In Evil Hour

  The judge answered pensively:

  "A useless risk."

  "People will stand with their mouths open," the mayor said. "I think, besides, that these poor fellows won't know what to do with the rifles."

  "They may be confused," the judge admitted, "but that won't last long."

  He made an effort to repress the feeling of emptiness in his stomach. "Be careful, Lieutenant," he reflected. "Don't be the one to ruin everything." The mayor took him out of the office with an enigmatic gesture.

  "Don't be a damned fool, Judge," he whispered in his ear. "They'll only have blank cartridges."

  When they went down to the courtyard the lights were on. The recruits were drinking sodas under the dirty light bulbs, against which the horse flies hurled themselves. Strolling from one end to the other of the courtyard, where there were still a few puddles of stagnant water, the mayor explained to them in a paternal tone what their mission for that evening consisted of: They would be stationed in pairs on the main corners with orders to fire on anyone, man or woman, who disobeyed the three commands to halt. He recommended valor and prudence. After midnight they would be brought food. The mayor hoped that with God's help, everything would come off without any trouble and that the town would know how to appreciate that effort of the authorities in the interests of social order.

  Father Angel was getting up from the table when eight o'clock struck in the belfry. He turned out the courtyard light, threw the bolt, and made the sign of the cross over his breviary: "In the name of God." In a distant courtyard a curlew sang. Dozing in the cool of the porch beside the cages covered with dark cloths, the widow Asis heard the second toll and without opening her eyes asked: "Did Roberto come in yet?" A maid squatting against the doorframe answered that he'd been in bed since seven o'clock. A little while before, Nora Jacob had turned down the volume on the radio and was in ecstasy over some tenuous music that seemed to be coming from a clean and comfortable place. A voice too distant to seem real shouted a name on the horizon and the dogs began to bark.

  The dentist hadn't finished listening to the news. Remembering that Angela was doing a crossword puzzle under the bulb in the courtyard, without looking he ordered her: "Close the main door and go finish that in your room." His wife awoke, startled.

  Roberto Asis, who in fact had gone to bed at seven o'clock, got up to look at the square through the half-open window, and he only saw the dark almond trees and the last light that was going out on the widow Montiel's balcony. His wife turned on the night light and with a muffled whisper made him go back to bed. A solitary dog continued barking until after the fifth toll.

  In the hot bedroom piled high with empty cans and dusty bottles, Don Lalo Moscote was snoring with the newspaper spread out over his belly and his glasses on his forehead. His paralytic wife, shaken by the memory of other nights like that, shooed mosquitoes with a rag while she mentally counted the hour. After the distant shouts, the barking of the dogs, and the stealthy running, silence took over.

  "Make sure there's Coramine," Dr. Giraldo instructed his wife, who was putting emergency drugs into his bag before going to bed. They were both thinking about the widow Montiel, rigid as a corpse under the last load of Luminal. Only Don Sabas, after a long conversation with Mr. Carmichael, had lost his sense of time. He was still in his office, weighing the next day's breakfast on the scale, when the seventh bell tolled and his wife came out of the bedroom with her hair in disarray. The river stopped. "On a night like this," someone murmured in the dark at the instant the eighth bell tolled, deep, irrevocable, and something that had begun to sputter fifteen minutes before went out completely.

  Dr. Giraldo closed the book until the curfew bugle stopped vibrating. His wife put the bag on the night table, lay down with her face to the wall, and put out her lamp. The doctor opened the book but he didn't read. Both were breathing fitfully, alone in a town that the measureless silence had reduced to the dimensions of a bedroom.

  "What are you thinking about?"

  "Nothing," the doctor replied.

