Feast of the Innocents

1

Arcaín Chivo himself used the word “catastrophic” to refer to the first course he taught at the university, in the early 1960s, that a well-supported student petition had forced him to give up. At least that subject, “The History of Colombia,” had served to strengthen his friendship with Doctor Proceso, revolving as it did around the menacing figure who shared their lives, the so-called Liberator, as they called him, and above all it had served to teach him a lesson. He remembered the catastrophe with visible dread and distress. The moral of the story, he said, was not to go plunging into the dark waters of Colombian independence with your students, because not just your career but your very life would be endangered.

So it was that from the post in history he moved on to one in philosophy, and only there did he manage to remain in peace, without anyone bothering about his existence. But, he wondered, what had actually happened with the history post? He didn’t have an answer, or rather he had a whole host.

It all began when the students complained to the vice-chancellor about the peculiar way Chivo sometimes delivered his classes: he lay on his side on the large desk, his head propped on one hand, face turned towards the class, like someone speaking lazily from bed, and, according to his detractors, curled up still further, head sunk onto his chest, observing a sombre silence, completely motionless, then suddenly raised his ruddy, smiling face and asked his students whether his pose reminded them of a young thought in its foetal stage. He did and said bizarre things like this (his students complained) without anyone being able to explain why or what for — a reproach? a provocation? — and then he jumped down off the desk and carried on with his class as if absolutely nothing had happened.

But it was not for this alone that the most fervent students got rid of him: to start with, he called Karl Marx “Saint Karl Marx.” He said that he did it knowing full well he was “surrounded” by Marxists. He had nothing against Saint Marx, he explained: on the contrary, Saint Karl was the basis for his interpretation of labour and the eternally unjust relationships between men — which is the same thing as saying life itself, he said — but then he’d go on to argue with Marx afresh and against the use made of his doctrine by totalitarian regimes, and he called him “Saint” again, as an element of irony, which nonetheless infuriated the potential Marxists who beset him. Doctor Proceso wondered why they were also incapable of tolerating a bit of sarcasm, when he found out about it.

The intolerance spilled over when Arcaín Chivo — who pained his students every morning by chalking a pun up on the board: Arcaín arts = insanity—started to study a text written by Karl Marx on Simón Bolívar:

“This is an article Saint Marx was commissioned to write by the worthy gentlemen of The New American Cyclopaedia. His study contains certain errors and inaccuracies that are not serious and do not damage the overall picture. For example, he confers upon foreign legions, above all the British, a decisive role in the independence struggles; but Sañudo can better explain what the role of the ‘foreign legions’ was: usually mercenaries who came only in search of gold, in the style of the Spanish conquistadors, and served the highest bidder; they changed sides depending which way the wind was blowing. The thing is, historians never agree on the details, kids. It’s impossible to expect such agreement. They agree, it is to be hoped, on the essence of events, if they are truthful historians. In the case at hand, Saint Karl Marx and José Rafael Sañudo are very much in agreement on the biographical picture they paint of this inimitable leader, Saint Simón Bolívar. They concur with the unavoidable truth, so suppressed by historians of various periods. What truth? That Bolívar is a lie, nothing more than that. And why? That’s the question to answer, my young friends. That’s the reason The New American Cyclopaedia proposed the study. Saint Karl had to think hard about our hero and research him even harder, and why not? This is Saint Karl Marx, señores. He wasn’t going to write for the sake of writing. Among his sources he had the testimonies of European officers who fought alongside Bolívar. Saint Karl did his utmost, no doubt; he was conscientious in what he did. And it doesn’t matter that he might have done it with the object of getting a few pennies so he could eat, because that great saint, who must have suffered hunger (so much unproductive time, I mean, spent sitting writing, without getting the smallest cash in return), also had to waste his time, otherwise devoted to philosophy and sociology, on the shadowy figure of a dictator of the Andes, thanks to an American encyclopaedia, the one which paid the best for the thought of the age, I suppose.”

“Dictator of the Andes”: the students stirred; a wave of dissenting voices ran around the lecture theatre for a moment.

The essay was included in a collection of the Selected Writings of Karl Marx, in English, but the professor had already translated and typed it up “with great affection,” as he would say in his defence, “for my enlightened students,” and he would explain that at the time he was not worried that none of the “enlightened” asked him for a copy.

“We’re going to read, boys and girls,” he had said to them, “we’re going to read in turn. That’s my way of making everyone do it; you are all free to think ‘my voice is better than yours.’ Appreciate the drastic summary, readable because it’s convincing, don’t be put off by the few pages to come, you’re not going to get worn out reading them.”

And he started to read, and had to carry on alone, because in open rebellion none of his students agreed to take over from him, to read how Marx describes Bolívar, from his birth in Caracas in 1783 to his death in Santa Marta forty-seven years later.

With the voice of a budding actor Arcaín Chivo took a firm, booming stand at certain points, and from time to time offered the pages, with a sweeping gesture, to his listeners, but no-one consented to go up on the stage.

“Señor Rodolfo Puelles, please read.”

“I don’t read, Professor.”

“Señor Zarama, read.”

“I don’t read either, Professor.”

“Señor Ortiz.”

“No thank you, Professor.”

“Señor Trujillo.”

“Me neither, Professor.”

“Señorita Antonia Noria, come and read.”

“Me?”

“Enrique Quiroz.”

“You read, Professor. Your voice is better than mine.”

Chivo persevered, brazening it out. But, nonetheless, the students’ absence of enthusiasm or even their simple attention affected him; he did not stumble over his words, but he did omit certain pages and radically reduce his comments. He felt as if he were reading to a gathering of stones.

He read that Bolívar, who had belonged to the Venezuelan Creole aristocracy, visited Europe, attending Napoleon’s coronation as emperor in 1804 and his assumption of the Iron Crown of Lombardy in 1805. That in 1809 he returned to his country, refused to join in the revolution that broke out in Caracas, on April 19, 1810, but once the uprising was over, accepted a mission to London with the objective of buying arms and soliciting the protection of the British government. He obtained nothing beyond the authorization to export arms for ready cash, and hefty taxes on top.

He read that the betrayal of Miranda procured for Bolívar the special favour of the Spaniard Monteverde, to the extent that when he applied for a passport, Monteverde declared that “Colonel Bolivar’s request should be complied with, as a reward for his having served the king of Spain by delivering up Miranda.”

He read, pages further on, that Bolívar proclaimed himself “dictator and liberator of the western provinces of Venezuela” thanks to the victories of other patriot generals. He read that he established the order of the “liberator,” created a choice corps of troops under the name of his “body-guard,” and surrounded himself with a sort of court, but that (like the majority of his countrymen) he was incapable of sustained effort, and it was not long before his dictatorship became a military anarchy, in which the most important matters lay in the hands of favourites who squandered public funds and then resorted to foul means in order to restore them.

“The same thing happens today,” Chivo said. “Identical.”

None of his students responded. Some of them were leaving.

But it was later — on reading about some of Bolívar’s other deeds — that Professor Chivo incited the wrath of his listeners: he read that Bolívar, while advancing in the direction of Valencia with eight hundred men, met the Spanish General Morales not far from Ocumare, at the head of a troop of about two hundred soldiers and one hundred militiamen. According to an eyewitness, on seeing that the initial skirmishes with Morales’ troops had scattered his advance guard, Bolívar “lost all presence of mind, spoke not a word, turned his horse quickly round, and fled in full speed toward Ocumare, passed the village at full gallop, arrived at the neighbouring bay, jumped from his horse, got into a boat, and embarked on the Diana, ordering the whole squadron to follow him to the little island of Buen Ayre, and leaving all his companions without any means of assistance.”

“Tell that to your granny,” he heard an anonymous male voice mutter somewhere in the lecture theatre.

Well, he had managed to get their attention, Chivo thought.

“Did I hear something?” he asked, lifting his eyes from the sheaf of papers. “Does somebody want to say something? It’s still possible to talk like civilized people.”

Enrique Quiroz raised his hand:

“You’re just confirming with your reading what Simón Bolívar himself feared to the end of his days. He said he ploughed the wind and sowed the sea.”

“I believe he said he ploughed the sea. It’s possible he also said he sowed the wind, nobody knows.”

“At the end of his life,” the student Quiroz continued, unperturbed, “Bolívar pointed out, quite rightly, that there had been three great madmen in humanity: Jesus Christ, Don Quixote and himself.”

“He didn’t say madmen. He said ‘greatest fools.’ He said this to Doctor Révérend: ‘Do you not know, Doctor, who the three greatest fools in history have been?’ The doctor replied that he did not, and Bolívar said in his ear: ‘The three greatest fools in history have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote, and myself.’”

“Madmen or fools, for our purposes it’s the same thing.”

“Well, no, it isn’t. A madman is not the same as a fool.”

“They were the words of a visionary.”

“Quite,” the professor replied. “A visionary. It’s true that he ploughed the sea, in the sense that he did not get what he wanted, his cherished dream right from the beginning of his political career, that lifelong presidency, or dictatorship or monarchy or whatever you want to call it, the absolute power over the new republics: yes, he ploughed the sea. His influence over the fate of the nations was so disruptive that in the end nobody wanted anything more to do with him, and he was asked to leave Colombia. So, the fact that he compared himself to Jesus Christ and Don Quixote is simply further proof of his infinite vanity. In the case of Jesus Christ, I don’t need to explain why. In the case of Don Quixote, even lovers compare themselves to him, but Bolívar? Poor Don Quixote.”

“He died in absolute poverty. Where’s the vanity in that?” Enrique Quiroz insisted. Pale, bolt upright at his desk, not a single muscle moved in his face.

Professor Chivo approached him.

“Everything about Bolívar’s life has become the stuff of legend,” he said, “Sañudo warns us of that. Legend goes so far as to tell us he died destitute, to the extent that they had to ask the indigenous leader — the ‘cacique’ of Mamatoco — for a shirt to bury him in; a puerile myth: didn’t it occur to its inventor that those attending the funeral were wearing shirts, even if Bolívar wasn’t, so there was no need for the embellishment of a semi-savage chieftain? According to the inventory that his nephew Fernando Bolívar and steward José Palacio took five days after his death, he left great wealth behind him. Not just dozens of linen shirts, but six hundred and seventy-seven ounces of gold in coins; three dinner services: one ninety-five-piece set of solid gold; another thirty-eight-piece platinum one; and the third, two hundred pieces of beaten silver — aside from sixteen chests of his clothes and other personal effects, another chest containing gold and silver medals, and one full of jewellery set with precious stones plus gold and silver swords, the most noteworthy of which was the solid gold weapon given to him by the Municipality of Lima on his saint’s day, encrusted with one thousand, four hundred and thirty-three diamonds, with a very ornate scabbard and a magnificent sword belt. This gift, according to Ricardo Palma, cost twelve thousand, eight hundred and seventy-nine pesos and five reales in total. As a curious aside, Bolívar owned around twenty tablecloths. In the inventory, bejewelled insignia, thirty-five gold medals and four hundred and seventy-one silver ones, and ninety-five gold knives and forks also appear: he had cutlery for his own exclusive use, he did not take his meals with his soldiers; in fact, he did not eat meat, which was the dish par excellence for the troops, and more than anything he enjoyed the salads he prepared himself, according to recipes learned from the ladies of France. He spent ten thousand pesos of the day on perfumes, and they lasted him no time at all, so unhealthy was his fondness for splashing them on, morning, noon and night: he never took the scented handkerchief from his nose. A division of bodyguards surrounded him, protecting him from the world. He had no need for ready cash because he could avail himself of the public purse whenever he liked, and he got through hundreds of pesos a week, as well as the pension of thirty thousand pesos a year for life they gave him shortly before his departure from Bogotá for Santa Marta — that is to say, shortly before his death ‘in the most abject poverty,’ as so many historians so foolishly maintain.”

