Feast of the Innocents

1

They pretended to be a theatre group, in order not to arouse suspicion, as they put it. Every Saturday morning they met at the parish church of Nuestro Señor de los Despojos, in the community hall, to “rehearse”: they were putting on a theatrical version of The Imitation of Christ, the idea of Rodolfo Puelles, poet of the group, but a secret poet to boot, as no-one knew — nor could they know — about his poems.

Puelles himself hid them: if his comrades discovered what they were about — which had nothing to do with the social emancipation of the people — they would not only brand him bourgeois, but a pervert. Because he wrote erotic verse, which he described as “about humorous love.” His work in progress was titled Nineteen Sugar Bums and an Enchanted Vagina, and the “First Bum” began: “Teresa into whose bum the dick begins/To vanish…”

There were twelve of them, all men. The only woman, Toña Noria, a lanky black girl from Barbacoas, who studied agriculture, had been expelled from the group by common consent because “her natural lubricity disrupts the activity of members.” She did not care: from the left-wing group she moved on to the university choir and then the women’s chess team. Her absence was lamented solely and secretly by Rodolfo Puelles, who had already immortalized her in the most torrid of his poems, “The Enchanted Vagina,” which he wrote without yet having exchanged more than a word with Toña Noria, as all he could do was idealize her during lengthy study sessions. Rodolfo Puelles tried to make up for such things with his poems of humorous love and by mocking the world and the poetry of his country, but more than anything mocking his own solitude, because at the age of twenty-two he had never known a woman, let alone love.

The group was a completely anonymous band of students, which sought to link itself to the National Liberation Army, with none of its members knowing whether the likelihood of that link was real or pure fantasy. They talked of “urban nuclei,” “urban networks” and “cells” within the student body; they were marked by a clear “pro-China orientation”; they attacked not just “the system” but the traditional Communist party, the “fascistization” of the university, “proverbial obscurantism,” “McCarthyism,” “anarchist tendencies within the student body,” “revolutionary spontaneity,” “verbal ultra-radicalism,” “divisive factions.”

And the sole “contact” with the “forces of the revolution” was Enrique Quiroz, who claimed to know leaders and was in constant communication with them about what steps to follow, but did not give out further information on the imminent link-up for reasons of “revolutionary security.” Be that as it may, the journeys Quiroz had been making to Bogotá and other cities, for months, guaranteed some truth to it all. His efforts were anxiously followed by everyone; there was even talk of representatives of the guerrilla war visiting Pasto in a few weeks: they would interview members of the group personally and “baptise” the chosen ones. The group, in spite of not belonging to any real political force, deemed itself radical, along Marxist-Leninist-Maoist lines, and had not yet identified the name of the armed wing it intended to support, whether it be independent or in the service of the organized revolution. In Pasto there were twelve members. At least as many again were waiting for them in Bogotá, plus two or three sympathizers in other major cities around the country. The Pasto twelve went to a lot of trouble over their cover as actors and assured everyone they would be presenting their Imitation of Christ to Pasto and the whole wide world in 1967—on March 19, Saint Joseph’s Day — it being a work of reflection and devotion never before seen on the stage. At least, that is what the parish priest, Joseph Bunch, said about it; a closet homosexual — clandestine, like the poet — Bunch gave them his support and also spied on them from time to time, ogling them when gym was part of their rehearsals; but neither the Quiroz brothers nor anyone else from the group, the poet included, had read a single page of The Imitation, and quite possibly Father Bunch never had either, they joked. With a theatrical enterprise like this, designed to extol the priest’s good Catholic deeds, they felt safe from the enemy: camouflaged.

Enrique and Patricio were the eldest sons of Sebastián Quiroz Carvajal, the architect; there were eight sisters behind them. Neither of the brothers had yet finished his university studies, and they were getting ready to go to Bogotá to continue them. The others in the group were working hard to do the same. They would all go: things “happened” in Bogotá; Pasto was “asleep.” What is more, it was not possible for them to use their noms de guerre in the small city because people knew who they were, had done since they were children. It was different in Bogotá: there, Enrique Quiroz was “Vladimir,” and at twenty-seven years of age had, not one, but two families of his own. One with “Tania” and the other with “Simona.” With the former he had three children: Lenin, Miguel Mao and Lenina, and with the latter, two: Simón Ernesto and little Stalin, just six months old. In Pasto, his third family was on the way, secretly, with his pregnant cousin Inés Bravo. No-one at home knew anything about all these households — three women and six children — but it was the architect Sebastián Quiroz Carvajal who, never dreaming it, supported them all. This did not stop Enrique Quiroz, after receiving his generous monthly allowance, referring to his father as an “old retrograde,” “iniquitous bourgeois” and “petty oligarch.” Enrique did not worry about his families’ straitened circumstances, circumstances he did not share with them, or worry about bringing further children into the world. He talked of “more soldiers for the revolution” and it was precisely for this reason that his brother Patricio, “Boris,” admired him. Patricio already had his first soldier on order, with a pure-blooded indigenous woman from the Sibundoy Valley, and he was euphoric about it: this presaged the incorporation of indigenous peoples into “the cause”; there was a new race on the horizon. Patricio Quiroz was the only member of the group not studying law and political sciences: he was doing economics, but considered himself an artist, and for years had been saying he was composing the great anthem of the Colombian Revolution. A heavy drinker, he played the accordion and crooned serenades.

The members of the theatre group appeared so committed that they even “rehearsed” on Saturday, December 31, the last day of the year, despite the sounds of celebration drifting through the streets. That morning they were settling how to bid the year and Pasto farewell, as once carnival was over they would travel to Bogotá, all of them already enrolled in the National University of Colombia. The plan was to shape an urban guerrilla war, in Bogotá, an idea they had been working on for months. While in Pasto, the city of their birth (although three of the twelve were not Pastusos: one came from Cali, another from Chocó, the third from the plains), they planned to put an end to the dangerous treachery of a multimillionaire gynaecologist, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, close friend of the madman Chivo, who meant to mock the Liberator Simón Bolívar, father of the revolution, with a carnival float.

“He’s got it coming to him.”

Enrique Quiroz, chief instigator of the action against Doctor Proceso, had spoken.

“That doctor is boss and ringleader for the idiot Chivo. Both of them are barmier than billy goats, but poisonous ones.”

The church bell tolled ten o’clock, ringing for morning Mass. Three of the group members gave an account of their military action:

“Yesterday we managed to seize two sculptures from that sell-out Cangrejito, the black piece of shit, artist of the enemy.”

“They’re wooden. Huge.”

“The shooting of the twenty Capuchin missionaries of Caroní, on Bolívar’s orders.”

“And of the La Guaira eight hundred, on Bolívar’s orders.”

“The captions were: Bolívar shoots the twenty Capuchin friars, 1817 and Bolívar shoots the La Guaira eight hundred, 1814, with dates and everything. Some balls, those bastards.”

“They looked very nice, really well made, for what it’s worth. In the one of the twenty Capuchins there was a Bolívar figure on horseback; a soldier was telling him about the capture of the twenty friars; Bolívar was asking, in wooden lettering: And you haven’t killed them yet? In the one about the eight hundred there were some old folk tied to their chairs, and that’s how they were carried and put up against the wall, because they couldn’t walk anymore. How about that? The captions also said: Gunpowder was expensive so they used sabres and pikes and The executions began on February 13 and finished on 16. Where did they get that from, those oafs?”

“What is to be done with history?” Puelles asked. “We don’t know who these people were, or who they were not either.”

“We didn’t know about these executions, at least. Did you?”

There was a silence, sharp as a guillotine, that Enrique Quiroz rushed to diffuse.

“If Bolívar shot them or used sabres or pikes on them, it was because they deserved it,” he said. “Bolívar cannot be called into question.”

“Those planks burned well on the bonfire we made.”

“Was that big black guy there, in the workshop? Did he put up a fight again?”

“He’d gone out. His apprentices were there, a bunch of yobs.”

“Watch what you say,” Quiroz said. “The apprentices are the people. Workers and campesinos add up to the future of the revolution. In this particular case, ignorance makes them innocent.”

“Perhaps the black guy hasn’t come back; he saw the way the wind was blowing. He took most of his work with him: he wants to show it all together on the float. That’s what he thinks.”

“Shitty reactionary. We’re going to blow his carriage sky high, along with everyone putting it together.”

“We don’t know where he went,” the apprentices told the doctor. “He disappeared in secret.”

They were in Cangrejito’s studio, empty of work. Despite it being mid-day, it seemed like night-time in there. There were three apprentices, big simple lads, propped against the walls, having their lunch of steamed corn parcels and cold oat milk.

“He took his sculptures with him yesterday, Friday, in a truck: imagine a truck full of carnival. And the thieves came last night; they didn’t find anything; they could only take two ‘Executions,’ which Cangrejito left behind because he hadn’t finished them.”

They did not seem frightened to the doctor, more like intrigued.

“They swore they’d give us a pounding if we carried on with the carriage,” the oldest apprentice said, chubby and smiling. “They were armed, that’s how they got away with stealing what they stole, they didn’t look very tough.”

“Police or military?”

“They were masked up, Doctor. I don’t think they were soldiers. You could see their hair, lots of it, underneath. Long-haired guys. They were just robbers, that’s all, and scared.”

The doctor was disconcerted. He could not imagine who they were up against. Was General Aipe behind all this? Now he doubted it.

“They said,” added another apprentice, fair, almost albino, “that in any case they were going to boot us all up in the air, one by one.”

“Like we were lying around to start with,” the fat one said, laughing. But the fair boy spoke again, very grave:

“They especially mentioned you, Doctor. They said: ‘We’re going to boot that so-and-so sky high.’”

“As if I were lying around too,” the doctor said.

“And if you carry on being a nuisance, they will shoot you, not boot you, Doctor.”

The fat boy burst out laughing; only then did the rest join in.

“Lucky none of us is lying around,” the doctor said in parting.

He drove through the muddy streets, unable to guess Cangrejito Arbeláez’s destination. The midday chill dampened his spirits. Who was he fighting against? Was it possible the mayor and bishop’s warnings would come true? He was worried about the sculptor’s fate — where would he have gone? Maestro Abril was the only person who could bring him up to date with events.

The secret poet Rodolfo Puelles was not convinced by the direction things were heading in. He had, above all within himself, serious reasons for this — or, better put, one single and terrible reason, although he admitted, inwardly, that things had begun with the best of intentions. But why, he yelled inside, are we messing them up?

Two years earlier, the group’s founding members had participated in one of Colombia’s historic student marches, which brought together more than five hundred thousand citizens in the capital. It was during this encounter that the group gained in numbers and enthusiasm: one of its members had even been given a grant by Fidel Castro’s government and travelled to Cuba to complete his studies. He sent passionate and inspiring letters from the island, which were seen by the group as triumphant war reports. When the student wrote that he was to go to Russia to specialize, and in addition receive political training, maybe military, the group was divided: some argued the student should return to Colombia immediately to take up the struggle again and occupy the position allotted to him, while others felt his sojourn in Russia was an “essential” experience, which would be to everyone’s advantage. So the hours had flown past until the early morning, and the wasting of energy on similar controversies, and other even more trivial matters (should you read or not read Count Leo Tolstoy: decadent writer, retrograde, symbol of Russian aristocracy?), undermined the poet’s morale, all the more so when the “polemic” about Tolstoy originated not from a sensible study of his work, but in a chance occurrence: the book had fallen out of his knapsack onto the table, and in spite of the covers being carefully wrapped in newsprint, the paper came adrift and title and author appeared before them all: The Devil, Leo Tolstoy. Enrique Quiroz picked up the book, showed it around as if showing them the actual devil, and did so with a disparaging smile, the same one spreading across the others’ faces: incredulous eyes scrutinized the poet Puelles as if they would unmask him. What was he up to, this Puelles, who was he, really? Puelles prepared himself for the fight, more apathetic than resolved: he gave up before he started — and with all the more reason, he thought, when Tolstoy was the namesake of the dissident Trotsky.

Was it so important to finish your degree, or better to take up arms, go into the mountains and educate the rural masses?

The recent death of Father Camilo Torres — founder of the sociology faculty at the National University, principal representative of liberation theology, leader of the people — which took place in February 1966, when he was cut down during his first combat, had been the trigger for Enrique Quiroz’s group to seriously consider the creation of an urban guerrilla front. The poet Puelles backed the initiative: he would prefer to fight in the city (he could not imagine himself firing a gun in the depths of the jungle), finish his degree and, above all, pursue his secret occupation, poetry, his poetry, the humorous love that sprang from his pores, as he put it. That is why he devoted himself to supporting the urban front and making it a reality. Up to that point, everything had gone well for Rodolfo Puelles, but formulating urban guerrilla war in Bogotá, with the Quiroz brothers plus three others from the Pasto front, and four from the capital, got off to an unanticipated start.

The secret poet Rodolfo Puelles had returned to Pasto after that whole venture in a state of shock, his life for ever divided into a “Before” and “After.”

As a “trial by fire,” the members of the group (without anyone knowing who came up with the idea, nor how or when) had decided to “eliminate an enemy”: kill a policeman, the secret poet repeated to himself, still incredulous; a policeman they had already had under surveillance and who did nothing but earn his wages chasing pickpockets in Bogotá; a policeman, what’s more, who was in civilian clothing at the moment of his “execution”; they killed him when he went to buy milk at a shop, one block from his house, in a working-class neighbourhood. He was the enemy. The enemy, the secret poet thought, what enemy? He was not in the least convinced.

Although the revolution should give no respite, a trial like that never seemed necessary to him, and he had not managed to get a decent night’s sleep since, but the reason he could not sleep in peace — over and above everything else in the world — was because it was him, in short, Rodolfo Puelles, secret poet, who had shot the policeman, an “indigenous-looking man in a poncho who turned out to be a police officer”—as reporters for the gutter press would later describe him—“He went out to buy milk, and never came home,” “Killed for a bottle of milk,” “Policeman, out of uniform, was buying milk,” “Thieves unaware he was carrying service revolver.”

It happened at seven o’clock at night.

Enrique Quiroz was in charge of the strike: when the big moment arrived, he froze. The other Quiroz got drunk the night before, and had stayed that way. There were three more from the Pasto front with Puelles and Quiroz—“Ilyich” from Cali, “Catiri” from the plains, and “Ulyanov” from Chocó—and four from Bogotá, scattered at strategic points around the objective: all frozen. Only the secret poet fired once, at the head. Yet he was the most frightened and the one who least supported the action. He fired out of pure, physical fright, he thought; he remembered he’d wet himself as he did it. The policeman crumpled instantly and they all fled, every man for himself; they did not seize the police weapon. Did anyone take the bottle of milk? No, that was an invention of the bourgeois press, they said, it must have been filched by the homeless guy who was looking on.

They returned to Pasto by separate routes, and only met up again after several nightmarish days.

Enrique Quiroz could not forgive the fact that no-one had taken the victim’s gun, that no-one retrieved it as a trophy, that they did not leave a written note, that they did not shout a defiant warning, a challenge, advance notice of the new revolutionary force. “What utter retards,” he bawled, “and we haven’t even got a name.”

Quiroz, better than anyone, understood the radicalism of guerrilla war, and applauded it. The year before, a commander in the People’s Army had executed a deserter. That was something else, he thought, that was betrayal, and fully deserved execution. The death of the policeman was a mistake that Enrique Quiroz, the real originator of the idea, did not want to, nor could ever, admit to in front of his men—“Bolívar made big mistakes,” he said to himself, “the mistakes of a great man: necessary errors, but he didn’t go around confessing them”—and when the group was back together again, in the safety of the parish church of Nuestro Señor de los Despojos, he told them the elimination of anyone in uniform was one more victory for the revolution, and that the death of a policeman must not be “sentimentalized,” because even if he was a plain and simple officer, he was someone who, although an authentic son of the people, was still in the service of imperialism, the master’s dog, the guardian of the oppressor, dammit, this is a war to the death, like the one Bolívar waged against the Spaniards. And he banged his fist on the table:

“Don’t mention the matter again, you bastards, nobody cry over it.”

Several of Enrique Quiroz’s acquaintances, active supporters of the revolution, had already gone into the mountains of Colombia to support the insurgents and follow in the footsteps of Che and Fidel, fine examples of manhood, Quiroz said to the group.

Rodolfo Puelles disagreed. In Bogotá, in the cafeteria at the National University, he had heard about another “execution” in the mountains, of two young members of the guerrilla forces: driven by hunger, they stole a block of cane sugar from the command stores. They were killed. The deaths of these hungry young men — were they an invention by the enemy oligarchy to discredit the insurgence, or was it all true? And he had heard, without being able to verify it, about the mistreatment of recently recruited university students, about the contempt they were treated with if they were seen reading, writing or — worse still — if they expressed their desire to educate the campesinos, or stumbled in training exercises, or tired during the terrible forced marches and collapsed. Revolutionary enthusiasm was a powerful force, the elation was immense, but the muffled messages issuing from the mountains gave rise to doubt: something bad could be going on, Puelles thought, something harmful about the way things were advancing, in how devotion and effort were being used or abused.

Puelles, who stayed with his uncle — a taxi driver by profession — when he went to Bogotá, had disappointing experiences. One of his earliest contributions to the cause was handing over the keys for his uncle’s taxi to three comrades who would carry out an “act of expropriation” on a small neighbourhood fruit and vegetable market. The night the keys were handed over, when the three revolutionaries (Ilyich from Cali among them) went off in his uncle’s taxi, they crashed straight into the lamp post on the corner. None of them knew how to drive: were they really intending to carry out a revolutionary act, or were they just planning to go out on the town? One Saturday at “rehearsal” in the church, Puelles ironically brought up that particular failure, the lack of preparation. Ilyich from Cali stood up for himself at the top of his voice, like he was barking. He had an extraordinary face: one eye blue, the other black. Sallow and skinny, it was Toña Noria who had given him a nickname that stuck: she said he was thin as a plate and from then on they called him “Platter,” although alongside his nom de guerre, Ilyich, of which he was so proud. He launched himself at Puelles to shut him up. Enrique Quiroz and the comrade from the plains pulled them apart. “That’s just what imperialism wants,” Quiroz said, “for us to kill each other. Are we going to oblige them?”

A meek silence followed his words.

Enrique Quiroz was not just the leader of the group, he was also the oldest: twenty-seven. And he saw, or felt as though he saw, the people surrounding him for the first time: they were very young, he thought, maybe too young, and he concluded that so much youth is a double-edged sword.

They studied Lenin, Engels and Mao together, carrying What is to be Done?, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man and Five Essays on Philosophy in their pockets as standard issue, prepared to “triumph or die”—as they used to chant in emphatic voices at the beginning of each rehearsal. “Actually, to triumph,” Quiroz told them, “the ‘transformation’ is a matter of months away — two years, at most.” That is what he told them the morning of Saturday, December 31, because he was utterly convinced not only that they would still be young men when the revolution triumphed, but that they themselves would make it happen.

Nineteen sixty-six was over.

2

“Starting from today, we’ll be keeping Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López under surveillance,” Quiroz told them. He said it slowly; it was more than an order. And, directing himself towards the poet Puelles, as if confirming who would carry it out: “You know where the doctor lives, don’t you? The doctor will lead you to the carriage. Here are the keys for the Vespa: follow him over the next few days leading up to Black Day, which falls on Thursday, January 5. Follow him until Thursday, but, listen, before White Friday, the day of the parade, we need to know the whereabouts of that reactionary float and destroy it to justly make amends to Bolívar’s memory.”

“And the artisans?” Platter Ilyich asked.

“Nobody mess with the artisans,” Quiroz replied. “A clout or two, at most, nothing major. As Christ put it, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

But why surveillance? — Rodolfo Puelles wondered. He did not hide his dismay. After the categorical “chat” about the policeman, which was not even a critical investigation, and in which only Quiroz’s judgement on sentimentalism was heard, the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles had realized he did not so much inspire respect among his comrades for his resolve on the night of the action in Bogotá, as exactly the opposite: rejection.

Rejection, he jeered himself, and rejection of the worst kind: revulsion.

It was hard to admit, but that was the way it was; he had thought his leading role was going to set him up as a man of action, at least earn him some credit. But, no. Revulsion. This was the conclusion he reached after examining the faces of his comrades, one by one, and their behaviour. Maybe — he thought — they saw I pissed myself when I fired the gun; but at least I fired it, chickenshits, he bawled at them, inwardly. And he already knew that shouting inwardly meant no-one would ever hear him, no-one would ever know of his troubles.