  He didn't concentrate any more until eleven o'clock, when he went back to the same page where he'd been when eight began to strike. He turned down the corner of the page and put the book on the table. His wife was sleeping. In other times they had both stayed up till dawn, trying to figure out the place and circumstances of the shooting. Several times the sound of boots and weapons reached the door of their house and they both waited, sitting in bed, for the spray of lead that would knock down the door. Many nights, after they had learned how to distinguish among the infinite varieties of the terror, they had stayed awake with their heads on a pillow stuffed with clandestine fliers to be distributed. One dawn they heard the same stealthy preparations that precede a serenade, and then the mayor's weary voice: "Not there. He's not mixed up in anything." Dr. Giraldo turned out the lamp and tried to sleep.

  The drizzle started after midnight. The barber and another recruit, stationed on the corner by the docks, abandoned their post and sought shelter under the eaves of Mr. Benjamin's store. The barber lighted a cigarette and examined the rifle in the light of the match. It was a new weapon.

  "It's a madeinusa," he said.

  His companion lighted several matches in search of the brand on his carbine, but he couldn't find it. A gutter by the eaves burst onto the butt of the weapon and produced a hollow impact. "What a strange mess," he murmured, drying it with his sleeve. "The two of us here, each with a rifle, getting wet." In the extinguished town no sounds could be perceived other than that of the water from the eaves.

  "There are nine of us," the barber said. "Seven of them, counting the mayor, but three of them locked up in the barracks."

  "A while back I was thinking the same thing," the other one said.

  The mayor's flashlight made them brutally visible, crouched against the wall, trying to protect their weapons from the drops that were bursting on their shoes like bird shot. They recognized him when he put out the light and came in under the eaves. He was wearing a trench coat and had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. A policeman was with him. After looking at his watch, which he wore on his right wrist, he ordered the policeman:

  "Go to the barracks and see what's happened to the food."

  With the same energy that he would have given a battle command, the policeman disappeared in the rain. Then the mayor sat down on the ground beside the recruits.

  "Any messes?" he asked.

  "Nothing," answered the barber.

  The other man offered the mayor a cigarette before lighting his. The mayor turned it down.

  "How long are you going to keep us at this, Lieutenant?"

  "I don't know," the mayor said. "For now, until curfew is over. We'll see what happens tomorrow."

  "Until five o'clock!" the barber exclaimed.

  "Oh, no," the other one said. "Me, who's been on his feet since four in the morning."

  A dogfight reached them through the murmur of the rain. The mayor waited until the tumult was over and there was only one solitary bark. He turned to the recruit with a depressed air.

  "Don't tell me; I've spent half my life in this mess," he said. "I'm collapsing from lack of sleep."

  "For no reason," the barber said. "This hasn't got any head or tail to it. It's like something women do."

  "I'm beginning to think the same thing," the mayor sighed.

  The policeman returned to inform them that they were waiting for the rain to stop to give out the food. Then he delivered another message: a woman, caught without a pass, was waiting for the mayor at the barracks.

  It was Casandra. She was sleeping in the folding chair, wrapped in a rubber cape in the small room lighted by the mournful bulb on the balcony. The mayor tweaked her nose. She gave a moan, shuddered in a start of desperation, and opened her eyes.

  "I was dreaming," she said.

  The mayor turned on the light in the room. Protecting her eyes with her hands, the woman twisted, grumbling, and for an instant he
suffered her silver-colored nails and shaved armpits.

  "You're a fine one," she said. "I've been here since eleven o'clock."

  "I expected to see you at the room," the mayor apologized.

  "I didn't have a pass."

  Her hair, copper-colored two nights before, was silver gray now. "I forgot completely." The mayor smiled, and after hanging up his raincoat, he took a seat beside her. "I hope they haven't thought that you're the one who's putting up the papers." The woman had recovered her relaxed manner.

  "I wish they had," she replied. "I adore strong emotions."

  Suddenly the mayor seemed lost in the room. With a defenseless air, cracking his knuckles, he murmured: "You have to do me a favor." She scrutinized him.

  "Just between the two of us," the mayor went on, "I want you to deal the cards to see if it's possible to find out who's responsible for this mess."

  She turned her head away. "I understand," she said after a brief silence. The mayor urged her:

  "I'm doing it for you people more than anything."

  She nodded.

  "I've already done it."

