Thus, while Montiel’s widow ate herself up in desperation, Mr Carmichael tried to prevent the shipwreck. Things weren’t going well. Free of the threat of José Montiel, who had monopolized local business through terror, the town was taking reprisals. Waiting for the customers who never came, the milk went sour in the jugs lined up in the patio, and the honey spoiled in its combs, and the cheese fattened worms in the dark cabinets of the cheesehouse. In his mausoleum adorned with electric-light bulbs and imitation-marble archangels, José Montiel was paying for six years of murders and oppression. No one in the history of the country had got so rich in so short a time. When the first Mayor of the dictatorship arrived in town, José Montiel was a discreet partisan of all regimes who had spent half of his life in his underwear seated in front of his rice mill. At one time he enjoyed a certain reputation as a lucky man, and a good believer, because he promised out loud to give the Church a life-size image of Saint Joseph if he won the lottery, and two weeks later he won himself a fat prize and kept his promise. The first time he was seen to wear shoes was when the new Mayor, a brutish, underhanded police sergeant, arrived with express orders to liquidate the opposition. José Montiel began by being his confidential informer. That modest businessman, whose fat man’s quiet humor never awakened the least uneasiness, segregated his enemies into rich and poor. The police shot down the poor in the public square. The rich were given a period of twenty-four hours to get out of town. Planning the massacre, José Montiel was closeted together with the Mayor in his stifling office for days on end, while his wife was sympathizing with the dead. When the Mayor left the office, she would block her husband’s way. ‘That man is a murderer,’ she would tell him. ‘Use your influence with the government to get them to take that beast away; he’s not going to leave a single human being in town alive.’ And José Montiel, so busy those days, put her aside without really looking at her, saying, ‘Don’t be such a fool.’ In reality, his business was not the killing of the poor but the expulsion of the rich. After the Mayor riddled their doors with gunfire and gave them their twenty-four hours to get out of town, José Montiel bought their lands and cattle from them for a price which he himself set. ‘Don’t be silly,’ his wife told him. ‘You’ll ruin yourself helping them so that they won’t die of hunger someplace else, and they will never thank you.’ And José Montiel, who now didn’t even have time to smile, brushed her aside, saying, ‘Go to your kitchen and don’t bother me so much.’ At this rate, in less than a year the opposition was liquidated, and José Montiel was the richest and most powerful man in town. He sent his daughters to Paris, found a consular post in Germany for his son, and devoted himself to consolidating his empire. But he didn’t live to enjoy even six years of his outrageous wealth.
After the first anniversary of his death, the widow heard the stairs creak only with the arrival of bad news. Someone always came at dusk. ‘Again the bandits,’ they used to say. ‘Yesterday they made off with a herd of fifty heifers.’ Motionless in her rocker, biting her nails, Montiel’s widow fed on nothing but resentment.
‘I told you José Montiel,’ she was saying, talking to herself. ‘This is an unappreciative town. You are still warm in your grave, and already everyone has turned their backs on us.’
No one came to the house again. The only human being whom she saw in those interminable months when it did not stop raining was the persistent Mr Carmichael, who never entered the house with his umbrella closed. Things were going no better. Mr Carmichael had written several letters to José Montiel’s son. He suggested that it would be convenient if he came to take charge of affairs, and he even allowed himself to make some personal observations about the health of the widow. He always received evasive answers. At last, the son of José Montiel replied that frankly he didn’t dare return for fear he would be shot. Then Mr Carmichael went up to the widow’s bedroom and had to confess to her that she was ruined.
‘Better that way,’ she said. ‘I’m up to here with cheese and flies. If you want, take what you need and let me die in peace.’
Her only contacts with the world, from then on, were the letters which she wrote to her daughters at the end of very month. ‘This is a blighted town,’ she told them. ‘Stay there forever, and don’t worry about me. I am happy knowing that you are happy.’ Her daughters took turns answering her. Their letters were always happy, and one could see that they had been written in warm, well-lit places, and that the girls saw themselves reflected in many mirrors when they stopped to think. They didn’t wish to return either. ‘This is civilization,’ they would say. ‘There, on the other hand, it’s not a good atmosphere for us. It’s impossible to live in a country so savage that people are killed for political reasons.’ Reading the letters, Montiel’s widow felt better, and she nodded her head in agreement at every phrase.