Chivo returned to the stage.

The students were leaving in increasing numbers.

Without taking his eyes off the page, Professor Chivo said to them: “I can hear you rushing off, señores. Rush off and read Sañudo and check the inventory. I’m sure I forgot something.”

In spite of having so few listeners left, he took up reading again. His voice and face seemed steady; in fact he felt saddened, not just by his students but by himself, by his apparent inability to stimulate discussion and capture attention. A sudden drowsiness came over him: he would have liked to be at home, sleeping alongside his cat.

But he carried on.

The more he read, the more desertions there were on the part of the students.

From time to time, Chivo raised his eyes for a few seconds to observe the young faces still watching him, and perceived that several of them were afraid to show interest in what they were hearing, as if they were committing a sin — but what, or who, was causing this fear?

2

According to the students, then, it was not just Karl Marx, but also the Liberator Simón Bolívar who was being horribly maligned in the mad-man’s classes.

Chivo said it never occurred to the angriest students — the very ones who should have carried out the most careful analysis — to check the veracity of the article. They accepted only their own ideas. And he was not mistaken: the students concluded that the Marx text was spurious, that it must have been written by Chivo, the imperialist puppet, spy and retrograde, terms that were all the rage at the time, only a few years on from the Cuban Revolution. Young people across a number of faculties were considering abandoning their degrees and heading off into the mountains of Colombia, to the guerrilla war, which had not yet officially begun but was already a great hope that guaranteed the taking of power, as Cuba demonstrated, they said: in less than five years a new revolution will shake Latin America, a Colombian revolution.

And when, in the company of Karl Marx and José Rafael Sañudo, they came to the War of Independence in Pasto, the capital of Nariño province, southern Colombia, beginning with the Battle of Bomboná, things for Professor Arcaín Chivo took — as he himself would say — a turn for the worse. Because it was following those last, surreptitiously defiant classes (in which the Battle of Bomboná defined Bolívar’s ignominy, no more no less, and Pasto’s Black Christmas made Bolívar’s name synonymous with barbarism) that Arcaín Chivo had to leave the post in history, after a very discreet kick from the vice chancellor at first, and then a very real kicking from hooded heavies who frightened off, once and for all, an already frightened Arcaín Chivo. He lost his irreverence and mischievousness, his speculative daring, and accepted his thoroughly humiliating situation; he never imagined that the university’s board of governors and the academics of Pasto University themselves, most of them Pastusos, hailing from various Nariño villages, precisely where Bolívar had surpassed himself in vengeance and brutality, would actually disagree with historical truth and not support even a single one of his arguments — or the claims of Karl Marx, or those of José Rafael Sañudo — and, worse still, would be scandalized, would throw him out.

“Professor Chivo,” Enrique Quiroz had said to him — known as “Enriquito” to his friends, he was one of the famous Quiroz brothers, and was the president of the student committee — speaking right at the critical moment of one of Chivo’s classes, “bear in mind that Pasto, our city, was royalist, monarchist, opposed to the republic, to the call for independence from the American people. Pasto was a Spanish stronghold, nobody can deny it, and in that and that alone lies the cause of Bolívar’s justified aversion.”

“Let’s consider first that call for independence from the people of the Americas,” Chivo replied. “Then we’ll move on to Pasto being a royalist stronghold, and then to what you call Bolívar’s justified aversion.”

He was on his feet, leaning back against the desk, fingers spread around the wooden edges. It was the first teaching period of the morning: the room smelt of soap and cologne. Before him were thirty-two heads: the boys bearded, the girls with bare legs; Chivo did not look at the girls, not a bit, he would lose his grip, he had to finish his lecture (although he used to publicly admit in the canteen that he was one of those lecturers happily aroused by the blur of his fashion-conscious female students, who looked as if they were nude from the waist down; he said this quite openly). The bearded faces got him worked up in a different way, they made him laugh indulgently: they are just twenty-year-old faces, he used to say, but hairy ones, and he said it with a gesture that seemed scathing, but was in fact only quasi-paternal irony; he never imagined they would hate him for that too.

Through the large windows, the volcano Galeras darkened.

“No people,” he said, “achieved independence then, and it’s possible none has done so yet. The cry for independence was less than half a cry: it was a yelp from the Creole elite, the bourgeoisie who wanted to make the most of the carve-up at any price. None were thinking of their fellow Americans or other such moony dreams, but about their own property, ladies and gents. That’s why they were yelping.” Here the professor started to yap like some strange caged animal, and was delighted to observe the smiling admiration of the girls, his blurry female students, and gladdened by the indignation of the bearded ones.

“Not all the Creoles behaved as you say,” Enrique Quiroz interrupted.

“They did,” Chivo countered, “every last one of them. But their yelp got away from them; they only wanted the powers of the monarchy so they could rule as they pleased and enjoy more of the spoils, and what happened was that the wretched of the Americas, the valiant Indians and even more valiant campesinos, who really had suffered the perennial lash on their own backs ever since the conquest, got worked up over the yelp, cried out with manly might, the powder keg was lit and, just like Bolívar, the little rich kids set off to command a war without knowing a thing about military strategy, but the nigh-on suicidal fearlessness of the Indians and peasants supported them, and they gained independence from Spain and then didn’t know what to do. Perhaps it would have been better to wait fifty years, or a hundred? Nobody was prepared. And the oh-so-great example of their first leader was an atrocious one: from Bolívar stem dictatorships large and small, and all these shoddy, corrupt entities that the most cynical commentators have taken to calling ‘developing countries’; the Indians and peasants are in the same situation as ever, and into their proverbial poverty are now added workers in the cities. It’s as if the girl sitting at the furthest desk — yes, you — were to decide to swap one inadequate, temperamental boyfriend who sometimes exasperates her, swap him not for one, but two brutal boyfriends, two eternal rivals who never tire of stripping her naked, who slap her, torture her, bleed her, prostitute her, sell her in the marketplace, spit on her; Colombia had very bad luck with this whole climax of independence, señores.”

Here Professor Chivo could not avoid the blushing young woman who smiled at him from behind her desk. He had to hurry the class along, because composure was no longer possible for him.

“Forgive me,” he said to the girl later, as he shut his book with a thump, signalling the end, “forgive me for using you in my feeble allegory.”

Her thin voice was heard over the racket of scraping desks:

“Forgiven.”

That’s how Professor Chivo was.

He lived alone, or lived with his cat, and this seemed to him “happiness enough,” as he used to say. The daily company of his students, their “vigorous normality,” made him “die less quickly,” he asserted. He did not predict the black storm fast approaching; he did not foresee himself becoming a whirlwind of emotions.

“Tomorrow we’ll start on the Battle of Bomboná,” he said to his students, “tomorrow we’ll look into whether Pasto was a royalist stronghold, and the matter of the great and justified aversion of little Bolívar.” He shouted this at his students, who were hastily abandoning the lecture theatre.

Little Bolívar: no-one could tolerate it any longer, for quite a while a letter to the vice-chancellor’s office had been doing the rounds asking for his head, the head of the crazy Chivo, a forceful letter because lecturers from other departments also signed it, indignant about the insults to Karl Marx and Simón Bolívar.

3

“Hold on to your hats, kids, youth of the Sixties, future of Colombia, we’re off to witness the Battle of Bomboná, considered ‘strange’ by writers of school history books, who want to make excuses for Bolívar’s defeat with that ‘strange’; another great big lie, but a heroic battle, and the cause of General Bolívar’s visceral hatred towards Pasto and the Pastusos of the day, his bottomless resentment, his innermost bitterness. For once in your lives pay attention to the details, kids, to the before and the after: judge for yourselves, read between the lines, don’t just trail along the track others want you to follow, like sheep, seek out and snatch the truth from the immense mountains of muck that official history has accustomed us to.”

So began Professor Arcaín Chivo’s lecture that early morning, while his impassive students watched him, still half asleep.

“Bolívar wanted to make all the victories his own. It’s not me saying that, Sañudo reconfirms it in his Estudios: he tells us Bolívar wrote to General Santander on the twenty-third of August, 1821 to say he was thinking of going to liberate the province of Quito, so Santander should command Sucre and Torres (who were already there) to stand only on the defensive.

“He wanted to make all the victories his own.

“He wrote to José de San Martín that he was marching with his army ‘to shatter as many chains as he should encounter binding the enslaved peoples who cry out across South America,’ and that he would go to Peru ‘with four thousand men to embrace the Children of the Sun.’ Bolívar set out for the south from Bogotá on December thirteenth, and arrived in Cali on the first of January, 1822, and as he wished to make Quito independent he wanted to go on to Guayaquil by sea, but on hearing there were enemy ships in the Pacific he decided to go overland on the seventh, after attacking Pasto, and he authorized commanders to send the new recruits to their barracks heavily restrained, so they should not escape, with any offenders to be shot.

“Here another shameful strategy Bolívar used should be pointed out, one that nevertheless a Colombian writer has lauded and praised as a brilliant idea, despite it being within the grasp of any swindler; well, it’s nothing other than a falsification of official public instruments, international ones. It’s an order given to General Santander to send forged communications to certain foreign diplomats; it was written on the nineteenth of January, and dated in Popayán, albeit Bolívar was actually absent from that city at the time, as he only left Cali for the south on the twenty-third, and arrived in Popayán on the twenty-sixth of that month.”

4

When Professor Chivo finished reading and commenting on Bolívar’s letter to Santander and the appalling events and repercussions in Pasto, he paused, scanning the lecture theatre to confirm what he’d imagined: hardly anyone was still there. The Quiroz brothers had already arranged to desert the room, and behind them disappeared the vast majority of the students; there remained on the horizon the bodies of just two, fast asleep: a girl with her head resting on her arm, long hair sweeping the dirty wooden floor, a boy sprawling, mouth agape as though recently arrived from a party and still drunk; this pair of sleeping students in another class was unthinkable, but judgement had already been passed on Chivo and his History of Colombia.

And, yet, also still in the room, still conscious, was the young woman who’d served as an allegory, who did not dare leave and make the absence complete; she was the last fully conscious student in the lecture theatre: she herself could not explain why she stayed or what for, in front of this man who talked alone and read alone in a room that was lonelier still. Did she feel sorry for him? He looked so lonely, she thought, so absolutely and utterly alone with his discourse on Bolívar, his reading of Sañudo, his indignation and his battles, poor madman, she thought.

“I’ve finished, you can go,” the professor said, so she could make her escape.

The girl stood up and seemed to be about to say something, but thought better of it and headed very slowly for the door. Behind her, the last two students carried on sleeping. It began to drizzle against the large windowpanes: cloud alone filled the sky; the Galeras volcano had disappeared. Suddenly the girl stopped in the doorway: a round, pale face, surprisingly pale, as if lacking mouth and eyes; she turned to the professor and said she had a question:

“Señor, I’ve listened all this time and I’d like to ask something.”

“Go ahead,” the professor responded without curiosity. They’re still trying to comfort me here with a question, he thought, little imagining how disconcerted he was about to become.

“Why make yourself hated?”

5

So, it was due to his own experience that Professor Chivo could not understand the suicidal decision of his friend Justo Pastor to show everyone a carnival float on January 6 featuring Bolívar’s deeds and misdeeds. Listening to the doctor, observing him, he seemed as if he were from another world, so fired up, almost sanctified, recalling the plight of Chepita del Carmen Santacruz. Chivo did not share his audacity, but for that reason he also envied him: Justo Pastor seemed immune to fear.

