on the float chasing his wife any more, but that he’ll have to pay triple not to end up accused.”

“There’s something that doesn’t convince me,” Maestro Abril said. “How come he’s not going to be on my float?”

Zulia Iscuandé grew exasperated by her husband’s words. She preferred to listen only to the doctor.

“Tell us what you’re suggesting,” she said. And even so it seemed to Tulio Abril that Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López really had gone mad, or just about: he looked at them without blinking, his hands were shaking.

Now or never, the doctor said to himself again, meanwhile. It was the opportunity of his life. His face was all lit up, as it had been when he made his first communion, when he received his medical degree, when he went to church to marry the woman he was in love with, when he saw her naked, at last. And his face was so full of wonder because he was looking and looking again at the huge figure while he said:

“Furibundo Pita is identical to Simón Bolívar.”

No-one said anything. The children stopped searching for the places where Furibundo’s bullets had left their mark on the float and for the first time attentively regarded the immense figure towering over them, now provided with an alternative identity.

“It’s just like him,” the boy who had been the lookout said at last. “It’s the Liberator himself from the books at school.”

“Simón Bolívar can stay up there just as he is,” the doctor went on. “Furibundo’s wife might come in handy later on, we’ll see how and where; with that terrified expression and fleeing the way she is, she’s like our country.”

No-one seemed to understand, or would admit to understanding, the comparison.

“The only thing up there that can’t be used is the jeep,” the doctor continued, all in a rush. “Luckily, it’s not finished, we’ll transform it. We’ll put a victor’s chariot in its place, a sort of nineteenth-century carriage, where that selfsame Bolívar will go, but in uniform and with a laurel wreath on his head, sitting on his velvet cushion; and the cart will be pulled by twelve girls — I said girls, not young women — with garlands around their hair and skimpy tunics on, like nymphs. That’s how Bolívar liked them.”

He lowered his vision-filled gaze and met the astonished eyes of the artisans for the first time.

“Which Simón Bolívar are you talking about?” Maestro Abril finally asked. “The one from Independence?”

“The very same,” the doctor replied.

It was too late to backtrack now.

But how to explain history in just a single moment and to such an audience?

This carriage the doctor proposed existed just as he described it, in Caracas, on August 6, 1813, when the same people who had celebrated the entry of the Spaniard Monteverde months earlier were now celebrating the entry of Bolívar, giving him a hero’s welcome for accomplishing victories that were not his — the real heroes of those early days had been Piar, Mariño and Girardot — Bolívar’s “victories” were just skirmishes, but the villagers in his path eagerly swelled his ranks, and Bolívar made the most of this and entered Caracas, and he was the one to call himself “the Liberator.”

The Liberator: a title the Caracas city council would later confer on him.

The little fellow had lost no time, the doctor thought. That’s what he used to call Bolívar, when he brooded over him and immersed himself in the man’s historic past as if in a bad dream that became more nightmarish because it was impossible to wake up from.

The little fellow, who ended up betraying General Francisco de Miranda, commander-in-chief of Venezuela’s insurgent forces, personally handing him over to the Spanish in La Guaira, after cunningly persuading him to postpone his journey to England, taking him captive at three in the morning, ordering him to be placed in irons and shackles and offering him up to Monteverde in order to get safe conduct and the approval of the Spanish authorities in exchange; the little fellow who had been the real reason for General Miranda’s fall after abandoning the fortress at Puerto Cabello — the best equipped of the insurgent strongholds — abandoning it despite having more than sufficient forces to thwart a spontaneous uprising by unarmed Spanish prisoners, the little fellow who fled in the night to his San Mateo estate with eight of his officers, without warning his troops who ended up without a leader, let alone any orders to follow; that same little fellow was now received in Caracas as if he were a Napoleon.

Yes, the doctor said to himself, it was the surrender of Puerto Cabello that forced Miranda to sign a treaty that would re-establish Spanish control in Venezuela, and Bolívar was the cause of the defeat: a great deal of shamelessness was required in order for Bolívar to seize Miranda, accusing him of betrayal, the very betrayal that Bolívar did commit by handing his commander over to the Spanish.

No-one will ever be able to understand, he mused, shaking his head in agitation, why they believed in him, how he managed to impose his lie. What to blame this on — ignorance? The uncouthness of the rebel leaders of the day? Why did they send him to negotiate with the English for protection, with such poor results? Why was he named colonel, why was he chosen as commander of the Puerto Cabello fortress? Because of his wealth. Why else? Francisco de Miranda, like any other military leader, gave the buying of arms and munitions and the upkeep of the troops the importance it merited; that was why he had to enrol that bourgeois, who was incompetent by any reckoning, into his army.

And the doctor’s bitter incredulity was sincere: he saw Bolívar as a make-believe strategist, faker of victories that were not victories, or worse — victories that were not his.

He tried, then, not to let his own agitation show in his voice.

“The carriage I’m telling you about,” he explained, “existed, just as I described, one hundred and fifty-three years ago, in Venezuela.”

Once again, an astonished silence surrounded him.

Doctor Proceso was suddenly hit by the hard truth: no-one there knew anything about Bolívar other than the official lies learned at school.

“What do you know about Bolívar?” he dared to ask, and felt his own uncertainty, like a great wall of encircling ice.

“He was the Liberator,” the lookout boy said.

“Father of the nation,” Maestro Abril said, as if adding a full stop; he would not lend himself to mocking Bolívar’s memory.

Doctor Proceso thought his vision — of the Liberator’s carriage — already lay in pieces. It would be superhuman, he thought, to overcome people’s fundamental ignorance of Bolívar’s true face in just one minute. What am I doing here? What am I proposing? Isn’t this futile — more than futile, humiliating?

The artisans withdrew; that morning’s interruptions had been unusual — first a drunk, then a lunatic — best get on with some work. Then they heard Zulia Iscuandé, who had not said a word that whole time.

“My grandfather always talked about Bolívar,” she said.

She half closed her eyes, as if remembering.

“He talked to me about Bolívar,” she said.

And then, resolutely, finding the memory, seizing upon it:

“He was always talking about Bolívar, but he said Bolívar had been a complete son of a bitch.”

The workshop shook with an explosive guffaw. Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López’s eyes were watering.

My God, he thought, there is still memory among us.

“And not just in Pasto, but right across the country,” Iscuandé continued, spurred on. “Grandfather told us Bolívar was always a complete son of a bitch, wherever he set foot.”

The doctor, who was usually temperate and controlled, asked for a glass of aguardiente, not to celebrate Zulia Iscuandé’s scorn, but her words. That was when Salvador and the rest of the children descended from the float. They had finished checking it over inch by inch.

“The three bullets hit the lady,” the watchboy gabbled. “One on the forehead, one on the bum and the other on one of her tits.”

Another guffaw. With a whistle, Maestro Umbría remembered it was Innocents’ Day, “Here’s to life!” he roared. Doctor Proceso did not want to interrupt the hullabaloo. All he saw, in front of him, was the colossal figure of the Liberator.

“Just like here today,” he said to himself, astounded, “Bolívar was never injured either, not once in his soldiering life, he always knew how to hide, he never showed his face.”

Well into the evening, the artisans took him home. They loaded him onto Martín Umbría’s truck — the one Bolívar was later to be fixed to for his procession. Even the children accompanied the doctor: Innocents’ Day overexcited them from the start. The adults proposed toasts at every corner and people out celebrating clambered up to soak them all, not just leaping into the back but also onto the running board beside the cab in which Zulia Iscuandé, Tulio Abril, the doctor in the middle and Martín Umbría — who was driving — were all drinking. Behind, on the open flatbed, the artisans and apprentices were fooling around, along with the horde of children who responded to each water attack with more water: they had a big earthenware jar full of bombs, which they hurled by the handful into the crowd. The clamour of the festivities swept over them from all sides: you could hear the din of water bombs exploding, crashing like boiling waves against the windscreen, the water like white lashes from a whip shooting over them, shouts like whistles — was that laughter or wailing? Heavy sighs, band music pulsing in the background, the traditional cries of “Viva Pasto, dammit!” from the revellers.

Right in the middle of the Avenida de los Estudiantes, at risk of being run over, a white-haired old man popped up, sitting astride a pregnant, squealing sow; delighted children urged them on at a run, and a fat woman, probably the pig’s owner, gave chase trying to catch them. A cow, completely soaked, was grazing terrified on one side of the Obelisk. Also soaked through like the cow, but happy, much more so than when he was a child and had joined in, Doctor Proceso got out of the vehicle at his lonely house, happy because he carried with him the maestros’ promise: they would create the Bolívar carnival float.

Long before the aguardiente, to prove their word as master craftsmen, the two maestros had climbed up onto the float and pulled down the devout Alcira, they toppled her bulk to the ground without hesitation; in her place they would put up the twelve girls pulling a victor’s chariot in which Bolívar would be seated with his Roman wreath on his head. And they themselves decided — to the doctor’s surprise — that around this carriage, on carved wooden panels, would go the key scenes of the War of Independence, which the doctor was to select: he would have to talk to Cangrejito Arbeláez about that, they suggested, one of Pasto’s best-known sculptors, who carved men and women and trees and animals as if breathing them into being. He was the only one who could triumph over the time left until the parade on January 6: exactly nine days.

With the maestros’ promise, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López said goodbye, reeling outside his house, drunk for the first time in years; it was some thirty since he had imbibed to the point of swaying about in such a fashion, but the cause was well worth the trouble, he thought, and he would not skimp: he would pay the artisans three times the float prize; he would not waste his time denouncing Furibundo, who was as rich as he was miserly — hadn’t he heard him swear he would charge the firemen for the six hens they drowned? Furibundo’s offer was a fabrication: he had wanted to trick and then startle the artisans, a ruse. The doctor would have to finance Bolívar’s carriage by himself. He was disheartened to recognize the fact that if the artisans agreed to support his idea it was purely and simply for money, three times the prize money of the winning float: why else would they work? — he said to himself — no other reason, don’t be naive, let’s not get carried away.

Because, when all’s said and done, who was he to set himself up as an expert on the true story of the Independence, and among artisans? There were nine days to go. Wouldn’t it be prudent to look for other allies? A float like the one in the offing could provoke resentment; it was Bolívar’s carriage, with his whole history on its back. He had to turn to his friends — to people who were his friends, years ago — but which ones? Doctor Proceso began to reflect on this, genuinely alarmed.

For now, he said to himself, finish the float, exhibit it on January 6, and more than that, let it exist in the world, as though memory were preserved on any corner of Pasto’s streets, the first bastion of the truth, of the real past. Something must come out of this float, something crucial, something definitive. Ah, he said to himself, if it could be exhibited permanently right in the middle of the children’s park, for the edification of infants and grandparents alike, but how would it be installed? What nook of the city would permit its permanent presence? For now, pay the craftsmen for its construction, guide the work; he would have to choose the scenes carefully — from among the many macabre events with which Bolívar’s life was full to overflowing.

