Now he worked to clean up his blue suit at the old fountain, which had been a watering place for horses and mules in the days when the big carts came down to the city early in the evening to the rhythm of the tired nodding of little bells. Lacking a brush, he rubbed the fabric with a handful of straw he’d moistened in the water, which was still warm from the sun. But suddenly it seemed to him that two workers were observing him too closely. He had nothing to fear from such people, but he still moved away, down a street where cabbage leaves had fallen into the gutter and pieces of fruit were trampled into the sewer grating. It was a long distance to the House of the Arrangement, even without taking a roundabout route. He measured it out mentally in terms of trees, because he needed shadows, and in terms of hills, because of his despair at their height, as if he were following an interminable path through the wilderness. He was about to knock at Estrella’s door to make her appear, but he remembered that when she was with someone she would put out all the lights in the front of the house and refuse to answer the door. He also knew that some of her customers, though they might return later if they thought she was shopping or doing errands, would think twice before lying in sheets still warm from another man. Besides, he couldn’t be sure the woman could get rid of the taxi driver that quickly; after all, the man might take advantage of what had been offered to him in payment and stay until after midnight. Therefore, he had to get there as soon as possible, and find out, finally find out once and for all, without delays or evasions, if tomorrow the night that had lasted so long would finally come to an end. He was asking for so little: a visa, some money, and people—that most of all, People!—to be around him at the last moment. The one to whom he’d speak now was the Man from the National Palace. He had relieved the Man of a feared adversary by means of an exploding book he’d sent through the mail. He had to find a thick book, strongly bound, within whose pages a kind of grave could be carved—Anthology of Orators: From Demosthenes to Castelar, a Madrid edition from the beginning of the century. The infernal device was placed very neatly between Cicero and Gambetta. Later, the man who’d actually doctored the tome had been picked up with the others, without revealing anything—”singing” they called it. Only he—a survivor walking between the metal curtains of a tortuous street of closed stores—knew the secret of what had been sent. As proof, he had hidden the receipt for the certified package, which he’d mailed under a false name. He would remind the Man from the National Palace—if it was necessary; he would threaten to send his copy to the newspapers with a long letter of explanation; he would force the Man from the National Palace to act without delay. “Stay right where you are and wait,” he’d been told. But the wait had gone on too long, and a death that happened to cross his path had finally driven him from the Belvedere. Just then he thought that it is indeed an ill wind that turns none to good. When the old lady who had once nourished him with the milk of her breasts died, she had done him a final good deed, one he could never repay . . . He hurried on, his courage renewed, thinking that he had been stupid to send Estrella to ask for what he, more than anyone, had the right to demand. He turned onto the wide avenue with its double row of trees guarded by the marble statue of the Spanish King with his wig, Order of the Golden Fleece, and velvet costume. He passed columns of a grand era that stood like the solitary remains of an ancient triumph, especially if compared to the neighboring smeared orange and blue columns or the flowers and other bizarre ideas of this pastry-shop, half-breed architecture. He passed in front of the incredibly high Gothic spire whose supporting arches opened over a store that sold shells and amulets for black rites, and crossing through the portal of the Grand Lodge, he swerved away from the sickle emblems of the Party’s central office, where the lights were still burning because of some cell meeting. Hurrying, he remembered how he had also rejected the Party, soon after arriving from Sancti-Spiritus, and used the gesture of crossing himself as he passed a statue of the Virgin in a building entrance as an excuse. Just ahead stood the severe palings of the fence around the botanical garden, with its flower beds labeled with Latin terms, trees sick with orchids; its Victoria regias blooming over sleeping waters, among gigantic malanga vines speckled with the cold light of the street lamps. On the street-sided hill behind, tinged black over reddish clouds, rose the prison, built directly opposite the ancient Spanish fortress. It was similar to those erected—under orders from the Champion of Catholicism—in these islands by an Italian military architect, enormously ingenious at hiding dungeons, corridors, and secret cells in the entrails of the stone. The fugitive trembled when he remembered that it was