  The mayor couldn't hide his anxiety. "It's something very strange," Casandra went on with calculated melodrama. "The signs were so obvious that I was frightened after having them on the table." Even her breathing had become affected.

  "Who is it?"

  "It's the whole town and it's nobody."

  THE SONS of the widow Asis came to mass on Sunday. They were seven in addition to Roberto Asis. All founded in the same mold: heavy and rough, with something mulish in their will for hard work, and docile to their mother with a blind obedience. Roberto Asis, the youngest and the only son who had married, had only a lump on the bone of his nose in common with his brothers. With his delicate health and his conventional ways, he was a kind of consolation prize for the daughter that the widow Asis had grown tired of waiting for.

  In the kitchen, where the seven Asises had unloaded the animals, the widow walked among an outpouring of trussed-up chickens, vegetables and cheeses and brown sugar loaves and strips of salted meat, giving instructions to the servant girls. Once the kitchen was cleared, she ordered them to pick out the best of everything for Father Angel.

  The curate was shaving. From time to time he reached his hand out into the courtyard so he could wet his chin with the drizzle. He was getting ready to finish when two barefoot girls pushed open the door without knocking and in front of him poured out several ripe pineapples, red plantains, sugar loaves, cheese, and a basket of vegetables and fresh eggs.

  Father Angel winked at them. "This," he said, "looks like Br'er Rabbit's dream." The younger of the girls, with her eyes all wide, pointed at him:

  "Priests shave too!"

  The other one led her to the door. "What did you think?" The curate smiled, and added seriously: "We're human too." Then he contemplated the provisions scattered on the floor and understood that only the house of Asis was capable of such prodigality.

  "Tell the boys," he almost shouted, "that God will give it back to them in health."

  Father Angel, who after forty years in the priesthood had not learned to dominate the nervousness that precedes solemn acts, put away the instruments without finishing shaving. Then he picked up the provisions and piled them under the jar rack and went into the sacristy, drying his hands on his cassock.

  The church was full. In the two pews closest to the pulpit, donated by them and with their respective names engraved on copper plates, were the Asises, with mother and sister-in-law. When they reached the church, together for the first time in several months, one would have thought they were coming on horseback. Cristobal Asis, the eldest, who had arrived from the ranch a half hour before and hadn't had time to shave, was still wearing his riding boots and spurs. Seeing that forest giant, the public but never confirmed story that Cesar Montero was the secret son of old Adalberto Asis seemed true.

  In the sacristy Father Angel suffered a contretemps: the liturgical ornaments weren't in their place. The acolyte found him upset, going through drawers while he carried on an obscure argument with himself.

  "Call Trinidad," the priest ordered him, "and ask her where she put the stole."

  He was forgetting that Trinidad had been ill since Saturday. Most certainly, the acolyte thought, she'd taken some things home to fix. Father Angel then put on the ornaments reserved for funerals. He couldn't manage to concentrate. When he went up into the pulpit, impatient and still breathing irregularly, he could see that the arguments that had ripened in the days preceding wouldn't have as much strength of conviction now as in the solitude of his room.

  He spoke for ten minutes. Stumbling over his words, surprised by a flock of ideas that didn't fit into the previous patterns, he spotted the widow Asis, surrounded by her sons. It was as if he had recognized them several centuries later in some hazy family photograph. Only Rebeca Asis, calming her splendid bust with the sandalwood fan, seemed human and contemporary to him. Father Angel finished his sermon without referring directly to the lampoons.

  The widow Asis remained rigid for a few short minutes, taking her wedding ring off and putting it back on with a secret exasperation, while the mass picked up again. Then she crossed herself, stood up, and left the church by the central nave, followed tumultuously by her sons.

  On a morning like that, Dr. Giraldo could understand the inner mechanism of suicide. It was drizzling noiselessly, the troupial was whistling in the house next door, and his wife was talking while he brushed his teeth.

  "Sundays are strange," she said, setting the table for breakfast. "It's as if they were hung up quartered: they smell of raw animals."

