"Seriously," the priest insisted, "I can talk to the dentist."
The mayor made a gesture of impatience.
"Do whatever you want, Father."
He lay face up in the hammock, his eyes closed, his hands behind his neck, breathing with a wrathful rhythm. The pain began to give way. When he opened his eyes again, Father Angel was looking at him silently, sitting beside the hammock.
"What brought you over here?" the mayor asked.
"Cesar Montero," the priest said without any preamble. "The man has to confess."
"He's incommunicado," the mayor said. "Tomorrow, after the preliminary hearing, you can confess him. He's got to be sent off on Monday."
"He's got forty-eight hours," the priest said.
"And I've had this tooth for two weeks," said the mayor.
In the dark room the mosquitoes were beginning to buzz. Father Angel looked out the window and saw an intense pink cloud floating on the river.
"What about the meal problem?" he asked.
The mayor left his hammock to close the balcony door. "I did my duty," he said. "He doesn't want to bother his wife or have food sent from the hotel." He began to spray insecticide around the room. Father Angel looked in his pocket for a handkerchief so as not to sneeze, but instead of the handkerchief he found a wrinkled letter. "Agh," he exclaimed, trying to smooth out the letter with his fingers. The mayor interrupted his fumigation. The priest covered his nose, but it was a useless effort: he sneezed twice. "Sneeze, Father," the mayor said. And he emphasized with a smile:
"We're living in a democracy."
Father Angel also smiled. Showing the sealed envelope, he said: "I forgot to mail this letter." He found the handkerchief up his sleeve and blew his nose, irritated by the insecticide. He was still thinking about Cesar Montero.
"It's as if you had him on bread and water," he said.
"If that's what he wants," the mayor said, "we can't force him to eat."
"What bothers me most is his conscience," the priest said.
Without taking his handkerchief away from his nose, he followed the mayor around the room with his eyes until he finished fumigating. "He must be very upset if he thinks he's going to be poisoned," he said. The mayor put the spray can on the floor.
"He knows that everybody loved Pastor," he said.
"Cesar Montero too," the priest replied.
"But it so happens that it's Pastor who's dead."
The priest contemplated the letter. The light was becoming hazy. "Pastor," he murmured. "He didn't have time to confess." The mayor turned on the light before getting into the hammock.
"I'll feel better tomorrow," he said. "You can confess him after the proceedings. Does that suit you?"
Father Angel agreed. "It's just for the repose of his conscience," he repeated. He stood up with a solemn movement. He recommended to the mayor that he not take too many painkillers, and the mayor answered back reminding him not to forget the letter.
"And something else, Father," the mayor said. "Try in any way you can to talk to the tooth-puller." He looked at the curate, who was beginning to go down the stairs, and added as before, smiling: "This all contributes to the consolidation of peace."
Sitting by the door of his office, the postmaster watched the afternoon die. When Father Angel gave him the letter, he went into his office, moistened with his tongue a fifteen-centavo stamp, for airmail and the surcharge for construction. He kept on digging in his desk drawer. When the street lights went on, the priest put several coins on the counter and left without saying goodbye.
The postmaster was still searching in the drawer. A moment later, tired of rummaging through papers, he wrote on the corner of the envelope in ink: No five-centavo stamps on hand. He signed underneath and put the stamp of the office there.
That night, after rosary, Father Angel found a dead mouse floating in the holy water font. Trinidad was setting the traps in the baptistery. The priest grabbed the animal by the tip of the tail.
"You're going to cause trouble," he told Trinidad, waving the dead mouse in front of her. "Don't you know that some of the faithful bottle holy water to give their sick to drink?"
"What's that got to do with it?" Trinidad asked.
"Got to do with it?" the priest answered. "Well, just that the sick people will be drinking holy water with arsenic in it."
Trinidad reminded him that he still hadn't given her the money for the arsenic. "It's plaster," she said, and revealed the method: she had put plaster in the corners of the church, the mouse ate some and a moment later, desperately thirsty, it had gone to drink at the font. The water solidified the plaster in its stomach.