But, nevertheless, there was one person who did not feel revulsion towards him, and he knew who it was, of course: Quiroz. And for that very reason, Quiroz charging him with a job such as surveillance seemed to him an insult. Why not give the task to that halfwit brother of his? And the fact was, in any case, the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles, twenty-two years of age, could not care less about Simón Bolívar and Doctor Proceso and his reactionary carnival float; the only thing he wanted to do was get himself into a brothel during the Black and White Carnival without any of his comrades finding out, without anyone subsequently accusing him of involvement in crimes against humanity, in capitalism’s most characteristic blot on society: prostitution. Thinking about it, Rodolfo Puelles smiled in anguish; he had really determined to make the most of the Black and White Days to finally plunge into the brothel, to discover and smell and celebrate the sex of a flesh-and-blood woman, a real face, real breath, at last, to touch the moon, kiss her inside, deeper inside, much deeper. Now he would have to tail and trail a grumpy gynaecologist who, clearly, was not even a millionaire, as Enrique Quiroz had made out, and he had to tail him and trail him during the January celebrations no less, and follow the mission through to completion: to find out where a stupid carnival float was hidden. What a country. What was I born into? He would have preferred prehistoric times.

Enrique Quiroz was looking at him fixedly.

Rodolfo Puelles picked up the keys for the scooter, without arguing.

And yes, it was glaringly obvious: it was not revulsion on Quiroz’s face, but resentment, envy, Puelles shouted to himself — worse than revulsion, he must be suffering more.

That certainty astonished Puelles: Enrique Quiroz loathed him for being the one who fired the gun, for being the one who had dared, but he loathed him above all for being the one and only witness to his cowardice, the intimidation of Vladimir, hesitant little Enrique, utterly spineless, weren’t the two of them shoulder to shoulder the night of the action? That certainty, rather than making Puelles proud, scared him. His resolve had won him an enemy: Vladimir no less. Was it possible little Enrique believed his leadership under threat? Why not? Stupidity is infinite, he thought.

But after the group said goodbye and dispersed, a worse fear occurred to the secret poet, a real one: perhaps Enrique Quiroz wanted to repeat the exploit with the policeman, but this time with a gynaecologist? “Not that,” he said out loud; such colossal imbecility would not be possible, or would it? Stupidity, he thought again, and then regretted everything and everyone and his own self; “fuck,” he bawled; a terrible desolation seized him: he thought of the mass of youth who were struggling frantically during these years, in every one of the universities in the country, in the schools and colleges, where students and teachers stood by the same ideal. What would happen? Where would it all lead? Wasn’t this energy being wasted? Wasn’t it being sacrificed at the hands of stupidity?

As for him, he would have liked the earth to swallow him up.

Doctor Proceso was overwhelmed too. Once again rain greeted him in Maestro Abril’s neighbourhood, once again the volcano was blowing out ice, again the narrow street, just the same, was engulfed in fog; but the carriage did not loom over the wall as before: they had “disappeared” the float, and no-one came to the gates, no child materialized, no woman came with news, he thought, as if the world had gone to another world. Was it because it was the thirty-first, the last day of the year, a hiatus?

He got back in the jeep: a black hen was pecking about in the rain; a dog ran off avoiding streams of yellow water, banana skins, dismembered plastic dolls.

He drove through empty streets. He parked on a corner; he did not know how long he lingered there, peering into nothingness. Then he drove across Pasto to the other side, got onto the sodden highway, which led to Lake Cocha. It was late afternoon. At the top of a lonely rise he got out and ran into the squall, to contemplate the lake; he could not see it; fog covered the vast expanse with lead. So he returned to Pasto, no destination in mind. And in the first street he ventured into, he felt the accumulated hunger of the day for the first time, and for that very reason believed he was alive, with something to live for: food. He had not even had breakfast; he deserved lunch, he thought, even if it was the last day of the year.

He stopped at a basic-looking restaurant, with covered terrace, lettering badly painted across the canvas: LA ESPERANZA’S FRITOS.

Beneath the big circus awning, solitary tables were set around a hazy platform: he caught a glimpse of very slow shadows that passed from one side of it to the other. A thin, ageless woman put a plate of frito on his table: chunks of roast pork, popped corn, boiled potatoes and, with a celebratory thump, although the doctor had not ordered it, a half-bottle of aguardiente and a tall, metal cup — like a chalice.

As he ate, amid the fog that swathed the place, straining his eyes, he was better able to make out the stage. There was a band of musicians, he discovered, and he learned more: they were all blind. The sightless were playing guitar, quena pipes and ten-stringed charangos, bass drums and a violin, they were ancient and decrepit, undeniably blind, they must be — he checked, incredulous — they wore those thick green glasses, the ones for blind people — those not wearing glasses exposed their eyes like sores — the youngest of them must have been seventy. What kind of place have I fallen into? On one of the drums he deciphered the white lettering: MUNICIPALITY OF LA LAGUNA, BLIND ORCHESTRA.

No doubt his arrival — the appearance of the first diner, the only one — prompted them to start playing: they began with “La Guaneña.” Behind the blind men a chorus of hundred-year-old women, nine or ten of them, trilled weakly, and it seemed more like a death rattle than “La Guaneña.” “This is how they bid the year farewell,” he said to himself, “and how they’ll greet the new one,” and on one side of the platform he spotted an old couple dancing; it was a listless dance, little clouds of dust were scuffed up by their shoes. It disheartened him to hear “La Guaneña”—war anthem from the days of Agualongo — transformed into a requiem. He drank more aguardiente, and that did nothing to lift his spirits either. He sensed something like bad news in the fog: a presentiment. Luckily the world is a long way off, he thought, I’ll go to bed. He wanted to get up, but his legs felt like someone else’s: he found that during the time that “La Guaneña” lasted he had drunk three half-litres of aniseed aguardiente, plus the first one, which meant that, without knowing it, he had consumed two whole bottles of aguardiente to the lonely strains of that “Guaneña” for the blind. “Right then,” he said to himself, “either I stand up, or I’m dead.”

And he stood up.

He paid the woman. One of the old dears in the choir called out to him, in her faraway, tremulous voice:

“Happy New Year, Doctor Justo Pastor, may God be with you, today as yesterday, tomorrow as today.”

Was she an old patient, or a patient from the other side? The doctor waved goodbye: he could not even manage to reply — it was as if he had forgotten how to talk.

Night was falling. At the Land Rover’s slow passing the city centre began to light up; he wound down the window: the smell of dust and fried food oppressed him; furtive shadows crossed at corners; the first drunks came out onto the street, music swelled, isn’t that Mandarina’s house? The first “visit” of his adolescence had happened there: he had trembled from head to foot; black Mandarina was not only the madam of the establishment, she also initiated the babes, she initiated him, she must be an old lady by now, he thought, why did they call her Mandarina? He remembered her large sex, round and smooth like a split orange, and shivered. Now, in the wide doorway of the big old townhouse, illuminated by a red glow, two girls wearing miniscule skirts, backs hunched over, were lighting cigarettes; they stood scrutinizing him, to see what would happen; one of them came over: lascivious, she offered ancient, unfamiliar words in his ear, and the other, with thick dark hair falling to the back of her knees, carried on staring at him with the constancy of a happy moment, as if she had known him for centuries. “Happy New Year,” the doctor said through the window, and neither girl could understand him, so spellbound did his voice come across. “Not so very long ago,” he carried on, as if telling a joke, “December in Pasto was the month of the dead, but you’ve got to sing and dance, carnival is on its way, nobody cries here, or do they?”

They did not understand him. He was babbling. The girls turned their backs.

When he got home he saw a Vespa parked on the other side of the road and, sitting on the little wall, a boy reading by the scant light of the street lamp, frowning, looking worn out; he was wearing a beret. The poet Rodolfo Puelles did not seem to notice the doctor’s arrival, the noise of the jeep parking, so immersed did he appear to be in his reading. The doctor entered his house hoping to find Sinfín, and did not; he would have liked to ask her whether Maestro Arbelaéz came to look for him the day before, or that very morning.

And only then did it occur to him — Primavera, he thought, Primavera went to open the door to the maestro, she dealt with him and dismissed him, without telling me, Primavera, Primavera, who would not one day wish to become your murderer? This certainty upset him like a betrayal: Primavera had told Cangrejito he was not at home; the sculptor had to go elsewhere with his truck. And it was more than likely, too, that Primavera was not with their daughters: no doubt she had left them at her sister’s house and gone off to meet General Aipe. That possibility revolted him; “Primavera,” he said, and, for a moment, involuntarily, painfully, he imagined her amorously entwined with General Aipe, or with any other body on earth, and his drunkenness aggravated his suspicions: he imagined her spreadeagled on a squeaky hotel bed, suffocated, and an intimate thrill ran through him, in spite of himself. He was alone in his house, a house even lonelier than he was.

“Damn you, world,” he said.

And he repeated this to himself while back in his jeep driving around streets that were getting busier all the time with the New Year: eyes like invitations, shouts, entreaties, explosive music that shattered windows.

He was going to the widow’s house, as if to the castle of an irreproachable maiden.

But he was more excited by Primavera Pinzón than by Chila Chávez. He could not even remember the widow’s face. Was she beautiful? Less beautiful than Primavera? Much more so? She was not an older woman, but not a girl either; her voice redeemed her, it revealed her utterly.

It was a struggle for him to park the jeep without crashing it. Walking to the front door he felt like a thief about to commit a robbery: a dead man stood behind this woman, he thought, and would be no less present for being dead; not a month had passed since his disappearance, who knows what other shapes he would take, is he that willow tree guarding the door? The willow calls me, keeps calling me, or is it the wind moving the branches? He chivvied himself along.

He raised his hand to the doorbell and did not ring it.

There was no light in the windows. He was sure the widow was not going to be expecting him. And what if he found her waiting for him? After so many tribulations, the widow was a shoulder to cry on, he thought, but to cry with too.

The living room curtains opened and Chila Chávez’s face appeared behind it, pale above her black dress, astonished. When she discovered it was him, she seemed more astonished still, but happily so, letting out a great silent laugh. Straight away, she opened the door. She appeared barefoot, her curly hair swept back:

“Come in, my dear doctor,” she said, “but what an old-year face you’ve got on you, I’m going to make it new.”

She was utterly drunk.

Her voice was slurred, as if in rapture — fine Pasto girl of my heart, he thought. She said she had slept and just woken up.

“Come in, come in, my dear doctor,” she said. She indicated a peaceful room where a black radiogram took pride of place and an Agustín Lara record was playing. A local girl, drunk, he said to himself, a disaster waiting to happen? She’ll fall asleep. No, he thought, in spite of her widowhood, or because of it, he was the cause of her small happiness: it’s me that’s exalting her. But the next moment he found out it was not so, in that very instant it is not me embracing her but her immortal deceased, he thought, or managed to think, buried in the widow’s perfumed hair, and he heard her whispers, almost without understanding her, but he did understand her, aghast, little doctor of mine, I was waiting for you here, my mouth and my legs wide open, little husband of my soul, why did you go and die on me?

Opposite the widow’s house, to one side of the lamp post, Puelles the poet settled down to read, back against the wall: “I’ll keep an eye on you from here, Doctor, but only until eleven, I’ve got my New Year’s Eve too.”

An only child, he lived with his parents and his grandfather, Capusigra the cobbler. His parents hated him — or so he believed. Things were different with his grandfather: they played dominoes, read aloud from the newspaper, or from his grandfather’s favourite book—Don Quixote—whatever page it fell open at. His grandfather was an ancient old man, but lucid, and was expecting him — he’ll definitely want to have a drink with me and see out the year, he thought. He looked at his watch: nine o’clock. He had left the Vespa in the shadow of an elm tree so the doctor would not see it. What am I doing here? What is my body doing in this street? He thought it shameful and even more idiotic to find himself there, spying on the gynaecologist, carrying out the orders of a lunatic. Wouldn’t it be preferable to jump this ship as soon as possible, to forget the tragedy of the policeman and start life afresh? In a city where no-one knew him. Singapore? Change his name, change his face, be reborn? One thing was certain — he swore — he would never give up his poetry.

He had read in a Sunday paper about a movement of young poets in which the latest ideas were brought together with the positions and impositions of established national poetry. The journalist explained that this was a crowd of young people “mad with a different joy,” and although the poet Puelles did not consider himself mad with joy of any kind, he would have given a leg to find himself among crazed poets reading any of his Nineteen Sugar Bums and an Enchanted Vagina, or simply atoning for or celebrating the poetry of any century, from the first to the last. Poets from every country who were proclaimed by the demented youngsters, philosophers and novelists whom they revered, all of them were already old friends of Puelles — he had read them backwards — and this comforted him, he was not so far off track, in spite of everything, he thought. The in spite of everything was that street, that doctor, that absurd persecution, that dead man hanging around his neck for ever. Puelles looked off in a different direction and scared away the apparition.

From the little hill on which the widow’s house was built you could glimpse a strip of the city, lit up by New Year’s Eve fire: rockets shot straight up into the black sky, and their multicoloured explosions seemed to lightly touch every peak, but “Father Galeras” was unmoved, a great impassive shadow, fleetingly crowned with fireworks—I can do better, Puelles imagined it meant to say.

Occasional cars went up and down the winding road; the festive December noises barely reached this elevated neighbourhood of large, spread-out houses; the road was a narrow carriageway heading down, each curve leaning out over the one below, and there were exactly three bends; on the summit, the concrete smudge of the Bethlemite Sisters’ college stood out, a big empty mass. Below, oblivious Pasto, Puelles thought, lights upon lights.

The book he was reading, The Black Heralds, made him suffer, not so much for the lines he read, but because he had to read with only half his mind; with the other half he had to keep watch on the house into which a certain Doctor Proceso had disappeared. Who was that guy really? A quack, he thought, a distinguished insect. He could not read any more: it felt like he was sitting on ice, his buttocks were numb, his legs asleep. He put the Heralds away in his knapsack and walked down the road, where the night was a distant rumble. On the first and highest of the bends he pushed his way into a dark hollow, between bushes, to pee. From there he observed the continuation of the road, the curve immediately below, flanked with other houses, and then he saw him, sitting on the pavement: Platter Ilyich.

Platter was not reading, he was smoking; not far away from him, in the grass, lay Patricio Quiroz’s orange scooter — the Quiroz brothers were the only “motorized” ones in the group. What was Ilyich doing there? Coincidence? Logistical support? For a second, Puelles was buoyed up: whatever the case, now he had someone to chat with to pass the time, even if it was the loathsome Ilyich, but then something like a light flicked on in his brain. “He’s following me,” he said to himself, “he’s been following me all this time, while I follow the doctor.” And he put two and two together, still incredulous: “He’s following us. He checked how far we went up, and dug himself in down there, where the doctor and I will have to go past sooner or later. What morons, why do they have to tail me? Do they doubt me? Well, when eleven o’clock comes, Platter will have to follow me home: I’m off then, and Vladimir can kiss my ass.”

And while he peed he remembered things about Ilyich from Cali.

He had known him since the first week at university: Ilyich announced to the world that he wrote poems; then that he painted and made sculptures; months later he played the sax; finally, he was an expert on film and photography. For ages they had kept their distance from one another, but they met again — and were both surprised — when they joined the leftist group led by Quiroz: surely that was Ilyich’s true destiny.

And Puelles called him to mind more vividly, suffering over the memory: he had a sharp face, perpetually morose; his eyes and mouth were marked by an unfathomable mistrust, grounded in malice, suspicious of everything, everyone, maybe even himself; his extraordinary, different-coloured eyes were small, a bird of prey’s; his mouth was large, purplish, always wet; his voice was deep, but phoney; everything about him, from top to toe, added up to something repulsive, he thought. Platter was a born traitor, quick to mock and bad-mouth people, he had the habit — which Puelles hated — of speaking ill of whoever had just left the room: he resorted to scathing invention, subtle lies — which the rest, who were afraid of him, applauded as a display of intelligence, how about that? He found it astonishing.

And he remembered him in Bogotá—the two of them active members of the group by then — the day Ilyich introduced him to his friend “Comrade Rosaura.” The pride with which he presented this friend — a mature woman, very short, almost a dwarf, who worked as a domestic servant “in the guts of bourgeois society”—disconcerted Puelles; they met in Rosaura’s room, in a stripped-out tenement building in south Bogotá: the place consisted of a bed, table and chair, a small spirit stove on the floor, an empty little saucepan; mice scampered quickly across the floor, mosquitos attacked, but it was precisely this pitiful narrowness that exalted Ilyich. Resting on the table, open almost at the middle, lay Marx’s hefty tome, Das Kapital, which Rosaura had pointed to, “I’m reading it,” she said. And with cheerful sincerity added: “I don’t understand a word of it, but I’m going to finish it, like I promised Ilyich.” A questioning look escaped Puelles, which he shot — regretting it too late — at Platter Ilyich, believing he would share in it: what was this about reading Das Kapital to the end without understanding it? But the blue and black look he found on Platter’s wan face was fully accepting, a look of triumphant pride. This ended up discouraging him for ever — he would never again expect anything of such an ass, he thought.

And now Platter was brooding down there, a few metres below him, no doubt more bored than he was. Puelles did up his fly; he preferred to go back to thinking about the Medellín poets — there was a light on in those great minds, he thought, and he could at least yell out his poems of humorous love without fear of crucifixion. And he continued with the image of light: us poets are light years away from those pigs, he thought. And he had just thought this when a chilly wind, inopportune like a gust against his skin, that seemed to come from deep inside himself rather than from out there, knocked him flat: could he consider himself “a poet light years away from those pigs?” He asked it in spite of himself. A profound despair welled up inside him; he was overwhelmed by the fear of himself; he was, above all, a murderer: he had killed, and not in self-defence, he thought. I killed him in an underhanded way, I killed him idiotically, yes, but I killed him. He very rarely forgot about the event, and when he did it was always an ephemeral forgetting, sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, sleeping or waking, the mild figure of the policeman appeared to him, leaving the shop with a bottle of milk in his hand.

As if invoking otherworldly forces, Rodolfo Puelles took refuge in poetry and from the whole of his memory chose the words of William Blake, clung to them as if they were a plank floating on the ocean: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” What’s more, hadn’t he read in some great Russian novel that you can kill and rob and, nevertheless, be happy? Where had he read that? And he repeated to himself over and over that he was a poet, above all and in spite of it all, and that no matter what, he was light years away from those pigs, I’m a poet, that’s what I am, come what may.

And when he understood, yes, that Platter Ilyich was following him, a pure peal of laughter burst from him, ringing in the night. Platter heard laughter above his head, but he did not know who it was.

3

“Floridita, we’re going to cover you in flour.”

“But today’s not January the sixth.”

“We’re going to flour you anyway.”

They were on one side of the children’s park. She did not know the three boys blocking her way. She could not remember them from anywhere but, somehow, they knew her name, and had said they were going to flour her — on the first of January, no less, when the carnival had not yet begun. She could not understand it: people painted their faces on the fifth, because it was Black Day, and they threw talc at each other’s faces on the sixth, because it was White Day. Why were these boys all around her on the first? What’s more, they did not even have the little bottles of scented talc she was familiar with, only grubby bags of flour. And they really were going to flour her, she thought, and if that flour went in her eyes she might go blind.

“If today was January the sixth, I would let you,” she told them. “But it isn’t. That’s why you can’t flour me either. Don’t you know what day it is? It’s Sunday, January the first.”

Above Pasto’s rooftops, crystal clear — pure, clear blue — the volcano Galeras rose up so close that it seemed to be listening.

Floridita walked off, and the three boys let her through, but they followed her, their hands in the tops of the open bags. She stopped again and faced them. The boys retreated, very slightly, not as she was hoping. She set off again, blushing, taking faster steps, and with faster steps the boys followed her. She checked there was no-one around who might help her. Then she confronted them one by one, her eyes glinting, lips compressed. For the first time in her life she had decided to go out of the house by herself, without her sister Luz de Luna, and this happened. For a moment she stood looking at the imposing silhouette of Galeras without really seeing it, and, when she did, it felt to her like it was coming down on top of them, that it would flatten them all; in the ruddy evening light it looked like a mountain of blood.

She set off. Her indifference cleared the way for her. But once more she heard:

“We’re going to flour you, don’t run away.”

“Who’s running?” she asked. And she paused again.

“Don’t cry now, Floridita,” the same boy said. Who was he? Did they know one another?

“Me, cry?” she asked, laughing, and her face immediately took on a scornful sneer: “Cry?”

Actually, yes. On the verge of it. And that boy had guessed it. She felt her legs trembling, but more than anything she felt unbounded rage that they might notice. What if they did flour her? With that flour in her hair, with it all over her face, how not to cry, she wondered.

And she broke into a run, heading further into the park. Her speedy dash left the boys standing; they were not expecting it; they thought she would give in, and they were wrong. Without thinking twice, they belted after Floridita. She had a good head start, but they managed to catch up with her by some tall eucalyptus trees; that is where they cornered her.

The boy who had spoken caught hold of her by the sleeve, at the same time as the others threw handfuls of flour — not just at Floridita, but at her captor.

“Not me, you idiots,” he yelled.

They seemed submerged in a dense fog, in clouds of fog, it was the flour smacking against her hair, her face; she closed her eyes and felt one of the boys — the one who had spoken? — no, it was all the boys, all their hands lifting her dress up to her neck; now she felt great lashings of flour under her clothes like mild stings. She began to cry and only then did the boy who had spoken let go of her. The others stopped throwing flour.