  The doctor put his razor together and began to shave. His eyes were moist and his eyelids puffy. "You're not sleeping well," his wife told him. And she added with a soft bitterness: "One of these Sundays you're going to wake up an old man." She'd put on a frayed robe and her head was covered with curlers.

  "Do me a favor," he said. "Shut up."

  She went to the kitchen, put the coffeepot on the stove, and waited for it to boil, hanging first on the whistle of the troupial and a moment later on the sound of the shower. Then she went to the bedroom so her husband would find his clothes ready when he came out of the bathroom. When she brought the breakfast to the table, she saw that he was ready to leave, and he looked a little younger with his khaki pants and sport shirt.

  They ate breakfast in silence. Toward the end he examined her with affectionate attention. She was drinking her coffee with her head down, a little trembly with resentment.

  "It's my liver," he excused himself.

  "Nothing justifies snapping," she replied without raising her head.

  "I must be drunk," he said. "The liver gets all clogged up with this rain."

  "You always say the same thing," she made clear, "but you never do anything. If you don't open your eyes," she added, "you'll have to heal thyself."

  He seemed to believe her. "In December," he said, "we'll be two weeks at sea." He observed the drizzle through the openings of the wooden grating that separated the dining room from the courtyard, saddened by the persistence of October, and added: "Then, at least for four months, there won't be any Sundays like this one." She piled up the plates before taking them into the kitchen. When she came back to the dining room she found him with his straw hat on, getting his bag ready.

  "So the widow Asis came out of church again," he said.

  His wife had told him before he started brushing his teeth, but he hadn't paid any attention.

  "They've gone about three times this year," she confirmed. "Evidently they haven't found any better way to entertain themselves."

  The doctor bared his rigorous dental system.

  "Rich people are crazy."

  Some women, on the way home from church, had gone in to visit the widow Montiel. The doctor greeted the group that remained in the living room. A murmur of laughs followed him to the landing. Before knocking on the door, he realized
that there were other women in the bedroom. Someone told him to come in.

  The widow Montiel was sitting up, her hair loose, holding the edge of the sheet against her breast. She had a mirror and a comb in her lap.

  "So you decided to come to the party too," she said to the physician.

  "She's celebrating her fifteenth birthday," said one of the women.

  "Eighteenth," the widow Montiel corrected with a sad smile. Lying down in bed again, she covered herself up to the neck. "Of course," she added good-humoredly, "no men have been invited. Much less you, Doctor; it's bad luck."

  The doctor laid his wet hat on the dresser. "You did well," he said, observing the patient with a pensive pleasure. "I've just realized that I've got nothing to do here." Then, turning to the group, he excused himself:

  "Will you allow me?"

  When she was alone with him, the widow Montiel took on the bitter expression of a sick woman again. But the doctor didn't seem to notice. He continued speaking in the same festive tone while he laid out on the night table the things he was taking from his bag.

  "Please, Doctor," the widow begged, "no more injections. I'm like a sieve."

  "Injections"--the doctor smiled--"are the best thing ever invented for the feeding of doctors."

  She smiled too.

  "Believe me," she said, touching her buttocks through the sheet, "this whole part of me is raw. I can't even touch it."

  "Don't touch it," the doctor said.

  Then she smiled openly.

  "Talk seriously, even if only on Sundays, Doctor."

  The physician uncovered her arm to take her blood pressure.

  "My doctor won't let me," he said. "It's bad for the liver."

  While he was taking her pressure, the widow observed the dial on the sphygmomanometer with a childish curiosity. "That's the funniest watch I've ever seen," she said. The doctor remained intent on the needle until he finished squeezing the ball.

  "It's the only one that tells exactly what time to get up," he said.

  When he'd finished and was rolling up the tubes of the sphygmomanometer, he observed the face of the patient minutely. He put a bottle of white pills on the table with the indication that she take one every twelve hours. "If you don't want any more injections," he said, "there won't be any more injections. You're in better health than I am." The widow made a gesture of impatience.