A church was lit up in the night, surrounded by ficus and palms; the fleurons on its slender steeple gleamed in the night. Its stained-glass windows were ablaze; the purples and the greens of the greater rose window flashed. And, suddenly, the doors of the nave swung open, and there appeared the path of red carpets that would lead the wedding party to the altar, resplendent with candles. The man on the run slowly approached the House that seemed to offer itself to him; he passed under the ogee of one of the lateral doors and stopped, dazzled, at the foot of a pillar whose stone was redolent of incense. His hands sought out the coolness of the holy water, bringing it to his forehead and mouth. An organ quietly sounded, as if someone were trying out its higher registers. There, standing on a lace-covered altar, was the Cross, clearly delineated by the body of Christ. So great was the man’s shock when confronted by the reality that had materialized because of his plea that his lips could not whisper the prayers he’d learned in his little book. He could only look, stare fixedly at what for him was burning outside the night of fear. He advanced from pillar to pillar—as before he’d gone from tree to tree—timidly approaching, step by step, the Table of the Eucharist. Each stopping place, each station, freed him from a mantle of horrors. He would stop, relieved, delighted to breathe in the air smelling of melted wax, of the varnish used in the recent restoration of a Last Supper. He rested his fingers on the railing of the pulpit, on the wood of a confessional, with the feeling that he was touching a precious substance. For the first time, he knew—he felt—what a church could be, bearing his ever more bearable flesh along the mystic ark toward Christ, who had bled because of His nails and the thorns in His crown, above altar cloths covered with flowers . . . “Are you a guest?” asked a quiet voice behind him. “I am,” he answered without turning around, hearing muffled footsteps fade away. But, behind him, a great murmur, coming first from the atrium, grew louder and louder as it reached the vaults. He was close to the sacristy when he noticed that sound, as if he’d suddenly recovered his hearing after a vertiginous ascent to the heights of the universe. Women wearing light-colored dresses came in, men in full-dress suits, little girls carrying bouquets: people who did not look at him, who did not see him, all moving under the lights, a sunflower of ribbons and flounces. The man on the run understood why the naves had been illuminated that night: now the bride would come, grand marches would be played, dowries would be exchanged, rings would be put on, and the sanctuary, empty again, would return to the shadows. When everything was over, he would find, at long last, someone who would want to listen to him. This House was asylum and help. The parish priest, no doubt, would know the Personage whose house, now being demolished, was so near. After hearing the abominable truths that would have to come from his mouth—he would tell all, everything, as one should when speaking to Him from whom nothing can be hidden—he would perhaps get help from his confessor. The organ rang out in epithalamic tones, and there was a great movement of the procession toward the altar. Wrapped in the half-light of a side chapel, the man on the run watched the ceremony as if in a dream, following the movements of the officiant. The rites and readings seemed interminable to him, even though he told himself a thousand times that his impatience was sacrilegious, and that he had no right to an opinion about what was happening under the nails in the Cross. The organ pipes sang out again in their triumphal bellowing. And then came the dispersion of people who took all too long to leave. The lights began to go out; the shadows returned to the central nave, while, beyond, the high doors were closing. Some diligent silhouettes bent down to roll up the carpets, while others took down decorations and straightened out the benches once again. When those people had finally left, all was silent: a great silence glittering with candles that partially illuminated the holy paintings: Christ in the Epiphany, the Bleeding Christ, and a Last Supper, whose too fresh varnish was mottled with reflections . . . The man waited for a long time without daring to enter the sacristy, where a presence revealed itself in the noise of closing armoires and the light clatter of metallic objects. But, suddenly, the corpulent outline of the parish priest materialized in the door frame, dressed in a light-colored soutane. “Who’s there?” he asked in a loud voice, as he picked up a heavy candlestick. The man on the run came out of the shadows, weighed down by the unforeseen idea that he might be taken for a thief. As if trying to explain himself, he showed the book with the Cross of Calatrava on it. The priest looked at it suspiciously, making a slightly defensive gesture. Someone was trying to talk to him now, down on his knees, clutching the dark little book in his tense hands. But his sobs interrupted his sentences, which made no sense anyway and always returned to the same