He would sell his finca. He had been ready to do this for a long time: sell off those several, poorly managed acres of wheat, the ancestral but collapsing house, the abandoned sugar mill, the swimming pool with its missing tiles, the stables empty of livestock, the gardens empty of flowers — Primavera must be the only woman in the world, and poet to boot, who did not know flowers existed. One thing’s for sure, he thought, the frustrated poet would be delighted to get half the finca sale price in cash; she would not complain, she would immediately plan what clothes to buy, which shoes, where she would travel. But he would not stint on paying Maestro Abril what he deserved, nor Martín Umbría and the sculptor Cangrejito Arbeláez, and each and every one of the makers. They would understand later on what work they had created. Zulia Iscuandé had shown that sufficient memory still survived in Pasto. Bolívar’s carriage, the carriage of history, of legitimate rage, was imminent. No-one was going to stop it, no-one.

Then he sneezed.

“Provided I don’t die of a cold first,” he said, because he was dripping water, leaving a wet trail as he walked through his lonely house, empty of voices — not just the voices of his family, but his employees too: Sinfín was nowhere to be seen. He found her hurried note, written in a childish hand: We bought the chickins already Im going with the señora its midday now docter dont be long.

In the margin he discovered Primavera’s rounded writing and it scared away his drunkenness: I hope you’ll come to the birthday party and stay with your daughters at the finca, that’s if you remember, you ape.

Ape.

It was still not too late.

He drank a mug of black coffee and put on dry clothes. A one-hour journey to the finca, near Sandoná, lay before him; the hot weather there would cure his cold: he was not going to die.

But before setting off he made up his mind and telephoned the philosopher and professor Arcaín Chivo, a fifty-year-old like himself and a childhood friend, who asked, rather taken aback, whether the fact that he was calling meant the world was coming to an end. They had not spoken for years, not since their mutual interest in Simón Bolívar used to drive them to meet at the Guadalquivir café on Nariño Square and reconstruct the details, the bickering and backbiting, setbacks and apathies of Colombian independence. That was years ago now, when Arcaín Chivo was Professor of History; these days they just recognized one another every so often, from a distance: in Pasto’s only bookshop, or in the queue for one of the three cinemas, or on some corner — life slipping past as quickly as crossing the street.

“See you at my house this Friday, seven o’clock,” Doctor Proceso said, rounding off his invitation.

“The day after tomorrow, December thirtieth? Let’s wait one more day and we can bring in New Year together on the thirty-first.”

“Our New Year hug can be brought forward.”

So he fixed a meeting with Arcaín Chivo, better known as “the Philanthropist” thanks to his notorious stinginess, emeritus educator at the University of Nariño — friend or acquaintance? Whichever he was, the doctor needed a deputy he could count on for the whole fast-approaching carnival firestorm.

And he also considered the involvement of Monsignor Pedro Nel Montúfar, Bishop of Pasto, the “Wasp,” who despite being a priest was — he thought — an intelligent one at least, representative of ecclesiastical power, plus the involvement of Mayor Matías Serrano, the “One-Armed Man of Pasto”—not actually missing either arm — representative of civil power; both acquaintances of his since school — although that might not mean much, but he could rely on them, unlike Governor Nino Cántaro, the “Toad,” who had also been at the same school but might yet turn out to be an enemy, he thought, due not so much to his intelligence, but his irrational idiocy.

He called the mayor and the bishop and they accepted the invitation, more intrigued than happy about it: it was unusual that Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, gynaecologist-historian, should remember a living soul — what was he up to?

And he arrived at his finca in Sandoná after a tortuous journey along the unpaved road; he arrived after nightfall, making plans like dreams are made, battling with himself. He parked the Land Rover beside the other vehicles belonging to the guests; he could not see Primavera’s Volks-wagen, and this bothered him. He smelled the damp earth, the wet bark of the trees. As he approached the house, hands in pockets, absorbed expression, his shadow stooping between bushes and sheaves of wheat, hearing dogs barking without really listening to them, he seemed like a sombre stranger.

Primavera was not at the finca.

Genoveva Sinfín told him so, surrounded by a tumult of clowns and kids, among whom his daughter Floridita stood out, riding her Shetland pony.

“The señora went back to Pasto,” Sinfín explained. “She left word that she wanted to be alone and that you would look after things here till tomorrow.”

They were talking about fifty metres from the main entrance to the house, in the middle of a wood of eucalyptus trees. The windows were shining with a yellow light. Floridita did not even acknowledge him: when he wanted to say hello, she turned her head, irritated. He did not try going up to her, sensing only too keenly that she would run from him — but why? He did not know. What had he done? His seven-year-old daughter loathed him, possibly instructed by her mother; she was going back and forth on her pony, followed the whole time by the boy Chanchán and the gang of admiring children; when all was said and done, it was her birthday: she could do and not do whatever she liked.

“And Luz de Luna?” he asked.

“I haven’t seen her for ages,” answered the cook, after a guarded silence. “She must be around somewhere.”

She scratched her greying head; did she want to change the subject?

“I’m here, obliged to serve, as is right and proper,” she said. “I’ve got six girls helping me, but they’re on their knees. And to think this goes on till tomorrow, señor.”

The doctor greeted the steward, old and aloof, who was no doubt waiting his turn to put in his complaints. The strumming of various guitars could be heard in the house: twelve-string tiples, a mandolin. A woman was singing off key. Applause. Stamping on the wooden floor. It was Primavera’s family, the Pinzóns — the doctor sighed — who never missed a christening or wake in Pasto.

He paused halfway between the eucalyptus wood and the front door. More parked cars warned of a sizable gathering. He asked Sinfín to bring him a cup of coffee and headed for the opposite side of the house, where the swimming pool was, closely followed by the steward. He did not listen in detail to his complaints: he was asking for money to pay the farm labourers; the tractor needed a spare part that was impossible to get in Pasto, they would have to order it from Bogotá; somebody was stealing the fence posts; the sheep pen was empty of sheep one morning; some-one set fire to the pine trees, señor.

“Never mind, Seráfico, we’re going to sell all this,” the doctor said, coming to a halt. The old steward studied him in astonishment and stalked off to his cabin without saying goodbye: he was not just cursing, but also seemed to be sobbing — however, the doctor did not think it had anything to do with him.

He went to the swimming pool because the water liberated him; the pool was missing tiles and the water looked black: it was a black mirror he would lean out over before splintering it with his naked body. He wanted to take a dip, and then think about life. But now near the pool he heard voices and laughter. He drew back, hiding himself in the shrubbery, and saw how Matilde Pinzón, her husband, and various unknown couples amused themselves, lounging around the pool in bathing suits. They were smoking and drinking by the flickering glow of the fireflies. One of them dropped a bottle of aguardiente into the water. The doctor went back the way he came.

This business of the birthday party was a turnaround, he thought. He and Primavera agreed that just he and his daughters would sleep at the finca after the party. Had they really agreed that? And now, by the look of things, the party guests would stay the night, people he could not stand. Primavera should take care of her family, he thought, but he tried to understand her: perhaps she could not bear them either, and had fled to Pasto. He was the one who would have to look after them, by rights. No, no, he could not. He would go back to Pasto too, and make the most of it to get down on paper the relevant scenarios from the Independence, which the sculptor Arbeláez would have to bring to life in wood. The prospect of a peaceful night, working on his own interests, cheered Doctor Proceso up. He took his coffee from Sinfín.

“I’m going back to Pasto too,” he said. “Look after the girls, see they get to bed early, and you along with them. And if you want to throw these people out, do so, you have my permission, tell them I ordered you to.”

“What, Doctor? You’re not going in to greet the guests? You’re leaving just like that? Aren’t you taking the girls?”

“You know very well they won’t want to come with me.”

Sinfín’s mouth twisted in annoyance, but she quickly resigned herself: it was not the first time the doctor and his wife had let the responsibility for a party fall on her shoulders.

The doctor finished his coffee in one gulp. He turned down the steaming cuts of roast pork Sinfín offered him on a tray, and repeated that he would not go in to greet the guests. The starry sky glowed above their heads. While they were walking along the winding path, amidst the chirring of crickets and the leafy darkness of the finca, Sinfín advised the doctor to come back early the next day to pick up the girls, thus avoiding the guests staying right through until lunch.

“They’ve eaten the lot,” she confided. “And they’re good and drunk: they sent for Don Seráfico’s three piglets to be killed, and then when they’d been roasted and eaten, nobody wanted to pay up. That’s why Don Seráfico got angry.”

The doctor no longer wanted to respond.

He was about to get into his jeep when Sinfín interjected again:

“Your daughter,” she said.

“My daughter?”

“Your daughter.”

“Which one? Floridita didn’t want to say hello to me.”

“Luz de Luna.”

“Where is she, Genoveva? I already asked you, don’t you remember?”

“I think she’s in the stables, Doctor. It hasn’t occurred to her to leave the stables all afternoon.”

He strode off towards the stables.

But the cook did not want to follow him there.

“Whenever you see the stars, I’ll be seeing them too, Luz de Luna, and we’ll go on seeing like that for ever and ever, wherever we are, you in Pasto and me in Bogotá.”

That is what the doctor heard on entering the stables: through the high, unglazed window, the world’s stars were peeping in. Who was talking? He did not recognize the boy in the gloom, but he saw him trying to sit up and then stop, embarrassed, and he also heard him call him “uncle.” It was another of Matilde Pinzón’s sons.

The two cousins were sitting on the dirt floor, lying back against a mound of chaff, shoulder to shoulder, hands entwined. His fifteen-year-old daughter’s long black hair was tangled, strewn with bits of straw, and there was dirt on her blouse. The doctor took all this in at a glance, along with her shining eyes, and heard her trembling voice, as frightened as it was resolute:

“Papá. You made it.”

“And now I’m leaving,” the doctor said. “I’ve got things to do in Pasto.”

“Yes, Papá.”

“Your mother has gone to Pasto, in case you didn’t know. You’ll have to take charge, stay with Genoveva, look after your little sister.”

“Yes, Papá.”

“I don’t want you hanging around in the stables any longer, okay?”

“Yes, Papá.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, Papá.”

The two cousins got up without letting go of one another’s hands, like it was some kind of shared challenge: it seemed they wanted to shout to the world that they were a couple. Proud of themselves, they ascertained that the doctor was not making a fuss, quite the reverse; he followed them in silence, at a distance. The doctor wondered what he should do. He suffered over the way things were, or the way the world was — what had things come to with his daughters, this tremendous distance between them in which he, alone, was the outsider, the intruder? Oh, if only he had not had them, he thought, if only he were not tied to Primavera, if he lived alone, could do his own thing: he would be free, he would have stayed with the artisans all night, celebrating the future as it should be celebrated. It’s too late now, he thought, too late for this family man.

“Goodbye, dear. Come and say goodbye to me.”

Luz de Luna gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Bye, Papá.”

The boy said goodbye too, from a distance:

“Bye, Uncle.”

And the doctor was on the point of explaining to him, “I’m not your uncle, I’m your aunt Primavera’s husband, I’ve got nothing to do with your family,” but he stopped himself. He remembered that years ago he had thought the boy showed signs of learning difficulties, and he had been on the point of alerting Primavera to the fact, so she could tell her sister.