there—near the fourth watchtower, from whose embrasure so many screams had emanated—where, not so long before, his most irreplaceable flesh had recoiled atrociously before the threat of torture. Since the trees were getting thicker, he sought their shadows to free himself from the abominable memory. He stopped, breathless, at the foot of the hill of the University, under whose lights the loudspeakers were blaring. The lights, unusual at that hour, reminded him of the drama productions put on from time to time in the Patio of Columns, where hundreds of spectators came to watch some tragedy acted by literature students dressed up as Messengers, Guards, and Heroes. The man on the run measured in that instant how short the journey had been from that building of high rows of columns and its HOC ERAT IN VOTIS that could be read from a distance under allegories of Knowledge, to the expiatory, dark fortress where he’d been made to confess abjectly—”to sing,” as they called it—what he’d learned from men met, ill met, in the halls of the University. The loudspeakers bellowed in a different key about the sons of Atreus, and the Chorus bellowed a strophe that stopped the fugitive in his tracks at the crest of a bare hill, bristling with hawthorn bushes: The curses are being fulfilled; Those under the earth are alive; Men long dead draw blood from their murderers to answer blood. The breeze, changing direction, carried the words away. The man sat on the curb, protected by a thick-topped poplar that was dropping black seeds on the cement which its roots were pushing up. Everything had been just, heroic, and sublime in the beginning: the houses they’d blown up during the night; the dignitaries shot down in the streets; the automobiles that disappeared as if swallowed by the earth; the explosives that were stored at home, among clothes perfumed with bunches of sweet basil—next to the pamphlets carried in bakery baskets or in cases of beer whose bottles had been cut so that only the necks remained. It was a time when death sentences were passed from afar, a time for modest valor, a time for putting your life on the line. It was a time for dazzling executions carried out by an emissary wearing an implacable smile, executions that took place when the guilty party opened a book or a Christmas present wrapped in paper decorated with mistletoe and bells. It was the time of the Tribunal . . .
(. . . although I tried to cover it up, to silence it, I have it before me, always before me; after months of a forgetting that was not a forgetting—when I found myself right back in that afternoon, I shook my head violently, trying to shuffle the images, like a child who sees his parents’ bodies enveloped in filthy ideas; after many days have gone by, it is still the odor of rotten water under the roses forgotten in their carnelian vases; the lights turned on after sunset has closed the arcades of that long, too long, gallery of awnings; the heat of the roof, the Venetian mirror with its beveled edges, and, from above, the noise of the music box when the breeze shakes the crystal pendants that drape the lamp with an icy fringe. A few drops of rain were falling as we entered, and, sure enough, the monk on the Swiss barometer is praying in his prie-dieu with his hood halfway off, since a few drops of rain fell as we were entering. We all know what will be said here; we all know that the already loaded weapons behind the screen will be used. Nevertheless, this ceremony is thought necessary so we can go through with it and have steadier hands when we’re finished. These are the times of the Tribunal. I hear the warbling of the birds in their cage with its gilt bars, filigreed domes, and glass doors, and I see the turtles slowly yawning, raisin
g their heads above the pool of turbid water. Everything takes on enormous importance in that instant of suspended time—still suspended, as if everything that was to take place afterward had already happened. The law-school people, who will act as judges, enter and sit down behind the table, and then the accused enters, smoking a good cigar, whose ash he tries not to lose, in a show of calm contradicted by his pallor and his uncertainty about where to put his legs. The Prosecutor, who has put on a dark tie though everyone else is in shirtsleeves, is now talking about the attempt on the Chancellor’s life: the routes had been studied, the place for the attack was chosen, the men, with open or closed newspapers, were at their posts pointing to the best escape route; the men who transformed automobiles with their acetylene torches, their spray guns, and their quick-drying paints would return a completely unknown car that very night. It was then that the imaginative ones proposed the tunnel. And so great was the desire to get it all over with—to blow up the man and all his dignitaries—that they began to dig a tunnel from the riverbank toward the family mausoleum, whose white angel had his wide wings spread open and his hands clasped in prayer. We would set the charges, set them to explode when someone pronounced the panegyric, under