ideas of guilt and self-abomination. Shocked, the priest listened without trying to understand that hoarse voice, which broke down in weeping and choking, accusing itself of obscure crimes and infernal perpetrations. He had professional experience with the crises of people who could stand for an entire day with their arms crossed at the foot of the Virgin of Sorrows, demanding for themselves the daggers she bore in her wounds; or others who would describe their obsessions as if they had lived them, retelling them as soon as they’d been granted absolution—taking confession every morning in a different church just to tell the same things; or those others who walked on their knees on the church floor, several scapularies hanging from their chests, irritatingly eager to hold up the poles in processions—putting their shoulder to the wheel for the Nazarene, with excessive displays of fervor. They were the same ones who, when they became ill, would go to the False Virgins, the saints with black faces, calling them by barbarous names. “Tomorrow,” he said, with just those parishioners in mind. “Tomorrow. Come to confession tomorrow.” And the more the man insisted, the more rapidly he repeated “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” accentuated by an impatience that was turning into anger. His eyes suddenly fixed on the small book with the Cross of Calatrava on it which the kneeling man had dropped to the floor: despite the imprimatur they carried in due and proper form, books like this were the kind sold in witchcraft shops along with dolls dressed in red, bells sacrilegiously marked JHS, and clay heads with seashell eyes. The prayers were good, but those who recited them had their minds set on the heresies of witch doctors, asking for things that could not be requested in a church. Rage reddened the priest’s face. With a vigorous hand he pulled the man, who went on crying, up from the floor and led him firmly through the sacristy with its chests to the rear door, which he blocked with his wide body. “Tomorrow,” he said for the last time, softening his tone. “And remember that you must fast; eat nothing after twelve.” Several turns of the lock clicked behind the door, which was then secured by a bar. In the twinkling of an eye, all the lights on the facade went out, the fleurons became dark, and the church became one with the shadows of the ficus and palm trees, suddenly shaken by a wind that promised rain. “Eat nothing after twelve.”
Walking again, staggering, tripping over everything, hurt by the cracks in the sidewalk, by the roots, by a stone put where his foot would hit it. One final idea: the candles must still be lit, there, next to the old lady’s coffin. And they would be burning until dawn, in a place where they’d already seen him, where no new faces would be appearing. Go up the stairs, again shake hands with the relatives, repeat the “Please accept my sincerest sympathies,” and fall onto the mattress in the Belvedere without worrying about the people shoving on the inside. They wouldn’t bother him until after the burial. The house was not far away, since this was the street with the saddlery that had the coach in it, the visiting-card printing shop. He was hurrying, making a renewed effort, when two nervous hands grabbed him from behind by the elbows. A voice he knew spoke above the back of his neck, which was ready to receive the blade. “I want to embrace a real man,” said the Scholarship Student, releasing him so he could stagger toward him. And, drunk, imitating admiration by bobbing his head around, he spoke of raising a monument to the glory of those who maintained their heroic spirit in these times. “We
need brotherhoods sealed in blood,” he shouted, without paying attention to the one trying to quiet him, demanding executions and exemplary punishments. He asked for a chance to take part in the next job, making a show of firing a pistol with his two hands. He wanted to bring the man on the run toward the crude lights of a restaurant full of people. “Bring me something to eat,” implored the other, remaining in the shadow of a pine tree. (There was still plenty of time before twelve; he wanted to show Someone who would be looking at His watch that he wasn’t breaking the rule imposed on those who moan to approach the Bloodless Sacrifice.) Forgetting his request, the Scholarship Student returned with a bottle of liquor. The two of them walked toward the end of the avenue, where the sea broke in mute onslaughts on a fringe of reefs . . . Now they were sitting next to each other in the old public-bathing area, with its rectangular pools carved out of the rock, where the waves that flowed through a narrow, sea-urchin-covered passage died. The large wood house, whose roof sagged because its support beams were missing, creaked in every one of its loose boards whenever a gust of wind came along. A phosphorescence suddenly appeared in the larger pool, like a load of green floating wash that illuminated a worm-eaten bottom, pockmarked, where, among limpets whose shells looked like caterpillars, moray eels lying in wait poked out their heads. The floating exhalation went dim, and