Well, no, he said to himself, as he drove the Land Rover along the highway, he’s no retard, he’s another poet talking about stars and he’s already deflowered Luz de Luna—“dammit!” he yelled into the night — I hope her mother has at least given her some good advice about how not to end up pregnant. Primavera Pinzón, who would not one day wish to become your murderer?

4

Just seconds before opening the door to his house he realized Primavera was not expecting him: really not expecting him, he thought. He was going to surprise her, then. In fact, it had seemed odd to him that the Volkswagen was parked on the street, why hadn’t she put it in the garage? Primavera would be going out that night, and where to? He did not open up the garage either, and parked the jeep on the other side of the road.

He was already pushing open the door when a woman’s voice in the street waylaid him—“Doctor”—this startled him: he had not noticed how close she was. “Who’s that?” he asked, as he did not recognize the woman with a dark veil over her head — the veil of the churchgoing faithful, half covering her face. “It’s Alcira Sarasti,” she said.

It was the wife of Arcángel de los Ríos.

The doctor greeted her impatiently; he did not want to know anything about anything anymore, and much less about Furibundo Pita and his revolver.

“He’s told me everything,” she said.

She sounded on the verge of tears. The doctor remembered her: she had been the very shy, skinny, mixed-race girl who used to keep herself to herself and read her Bible on a bench in the children’s park; and she’s still beautiful, he thought, an innate beauty, who knows what penance cast her into Furibundo Pita’s jaws, but didn’t she try to kill me one Innocents’ Day with those poisoned empanaditas? And hadn’t he been in love with her when they were children? Wasn’t she the same girl leaning over a balcony, a black Bible in her pale hands? The same Bible she was always reading as a youngster? It was her.

She swallowed air, as though it would give her courage to speak.

“He told me he fired at a man, and that he doesn’t know how.”

She waited a few seconds for the doctor to answer but he was so surprised that he could not. He just thought: I don’t know how either.

“He told me he fired at Maestro Abril and he doesn’t know how; he’s sorry.”

The doctor remained mute.

“Arcángel’s not like they say. He drinks, it’s true, but that’s all; he’s done me harm, but he’s a good man, when all’s said and done.”

Doctor Proceso looked at her in amazement: there was Alcira Sarasti, sticking up for Furibundo Pita.

“He told me about the float, about what that float represents. I myself…” she said, stifling a sob and raising her voice, “I’d be the first to be insulted; how could such a float occur to a man like Maestro Abril, someone I know? How many times did I go to his house with the Day of the Poor ladies to comfort his children, to leave shopping, pencils and exercise books, clothes, medicines; why does he repay us in such a mean-spirited way? How could he think of goading my husband? He knows my husband well; the whole of Pasto knows my husband when he drinks. Don Tulio Abril knew perfectly well what he was taking on.”

And she made up her mind to ask, terrified:

“Tell me, Doctor, for goodness’ sake, just tell me he didn’t kill him.”

She had started to cry.

“He didn’t kill him,” the doctor said.

She crossed herself.

“Thanks be to the Blessed Virgin of La Playa,” she said, and lifted the veil from her face; her shining eyes appeared, her voice recovered:

“I knew God would protect us, how could Arcángel think of firing at so good a man as Maestro Abril?”

The doctor looked at her, yet more astonished.

“I don’t know,” he said.

And he was about to go in, but she stopped him; she placed her gloved hand on the doctor’s arm.

“Wait,” she whispered, “are you in a hurry? Are you sure Señora Primavera’s expecting you? Come over to ours, just one minute, Arcángel needs you. He sent me to beg you to listen to him, one minute.”

“Tell him he didn’t hurt anyone. The float won’t be seen. Tell him to forget the whole thing.”

And once more, he made as if to go inside.

“No,” she said, “don’t go in, please.”

Did she really want to stop him entering his own home? It seemed so: her hand bore down on the doctor’s arm. And, all of a sudden, she began to stroke it, really began to stroke it, she was stroking it: the doctor found that Alcira Sarasti was stroking his arm without realizing it, as if she were caressing him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “No-one got hurt, this whole misunderstanding’s going to be cleared up: neither you nor Arcángel will have anything to do with what the float says.”

“Dear God,” she fretted. “It would be my biggest sorrow.”

Her eyes roamed across the starry sky; was she going to cry again? She recovered:

“Listen,” she said, “I understand Maestro Abril, I know why he did it, I know him better than I know myself. He’s a good man.”

“Another good man,” the doctor said.

But the pious Alcira did not hear him.

“One afternoon, coming out of church, after Benediction, I bumped into Maestro Abril. He didn’t just say hello, but walked along with me. I don’t know if he already knew, like everyone else, what was in store for him: Arcángel appeared, as he always does, hooting in the Willys, accelerating and slowing down, making all his usual racket when he finds me in the street after Benediction. He came up behind us, Hell itself on our heels. I said to the maestro: ‘Señor Tulio, you don’t need to come with me,’ and he said: ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll stay with you.’ Arcángel caught us up: he hooted more than ever, shouted at the maestro to leave me on my own, he said some things to his face it would be a sin to repeat, Doctor; the whole of Pasto heard them, what an insult, and me so sorry to be the centre of attention. The maestro took my arm, because I tripped and nearly fell over with fright, can you imagine? He didn’t let me go and stayed with me and told my husband that he should get out of the car, to see if he was big enough to make him leave my side, he said that to him, my God, and thank heavens Arcángel didn’t get out: somebody turned up, one of his secretaries, a good angel who tempted him with a meal of guinea pig in Catambuco and took him away, that angel saved us, because Maestro Abril remained stubborn, determined to accompany me, taking my arm: Arcángel would surely have run us both over, he was capable of driving over us a hundred times, out of fury. But the maestro’s bravery was something to see: he wasn’t scared, although he was trembling as much as I was or more, and he was crying like me, from pure courage, God bless his strength of purpose. How rotten I feel, my shame shaming others. I put a good man like Maestro Abril’s life in danger, do you understand? That’s why the maestro got his own back with the float, he was saving my honour, what an upright man. Thank him for me in any case, because it’s the thought that counts at least.”

“Goodbye, Señora Alcira.”

“No,” she said, with an expression the doctor thought was pity for him. “You shouldn’t go in.”

“And why not?” he asked.

She smiled, undecided. He thought she would insist, in order to convince him to go to her husband, for a minute. She gave up, her voice a whisper:

“My regards to your wife.”

And she disappeared down the street: slowly, light-footed, as though afraid of making a noise, she seemed to float. The doctor grasped the door handle again and pushed, at last, as if it were a heavy sheet of lead.

He made the door click audibly as he closed it: best let his presence be known, although it was possible Primavera had already heard his conversation — that depended where she was, he thought.

And straight away he saw her emerging, from the depths of the corridor leading to the guest bathroom, a shadow barely illuminated by the single light bulb switched on, was she still unaware of his presence? She approached with her leather skirt hitched up almost to the waist, bending down — in the middle of the infinitely complex manoeuvre of pulling down the skirt stuck around her thighs — and at the same time he heard her voice. It was hard to make it out.

“I heard the door,” she said, “who was it?”

“Me,” he said.

Primavera Pinzón stopped in astonishment, open-mouthed, just like him.

“A fish bone,” she said.

And despite everything, he discovered, her voice was unchanged, unruffled by the slightest emotion.

Bewildered, he heard her persevere:

“A fish bone got stuck in his throat. I was seeing that he drank some water, in the bathroom.”

The doctor had already moved towards her. They looked at one another numbly.

“A fish bone,” he repeated, and nodded.

In the shadows of the corridor it seemed as though they were trying to work out whether it really was the two of them. As though Primavera were making an effort to remember him: he looked taller and stouter to her, but a chilly aura made him different from her memory, and, for that very reason, at that moment, a stranger, someone truly unknown and dangerous and much stronger than her, alien to the house.

She felt her daughters’ absence made her vulnerable.

But she shook off the fear: it was just her husband, Doctor Donkey, hadn’t he surprised her early that morning dressed as an ape, giving her a preview of his pathetic prank from beginning to end? And wasn’t he even more pathetic now, so hesitant and ultimately deferential towards convention, as expected?

By then, with that almost magical, invisible speed of movement with which every woman dresses and conceals herself, she had finished fixing the skirt and straightened up, slightly flushed, as though with a final scrap of strength.

They both turned to look towards the door of the bathroom where early that morning Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López had dressed up as an ape: there, through the same doorway, a head stuck out — a different head, a head with moustache and sideburns, that dithered without making up its mind to say hello.

Who can it be? — the doctor wondered.

The truth was, he expected to find a boy—an adolescent, which was the same thing as far as the doctor was concerned — given that he already knew his wife’s secret tastes, her unsuspected love, her outrageous, perpetual desire: boys. With good reason he once heard a whispered conversation between two of his lady patients, who referred to Primavera as “the Cradle Snatcher,” a nickname the doctor found very amusing.

Years before, one afternoon at the finca, he had surprised her at a bend in the river with one of the young labourers, a recently weaned colt — the doctor had thought — a prize yokel, a country boy who must have been for her, with all her respectable reasons, the most wonderful thing in the world; he discovered her right in the middle of the preliminary persuasion while they were each eating a guava, sitting very close to one another on top of a large, white boulder at the river’s edge: the foaming current chattered, swallowing up the laughter, the words. Primavera was wearing that long summer dress he knew so well, grey and frothy with a large flower embroidered on it in gold thread, a dress sprinkled with river spray, here and there, on the shoulders, on the back, wet and sticking between her open legs, where her hands were resting, and she had one foot bared, rosy and small in the grass; the sandal, not far off, lay upside down, as if the foot had freed itself by kicking it off in annoyance. Primavera’s head remained bent downwards; she seemed to be contemplating the tips of her breasts; from time to time her teeth bit into the guava, her lips sucked at it, while one of her hands ran over her long blonde hair as if untangling it; in reality she was sweeping it in shining strands across the boy’s bare shoulder, grazing his skin like real, wounding darts. Primavera never displayed such furious and mute mortification as she did that afternoon, when the doctor disturbed them, saying hello. Primavera loathed him, smiling at him; and the colt fled, stammering.

But tonight was different. This was no strapping youth who leaned out from the doorway. It was General Lorenzo Aipe, a fact that not only amazed the doctor, but disconcerted him: he hardly knew the general, they had been introduced at the governor’s house — when was that? This was not a boy: the general must have reached his half-century, just like him; together they totalled a hundred years. That made all the difference.

“General Aipe,” Doctor Proceso said.

“He can’t speak,” Primavera interrupted, “didn’t I say he’d got a fish bone stuck in his throat?”

“You did,” the doctor said.

“That fish from Tumaco that Yolandita, Gerardo’s niece, sent.”

“Yes.”