"In any case," the priest said, "it would be better if you came and got the money for arsenic. I don't want any more dead mice in the holy water."
In the study a delegation of Catholic Dames was waiting for him, headed by Rebeca Asis. After giving Trinidad the money for the arsenic, the priest commented on the heat in the room and sat down at the desk facing the three Dames, who were waiting in silence.
"At your service, my distinguished ladies."
They looked at each other. Rebeca Asis then opened a fan with a Japanese landscape painted on it, and said without mystery:
"It's the matter of the lampoons, Father."
With a sinuous voice, as if she were telling a fairy tale, she recounted the alarm of the people. She said that even though Pastor's death could be interpreted "as something entirely personal," respectable families felt obliged to be concerned about the lampoons.
Leaning on her parasol, Adalgisa Montoya, the oldest of the three, was more explicit:
"We Catholic Dames have decided to intervene in the matter."
Father Angel reflected for a few seconds. Rebeca Asis took a deep breath, and the priest wondered how that woman could exhale such a hot smell. She was splendid and floral, possessing a dazzling whiteness and passionate health. The priest spoke, his gaze fixed on an indefinite point.
"My feeling," he said, "is that we shouldn't pay any attention to the voice of scandal. We should place ourselves above such things and go on observing God's law as we have done up to now."
Adalgisa Montoya approved with a movement of her head. But the others didn't agree: it seemed to them that "this calamity can bring fatal consequences in the long run." At that moment the loudspeaker at the movie theater coughed. Father Angel slapped his forehead. "Excuse me," he said, while he searched in the drawer for the Catholic censorship list.
"What are they showing?"
"Pirates of Space," said Rebeca Asis. "It's a war picture."
Father Angel looked for it in the alphabetical listing, muttering fragmentary titles while he ran his index finger over the long classified list. He stopped to turn the page.
"Pirates of Space."
He was running his finger horizontally, looking for the moral classification, when he heard the voice of the manager instead of the expected record, announcing the cancellation of the performance because of bad weather. One of the women explained that the manager had made that decision in view of the fact that the public demanded its money back if rain interrupted the movie before it was half over.
"Too bad," Father Angel said. "It was approved for all."
He closed the notebook and continued:
"As I was saying, this is an observant town. Nineteen years ago, when they assigned me to the parish, there were eleven cases of public concubinage among the important families. Today there is only one left and I hope for a short time only."
"It's not for us," Rebeca Asis said. "But these poor people ..."
"There's no cause for worry," the priest went on, indifferent to the interruption. "One has to remember how much the town has changed. In those days a Russian ballerina gave a show for men only in the cockpit and at the end she auctioned off everything she was wearing."
Adalgisa Montoya interrupted him.
"That's just the way it was," she said.
Indeed, she remembered the scandal as
it had been told to her: when the dancer was completely naked, an old man began to shout from the stands, went up to the top bench, and urinated all over the audience. They'd told her that the rest of the men, following his example, had ended up urinating on each other in the midst of maddening shouts.
"Now," the priest went on, "it's been proven that this is the most observant town in the whole apostolic prefecture."
He elaborated his thesis. He referred to some difficult instances in his struggle against the debilities and weaknesses of the human species, until the Catholic Dames stopped paying attention, overwhelmed by the heat. Rebeca Asis unfolded her fan again, and then Father Angel discovered the source of her fragrance. The sandalwood odor crystallized in the drowsiness of the room. The priest drew the handkerchief out of his sleeve and brought it to his nose so as not to sneeze.
"At the same time," he continued, "our church is the poorest in the apostolic prefecture. The bells are cracked and the naves are full of mice, because my life has been used up imposing moral standards and good habits."
He unbuttoned his collar. "Any young man can do the rude labor," he said, standing up. "On the other hand, one needs the tenacity of many years and age-old experience to rebuild morals." Rebeca Asis raised her transparent hand, with its wedding band topped by a ring with emeralds.