And the fact was that the doctor had witnessed Chivo’s final mortification, when not only had the vice chancellor backed the students, but the students themselves went to his house at midnight, masked (he recognized their voices, they were led by the Quiroz brothers), knocked down the door, and knocked him down too, kicking him upright again, shattering his ribs, forcing him to drag himself through the streets to the door of the University Hospital, where by a miracle he was treated; voices from the shadows went with him, shouting “keep dragging yourself along, snake, that’s what you were born for.”

They had killed his cat, a ginger Persian called “Mambrú,” hanging him, and they left a note tied to the animal’s tail: Puppet. Pasto’s only newspaper did not report the attack. Not a single one of his colleagues from the university visited him, only Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, whom he would nevertheless stop seeing after that incident, as if the sacrifice Arcaín Chivo had made also meant sacrificing the friendship between the only two men in Pasto united in denouncing Bolívar.

Perhaps it was the professor’s fear that repelled the doctor and made him decide not to see him anymore, or perhaps it was his warning when they were alone, in the hospital itself, at the end of his visit, when the nurses were no longer listening. “Best we keep quiet about the so-called Liberator, Justo Pastor, they’re going to hurt you like they did me; give up your book, Sañudo already made a better job of it; live your life, keep it to yourself, or they’ll chop your balls off.”

They did not touch on the subject again for years, not until that Friday, December 30, 1966 when Chivo turned up at the doctor’s invitation, opening his arms and declaring that the only redeeming feature of old age is that one ages alongside one’s friends.

“As our mayor points out,” the doctor said, “the business with Chepita Santacruz must have taken place during Bolívar’s initial entry into Pasto, on the eighth of June, 1822.

“Sañudo states: ‘He entered the city at five in the afternoon, entered the city surrounded by royalist troops who had formed up in his honour, proceeded to the parish church where the bishop and clerics were waiting to lead him, as Bolívar had arranged, in the manner of a royal tribute, under a canopy, up to the altar where the “Te Deum” was sung. The same day the surrender was ratified and Bolívar issued a proclamation full of promises to the people of Pasto.’”

It was after this proclamation that the Liberator was invited over to drink chocolate, as was the tradition, by one of the most powerful men in Pasto: Joaquín Santacruz himself, Belencito’s ancestor, who had very good reasons for making a fuss over Bolívar and ingratiating himself, at least for the duration of his stay in Pasto. The gold coins Santacruz kept in his house were famous, buried in a secret corner — under his bed, as was the tradition — and Bolívar’s aide-de-camp had already informed him, as he had the rest of Pasto’s merchants, that a contribution towards the cause of freedom would be required, as was Bolívar’s tradition. But Santacruz did not fear so much for his property as for the fate of his daughters, still very young, any one of whom Bolívar might take a fancy to, quite devoid of responsibility — as was also the tradition. Handing over the gold, Santacruz believed, would mean he could expect his daughters’ honour to remain intact in return.

“That’s how simple solutions were back then,” the doctor said, “very simple indeed, as they are now, with certain variations, in order to defend honour against the passing whim of a powerful man.”

And Primavera let out a ringing laugh as she was returning from the kitchen, where up to that moment she had been listening to everything, curious and entertained by the conversation; then she, who had resolved to go straight up to bed and sleep, without saying goodnight to anyone, decided to go back in to the living room and sit down next to the bishop, brash and happy. Hearing the stuff about honour on the point of dishonour gave her renewed energy, although she would have preferred to hear it from Belencito Jojoa himself — via her Doctor Donkey, who was seducing her with stories of independence in those moments, much to her surprise.

Belencito drank some more, and spoke:

“My grandfather Pedro Pablo was still living in the house belonging to his father, Joaquín. My grandfather was one of three sons, along with José and Jesús. There were seven daughters: Redentora, Prudencia, Severa, Digna, Cirila, Metodia — pretty names, eh? — and the youngest of all: Josefa del Carmen, better known as Chepita, thirteen years old.

“At that age her disgrace arrived, with the arrival of the Liberator. And her disgrace came at night, when the Liberator came to be there.”

Before the evening got properly underway, Joaquín Santacruz and the Liberator, escorted by a lieutenant who pretended not to take any interest, shut themselves up in the smoking room. They did not smoke in there because the Liberator loathed tobacco, but the master of the house presented his offering: sixteen chests of gold coins for the cause of freedom. Without a word, with just a gesture, Bolívar indicated to his lieutenant that he should take charge of the chests. And then he let himself be led back to the main part of the house. “The only thing I ask in return, Your Excellency,” Joaquín Santacruz dared whisper in his ear, “is my daughters’ integrity.” Bolívar still did not say a word, behaviour his host interpreted as tacit agreement, and he proceeded to introduce him to his wife, Lucrecia Burbano, as conservative a woman as ever lived, pale and dressed in black, who ceremoniously observed the customary greeting, surrounded by her children — more waxworks in the icy silence.

Lucrecia Burbano suffered, she suffered over the fate of her daughters; with great reluctance she had acquiesced to Joaquín Santacruz’s scheme, which seemed absurd to her: make overtures to Bolívar, invite him for chocolate and hold him to his word with gold. But her husband had already warned her: “He doesn’t just know about the gold, he knows about our daughters too.” Lucrecia Burbano would have preferred to flee with her daughters and the gold into the fiery entrails of Galeras itself, or at least into one of its caves, but it was already too late, the little fellow was there in the flesh, he was opening and closing his hands, small like a woman’s; his feet must be smaller still, she thought, inside those riding boots that seemed made for a child. Lucrecia Burbano observed before her the excessive mobility of the Liberator’s body, the overly large head, the curly black hair; she endured his startling proximity to the point of exasperation. At this meeting, the Liberator alarmed her with his shrill voice, but appeased her with his perfect bow. He really was a proper little gentleman, whom she knew they nicknamed “Manikin,” “Zambo” and “Chipolata,” but who she also knew could very well send them “to the other side” with a word, if he had a mind to.

Bolívar greeted the sons, and then set about complimenting the seven Santacruz daughters, the cream of the city with their beauty and good manners, the seven Santacruz sisters who, according to the ribald remarks of the first drunken liberators, could satisfy, on their own, the whole column of eight hundred mounted cazadores that Bolívar had brought with him for his entry into Pasto.

The eldest was twenty-six.

The musicians had already taken up their instruments, bolt upright on their little cane chairs, beneath a porcelain clock; the snare drum could be heard, a clarinet, a flute and a trombone were announcing the contradanza, the guests drew themselves up straight, observing themselves in the mirrors, under the glittering bronze chandeliers, and in the ballroom with its decorative urns, around the piano, Bolívar greeted the seven Santacruz sisters one by one: he would have to open the dancing with one of them, and then his officers would follow his lead. The wooden floor trembled. The house looked aflame, illuminated by torches on all four sides, the double rows of windows glowing behind the ever-present geraniums on the balconies; it was one of Pasto’s main houses, right on Santiago Square, opposite the Church of the Apostle, and, from its far-off kitchen, near the stables, came the delicate aroma of chocolate being prepared over a low heat: pastilles of fine chocolate brought from Lima and kept in cedar chests for years, for whenever an occasion might arise. And what an occasion it was, Lucrecia Burbano lamented: the entire ballroom seemed to her to smell of horse droppings, leather and sweat. A heady perfume came from the little fellow — she was later to recall — but he also smelt of blood — she would say — it was a sorry hour, a thousand times over, when that scented scoundrel appeared.

Bolívar did not dance with any of the sisters, but to many, who would later remark upon the fact, it seemed that “he spent longer than was customary over his compliments to Chepita del Carmen Santacruz.”

In spite of being just thirteen, Chepita noticed her father’s disturbing anxiety, and she found it odd that her mother should demand she carry her favourite doll in her arms for the official presentation. She complied without understanding why. How could she comprehend the maternal tactic, both childish and desperate, to signal her innocence? Chepita cradled the doll, although “the mistake had been made”—Lucrecia Burbano would confess, and confess that she thought of it too late—“of dressing Chepita like a young woman.”

For Chepita, at any rate, the whole display of dancing and chocolate was fun, just another game. The Liberator not only failed to dance that night, he did not try the chocolate either; he left his officials to head the table and withdrew. His hosts never dreamed of such indifference, and, of course, were not at all offended: they thought the gold coins had been sufficient.

“That was not how things turned out.” The doctor drank, just as Belencito Jojoa had, and everyone else in the room drank too, including the Bishop of Pasto.

“What happened,” Doctor Proceso told them, “was that on the tenth of June, Bolívar left Pasto for Quito, and barely two hours after he set out a detachment of riders deliberately returned to Joaquín Santacruz’s house. They got in through the back, through the stables, killed two pigs and a donkey, nobody knows why, then murdered one of the servants who was going to help them dismount, and carried off Chepita del Carmen Santacruz. Less than a league away, Bolívar was waiting for her. He used her straight away, and carried on using her out in the open during that whole forced march up to the gates of Quito, six days later. Only then did he return her to Pasto.”

“Pregnant,” Belencito had said, and drank some more. “That was the sad thing: she was thirteen, but it happened; it can and does happen; marked for life, not so much as far as the city was concerned, that was the least of it, but in the eyes of her own family, my ancestors. Bolívar’s fault, of course, but also my people’s. Her pregnancy set her apart like a scar on the soul, just as soon as it was confirmed. With a different father, it would have been a different story. But a child of Bolívar’s was a child of hate. Who knows which was worse, the Liberator’s breach of good faith or Lucrecia Burbano’s terrible and insane decision: she shut Chepita away for life in her bedroom on the first floor, in that old Santiago house.”

“Didn’t she ever see anyone again?” Primavera asked, heatedly. “Didn’t anyone ever see her again? And her child? What became of her child?”

“It was a daughter,” the mayor ventured, “at least, as far as I know. Some say they sent her to a convent in Popayán when she was old enough; others that she stayed with her mother in confinement and that, after the mother’s death, the daughter went the same way.”

“So sad,” the bishop concluded. “Something is known of that calamity.”

The doctor let them talk.

“What convent in Popayán? No convent took her in,” Belencito had recalled. “At least the two locked-up women had their room looking out on the Church of the Apostle: there was a little square, they could see the world through the window, and the world could see them too, but only through the window, because their window was the only one in the house that didn’t have a balcony, they didn’t give them the privilege of a balcony. Lots of people from Pasto, all dead now, could remember them looking out of the window; first it was the girl holding her little daughter, then the woman and the little girl, then it was the old lady and the woman, and finally the two old ladies, they were the ones I knew through the window: I saw them disappear like dust on the wind.”

“It seems,” Primavera said, “that Don Joaquín and Doña Lucrecia did not mind sharing their double tragedy with everyone else, the tragedy of their daughter and granddaughter in the window. Didn’t it occur to them that people might have fun, spying on them? Wouldn’t it have been better to keep them somewhere else…?”

“Bury them, so nobody should see them?” The professor regretted jumping in with such bleak humour, too late, because Primavera was already blushing, embarrassed.

6

“Polina Agrado’s ancestors had a worse time with Bolívar,” Doctor Proceso said.

The elderly Polina Agrado had received him at her house, which must have been the oldest in Pasto, with three rows of windows, thirty-six unoccupied rooms, empty barns, abandoned kitchens, dark hallways, phantasmal whinnying and phantom riders, and a large kitchen garden full of tangled rose bushes: such was the house in 1966, grey and white, looming up opposite Santiago church.

To his surprise, Doctor Proceso was announced in the old-fashioned way, by a manservant as ancient as Polina Agrado. The old lady received him dressed as though for a funeral, more than surrounded — protected — by three of her nine daughters. He thought he was in Paris, at a marquise’s salon. The old lady’s head was covered by a Franciscan veil. She held out a gloved hand, which the doctor kissed — as her daughters had demanded when he made the appointment by telephone: “Greet her with a kiss on the hand and sit on the stool you’ll see in front of her. Don’t say a word. Just listen. She knows what you’re after.”