The doctor headed for the bathroom, while the moustached head remained sticking out, waiting for him without saying a word, unable to say a word, according to what Primavera herself had decreed — the doctor thought — the general must be furious, unable to speak, Primavera let slip something about a fish bone, isn’t that ingenious? Ah, bountiful Primavera — he carried on talking to himself as he made his way very slowly down the corridor, too slowly, gloomy and chill, like a ghost ship.

And how repulsive, how absurd this General Aipe seemed to him compared to the graceful savages at the finca, what a sorry, unfortunate transformation Primavera’s taste had undergone, he thought.

Primavera managed to flash her blue eyes at the doctor, dark with bitterness, as though saying to him: “If you already know what’s going on here, why don’t you leave? I’ve left you in peace plenty of times, now you leave me in peace.”

With your boy? — the doctor said to himself, and he seemed to hear Primavera reply: “With my boy.”

But that isn’t a boy — the doctor went on thoughtfully — it’s General Lorenzo Aipe.

“Let me see,” he said out loud, clapping one of his hands on the general’s shoulder, gently pushing him into the bathroom. “Supposedly, I’m a doctor.”

The general spluttered something.

“Don’t speak,” the doctor said, “it’s not a good idea for you to talk.”

General Aipe sought Primavera’s eyes, but she had lowered her head, in a confusing gesture, which could signify anger or resignation. The general was a bald man, robust and very tall, though not as tall as the doctor, and gave off a strong whiff of armpit. The doctor wondered whether Primavera, like other women, was fond of that smell. The general, embarrassed at having to submit to Primavera’s extraordinary inventiveness, the fish bone, decided to accept the situation and allowed his tongue and throat to be examined in front of the large mirror in the guest bathroom; the room was dark when the doctor approached: they had to turn the light on as they went in; all that time, the only weak light came from the bulb that illuminated the corridor, so that it seemed impossible to the general that this giant of a doctor should suspect nothing untoward, or was he pretending? The general and Primavera had been in the kitchen first, and after concluding the whirlwind of an inopportune embrace — standing up, semi-naked against the wobbling fridge — they went to the bathroom simply to adjust their clothing in front of the mirror, as they would be going off in Primavera’s Volkswagen to eat guinea pig in Catambuco; and they had just entered the bathroom, without yet switching on the light, when Primavera heard the front door open and went to have a look.

Now the general heard, inexplicably, the unbelievable doctor’s earnest voice:

“Yes, yes,” he said.

And he felt him place one of his great big fingers, overly confidently, on the top of his tongue, at the back.

“I can feel something here, General. Luckily, the bone hasn’t gone into the throat, good, very good, it’s buried itself almost completely; the tongue is a fleshy organ, making it very difficult to find a fish bone, but never fear, General, we’ll extract it, if it turns out there is, in the end, a bone there, because the body itself is capable of assimilating it, do you see? It’s quite possible your system has already absorbed it. Come with me to the consulting room, General, just for five minutes.”

The general seemed to assent with a sigh.

And this time he did exchange a reassuring look with Primavera Pinzón.

“Alright,” the general agreed unexpectedly, in his normal voice, “it’s best you help me.” And he enunciated it perfectly, the doctor discovered — a grave mistake for a general well versed in strategy, he thought, to speak so clearly with a fish bone stuck in his throat.

“Best not make the effort to talk,” the doctor said to him, affably. “Stay calm and come with me. If you had that bone in your actual throat I’d have to give you a few hard thumps on the back, or compress your thorax; I’d have to get behind you and hug and squeeze you, squeeze to fainting point. Fortunately, there’s no need. The procedure is different for a fish bone in the tongue, if you still have the fish bone in your tongue. It’ll be a simple, yet delicate matter: the fish bone can splinter and go into the jaw, and then take up residency beside the carotid artery on its way to the heart, no less. But we’re going to check it out.”

And they headed for the private consulting room, right there, on the ground floor, through a discreet oak door on one side of the living room. Primavera followed behind, bewildered: she had thought the matter would not go on for long, that they would all, formally, say goodbye to one another, and that her husband would go on being the man she knew. But to see him so composed and obliging, leading General Aipe along, intrigued her as much as it irritated her. Her Doctor Donkey was so naive — she calmed down at last — he really must believe the general was suffering from a stuck fish bone. Then, going along behind her husband’s tall figure, glancing at his affable profile, she suddenly wondered, very surprised at herself, why she was not in love with him, or why she did not accept, after all, that this was her husband and she loved him; there are so many ways to love with resignation, she told herself, why, simply, did she not love him or try to love him and stop, frankly, fucking about? Primavera Pinzón asked herself this, engrossed in her own moment of truth, and now — she suddenly cried out — what will happen? Why did I think of a fish bone? All this is through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, amen, and for a second she believed, unable to credit it, that she was laughing, that she was roaring with laughter at herself and the two men by her side.

Had he made a mistake in returning home, the doctor wondered, meanwhile.

For years a sort of tacit agreement had been established between him and his wife regarding their private wishes to be “alone.” The doctor himself sometimes went out to the finca “alone,” for a weekend, and Primavera did not object. No doubt about it — the doctor thought — he had neglected to remember the agreement in time or, remembering it too keenly, he had found himself there, besieging Primavera. The fact was, they both knew what to expect from one other: the reckless female patients, for example, who from time to time, and so thriftily, became the doctor’s lovers, did not pass unnoticed by Primavera, who smiled patronizingly — stronger than he was. As for him, why did he resort to these affairs? Simple repayment — he told himself — generosity towards the generosity of certain women exhausted with their husbands, women who were starting to grow old, like him, who admired their doctor and found an occasional diversion in him. The doctor did not feel one iota of tenderness for these tormented patients who invented a whole range of illnesses in order to visit his practice; he just proved to himself that he was alive, and that he was more alive if he managed to make them happy, but — he recognized — while the hospitable embrace occurred, his memory took refuge in the flesh and eyes of Primavera Pinzón: he did not succeed in ridding himself of her.

And now — he wondered — what was he doing leading the general towards his consulting room? If it were only a matter of another of Primavera’s boys, he thought, he would let him go, unscathed, but it was this horrible General Aipe. And something at the doctor’s core inflamed and — conversely — pleased him: the irritation on Primavera’s face pleased him to the point of anguish.

“Eleven o’clock at night,” he said, consulting the clock on the consulting room wall, “Innocents’ Day isn’t over yet.”

He seemed genuinely eager to assist, bent over the little table of medical instruments, searching here, searching there; an unassailable force was at work in him which froze his wife and the general, a force that sprang above all from an inspiring serenity. For that reason, lying back on the leather couch, more of a divan than a couch, General Lorenzo Aipe listened drowsily to the medic’s calming voice. The general had his mouth open, lit by a small torch the doctor was holding in his hand. Then the general saw him pick up a tongue depressor and, almost immediately, a syringe; the needle went in, clean and painless. For a moment, the general’s hand seized the doctor’s.

“Steady, General,” Doctor Proceso said. “It’s preferable to anaesthetize the tongue to avoid any pain: we’ll find the fish bone, if there is one.”

“Is there a fish bone?” Primavera asked, fixing her darkened eyes on her husband.

“It’s the likeliest thing,” he said, without altering his expression. His voice was uninflected, neutral, professional: a medical practitioner carrying out his duty. “That’s what the colouration of the tongue here suggests. I’ll need to palpate it. Patience, General.”

General Lorenzo Aipe wished to speak; he gave a sort of prolonged sigh, and wanted to add something with his hands: signals of astonishment and dissent, incredulity at what he was going through, that well-aimed jab he had been the object of. He started to get up, but the doctor’s hand spread open on his chest and pushed him gently but firmly back onto the couch’s leather pillow.

“General,” he said, “don’t try to speak. At this moment, your tongue is a dead one — like Latin.”

The general and Primavera exchanged another look, full of misgiving, urgently apprehensive. But the doctor’s voice went impassively on and was of a candour that persuaded them.

“Let me do it, General, it won’t hurt, it’s a case of finding the end of the bone, taking hold of it and pulling it out, or breaking it off and destroying it,” and while saying this he already had in his hand, as if by magic, a slender scalpel, like a glinting streak, that he quickly used on who knows which of the seventeen striated muscles of the tongue, as he explained while he did it, “the tongue is a fleshy organ possessing seventeen striated muscles,” he said, concentrating, “that’s done it, general, I’ll apply this little bit of gauze for a few seconds to stop it bleeding, like so, good, the bone has been absorbed into your tongue, from there it’ll dissolve into the intestinal flora and cease to be a danger; it’ll become just like you and me and everyone else: pure shit.”

The horrified silence which followed his words was the decisive push that helped the general to finish getting up, Primavera to finish getting out of the consulting room, the two of them to finish crossing the living room as if fleeing from a lunatic.

The doctor followed them unhurriedly to the front door: he saw how they got into the Volkswagen and left — Primavera at the wheel, the general just a panic-stricken face, goggle-eyed, his hand at his lips.

Afterwards the doctor returned to the living room and sat in the easy chair—“bad job,” he said to himself, “bad job.”

He did not know when Primavera got back. He felt her pass by him, vaguely, like a draught, heard her go upstairs and slam the bedroom door with all her might.

She came back to him much later, by the light of the dawn tinting the windows. He sensed her pass him again, go to the kitchen, head slowly back up the stairs to the first landing: there, Primavera rested her elbows on the handrail.

“And you’re happy,” she said.

The doctor heard her, frozen in his easy chair, but understood absolutely nothing: he was thinking about that episode in Bolívar’s life that Belencito Jojoa had recounted to him one rainy afternoon.

Then he felt her go past again, towards the front door.

“Where are you going?” he said, just for the sake of it, because he thought that was what he ought to ask, or rather, what anyone would ask, and he did not want to disappoint her, he wanted her to leave for wherever she was heading, calmly, at peace.

“The girls,” she snapped, “remember them?”

She clenched her fists. She trembled beside the door.

“You abandoned them to the mercy of those drunks; doesn’t it ever occur to you to worry about your daughters?”

Those drunks are your brothers and sisters, your family, he was on the point of retorting, but contained himself.

“Don’t you ever think that some pervert might just rape them?” Primavera asked, without expecting an answer. “I’m off to the finca, if you really care.”

And then:

“That’s if I’m not too late. And please don’t follow me, don’t even think about it.”

Motionless, he saw her open and close the door and disappear.

He did not know how much time went by, but he was disturbed by the telephone, which dragged him away from Belencito Jojoa telling tales of Bolívar that rainy afternoon, pulled him from his dreams — although not sleeping — in that same easy chair where he was still sitting from the night before. The morning advanced across the windows: now the light hurt his eyes, and yet — he thought, wiping away a tear — for him it was as if the night was still going on. Are my eyes watering because of the brightness of the light or because I’m crying? The telephone persisted, beside him. He stretched out an arm and answered it. Even before putting the receiver to his ear he heard a voice that sounded like it was coming from the other side of a storm. Not only did the interfering noise resemble that of a storm, but the quiet voice itself could be heard breaking up into crackling sounds. It was the voice of General Lorenzo Aipe, or rather, a sort of guttural groaning he was making — more words, fewer words, and always fragmented:

“Doctor, if I’m damaged for life, you’re dead, do you hear me, you sonofabitch doctor? You’re dead if you injured my tongue.”