"For that very reason," she said. "We thought that with these lampoons, all your work might be lost."
The only woman who had remained silent until then took advantage of the pause to intervene.
"Besides, we thought that the country is recuperating and that this present calamity might cause trouble."
Father Angel took a fan out of the closet and began to fan himself parsimoniously.
"One thing has nothing to do with the other," he said. "We've gone through a difficult political moment, but family morals have been maintained intact."
He stood up before the three women. "Within a few years I shall go tell the apostolic prefecture: I leave you that exemplary town. Now all that's needed is for you to send a young and active fellow to build the best church in the prefecture."
He gave a languid bow and exclaimed:
"Then I will go to die in peace in the courtyard of my ancestors."
The Dames protested. Adalgisa Montoya expressed the general thought:
"This is like your own town, Father. And we want you to stay here until the last moment."
"If it's a question of building a new church," Rebeca Asis said, "we can start the campaign tomorrow."
"All in good time," Father Angel replied.
Then, in a different tone, he added: "As for now, I don't want to grow old at the head of any parish. I don't want to happen to me what happened to meek Antonio Isabel del Santisimo Sacramento del Altar Castaneda y Montero, who informed the bishop that a rain of dead birds was falling in his parish. The investigator sent by the bishop found him in the main square, playing cops and robbers with the children."
The Dames expressed their perplexity.
"Who was he?"
"The curate who succeeded me in Macondo," Father Angel said. "He was one hundred years old."
THE WINTER, whose inclemency had been foreseen since the last days of September, implanted its rigor that weekend. The mayor spent Sunday chewing analgesic tablets in his hammock while the river overflowed its banks and damaged the lower parts of town.
During the first letup in the rain, on Monday at dawn, the town needed several hours to recover. The poolroom and the barbershop opened early, but most of the houses remained shut up until eleven o'clock. Mr. Carmichael was the first to have the opportunity to shudder at the spectacle of men carrying their houses to higher ground. Bustling groups had dug up pilings and were transferring intact the fragile habitations of wattle walls and palm roofs.
Taking refuge under the eaves of the barbershop, his umbrella open, Mr. Carmichael was contemplating the laborious maneuvers when the barber drew him out of his abstraction.
"They should have waited for it to clear," the barber said.
"It won't clear for two days," said Mr. Carmichael, and he shut his umbrella. "My corns tell me."
The men carrying the houses, sunk in the mud up to their ankles, passed by, bumping into the walls of the barbershop. Mr. Carmichael saw the tumble-down insides through the window, a bedroom completely despoiled of its intimacy, and he felt invaded by a sense of disaster.
It seemed like six in the morning, but his stomach told him that it was going on twelve. Moises the Syrian invited him to sit in his shop until the rain passed. Mr. Carmichael reiterated his prediction that it wouldn't clear for the next forty-eight hours. He hesitated before leaping onto the boardwalk of the next building. A group of boys who were playing war threw a mud ball that splattered on the wall a few feet from his newly pressed pants. Elias the Syrian came out of his shop with a broom in his hand, threatening the boys in an algebra of Arabic and Castilian.
The boys leaped merrily.
"Dumb Turk, go to work."
Mr. Carmichael saw that his clothing was intact. Then he closed his umbrella and went into the barbershop, directly to the chair.
"I always said that you were a prudent man," the barber said.
He tied a towel around his neck. Mr. Carmichael breathed in the smell of lavender water, which produced the same upset in him as the glacial vapors of the dentist's office. The barber began by trimming the curly hair on the back of his neck. Impatient, Mr. Carmichael looked around for something to read.
"Don't you have any newspapers?"
The barber answered without pausing at his work.
"The only newspapers left in the country are the official ones and they won't enter this establishment as long as I'm alive."
Mr. Carmichael satisfied himself with contemplating his wing-tipped shoes until the barber asked about the widow Montiel. He'd come from her place. He'd been the administrator of her affairs ever since the death of Don Chepe Montiel, whose bookkeeper he'd been for many years.