“I like to talk looking out at Santiago church,” Polina Agrado had said, “and especially when I have to speak about things I no longer want to. It is even sadder to talk to someone who asks, without a drop of pity, that I tell the tale of my family’s misfortune. But I knew your parents, Doctor, honest folk, and that’s why I’m speaking, out of respect for them. I know nothing at all about you, but, at the very least, I expect your discretion. I do not know what you are going to do with my truth, I cannot imagine what you have in mind, and I prefer not to find out. I leave it in God’s hands; that’s the only reason I agree to talk about things one cannot forget, even at my age. If I keep my eyes on the window, do not think I am ignoring you: I just look at the church so God, who resides within, may give me strength.”

The daughters served coffee. In utter silence they settled themselves down to stay. “Leave,” Polina Agrado told them, “you do not need to hear what I’m going to say again, because then you would have to go to Confession again.” So the daughters went out, and the door was closed. The whole place smelled of old age. The doctor distracted himself by contemplating the arabesques in the cracked ceiling: there were pink and blue landscapes, angels and swords, suns.

“Now I’ll begin,” Polina Agrado said.

But she did not.

Silence.

Sighs.

Was she crying?

Primavera poured more aguardiente into the glasses. The professor did not take his eyes off her hands. Mayor Serrano was speaking; Doctor Proceso was speaking, heatedly. The bishop was deep in thought. Professor Chivo contributed, but switched his attention painfully back and forth between the story of Polina Agrado and Primavera’s hands, her indifferent eyes.

“Polina Agrado’s ancestors were a grandmother and her grand-daughter.”

“And both suffered their own calamities in the tragedy. A lot of people think it’s beyond belief, but it happened,” Chivo interjected.

“It’s been passed down by word of mouth like the tale of an unlucky Little Red Riding Hood, but it’s a true tale, and that makes all the difference. ‘In order to understand my ancestor’s gesture,’ Polina Agrado had said, ‘to understand the gesture made by Hilaria Ocampo — better known as the widow Hilaria, because she lost her husband very young and raised her children alone — you have to understand the predicament she and her granddaughter faced.’”

“In order to understand the ‘gesture?’ Is that what you’re saying she said, Justo Pastor?” the professor marvelled. “If you can call that a gesture… I know all about the gesture, although I’d prefer to call it a ‘desperate measure,’ and sweeten it a bit, and even so it would still be appalling.”

Everyone drank.

“Five months after the surrender of Pasto the rebellion broke out again, on the twenty-eighth of October, 1822, this time at the hands of Benito Boves and Agustín Agualongo. They escaped from prison in Quito, at a point when a good many people in Pasto already seemed reluctant to see further uprisings; those with something to lose, the well-off, could not afford to run the risk of remaining royalist, at least not until a reorganization of Spanish forces came into effect, which looked more than unlikely. It was the same for the middle class: they too had something to lose if they continued to oppose the republic. The common people, the soldiers who had sworn loyalty, the highlanders, the indigenous population stayed under clerical control — king and God, or the other way around: God and king, which amounted to the same thing. Curates and priests, for or against the republic, exchanged vehement edicts, sermons and letters in Latin; they excommunicated left and right, de-excommunicated when it suited them; it was a brawl among scholars who discredited themselves, bandying bits of Latin about: ‘The excommunication imposed upon all those who directe vel indirecte have cooperated with the republicans is not only unjust but illegal and reckless because it has not taken the pronouncement of the sacred Council of Trent into account and does not proceed from three canonical monitions.’ But ultimately, curates and priests were all encouraging the same thing: war, and I say this begging the pardon of those present.”

“You don’t need to beg my pardon,” the bishop broke in, “I agree with you.”

“The indigenous people remained subject to fate, and were soon fighting not for king or God, but for themselves, for survival. The war had left enough poverty for everyone, while they’d been out defending the idea of a king who did not protect them, an insubstantial king. That was the general feeling of resignation when the cry of rebellion broke from the mouths of Boves and Agualongo.”

“But who were Boves and Agualongo? Forgive me for forgetting, señores.”

“Forgiven; lovely, elegant Primavera.”

“Your adjectives are lovely and elegant too,” Primavera replied to the professor, mortified.

“No-one can remember it all,” the mayor butted in. He contributed very infrequently, but he did contribute. Now he tried to catch the bishop’s eye, as if urging him to pick up the topic. The Bishop of Pasto was just listening. He had wanted to air his views when curates and priests were mentioned, and was thankful no-one noticed his desire. He simply said, in a conciliatory manner: “Go on, Arcaín, Justo Pastor, stop interrupting each other.”

“Benito Boves was a nephew of the bloodthirsty Asturian general Tomás Boves, who had already confronted Bolívar, defeating him in Venezuela, at the head of a division he himself called ‘the Legion of Hell.’ He was, nonetheless, considerably less bloodthirsty than a number of patriots Bolívar surrounded himself with, above all those from his own country, the Venezuelans Salom, Flórez and Cruz Paredes, who would in turn take charge of Pasto, following strict orders from Bolívar, obeying his mandate of death and his suffocating decrees to the letter, much to Pasto’s misfortune.”

“And Boves the uncle and Boves the nephew came to very different ends: while uncle Boves died in battle, nephew Boves fled — right in the thick of the fighting, when he was most needed — ran off with the Spanish soldiers, his army curate and two other clergymen ‘at breakneck speed’ to the village of La Laguna, from there down the Putumayo River, then to Brazil, and no more was heard of him.”

“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Arcaín interrupted, “don’t make them flee when the October uprising has barely begun. The Spanish ran off at Christmas. Besides, Primavera was asking us about Agustín Agualongo.”

“He was,” the doctor began, “the man who would take charge of the resistance, alongside his own people, his compatriots: Estanislao Merchancano, who was also a learned man, Colonel Jerónimo Toro, famous warrior from Patía, Juan José Polo and Joaquín Enríquez, both reputedly invincible, José Canchala, indigenous cacique of Catambuco, the Benavides brothers, the formidable negro Angulo, leader of the Barbacoas blacks, Captain Ramón Astorquiza, Francisco Terán, Manuel Insuasti, Lucas Soberón and Juan Bucheli, among others. It was Agualongo who brought about the participation of the people, precisely because he was of the people, a noble and war-hardened Indian, nobler than any Creole, a strategist who stood out by virtue of his talent for command and his intelligence.”

“He was not the ignoramus official historians have made him out to be, even going so far as to make fun of his name, nor was he a ‘humble servant.’ He knew how to read and write, he painted in oils and, like many others, he joined the royalist ranks early on. He’d been born in Pasto, in August 1780, and was not a pure-blooded Indian, but mixed-race. If only he had been completely Indian, he would have been even more estimable.”

“He too ended up fighting, no longer for the king, but for his own people. The tricking of the Pastusos and later the barbarity unleashed upon them would ultimately become the sole motivation for his struggle, the banner he would defend until his death by firing squad. It was after his flight from Quito, in the company of Benito Boves, that he entered Pasto in order to organize the resistance. In the convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception he gathered his armaments together. And, to the surprise of those in Pasto who were indisposed towards the idea — the civil authorities and certain ecclesiastical ones — his army of four hundred militiamen assembled, to which around five hundred highlanders, drawn from neighbouring villages, were added; they crossed the Guáitara River, took the garrison held by Antonio Obando — the military chief Bolívar had left behind — and reconquered territory for the royalists as far as Tulcán, no less.”

“It wasn’t long before the Liberator heard what had happened; the news found him celebrating in Quito, at the beginning of a banquet in his honour, and when his aide spoke of events into his ear he erupted into profanities, as usual, and, as those around him witnessed, ‘leapt onto the table with a single bound and began kicking cutlery and crockery from one end to the other.’ In a state of shock, quite beside himself, he must have remembered fearsome men like the Pastusos only too well: men who had already made him suffer, the same ones who, almost unarmed, had defeated him at Bomboná; he had seen them fight and decimate the Vargas and Bogotá battalions.”

“So he mustered a division of more than two thousand men, made up of the Rifles, squadrons of guías, mounted cazadores and Dragoon Guards, who were the most experienced troops in the southern army, and put at their head none other than Sucre, the victor of Pichincha.”

“But Sucre was driven back too, in Taindala on the twenty-fourth of November, by Agualongo’s army, which relied on only seven hundred fusiliers, a few lances, and palm sticks and guayacán clubs for the rest.”

“In reality, these were people armed solely with courage: they made up for the lack of rifles with sticks and stones, and sheer obstinacy. Without arms or munitions the order given before each battle was straight-forward: A club for the rider and another for the horse; the spear to the stomach.”

“Sucre withdrew to await reinforcements, which an infuriated Bolívar sent without delay.”

“And this was how the army of veterans, boosted by the Vargas and Bogotá battalions and the Quito militias, took Taindala on the twenty-third of December, descended on Pasto on the twenty-fourth, and, following isolated bloody affrays, went out onto the city’s streets to kill.”

“It was not a victory of patriots over royalists: it was a hideous misunderstanding that Bolívar, who should have resolved it, brought about; he was unable to pluck the thorn of Bomboná from his ludicrous, wounded pride.”

“This is the point at which Benito Boves flees with his posse of priests and Spaniards to the Putumayo, never to return. Agualongo, who was from Pasto, would fall back to the mountains with his captains, to draw strength from the craggy landscape. He little suspected that the people of Pasto, without militiamen to defend them anymore (the last fell before incoming forces that were ever more numerous), would end up burned alive; he never imagined the mercy that he did grant the defeated would not be granted to women, children and the elderly.”

“It would be the first major example of barbarism in the history of Colombia: the first major massacre of many that would follow.”

“The stuff of every day,” the bishop said. He spoke for the first time.

“This is also where we hear for the first time about Hilaria Ocampo and Fátima Hurtado, ancestors of Polina Agrado, may she rest in peace. It’s here we begin to learn of her tragedy, passed down like a fable from one teller to the next, here ‘in the horrid butchery that followed, in which soldiers and civilians, men and women were promiscuously slaughtered,’ as O’Leary points out. But is it right to say ‘soldiers?’ Only the defenceless — women and children — remained in the city. Sucre continued the assault on them, and followed Bolívar’s orders.”

“Historians who speak of Sucre, his thinking, the dazzling clarity of his actions, doubt he participated in the massacre. No doubt he closed his eyes and carried out orders, because this business of ‘carrying out orders’ was and remains the universal excuse when it comes to butchery. Even if Sucre did not enter the city during the slaughter, he did send in the chief of assassins, a certain Sanders. Bolívar’s orders were irrevocable, and the Rifles and Dragoons must have turned themselves into animals to carry them out.”

“Polina Agrado’s forebears were not in the least bit wealthy, unlike Belencito Jojoa’s, isn’t that ironic? Here’s Belencito, a carpenter: there stands his Santacruz ancestor, rich and influential. Here’s Polina Agrado, a fine lady with a three-storey house on Santiago Square: there are her ancestors, obscure, battle-hardened mountain people, and above all that forthright and resourceful grandmother, the widow Hilaria Ocampo. Her own loved ones had already gone off to fight and she had heard no news of them for weeks; only she and her granddaughter were still in Pasto. If she had not been ill, she would surely have gone to fight too, but she also had to look after Fátima, her fourteen-year-old granddaughter who ‘struggled with words,’ as the family put it: it was hard for her to get them out, and, when she did, she directed them to her grandmother alone. What language was she speaking? It was a muttered gibberish that only grandma could decipher; her grandmother was the one person Fátima trusted: she laughed with her; they slept in the same bed; they went to Mass together every morning; the grandmother herself used to say: ‘She has faith only in me.’ But she also said that sooner or later Fátima would come to believe in others too, for good or for ill, and that she must be given time.”