Doctor Proceso let the morning advance over him, let the sun touch the edge of his shoes, his knees, his waist, his chest, and on up to his eyes. He had resolved to go out to the finca after Primavera, for his daughters — but no, he said to himself. “No,” he repeated out loud, “I won’t go.”

He would visit the sculptor Cangrejito Arbeláez, as agreed with the maestros: renew his enthusiasm for Bolívar’s carriage. From that moment on, his pain of a love for Primavera, that absurd uncertainty of love, would be left behind. From now on he would think only of himself and the float, with no backing down, unlike what he had been permitted his entire life, his whole life condemned to the suffering caused by a single name: Primavera.

But when he crossed Pasto’s sleeping streets in his jeep, that Thursday, December 29, 1966, he was still remembering the scalpel that had seemed to have had a life of its own, the pink and white tongue, Primavera’s astonished eyes, the blood, General Aipe’s tortured voice threatening him.

“Bad job,” he said to himself again. “Very bad job.”

5

Without yet having exchanged a word with the doctor about the float, the sculptor Cangrejito Arbeláez had already chiselled reliefs of the early events of Bolívar’s life onto wooden panels. At that moment, he was marking out the betrayal of Miranda, and Doctor Proceso was observing, fascinated, the gradual appearance of Simón Bolívar and the other conspirators, beneath the rapid chisel blows, Bolívar with Miranda’s sword and pistol — Miranda who waited, sitting up in bed, hands and feet in chains — the Spanish soldiers approaching and, underneath, running the full length of the panel, in carved lettering: SIMÓN BOLÍVAR BETRAYS HIS GENERAL, FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA.

“How many men went there with Bolívar?” Doctor Proceso asked.

“Five: Miguel Peña, Juan Paz del Castillo, Carabaño, Mires, Casas. As you can see, you’re not Sañudo’s only reader. Surprised?”

The doctor leaned over one of the panels that was already completed: Simón Bolívar and eight of his officers abandoning the square inside Puerto Cabello — with its three thousand guns and four hundred quintals of gunpowder — to the mercy of an uprising by unarmed Spaniards; they fled flat out, the nine faces showing disproportionate fear; even the galloping horses had expressions of terror, and, if you looked more closely, there was something extraordinary about them: the gaping faces of the nine horses were faces of petrified virgins, about to be sacrificed. The wooden lettering stated: BOLÍVAR FLEES FROM PUERTO CABELLO AS IF THE DEVIL WERE ON HIS HEELS.

“But I want to show you something I made, long before reading Sañ-udo,” Maestro Arbeláez said.

He left his tools on the table and stood for a moment in thought, wiping his hands on his leather apron. He came from Tumaco originally: a burly black man, with bloodshot eyes, and — the doctor thought — the unwavering sullenness of an abandoned child. He marvelled at this apparition of a giant, who carved wood as if breathing life into it, and he allowed himself to be led along a pathway of shrouded statues.

The studio was in a large, damp, rented house, and was so dark that it was surprising a visual artist could create his work in there. The maestro had to labour by electric light: beneath the pale bulbs his shadow seemed to float as if among age-old torches. He stopped in front of one of the sculptures and became thoughtful once more. Before uncovering it, he turned to the doctor.

“I didn’t make this because I’m black,” he said. “But almost.”

And he smiled, without losing his sullen expression.

“I have to admit,” he went on, “that the fact General Manuel Piar was black aroused my curiosity, in the beginning, and later on, more than anything, Bolívar’s reasons for ordering him to be shot: he said Piar wanted to establish pardocracy, and used this to frighten the upper-class patriots, who feared being under the command of a black man, how about that? Bolívar assumed just the right kind of ingenuity for his day and age.”

“They left Piar unprotected,” the doctor said. “Piar, who up to that point had acted impeccably, unlike Bolívar and his flawed imaginings. That was how Bolívar managed to disguise the real reasons for the execution.”

“Bolívar was afraid of Piar’s intelligence, his independence of thought, not just his military qualities,” Maestro Arbeláez picked up the thread, “Piar wasn’t a toady, like the others. Faced with Bolívar’s campaigns, all of them useless up to that point, Piar had nicknamed Bolívar the ‘Napoleon of withdrawals,’ no less. I don’t know if the name reached Bolívar’s ears, but Piar had already warned the others about his idiotic and pretentious Napoleonism, and about his main strategy, which seemed to consist of retreating at the slightest sign of danger.”

Here the maestro’s smile put in another appearance, and now his sullenness ceased to be unwavering; the more he talked, the closer he came to roaring with laughter.

“Remember the Battle of Junín,” he said, “which wasn’t a ‘battle,’ according to the technical terminology of warfare. Sañudo initially says it was a ‘skirmish,’ subsequently he says ‘fight’; in his History of America Estébanez says it was really an ‘engagement’; Cortés Vargas goes further and calls it a ‘gamble.’ Skirmish, engagement or gamble, Bolívar fled the field when he thought his cavalry was defeated; he didn’t stick around long enough to observe that a squadron of lancers took the royalists by surprise; he alone fled to behind the cover of his infantry, galloping at the double, and withdrew to a hill ‘until the evening shadows covered the field’… Colonel Carvajal finally managed to find him to inform him that while the general was retreating, the enemy was put to flight. He said: ‘Fear not, Liberator, victory is yours.’”

The maestro finished off his speech with a great guffaw but the doctor was unable to join in, too astonished by the pearly splendour of the laughter, its immoderate booming. And yet he heard the maestro say, with the last gasps of mirth:

“Gamble or engagement, historians used Junín to build another pillar of glory for Bolívar to stand on, another crowning moment made from what was only a brief skirmish in which two thousand Peruvians deserted the royalist ranks, a fight that wasn’t even suggested by Bolívar but by the Frenchman Canterac, who led the royalist forces; Bolívar wasn’t even there for the clash, he ran away.”

With a tug the maestro pulled the dust sheet from the sculpture — a realistic figure, in reddish bronze — and waited in silence; it was General Manuel Piar’s execution by firing squad: no blindfold, looking at the sky, barefoot, his shirt torn, legs slightly bent, it looked like he had just been hit and was starting to fall without ever reaching the ground.

“We must put the shooting of Piar up on the float,” Doctor Proceso said. “Poor Piar, a great strategist: he waited for death calmly and said it was not being a traitor but a patriot that led him to the firing squad. His end was terribly ironic: they were not shooting him because he interfered with Bolívar’s plans, but because he was black and wanted to establish pardocracy.”

“Piar had been born in Curaçao, of a white Venezuelan father and a mixed-race mother from the island,” the sculptor responded. “He was a combination of races, like Bolívar: Bolívar’s paternal great-great-grandfather had a relationship with a black woman in his household called Josefa, who gave birth to María Josefa: her daughter Petronella married Bolívar’s grandfather, and this doesn’t matter to us, not to you, not to me,” he suddenly shouted, “we don’t give a damn, but go and say that to Bolívar, were he alive: one more execution.”

“Who doesn’t have black blood mixed with indigenous and white in these beleaguered countries?” the doctor asked.

The maestro was exhilarated by this.

“We’re not black, white, indigenous or yellow,” he said, “but we’ve all got black, white, indigenous, yellow and who knows what blood running in our veins. Best we don’t find out.” And again, an explosive laugh that barely let him speak contorted his face. “In fact, Bolívar didn’t care about blacks: the abolition of slavery was just a signature on a document for him, he didn’t do anything concrete for the blacks; the first time he mentioned the need for abolition was because of the request from President Pétion, a black Haitian, who made him formally promise the emancipation of the slaves in return for money and munitions. Pétion effectively supported him when Bolívar fled to Haiti in order not to face up to the responsibility that was his due as leader. Bolívar would only go back once the wind was blowing in the patriots’ favour; he was a wily parasite, taking every opportunity afforded him by the other generals’ victories.”

Another guffaw burst out and rang all around.

“He didn’t just hold a grudge against Piar,” he managed to resume, close to choking, “but against Mariño and Páez too. He could not run any risks with his presidency for life, his monarchy of the Andes. And what about Admiral Padilla’s execution by firing squad?” he asked, laughter bubbling up inside him. “Another black man, another of Bolívar’s innocent victims, I don’t know how I’ll represent it, but I’ll definitely do it, Doctor, don’t you worry.”

And he had just finished saying that when a mighty crash was heard at the studio door. The din froze his laughter. The door had jumped off its hinges. Three men in carnival masks — a frog and two goblins — burst in and rushed at the burly maestro. They pushed his back up against the wall. In the throes of shock Doctor Proceso surprised himself: he became indignant they were paying him no attention, as if he posed no danger to anyone. He hurled himself towards the masked men who were grappling with the maestro, seized the frog by the shoulders, shook him, and had already made him turn around when a blow to the head left him unconscious.

He came to, stretched out on a sofa, Maestro Cangrejito looming over him.

“What happened?” he managed to ask.

“They took ‘The Battle of Bomboná’ and ‘Time of the Rifles,’” Maestro Cangrejito said.

They were two of the best reliefs of the War of Independence in Pasto.

“It’s not the first time my work’s been stolen. Last time they took some carvings, I didn’t know how or when, and I discovered by chance they were selling them in Cali. I bought them myself: I asked where I might find the artist of such good carvings and they told me he’d already died, that I had died; and another time I found a lost statue in the parish church of a priest I know: he told me quite shamelessly that he’d fallen in love with it like with a statue of the Virgin; it was of a black woman in the act of taking her dress off over her head: the good priest had her well hidden away among the plaster angels in the sacristy. But I must admit, Doctor, this is the first time they’ve robbed me like this: with violence, as if they hated me as well as stealing from me — did they hurt you? There were five of them, it wasn’t easy to stop them, they wanted to set fire to the studio, they’d brought a can of petrol with them; I don’t know what would have happened if the other tenants of the house hadn’t come to my aid — good people, firm friends: the two Chepes, Jaime, Franco, Nene, Marco, Pacho and Muñeco — the party’s over, Doctor, look how they left the place.”

The studio was turned upside down, sculptures scattered about, broken in half. At least the one of General Piar was still in one piece, the doctor noticed. The large table, where the tools were, seemed to have been destroyed.

“That’s where I threw one of those goblins,” Cangrejito said, “I must have broken at least six of his ribs.”

Doctor Proceso began to worry. It was possible the attack was something more than a simple robbery: Cangrejito Arbeláez had heard about the float from maestros Tulio Abril and Martín Umbría; no-one else in the whole of Pasto could know about it, so what had happened? Common robbery? A veiled threat? Was the governor, were the authorities, involved? Impossible, he told himself, it would be too soon.

“Let’s imagine it was a coincidence,” the doctor said as he left, “but send whatever you make to my house, and at my expense, as you go along. I want to see it all, check it before putting it up on the float. What are we going to do now, for example, about the stolen reliefs?”

“Out with the old and in with the new,” the sculptor said. “I’ll make them again, and even better.”