She was already moving away when she was halted by a tremendous clatter of wings in the sky, like applause. She and the boys raised their eyes: above, gliding over their heads, a flock of carrier pigeons was surging up, like the tip of a spear, then wheeling down like a circle, in dizzying hieroglyphics; now the flock seemed to brush against their heads, and swam up into the sky again, vertically, ascending; suddenly, it hung motionless for a few seconds, and, in a whirl of distress, with no order whatsoever, the birds tore off to seek out their pigeon lofts, or any protective niche in the walls. And all because, at the very instant the pigeons fled, there was a harsh, hungry cry of a hawk not far off; the children spotted it — a fast-moving smudge in the sky — and soon they could make it out above them: its broad, blunt wings, predatory beak, yellow eyes scanning for prey. The instant it shrieked, the pigeons scattered, to any roof, any roost, and the hawk’s cry cornered them again, terrifying them with its deadly raucousness. In a second, the sky was left empty of pigeons and the hawk kept on going, high in the sky, flying to the volcano; the volcano looked completely black now against the evening blue, a dark triangle silhouetted against the sky; the children remained looking at it as though it dazzled them; into the middle of its blackness the hawk vanished, swallowed up, just as the boy who had spoken appeared in Floridita’s memory: he was the steward Seráfico’s son, and those were his friends. What were they doing here? Shouldn’t they be watching the sheep? It was Toño, little Toñito, the boy she always saw around without really seeing him: at her birthday party he followed her all over the place, but only now was she able to see him.

“Now I know who you are,” she said, pointing at him. “You’re Toño, Seráfico’s son.”

“She’s recognized you,” the other boys chorused, terrified. Toño turned pale. Floridita ran away from them. But her voice was vengeful:

“I’ll get you back, you’ll see.”

Zulia Iscuandé saw her arrive home: she was a girl with the hair of an old woman, bright white, and she must have been floured all over because she ran along as if floating on white clouds. For some minutes Maestro Abril’s wife had been on the doorstep, without making up her mind to ring the bell. She wanted to speak to Doctor Proceso. The girl’s arrival brought her wavering to an end: when the door opened she would ask for the doctor.

Zulia Iscuandé took a step backwards; the girl, enveloped in the cloud of flour, which billowed around her at every step, not only pressed the bell without let-up, but gave the door a kick; the cloud got bigger, whiter still. Genoveva Sinfín opened the door. The girl went in like a wave, but when she heard her father being asked for she turned around, fuming.

“Papá isn’t here,” she shouted. “Doctor Donkey is never here.”

And she disappeared.

“How odd, my dear Zulia: the girl has told the truth this time,” Sinfín said. “Her father isn’t here. But wait for him, come in and have a coffee, just in case.”

The two women walked over the trail of flour Floridita had left, right through the house.

4

Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López did not manage to get back home until January 4, in the early hours of the morning. Zulia Iscuandé was waiting for him at the front door, a persistent visitor for the past three days.

The doctor was returning from slaking a thirst that had lasted years: the widow had revived him. “You’ve turned me inside out, Chila,” he said on parting, “now I believe in another world.” They had entwined amorously in the most unexpected corners of the vast house — to occupy it, they said — and in truth they took the place apart with passion on a grand scale: upstairs and down, out the back, in every nook and cranny, on the roof terrace, with half of Pasto spying on them, including the secret poet.

They were seen dancing bambucos in the streets, their madness anticipating carnival, with no respect for the departed, witnesses said; they were seen glittered over with cold, right at the top of Las Lajas cathedral; and on the shores of Lake Cocha, eating pink trout with their fingers, drinking aguardiente from the bottle. They swam naked in the hot, green waters of Laguna Verde — they lost themselves there and were found — they went up and leaned fearlessly into the belching mouth of Galeras, and in just one day drove all the way to the ocean at Tumaco and back again. Nobody in Pasto could tell who was the drunker of the two, both of them going up and down the country in the Land Rover. That it never broke down, or crashed, was a miracle performed by Saint Aguardiente, witnesses said.

And they arranged to meet on Black Day, but they would never see each other again.

News of the doctor’s adventures reached the ears of Primavera Pinzón — who could not and did not want to believe them. The pious Alcira Sarasti, Furibundo Pita’s wife, heard about them too, and the thought nipped at her like a saucy pinch. Similarly, Zulia Iscuandé found out about his exploits: she had been laying siege to the doctor’s house, waiting for him every morning for the past three days; she was after the deposit, an advance, at least, for the float, which was just about ready. She was worried that her doctor, so generous with words, might not be with money. And she was nearly right: Bolívar’s carriage now mattered less to Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López than reliving the memory of the widow Chila Chávez dancing naked boleros on her roof terrace — her face smeared with hand-spun local ice cream.

He had forgotten all about Bolívar, the carriage, the artisans, his pledge. For the first time in his life, all he was thinking about was the Black and White dance. If life was a vale of tears, as his grandparents had maintained, he did not want to live in it, and if life was a macabre circus enjoyed only by a few madmen — as they had also maintained — he intended to go mad for the years remaining to him, who knew how many there would be.

Impossible to imagine he had only three days left.

I couldn’t care less about Bolívar, he said to himself: they make a god out of him, they go on making gods, I care only about my widow’s honeypot.

But he was a man of his word, and that morning, when he recognized Zulia Iscuandé lying in wait for him at the door — Zulia Iscuandé no less, she who had said “Bolívar was a complete son of a bitch”—he acknowledged his recent past: he took her by the arm and led her into the consulting room and offered her a glass of sacramental wine.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll have your money today.”

Was he still drunk?

He seemed to be.

Zulia Iscuandé stayed waiting for him in the loneliness of the consulting room, while the doctor went out of his house and knocked on the door of his neighbour, Furibundo Pita, the only person in Pasto who could buy his finca outright, and pay for it that very day, the eve of carnival, in cash.

“Here you are, Doctor Justo,” Furibundo Pita said, and held out a hessian bag containing the money.

He was in Furibundo’s house, in his office with its high leather chairs. Furibundo was looking at him from behind his desk. They had already signed the sale papers.

“The bag is a gift,” Furibundo went on. “You don’t need to count the money. I already counted it the customary seven times. Now, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you going to do with all that cash? Is there business on the boil? Any tasters going?”

“A lot of questions for a man in a hurry,” the doctor said, getting to his feet.

He looked elated, with the bag over his shoulder. Taller, leaner, calmer. It was a stroke of luck that Furibundo Pita did not keep all his money in the bank; he had managed to sell the finca in the blink of an eye, the finca that had belonged to his grandparents and that by rights he should keep for his daughters, but all that mattered to him now was the joy of paying the artisans, his only joy, because he wasn’t worried about his other delight, Bolívar’s carriage.

“Doctor Justo,” Furibundo Pita said, “I always knew I hadn’t killed Maestro Abril: I knew it very well. But that old fool really deserved a drubbing, for poking fun. Don’t throw away so much money on Bolívar’s carriage; use your common sense: it would be money down the drain.”

The doctor did not answer; now everyone in Pasto knew everything, he thought. He wanted to get out of the office as soon as possible, without staying for the coffee with little achira biscuits that Alcira Sarasti offered him, as soon as she heard of his unexpected visit:

“Another time, señora.”

“What’s the hurry, for goodness’ sake?” she said. “Take it easy, it’s not Innocents’ Day and nobody’s giving you poison. I baked these biscuits myself an hour ago.” And she shook her head: “You’ve snubbed me.”

“Never. I promise I’ll see you on the sixth for White Day.”

“If you can find me,” the woman shot back.

That morning — in spite of her buttoned-up clothing, the veil for Mass on her head, her black lace blouse — the pious Sarasti struck the doctor as even more desirable than Chila Chávez. And he stole another look at the lace blouse, through which Sarasti’s skin appeared, glowing like it was on fire; the doctor seemed to doubt his judgement, surprised at himself: “it must be because I’m seeing her with my heart for the first time,” he said to himself, “and not as the idiotic doctor I’ve been up to now.”

The pious Sarasti did not take her eyes off the walls. She clasped and unclasped her hands. Furibundo Pita picked up the conversation again:

“Does Primavera know anything about the sale?”

But the doctor could not hear him anymore; he had left.

And before Zulia Iscuandé’s disbelieving eyes, he scattered the thick bundles over the consulting room’s table: he counted out the money for the float and placed it on one side — three times the winner’s prize money — then put it back in the bag. The rest he put away in his trouser pockets as best he could, like he was stuffing a guy for New Year’s Eve — that’s what Iscuandé said she thought of when she saw him doing it.

“Money,” the doctor said. “Coffin and grave of the heart.”

“Well if that’s the case, my heart can die,” Iscuandé replied.

They looked at one another without connecting: Doctor Proceso seemed not to hear her, and Zulia Iscuandé understood absolutely nothing. She had only gone there looking for the deposit, and she had received it all. And by the look of things, the doctor did not even want to know about the float.

“Don’t you want to come and see it?” she asked, genuinely shocked. And she gripped the bag in her hands. “We’ve got it well hidden.”

“Give my regards to the carriage,” the doctor said oddly. “It can surprise me on January sixth. I’ll be on some Pasto street corner waiting to see it.”

That same January 4, Puelles was giving Enrique Quiroz his surveillance report, in the street, at the doors of the parish church.

From the corner they heard the combined voice of the crowd swell, cheering — the Carnavalito was being inaugurated for the first time, a preamble to the Black and White Carnival, a copy of the main event put on by children, with their little floats, marching bands and mini-parades: they wheeled their inventions along on bicycles and wagons. It was a procession of exalted little boys and girls: they sang while they danced; some carried aguardiente bottles full of lemonade, but stumbled about as they marched past, imitating the drunkenness of their elders in every detail; proud mothers applauded. A band of musicians went by, belting out the “Miranchurito.” The secret poet strained to make out Quiroz’s whispering, his rage interrupted by the celebration:

“So you haven’t been able to track down the float.”

“Hard to follow the doctor on this scooter,” Puelles said, and pointed to the Vespa, battered and covered in mud, beside him. “The doctor went to Tumaco, to the Laguna Verde, up the volcano, he got to Las Lajas, and everywhere he went all he did was make love. This float you’re on about doesn’t exist.”

“There’s still time before tomorrow,” Quiroz said. “Speak to the little doctor, make friends with him — you’re smart, make him believe you think as he does, that you’re on his side, and he’ll tell you where the float’s hidden. Meanwhile, we’ll look for it on our own account too; we’re all working to the same end, you know? We couldn’t leave such a responsibility to you alone, you were never going to be up to the job on your own, we already knew that. Make friends with him, I tell you.”

The poet got on the Vespa, he did not want to hear another word, far better to get away from the Carnavalito than have to swallow that lunatic’s complaints. But suddenly he saw the lunatic right on top of him: it was as if the two of them were revealing their true colours for the first time. Quiroz confronted him, thrusting his face an inch away from him:

“This is serious stuff, Puelles. That little doctor is worse than the policeman. Do you understand me?”

Puelles did not.

And then he did not believe it.

It was as he supposed.

This isn’t happening, he thought.

And then:

Not me.

“That doctor is a worthless bastard,” he said. And now he could not hide his desperation. “But he’s not worth a damn. The float is just a rumour. Think of the hassle — the doctor is an innocent little angel.”

“He’s poison, and the purest kind, the worst. An anti-Bolívarian, no less. An enemy of the people. Understand, chickenshit? This time we’ll explain who we are, so there’ll be no room for doubt. This time we’ll leave our indelible signature. A new force is on the horizon. The future. Us. These people are my people, your people, our people. Are we going to defend them or not? Not one step back, not even to get a run-up — and down with the rich, dammit!”

Puelles nodded, as he switched on the Vespa and sped off without knowing where to go.

He fled.

He fled, zigzagging through the bodies lining the street, a row of blurs scattered in the Carnavalito: he saw two girls dressed in green, twins; a drunk man hugging a tree, talking to it; another drunk asleep on the pavement; three or four nuns holding hands — real nuns or fancy dress ones? And just then he spotted him: Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, his target — slouching, hands in pockets, tubby but tall, a huge black hat on, the kind an old hippie would wear — standing stock still. What was he staring at so attentively? The shuttered facade of Mandarina’s big old townhouse, no less.

The secret poet shivered.

He braked and got off the scooter. And he joined the doctor, stood by his side, shared a silence for two — will he suspect me? No, it often happens during carnival that a random stranger follows your steps, Doctor, poor doctor, or rather happy doctor, as far as women were concerned. Even though it was only Carnavalito — Puelles thought — that parade of imps and monsters was just like the grown-up Black and White Carnival that was coming soon: the jaws were identical. A jubilant racket ran up and down the street: toy drums; goblins and clowns faced each other. The doctor turned his face towards him — no child’s face could be more innocent or happy — and he drew a bottle of aguardiente from his pocket and deliberately poured half on the ground: the aguardiente seemed to boil on the paving stones.

“For the dead,” he cried.

Puelles shivered again; such a greeting almost unhinged him.

“Here’s to them,” he answered.

The doctor held the bottle out to him; Puelles took a long swig. The doctor did not take his eyes off the townhouse:

“When will they open?”

“That house is a night-time business,” the poet said.

“Well, love should be morning, noon and night, for the incurable. Now I’ll have to wait.” The doctor took back the bottle and looked at him attentively. “Would you like to have lunch with me?”

The poet Puelles stopped shivering.

The doctor’s eyes scanned Mandarina’s house again. He drank thirstily.

“The time will pass more quickly,” he said.

They left the scooter safe in a garage, and did not have lunch: without agreeing it, without discovering who was leading who, they went from the illuminated street of the Carnavalito into a sort of subterranean labyrinth — like they jumped down into it — a bar near Mandarina’s house, with neither name nor windows, just a metal door and a few steps resembling a descent into Hell, Puelles thought; they came out into a room half lit by ruddy candles, where music was pounding from rectangular black speakers hanging from the ceiling; in the space completely filled with bodies, shadows were dancing to “La Múcura” and singing along: a single voice, a single body, and one and the same sweat — the smell of hot, damp clothing — eyes like torches, hundreds of eyes glowing white in the gloom, because still further in there was no light, only that massed glow of eyesabove concealed bodies, linked together, sleeping bodies that danced.

And they walked in, feeling their way like blind men.

At the table they ordered aguardiente. Nearly all the tables were occupied by couples embracing, tightly clasped. What a place to talk, Puelles thought, but only if he was drinking could he talk to the doctor—dare to talk, he thought — and something similar might happen to the doctor: he might talk to his heart’s content, even confirm once and for all that the float was a lie, and everyone would be happy. But what if the float exists? He said it out loud, as a waiter poured their aguardiente: “What if the float exists?”

“What did you say?” the unsuspecting doctor enquired from the other side of the table. With “La Múcura” blasting out it was hard to hear.

“Does the float exist or not?” the poet made up his mind to bellow, then drank the aguardiente down in one.

The doctor hesitated a moment. In the end he gave a shrug. He nodded silently — not as though responding, only as if talking to himself — and drank his aguardiente, adjusted the ridiculous hat, put a banknote on the table and stood up.

“Don’t go, Doctor Proceso,” Puelles held him back. “Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López. Sit down just for a minute, I have to tell you something of interest to you. Afterwards you can go where you like. To Mandarina’s? I’ve had a visit pending too since I was fifteen, but listen and the time will pass more quickly, as you want it to.”

The doctor sat down again. Who was this ghost? Did he know him? He had seen him somewhere before.

So they were going to kill him.

At least, that is what the kid shouted into his ear, in an exaggerated whisper. What extraordinary news: according to the kid he should make a “quick” visit to Mandarina’s place, and then pack his bags and skip the country “until it’s all blown over,” they don’t call Pasto Colombia’s “Surprise City” for nothing.

“Are you having me on? You’re making fun of me.”

“No, Doctor, I’m not: Innocents’ Day already came and went. I’m just warning you, it’s up to you. Remember the beating crazy Chivo got? Who shook up Cangrejito Arbeláez, artist of the enemy? Now things are going from bad to worse, Doctor, now they won’t just do you over, they’ll send you to the other side. You’ll see. Cheers.”

“And all this over Bolívar’s carriage?” the doctor puzzled. “Who are you people?”

“We still don’t know,” Puelles said. Did he suddenly seem sad? “Or they don’t know,” he said hurriedly. “I’m not with them anymore.”

Doctor Proceso had another drink and remembered: this skinny kid was the same one who had been reading outside his house, the night of the thirty-first. So they had been following him since then. He was a student — a pupil of Chivo’s of course, one of those who had kicked Chivo through the streets to the hospital — turned dissenter. What was going on with the young? Not long ago Chivo himself had told him they had “imported” a distinguished philosophy professor from Italy; under his aegis, students not only started dressing in black and frowning like bitter old men, but many killed themselves and left suicide notes giving the same explanation: despair at existence, or something like that. Why were the kids bowing down? Why did they allow themselves to descend into idiocy? Because they were kids — he answered his own question — but these ones were different, faddish revolutionaries, and it seemed he was an enemy of the people, public enemy number one. What can I do?

“So my time’s a bit tight for popping to Mandarina’s?” he asked as a joke.

“You’ve got the time it takes a rooster with his hen,” Puelles joked back. Quite a guy, this doctor — he thought — you have the courage to laugh, but you cannot imagine how serious the warning is, Doctor.

The music had changed: just as ear-splitting but, even so, they understood each other well enough as they drank outrageously. Puelles wanted to go to Mandarina’s that very day, the day of the Carnavalito, when they opened — if they opened — and with or without the doctor — he wanted to visit that house as soon as possible — but the why of the doctor’s visit piqued his curiosity: he knew of his wife, the famous Primavera Pinzón, eldest of the Pinzón girls, knew enough to dream about her, what a wild beast of a woman, what a magnificent drop of pure water:

“Why the hell do you need the whorehouse, Doctor?”

“I’m looking for a woman to take to a friend,” the doctor said.

“A commendable service, señor. I’m just looking for my very first. Cheers.”

From one moment to the next they found themselves walking through the streets of Pasto, far from the bar, how long had they been talking? Now it was night-time, minutes earlier Puelles had sat on the pavement to puke, now they were passing for the third time in front of Mandarina’s “house of crossed legs,” as Puelles put it. No doubt the girls aren’t working during Carnavalito, the doctor said, they take their kids out to it too. Or they’re in the procession themselves, Puelles said, and they went up steep narrow streets, they wanted to keep right on going till they got to the volcano, but their own talking stopped them on a corner, the doctor heard himself saying, from a people sunk in misery, with no industry, no hospitals, from a people without schools, without… from a… what can come of it? And Puelles’s voice from somewhere: “They say revolution, señor.” Yes, the doctor laughed in astonishment, but it lasts only a minute, because the people get drunk and go back to sleep, sleep for centuries, dream, as happened… when did it happen last? Even the dogs got drunk.

“Like us,” Puelles said.

“What can come of it?” the doctor repeated.

“Dreams, you said it.”

The last groups of children were dispersing now: kids with their costumes over their shoulders, almost asleep, some still singing, holding their parents’ hands, others whistling, climbing trees, precariously balanced, rebellious birds, we don’t want to go home, it’s Carnavalito. Were they actually drunk? Very possibly, Rodolfo Puelles replied; the doctor said children were happy because they did not know about love. And above all they don’t know about old age, the young Puelles added. They laughed over that for a minute, ludicrously, howling, choking, they could hardly manage to speak, saying in unison: “poor kids when they get old.”

Another great swig steadied them.

A truck went by, full of young people protesting about the shoddy government, political slogans right in the middle of Carnavalito — against Yankee imperialism, against the bloodsucking oligarchy: “And the living and the dumb, kill them every one,” they chorused, “And the donkey and the horse, one by one, of course.” So the revolution comes from there, the doctor said. Did Puelles really believe in that? Revolution with those animals, no way, Puelles rebelled. Revolutionaries killing to left and right, the doctor went on, did you hear them? They included donkeys and horses on their list, with such a project in hand I don’t think they’ll die in the attempt, they’ll die old, still trying. I’m not involved in that anymore, Puelles said, exasperated. How to proclaim it to the four corners of the earth that he was a poet, that when he spoke, he was voicing his poetry? If I was up to it, I’d recite at the top of my voice all this humorous love that is springing from my pores, and sooner or later some girl would redeem me, he thought.

They were sitting very close together on one of the wooden benches in the children’s park, a few blocks from the doctor’s house, their clothes soggy with aguardiente; someone had stolen the doctor’s hat — a hand stretching down from a balcony — Puelles’s eyes were red, staring, as if he were hallucinating, his hands were shaking, they were each drinking from their own bottle; my problem, Puelles suddenly said as if renouncing life, isn’t being alone, it’s being with myself, Doctor, imagine a man who couldn’t even be friend to a dog anymore. Want me to tell you something, señor? I’ve killed; do you realize what I just said? I’m a murderer; do you know what that means? It takes an enormous effort just for me to be with myself, and Puelles wondered if he was going to cry. Don’t say that, the doctor said and tried to stand up, or are you going to murder me? Never — Puelles said in surprise — and the doctor countered: one death is enough? Better kill me off at once, don’t keep me hanging about, and a shared fit of the giggles surfaced again, choking them, the doctor attempted to get up and did not manage it.