“For a long time Fátima’s beauty had been startling; it was just that her loveliness, paired with the mental fog that shut her in (‘She seems an odd girl,’ ‘She’s virtually dead’), meant it was no sooner noticed than forgotten; it was something everybody had got used to, the extraordinary beauty that blazed just for an instant, because it was immediately overwhelmed by the certainty of a gentle, absent madness.”

“They stayed inside their house, on the outskirts of Pasto, at the mercy of fate and war. The River Chapalito ran nearby, crossed by a stone bridge where granddaughter and grandmother sometimes went, and waited. The grandmother despaired of the time spent without news: months before her illness (her right arm was paralyzed, they said it was bewitched) she took an active part in the fighting, and for this very reason the tale that’s been passed down commemorates her. From his pulpit, the vicar of Pasto had already given her just cause: to defend the king was to defend God. With this holy blessing behind her, the widow not only took charge of cooking for the militia but at times, in the clamour of the fight, abandoned the stove and ran to help, body and soul, wherever she might be most needed. When she was forced to resign herself to the paralysis in her arm, she symbolically handed in her kitchen knife to Estanislao Merchancano, colonel of the Invincible Squadron. And now, instead of a knife she carried a sharpened eucalyptus stick, hidden in her bodice, which she surely used more than once, with her one good arm, the day Bolívar’s Rifles entered Pasto: one Liberator or another could have fallen to its point, but the fable passed down by word of mouth records its use just one single time.”

“A single time?”

“Hilaria Ocampo was a redoubtable lady: a giant of a woman around six feet tall, but with the face of a kindly grandma, the face old women have who were once beautiful. She was not Fátima Hurtado’s grandmother for nothing: ‘As lovely as she is sick,’ the soldiers would say of Fátima when they discovered and chose her for Bolívar, ‘but lovely still.’”

“The widow had fought against Bolívar at Bomboná, that Sunday, the seventh of April, Feast of Flowers; she found herself shoulder to shoulder with the six hundred Pasto militiamen who crossed the Cariaco ravine not fearing enemy bullets, climbed the steep sides, entered the encampment of the Vargas and Bogotá battalions, stripped them of flags, arms and munitions, and after leaving most of the troops in a bad way and the principal patriot commanders injured, returned to their own camp taking many prisoners with them: she took along four herself and kept them safe until it was decided to return them unharmed, with the others, to Bolívar. The Pastusos in the Invincible Squadron called for her; their leader, Estanislao Merchancano, said she brought them luck. Now, with such perfidious paralysis, she could not fight against Zambo, and stayed in Pasto, with Fátima, waiting. That December twenty-fourth, during Black Christmas, she had not managed to find any of her loved ones in the confusion of the slaughter, and she felt afraid: they might be dead already, dead beneath the dead.”

“When Agualongo’s men left the city, she believed, like most people, that since the resistance had faltered, the killing would also stop, that Pasto had been captured and peace would once more ensue: restrictive, but peace after all, settling for whatever was to come — the republic? — so be it, this was something she and everyone else were already resigning themselves to. What she did not anticipate was the subsequent actions of murderers in the Rifles on the undefended city: ‘the killing of men, women and children went on even though they took refuge in the churches, and the streets ended up filled with corpses; so that the time of the Rifles is an expression which has stuck in Pasto to mean this gory catastrophe,’ Sañudo tells us.”

“That battalion had a very bad name even among Bolívar’s own troops. Under the command of that man Sanders, the Rifles foretold days of bloodshed that were coming not just for Pasto but for the whole of Colombia, from that time onwards, for years and years that are still without end.”

“After that Black Christmas, four hundred civilian corpses of all ages lay in the streets of Pasto, not counting the militiamen lost in combat, and the carnage would continue for three more days, with the acquiescence of General Sucre, who ‘was carrying out orders.’”

“But what became of the widow Hilaria and her granddaughter?”

“They were two of the ‘Hidden Thirty’ underneath Our Blessed Lady of Mercy’s cloak, when the bloodbath began, at dusk.”

“The slaughter had started at dawn, actually, once the last militias in the city were defeated, but let’s say the killing got properly underway at midday: it was pure butchery, not one official stepped in to halt it; quite the contrary, the orders were precisely that, to incite cruelty.”

“They hid under the Virgin’s cloak? Did they survive?”

“The statue of the Virgin was in the middle of a large wooden platform, from which twelve poles stuck out, six on each side, that the privileged Dozen Devout, chosen from among the sturdiest and most respected women, carried on their shoulders to transport it through the streets of Pasto, shouting prayers to her while the men fought. The cloak was draped from the Virgin’s crowned head and it came down at the back to the two furthest corners of the platform, so there was a sizeable concealed space underneath it.”

“Hilaria Ocampo had dodged death at every turn. The only thing that mattered to her was keeping her granddaughter away from the devastation: at first they had stayed shut up in their house on the outskirts, the night of December twenty-third and the early morning of the twenty-fourth, but they had to flee without delay because this was the place, near the Caracha river, where isolated troops of invaders began to appear, from the early hours of that day. The widow thought they would be more protected on the streets of Pasto, but it was worse: the liberators went into the San Miguel and El Regadío neighbourhoods too. Fire began to light up many places; would they burn Pasto down? Knowledgeable about war, Hilaria saw with dismay that few of the militiamen put up a fight, compared to the hundreds of liberators who continued to arrive in double rows of infantrymen; these were detachments with well-assigned orders, furious cavalry troops who burst into the terrified city.”

“Right in the middle of Calle Real the widow wanted to go back home, but hesitated: there was death on all sides; enemies on foot and on horseback were multiplying; she didn’t know which would turn out to be for the best: to go on, to go back, to stay still; nowhere seemed like a good place; the only thing on their side was anonymity: the fact that amid all that random death, nobody noticed them, it was as if they did not exist; by lucky chance none of the eyes looking for people to kill saw them; those many eyes, reddened and hasty, passed right over them, without noticing; in the blur of victims they did not spot them, did not make them out, despite the light, because it was still light, dusk had not yet fallen.”

“They had fled up Calle Angosta, skirting bodies that were scattered like stains, in the most unlikely poses, and they had to go along jumping over these stains, deliberately ignoring them, because stepping on them occasionally was unavoidable, and they didn’t stop until they reached one side of the cemetery, where the widow imagined they would find the best place to hide; she thought it would not occur to anyone to kill in a cemetery, so what she saw appalled her all the more: plenty of people had the same idea, and they were killing them there too, in the cemetery; she could not make out whether it was men or children or women, she only saw red-coloured stains, and above all she heard them, each identical cry, unearthly, drawn out like a river.”

“She fled once more, pulling her granddaughter through the streets: at her passing front doors splintered to bits; the liberators entered on horseback, spearing and shooting anything that moved. Unable to avoid the destruction, they ran aimlessly on; they came out at the doors of the former cathedral and there encountered a group of parishioners craning forwards, into the church, paralysed in a stone-like silence. Were they pretending not to notice? As if the war were not going on around them, the rigid faces were watching something happening inside; not only did they not dare go in (as the grandmother would have liked, in order to hide), they did not dare flee either: they stayed riveted before the doors, fatally frozen, their faces fixed. Hilaria and Fátima peered in too and at that exact moment witnessed how Old Galvis got his head smashed in, at eighty years of age, right on the altar. ‘Galvis,’ the widow shouted, ‘Galvis.’ They lived near Galvis; she chatted to him at times, and now he was dead, just as they would be if God did not protect them. A stampede of soldiers dispersed the group; the widow felt the shadow of a bayonet just graze her back. She grabbed Fátima and they ran off again, because death was still circling around them, death which still did not look them in the eye, death not looking at them, still not looking at them.”

“The doors to the Sisters of Mercy’s convent were on fire. Inside, behind the smoke, tongues of flame showed glimpses of the unbridled shadows of Rifles on top of the naked shadows of screaming girls: at the same moment they raped them, they killed them, the widow observed. Fátima saw, her arm tightly gripped by her grandmother. Then she spoke in her murmuring gibberish, spoke for the first time since the catastrophe began: she asked if they were all playing in there; her grandmother did not reply, she was tormented by what the question foreshadowed. Would it be a game for Fátima, if it happened?”

“They went up to the Santiago neighbourhood, where the Church of the Apostle stood, and it was worse; the fight was still going on there, in its death throes: three or four militiamen were holding out against at least a hundred liberators, the grandmother calculated, well-versed in war. She could not help: she was in charge of her granddaughter; she had a bad arm; she was only good for running away. And the demise of these cornered men made her cry at last; they were attacking without achieving anything, barely defending themselves, they tottered weakly from here to there until they fell, hidden in a forest of lances, without a sound, as if they were grateful; it made her weep silently, and another pile of dead men made her cry some more. Dead men? Women, she discovered, it was a corner full of dead women, acquaintances of hers she recognized in horror: the seamstress Otoniela, Zenaida Montúfar the hat maker, the two Patoja sisters, Cándida Iriarte, Facunda Bucheli, Terencia and Tila Moncayo, Cirila Cruz, the deaf Castillo woman, all she had to do was look at a face to know the name straight off, it pained her, and so she stopped looking for more names and more dead, but she was shaken to her core to discover the women were carrying white flags, flags made from white cloths, which had done them no good.”

“In the midst of the dead women, Fátima inexplicably burst out laughing. And her laughter appalled her grandmother, who was leading her blindly, without a destination in mind, along the horrific street, no hope left: she thought her granddaughter had finally gone completely mad. In Taminango, one of the most traditional neighbourhoods, overflowing with the injured, the cries of those dying and the cries of those killing, they could not run any further; where would they run to? ‘God help us,’ the grandmother heard someone below her shout, ‘they’re going to murder the city.’ She was the one shouting, and it was the first time she had. Fátima did not hear her: she had felt something warm stroke the top of her head, and raised her eyes; wings grazed her forehead; it was a dark bird that escaped, soaring into the sky, and now Fátima laughed harder still, the great delirious laugh crossing her face.”

“On the banks of the River Pasto the carnage intensified: on the skyline, figures up on the bridges, figures dying, figures killing, dying and killing beneath and on top of the bridges; the rays of a curiously ruddy sun cloaked them both; where was fear leading them? In the blink of an eye they appeared in the middle of the San Andrés neighbourhood, and it was there the grandmother ran headlong into her friend Isaura Olarte, who was crying. She was fleeing with her daughter, a girl younger than Fátima; after staying hidden in the entrance to a granary, they had to leave when the main door started to burn. Just two steps away from the burning door, and perhaps protected for this very reason, the two friends tried to make themselves understood amid the explosion of whistles and gun-fire, the moans and screams, and the terrifying gallop of horses. Isaura Olarte spoke of her dead, of her house razed to the ground; she cried out, in a hoarse voice, that ‘all she asked for was a white soldier for her daughter, that she not fall into the hands of a black one, that no black man get her pregnant,’ and she cast about her in desperation as if summoning up a white soldier to save her. ‘Black or white, it makes no difference,’ the grandmother told her, and suggested they run to the Church of Jesús del Río where the statue of Our Blessed Lady of Mercy was. ‘There,’ she said, ‘the miracle will happen.’ Isaura Olarte refused with a shake of the head: ‘They kill more in the churches; it’s like going up to them and saying here we are, kill us.’ The grandmother remained stock-still, her eyes trained on the inferno; the faces of the horsemen who directed the slaughter were all soot-streaked. She pulled herself together. ‘Come with me,’ she shouted again, but already her friend and the daughter were moving off into the swirling mass, pressed like bundles up against the bloody walls. Now the grandmother shook with fury, she grabbed Fátima roughly. ‘Get a move on, you idiot,’ she told her, and it was the first time she ever spoke to her that way. ‘Why don’t you get going?’”