“I congratulate you,” the doctor said. “It’s not often you find such enthusiasm among artists. Generally speaking, they kill themselves, one is led to believe.”

They both smiled, looking at each other steadfastly: was that a challenge?

“I’m not the suicidal type, but who knows, one of these days,” the maestro responded. “Who hasn’t thought about it, at some time or other?”

“Several times, in my case, and without being an artist,” the doctor said. I hope I can go on chatting with this man in the future, he thought, he laughs and his face says the opposite. Then he said goodbye: “Send every piece to my house, you’ll be better protected.”

Why did I say that — he asked himself later on — how can I guarantee it? Could his house really be considered safe, with Primavera and General Aipe hanging around? The things he said. Why did he promise these people the earth?

His head hurt, but he plucked up courage from where he did not have it and, disillusioned, negotiated Pasto’s chilly streets, cluttered with debris from the fiesta. He was going to Maestro Abril’s workshop, in the far-flung hamlet.

There, in the midst of labouring artisans throwing jokes back and forth, among jugs of chicha and platters of roast pork, by shelfloads of tools, surrounded by the din of children, barking dogs fighting, shouting, banging, hammer blows, by the smell of varnish, amid the onslaught of clouds of sawdust, Bolívar’s carriage was beginning to take shape.

The promised payment was already a fiesta in advance.

For a moment the doctor was overcome with the fear that no-one would complete it after all, that a mob of drunks would end up sleeping around the unfinished float. But he cheered up when he noticed that the former Furibundo Pita was every inch the Liberator Simón Bolívar, enthroned on the float, dressed in his blue-and-red uniform from head to toe, the gold and medals, the crown on his temples. Of the twelve girls dressed as nymphs who rose up, immense, hauling the chariot, three were perfect in every detail: the blue faces, innocent laughter playing on their lips, their delicate arms reddened by the leather straps, their backs bent from the effort of pulling the carriage on which Bolívar lounged. They were like flesh-and-blood girls, lively and happy beneath the swags of paper roses around their wavy hair — the roses the people rained over them.

Maestro Abril and Martín Umbría, up aloft on a pile of building materials, were directing the positioning of a huge polystyrene dove that would fly around the float, a snowy dove with a stain on its breast like a drop of blood in the shape of a heart. The two maestros toasted and conversed in shouts with the doctor, without deigning to descend from the summit; they calmed him down — the robbery was not as serious as it seemed, they said, pure coincidence.

“Nobody here has talked, nor will they until you wish it,” Umbría said.

Doctor Proceso was watching the women, the children — likely reckless mouthpieces for the embryonic float. He wanted his float to be made public, fearlessly, in the parade on January 6, and then let the sky fall in; he would know what to do by then. But a sticky situation in advance, without the float having seen the light of day, made him nervous.

Zulia Iscuandé was even more distrustful, approaching the doctor to ask if he had yet put in a claim with Furibundo Pita concerning the payment. The maestros did come down from their peak then, and even the children fell silent.

“You’ll get that money,” Doctor Proceso said. “You can work without risking a thing. If the drunk doesn’t pay up for the float, I will, with all my heart.”

The answer surprised the artisans, but also reassured them, for the doctor spoke in all seriousness; he was, what’s more, a doctor: he had his finca, he had money, he had rich patients who paid him.

And, just like on Innocents’ Day, they filled him with roast pork, cheese and sweetcorn, and above all with chicha, and once again they sent him off at eleven o’clock at night, smelling of varnish and glue, tripping over himself, they waved goodbye with the roar of a general cheer and toasted his health; they did not seem hopeless drunks and, what was certain, the float was still there, growing in front of them all.

6

On the night of Friday, December 30, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López was more worried than ever; it was no coincidence, the whole of Pasto was in the know, he confirmed this when the guests arrived at his house, at seven on the dot: Professor Arcaín Chivo, or “the Philanthropist,” famous for his miserliness, Mayor Matías Serrano, called “the One-Armed Man of Pasto”—though missing no limbs — and Monsignor Mon-túfar, the bishop, better known as “the Wasp,” all very well informed about the float under construction.

“You’re going to get into trouble,” they warned him, each in their own way.

The doctor felt put out. He had anticipated telling them things from the beginning, with his motives well backed up, in order to win unconditional support. Now all he saw, looking back at him from the armchairs in the living room, were sceptical faces, expressing a sorrowful irony.

“Governor Cántaro and General Aipe will waste no time in taking measures,” Matías Serrano was arguing. “They’re not going to let Simón Bolívar dance to your tune, Justo Pastor, especially not up on a carnival float. It’d be different in a book: nobody reads books; on a public float there’s a name for this: disrespect towards the founding father, and that, as far as those animals are concerned, is worse than insulting the flag, coat of arms and national anthem all at once, three distinct entities in a single true God. It’ll be wretched. They’ll have the whole weight of the law on their side to smash your float, imprison you, if you insist, and give you a few warning wallops.”

“That’s if they don’t mangle your fingers, like happened to that Vicente Azuero, who published articles against Bolívar’s dictatorship in his newspaper. A colonel by the name of Bolívar, perhaps another grateful descendent, sought him out and smashed the fingers he’d written his truths with. It was a straightforward threat: break the fingers of anyone who writes against Bolívar. I’ve suffered similar experiences myself, and I can describe them, if asked.”

It was Professor Arcaín Chivo who had spoken.

He was the first to arrive, breathless in the cold: he made his journey on foot, to save the taxi fare from his house, which was on the other side of town — behind Canchala church, where they worshipped the Lord of the Good Death. He’d come all that way, and there he stood, perspiring, with arms outstretched, when Doctor Proceso opened the door. It was exactly seven o’clock in the evening.

“My dearest Justo Pastor,” Chivo began, still with his arms spread wide like a crucifix, but without taking a step forward, without yet coming in for the clinch, by which Doctor Proceso understood that he must wait for the professor’s salutation, a greeting possibly rehearsed in advance.

“The only redeeming feature of old age is that one ages alongside one’s friends,” Chivo said, jubilantly.

Tall but stooping, he had the bloodshot eyes of a hardened drinker, bushy grey hair and a leathery, yellow face. He held back a few more seconds before concluding:

“To each of us comes the same slice of sorrow, or ugliness, that the years bring with them, isn’t that right, my dear Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, you hermit crab, sage in solitude, one more of Pasto’s shades?”

“Must I thank you for this greeting?” the doctor asked, still without embracing the professor. “I just hope that your communal old age, with sorrow and ugliness to boot, will be a bit happier tonight, in my house.”

And they embraced.

They clapped each another heartily on the back, still inspecting one another; laughingly, they said they were going to give death the brush-off.

“Each passing year brings us closer to death, it’s true, but also closer to God,” came a sudden voice of ecclesiastical solemnity. It was the Wasp, or the Bishop of Pasto, who was in the habit of popping up like a wraith, unexpectedly. Neither the doctor nor the professor had noticed the long black Ford parking; the driver opened the door, promised to wait for His Excellency without moving from the spot, but neither the doctor nor the professor heard him, and they did not see the bishop either — who, what’s more, was not wearing the characteristic vestments of his office, just a black cassock with a small cross at the collar. Had he heard them, or did he speak of death and the passing years by chance? Hard to say: the three of them had their little tricks and their little ways, they were childhood friends, they had been through primary education together at the same school, San Francisco Javier.

And just then the Mayor of Pasto — another one from the same school — arrived, with more pomp than his predecessors: he was guarded by a policeman on a motorbike. He got out of the official car, spotted the three of them and hailed them at the top of his voice:

“By God, Bolívar is on trial today.”

By which Doctor Proceso understood once and for all that Bolívar’s carriage was common knowledge, or at least known about by the authorities.

“Let it be in God’s hands and the Devil’s,” he said quietly, but not so quietly that the bishop did not hear him.

“What’s that, Justo Pastor?”

“Let’s go inside at once, señores. Pasto is cold.”

7

In the living room, when all they had done was exchange those few warning words about the Bolívar float, Primavera Pinzón appeared before the learned invited friends, appeared, because you had to appear — he thought, gazing at her as if for the first time — my wife, he thought, you had to appear when I least needed you, showing up as if absolutely nothing had happened between the two of us (no scalpel, no tongue of any General Aipe), waltzing in, what’s more, as if the Bishop of Pasto were not among them; her appearance dazzled them, her blonde hair in two plaits, hands on hips, her hatred and vengeance well concealed — the doctor thought — Primavera Pinzón appeared wearing her costume for the Pasto carnival, and said:

“I was just trying on my ñapanga costume, señores, which will have its debut on the sixth of January. What do you think?”

And she gave a twirl.

Like a flame, thought Arcaín Chivo, recovering from the surprise. He was the first to approve.

“And God created woman,” he said, “the only thing in the world capable of coming between two brothers.”

“Or two peoples,” noted mayor Matías Serrano, “if we look to the Iliad.”

The professor ignored the reference. He had said what he said after taking a gulp of air, and without knowing whether it was appropriate to say it. He pulled himself together:

“It’s been ages, Primavera, since you’ve graced us with the pleasure of your company. That costume does wonders for you, but you do far more for it.”

“It’ll be a controversial costume,” the mayor said. “The ñapanga, the traditional dress of the Nariño countrywoman, comes down somewhat further below the knees.”

“This has been the year of the miniskirt,” Primavera reminded them. “At last they invented the miniskirt for us, señores.”

“Glorious invention by men for men,” Arcaín Chivo said. “Marvellous gift.” And bowing his head slightly in the bishop’s direction, he added: “Begging the pardon of those present.”

“There’s no need to beg the pardon of anyone present,” the Bishop of Pasto seemed benignly put out. “The discussion is worthy of interest. One might just ask oneself whether a real ñapanga, our countrywoman, would ever adopt this last word in fashion: the miniskirt.”

“Usurper of men’s peace,” the professor added quickly.

“I don’t think she would,” the bishop answered himself, ignoring the professor. “The Vatican has already expressed its disapproval — yes, allow me to continue, Arcaín — these days nobody cares about the Pope’s disapproval — you’re a living example of that — but it’s a matter of the Pope’s reflection, which we should consider from time to time, as Christians.”

“No ñapanga would wear a skirt that short,” the mayor said. “You’re taking a risk, Primavera: I read in the newspaper that a man was arrested for biting the thighs of a woman in a miniskirt; he claimed to the judges that she had provoked him.”

“A flimsy excuse,” Arcaín Chivo said. “It is provocative, but that doesn’t give us the right to go so far as to bite.”

“Quite so,” the mayor said. “We should ask permission first.”

“Not even if they do ask my permission, señores.” Primavera smiled fleetingly. “My thighs are not flesh for anyone’s nibbles.”

“I can’t believe that,” snorted Chivo, and confronted the doctor with a wicked look.

“Come to think of it,” the doctor said, straight-faced, not looking at Primavera, but watching her, “I can’t remember having bitten you in such a distant place.”

Discreet chuckles were heard coming from the mayor and the professor. The bishop did not join in.