"She's there," he said.
"A person goes on killing himself," the barber said as if talking to himself, "and there she is all alone with a piece of land you couldn't cross in five days on horseback. She must own some ten towns."
"Three," Mr. Carmichael said. And he added with conviction: "She's the finest woman in all the world."
The barber went over to the counter to clean the comb. Mr. Carmichael saw his goat face reflected in the mirror and once more understood why he didn't respect him. The barber spoke, looking at the image.
"A fine business: my party gets in power, the police threaten my political opponents with death, and I buy up their land and livestock at a price I set myself."
Mr. Carmichael lowered his head. The barber applied himself to cutting his hair again. "When the elections are over," he concluded, "I own three towns, I've got no competition, and along the way I've managed to get the upper hand even if the government changes. All I can say is: It's the best business there is; even better than counterfeiting."
"Jose Montiel was rich long before the political troubles started," Mr. Carmichael said.
"Sitting in his drawers by the door of a rice bin," the barber said. "The story goes that he put on his first pair of shoes at the age of nine."
"And even if that were so," Mr. Carmichael admitted, "the widow had nothing to do with Montiel's business."
"But she played the dummy," the barber said.
Mr. Carmichael raised his head. He loosened the towel around his neck to let the circulation through. "That's why I've always preferred that my wife cut my hair," he protested. "She doesn't charge me anything, and on top of that, she doesn't talk politics." The barber pushed his head forward and continued working in silence. Sometimes he clicked his scissors in the air to let off an excess of virtuosity. Mr. Carmichael heard shouts from the street. He looked in the mirror: children and women were passing by the door with the furniture and utensils from the houses that were being carried. He commented with r
ancor:
"Misfortune is eating at us, and you people still with your political hatreds. The persecution's been over for a year and they still talk about the same thing."
"The state of abandonment we're in is persecution too," the barber said.
"But they don't beat us up," Mr. Carmichael said.
"Abandoning us to God's mercy is another way of beating us up."
Mr. Carmichael became exasperated.
"That's newspaper talk," he said.
The barber remained silent. He worked up some lather in a mug and anointed the back of Mr. Carmichael's neck with the brush. "It's just that a person is busting with talk," he apologized. "It isn't every day that we get an impartial man."
"No man can help being impartial with eleven children to feed," Mr. Carmichael said.
"Agreed," said the barber.
He made the razor sing on the palm of his hand. He shaved the neck in silence, cleaning off the soap on his fingers and then cleaning his fingers on his pants. Finally he rubbed a piece of alum on the back of the neck. He finished in silence.
While he was buttoning up his collar, Mr. Carmichael saw the notice nailed to the back wall: Talking Politics Prohibited. He brushed the pieces of hair from his shoulders, hung his umbrella over his arm, and pointing to the notice, asked:
"Why don't you take it down?"
"It doesn't apply to you," the barber said. "We've already agreed that you're an impartial man."
Mr. Carmichael didn't hesitate that time to leap onto the boardwalk. The barber watched him until he turned the corner, and then he grew ecstatic over the roiled and threatening river. It had stopped raining, but a heavy cloud hung motionless over the town. A short time before one o'clock Moises the Syrian came in, lamenting that the hair was falling out of his skull and yet, on the other hand, it was growing on the back of his neck with extraordinary rapidity.
The Syrian had his hair cut every Monday. Ordinarily he would lower his head with a kind of fatalism and snore in Arabic while the barber talked to himself out loud. That Monday, however, he awoke with a start at the first question.
"Do you know who was just here?"
"Carmichael," the Syrian said.
"Rotten old black Carmichael," the barber confirmed as if he had spelled out the phrase. "I detest that kind of man."
"Carmichael isn't a man," Moises the Syrian said. "He hasn't bought a pair of shoes in more than three years. But in politics he does what has to be done: he keeps books with his eyes closed."
In Evil Hour Page 4