everything fell into darkness. “We should go back to. human sacrifice,” the Scholarship Student rattled on, “to the teocalli, where the priest squeezes out the fresh, juicy heart before tossing it onto a rotting pile of hearts; we should go back to the sacred horror of ritual immolations, to the flint knife that penetrates the flesh and slices open the rib cage . . .” The man on the run had heard the Scholarship Student’s rhetoric ever since the days when both had studied in the same provincial school and talked over their plans for the future. “We belong to this world,” he rambled on, his tongue growing thicker and thicker, “and we must return to our earliest traditions. We need chiefs and sacrificial priests, eagle warriors and leopard warriors; people like you.” Several flashes of lightning suddenly lit up the pine shed, stained with green, falling apart, termite-eaten, where the two of them were lying at the edge of pools that stank of dried-out algae, of mollusks that had died in the sun, of the sea made foul by the city’s garbage. “I’m hungry,” moaned the man on the run, lying facedown. “Blessed is he that hungers,” said the Scholarship Student, “in this city of gorged pigs, of those who hug their bellies.” And now it was the song of praise for those who purified themselves by means of privation, the trials they endured, those who raised themselves to the level of knighthood. The other’s fatigue was so great that he listened to the drunk speak without trying to follow his meanderings, enjoying the only satisfaction he still had in this misery: that of feeling near him the presence of a voice that was not a danger signal. The Scholarship Student offered him the bottle. But the idea of swallowing that fiery liquid devoid of all consistency, all density, which lacked anything hard he could chew and feel pass down his throat, made him so nauseous that he pretended to fill his mouth by snapping his tongue and covering the mouth of the bottle with the palm of his hand so the smell wouldn’t make him vomit. “The superman,” the other went on, “the superman . . . the will to power”; his ideas were so fogged that he couldn’t even follow his own exposition of an obscure theory that trailed off into shreds of sentences, interrupted by angry grunts and confused insults aimed at unnamed people. The man on the run decided to let himself fall asleep: the Scholarship Student, once he’d finished the bottle, would end up falling asleep as well or walking off without remembering where he’d been or with whom. He loosened his belt and his shirt collar, put his pistol—which weighed him down so much—on the ground, and let himself lie back with his eyes closed while his ears wandered from the words of the other, like a child drowsy from a lullaby whose words fade and disappear . . . Just as he was sinking into a nervous sleep, the other seized him by the arm, straightening him up with a shock. Near them, a man and a woman were tangled into a single silhouette. The higher head bent over the lower in an enveloping eagerness of arms that wrapped around each other. A lightning flash made it seem that both were black. Her dress began to float away, falling with its sleeves outstretched in a cloud of vetiver. The man grasped her around the waist, bending her backward over a bench, and another lightning flash illuminated, just for a second, a body in metamorphosis, the beast with two backs moved by hushed moans that seemed more like the accompaniment to a cruel rite than a delightful embrace. Suddenly that knotted flesh slipped off the bench, like a wine cask falling over, without dividing or separating. “They are our strength!” exclaimed the Scholarship Student. “They are our strength!” The shadows stood up. The man walked aggressively toward the one who had shouted, while the woman huddled in a corner calling for her dress. The man on the run slipped away to the street while the noise of punches landing on soft flesh made him think the Scholarship Student was receiving blows he wasn’t returning. Suddenly a long peal of thunder rumbled and the rain came. A warm, compact, swift rain, the kind that sweeps down from above, leaving the ground covered with dusty clots. Caught by the storm, the fugitive began to run toward the house with the Belvedere. But now the rain was pouring so heavily off the eaves, overflowing the gutters, pouring in streams onto the sidewalks, that he hurried to enter a café near the Concert Hall, impelled by an instinctive scruple to retain what decency remained to his dark suit. On seeing him, two men stood up. The man on the run understood, by the intensity in their eyes, by the way they slowly stood up, by the way each shifted a hand to his breast pocket, that they were going to execute him. His own hand sought out his pistol, clenching over its absence: the weapon had remained there, on the public beach. An ambulance was coming closer at full speed, its sirens screaming: the condemned man threw himself in front of it, frightened out of his wits, running toward the lobby of the Concert Hall. The ambulance slammed on its brakes and stopped between his body and the hands frozen over their breast pockets.