“They came to the Church of Jesús del Río.”

“And that’s where their troubles began.”

7

“Eight years before calamity struck Hilaria Ocampo, in 1814 (when Pasto was besieged by General Nariño, whom the Pastusos defeated), the Dozen Devout carried the statue of Our Blessed Lady of Mercy out of the church for the first time, accompanied by the rest of the women from Pasto, paraded her on high through the thick of the fighting, and took her fearlessly into the fiercest clashes, shouting to her ‘don’t ignore us, don’t wash your hands of us,’ entreating her with prayers and even insults to take their side, tugging at her cloak, her rosary, slapping her knees, tickling her plaster feet as if to wake her, pleading that she too should fight, that it was high time, come down on our side, Most Holy Mother of Mercy, be true and be strong like us.”

“And she did come down on their side.”

“But things didn’t happen quite like that: General Antonio Nariño, that authentic independence leader, later betrayed not just by his men but by destiny, saw through his spyglass a long line of soldiers advancing on him from the very heart of the city; they weren’t soldiers, but a horde of women: it was a procession from San Agustín to the Church of Mercy, headed up by the statue of the Virgin, but the Virgin never went round the most intense areas of fighting, like they say she did.”

“But eight years after Nariño, when Black Christmas happened, the widow Hilaria and her granddaughter found the statue of Our Blessed Lady of Mercy in the Church of Jesús del Río, at rest on her platform, facing the doors, as if about to go out by herself but never leaving: the Dozen Devout lay strangled around her, and there was no-one else in the church.”

“Or so it seemed.”

“The murderers had tried to set the church on fire, and had given up. If the killers were gone, the grandmother reasoned, that would be the best place to hide, among the twelve dead women, at Our Blessed Lady’s discretion: to go back out onto the street would be tempting fate. A few candles still flickered from the walls, all was devastating silence, the silence of ruins, but at length they heard a whimper. No-one could be seen in the half-light, among the charred confession boxes; it smelt of smouldering. But they heard the whimper again, and discovered its source: someone had to be concealed under Our Lady’s cloak. They heard several horsemen pass the doors at a gallop without slowing down, and were just about to get under the cloak themselves when sudden footsteps rang out behind them: it was one of the murderous Rifles. By the dim light of the candles, in the warm glow of confessionals, like red-hot coals, the grandmother saw that the soldier was very young, that he was alone, and that he was coming towards them bent on killing; they heard him shout, calling out to his companions: ‘There are some here.’ The grandmother intercepted the murderer, confronted him, took Fátima by the arm and handed her over, purposefully, with a gentle shove: ‘Here,’ she said, ‘for you. For the love of God, protect this child, she is yours alone.’ The soldier opened his reddened, shining eyes very wide. His shirt was stained with blood, the sleeve torn, and he had a straw hat tied around his neck. He looked at Fátima in disbelief; it seemed to him the beautiful but peculiar girl was yawning in his direction, as if she were going to swallow him up, so he stopped pointing his bayonet, received the yawning Fátima, and clasped her to him; she felt his mouth glued to her neck, smelled gun-powder and sweat, and saw the face streaked with soot in which his eyes shone with an almost atrocious innocence, but in a flash she also saw her grandmother, behind the soldier, heard her say with absolute calm: ‘Close your eyes tight, Fátima.’ She opened them again when her grandmother was pushing her towards the Virgin, after she heard the scream like a stuck pig; the one who had been taken by surprise was on his back, arms and legs flailing, one hand clutching at his throat, which was gushing blood; the grandmother was putting the eucalyptus spear away in her bodice.”

“And they got in under the Virgin’s blue cloak, with the rest of the Hidden Thirty, those elderly women who used to accompany the Devout.”

“And they weren’t quite thirty women, as the story has it: the priest Elías Trujillo was in there too and Ninfo Zambrano’s four children, all boys.”

“But they were discovered because of that same recurring whimper: it was one of the boys. The liberators pulled the hidden out one by one, and one by one slit their throats. Fátima felt as though she were under a stone: her grandmother would not let her move. Purely by the grace of Our Blessed Lady of Mercy the killers did not realize that there were still two survivors, squashed up together, in a corner of the platform, beneath the Virgin’s violet cape. It was not altogether a blessing: the massacre lasted three days. They had to eat candlewax and drink holy water from the baptismal font. It was not a blessing: at the end of the third day Hilaria Ocampo and Fátima Hurtado emerged to join in the universal grief, to inhabit the phantasmal city like phantoms themselves and to accept, like the rest of the survivors, the new order established by Bolívar.”

“That’s to say, to accept another barbaric act: the decrees.”

“The decrees and Bolívar’s trap.”

“Bolívar had arrived in Pasto on the second of January, 1823, nine days after his Christmas of Death, and immediately began: he issued a decree confiscating goods, and imposed a contribution of thirty thousand pesos and three thousand head of cattle and two and a half thousand horses, which the sacked city of Pasto could not pay. Property belonging to Pastusos was parcelled out to republican officers. In addition, contravening the constitution itself, which abolished the exacting of tribute-money from Indians, he commanded the Indians in Pasto to pay it (with taxes backdated), just as they had been previously paying the Spanish king. How was the rebellion not going to continue, starting with the Indians? What kind of Liberator was this, who only gave orders for ruination?”

“Bolívar would leave Pasto on the fourteenth of January. But he was still in the city when he set up his trap and gave his grand last order to General Salom. And what did Salom do? Carried it out to the letter. O’Leary sums it up: ‘Salom carried out his assignment in a manner that did little honour to him or to the government, albeit they were dealing with men who ignored the most basic rules of honour. Feigning compassion for the fate of the vanquished Pastusos, he issued an edict calling them to assemble in the city’s public square, to swear loyalty to the Constitution and to receive assurances of the government’s protection from that moment on. Hundreds of Pastusos, obeying the call, or perhaps fearing a worse punishment, converged on the designated place, where they had read to them the law stating the duties of the magistrates and the rights of the citizens. Under the law, both property and person were amply protected and the responsibility of the magistrates was clearly defined. The law was read, in the presence of all those in attendance, and documents of guarantee were distributed as evidence of the government’s good faith. But in direct violation of the agreement, a picket of soldiers was stationed in the square and took one thousand Pastusos as prisoners, who were immediately sent to Quito. Many of them perished on the journey or at a later date, refusing to take food and declaring in unmistakeable terms their hatred for the laws and the name of Colombia. Many, on arrival in Guayaquil, ended their lives by throwing themselves into the river; others mutinied aboard the ships conveying them to Peru and suffered the death penalty.’”

“Part of Hilaria Ocampo’s family fell into this Bolivarian trap, and the rest would be finished off later, on the plains of Ibarra, on the sixteenth of July, 1823, when Agustín Agualongo’s men, greatly outnumbered, once again confronted Bolívar’s army of veterans.”

“Bolívar pitted an army against a band of highlanders.”

“Before the fight, Bolívar’s aide, Demarquet, wrote: ‘His Excellency plans to operate according to all the rules that the art of war provides… His Excellency’s intention is to defeat the Pastusos out on the open plain and far away from Pasto so that not a single one is able to return… and that once defeated, villagers should be advised that they may harry them, killing them or taking them prisoner… and in addition he offers a reward of ten thousand pesos to the corps which is first to break them.’”

“In Ibarra — without arms, without logistical support, when they were resting — the Pastusos were surprised by a devastating cavalry attack. Agualongo’s men hurled themselves at the horses’ necks, trying to bring them down. They fought without surrendering: they had no trust. How could they believe in the word of the liberators, when the Liberator himself so conspicuously failed to abide by his word, just as his successors in Colombia would be conspicuous from then on, for ever and ever?”

“It was an appalling battle, if it can even be called a battle when it was so unequal. And as is traditional, historians shut their eyes when faced with it.”

“At a certain point in the fighting, being apprised of the death of more than five hundred Pastusos and only eight republicans, Bolívar — rather than halting the action, calling upon his good judgement, or at least showing the indulgence of the victor once things were already way past victory — did the exact opposite: he overcame his legendary cowardice, or displayed it all the more clearly, and rode off to fire on the unarmed, instructing his lancers to run through body after body without mercy, until night fell.”

“The final tally gives an idea of his ruthlessness: according to official sources, more than eight hundred Pastusos lay scattered on the battlefield, and only thirteen republicans. Wounded Pastusos were shown no quarter; they were finished off. The bodies were not buried, as the most fundamental human right demands: Bolívar made them into a pyre.”

“And what about the widow Hilaria and her Fátima, after Black Christmas?”

“Fátima was on the bridge over the River Chapalito when Bolívar returned to Pasto, on the morning of January the second. From that bridge, enveloped in the cold, she saw Bolívar cross the other: the bridge over the River Pasto, far off, though visible; she saw him almost without being able to make him out, but how could you not spot him on his white horse, at the head of an endless column of armed men?”

“Men without mercy.”

“Bolívar didn’t need to see her to find her; they used to take the Liberator the spoils of the hunt, and he would choose.”

“He had his ‘fixer’ for these errands: a discreet subordinate with name and surnames, but so out in the open that no historian ever showed any interest in mentioning him. Some simply acknowledged his task, and gave it their blessing, applauding it: ‘And then he enabled that magnificent leader, that invincible man, a latter-day Alexander, to put aside his role as hero for a minute; he sought him out and showed him the little doe.’”

“That’s how the Liberator got his bit on the side.”

“The fixer took him to the first assignation of the night, encouraging him: ‘Liberator,’ he said, ‘woman was made for the warrior’s repose.’”

“But in Bolívar’s case you shouldn’t really say woman, but little girl, child, maid, kid, infant, innocent, babe, pure flesh.”

“Very pure appreciation, a very pure list,” Primavera said to the professor, and he deliberately ignored her, secretly thrilled by her interest.

“The fixer was a religious and sober man too, just the type employed for the dressing and undressing of a general in those days, doing his hair and shaving him, putting him to bed and waking him; a man who inspired a certain spiteful respect among the soldiery because of this. He was cunning, just as he was discreet. He knew how to tell the Liberator things without saying them. He arranged everything, from the time of the assignation to the bedclothes. He preferred to take charge of things personally, as he knew His Excellency’s likes and dislikes very well.”

“Three days after the Liberator’s arrival in Pasto, the fixer and his men ‘discovered’ Fátima Hurtado. They found her at a gloomy bend of the River Chapalito and, when they observed her contemplating herself in the water, in the words of the story passed down by word of mouth, they knew straight away she was another of the ‘Liberator’s doves,’ as they called them.”

“Like they were secretly jealous.”

“It wasn’t unusual for the soldiers themselves to present these offerings to Bolívar, or else they did it via his officers. Everyone, just like the fixer, knew of His Excellency’s most pressing needs.”

“Fátima Hurtado was like Our Lady of Fátima,” Fabricio Urdaneta reportedly said; “he was native of Riohacha, a barber-soldier under the fixer’s orders, one of those who discovered Fátima, according to the story passed down by word of mouth.”

“Marvelling at the apparition, and observing the due caution these exercises demanded on pain of death, the soldiers and the fixer followed her through the outskirts of Pasto, without the apparition noticing. The soldiers seemed quite unhinged by so much beauty concentrated in one girl: the fixer discovered them plotting as they followed her, but a single reprimand from him, invoking the name of Bolívar, was enough to discourage them.”

“And they saw her shut herself up in the rural quiet of a tumbledown cottage, with a little path of carefully swept stone leading to the door, this was the house where Fátima lived with her grandmother, sole survivors, given that they knew nothing of their relatives.”