“I have to go home,” he said, “Mandarina can wait till tomorrow.”

“Doctor,” Puelles asked, facing him, and clutching one of his arms, “why don’t you leave Bolívar in peace? Put an end to this aggravation and everything will be alright.” The doctor waved his hands about, drank:

“You can’t leave the dead in peace if they won’t leave the living in peace,” he announced. “Well,” he corrected himself, stunned, “I thought that once, now I don’t know what I think. I’m at peace with the living and the dead: the, only, thing, I, want, is, to, love.”

“Really?” Puelles said, reviving. “Go back to the merry widow? You’re after fresh bread, how lovely she is, widows here are often almost girls, Doctor; pastures new for the old bull, eh?” Unlike the doctor, Puelles was able to get up and he opened his arms wide, flapped them, leapt up onto the bench, pulled himself erect — my freedom takes flight within me, he shouted without knowing why, still as a statue, the doctor sat looking up at him from below. Statues have mattered very little to me my whole life, but today I started to despise them; there are a great many statues in Pasto to pull down, we could do it — the doctor proposed excitedly — it always seemed outrageous to me that such a cretin of Liberty should have it his own way all these years, his great big lie rides through every village on horseback, every park, every town square, inside every brick — it should be buried in Pasto cemetery. What good does it do to broadcast that truth? I don’t know, but I’m not going to stop my float from fulfilling its destiny: it is my hope, do you see? So — Puelles said, apropos of nothing, as if in response — you don’t believe they torture our lot? Of course, the doctor said — it seemed they had been talking about torture for ages — and I’m sure, what’s more, that you people torture the others, and torture comes and torture goes, and generations pass by. The doctor tried to get up again, a hand stopped him, he sat down — what was Professor Arcaín Chivo doing there? Since when?

So, Arcaín Chivo, emeritus educator, was sitting beside him, and his probable A-grade student was standing opposite them, swaying and listening, how much time had gone by? Am I imagining you, Chivo? — the doctor asked. You’re not imagining me, Justo Pastor, I was passing by and stumbled upon you celebrating Carnavalito like any other child in the park, and you look happy, but I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you: it sometimes falls to us to be the bearers of bad tidings. Matías has left us — departed — our dear Matías Serrano died in his sleep, last night. What were you doing, Justo Pastor? We’ve looked all over Pasto for you. The doctor shrugged, as if it did not matter. Just from that, Professor Chivo was able to judge the extent of his drunkenness, he reproached him: And what’ll we do when all our friends start dying, Justo Pastor, just shrug? The doctor shrugged again, but this time he spoke: We’ll die too, what if we didn’t? How would one go on living among strangers? The professor gave up, his eyes found the explanation in the empty bottles of aguardiente scattered around and the ghostly student swaying about listening to them, so he repeated his greeting: You look happy, Justo Pastor, and in the company of this disoriented soul, no less. Your name is Rodolfo Puelles, am I right? Thanks for reminding me, Puelles said, I needed the orientation, either I’m very young or you’re very old. Don’t mention it, Chivo replied, and became animated. Indignant? Well, yes, he said, the world is divided into young and old, would you like me to finish orienting you? I know very well who you are, you’re one of Enrique Quiroz’s merry band, am I right? More disoriented souls. What do you know about orientation? Puelles said, and spat. Chivo pounced: Would you like me to remind you of Kierkegaard? — he asked — disorientation ensues because one comes to speak highly of the opposite of what one would really like to, such as occurs when one moves abstractly within dialectic definitions, where not only does it happen that a person says one thing and refers to another, but one says the other: what one thinks one says, one does not say, but quite the opposite. Do you follow me? Do at least try to understand me, as you won’t later. Oh, what a hassle it is to catch your drift — Puelles said — and the doctor added: Chivo my friend, you seem drunker than we are — he was trying in vain to stand up — did Matías really die in his sleep? What a very wise way to die — and once again he could not get up. Let me help you, I’ll take you home, Chivo said. Leave him with me, I’ll take him, Puelles said. Nobody need take me, I’ll take myself — the doctor failed to get up — what was he dreaming about when he died? Either I get up or I’m done for, I must get back to the woman who doesn’t love me, my wife.

“You’re a good few bottles ahead of me,” Chivo said. “I’m in the way here.”

He left quickly, heading along the stone path. They no longer saw him; only his voice could be heard, in the night:

“See you tomorrow, Justo Pastor. It’s Black Day, you’ll have a sore head.”

And, still shouting:

“Watch the company you keep.”

Puelles and the doctor were hardly listening to one another anymore. Puelles was explaining to the doctor that death brought them together: it was death that was uniting them sooner or later, yes, Doctor, he repeated, if there’s one thing bringing us together it’s death, but were they talking about marriage or the deceased Matías Serrano? In marriage — the poet Puelles said, who had not known a woman — each partner thinks about the death of the other. I should say so — the doctor said — if you were to die, wife, I’d be the happiest man on earth, and then he did stand up, and he stayed that way with his index finger raised, in the pose of someone about to say something definitive — I wish you were my son, he said to Puelles in the end. Puelles burst out laughing: I don’t wish you were my father; tomorrow or the day after I’d be an orphan. The doctor said he wanted to give him a hug, but he did not do it; Puelles did, he hugged him, you’re a good bloke, he said, stressing each syllable as if telling off a surly child as he advised him: best fly to Singapore, stay there a century and only come back when the monsters disappear, you’re like my granddad, another good bloke, he’s stubborn, like you, the last thing we argued over was whether Pedro Infante had a purer voice than Javier Solís, a serious argument, two friends in Mexico settled it with pistols, my granddad said that to settle it in Colombia it would not be unusual for a grandfather to take it into his head to murder his grandson, funny, huh? One day he told me to take care: women’s legs are actually scissors, you already know what it is they’ll snip off, I really love that granddad of mine, I love you, what I’m telling you is a prophesy, I’m a seer, all I’m telling you is get out; and after he said that, the poet’s face lit up with curiosity — as if a different Puelles was peeping out, the real one — Doctor, is it true you go to bed with all your patients? Now it was the doctor who burst out laughing: you’re too skinny, you need to get more sleep, and he moved off towards the street — at last he could walk — Puelles stopped watching him: either I’m very young or he’s very old, and he stayed on his feet, swaying about; if he sat back down on the bench, he would not get up again. He drank some more.

Alone. In the park. There was not even a passer-by to exchange a word with, a girl to offer this bouquet of words to, what great legs I saw today, what eager faces, what bums, and the day came back to him in flashes, events like a river passing before his eyes, fleeting voices, snapshots of fleeing girls with frightened faces, what did he say to them? Did he open his fly, did he show it to them? He had left Quiroz’s Vespa in a Pasto garage. Which one? Tomorrow I’ll go to Mandarina’s place, Black Day is perfect for it, tomorrow Paris will burn when I paint my face black, maybe I’ll bump into the doctor, happily surrounded by beauties. What else did we do for Carnavalito? We went past Santiago church, we drank a toast there, there the poet painted a sign in black on the white wall: R.I.P, GOD, and the doctor was not far behind: GOD BLESS THIS BUSINESS; he had his funny side, and they saw the little nuns go by, flirted with them, three or four nuns who did not kick up a fuss. Did we chase them? They’re all wet between the legs, the doctor said, or was it him who said it? What a rotten memory: I’ve got gaps like black holes, I’ll crash Quiroz’s Vespa. Puelles’s face clouded over: fuck, he cried in terror, why did we leave the bar? He suddenly remembered eyes like blue-black globes, Ilyich from Cali, his profile reminiscent of twisted wire, sitting on the next seat along, listening to them all that time, had he heard the denunciation? Doctor they’re going to kill you, Ilyich had followed them into the furthest depths of the bar, Puelles greeted him with a wink, tried to explain: Enriquito ordered me to make friends with this good old doctor, let me introduce you, but Ilyich slipped away, without a word. Puelles let himself fall onto the grass, face up: “fuck,” he roared, overhead the whole park grew dark, the lamps were switching off, fuck, he murmured something, and passed out, he looked like a corpse.

Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso still had one more Carnavalito surprise to go — other than the surprise of his imminent death, which he had already forgotten about.

The surprise revived him in the nick of time, because he was no longer finding it easy to walk: the devout Alcira Sarasti, who that very morning had offered him achira biscuits, was passing by — or was there, close to midnight, at his front door, waiting for him.

“This is sad, Doctor,” he heard her say, “Arcángel won’t come home tonight, he was seen very drunk at his new finca in Sandoná. Why did you sell it to him? He won’t come home to sleep and I won’t know what to do.”

Neither will I, thought the doctor.

“Your wife and daughters aren’t here,” the pious woman continued, as if remarking on the day of the week. “They went to see street bands in El Tambo, with the servant and all. They told me they’d be back tomorrow, for Black Day.”

Only then did Alcira Sarasti notice: he’s completely drunk — and she wanted to go up the next street, run across the road to the other pavement, “all the men here go about drunk, they drink for one reason, they drink for another, Holy Mother of Mercy, Pasto is still sick and there’s no cure,” but it was already too late: the doctor stretched out a hand as if in greeting and pulled her to him hard and kissed her much harder still, crushing her. Then he just said “follow me” in her ear, and she did.

More than drunk, immoral — the pious woman thought, hearing him laugh; the doctor struggled to open the door, but when he managed it she went straight in, rather startled.

So they were going to kill him, the doctor remembered, and froze; he could remember it now he was inside, in the heart of his own home: some murderer might be lurking behind the walls. That fact shook him, waking him up, but the thought soon vanished; Primavera’s absence grew more noticeable; so Primavera wasn’t around, oh, how much her presence mattered to him — in spite of everything, he thought.

But he forgot about Primavera when he sensed, behind him, the perfumed shadow of the pious Sarasti silently encouraging him. She was a shadow aflame, burning the air, a red-hot apparition. He forgot his forthcoming death, forgot for ever that they were going to kill him and, amazed, observed the pious Sarasti in the pitch-black night: yes, he confirmed, the heat emanated from her, physically. He saw it as a sort of orange glow around her pale face. She had pressed her palms together as though praying, and her lips were moving in prayer, no doubt about it. What was she asking for? Strength? Protection? Which saint was she putting her faith in? The doctor saw light separate itself from the line of her stomach, another mouth, sinuous and floating. Or am I raving? The devout Sarasti was a living torch, levitating. “Not even modern science could explain you,” he said. “What did you say?” the pious woman asked, but he was already dragging her by the hand, stumbling along. On the stairs, heading for the bed, the doctor tripped time and again, but the pious woman’s hand appeared, to save him.

“Let us rest,” she said, like a supplication. What a hallowed voice. She was praying. In the middle of the bed the doctor thought he could smell incense. She — the mystical voice — went on with utter sincerity: “I haven’t experienced such excitement since my first communion; this is the first time I’ve been with a man other than my husband, and, I promise you, it is more terrible than the first time I was with him.”

Doctor Proceso was struggling to pay attention to her, he did not know what had gone on or how, he did not remember. Before reality should hit him in the face it would be better to find another bottle of aguardiente, or reality will be worse, he thought. Was I rude with her in this bed? I threatened to nibble her biscuit, that’s what he’d called it, and he’d nibbled away until he heard her cry out, and now he felt the devout woman’s leg on top of his, rubbing it gratefully, he heard her Mass-time voice, her voice of the Elevation. Dawn was not yet breaking in the bedroom: Black Day was only lighting up the cracks in the window frames very slightly. One of the windows gave onto the garden, the other onto the street: the doctor did not know against which of the two Primavera Pinzón’s face and silhouette were outlined.

Impossible, he thought.

“What a pair of rabbits,” they heard. “You’ve been magnificent.”

Yes, it was Primavera Pinzón’s voice — like diamond because it seemed to cut through them in the gloom; a very different voice to Alcira Sarasti’s sung Mass, a deep voice but deeply feminine, and in spite of that, a roar.

Neither of the two moved; they just listened, overwhelmed.

“I never imagined it,” they heard, “such acrobatics, Doctor Donkey, what rubber doll bendiness, my God, what jumping, what jerking, what appetites, why did you never give me a bit of that?”

“Primavera,” the doctor said.

“What?”

“We can talk later.”

“Really? Painted black?” she asked.

Then:

“And in my own bed, with such a paragon of virtue: little Saint Alcira Sarasti.”

The pious woman was heard to sob.

The doctor sat on the edge of the bed. In the incipient semi-dark he was casting about for Alcira Sarasti’s clothes.

“There are no clothes,” Primavera announced emphatically. “I threw them into the street.”

Sarasti’s exclamation of disbelief was audible.

“I threw out yours and your saint’s,” Primavera said.

The doctor wanted to look into her eyes: he made out her face with difficulty. Full of perversity, a woman possessed, he thought. And, nevertheless, inexplicably, he felt like laughing.

Primavera took a step towards him.

“If that Furibundo finds out,” she said, “he’ll leave no-one alive; aren’t you worried? Are you very brave or very drunk?”

The voices of merrymakers leapt up from the street, quarrelsome cries. A rocket burst in the sky, its radiance lighting the room blue; the doctor discovered it was true: there was no clothing anywhere; bringing it in from the street would mean getting past the formidable obstacle of Primavera, in her white dressing gown — happy or unhappy?

“Now,” the doctor said, getting up, “you’ll have to lend her a dress, so she can leave.”

Another sob from Sarasti.

Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, naked as found, and not trying to cover himself, went to the wide-open window. He leaned out and saw, by the light of the street lamps, Alcira Sarasti’s clothes and his own scattered about; he even made out their shoes, here, there, upside down, on their sides, everything squalid and twisted like when there’s a traffic accident, he thought, with fatalities.

He went up to Primavera, took her by the arm and, without effort, with just a hint of his anger, put her from the room. He closed the door.

“It doesn’t end here,” Primavera shouted from the other side.

Hearing her shout, the doctor realized she was drunk. He wondered whether his daughters were in the house, listening to it all. Furibundo Pita’s wife was standing, waiting for him, covering her breasts with her hands.

“Has she really thrown out my clothes?” she asked in a thin voice.

“She may well have,” the doctor said. “Pity she didn’t throw herself out.”

And he flung open the doors to the bedroom wardrobe.

“And dawn’s already broken,” the pious Sarasti moaned. And now she covered herself with the sheet, she was a frightened ghost. The doctor chose any old dress from a hanger.

“Not even my shoes are here,” Alcira Sarasti said.

In her surprise, the sheet slipped off her body and she did not notice: her eyes were scanning the whole carpet. She knelt down and groped about under the bed; she did not care about bending over like a spectacle: the doctor positively applauded the fact.

“Put this on,” he said, handing her the dress. “And don’t worry, I’ll come downstairs with you.”

“What will they say at home?” the pious woman sobbed, “what will the maids think when they see me turn up in a different dress, and without shoes?”

“It’s carnival,” the doctor said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Primavera,” the doctor said.

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

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

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

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

And she left.

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

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

“Don’t touch me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’ll be after the sixth,” he said.

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

And she heard him say wearily:

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

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

5

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

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

“Doctor?”

He opened the door like it was his salvation.

“It’s a miracle,” Sinfín said, “that at this hour of the morning the poor of Pasto are sleeping, like you. They must have drunk from that river that turned into aguardiente, like you did. Here are your shoes and trousers, which I found in the street, Doctor; I was going out to buy salt for the corn parcels and what do I see, what can I be seeing? The doctor’s shoes and trousers lying around, are those really the doctor’s shoes and trousers? Yes they are, I’ve washed those trousers myself a thousand and one times, I know them like the back of my hand, there they were, Doctor, looking like a sleeping drunk, but they were your shoes and your trousers with the pockets well-filled, thank God I saw them first, no poor beggar came along, everyone already knows the rich have better luck than the poor, is that fair, Don Justo Pastor? Don’t you think the time is coming to stop drinking? A nice shower would do you good, a vegetable broth, or do you fancy a roast guinea pig?”

She handed him the shoes and his trousers, the pockets bulging with banknotes.

“You don’t just throw this stuff out the window, just like that,” she went on, bitterly, and she left, before the doctor could reply.

The doctor put the money away again, into the trousers he had just put on. He pulled on his shoes, thinking that, far from calling a halt, he would have to drink more aguardiente if he wanted to get his head straight, to wake up, as he was not managing to emerge from his dream: he knew he was awake, but he was still suffering the same loneliness — he just could not get out of his dream.

Genoveva Sinfín had not closed the consulting room door, which gave onto the living room. In the furthest corner, bathed in sunshine, little girls and bigger ones were painting their faces black. Standing around, dressed up as flowers, they were contemplating themselves in round hand mirrors, examining themselves with extraordinary attention, what were they looking at? He recognized his daughters, both rapt, in the midst of cousins and friends, the outlandish paper petals, the long quivering stamens did not hide them. What flowers were they disguised as? Now they all had black faces. Some of them had smeared their necks too, shoulders bare. The doctor was grateful for the crystal-clear voices, the garden of bright eyes, and the crowd of human flowers who freed him from the dream. Floridita was identifiable by her laugh, the tinkling but extravagant laughter that reminded him of Primavera: of Primavera herself there was not a whisper. What if I find her dressed as a flower? — he wondered.

Sinfín reappeared. She brought a tray of two steaming roast guinea pigs, which the doctor ate with his fingers, the way they should be eaten, and he polished off the whole lot, heads and all, but he ate standing up, entertained by the group of girls painting themselves; he did not want to sit at the table; he got Sinfín to pour him a glass of aguardiente and drank it—“to your health, Señora Genoveva Without Sin.” She shook her head, disapprovingly. Sinfín always appeared where she had to, she saw and knew everything, she was an oracle, he thought. He asked her where he would find Primavera:

“She’s having a shower now, Doctor. She had a cruel morning.”

And then:

“That must be the reason she’s going out, alone. She’ll leave the house to celebrate Black Day, all on her own. The girls are staying here: it’s their big flower party.”

He headed for the stairs, followed by Sinfín at all times. He skirted the edge of the garden: not one of the flowers noticed him; Luz de Luna did not even glance at him out of the corner of her eye; she looked more beautiful black, he thought, her eyes were luminous. But didn’t that flower appear to be sprouting a monster? Fur, tongue and fangs? Who thought up a carnivorous rose as a costume? Floridita, he discovered.

He got to their bedroom on the second floor, where water from the shower was hammering down in the en-suite bathroom. Hearing the water fall, he imagined Primavera’s nakedness, vividly, as if she were before him. He trembled in spite of himself. Then he took the wads of notes from his pockets and scattered them over the bed. But he thought better of it and took one of the bundles back; he picked up another and gave it to Sinfín, who received it as though she had never been given it: she hid it in her bra and crossed herself.

They went down the stairs without hurrying, but it seemed like they were both running away. Only Sinfín’s voice could be heard, sounding sympathetic, perhaps to occupy the doctor’s mind with less solemn matters than Primavera:

“How lovely that carnival float you had made is, Doctor, but how sad too, eh? I saw it last night, they invited me over to see it, because I’m part of this household, your household. I know where they’re hiding it, if you want to go by and correct any mistakes before the parade, they told me to tell you that your friends want you there, why don’t you go along? You’ve got them all on tenterhooks waiting for you, go on, Doctor, go and have a look: a single one of Bolívar’s hands is as big as the cathedral door; imagine the eyes like two wheels, they look up and down and shoot side to side, not just as if they’re alive but crazy too, and they look at you like he’s going to eat you up; what a tree stump of a nose, giant boots, giant spurs, the sword of a Goliath; they told me they had to take the whole head out through the roof, they had such trouble fixing it to the body, they say it weighs two tons altogether, there are loads of people working now to attach the carriage to the lorry, all will be well providing the engine works and Don Martín doesn’t get drunk on us and instead of taking a turn around Pasto head off up the volcano and hurtle down inside with his Bolívar on his back. It’s an absolutely immense Bolívar: his nose looks as though everything smells bad to him, lips as though he’s about to curse, and how lovely and lively those girls are who pull him along, they look about to burst into song, that’s how real they made them, Doctor, the smiles on their little mouths are very pretty, as gentle as kittens stretched out in the sun, but all those dead bodies around the edge, those unscreamed screams, that shower of blood, those hands tied up and so much pain, it scares you just to look at it. Was it true? Or did it only happen in a bad dream?”

“It happened in Pasto,” the doctor said.

“Don’t you want coffee? What do you want to do?”

“I’m going out.”

“So it’s true; don’t you want to go see the carriage?”

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

And the doctor ventured out into Black Day.