“I shall rectify that mistake,” the doctor went on coolly.

Primavera struck a capricious pose, which might have meant pity or defiance.

Primavera Pinzón, stood with arms akimbo, one leg slightly out in front of the other, irremediably beautiful, turned yellow by the firelight, then suddenly red, a standing sphinx, the doctor thought, inflamed by men, unseasonably shivery in the midst of all those eyes, not knowing what to do or say — you allowed yourself to be adored dressed as a ñapanga: the skirt of coloured, woollen cloth, trimmed with a velvet border; velvet too around the edges of the huge pocket; again the skirt, pleated from the waist, somewhat shorter than the petticoat, of which they could see the crocheted edging; the white, shiny satin blouse revealing her pert, medium-sized breasts, deliberately badly covered up with a fringed, embroidered black shawl; on her head she wore a tortoiseshell comb, and ribbon bows finished off the plaits; against the whiteness of her throat the glass beads, the necklaces virtually tinkled, a gold filigree crucifix glittered; she wore large earrings; both hands played nervously with a felt hat that she remained undecided about putting on; her rope-soled alpargatas showed off her tiny feet, the toenails of which she had not neglected to paint a vivid pink: it was that detail Professor Arcaín Chivo observantly fixed upon:

“My dear señora,” he said, “like a good ñapanga you did not forget to paint your nails pink; I bet you don’t know why ñapangas do that.”

Primavera looked at him for a moment with genuine curiosity. She tossed her head as she said:

“So you don’t bite us, señor.”

The mayor congratulated her:

“So you did know,” he said. “Painting the toes pink wards off bites from snakes and academics. You are farsighted, Primavera.”

Chivo opened his arms.

“You’ve beaten me,” he said.

And he turned back to Primavera; he could not take his eyes off her.

“Nonetheless,” he advised, “wearing alpargatas is incorrect; ñapanga, my lovely lady, is a corruption of the original word llapanga, which is Quechua for ‘barefoot.’”

“Come off it, Arcaín,” the mayor continued. “You’re not suggesting our Primavera go through the streets barefoot on January the sixth.”

“Heaven forbid,” Arcaín Chivo protested hammily. “I just want…”

But Primavera was no longer paying him any attention.

“Your Grace,” she said, making for the bishop, and seeming frankly astonished, almost shocked at herself, but only for a second, “forgive my intrusion. I did not know you were among my husband’s guests. You’ll understand my delight in the carnival — which is why you see me in my costume,” she said, gesturing at herself from head to foot.

“I understand, Primavera, I understand. Don’t worry,” the bishop said, and allowed the radiant woman to kiss the episcopal ring on his finger.

“I’ve brought you empanadas de pipián and anisette,” she went on, once more in control of her words. “Genoveva, Conchita, what’s taking so long?”

Genoveva Sinfín and the maid emerged from the shadows, both holding vast trays, over the tops of which peeped the dainty peanut and potato empanadas and endless glasses of aguardiente.

“Do the señores need us, or can we go?” Sinfín asked unceremoniously, while setting down the trays in a bad mood.

The bishop felt embarrassed, and took pity on them.

“Go in peace, ladies,” he said. “We’ll look after ourselves.”

Sinfín and the girl recognized him. They both crossed themselves; it looked as though they were going to fall to their knees.

“Most Reverend Father, we didn’t see you,” Sinfín said.

“Go in peace,” the bishop repeated, blessing them.

Genoveva Sinfín and the girl needed no persuading. They vanished as if they were fleeing.

“I’ll be back in two minutes,” Primavera said. “But without this ñapanga costume, so as not to cause a stir. I just want to sit with you, señores, and listen.”

So Primavera left the living room, taking the party with her, and the guests took a further, long minute to recover themselves; no-one looked at anyone else, there were no words; all converged on the trace of perfumed air that the costumed Primavera had left in her wake.

“You should feel proud of a woman like that,” the professor said. “She’s left us stunned. Who was expecting her? I wasn’t.”

And he began tucking in to the steaming empanadas. They all followed suit. No-one drank the aguardiente.

Doctor Proceso did not respond straight away. He came round with difficulty.

Yes, he said to himself, why would one not feel proud of an unpredictable woman.

Matías Serrano extracted him from the sticky situation:

“Confess that all this business with the ñapanga costume is designed to draw attention to Nariño’s history, to your Bolívar float, isn’t that so? I admit you’ve got us on tenterhooks: maybe we’re being hasty to criticize it without first hearing your motives.”

“That’s right,” the doctor exhaled. “That was just the beginning.”

“A magnificent beginning,” the professor ribbed him. “Worthy of you, Justo Pastor.”

“I don’t know whether to wait for Primavera to come back,” the doctor said.

“So, she really is coming?” Chivo said in surprise.

“She should hear this,” the doctor replied. And he called to her: “Shall we wait for you, Primavera?”

There was silence.

“Coming!” They heard her voice clearly, and immediately saw her arrive, no longer in her ñapanga costume — just the rope-soled alpargatas—but in a comfortable outfit — wool sweater, mid-length print skirt — she arrived as though walking on tiptoe, bathing them all in her habitual splendour, all the more splendid as she sat on the sofa, letting herself fall onto the cushions like a great flower opening and closing, stirring a breeze from her own self, from deep in her bones, next to the Bishop of Pasto no less — who shifted uneasily, as if afraid of her.

8

“Tell them, Doctor Donkey,” Primavera said, and met the doctor’s eyes just for an instant, because afterwards she just looked into space, “tell them about your float for January: you’ll give them a lot more to talk about than my ñapanga costume.”

There was a silence no-one wanted to break, because they could not. Did Primavera just say Doctor Donkey? Did we hear right? Doctor Proceso ignored the nickname. His voice sounded beyond natural: indifferent.

“That’s the mystery,” he said, “how you came to hear about the float, when it was only yesterday the artisans started working on it. What to put that down to? The city I live in? Little town, living hell; walls have ears in Pasto. But I’m not going to give you each the third degree to find out how you heard about it. I want to get people talking about the float, let’s hope much more than about my wife’s ñapanga miniskirt; I want to display snippets of our memory, on a carnival float.”

And he described as best he could, summoning strength from where he had none, the carriage in which the so-called Liberator would ride, the emperor’s crown on his head, the twelve girls like stooping nymphs, and Cangrejito’s reliefs around the edges — Bolívar fleeing as if the Devil were on his heels, the sculptures, the models, the masks, the history of the south in fragments.

Following his words, a silence mightier than a wall rose up in the midst of them all. They could do nothing but raise their glasses — with a stifled reticence.

“I’m listening,” the doctor told his friends. “That’s why I spoke.”

No-one responded.

“Propose the key events, señores, the ones to show on the float.”

The silence continued, but the invitation exerted a powerful influence over the guests: their eyes moved uneasily.

“What do you think?” the doctor coached them, opening his arms.

“More bad business,” Arcaín Chivo said.

The bishop’s meditative voice was heard:

“They’re not going to let you do that to Bolívar, Justo Pastor, in any city in the country, or in any town, or any village.”

“In Pasto they will,” the doctor said.

“Maybe so,” Matías Serrano said. “Maybe in Pasto, if Pastusos remembered. But nobody in Pasto remembers anymore, Justo Pastor. They’ve been efficiently incorporated into the fine history of Colombia, with its whole host of heroes and angels.”

“Don’t you believe it,” the doctor said. And he told them of Zulia Iscuandé and her grandfather’s words: “Bolívar was always a complete son of a bitch.” While repeating the sentence he could do no less than excuse himself in the bishop’s direction, as Arcaín Chivo had done earlier: “Begging the pardon of those present.”

“Do let’s stop asking for the pardon of those present,” the bishop said.

“Yes,” the professor said, “let the people speak how they speak.”

“But how,” the mayor continued, “how will the governor judge the float? What will he decide? He’s a Pasto man, but, like many others, at the front of the queue when it comes to not knowing who Agualongo was, who our hero Agustín Agualongo really was, and he won’t have read Sañudo, and he doesn’t think, he brays; it’s unbelievable the amount of rot a human being can hold inside, not in the gut but in the mind. He’ll confiscate your carriage like he’d confiscate a gun at a party: he’ll return the gun when the party’s over, if he returns it at all, and that’s what he’ll do with your float, he’ll return it after carnival, if he doesn’t destroy it first, along with all the artisans’ good intentions. Don’t make them work in vain, Justo Pastor. Don’t be naive.”

“Naive?” Doctor Proceso asked no-one in particular, his tone pouring scorn on the word, then he got up and walked over to a large piece of pine furniture, to one side of the crackling fire. The watercolour of Primavera Pinzón en plein air presided over the cabinet, and the doctor fretted, bent over the compartments and drawers: he kept part of his research into Simón Bolívar’s life in there. So many years pursuing dates and facts and events, without ever settling down to organize them, he thought, surprised at himself: he felt the presence of the tattered exercise books with their green covers like an accusatory chaos.

He started to look in one of the drawers while he was speaking.

“Years before publishing his Estudios,” he declared, “Sañudo recognized the need to write about other aspects of Bolívar — not the public ones, but the private. He said the private aspects were a way of getting to know the public, that family life resembles a tracing of public life: the leader is always the same, with the same passions, in the family arena as in that of the state.”

Here Doctor Proceso cleared his throat and cast an uneasy glance around him; Primavera seemed to laugh imperceptibly at his words.

The doctor ignored her.

“Someone wrote that history must treat the great as God treats us all,” he said, “impartially and truthfully; those who want their private life respected must limit themselves to living privately, but those who raise themselves on high are very visible and their vices teach those lower down how to commit them. What did Bolívar teach the whole host of politicians who would succeed him throughout Colombia’s history? Firstly, to think only of themselves: of power. Next, to think only of themselves, of power, and then, power again — and so on and so on to infinity. Never to think of the real needs of the people.”

“How very true,” the mayor said.

Primavera’s fleeting laughter was heard at last. The doctor continued, unaffected:

“If Sañudo covered the political and military sides of the so-called Liberator in his Estudios, he never touched upon other intimate facets, and that was out of pure decorum. Besides, those were not the facets he was interested in. But the polemic his Estudios unleashed in the ‘cultured’ corners of the country tempted him to embark upon Bolívar’s other face, his other dimension, the human one. But, nevertheless, he never did take on the work he talked about.”

“Sañudo didn’t write it,” the professor said, “but he did make ironic comments at times. He alleged that little could be said about Bolívar’s education, because he was packed off to study in Spain when he was seventeen years old and still didn’t even know how to spell; that he was only in school there a year, as he opted to marry his cousin and tour around Europe enjoying himself like the Creole dandy he was.”

The professor laughed at his own wit; no-one joined him.

The mayor chipped in. He picked up with Sañudo again, too:

“Bolívar used to say he benefitted from many teachers — does that prove his learning? When young he had Don Andrés Bello, who had no experience and was not much older than he was himself, and after that Don Simón Rodíguez, a conceited and eccentric fellow, whose real surname was Carreño, which he dropped because of a disagreement with a brother; Rodíguez came from Europe, where he had been immersed in the ideas of the French encyclopédistes, and made a show of his religious indifference to the extreme of giving his children the names of fruits and vegetables.”