“There the soldiers knocked at the door, with the fixer in their midst: he waited prudently, mindful of convention but, nevertheless, authoritarian; there was an uneasiness that came over him whenever a mission of this type drew towards its conclusion; he knocked on the door again himself.”

“And the widow Hilaria Ocampo answered it — the giantess.”

“From this point on, the inexplicable story, passed down by word of mouth, unfolds. Doña Polina told it very well, with its back and forth, its body blows, eh, Justo Pastor? I heard it too. Now I should pass it on.”

“If you wish.”

“I’d rather hear it from Polina Agrado,” Primavera said.

The professor pretended not to hear.

“The fixer was intimidated by the brawniness of the old woman who came to open the door. But he regained his composure and explained, with the restraint typical of him in such situations, that he would have to take her daughter to the Liberator, Simón Bolívar. That these were his orders.

“‘She’s not my daughter, she’s my granddaughter,’ the widow clarified.”

My ancestor Hilaria Ocampo already knew what was afoot—Polina Agrado related—sooner or later the time had to come. Sooner or later they were going to discover her — not her, but her Fátima — sooner or later.

She had avoided being corralled by death during Black Christmas, dodged the monster’s ambush, its claws, and now she saw it at the door, inescapable, in the summoning of her Fátima. This time it was not the young murderer who had harried them in the church, and whom she dispatched as was only right and proper, but Bolívar, for God’s sake, it was Zambo.

And it grieved her that that very morning she had considered hiding Fátima out near La Laguna, far away from Pasto, but she had let the premonition pass and remembered it too late, when they were hammering at the door: that was what distressed her most, forgetting to hide her granddaughter when so many eyes were already menacing her; not hiding her in time. Why, she lamented, didn’t I do it? Why didn’t I tie her to my apron strings? At what point did I let her out of my sight? She was confounded by the fact that her granddaughter had not ended up being claimed by some murderer, whom she might very well take on and defeat, but by a well-dressed agent who was almost pleasant, and a few open-mouthed soldiers — four in all, she counted them, preparing herself — Bolívar’s emissaries. It distressed her, and finally she understood: it was Bolívar; behind that whole calamity stood Zambo.

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

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

“That cannot be,” the fixer said.

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

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

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

“That the Liberator come and get her.”

“Impossible.”

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

No-one responded.

She raised her hands in the air:

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

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

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

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

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

And he left two watchmen posted on the door.

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

“That’s never been proved.”

“It has.”

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

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

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8

Gales of laughter united them like a colossal embrace — in the living room, which was all ashake.

“If it didn’t happen that way,” the professor said, “it should have done.”

“Impossible to check whether the story is completely accurate, but it did happen,” the doctor said with great difficulty, and laughed along with the rest, including the Bishop of Pasto.

And the fact was, Fátima and her grandmother’s end, their tragedy, had strangely overexcited them, to the point of hysteria. Once again, they drank aguardiente—as they had been doing during the whole unfolding of the tale. Once again, Primavera offered it generously around to each of them — with genuine affection? — the professor wondered. She offered it right on the back of the guffawing which boomed out, a manly sound; that’s how Primavera heard it, from all sides, like the laughter of hairy hunters around the fireplace applauding a joke, she thought, and I’m the only woman here: the fire.

Arcaín Chivo, slumped in his easy chair, was adoring her. And he suffered, sighing over her, when she leaned towards him, offering aguardiente. He snatched up a glass and drank it down in one, stole another straight away, and slurped from it noisily.

“When it comes to drinking,” he said, “I drink like a poet, and if a woman like you is pouring the booze, Primavera, what other hope is there but to drink? You are the unattainable woman, the impossible dream.”

Doctor Proceso heard him too. At that point the mayor spoke into his ear:

“Wouldn’t it be best, Justo Pastor, to wind up the evening now? Our dear Chivo is starting to flirt with your wife.”

“Ah, Chivo,” the doctor replied in a whisper. “Chivo the wise, Chivo the temperate, his intelligence overwhelmed by a good pair of legs, my wife’s legs.”

“What are you laughing about?” the bishop asked, swapping to a nearby seat. “Are you going to let me in on the joke?”

Doctor Proceso felt a little tipsy; he had thought the mayor and bishop were not far behind him, but as the story unfolded he had discovered quite the opposite: Primavera’s presence did not captivate them, and they were not even drunk. They’re pretending to drink, he realized, and in the last exchange he detected their eagerness to find any excuse and disappear. Worse still, as far as Bolívar’s carriage was concerned, they had not confirmed whether they approved of it or not. They’ll wash their hands of it and go, he thought.

“And the music?” Chivo said, “Shouldn’t we round off the sad tale we brought back to life with some music?”

“It’s a bit late for music,” Primavera said, taking them by surprise, given that not long before she had been offering around the aguardiente and laughing. “My daughters are sleeping. I think it’d be best to make coffee, would you like some?”

The Bishop of Pasto thanked her by quickly clapping his hands.

“It’ll be coffee for the road,” he said. “We really must go, it won’t be long till dawn.”

“We need coffee,” said the mayor, and threw the professor a sardonic look.

Arcaín Chivo took another glass, in a hurry. He set off behind Primavera, who was already on her way down the corridor:

“Allow me to keep you company while you make that coffee, señora. Let me tell you another story about independence, one worthy of your ears.”

Primavera neither consented nor refused. She headed silently for the kitchen; she felt pursued by the professor as if by a dog, she thought, a dog sniffing about. The others had already picked up their conversation again, but, nonetheless, the professor did not go straight into the kitchen: he seemed to hesitate at the bend in the corridor, as if an inopportune moment of lucidity were going to prevent him committing his indiscretion. Then he went back to the living room, but no-one there paid him any attention now, they were once again embroiled in plans for the carnival float, the bishop insisting on scrapping the spectacle: “You’ll run into serious problems, Justo Pastor, nobody’s going to allow it.” Matías Serrano described the idea as picturesque, but pointless: he said the world would go on as ever.

Chivo sank down into his chair, panting. For a few minutes he felt sorry for the doctor, with his obvious efforts to get his influential friends to commit to the undertaking. Efforts the bishop and the mayor repaid with little conviction. “Count on us in any case,” the mayor said, “to the extent that we’re permitted.” The bishop fretted: “We need to arrange another get-together; we could meet on the second of January.” Chivo was watching them — how ugly they looked, he thought, how horrible, how old, how skeletal; cheerio, corpses, I’m out of here with the beauty, he yelled in his head. The bishop’s indifference encouraged him to drink more aguardiente, and to run stealthily in pursuit of the fleeing Primavera.

Primavera was in front of the stove, about to filter the coffee, when Professor Chivo came in, hot on her trail. Dishevelled, his face shiny with sweat, he threw himself without thinking at Primavera’s tiny feet — more naked than ever in the rope-soled alpargatas—he knelt before them as if in ecstasy and kissed her toes rapidly, silently, many times.

“What are you doing?” Primavera asked. And then provided the answer herself, unable to credit it: he’s kissing my feet.

She tried moving her feet away, but the professor’s hands were gripping her ankles. The voices of the bishop and mayor could be heard in the living room. Chivo, on his knees, raised his intoxicated, inflamed face; it was as if he was catching a glimpse of Primavera in Heaven and he was much further away, in Hell.

“You are to be adored,” he said, as if crying.

“Get up from there,” Primavera urged, in an anxious whisper that sounded like a warning but also a celebration. In response, the professor simply crouched down again and redoubled his kisses, this time around her ankles, and then he moved lower down and started to plant kisses between Primavera’s toes, while she opened her mouth, incredulous, bowled over by a wave of heat. And he’s still kissing my feet, she cried inwardly, paralysed: now she could not even attempt to move her feet backwards. My feet? — she asked herself — not just my feet, because the kneeling professor was kissing her calves and had suddenly lifted a burning hand and was sliding it over her knee towards Primavera’s thighs, underneath her skirt.

“My dear Don Arcaín,” Primavera managed to blurt in surprise — with pleasure or annoyance? — and she thought that having said “My dear Don” to him, which she never said to anyone, and saying it in such a tone, she was calling him to order, “I could scream, they could hear me.”

And yet, in spite of everything, an immeasurable delight took hold of her, against her will; the presentiment that they could be discovered at any moment: that was what worried her most, that her husband and the bishop and the mayor might come into the kitchen at any time — above all the bishop, she thought — but she felt the professor’s hands moving even higher up her thighs, like dizzying, burning wings, pushing her legs apart; will I faint? — she wondered, leaning over the professor, who trembled on his knees as if praying — I will faint; and she opened her mouth to gulp down air because she could not breathe and it looked as though she were going to scream so the professor stopped his marauding: he lowered his scalding hands to encircle just one calf and left them there, as though shackling her.

“You,” he said at once, not giving her time to react, “you are the remote Virgin of my childhood, surely it was for a kiss from your lips that my great-grandfather killed himself, or that he was killed, or that there was that war between two peoples, each of their kings wanting to abduct you and throw you on the marriage bed and gulp you down thirstily, Primavera, like a drop of water in the desert,” and meanwhile he was looking fleetingly at her knees, and raised his gaze, fleetingly, to the place where her sex must be underneath her skirt, and from there he moved up fleetingly to her eyes, nothing daunted, and held her shocked, liquid blue gaze, held it without wavering while she stretched her mouth wide and exposed her teeth as though laughing silently, and yet it seemed she did it out loud, he thought, a torrent of feminine mirth cascading over him, encouraging him to keep talking, to provoke another silent, obliging laugh, she was challenging him to make her laugh more, or lose the game and see the laughter turn to contempt.

“I live in the hope of your love, the hope that one day you will open up for me like a flower, mistress of my pain,” he said and recited “sweet and sacred little light within my heart,” and chided her: “You’ll never imagine what you’re missing out on, not letting me adore you.”

“God, what are you saying? Do you know what you’re saying to me?”

Astonishment made her voice crack; another wave of heat washed over her; Arcaín Chivo renewed his wandering, his hand high inside her skirt.

“Don’t do that,” Primavera seemed to beg with a groan, mute laughter playing across her flushed face the whole time, and she lifted her free leg slightly and rested her foot on the kneeling professor’s shoulder (so that for a blazing moment Arcaín Chivo could see she was entirely naked beneath her skirt); oh unattainable sex, he thought, and was able to stammer “unattainable Primavera,” incredulous at such joy, and as Primavera moved he believed he managed to detect, on the air that wafted from inside her skirt, her most intimate scent, a sort of bitter sweetness, he thought, and now in a trance he was straining his neck head face mouth much further in to her when she pushed her foot against him with all her might and the professor collapsed backwards against a cabinet amid a clatter of saucepans and spoons, which simultaneously crashed down on his head.

“Arcaín’s just fallen over,” came Primavera’s nervous announcement. “Something happened. He’s hurt himself.”

The others arrived: three long, grey shadows leaned in through the doorway. The professor had hit the base of his skull, hard.

“I think I’ve had too much to drink,” he said, half getting up. The doctor himself held out his hand and helped him.

“I think I’d better go, señores,” Arcaín Chivo continued, and it was impossible to tell whether he felt angry or overwhelmed with delight — he did not know himself.

“Us too,” responded the bishop. “I’ll drop you home, Arcaín. It’s all been quite enough, if not too much. There are holidays on the horizon, but that doesn’t make the days any easier to get through, eh, Justo Pastor? Promise me we’ll meet again before carnival.”

“I promise,” the doctor replied. He could not take his eyes from his wife’s flushed face, the face that was looking right back at him, happy.