He went along thinking about Black Day like the historian he was not: the celebration had been born out of jubilant amazement in 1607, when the slaves threw themselves into enjoying a “day off,” the freedom of one day in the whole year granted by the Spanish king. In Pasto, this free day only got going in 1854: blacks went out to dance in the streets and their masters allowed them to come up and daub their white faces with charcoal, and the slaves must have done it with affectionate terror, or justifiably murderous intentions; but either way, certain that underneath it all they were still touching skin that was skin, with blood inside it just the same, the same shit from a different bum, he thought. The carnival began in 1926, always under that premise: one day’s freedom, its celebration; painting faces — hiding your face? — hiding and becoming like everyone else; the silent one shouted, the one who did not dance danced and the one who went without love loved — exactly like me, he thought, in the thick of the crowd on a carnival corner; he did not need to paint his face: in less than a minute the first revellers of the day painted him down to the neck, delighted to take an unsuspecting fool with no paint on his cheeks by surprise, but all the fool wanted was to be painted as soon as possible — Mandarina’s big yellow house was waiting for him ten steps away, open.

He went in without anyone noticing him. The rooms were small, dimly lit, and unlike the streets of Pasto, which vibrated with light and whistles, a smooth but despairing bolero—“Humo”—was all that could be heard coming from the hidden speakers. Behind that bolero, the carnival faded away: it had to be because of the eternal atmosphere holding sway in the house — biblical, unassailable, be it carnival or Galeras erupting.

One girl after another appeared and disappeared.

He chose the table next to the staircase that the girls went up in company, and came down later on, alone. Someone, a shadow, poured him a double shot of aguardiente. There was a photograph on the wall, above his table, a sepia shot, in a battered frame: Mandarina leapt out of the picture in a long sequinned dress, smiling in the middle of a group of happy men, obviously foreigners, explorers recently arrived from the Amazon, hats and water bottles, boots and rifles, all raising their glasses to the black woman’s health. Beneath the photo he read: Mandarina opens her first establishment in Puerto Asís, Putumayo, 1916. With her, from left to right: Wilson Fallón, Joel Schloss, Richard Cross, James Reed, Hermann Price, David Dávoren, Alfred Wills and Félix María Lindig, her most devoted admirers. And the signatures of the eight admirers lived on in the photograph, faded and looping, written around the blades of a fan.

Not far away, on a carpeted dais, decorated with flowers, red curtains like a little theatre, a trio of musicians were smoking, sitting down, their instruments lifeless between their knees. Old advertising posters surrounded them: FLANDES SWEETS, AMBALEMA CIGARS. The doctor was grateful for a second drink: once again he could not see who served it. Around him there were dark red couches and mahogany tables, full-length mirrors, an upright piano, oil lamps, a clock with no hands; men drank in discreet corners, seated on leather chairs; girls, like shadows, waited standing up, leaning against the walls — and the student? — the doctor remembered, and looked around for Puelles: no Puelles anywhere.

Nothing had changed in that house since he had visited it for the first time: the whole place smelled of disinfectant. He needed to pee; in the entrance to the toilet he read the same notice that had frightened him as an adolescent: BEWARE: HERE BE WITCHES. But above the urinal he saw obscene drawings and posters that were new — one of them could very well have been written by any one of Chivo’s students, he thought, or by Chivo himself: Love constitutes the only universal principle of a complete synthesis. Below that he read: That’s as good as saying love is the religion of humanity, arsehole. Returning to his table he saw two men dressed up as monks, or two monks, fighting harmlessly in a corner; they were yanking each other around by their cassocks, shouting; one of them wanted to leave, the other did not. The first resigned himself to waiting “just a minute.” The doctor sat down, and again a hand poured him more aguardiente, which he drank despondently. The three musicians were no longer smoking on the dais; the red curtains opened right up.

Mandarina emerged, dressed half in yellow, arms spread wide as if preparing to embrace the world. “Here you can only be happy,” she cried, “there’s no other way to be.” Loud applause accompanied her words. What great strong teeth, they’ll eat you alive, he thought, she’s ageless, looks younger than me, she tended to me when I was a boy and yet she looks like a younger sister, it’s impossible, but what a blazing woman.

“As you can see,” Mandarina whispered, as if she were reading his thoughts and answering him, “I did not grow old: I went backwards,” and with a tremendous shout: “The world ages around me, señores.” Another burst of applause ensued. “Let every man seek out his other half,” she cried, and disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared, into the cloud of pink smoke her girls were fanning towards her. The echo of her indomitable laughter remained, like a growl.

“You must do as she says,” the doctor told himself.

“Whenever you like,” a girl said at his side. At what point had she sat down with him? It was the woman who was pouring the aguardiente. All he could do was ask her name.

“Here, they call me Darkness,” the girl said. “What will you get me to drink?”

She was all spirit: enormous liquid eyes, great violet shadows underneath, very fragile, but hands twice the size of the doctor’s.

Then his attention was caught by the unusual names of the girls Mandarina was now calling, through a speaker, from the first floor, as if demanding they report in; she urged them to go up and do their duty.

“Density! Silence! Red Beard! Birdie! Poison Ivy! Baldy! Blame! Darkness!”

“That’s me, as you may recall,” the girl said.

But she sent a message with the girls going up to say she was sick.

“I’m a doctor, if I can be of any assistance.”

“I’m not really sick. It’s just that I know who’s waiting for me up there, and I’m tired of that pig. He’s got a thing like a donkey and I can’t take it anymore; he really is an ass, more of a beast than any real one.”

She was young, but the ravages of insomnia showed on her face.

“And you, señor, can I help you?”

“Not me, it’s for a friend,” the doctor said. The memory of Chila Chávez and the pious Alcira Sarasti, who were possibly waiting for him that Black Day, were a factor in his refusal, because he had been on the verge of taking her by the hand and leading her away, or letting her lead him away, until the last night of time.

And he explained to Darkness who Belencito Jojoa was.

“No kick left in him,” she said. “He’ll die on me.”

She remained with her arms folded, deep in thought, assessing the picture the doctor was painting of Belencito Jojoa.

“Sick and old with it: impossible.”

“Love works wonders,” the doctor said.

“He must be a right bag of bones, or is he one of the fatties?”

“More the dried-up type.”

“He’ll crumble away to nothing.”

“Don’t be a pessimist.”

“Fat or thin, I’d have to drive him.”

“Drive him?”

“Hop aboard and steer.”

The doctor imagined Belencito Jojoa receiving Darkness into his bed, his hands reaching out, and heard his voice, razor-sharp: “Drive me, drive me, kiss my soul.”

“Grandpas cost double,” Darkness went on, relentlessly, “it’s more of an effort, though you wouldn’t think so. It makes us think about death. Grubby old age. And, also, home visits are difficult, they’re a risk, what if he’s being nursed by Franciscan Sisters? That happened to me once before. And I don’t know if Mandarina will let me out today, on Black Day, because tons of people are coming in with the carnival, not just men but women as well, who we lend beds to. Tricky, señor. You’d have to pay in pure gold.”

“You will be paid in gold,” the doctor said. “And you’ll have to dress as a nurse, so they let us in. Me the doctor, you as the nurse.”

“Costumes cost extra.”

“But don’t paint yourself black. Let him see you as you are.”

Darkness made up her mind. “I’ll go and speak to Mandarina. You wait for me outside, in the doorway. She’ll tell me how much to charge you, and we can go. If Mandarina doesn’t let me out, never mind, I’ll escape: I was already keen to get away from this dump for ever.”

“As you wish,” the doctor said. And he went out of the house, into the confusion of the carnival.

A carnival troupe went by, and the revellers crushed in and around about: faces floated by, painted black — or black and white — there was a smell of bodies, alcohol, scented lotions. One of the merrymakers offered the doctor a cigarette, which he accepted. “So, are they worth it?” the man asked. The doctor nodded and the merrymaker went into Mandarina’s townhouse.

He smoked with pleasure, streamers hung around his neck, confetti brightening up his eight-day beard with colour. They offered him aguardiente straight from the bottle, and he accepted. His face was painted, but even so, he thought, it was perfectly possible they recognized him; Pasto was a very small world: on any corner the whole population would find you. He imagined the faces the bishop and his learned friends would make if they discovered him right by the townhouse, as though about to go in or having recently come out. They’d be jealous, he thought, although the Wasp would excommunicate me anyway.

But what am I saying, he thought immediately, protect me, oh Matías, protect me, little brother of mine, wherever you are, whatever hell or paradise you’re in, though I know very well you didn’t believe in those places; you used to say: “The day you die you turn into a mosquito, and that’s that.”

None of his friends did surprise him that day. He never imagined who he would bump into.

“Well,” Primavera said, “this is certainly a mistake.”

She was dressed as an equestrian: black whip in hand, fitted jacket, her hair drawn back under a little round black cap. In her painted face her blue eyes distinguished her from the rest, as did her voice. Yes, it was Primavera; he was stunned. Her white riding outfit, blackened with handprints at her breasts and on her back, her bottom, gave a good idea of how much attention she had been paid that day, no doubt entirely to her liking, he thought. Her voice and the slight swaying of her body — she was speaking with her arms out as if preparing to fly away or as if already in flight — proclaimed her growing drunkenness, if she were not already completely inebriated:

“My Doctor Donkey emerges from a fine establishment, the most highly prized in Pasto, the most expensive, exclusive preserve of family men, civil servants and even undercover priests. In fact,” Primavera carried on with her reprimand, but now her voice changed, became intimate, wistful, “one never stops admiring those girls, once I dreamed of joining them.”

Her companions had already moved off: they were going along in a chain, men and women interspersed, holding on, one behind the other; at last they stopped to wait: they had guessed what the great mix-up was about and were enjoying it, furtively. Near to Primavera and the doctor, a nineteenth-century carriage, pulled by a mule bright with garlands, full of defiant girls as yet unpainted, was suddenly boarded by a mob of merrymakers: the shock absorbers creaked, springs popped one by one, the occupants of the carriage were thrown from side to side, and finally the excessive weight cracked the axles, which split, sending everyone crashing down, untold bodies on top, a heap underneath, tangling and untangling in dizzying fashion, so many arms and legs, so many faces slyly rubbing against each other like desperate kisses, greedy hands diving inside clothing, mouths and laughter and screaming, the whole street was erupting in howls, the mule collapsed, fell down in a dead faint, kicking out dangerously among the heads of girls and drunks, cries of panic rang out over cries of rejoicing. Primavera’s companions, among whom General Aipe might very well be found — the doctor thought — ran to see the accident up-close. Primavera did not turn a hair: she stayed where she was.

“How was it, Doctor Donkey?” she asked.

“How was what?” the doctor asked. He genuinely did not understand her. They looked at one another closely, the same two enemies from that morning, confronting each other.

“With the girl, Doctor Donkey, or should I say girls? After shimmying about so nicely with that little saint, you’re up to any miracle, aren’t you?”

“What girl?”

Primavera burst out laughing.

“Oh,” Doctor Proceso said, “the girl. I’m waiting for her, I’m going to present her to Belencito Jojoa.”

Primavera Pinzón, who was already going back to her group of friends, stopped, frozen in her tracks. She turned to him, eyes glowing: surprise lit up her face, in spite of her having it blackened. It really was as though she had flushed, and the flush showed through in the astonishment in her voice:

“Can it be? You’re finally taking Belencito his woman? What a great friend, what audacity, my hero.”

She stood on tiptoe, briefly, up towards the doctor and, briefly, kissed him hard on the lips.

“Shall we go, Primavera?” her friends were calling. The people from the broken-down carriage had now got to their feet, bruised here and there, nothing major to report. Girls and drunks brushed off their clothing as if nothing had happened; even the mule came back to life: a bystander gave it aguardiente straight from the bottle; music and dancing took over again, playful shouting. But in the midst of the hubbub, there was a silence surrounding them.

“I’m staying here,” Primavera said. “I’m staying with my lawfully wedded husband, as God requires.”

No-one in the group objected. One behind the other, hanging on around the waist, playing choo-choos like children, they danced off again into the crowd.

Primavera dangled from the doctor’s arm. He thought she was going to fall; he embraced her.

“We’ll wait for your girl,” he heard her say. Her voice sounded splendid: a happy ultimatum.

That very moment Darkness appeared in the doorway. She was carrying a small suitcase under her arm, no doubt containing the nurse costume, or was she leaving that dump for ever?

“How beautiful she is,” Primavera said. “A real jungle flower for Belencito Jojoa, courtesy of his humble servant Doctor Donkey, my devoted husband.”

Darkness could hear her. She approached them warily. She had to shake off a drunk who tried to anoint her cheek with the customary “lick of paint,” and she did so with a shove, no hesitation about it: the drunk rolled about on the pavement, did not get up.

“Nobody paints me,” Darkness yelled.

No-one else approached her.

And she stopped just inches from Primavera:

“Who’s this?” she asked. “She seems drunk, or is she pretending? Is it a trick? Pay me right now, or I’m not going anywhere. Shall I tell you how much?”

“Pay her now, darling, just a little something,” Primavera said. “Don’t you see it’s the most important thing to these girls? Pay her and let’s go by ourselves, I’m going to replace her.”

Without believing what he was hearing, the doctor held out various banknotes, which Darkness scorned: she shot a stream of green spit at Primavera’s feet, and went back inside the townhouse.

So that was how Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López and his wife Primavera Pinzón ended up alone again, in the street, towards the height of carnival. Neither of them seemed to remember the early hours of that morning now, with the pious Sarasti on board, the clothes in the street and the nakedness. Nor did Primavera mention the bundles of money found on the bed; another immediate future held theirs in abeyance: Belencito Jojoa lying in his bed, waiting — not expecting anything — for the carnival surprise they were preparing.

The doctor did not believe — or could not, or did not want to — that Primavera would go through with standing in for Darkness. But he started to believe it, watching her walk along at his side with the air of a determined teenager; then he desired her: surely he desired her for that very reason. What must be will be, he thought, although it’d be best to walk about a bit so she can think better of it — that is, if you do happen to think about it, Primavera.

It was getting dark, and the sun, which until that moment had been lighting up the most intimate workings of the celebration, its nooks and crannies, its guts, now lay swallowed up by storm clouds; a foggy sky smudged the horizon, was it going to rain? Primavera did not say a word. The doctor waited. They moved away from Nariño Square, which bubbled with revellers, and continued their walk blindly, without destination: she believed, or seemed to believe, they were going to Belencito’s house, and he did nothing to dissuade her. They heard a fleeting conversation between two old men: “That bloke got bumped off ages ago,” “Well, that’s what happens if you go after married women.” She seized his arm: “Let’s have another drink,” and they went into one of those improvised tents at the edge of the carnival where, apart from dancing to the son played for them, carnival-goers ate and recovered, returned to the game or were ruined for ever. There they got carried away by the Ronda Lírica; listening with mounting excitement to their “Sonsureño,” “Agualongo,” “Sandoná” and “Cachirí.” The band members of the Lírica were vibrating along with the flutes and violins: they finished off with “La Guaneña.” At the first notes, Primavera jumped up to dance in the heart of the crowd: she leapt like a deer, pulled off her jacket, got rid of the cap, her hair tumbling down rebelliously, she spun around like she was floating and carried on dancing madly, jumping and whirling, in wild spirals, breasts swinging, occasionally accompanied by other frenzied dancers: very soon they encircled her, applauding, while the doctor observed her, fascinated. “La Guaneña” finished and she came back triumphant, like a flame, splendid, teasing; “I’m exhausted,” she said, but she did not seem so.

They bought more aguardiente—a bottle for us and another for Belencito — and carried on drifting through Pasto’s carnival-filled neighbourhoods. The floats being created for January 6 remained hidden behind high walls, who knew which ones, awaiting the next day’s parade. The doctor was still wondering whether his float might be nearby — it was possible, why not? How about a happy coincidence and finding the float’s hiding place while he was with Primavera? Seeing the float with Primavera would be more thrilling than any frantic dance in the street, among a crowd of crazed revellers. Where in Pasto was his float installed? In which house, shed, patio or garage? Tomorrow was the hour of hours, the parade. Oh, Tulio Abril, Martín Umbría, Cangrejito Arbeláez and the rest of the artisans were not going to be slow in coming forward, they would make Bolívar’s carriage count in their own fine way, warn of his dreadful legacy, they would not be scared off. The doctor did not worry that the artisans might end on bad terms with him: they were not going to end on bad terms with themselves, he shouted inwardly, they would face any consequences, in spite of Governor Cántaro, his General Aipe and the fanatics.

He repeated this to himself, following along behind Primavera, who was on her own, several feet ahead of him in the never-ending encounter with bodies flowing towards them, like a river. He caught up. Put his arms around her. They kissed there for an instant that felt like a century: no dark thing, no ill-omened thing had ever happened between the two of them; no widow, no general, no pious woman, no strapping youth, they had two daughters, my God.

The streets let them pass, respectfully.

But the carnival would not be long in shaking them up, snatching them from one ecstasy, or pushing them towards another, more extreme. In Pandiaco, they saw a man peeing under a tree, terribly intoxicated, with terrible timing; it was too late to avoid him; the man had to be drunk, he was swaying about; in fact, he was peeing on a woman stretched out on the grass, face up — drunker than the drunk who was urinating on her, the woman laughed dully, shower me, tomcat, poison me.

They kissed; it was as if everything was determined to push them together, entwine them, in spite of the squalor.

At the top of a street in the Tejar neighbourhood, people were crowding around: a huge ox, reddish in colour, too placid — had they got it drunk? — was being shown off by two proud little boys; a fluorescent fabric mask hung from its horns, over its face, the face of a lewd demon, tongue licking its lips; they had tied a tin trident with tinkling bells to the ox’s tail. There in that street, captivated by Primavera’s beauty, and with the ox in the background — like an idol looking on — three drunks knelt before her, their hands raised as if praying, each one giving his name and profession: “Paquito Insuasti, slaughterman,” “Hortencio Villareal, saddler,” “And I’m Rafico Recalde, goldsmith, we all die at your feet, blessed Virgin.” The doctor was amazed that Primavera went along with her worshippers: she gave each of them a resounding kiss on the lips, and for each kiss the people cheered and the drums redoubled; Primavera did not stop there: she raised the ox’s mask and kissed it on the snout; then music seemed to rain down from the skies and men and children and women threw themselves into dancing, with the ox in the middle. For the first time in years, Doctor Proceso — who boasted of never dancing — danced with Primavera until they had both had more than enough. The exercise saved them from the aguardiente they drank, as did all the spicy empanadas they ate.

So they danced on through many Pasto neighbourhoods: they were seen in El Churo and La Panadería, in San Andrés and San Ignacio and San Felipe, in El Niño Jesús de Praga, in Maridíaz, in Palermo and Morasurco. Up at Dos Puentes, when they were resting, sitting on a wall, heads together, holding hands, the carnival called for them again in the shape of a man who went by with his dog, tied to a rope. Primavera silently mocked the fact that both man and dog wore ridiculous black capes, and above all she smirked because the man talked to his dog, which seemed all ears and followed him along. He was talking to his dog for all the world to hear: “You know very well that I told her so, I warned her, you heard me say it, you know I told her, I warned her, dear God let her not be dead, I pray to the Holy Souls in Purgatory, and if she is dead, don’t you worry, she’ll only be pretending, don’t you pay her any attention, not when she opens the door, or when she comes to greet us, or when we find out she’s not playing dead, oh, Holy Souls.”

At this, Primavera lost her self-control:

“He’s killed her,” she said, retching.

“It’s just an actor teasing us,” the doctor said. He would never have imagined Primavera’s reaction, fighting nausea, bent over the wall. But she was soon sound asleep for a long time in the doctor’s arms — and he succumbed to sleep too, as night fell, to the beating of drums near and far, the carnivalesque thump-thump, deep, like an omnipresent heart.

The first drops of rain woke them. They drank a toast with more aguardiente, and then another.

Only in Mijitayo did they witness the finishing touches being put to a carnival float: although it was already night-time, the craftsmen were still working by the light of a string of lightbulbs. The gentle but steady rain was pattering on the zinc roofs. The tall garage doors, thrown wide open, allowed the curious to get a proper look at the float: at night, in the rain, it seemed all the more wondrous; it was a condor brought to life, on the highest nest in the Andes, and it stretched out its colossal wings as if it had just landed; in its claws lay a huge bull, black all over, in its death throes, bloodshot eyes imploring, mouth agape. Between its hooves was a sentence in Gothic script that the doctor did not have time to read. “Why aren’t we going to Belencito’s?” Primavera asked, impatiently, clutching his arm.

Ha made up his mind. “That is where we’re going.”

And they headed off there, by the half-light of the carnival. The last revellers were still up and about, the occasional viva! and other cries rang out; the crowd went up or down the puddled streets, on their way home. The pavements were littered with curled-up drunks, asleep or awake, who grunted at their passing. They went up through Santiago, adjacent to the Obrero neighbourhood, and the rain got heavier. There was a spasm across the city: suddenly the electricity was cut off; people were using candles and kerosene lamps for light. In windows, candle flames guttered “like ghosts’ eyes,” Primavera said — her breath smelled of aguardiente, her speech was slurred — over-excited, my poor Primavera, the doctor thought, you want and fear what is to come. In Obrero, with its muddy streets, he pointed out Belencito Jojoa’s house to Primavera from a dark street corner. Would she go? Would she dare?

“Let’s get on with it,” was all she said by way of an answer. And her impatience made the doctor uneasy.

But an instant after they knocked on the door, he saw her leap like a panther into the shadows of the front garden, far away from the candle lighting up the porch, she did not want them to see her.