the last empty vault. We worked at night, sinking a little deeper each time into the clayish soil that stank of the sewer. When we realized, because we were pounding the base with our picks, that we were under the outer walls of the cemetery, the stench was so terrible that some of the diggers fainted and had to be revived by the medical students with concoctions prepared by the pharmacy students. The horrible work shift lasted until dawn, when the first roosters, those belonging to the fishermen, put an end to that labor of darkness, which slowly lengthened its path under crosses and chapels, toward the white angel, which served as a guide . . . “Defend yourself!” I shout, when the Prosecutor points to the Informer, whose words had spoiled that great work and cost us several lives. “Defend yourself!” everyone shouts, demanding to know his unknown motive, if he suffered intolerable coercion, their impossible surprise that the men could have left their weapons on the bed in the room with screens—the shovels inert at the foot of the thickest trunk. But, overwhelmed, the man shrugs his shoulders, defeated beforehand, and again accepts what we all knew . . . The word “death” is pronounced. And after it is spoken, after this word which is an end, after this word which is the antithesis of creation, the silence grows. A silence that already belongs to the time afterwards, to what has already ceased to be; premonition and movement that already know about the monkey wrench tossed into the heart of the machinery, about the earth that will fall on the still warm immobility of what has been stopped. The body present—present but already absent—detaches a watch from his wrist slowly because he already knows himself to be beyond time; he winds it out of habit with the thumb and index finger of his right hand; he places it on the table, leaving it to someone else, and he looks for the last time at the hands of an hour that for him will never end. It is the body that amazed me in the stadium showers, when he came in from being acclaimed, sweaty, filthy with scratches, smelling like an animal, and the padding that had covered the fur on his back fell off. I wanted those back muscles that moved so smoothly over his bones for myself; I wanted that stomach that narrowed between his hips until they squeezed into blackness; I wanted those legs made longer by jumping that ran toward the water under a chest that had just released its surplus of energy in singing and shouting. And they were hideous words as he lathered his head, proclaiming that he still had a yen for women, music, liquor. In my province, the intellectuals—assiduous conversationalists at the tailor shop, contemplators of the fountain in whose shadow the poet Heredia had meditated—had declared muscles stupid and only the spirit grand. I envied that flesh when it lived among us, reduced to its most masculine dimensions, unaltered by its own excesses, lifted by the pole, vaulting over obstacles, hurling the javelins of ancient warriors. Now his miserable shoulders sagged before the Judges, virtually counting their last heartbeats. And we have to raise our hands to pass sentence. There are two, five, I don’t know how many hands. Mine remains inert, hanging, seeking a pretext not to rise above the back of a dog that wags its tail at the foot of my chair. “Defend yourself!” I say again in a voice so low that no one hears me. And, as it waits for all the others, my elbow finally moves, raising cowardly fingers to the same level as those of the others. Everyone embraces the sentenced man without looking him in the eye. The executioners retrieve their weapons. And, a short time later, a shot is fired at the foot of the tree with the thickest trunk. I am astounded, now, in the face of what lies there, at how simple it is to cut short an existence. Everything seems natural: what once moved has stopped moving; his voice was silenced in a mouthful of blood that looks like a compact piece of enamelwork, covering his unshaven chin; everything that could be felt has been felt, and immobility has only broken a cycle of reiterations. “It had to be done,” they all say, their consciences in dialogue, looking for themselves in History. And they disperse into the night, without having to hide any longer or to distrust the shadows, because times have changed, repeating in louder and louder tones that it had been necessary so that we could be pure as we enter into the times that have changed. And the pitch of their voices rises, the farther away from them the body lies . . . The birds sleep under the filigree domes; the turtles remain motionless, lifting their heads out of the turbid pond. The monk in the Swiss barometer has pushed back his hood—I remember—because a few drops of rain fell and were quickly absorbed by the dried-out roof tiles. Above the tree with the thickest trunk, the flies pause, looking for the bullets that went all the way through. On one of the branches, a frog croaks with the dry song of a nocturnal bird. Those were the
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