But the joy on Primavera’s face drained away as soon as they were alone, as the guests’ voices on the other side of the front door grew fainter; she crossed the living room at once and started to go up the stairs, with the doctor behind her, neither of them hurrying, but escaping and in pursuit.

When they got to the first-floor landing the doctor took her by the arm and made her stop. “We need to talk,” he said. “I’m going to see if the girls are asleep,” she responded. With a brisk jerk she shook off her husband’s hand, and carried on going upstairs. He hesitated over following her: in the end he headed for the study on the first floor, still hoping to find the recordings, or at least the paper transcriptions. He spent a long time there, in the office, rummaging through files, all to no avail: he had already lost the urge to ask Primavera about the tapes and start another row. He went up to the second floor with the intention of going to bed and putting the world out of his mind, but saw Primavera in Luz de Luna’s bedroom, leaning over her sleeping daughter, and to see Primavera so calm, in peaceful silence, reawakened his impotent rage and the misery of depending on — or not depending on, more like it — a woman like her. Would he ask her about the tapes, without worrying about the row? He remembered his daughters were sleeping. My God, he said to himself, was it possible Primavera had stolen the tapes?

He chose to go back down to the first floor: he turned on all the lights, went in to the guest room, the laundry room, the room with the ping-pong table in it — all lined with further bookshelves — and in each room he continued his search, for endless minutes. Absolutely nothing. How long ago did he lose track of the recordings? He could not remember. Didn’t he keep the tapes in a Cuban cigar box? Where did he hide that box? Why was his work — the only thing he had going for him — in such a muddle? The final room on the first floor was the toy room, and that was where he headed. He switched on the light: wooden Pinocchios, cuddly bears, lizards and whales, giant mice, penguins, plastic dolls and wind-up ones, puppets, wooden horses, electric trains, rubber ducks, tin soldiers, ballerinas, fairies and elves on strings all seemed to greet him at once with the most monstrous guffaw — that’s what he heard — a freakish laugh issuing from deep within the toys as they lay piled in heaps against the walls, like multiplied versions of his own daughters.

In the middle of the room there was a table for playing Chinese chequers, with a huge bouquet of red roses in a vase and four chairs set round about. He tried to remember the last time he had sat at this table with his daughters: it was years ago. But he could not recall them putting bunches of roses on the games table. What kind of game was this? There was a card stuck to the vase. He read, From an undying admirer, and, almost immediately, felt the presence of his wife, who had just come in, noiselessly, behind him.

“What?” she said. “Now you’re going to play with dolls?”

He did not answer. Nor did he turn around. But he detected the apprehension in Primavera’s voice, the doubt: had he read the card?

“I need the tapes,” he said in the end.

“Well of course I haven’t got them,” she replied. Her voice had gone back to normal, the same old steady mockery. “I expect the toys have them, to play with.”

He turned to look at her: she was coming towards him from the door, without hesitation. The games table stood between them. The bright light in the room shone into their faces and made them blink.

“What do you know about the float, what have they told you, what are they telling you to do about it?” the doctor asked.

“Something to do with Simón Bolívar,” she said, “the father of the nation, I believe. I know the governor has taken steps. You’re getting into a mess, and it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care if you get yourself in all the damn messes in the world, but do it on your own. Seráfico told me you want to sell the finca. You’re dragging me and the girls into your insanity, don’t you see?”

“You never know what you’re talking about,” the doctor said. He sighed resignedly. He was about to leave when Primavera made him pause with a bitter, muffled cry.

“Idiot,” she said.

And then:

“They can even put you in prison for mocking Bolívar, the father of the nation.”“Did your General Aipe tell you that? Was he able to speak?”

“Luckily for you, he can speak now. He had to go to Bogotá, to specialists. It wasn’t serious, fortunately for you.”

He spun around, possessed; knocking two of the chairs out of the way with a sweep of his hand, he reached her in two strides and grabbed her by the hips; he was behind her, pushing her forward against the edge of the table. The vase overturned; water splashed out among the blazing roses.

“What father of what nation?” he yelled. “Father of your General Aipe, more like.” And he loomed still further over her, and, holding her around the waist with one arm, yanked up her skirt in one go with the other; her naked backside glowed, very white. “So, nobody’s ever nibbled your thighs?” he asked, as though he were choking. He did not recognize himself.

“You sod!” she shouted. “Run back to your pregnant women!”

“The father of the nation is the sod.”

And as Primavera’s skirt, which he was forcing up, had fallen back down like a curtain, he ripped it open at the seams; Primavera bellowed, wounded, she on the verge of passing out with rage, breathing hoarsely, twisting about furiously within the imprisoning arm, but he clasped her furiously and did not let her go, furious with himself, above all, because he desired her. He desired her with all his might, against his will, and it was impossible for him to kill the desire; he pulled down the zip of his trousers. There was a moment’s pause in which they both seemed to make one single body: Primavera’s rage spilled over on realizing that he intended to sink himself where none of the sixteen lovers in her life — she had them counted out — had ever dared to. She defended herself more fiercely than ever: bent her head, sinking her teeth into the hairy arm that encircled her. In answer, the doctor arched his body — he looked like a colossal, curved maggot — caught up the bunch of wet roses, grasped them by the stalks and whipped Primavera’s rosy rear, just once, smashing blooms and thorns to bits, the roses shed their petals all over the place, she felt the multiple wounding of the thorns like tiny bites and the wet petals graze her skin; if, immediately after this peculiar botanical lashing, he had kissed her, offered any caress, an entreaty of love — Primavera thought, she managed to think — she would have gladly surrendered, but right at that moment he pushed her face down on the table, her luxuriant hair fanning out, the nape of her neck offering itself, and he bit her there, bruised her, parted her buttocks and surged towards the middle of her being, while Primavera twisted about in vain; in vain she cursed him without, it’s true, failing to notice the particulars, the strange sensations linked to an ambivalence it was still impossible for him to pick up on, then she bawled “Pig! They’re watching us! Your daughters!” and turned her head in the direction of the door, and he let go and looked to the door and now could not avoid her twisting around, slippery, and she leapt and ran, letting out a laugh of loathing and mockery — because there was no-one in the doorway. No-one at all. Just Primavera’s extraordinary laughter as she fled, free of him.

He let himself fall weakly into a chair, alone again, and lonelier still because peeping from his open trousers he saw his sex, trembling and wet, more solitary than he was — tonight we’ll sleep by ourselves, he thought — and in the middle of it all, and in spite of it all, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López laughed, he laughed, surrounded by toys on every side.

9

The morning of Saturday, December 31, Primavera sent a message with the old cook that she would be spending New Year’s Eve at her sister’s house and would be taking the girls. The doctor, who was in his consulting room, where he slept badly and with no hope, did not have time to say goodbye to his daughters; when he went to look for them, they left: he heard them dash off. A New Year’s Eve apart, he thought, but did not think they’d mind — they won’t even think of me.

And, on top of that, he received an invitation from the wife of Arcángel de los Ríos, Alcira Sarasti, written in her own hand, to come and see out the last night of 1966 together; the New Year’s Eve parties at Furibundo Pita’s house were famous — as were all Pasto’s New Year’s Eve parties — at midnight on the dot they burned the años viejos: large dolls, which looked identical to the people setting them alight, dolls made of cloth, rope, true to life, one-eyed and toothless, drinking chicha, smoking pipes, seated on rocking chairs, legs crossed, a rotten banana for a penis; you saw them dangling from blasted trees, hanged lovers with a poem pinned to the heart, or leaning against doorways like ill-fated visitors, each with his respective will and testament around his neck, or asleep in ramshackle cots, all bloated with explosive surprises: sparklers, whistling bangers, volcanoes, firecrackers, rockets. At Furibundo Pito’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, shots were fired into the air, horses turned up in the living room, and there were chumbos—black turkeys with red coxcombs — they pumped them full of aniseed-flavoured aguardiente to sweeten the meat, inflated them; the turkeys danced drunkenly among the dancing guests and were later decapitated in the same room — even without heads, they carried on dancing — before being taken out to the kitchen, amid shouts and applause and live music. The doctor did not remember having been invited to such revelry before, only for those surprise empanaditas one Innocents’ Day years before. Maybe Furibundo Pito wanted to redeem himself? Was he afraid of being prosecuted for being trigger-happy?

One of his patients also telephoned him, Chila Chávez; a woman beset by misfortune, she had married and been widowed that very December, and now suspected she was pregnant, when could he attend her? “Next year, señora, when all this miserable partying is over,” he said circumstantially, and added: “Let me remind you, next year starts tomorrow.” With the woman’s laughter over the telephone, the air turned feminine, captivating, and the doctor wavered, befuddled. Before hanging up, Chila Chávez asked him where he would be spending New Year’s Eve, just for something to say, out of politeness, and the doctor did not know how to disguise the hurt in his voice: he said he did not know. She did not hesitate to invite him to her house, as if she sensed his sorrow straight-away, “I’ll be on my own,” she said, “but in good company with you.”

And she certainly lived alone, in one of those devastatingly huge Pasto mansions, set on the top of the Bethlemites’ hill, a glass house resembling a cage that her husband had had built for her before his accidental death: the brakes failed on his truck and he hurtled into the Guáitara. The doctor wondered whether he would go, whether he was capable of it, while the widow’s still-ardent voice told him over the telephone to think about it. Like a stroke of fate, what claimed to be a consultation might turn into a party for two. But the doctor would not go, he checked it against his conscience; the only thing in this world or the next he was concerned about was the Bolívar float: he wanted to know what had befallen Cangrejito Arbeláez and his sculptures. Had the robbers come back?

At midday he said goodbye to Genoveva Sinfín, not without informing her that they should expect him, he would spend New Year’s Eve with her and the rest of the staff, “with each and every one of you,” he said, brimming with bogus bonhomie, and he gave her carte blanche to prepare the dinner. “We’ll eat in the garden,” he said, “whatever the weather.” And he remembered the gardener, his day labourers: “Tell Homero he’s invited, tell Seráfico, tell the plumber, that Cabrera fellow and Chamorro that we’ll eat guinea pig today like they’ve never tasted in their lives, tell them to bring their girlfriends or their grandmothers, I’ll expect them here.” Sinfín could not hide her astonishment, and the doctor thought she seemed pleased. He was to be disappointed: Sinfín asked permission on behalf of herself and the staff to celebrate the last day of the year with their respective families. He could do nothing but spread his arms open wide, in suffering: “Do what you like,” he said. He would have to spend it alone, if he did not decide to go to Furibundo Pita’s party, or to the widow Chila Chávez — dear God, he said to himself, why such panic over being alone?

So he drove his Land Rover to Cangrejito Arbeláez’s house: with low expectations, feeling resigned. In Galerías, the marketplace, while he was waiting for the lights to change, he thought for a split second he saw an ape come stumbling out of a bar, with a gourd full of chicha in his hand. “It can’t be,” he thought, “Homero?” The ape immediately disappeared back inside the bar and the doctor decided not to check for himself which ape it was. It had to be Homero, he thought, there could not be another costume like that in the whole of Pasto. But they would see each other soon enough, he thought, he would explain soon enough.

Following that apparition, when the light changed to green and the jeep was starting to pick up speed, a shadow stepped out in front of him. He had to slam on the brakes: it was a very pale, tall young man, who stood looking at him fixedly after the sudden halt, and even came towards him, up to the driver’s window, when he set off again, as if he wanted to ask him something; the doctor braked again and wound down the window to hear him, but the young man kept on going, without so much as a gesture. That young man was Enrique Quiroz, the eldest of the Quiroz brothers, Enriquito, the instigator — according to Professor Chivo — of the beating he had received at the hands of masked thugs. The doctor knew about the incident, but he did not know Quiroz.

And very soon he forgot about the passer-by who almost got himself run over at a traffic light.