I wasn’t expecting that, Primavera, he thought.

“Belencito has just left us,” Doña Benigna Villota announced solemnly from the doorway.

She held a candlestick beneath her face. Other yellow faces, of old, inquisitive women, accompanied her.

The doctor did not understand. He was going to ask where Belencito had gone to — thinking he might actually have gone off somewhere, like in his heyday — when the penny dropped. He understood it more fully when he heard Primavera’s laughter from somewhere in the garden surrounding the house: she was laughing from nerves, but laughing, nonetheless, like at the circus.

“If you would like to, Doctor,” Villota said, “come in and pray with us for our Belencito’s soul. Fancy, he always did things his own way: now, for example, it occurred to him to go and die right in the middle of carnival, he made it hard on us, you can hardly find a priest, they’re all off duty, but we got one, and now when Belencito’s just passed away and we’re starting his vigil, there’s a power cut, isn’t that another of Belencito’s bright ideas? Maybe. Does Belencito want to tell us something? Maybe that too. Thank God that Father Bunch has the patience of Job, we’ll begin in a minute, there’ll be a lot of rosaries said tonight for the soul of a sinner: a great sinner, it’s true, but one we loved and love still. All his children are here, that’s what he left behind him, children and grandchildren by the dozen, who will follow his example, God willing.”

And Benigna Villota’s face disappeared, followed by the rest of the old women, silent, judgemental.

They had left the door open.

All this, which Primavera heard from behind the Capulin cherry tree, exactly in line with the half-illuminated window, inside which the vigil was taking place for Belencito Jojoa, gave her a fit of the giggles; so that they should not hear her, she covered her mouth with her hand, one knee on the ground, shaking like a woman possessed, among flowerpots and clumps of mint. She was, without knowing it, right beside the deceased’s bedroom, lost in the insanity of her laughter, outside the room that must contain Father Bunch, the old women and the children and grandchildren; from the hazy window seemed to spring a silence that smelled of tallow; shadows passed back and forth. The doctor went there looking for her, underneath that window: he found her with her back to him, her knee on the ground, still in the grip of the muffled laugh that was making her curl up. And he seized her by the shoulders, he did not know whether from delight or exasperation, still not knowing what he was going to do, what was he going to do with her? Finally kill her? — he yelled to himself. Strangle her? Kiss her till he left bite marks? Bite her till she bled? Laugh with her? Laugh more, maddened, without end? Primavera’s messy hair, the nape of her neck, the sort of perfume of sweated aguardiente on air redolent with mint disturbed him: “The man you wanted to make happy is dead,” he said in her ear, she turned her head, her mouth open from laughing, her lips wet with rain, and he kissed her at last.

“So, Primavera, was this what we wanted?”

She was choking from laughing so much; she lowered her other knee to the ground and stayed on all fours in the garden, riotous with flowers; she was going to get up but he stopped her; effortlessly he slid Primavera’s breeches down to the back of her knees:

“And let the whole world see your marvellous rear, eh?” And he gave it a resounding smack.

“What…?” Primavera twisted around.

“Shout louder so everyone can hear,” he yelled.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

The rain got heavier.

“So this was my fate?” the doctor said in her ear. “To have to subvert the order of things with my wife?” She said yes, after a rain-filled silence that unhinged them, arching her back beneath him, as he found her: from pure longing they fell on one side, he did not let go, and that was when Primavera looked up to the candlelit window, her eyes looked without seeing, transported, but she finally saw the faces of the children looking at them from behind a terrified silence. She was taken by surprise, but in the middle of her own apocalypse it no longer mattered to her, she did nothing, she could not. Let the children see her, she resigned herself happily, and said, without knowing what she was saying: “We could start again, a new life.”

“Right now,” he said.

“Until we die?”

“Until we burst.”

“I like bursting best,” Primavera said, and sought out the window again: more faces of astonished children. Witnesses.

The rain fell hot upon them, another body on top of their own; Primavera did not come back from her cataclysm; “kill me and get it over with”—her voice echoed in the downpour.

“Is that what you want?” he growled.

She slipped, face down in the wet grass, she thought she was falling from atop a speeding horse, she slipped down like a happy prayer, “my murderer,” she said, and recalled the stallion she saw as a child covering the big yellow mare with lather and vigour, but a shriek that sounded like a bird returned her to reality from her calamity: there was the face of an old woman crossing herself in alarm, inside the window, where not long before there were only children.

Other women’s faces were screaming behind the first, and other yellow faces took turns to look, all of them gathered together at the window. One of the old women rapped on the glass with her knuckles as though she wanted to break it.

The instant she heard them, Primavera was fully dressed once more.

The doctor, bewildered, heard shouting in the rain, without understanding it. In a second he saw that shadows of old women in mourning passed in front of him; they ran after Primavera, and ran on; among the most zealous was Benigna Villota, the one who hurled most insults, burning with rage, but the lithe panther had already bounded over the little wall surrounding the front garden.

Down that lonely street the old women ran in pursuit of Primavera; “whore bitch sinner,” they shouted, “a thousand times profane, grab her, do her in.”

It was the doctor’s last sight of Primavera: she ran gracefully down the street full of yellow candles, sending her most inebriated peal of laughter heavenward, in the rain. Very soon she left the irate women far behind her.

The doctor took the street going in the opposite direction, feeling happy, completely happy: he was thinking about finding Primavera at home, in order to start living, all over again.

6

He thought it was getting dark, but it was dawn: a thin tracing of mist still eddied around the corner where the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles stood wondering whether it was getting dark or light. And just as he was hesitating, at that cold early morning hour of January 6, on that unfamiliar corner, he saw the ghostly Carriage of the Afterlife hurtling downhill from the streets furthest up — the one they say everyone sees, dreaming or otherwise — he saw it go by like a swirl of dust, cutting a great furrow through the mist, creaking and dark, full of witches from Sapuyes, El Loco and the Devil-in-Disguise, the Beggar, old man Cartabrava, the Mule Woman, the Faerie and weeping Turumama, crowded with all the monsters and ideas of this life and the next, he saw it turn corners without braking, carrying in its teeth the sorrows and ills of the body, as they say that at its passing all grow young, things and people, and even the dead cheer its fleeting appearance: there they go, there go the Spirits, Old Bombo, the Headless Priest, the Screamer, club-footed Tunda, the Taitapuro bonfire dummies, the Snoring Pig, the Mater Dolorosa, there we go: cheers! — Puelles greeted them, stretching out his arm with its empty bottle, but he heard no carnival whistles, no outburst of astonished voices, nor the invisible heart of the drums. If the world is sleeping — he realized — it’s because it is getting light, the celebration of the sixth has barely dawned, I haven’t missed it, my blood is tickling me, and he threw the empty bottle against a tree, which received it, stretching out one of its branches; that is what he saw.

Puelles was not drunk: he was stunned.

The day before, at midday on January 5, in the midst of the carnival hullabaloo, he had taken the Vespa to Enrique Quiroz’s house, and not found him at home: he was out having fun on Black Day, no-one was there, except his servants—he thought — maids and ranch hands from his estates who were not celebrating Black Day because they had to work. He left the Vespa with them, and a note written while drunk: Rodolfo Puelles says goodbye. Don’t count on Puelles for a thing.

He would never know whether the servants delivered the note, but it was Enrique Quiroz who found him, hours later — or they found each other, somewhere neither of them had dreamed of: church.

A church open at the height of carnival — Puelles had thought, peering in. He was on his way from Mandarina’s townhouse, but the open church on Black Day intrigued him. Not even an echo — no-one there? From the furthest reaches of the altar, Father Hoyos headed for the confessional, and shut himself in, what was Father Hoyos doing in this church? What was he doing shutting himself in the confession box? Whose confession was he planning to hear? Mine, he shouted to himself. And he moved towards the confessional, thinking: how did he find out? And the fact was that it had been a century — starting the day before, on the fourth, on Carnavalito — since the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles had remembered the man buying milk on the corner, the dead man, and the open church brought him right back, unassailably: his dead man. Father Hoyos had been his religious studies teacher when he was a boy, gave him the sacred host the day of his First Communion, heard his confession, why not confess again? A Jesuit priest had placed himself in his path to hear it — ah, he thought, he would say: “Father, save me from myself.” He had tried to share the burden of the policeman with Doctor Proceso, and yet the doctor had not heard him, or maybe he had; he’d listened too closely and said: “If you’re going to kill me get on with it, don’t keep me hanging about.”

Rodolfo Puelles set off resolutely for the confession box. He would say to Father Hoyos: “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned in not coming to Mass for years,” and the priest would say to him: “You haven’t come to confess that.” And he would respond: “You already know what I would like to confess.” And the father: “Everybody knows. Now God needs to.”

“What are you going over there for, what are you up to?” came the urgent voice of Enrique Quiroz.

Enrique Quiroz was in the middle of one of the church pews, and he was praying on his knees. Praying? The church was not empty: Quiroz was there praying, on his knees. The puzzled Puelles saw Quiroz getting to his feet, summoning him with a look. And they left the church in complete silence, one behind the other.

Outside it no longer seemed like carnival: the meeting with Quiroz or Enriquito or Vladimir cast a shadow over the day and throttled joy — the secret poet thought — the sun hid itself, it was going to rain, how tedious, what a bore, how annoying that idiot is, and yet I obey him, why hold myself in such low regard? I could knock him down if I wanted to, I’m more than he is, practicing what he only preaches, I’ve already shown that.

Silent in the midst of the uproar, one behind the other at all times, they arrived at the parish church of Nuestro Señor de los Despojos, where they found Platter Ilyich and three strangers. Who were they? He had never seen them before, not in Pasto, not in Bogotá, and they were old fogies, he thought, about forty, in boiler suits, not in a party mood at all: they were unamused by the carnival, rather grim-faced, they did not look him in the eye when he greeted them. There were people from the neighbourhood celebrating Black Day in the corridors of the church, with the consent of Father Bunch — who must be tucked away in some nook surrounded by young men — but the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles did not share their feelings, it seemed to him that the happy faces and shouting accentuated his immeasurable sorrow, which was the same sorrow that ran through the parish and the whole world, all around.

Platter and the three strangers were in the most sacred corner of the parish church of Nuestro Señor de los Despojos, no less, behind the altar, near the sacristy door, and grouped around what looked like a carnival donkey. Puelles gathered that they were getting it ready for January 6. Two people would operate it: one at the front — arms pushed down inside the hollow forelegs, each one extended with a wooden stick like a cudgel, head and shoulders occupying the huge donkey head — and the other man behind, his own limbs down inside the hind legs, or cudgels, his back bent over, his body becoming the animal’s rear end — he’ll have a job to dance, Puelles thought.

The splendid disguise concealed them: the multicoloured flaps at the sides which brushed their shoes, the thick rope tail and the great head of a fairy-tale ass; Quiroz was at the front — he showed himself now — Platter at the back. When did they get into it? And they operated the legs like they belonged to a donkey gone berserk, banging into things, lurching from left to right, around in circles, zigzags, suddenly they launched themselves at the wall and pounded away, kicking: bits of pulverized brick went flying, so great was the rage they attacked with. Platter and Vladimir, draped with the magnificent covering, donkey tail swishing, donkey head laughing, took a turn around the altar, knelt before the cross, piously, and carried on trotting around deliberately. They galloped, pawed the ground, brayed. They are going to sweat buckets in there, Puelles thought: it was a donkey in all its dumbness, decorated with coloured cloth, stuffed with hay and hemp, and with four lethal wooden hooves, yet a genuine-looking donkey for all that, no-one would know whether it was real or pretend, all in all a donkey, the one that would kick Doctor Proceso, finally killing him with an almighty blow, the very next day — he thought — January 6, if they don’t find him today, on the fifth.

Quiroz emerged from the donkey, and then Platter.

“I’m off to look for the swine,” Platter said.

Puelles felt crushed: it was as if they held him responsible.

Platter Ilyich dried his sweaty hands on his knees; his face was painted black, but the orbs of his different-coloured eyes shone very white; he did not seek Puelles out on leaving, as though Puelles did not deserve the attention. He said goodbye only to Quiroz.

And Enrique Quiroz said to him, like an ultimatum:

“You will bring him to me.”

The three strangers set about measuring and weighing up the donkey, going over it — Puelles thought — inside and out, worse than a gun.

“This donkey’s for tomorrow, in case we don’t find him today,” Quiroz said. “We’ll give him a good kicking, in disguise. Don’t be scared, Puelles, don’t say a word against us, we’re not going to hassle your friend, although we ought to kill a sonofabitch from time to time for them to take us seriously, eh? But Ilyich will soon find him. The swine will come. We’ll reason with him. He’ll tell us where to go to destroy the float, and all will be well. And if Ilyich doesn’t find him, better still: I will find him tomorrow. And let the float go out on parade, we’ll blow it up on sight. I’ve even started to think it would be sweeter that way.”

Just hearing him talk frightened Puelles: the crazy plan was true. Some Black Day this was: that morning he had woken up outdoors, in a corner of the children’s park; at midday he had left a drunken note at Quiroz’s house — fatal in its recklessness — but he never imagined this nightmare: him, in the church, witnessing the creation of the lethal donkey, what a black day, he thought, and devoted himself to listening to Quiroz’s reasoning, without understanding it; the pale mouth moved before him, no sound came out, and Puelles nodded, Quiroz never blinks, he thought; one of the strangers asked where the urinals were, I need a pee — me too, Puelles said, and led him to the toilets, but did not go in, he left, fled the parish church, managed it. He got away.

He would make one last effort for the doctor, the definitive warning, his charitable deed for Black Day. Am I really worried? It’s his funeral. And he set off for the doctor’s house when it was already getting dark. He did not find him, just as he would not find anyone this carnival day. There was a “flower party” at the doctor’s house, according to the old cook who came to the door. Behind her he could make out the mob of dressed-up children — not just flowers, but creepers, oaks and myrtles — their faces painted. There were still mamás in Pasto who preferred their children not to go outside to play on Black Day, but to celebrate indoors, prisoners of security, he thought. He was about to leave, wondering where he would find the doctor — possibly at Chivo’s house or the house of the seduced widow. He would try to warn him, his good deed for January 5. Then he would migrate to his own home, to drink and listen to the Ronda Lírica record with his grandfather.

“And I’ll have a rest,” he thought.

“The youngster doesn’t look as though he’s had lunch,” Sinfín then launched in. “Why do you drink? So you won’t feel afraid? Wouldn’t you rather have some sweet pumpkin empanadillas? There’s pork and plantain soup and corn parcels. If you don’t mind me saying so, you look like a ghost. What is it with the youth of today that they don’t eat? They’ll never drink like men at this rate.”

Just then another guest arrived at the doctor’s house — he must be the last child to come to the party, the late one, Puelles thought. He had a headdress on, a sort of crown of banana leaves. A campesino brought him: it was old Seráfico, steward at the finca in Sandoná, with Toño, his youngest. He brought him himself, amazed that his son should have been invited to a party at the doctor’s house.

Floridita came out to greet the guest. Beneath her disguise as a carnivorous plant, with teeth and fangs sprouting from the petals, her hard, silent smile glittered:

“We’ll bring him back to the finca tomorrow,” she said to the steward, without more ado.

It seemed to Puelles that the recently arrived child was sweating in terror. What a shy boy, he thought. Behind them, the clamour of the other children rose to fever pitch. Floridita seized Toño’s hand and led him away into the uproar, for ever.

Genoveva Sinfín repeated the invitation to the poet and the steward. Neither accepted: Puelles promised he would come back later, and Seráfico got on his high horse — as the doctor had sold the finca in Sandoná, he had no right to eat in his house, he said.

“Don’t be silly,” Sinfín told him. “Eat. There’s more than enough food here, and it’s a long way to Sandoná.”

The steward went out into the teeming carnival without answering and disappeared.

Professor Arcaín Chivo was not at home either. Puelles found it amusing that he did not understand the Latin that presided over the professor’s door, a wooden sign that read: ALTERIUS NON SIT QUI SUUS ESSE POTEST.

“It’s spelled out right there,” he thought, “another lost soul.”

No-one came to the door at Chila Chávez’s house either. Leaning against the willow tree that guarded the entry, Puelles felt faint; the old cook was right: the wanderings on January 4, added to the whirling about on Black Day, January 5, made his legs shake, now that it was getting dark. But he carried on sipping from the sea of aguardiente they offered him, and going from one toast to another, arrived home, transformed; he looked like he was made of wax. He listened to the family news: his grandfather was asleep.

What a terrible disappointment that his grandfather was sleeping.

His mother served him a cold guinea pig, cold wrinkled potatoes and icy plantain slices: “Eat it all up, like it or not,” she told him. As soon as he finished, his father insisted he go to sleep; he wanted to carry him to bed: “You’re very drunk, you oaf, you can’t go round carnival like this, drunk yes, but not so drunk, do you understand?” Puelles was sorry his grandfather was sleeping; maybe his grandfather was the one who could save him from his death (he would finally tell his grandfather everything), but he did not feel up to waking him, and remembered his famous pronouncement: “If there’s one thing that kills me it’s people waking me up when I’m asleep. What if I’m dreaming of the one I love? I’d hate the person who woke me.” “And what if I rescue you from a bad dream, Granddad, from someone just about to murder you?” Puelles imagined he might say, but he also thought his grandfather would reply: “Don’t risk it.”

No. He would not wake his grandfather.

Rodolfo Puelles said he would go to sleep, went to his room by himself and closed the door; he greeted the books surrounding his bed with a salute — too many books, he thought, an impregnable castle: at times, in the midst of so many books, he experienced the same feeling of desolation that had come over him the day he visited a hospital for the incurable.

Butting it with his forehead, he greeted the small wooden puppet hanging from the ceiling: a tormented Quixote. And he heard the lament of the familiar mouse that dwelled in the wardrobe and lived on those very books, and he stretched out full length, face down, fully dressed and with shoes on, hands linked behind his head: for a minute he made a concerted effort to sleep, yawned and closed his eyes — I’m sleeping now, he thought, I’m already asleep, already dreaming, but deep inside him, Mandarina’s townhouse carried on nagging away: he did not care what happened to the doctor, the night outside his window was an invitation, there were stars in the sky. His parents dropped their guard: he got away.

Of what happened that night — and in the early morning of January 6 that he confused with dusk — Rodolfo Puelles the secret poet would remember absolutely nothing: he would not know whether he arrived at Mandarina’s sleepwalking and sleeptalking, whether he got his girl — although you ought to remember such a cataclysm for ever, he thought — he would not know how he woke up on that isolated corner, with an empty bottle in his hand, he would not be sure whether or not he saw the Carriage of the Afterlife, he did not even remember who he was or what he was called — he panicked — what’s my name? Tomorrow they’ll call me the same as yesterday, but what’s my name today?

“Cain,” he cried.

And down the lonely road he went.

He was arriving in Unfamiliar Square — unfamiliar because he did not recognize it, he only made out a bell tower against the sky — when something landed at his feet: a stone; a dirty scrap of paper, tied with string, around a stone. He looked closely, saw lettering — a message, in the old style — he picked it up. There was no-one in the square, no window opened or closed, nothing to give away anyone who might have just thrown a message in the old-fashioned way. He untied the paper with a shaky hand and read: im the gurl in the shop yu askt yestaday if ther woz lov and i sed no. Well see yu outsyd the chirch taday at ten.

He stroked the paper, smoothing it out, and looked around him: no-one; doors and windows tight shut; the only movement on the street was Furibundo Pita’s jeep, or was it the Carriage of the Afterlife? The fearsome milk dealer was making the most of the early morning to deliver his churns before the party began: the Carriage of the Afterlife cut across the empty square honking and disappeared. He realized he was beside one of those corner shops, with two stone steps outside and a big, green wooden door, all closed up: The Spinning Top. Its old window seemed sealed shut, did someone toss the stone from there? Was it in that shop he’d asked if there was love? Did he ask a girl yesterday? And was that very white church the one for the meeting? He put stone and all into his pocket, feeling hopeful. He made out the church clock: seven in the morning. His date was at ten, White Day would be in full swing, it wouldn’t be long, oh, what to do, where to get another bottle — he fretted, and how cold he felt, how cold.

He stretched out across the pavement, next to the shop, his back against the wall, one leg on top of the other, and slept. He was woken by the enormous marimba some merrymakers from Tumaco were playing right beside him, rehearsing for the procession. He reached out and received the carnival bottle and drank without taking a breath—“here’s to music,” he shouted. A burst of applause comforted him. More people were beginning to circulate for White Day; the first volleys of talcum powder were thrown, streamers were spiralling from roof terraces, they coiled up and down like snakes in the air, menacing him; in the window opposite he saw the extraordinary face of a girl looking out: long black hair framing a white oval, eyes like water, he thought. From the way she was peering, hands clutching the curtains, covering herself from the neck down, he concluded she was naked; you have not disguised your nudity yet; are you my love? Someone at his side said: “It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” and he overheard: “I dreamed the cat was barking, can you believe it?” He felt those radiant eyes upon him: restless, bright with carnival passion, excited by the men passing at her feet — I’ve known some really beautiful girls, but a face with eyes like that, only in Pasto at carnival. “Was it you who threw me the love stone?” he shouted into the uproar of the dance, and knew she would never hear him, but she did because her eyes met his for an instant, and she smiled: was it her?