(. . . and the musicians, their instruments looking like huge springs, finished playing the music for hunting dogs that have been blessed, finished the hunters’ Mass; then came the silence he’d heard so often in the terrible solitude of the Belvedere—when the silhouette of a telephone lineman who had climbed up to the forest of green insulators that stood at the same height as the terrace took on the powers of the Angel of Death; after a pause comes the other music, the music in little jumps, with something to it of those toys very small children play with, the ones in which two parallel sticks are moved up and down so that two dolls take turns pounding a peg with mallets; now the broken waltzes would come, the trill of the flutes, and then the trumpets, the long trumpets, like those
played by the gilt angels on the cathedral organ where I made my First Communion; minutes, minutes left; then everyone would applaud and the lights would come on, all the lights; and it would be necessary to leave by one of the five doors; three behind me, which would be like one; two toward the park, which would be like one; they, the two of them, would be waiting outside, smoking, with their hands ready. Leave surrounded by people; put bodies around my body. But those two bodies will pass right through and swiftly scatter his cover; the woman with the fox stole will disappear; the man next to her will cross the park alone, useless for being alone; the man in front, whose neck I do not want to see, and the one on the left with his huffing and puffing, and the tall man with the nervous knees, and the young couple who listened with their brows furrowed, holding hands; and I will be left alone on the infinite length of the sidewalk made of soaked, slippery granite, so difficult to run on; I’ll be alone, unprotected, unarmed, right in front of those men who will have all the time they need to raise their hands to their breast pockets, to aim, to squeeze the trigger without having to hurry, to empty a whole clip in a single volley. Oh! the howl, the eyes of that man who rode along ahead, that time, whose neck was scarred with acne—a neck so similar to this neck that I wo
uld have to find here, closer than that other when I caught it in the sights of my sawed-off shotgun . . . Those outside, those waiting for me were also looking toward the acne-scarred neck—don’t look at it, don’t look at it. “Take off the safety,” said the tall one, who never forgot what had to be done in those situations and who later directed their escape. “Stay to the right, always to the right, pass the truck, take a left, now the tunnel, careful,” without ever meeting an obstacle, a police station or the lowered gates of a railroad crossing; the tall one who is out there, waiting for everyone to applaud and for the lights to go on, his eyes glued to the three doors which are like one or on the two doors which are like one, from the corner, where it’s possible to see the five doors all at once. “Take off the safety,” he’d say when the applause broke out and the lights went on and the porters opened the red curtains, making the rings click on the rods like poker chips . . . The box seats, all red in the half-light, the red plush of the chairs; the scarlet velvet of the railings; the wine color of the carpeting; a box like a house, like a bedroom, like a bed with high sides; go to sleep on the floor, on top of the smell of dust, my cheek among the tacks in the corner, my head sunken in the darkness, legs under chairs, as if under a roof, as if under roof tiles, red like the roof tiles of the tailor shop; lie down like a dog, on what’s soft, what’s bundled up, in whatever makes the floor softer; go back to the shacks of my childhood, made of boards, of debris, of cardboard, where I crouched down on rainy days along with the wet hens, when everything was moisture, bubbles, drainpipes—as it is now—and I didn’t answer when people called me, because not answering when people called me made me enjoy being alone in the half-light even more, knowing I was being looked for in places where I wasn’t . . . We’ve already reached the broken waltzes, which never quite become waltzes, the trill of the flutes; soon the trumpets, the long trumpets; and the woman with the fox stole is already picking up her stole and loosening something under her skirt that’s bothering her, assuming all eyes are turned toward the orchestra; and throughout the entire audience, behaving as it would in church, there is an almost imperceptible flutter of hands, of sleeves, of fingers returned to bodies, the straightening, the gathering up of things exactly like what happens in church during the Ite misa est. I breathe deeply, calm, quite calm; I finally figured out what was so easy, so easy, much easier: the only easy thing. I won’t leave. They’ll applaud and the lights will go on, and then there will be confusion under the lights. They’ll gather up their things, they’ll slip on their furs; they’ll take care to show off their jewels, they’ll wave goodbye across the rows, saying that it was all magnificent, and they’ll form groups, slow lines, toward the exits; and it will be easy to hide behind the curtains of one of the boxes, and wait until all of them have gone; wait until the doormen close the doors of the boxes, after they check to see if anything’s been forgotten on the seats. And the two of them will think I’ve gone out with the audience, mixed in with them, surrounded; they’ll think that they’ve lost my face among all those faces, that my body has blended in with too many other bodies together for them to see it; and they’ll look for me outside, in the café, under the pergolas, behind the trees, behind the columns on the street where the saddlery is, on the street where the visiting-card printing shop is; they’ll think, perhaps, that I’ve gone up to the old lady’s apartment to hide out among the blacks at the wake; they might even go up themselves, and they’ll see the body, shrunken in its box made of the poorest quality boards; they might even look for me in the Belvedere, without suspecting that my pure things, my boxes of compasses, my first drawings are there inside the trunk. They won’t think I stayed here. Nobody stays in a theater after the show is over. Nobody stays sitting in front of an empty, dark stage where nothing is being shown. They will close up the five exits with bolts and padlocks, and I’ll stretch out on the red rug of that box over there—where the two in back have already gotten up—curled up like a dog. I’ll sleep until dawn, until after it clears up at ten, until after midday. Sleep: the first thing is sleep. After that, a new era will begin.)
The Chase Page 8