“Is that true?” Primavera was constantly being surprised, and let out another yelp of laughter, short, frank, of pure amazement. “I’d like to have known a man like that, father to artichokes and beetroots — what if they’d called me ‘apple?’”

With that hair of yours, golden delicious, thought the professor, going off into a reverie, and he raised his glass and forced the others to do the same.

“To Primavera,” he said, “for her presence, saving grace of the evening.”

Mayor Matías Serrano toasted unenthusiastically, and immediately returned to Sañudo:

“In one of his letters to Bolívar,” he said, “General Sucre told him that Simón Rodíguez (who Bolívar named Director for Public Education) made a lot of silly mistakes and messed up the instruction in schools in Cochabamba, where he’d spent ten or twelve thousand pesos on non-sense in six months. ‘I have asked,’ Sucre wrote to Bolívar, ‘that he bring me in writing the system he wants to adopt, and in eight months he has been unable to present me with it. But in conversation he says one thing one day and the following day another.’”

“He was Bolívar’s tutor,” the doctor said, “Simón Rodíguez, who endeavoured to apply the theories of Rousseau’s Émile to the little Simón, which consisted of not teaching his pupil anything, so that he should remain in a ‘natural’ state and learn what he could on his own account; this meant Bolívar’s early instruction must have been utterly useless.”

The bishop, who had barely spoken, joined in impatiently, as if he wanted to clear the matter up once and for all: “Sañudo pointed out conclusively that Bolívar was made into a myth, such that the common conception of him bears no relation to reality. But so what, Justo Pastor? The people need their hero — what reason is there to topple Bolívar now?”

“True, why screw Bolívar?” the professor agreed, to ingratiate himself with the bishop.

“‘Screw,’ what an ugly word,” the bishop said, put out. He wanted to go on talking, but just the sight of the professor’s smile dissuaded him.

“No-one here is trying to screw anyone,” the doctor countered. “And what vile injustice towards Sañudo: I still see his ghost passing along Pasto’s streets, always alone, and why wouldn’t he be? In 1925 he dared do no less than the worst thing you can do in this country: tell the truth. It’s the memory of the truth, which struggles to prevail sooner or later. By correcting the error of the past, speaking out against it, you correct the absence of memory, which is one of the main causes of our social and political present, founded on lies and murder. It’s not a whim, Arcaín; it’s our duty to dot the i’s if we don’t want to sin by omission. I’m surprised at you, we’ve talked about this. You share my views more than anyone.”

“Of course,” the professor replied, offended. “And what’s more I speak from personal experience. Remember what happened to me at the university. I’ll remind you if you ask — may I remind you all?”

“While we’re on the subject of truth,” Matías Serrano said, scorning the professor’s own experiences, “I want to let you in on something I’m convinced of, after carrying it around with me for years: Simón Bolívar, the long-winded author of proclamations and ravings, could not have written the Jamaica Letter, the famous one.”

“And if Bolívar didn’t write it, who did?” Primavera asked, just for the sake of it.

All eyes turned towards her. Primavera was entranced by herself; she found she liked the sound of her own voice. She recalled that famous letter, read and reread to the point of tedium at school: Franciscan Sisters, Father Muñoz, history class.

“Some wise little fellow,” the professor said, happy to be exchanging views once more with the only woman at the gathering. “A disinterested foreigner?” he wondered. “An idealistic friend of Bolívar’s? It’s possible; in any case, the Jamaica Letter is nothing out of this world, for goodness’ sake. But I agree: nobody knows who wrote it.”

“Some little ‘philanthropist’ of the day?” Primavera responded.

Chivo hung onto her words, like one begging for mercy.

“Bolívar did not want for power or gold,” the mayor said, “to procure good services. He had no end of amanuenses, ranging from the most well-informed to the most uncouth. The truth is, it’s hard to believe in his authorship; the Jamaica Letter is no big deal, true, but it’s a sensible analysis, and it’s not in Bolívar’s style, if we think of his other writings, those from before and after that ‘Delirium on Chimborazo,’ including the ‘Cartagena Manifesto,’ the ‘Angostura Address’ and the ‘Message to the Congress of Bolivia.’”

That “Delirium” was another of Bolívar’s writings, Primavera remembered, almost a poem, that she and two fellow students recited as girls, one July 20, day of the Cry of Independence: “I came, wrapped in the mantle of Iris… A feverish delirium seized my mind. I felt inflamed by a strange superior fire. It was the God of Colombia who possessed me…”

“And even if he did write the Jamaica Letter?” Doctor Proceso said. “What is written with the hand is wiped out with the feet. How about him talking of freedoms while planning to crown himself monarch of the Andes? He urged on the advances of the republic, but behind the scenes tore down everything he constructed in public; he schemed, deceived, dissembled, so that once again those around him echoed his real objective: dictatorship, which they proposed as if it would never have occurred to him. There were innumerable occasions. He was engaged only in this, while the crucial priorities of the new republic were held in abeyance: education, industry, those things that make for the real independence of a country — not the independence of one master being replaced by another. Oh, the soldier: he prolonged the war to suit himself. For years. Chaos fascinated him. The most naive now say that he aspired to monarchy because he found it necessary in order to combat the fickleness and brutalities of the politicians of his day; nothing could be further from the truth: he led the way in fickle brutality, he was the prototype himself. If there was killing to be done on a whim, he killed on a whim. The dream of Gran Colombia was his own dream, of his own power. He delegated authority and public wealth to rough squaddies and unrefined thinkers, to the toadies who did not trouble his ambition, the same men who ruined Colombia at his fall, imitating him like little mirrors from which destiny called them. Upon the living flesh of Gran Colombia (a beautiful dream if you look at it like a child, but a dream for us, the millions of us, not for Bolívar), upon Gran Colombia’s young body, his minions carved out larcenies of their own: if he did it, so can I. All those treacherous men are epitomized, explicitly, by one of the most unpleasant sycophants: Vidaurre, a character from Peru, Bolívar’s plenipotentiary for the Panama congress, who got down on all fours in meetings so that Bolívar might mount him: and Bolívar did; Bolívar provided the disastrous model that would turn itself over time into Colombia’s political culture.”

All the while, Doctor Proceso was rifling about in the cabinet drawers. What was he looking for? A book, a letter, a document? He could not find what he was after and this fact seemed to weigh down not just upon him, but on his audience too.

“Well, señores,” he said, “I have human records, which might clarify certain hidden aspects of Bolívar, those aspects repudiated by historians. To be precise I’ve called them ‘Human Investigations.’ I’d like to share two of the most important testimonies with you: two tapes, two recordings.”

And from a drawer he took a white tape recorder, and placed it beside the trays, which encouraged the guests to eat empanadas and drink more aguardiente.

“Belencito Jojoa, Polina Agrado,” the doctor said. “Do those names mean anything to you?”

“I knew Polina Agrado, may she rest in peace,” the Bishop of Pasto said. “An upright woman. God bless her soul.”

“And we’re all familiar with Belencito Jojoa, of course,” Chivo, the professor, added. “They say he’s very sick.”

“Two of Pasto’s old folk,” Matías Serrano sighed heavily. “How could we forget them? And we know their stories, too.”

“But not in their own words,” the doctor replied.

He carried on opening and closing drawers, showing his irritation for the first time. He did not find what he was looking for. Finally he opened and searched the last drawer, which he thought would be the end of it, but still he found nothing. His voice trembled: was he muttering? Talking to himself? He looked anew in the drawers he had already been through: it seemed he had found the recorder, but not the tapes.

“Which of the two tapes shall we start with?” the mayor asked. “Doña Polina or Belencito?”

“Justo Pastor has to find them first,” the professor replied, unruffled. “Couldn’t we run through my own Bolivarian experience at the university in the meantime?”

“Patience, Justo Pastor,” the bishop said, paying no heed to the professor’s request. “You could have put the tapes in another cupboard.”

“When the tapes appear, we’ll start with whichever one you choose, señora,” the professor said. “Polina or Belencito?”

He awaited the answer eagerly: unable to prise his eyes from Primavera, as she lounged beside the bishop, legs crossed; one of her sandals, half falling off, showed her delicate toes, tiny and pink; above, her pearly face was hidden behind the smoke from a cigarette.

“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.

9

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.”

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.”

“A sorry tale,” Matías Serrano chipped in, “people around here are not very well informed. What Belencito’s talking about must have happened the first time Bolívar entered Pasto, in 1822, and he didn’t exactly enter victoriously, as Belencito believes: it was a capitulation imposed from afar by General Sucre, who had just won the Battle of Pichincha, a stone’s throw from Los Pastos province, and the people of Pasto, who had no provisions, lacked arms and ammunition, found themselves obliged to sign the surrender, which allowed big-headed Bolívar in, the very man they’d already crushed at Bomboná. And who was it who’d humiliated him? A smaller army, an army made up not just of men, but of women and children armed with sticks: the Pasto militias were formed primarily of highlanders; Bolívar retreated ‘in the most painful disgust and almost humbled,’ in his own words.”

Matías Serrano drank, alone.

“Such ignorance as Belencito’s is sad and breaks your heart,” he went on, “but how to avoid it, when there’s not a single school in the country that doesn’t insist on the world revolving around Bolívar at Bomboná? Not just the battles he was actually involved in, while he was squandering things away, but also great battles he was nowhere near. Upon this dreadful error the building of our nations began: a lie is worth more than the truth; a gimmick, a stab in the back: the end justifies the crimes. Simón Bolívar said to Perú de Lacroix: ‘The people love most those who do them most harm; it is all a matter of how it is done. Jesuitism, hypocrisy, bad faith, the arts of deceit and duplicity, which are called vices in society, are virtues in politics, and the best diplomat, the best statesman, is he who best knows how to conceal and make use of them.’ This, Sañudo concludes, was how Bolívar made his own ideas on public morality known. But why don’t you remind us, Arcaín, Justo Pastor, about that Battle of Bomboná, which Bolívar won and which allowed him to enter Pasto? You two, more than anyone, could help us to remember what we have forgotten for a hundred and forty-four years, a people without memory.”

“Why don’t you please let Belencito Jojoa speak, Mr. Mayor?” Primavera said, irritated, rekindling the guests’ surprise at her.

“Belencito will speak,” the doctor said, “and we’ll all speak, all of us. Don’t get worked up.”

“Why don’t you let me recall my experience at the university first? It would serve as an introduction,” the professor persisted, vehemently, “and also as a warning to you, Justo Pastor. All these things happening around the Bolívar float oblige me to refresh your memory.”

He had noted Primavera’s blossoming interest in the discussion, and wanted to assert himself now, over the doctor and Belencito. And no-one could hold out against him any longer, his plea was so stubborn, but the woman lit another cigarette, with undeniable annoyance.

“I’ll just pop into the kitchen for a moment,” she said, and deserted them.

She seemed happy to make them all sad.