The door of the shop opened, interrupting them: an ancient woman, at least a hundred years old, whisked away the cobwebs around the door frame with her broom, and swayed rhythmically, to and fro, in time to the music spreading out around them — that can’t be my girl, she’s just a slip of a thing. Several green ostriches ran off down the street, “La Guaneña” was playing like there was no tomorrow; it seemed to him an eagle from the high plateau was flying over the rooftops, up into the carnival sky, a golden eagle, he mused — or a sparrowhawk? — a falcon with a white throat, would that he could open his eyes and fly, “Viva Pasto, Surprise City!” he shouted, I cannot see the volcano from here — he said to no-one, and no-one was listening, Galeras cannot see me, the sacred Urcunina. Where does my girl live? Love’s end: to forgive and be forgiven, all alone thinking of your unique naked voice, this way we will save ourselves from ourselves. Who’ll give me a bit of bread? I’ll laugh about this one day. He despised himself lying there, dirty body across the pavement, time stood still or had passed by, the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles just saw falling bones, bones raining down before his eyes, never-ending, a shower of femurs, craniums, shoulder blades, getting soaked in a downpour of his own bones, he felt wet with blood: it was the aguardiente other drunks were sprinkling in his face. “Rise up, Lazarus,” they said; he answered: “Fetch me Jesus.” He believed time was turning thick, unbreatheable, swarms of insect-children buzzed at his side, who would ever think of bringing them out flying? A puma-man said hello, he wondered whether dogs were taking part in the carnival or if they had hidden them or if they ran away frightened by the drums beating out son to all four points of the compass; he sensed revellers somersaulting past his eyes one by one, the clouds of talc, chests ragged with song, but he did not see a single dog, since leaving home he did not recall seeing one dog, he laughed in amazement, everything in the street turned white, whiter, as though snow had fallen, he shouted — Pasto’s snow, the carnival, Viva Pasto dammit — and could not move.

If that old cook were to appear, one of those witches who no longer appear, a wise woman in the ways of food, then a hearty sancocho would be a miracle, he should eat meat, a poor animal, we even eat insects, one of these days we will consume ourselves — we’re already consuming ourselves — you have to enjoy carnival, what am I waiting for? But he did not manage to get to his feet, scrabbling, the window remained without a face at it, without a girl, once more he wanted to get up in search of the carnival, but it was no use: he fell again — like the Achaean hero, he said — and, when he fell, the earth shook: “what makes the hero weep,” he quoted from memory, “what makes him appeal to the forsaking sea, he is the strongest and fleetest of heroes, the one who could have brought the war to an end, son of a goddess, condemned to a fleeting life, more fleet than he himself: he weeps for Briseis, she of the lovely cheeks, who the gods have taken away, the rancorous gods who do as they please in spite of the heroes,” he kept quiet and waited for applause, heard it all around him, acknowledged it with a wave of the hand, “I love time,” he shouted, and decided to wait, let the carnival come and find me, let the floats come here, let Simón Bolívar come like the punishment you deserve, oh horrible Quiroz, oh Platter you dog, but don’t I have a romantic assignation at the church? He looked for the note he had kept in his pocket and recited it to the world, at the top of his voice; then said “that’s what I call a love poem”—while hungrily eating the paper — now that girl will be mine, thanks to my binge, and she’ll give me the love I asked for; she’ll be the love of my life, she’ll teach me her spelling, we’ll make love three hundred and sixty-five times a day to mock death as it should be mocked, but he had to get to their date. How? He could not move — oh, let her come here, like the carnival. Who goes there? I see you, I’m watching you, why don’t you say hello? Oh, old men, the street, walls, roofs coming down on top of him, numerous different-coloured noises, insatiable voices, unpronounceable faces, and yes, he rolled over, I see them going past. Or was he hallucinating? He saw those poets drunk on light pass by; there they went with their sonorous names: Helcías Martán Góngora and Guillermo Payán Archer, didn’t one of them write that the world is a bitter bazaar of empty souls? Where to run to, where? Shivering, he saw the only great poet, Aurelio Arturo, on his own: dark suit, white hat. And a troop of friends followed; at what point did each of them turn to mist and vanish? He felt tremendous despair at himself, lying there, unable to move, a slave — worse than the whole mass of men who once received “a gift of a day” on which to be happy, far worse than all of them, what good did it do to greet the ghosts of poets passing by? Why all these spectres and Carriages of the Afterlife? When would he be capable of writing pure poetry? Or were the enchanted vaginas his poetry? Did he possess poetry, did poetry possess him? I must go, clear-headed, through the carnival for a minute, to see what’s going on, nothing’s going on, the carnival is pure intoxication, cheer up, but it laid him low to recall that he remembered absolutely nothing of the recent early morning, not one detail, a wink of memory’s eye, nothing. What did he do? Kill?

He thought or dreamed he remembered walking through the outskirts of Pasto, lost; the carnival was thumping down below, but he carried on away from Pasto, stubbornly; he wanted to get as far as Tumaco, drinking. He crossed a bridge over a clear river, a spot he did not know, and saw a horse coming along the dusty highway, black head turned to the side, trotting hesitantly, and, behind it, stumbling along, an old woman, with a black hat and shawl, a lasso in her hands: she did not seem to be coming from any carnival, but there were talc marks on her skirt. From time to time she shouted “hey, hey,” and stopped to catch her breath. He was watching her from the other side of the highway: her legs were swollen, she was barefoot, her feet the colour of soil, she must be sick, the skin on her face was ulcerated, peeling, like she was shedding it. She turned to look at him, for a second, and he was shocked to see her nose split down the middle, an old wound that looked like resin, the two eye teeth protruding over her lip greeted him silently, her eyes flashed ferociously, and she carried on running. She’ll never catch it up, he thought, and, as though she had heard him, she turned her horrible face to look at him again. He closed his eyes, from pity, shame, disgust, panic, in order not to see her, but he carried on suffering that divided woman’s face: he thought it was a face that hated, that hated him and that he hated, it was like revenge, he would dream of her, he thought, and he followed her, he followed them, in spite of himself, up to the highest point of the highway, and spotted them not far off, on a piece of flat level ground, she had managed to lasso the horse around its sweaty neck and was tugging on the slip knot, holding it tight. The horse reared up on its hind legs, surprised to be caught, and pawed the air. She approached, bent over, and continued calling out “hey, hey” until her voice became a triumphant whisper, and the horse stopped pawing, bent its black neck, allowed her to come near and almost touch it and then in a flash of hatred reared up and came down on top of the old woman, kicked her in the chest, knocked her to the ground and set off at a gallop, dragging the rope that snaked bloodily along through the dust on the highway, between curls of smoke. He ran to the old woman and leaned over her: the black hat on one side, white with dust, like she was; her hands fat-palmed and open on the ground, slashed by the rope; thick copper-coloured calves, tattooed with violet scars. He thought he should feel sorry for her, but the wound in the middle of her face stopped him: now it looked like a terrifying laugh, poking fun at him. “That horse is diabolical,” he heard her say — what a sibylline voice, what a shiver-inducing voice—“but today I am more so,” she said, “soon you’ll know what I am,” and he saw her get up as if nothing had happened; her skirt fell open; a bitter smell of burnt wood sprang from her body. Then he heard galloping again, coming closer all the time, thundering, he could not see the horse, where it came from, what place, what region it was galloping towards them from, and now the terror was too much, the whinnying sounded like a whirlwind, the galloping carried on getting closer, he heard it thump inside him, throb, heard his own heart thumping against the ground, Puelles had turned face down, on the paving stone, “the old woman will confront the horse,” he said to passers-by, “the horse will kill her,” he shouted, if his grandfather were to come to collect him, grandfather was up to the job, my saviour, he would be looking for him, he remembered his granddad dancing with a broom — more migratory bottles cut across the crowd from hand to hand, they came and went from one side of the city to the other, someone shouted “drink, dammit, the devil’s at the party,” the floating bottle appeared and Puelles drank, gratefully.

Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López woke up on January 6 in his own bed, without Primavera at his side. It was the most important day of his life: the day of his death — as Enrique Quiroz would put it.

One day earlier, in the parish church, Quiroz himself had said: “I want him alive, so I can be the one to bury him.” And, as Ilyich turned up with no news, he had burst out: “It’s now or never.” He issued orders: eight members of the group, led by Boris — Quiroz’s brother — and Catiri from the plains, would pay a visit to a shed on the outskirts of Pasto that night where they believed — based on unreliable information — the float was to be found. Their mission had but one objective: blow up Bolívar’s carriage, without further ado. Meanwhile, Ilyich and Vladimir would scour heaven and earth for the doctor. And yet, after receiving their orders, the group members did not move. A heavy silence pinned them in their places. It was not their own mission that seemed to shock them — the annihilation of the float — but the mission Quiroz and Platter took upon themselves, a mission they all, in their heart of hearts, considered a done deal, and which for that very reason scared them. Quite simply, they did not want to believe it. And there they stayed, surrounding their leader and Platter, as if waiting for an explanation: Was it all decided? Would they find Doctor Proceso? And then what? Would it really happen? Must it? They did not take their eyes off Quiroz and Platter — astonished, but still incredulous, you might say scared stiff. Quiroz and Platter let themselves be looked at, exalted. It was an oppressive situation, accompanied by a silence that, in spite of everything, was judgemental, and lasted only a few seconds. Quiroz and Platter had flushed; they were so different, but now they looked alike: their gaze was fixed, eyes wide open, as if they had both just been on the receiving end of an identical and terrible insult, and just the two of them, acting as one, were required to do something about it. Ultimately, their attitude and determination convinced the group: they displayed utter conviction that their action was justified; the whole world depended on the result; they were predestined to do this; they were going to kill.

“What are you waiting for?” Quiroz rebuked them. “Get a move on.”

Immediately the group flew from the church, without a word. Their shadows moved resolutely through the night of wet streets. Quiroz and Platter were left alone.

“Shall we do it?” Quiroz yelled.

“Yes,” Platter said, but in a hoarse, glad whisper.

“Yes,” Quiroz repeated. And they both yelled it at once as they set off running into the rain, in search of Doctor Proceso.

And in fact they had looked for him the remainder of the night, fruitlessly: he was not to be found at his house or the houses of any of his abettors. In their frenzy, running from street to street in the rain of January 5, surrounded by the carnival on all sides, Ilyich and Vladimir imagined in despair that they crossed paths with the doctor on more than one occasion and did not recognize him — Pasto was like that, too. And still not knowing how the bombers had fared, when only a few hours remained for sleeping, they agreed to conclude their mission on January 6, during the parade of floats, the most important day of the doctor’s life, the day of his death — Quiroz had said — on he would have to appear so he could be disappeared: it will be the fireworks of our carnival, the great test.

The morning of January 6, a noise like muffled thumping at the foot of his bed had woken the doctor. He discovered the thumps were coming from inside the chest where Primavera kept the sheets. He heard the defeated cry, the hopeless weeping of a child. He wanted to open the trunk, but it was locked; he had to break the catches. To his horror, an utterly terrified boy jumped from the chest and fled without saying a word. His head had been sheared and smeared with bird droppings. Who was it? He heard him go sobbing down the stairs, and out of the house with the distant slamming of a door.

“What’s going on here?” the doctor asked himself.

His clothes from the night of the fifth lay scattered across the floor, still wet, muddy, testament to who knew what meetings and misses, where are you now Primavera, what are you up to? He put on his dressing gown and leaned out of the window overlooking the garden. He saw Sinfín, Floridita and the maid gathered round an ape—the ape—lying face up on the lawn, in the shape of a cross.

Homero.

“What’s going on here?” the doctor asked.

“Nothing, señor, just that Homero got drunk and nobody can wake him up,” Sinfín answered. “He’s gone round scaring half of Pasto dressed up as a monkey, but it looks like he scared himself the most.”

“Take off the costume, and let him breathe,” the doctor said, “I’ll come down.” He was going to step back from the window but a burning question got the better of him: “Where’s my wife?”

“She went to pick up Luz de Luna, who slept at her aunt Matilde’s. She’ll be back soon. She said for you to wait for her.”

Sinfín was examining him from below; her eyes, accustomed to making things out in the distance, continued to scrutinize him inside and out; her sly face smiled indulgently:

“The señora woke up with you, Doctor, it’s just that she woke up first, very early. She had to go for Luz de Luna: the girl stayed the night at her aunt’s, without permission, you see? Wait for the señora, and don’t despair, what else can you do?”

“The carriage,” the doctor said. “Has the procession started yet?”

“It will in an hour. Just stand on Avenida de los Estudiantes and you’ll see it go past sooner or later, but wouldn’t you rather wait for the señora? Wait and see it with the señora, it’ll be nicer.”

The doctor did not reply. His whole life turned on a different question: where could Primavera have gone, with whom? The excuse about Luz de Luna sounded ridiculous to him — and he considered himself ridiculous too, for doubting. He did not want to remember the details of the night before, at the late Belencito’s house, under the window with witnesses, he did not want to recall those details: their bittersweet aftertaste was embarrassing to him. He convinced himself to go out and find Primavera at the height of White Day: having her in front of him, face to face, he would know what to do, or they both would.

When he got down to the garden, Sinfín and the maid were pulling the costume from the gardener: they had just taken off the gorilla’s head, exposing his reddened face, wrinkled and wet with aguardiente. Completely drunk, he was still in a stupor, he babbled incoherently, slapping himself, and all in front of Floridita, an observer of every gesture, every stutter, deliciously fascinated. Floridita’s presence reminded him immediately of the locked-in, crying boy, a few minutes before. He was shocked observing her, so calm. He heard her say:

“He looks dead.” And she nudged the gardener with the toe of her sandal.

“Leave him, girl,” Sinfín said. “Let him sleep, he needs it.”

The doctor picked up the disguise, and, just as he had done exactly ten days earlier, slung it over his shoulder. Then he turned to his daughter:

“There was a boy locked in the linen chest.”

“So that’s where he was,” Floridita sounded surprised. “We were playing hide-and-seek yesterday. Nobody could find him, he beat us all.”

“Oh, Floridita,” Sinfín butted in, and shook her head. “It’s a wicked, wicked, wicked world.”

And she said no more.

“He ran off, that boy,” the doctor said. “Who is he?”

“Seráfico’s son,” Sinfín told him. “I thought he had already escaped, yesterday. But he’s a sharp one, he’ll know how to get to Sandoná.”

“You invited him to the flower party?” The doctor was amazed.

“He’s a good boy,” was all Sinfín said by way of an answer. “He can’t read or write, but he likes singing. Thank God he’s still alive.”

Floridita and the maid burst out laughing. Sinfín showed her disapproval with a shake of the head.

“It’s a wicked, wicked, wicked world,” she said again.

Sinfín had her eyes half-closed, sorrowing, on the verge of tears — the doctor thought — and she remained engrossed, as if she were glimpsing, on the narrow horizon of the garden, everything to come, the next few years, and years far into the future, and found them grey, unchanging, really identical, but ominous too: she gave herself little pats on the forehead while saying, like a complaint to no-one in particular, “it’s a wicked, wicked, wicked world.”

The doctor ordered Floridita to go to her room:

“No carnival for you today. Shut yourself in there, till tomorrow.”

Floridita shrugged.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I can play on my own.”

And off she went.

Then they heard a groan from the gardener, as if he were waking up.

“The poor thing’s lovesick,” Sinfín said, “and doesn’t learn; he suffers without learning a thing, suffers right in his guts.”

“Oh, my darling,” Homero said, “where am I? What did they do to me? It’s so hot, what bastards, where are they? I want my revenge.”

He opened his eyes and looked around him; he did not seem to recognize anyone, but he did seem to remember something, very far off:

“Take me to that bandit girl, she killed me, bring her to me, living without her is impossible.”

The maid, all ears, burst out laughing again; she sought the doctor’s eyes — as though summoning his approval, but the doctor did not share in the joke.

“Love is made of glass, my friend,” Sinfín said, leaning in towards the gardener’s ear, “sooner or later it shatters. Don’t let it get you down, take my advice, a good lunch and plenty of sleep, that’s all you need.”

“So feed him up,” the doctor said, “and let him sleep. You’re always right, Genoveva. Bring him back to life.”

“Doctor, dear doctor,” Homero said, recognizing him and stretching out his arms. “Give me back the monkey costume. It’s unlucky. I’ll burn it.”

But the doctor had already left the garden.

“What are you dressing up as, Papá?”

The doctor was in his room, about to put on the great ape head. Floridita was watching him from the doorway, without emotion. If that was his daughter, he thought, she was unrecognizable. Anyway, shouldn’t she be shut in her room? Why did she ask that question if she already knew what he was dressing up as? Or did she want to initiate a conversation, be forgiven? But what was that about, locking a little boy in a chest all night? And the shorn head and bird muck? How would he punish her? And yet, a kind of tenderness took hold of him: she was his baby girl.

“As an orangutan,” he said.

There was a strange silence; the doctor thought it was the first time he and Floridita had looked each other in the eye.

“Do you want me to tell you why I’m dressing up?”

He thought that he finally had the chance for a chat with his daughter. He had already thought of his answer — when she asked him why—“All the better to frighten you,” he would say, imitating the wolf in the story. Then he would give her a hug.

However, Floridita did not oblige:

“No,” she said, “I don’t want to know why.”

She said it as if she were winning a game.

She was leaning up against the door frame, looking at him with glinting eyes; at that moment she looked as though she was either going to cry or insult him; she turned and fled. He finished putting on the giant ape head: the mechanism in the throat did not work; he heard his voice just like normal. “What’s going on here?” he had said. He had his daughter’s glinting eyes engraved on his memory. “She’s another Primavera,” he thought, “she’s more like her than she is me: she hates; she’s stronger than me.”

Minutes after Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López left his house dressed as an orangutan, a carnival donkey arrived at his door looking for him.

Floridita, Genoveva Sinfín, the maid and the revived gardener were leaning over the balcony. Maltilde Pinzón, recently arrived in the company of her two sons and Luz de Luna, was presiding: they were all waiting for Primavera so they could go out and watch the parade; where on earth was she? Maltilde was getting impatient: Primavera had them all used to her ways. And what a surprise; suddenly a participant in the parade itself appeared in their street, under the balcony: a gleaming carnival donkey no less, capering about in front of them, among the happy people. They even saw that the multicoloured donkey stopped by the house, bowed as if in greeting, and kicked softly at the door, like it was knocking. The music around them got louder: an explosion of tambourines and drums. They saw the man who was inside the donkey’s head emerge: his painted face was a grimace of delight, he had his hair streaked red and blue; he drew a bottle from inside his jacket and waved it about.

“And the good doctor?” he shouted up to the gathering on the balcony. “I want to drink a toast with him.”

Sinfín yelled that the doctor was not at home:

“Wait for him, he’ll be back.”

“We’ll look for him,” shouted the smiling Quiroz. He was going to get back inside the donkey head, when the little girl on the balcony caught his attention:

“Are you looking for Papá?”

“Of course,” Quiroz said.

“Well you won’t find him,” the girl hollered back. “He’s dressed up.”

Quiroz paused in suspense; the girl’s face glowed, as if she were saying: “Aren’t you going to ask me what Papá dressed up as?” At that moment Platter Ilyich came out from inside the donkey; he wiped the sweat from his forehead, his painted face was running, his hair a yellow clump.

“And what is he dressed up as?” he hollered.

The girl did not hesitate:

“An orangutan,” she told them.

And, not yet knowing why, Genoveva Sinfín felt as if the air were actually growing dim, the feeling of ill omen that was running through her that morning solidified, and she crossed herself as she heard Floridita’s reply.

And why an orangutan? Why this costume? Suffocation. Do I imagine discovering her without her discovering me, following her without her knowing who I am? How pathetic.

No-one pointed at him, his costume lacked soul: the ape was just one more participant in the carnival; Homero had really made him hate it now. He was skirting the street full of hands and heads stretching towards the avenue like branches; at least the disguise meant they did not recognize him. No floats were visible from the Obelisk; the carnival was growing apace; any arm, any hand could stretch out towards him from anywhere, stroke him, squeeze him or strangle him, he thought. At that moment he was assailed by a trio of formidable pigs, yoked together as horses from the crusades: the red crosses glowed from silk cloths covering their flanks, they squealed madly, he had to jump out the way; a dwarf couple were driving them along; very close by, a knot of black women were dancing with lit candles in their hands; one of them started to dance in front of the gorilla: her silhouette blazed amid beads of sweat; he heard horses’ hooves clattering on the pavements, heard their whinnying; he smelled the pungent smoke of marijuana; beardless young men were smoking it beside him, sucking eagerly on the joints; someone yelled that they could see the first float of the carnival coming, elbows and knees shoved him; a little girl was crying, lost, she ran without direction through the carnival, not a puff of talc on her dress — as if protected under an invisible glass dome — in her hand she was carrying a sunflower bigger than herself. A finger sank itself into his hairy chest, three, four, five times; a voice:

“I know who’s in there.”

It was Matilde Pinzón. Alone. Without Primavera.

“I still don’t,” the doctor replied.

“Can’t you find her?” she asked. Her tongue glistened very red; she seemed about to burst out laughing.

“Find who?”

“Go home and wait for her,” Matilde said, pitying him, “I’ll look for her for you.”

The doctor did not know what to reply. Matilde Pinzón looked just like Primavera, but something repulsive set her apart, she was a sad woman, her expression a perpetual sneer. It felt inexplicable to him to be discovered in his ape costume by none other than Matilde Pinzón; how did she find out?

“Justo Pastor,” she went on, “do your bit and everything will work out, you and Primavera are the ideal couple, you understand each other, you hear one another without speaking.”

“Yes,” the doctor told her, he and Primavera understood each other so well that he was forever losing things and she found them all:

“Now, for example, I’m out looking for her.”

Matilde Pinzón started to laugh.

“Then first you’ll have to find her,” she said, “so she can tell you where she is. What a sense of humour you have, Justo Pastor, at least you still have that.”

And she moved off: an older man, who was not her husband, was waiting for her cagily, one arm open; the doctor recognized him, the fabulously wealthy but now decrepit Luisito Cetina, owner of the Luz del Pacífico hotel chain. He saw them slink furtively into the crowd. The sun grew stronger; the ape got further towards the edge of the avenue, not just pushing, but pushing people right over, and no-one complained; it was the fiesta.

He did not want to find out what or who was parading, he wanted to lose himself as soon as possible; an orchestra was announced; he felt as though they had turned some incredibly powerful lights on the day, out of nowhere; the ear-splitting orchestra began to rock the pavement to its core, the crowd thundered applause, bodies swayed desperately to and fro as one, faces daubed with powder and paint rubbed up against one another, a surge of multicoloured skirts dazzled him, two girls who were dancing — streamers and sawdust like glue in their hair — kissed greedily, far gone, happy; he craned his hairy ape head into the cleavages of celebrating women, one or another hung on to his arm a few seconds, a drunk span around crazily on one leg and did not fall, the women seemed to want him to, but the drunk did not fall, he did not fall; a bald man rubbed his eyes, bawling that they had thrown flour and lemon juice at him, the tarmac smelled of urine, dung, he forced a way through and reached the side of the avenue and leaned out; a troupe of old people were dancing a waltz: seven or nine columns of geriatrics enduring the morning sun, daintily dancing the waltz played for them by the San Pablo band, made up of musicians older than the dancers themselves. The bodies, their outer trappings — he thought, feeling sorry for them — they do what they can manage for us, what they can manage, should I get drunk? They were all at least ninety years old, he reckoned, from the Don Ezekiel Home for the Elderly— according to the banner — and some of them pretty senile, more in the next world than this one, he thought, it’s well worth dying while dancing without knowing we just died. Pushed by the crowd, a girl squashed her face against the orangutan’s hairy chest, and flapped her arms in distress; the ape embraced her and let her go, as if moved to pity, with tender little taps on her cheeks: those nearest laughed; the old people’s strange waltz started to twirl right in front of him; he heard someone asking: “Are they really old folk, or are they wearing corpse masks?” And someone answered: “Of course they’re old folk, but they dance like children; they’re made of stern stuff.” And a woman’s voice: “There are real nuns parading too, three blocks from here, and real lunatics, a lot further behind, the mad from San Rafael, the genuine article.” Another voice chipped in: “They say that in the prisoners’ troupe, the prisoners dressed as prisoners are real prisoners, and they swore to go back to jail when the carnival’s over.” “If I was a prisoner, I wouldn’t go back,” somebody said, and someone else: “I would, your word is your word, and your word is sacred.”

At that point Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López did not know which he would prefer, to find Bolívar’s carriage or to find Primavera in the crowd. Primavera would be best, he thought, to give her a fright, to cover her eyes with his great mitts and ask, throatily: “Guess who?” Frighten her in order to kiss her, or the other way around, he thought.

One of the ancient couples waltzing, she and he exactly alike, siblings in decrepitude, saintly smiles on toothless mouths, turning very slowly, came to an ill-timed halt beside him. In the old lady’s eyes was the look of someone about to pass out. He heard her say: “I can’t go on,” and her partner: “We’ll have a rest,” and she replied: “It’s not the dance I can’t go on with, it’s life,” and they separated themselves from the procession, hand in hand, heartbroken. No-one came to their aid. The doctor took off the great ape head: “Go and get some fresh air and no more dancing,” he ordered, like the doctor he was. Someone offered them a bottle of aguardiente, which he turned down; he took the old people by the arm and led them to a nearby tent, where the different soloists and trios were taking turns to play. He sought, found and fought over two chairs for them. Just then, Pasto’s most glorious musicians greeted the audience from the stage: Maestro Nieto, on the requinto, and Chato Guerrero on guitar. They were announcing the already legendary “Viejo Dolor,” to be played as a foxtrot, which made the old lady swoon with emotion: “Don’t let me die without hearing it.” The public uttered cries of “viva!” for Maestro Nieto, famous not only for his “Viejo Dolor,” but the phrase he once used to describe his musical abilities: I can’t read a note, but nobody notices. The doctor listened to the opening cadenzas of the foxtrot for a magical minute and moved away. He had the ape head in his hands, undecided whether or not to put it back on: he was dripping with sweat; he decided to plunge into the broad current of the crowd and strike out in the opposite direction to the way the parade was going in order to finally encounter the floats, one by one. There, astonished, he heard a woman shouting, calling him by name. He froze. The shout came again, from a nearby balcony. He moved forward until he was underneath it, beside an unfamiliar house: the doorway teemed with bodies going in and coming out with considerable difficulty. In the middle of that balcony brimming with women, the pious Alcira Sarasti laughed and stretched her bare arms towards him:

“Come up, Doctor, what are you doing with that ape head? Come up and we’ll watch the floats from here.”

“I don’t think I can come up,” the doctor shouted. “There’s an absolute forest of people.”

And he put the big ape head on again — she recognized me, he thought, what if I bump into the widow? What’ll I do with two lovers at once?

“Then I’ll come down,” Alcira shouted, and disappeared from the balcony.

He waited for her a good long time, under a crushing sun, but she did not come. At one point he thought he saw her head float past on a sea of heads, going under and coming up again, and then he saw her no more: it was as if the crowd had swallowed her up. The sea of heads was crashing on the shore of the avenue; at last the first carnival float was seen approaching. He did not need to move: the entire mass of merrymakers, like a river, dragged him along to the foot of the float. And still he did not manage to make out the theme, the spirit of the float; he was at its feet, but he could not guess what it was about, it presented such a vast spectacle to his eyes, an edifice; to take it on board in its full enormity you had to be on the balcony where Sarasti had shouted from. And he read the notice on it, a banner suspended between the feet of an unidentifiable animal: WHEN THE POPPIES FLOWER. It was not his Bolívar float. In a sort of royal box, stuck halfway up, he saw four girls dancing: the sequins on their miniscule costumes flashed in the sun; clouds of talcum powder swirled out around their ankles, streamers flew through the air; “It’s the House of the Sun,” the crowd guessed, and the titanic animal seemed to agree — half fish, half lion; huge seahorses swam about, a resounding jeer was heard on all sides, the doctor wondered who the crowd was laughing at — is it me? — and he looked himself up and down: he was an ape, white with powder, but no-one seemed to see him. He continued to overhear absurd comments: “My bitch and my grandma are going there,” “They’re the governor’s canaries,” and he raised his eyes higher, as the orchestra exploded over his head; then he discovered the queen of the carnival, beauty of beauties, almost naked, jiggling about at the very top of the float, shimmying on a narrow beam; she held a small sign against the triangle of her crotch which read: TROY WAS HERE.

The ape allowed the destination of the crowd to pull him along. He thought that sooner or later, by chance in all the commotion, he would come across Primavera or Bolívar’s carriage, whichever cropped up first. He would receive them gratefully, as one might receive infinite repose, but he would abandon Bolívar’s carriage to the mercy of the world, and Primavera he would take home, to bed, and into his arms, he thought. And yet, after an hour adrift he lost hope: corner followed corner with-out a sighting, the carnival soon smothered him: Primavera was nowhere to be found, better to return home as soon as possible and wait for her — as the world seemed to be advising him. But immediately after coming to this decision it became impossible for him to go towards any destination other than where the crowd was heading. He made out a carnival donkey on the other side of the avenue, a donkey separate from the group of weavers who were parading along: the donkey was spinning rapidly around among the revellers. Me and that donkey are the only animals here, he thought, and he examined himself again, inside his ape suit — what was it for? Wouldn’t it be better to drink to the point of oblivion, turn into smoke blown away on the wind? Then the mob seemed to push him towards the spinning donkey, and, funnily enough, from the other pavement the crowd seemed push the donkey towards him. The multitude lapped around them, like dark waters opening up to the point of devouring them — like one more carnival game.

A few metres away, General Lorenzo Aipe and Primavera Pinzón observed him for the last time. They had discovered him long before, when he took off his ape head to speak to the old people, but under the balcony where he shouted to Sarasti “there’s an absolute forest of people” was where they properly recognized him, and it was where Primavera did not know what to do: she did not know herself, her life and her daughters, she did not know whether to run to him, embrace him or lose him again — she thought — for all eternity. When she realized she did not love him, she felt a tremendous sorrow for him, to the point of tears, but composed herself in time: General Lorenzo Aipe did not notice her emotional state. The general was sweating, dressed as Bolívar: he could think of no better costume to taunt Doctor Proceso with, a Simón Bolívar in civilian clothing: tall straw hat, with red-and-blue poncho, woollen jacket and breeches, and long leather boots.

That morning General Lorenzo Aipe had personally taken charge of Bolívar’s carriage. His soldiers located the float a day earlier, but he chose the dawn of the sixth to surprise the artisans and confiscate it. None of them put up any resistance: some were in nightclothes, others in their underwear; they were frightened men, women and children, of all ages. They had hidden the float in a shed on the outskirts of Pasto, on one side of the cold highway leading to Lake Cocha, and now it had been found: soaring up like a ship in full sail, it seemed to touch the sky; he was a monster, this Bolívar pulled along by girls, Emperor of the Andes. But that early morning, Arbeláez the sculptor, Martín Umbría and Maestro Abril, makers of the float, lost heart: the soldiers spread out around the inside of the shed, pointing guns at them.

On the night of the fifth they had resisted an attempt by hooded men to blow up the float, who besieged them without order or agreement, and who — following their strange engagement — took flight, in the rain. They threatened them with blowing the float sky high in the procession—“and you’re responsible for putting the citizens of Pasto at risk”—but nothing more, only words; they fled, the gun that one of them was holding went off in his hand, which made the women laugh. Two more fired without consequence: one hit the ceiling, above his own head, and a cascade of falling plaster turned him white, and the other struck Boozy, Maestro Abril’s dog, and did not even hurt him, it was just a graze, but they heard him yelp, which inflamed the children. “It’s not the dog’s fault,” they cried, and the fight began. The youngest artisans easily took care of those in hoods, who outnumbered them. When the makers entered the fray, genuinely determined to defend the float from the destroyers, the hooded ones were already “scampering away like guinea pigs”—according to Maestro Abril. And, yet, the winds of victory did not stay the course: now it was not a matter of hooded men — more amusing than dangerous — but the army itself. “Sonofabitch,” they said, this is serious: the army was pointing guns at their chests; they were surrounded.

They confiscated the float, along with the truck carrying it and everything: Martín Umbría’s truck.

General Lorenzo Aipe considered the mission accomplished. He regretted the military deployment, and that was what upset him most; he ordered the soldiers to return to base, “quietly,” and climbed into the jeep waiting for him; a cinch, the only tricky bit had been finding out where the float was hidden. Now all he thought about was his Simón Bolívar costume, and blonde Primavera Pinzón, naked. He retired, leaving an officer and seven soldiers in charge of transporting the float; he did not even want to look at it in any detail, but he did order it to be covered up as soon as possible: “Don’t let anybody see it,” he said, “that’s the main thing.”

The soldiers proceeded to cover it up immediately, even though it was early and all Pasto was sleeping. Shrouded, the float looked like who knows what kind of folly-surprise, advancing through the streets of Pasto in the early morning of the sixth.

They were taking it to the barracks to dismantle it.

There were seven soldiers and their officer — later people would say there were twenty, fifty, a hundred and many more. They were not far from the barracks when Martín Umbría, Tulio Abril, Cangrejito Arbeláez and the rest of the artisans caught them up — backed up by their wives and children. The soldiers did not suspect the attack. They thought it was a parade group arriving in Pasto to join in White Day: they were dancing, throwing streamers and drinking. Perhaps the only peculiar thing was the time: too early in the morning for such larks. But anything was possible at carnival.

It was the same early hour that in another part of the city the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles confused with dusk.

Now it really was getting dark, but the carnival was still in full swing, and it danced in front of the Spinning Top, in that Pasto street where Rodolfo Puelles still lay, not moving.

“Okay, Puelles, wake up,” a voice said. “We’ve been looking for you.”

And a different voice:

“The moment of truth has arrived, Puelles. Get up. They’re here, and they want to meet you; on your feet, Puelles. The time has come to walk.”

He opened his eyes. Suddenly he saw Quiroz: his head. Quiroz moved to the side to allow Ilyich’s head to appear.

They had both shaved off their hair.

Platter Ilyich laughed, his mouth very wide open.

“They want to meet the chosen ones, and you are a chosen one, of course.”

He bent down and placed a hand like a bird’s talon on Puelles’s shoulder:

“Let’s go. It’s getting late.”

Quiroz looked at his watch:

“They’re not far away.”

Puelles started to get up: the bird’s talon weighed his shoulder down, rather than helped him. It must be five o’clock; it was getting dark. Puelles panted, gulped down air. He still felt exultant:

“And where did you leave the donkey?”

Quiroz did not miss a beat:

“We showed off the donkey this morning,” he said. “We got delayed by a monkey.”

It was the only time they ever laughed, all together. In his delirium, the secret poet did not imagine what monkey they were referring to; Rodolfo Puelles did not imagine anything at all.

The carnival blazed up more brightly, right across the street. The music strolling past got louder: a group of revellers were dancing a step away from them. All of a sudden, as if obeying the impulse for one last burst of joy, or because a suspicion of the sacrifice entered his head for the first time and he wanted to run away, Rodolfo Puelles threw himself into the centre of the human wheel and began to dance, transfigured, pop-eyed, shouting “viva!”

Quiroz and Platter stayed at the edge, looking at him in astonishment: they had not expected him to do that. Platter took a step forward, to catch hold of Puelles.

“Leave him,” Quiroz said. “Let him finish dancing.”

The little carnival band was playing “La Danza de la Chiva”: it finished with a clatter of cymbals, the trumpet bade farewell, and a sea of applause came crashing down. The people dancing offered Puelles a bottle, and Puelles drank, he drank and went on drinking, down to the last drop.

“That’s it, that’s it,” Platter told him, “have one for the road, because we’re taking you to paradise now.”

“Follow us,” Quiroz said.

And Puelles followed them.

He thought that he did not mind.

The light from the sun became reddish, a cold red light, eerie at this hour of explosions. They made their way quickly through the streets, despite the crowds.

They left the carnival, which meant, in effect, leaving Pasto.

It had been Zulia Iscuandé who called on the artisans to put up a fight — they had already given the float up for lost. “We can’t end on bad terms with the doctor,” she said, “and it’s not about his money; the fact is that we made the carriage ourselves and those heartless bastards are going to wreck it.” Cangrejito Arbeláez had no illusions: even if they did get the float back it would be difficult to exhibit it, with the army in the way plus the balaclava boys, who would soon surround them, pop up where they might; the Pastusos were the only hope, he thought, the people of Pasto might defend the carriage, but how? It was unlikely they could count on this defence: this was a fiesta, people went out to dance, how does one arrange a battle overnight for the sake of a carnival float? A float that only seemed like a bit of fun at the outset. The urgent thing was to hide the carriage from obliteration, it would have to bide its time for all Pasto to come to its defence.

He heard the artisans shouting “viva!” for the doctor. “Thanks to him, on behalf of the float-makers,” he heard: “We’re not going to abandon him, dammit,” “Let’s get a move on,” “Here we go.” The sculptor observed the makers’ large, deeply lined hands, which looked carved from stone; they had painted their faces; they got out bottles of aguardiente and pretended to start the January 6 binge, but they were off to recover the carriage from the hands of the army, no less. And they set off at a run through the sleeping streets, in pursuit of the stolen float.

It was also Zulia Iscuandé who started the battle. She offered a swig of aguardiente to the soldier nearest her, who was perched up on the shrouded carriage, holding the bottle out to him, and when the soldier went to take it, he got smacked around the face with it instead. In minutes the soldiers were disarmed and hurled from the carriage as if by an unstoppable whirlwind — with the same rage and courage as in the days of Agustín Agualongo, Cangrejito reflected while he fought. It was a silent and speedy battle. Just one shot was fired, which got lost in the cries of “viva!” from the assailants: the officer fired; he was driving the truck the float was embedded on, and his shot hit Maestro Umbría in the arm, up on the running board alongside him; in spite of the burning bullet, the maestro stretched out his other arm and took the officer by the throat, pulling him out through the little window by brute force. The few inquisitive onlookers who caught a glimpse did not understand what was going on, just a “dressed” float, as they put it, and a few soldiers chatting with some early birds. They were not chatting, they were grateful to still be alive: the attackers occupied the cab of the truck, the various vantage points on the carriage, and made off.

In the isolated neighbourhood, which Puelles was struggling to recognize — wasn’t it here I played spinning tops, as a kid, and won? — the dirty, narrow streets of unfinished cement houses, looking like black, upside-down skeletons as night fell, started to oppress him, but he was crushed altogether by the shock he got on the last corner, in the dusk, when the houses were already petering out: three or four boys were playing war, they fell and died, came back to life, killed again.

Now Puelles saw wheat fields, not far away, behind the last house.

“And what have you got in your pocket, Puelles, a stone?”

Platter had slipped a hand into his trouser pocket and went on, amazed:

“Yes, it is a stone, for pity’s sake. For killing wood pigeons? Self-defence?”

“And that cross?” Puelles said to Platter, pointing to the gold crucifix dangling from his neck. “Did Father Bunch give it to you?”

Platter stopped walking.

“Christ was the first of us,” Quiroz said. “Don’t sneer, Puelles. We have a religion too.”

He signalled to Platter for him to keep on walking with them.

“Ah, religion,” Puelles said, and once more the hidden poet peeped out. “Mankind’s worst and most perfect intolerance.”

“Yeah right,” Platter said. “Now you’ve taken it into your head to talk like that crazy Chivo, you philosophizing prick. Who do you think you are? You want to have it out with me?” And he broke into a string of rapid insults, which Puelles ignored; but he could not help laughing on hearing the last: revolting revisionist.

I can laugh, Puelles thought, it’s still possible.

“Steady, Ilyich,” Quiroz said. “There’s time.”

They had left the neighbourhood of grey houses behind them now. Everything was green in the failing light. Now they were treading on soft, lush grass, the damp earth. Around him Puelles saw rolling hills knitted together, the ruddy sky. They carried on towards the fields of high yellow wheat, swaying just a little further on, ruffled by the wind. Puelles no longer felt the desire to talk, to ask anything. Much less to flee. It was as if a great lethargy towards everything and everyone, including himself, were stored up in his limbs, in his intelligence. He remembered the dead policeman again, like so many times before, and now he could not go on, he could not go on. He could not go on. And he smiled dumbly; he wondered whether, when he died, as had happened when he killed, he was going to piss himself with fright. Neither Platter nor Quiroz paid him any attention.

Now they were crossing the field sown with wheat. The stalks were tall, they brushed Puelles’s chest.

“Ah, Puelles,” Quiroz said. “Why did you have to talk so much?”

Puelles did not answer.

“Relax, Puelles, we’re not going to do anything to you,” Quiroz went on. His voice had gone hoarse; he seemed to want for air. “We’re just going to execute you.”

Puelles felt an immense tiredness: when I die I’ll think of Grand-father, or will I think of Toña Noria’s enchanted vagina, enchanted because she never gave it to me?

The tremendous fatigue befuddled him. He thought it was not just a fatigue of his bones, but reached far beyond him, to the entire universe.

“Here, here,” he told them.

He wanted to rest in that place, hidden in the middle of yellow wheat, at dusk, looking at the sky. He felt exhausted, and yet, surprising himself, remembered he had often run the marathon at school and won, the hundred-metre dash too, a hare, and, as if dreaming, he broke into a run, and believed he ran faster than a hare, turned to look, they were close, deranged faces, arms stretched out, they could touch him, but he would get home and carry on to Bogotá and then Singapore, he thought, and thought on, managing to have time to think — they’ll say Puelles got away.

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

They fled with the float, they fled.

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