On a certain occasion, her daughters wrote her about the butcher shops of Paris. They told her about the pink pigs that were killed there and then hung up whole in the doorways, decorated with wreaths and garlands of flowers. At the end of the letter, a hand different from her daughters’ had added, ‘Imagine! They put the biggest and prettiest carnation in the pig’s ass.’
Reading that phrase, for the first time in two years Montiel’s widow smiled. She went up to her bedroom without turning out the lights in the house and, before lying down, turned the electric fan over against the wall. Then, from the night-table drawer she took some scissors, a can of Band-Aids, and a rosary, and she bandaged the nail of her right thumb, which was irritated by her biting. Then she began to pray, but at the second mystery she put the rosary into her left hand, because she couldn’t feel the beads through the bandage. For a moment she heard the vibration of distant thunder. Then she fell asleep with her head bent on her breast. The hand with the rosary fell to her side, and then she saw Big Mama in the patio, with a white sheet and a comb in her lap, squashing lice with her thumbnails. She asked her:
‘When am I going to die?’
Big Mama raised her head.
‘When the tiredness begins in your arm.’
One Day After Saturday
The trouble began in July, when Rebecca, an embittered widow who lived in an immense house with two galleries and nine bedrooms, discovered that the screens were torn as if they had been stoned from the street. She made the first discovery in her bedroom and thought that she must speak to Argenida, her servant and confidante since her husband died. Later, moving things around (for a long time Rebecca had done nothing but move things around), she noticed that not only the screens in her bedroom but those in all the rest of the house were torn, too. The widow had an academic sense of authority, inherited perhaps from her paternal great-grandfather, a creole who in the War of Independence had fought on the side of the Royalists and later made an arduous journey to Spain with the sole purpose of visiting the palace which Charles III built in San Ildefonso. So that when she discovered the state of the other screens, she thought no more about speaking to Argenida about it but, rather, put on her straw hat with the tiny velvet flowers and went to the town hall to make a report about the attack. But when she got there, she saw that the Mayor himself, shirtless, hairy, and with a solidity which seemed bestial to her, was busy repairing the town hall screens, torn like her own.
Rebecca burst into the dirty and cluttered office, and the first thing she saw was a pile of dead birds on the desk. But she was disconcerted, in part by the heat and in part by the indignation which the destruction of her screens had produced in her, so that she did not have time to shudder at the unheard-of spectacle of the dead birds on the desk. Nor was she scandalized by the evidence of authority degraded, at the top of a stairway, repairing the metal threads of the window with a roll of screening and a screwdriver. She was not thinking now of any other dignity than her own, mocked by her own screens, and her absorption prevented her even from connecting the windows of her house with those of the town hall. She planted herself with discreet solemnity two steps inside the door and, leaning
on the long ornate handle of her parasol, said:
‘I have to register a complaint.’
From the top of the stairway, the Mayor turned his head, flushed from the heat. He showed no emotion before the gratuitous presence of the widow in his office. With gloomy nonchalance he continued untacking the ruined screen, and asked from up above:
‘What is the trouble?’
‘The boys from the neighborhood broke my screens.’
The Mayor took another look at her. He examined her carefully, from the elegant little velvet flowers to her shoes the color of old silver, and it was as if he were seeing her for the first time in his life. He descended with great economy of movement, without taking his eyes off her, and when he reached the bottom, he rested one hand on his belt, motioned with the screwdriver toward the desk, and said:
‘It’s not the boys, Señora. It’s the birds.’
And it was then that she connected the dead birds on the desk with the man at the top of the stairs, and with the broken screens of her bedrooms. She shuddered, imagining all the bedrooms in her house full of dead birds.
‘The birds!’ she exclaimed.
‘The birds,’ the Mayor concurred. ‘It’s strange you haven’t noticed, since we’ve had this problem with the birds breaking windows and dying inside the houses for three days.’
When she left the town hall, Rebecca felt ashamed. And a little resentful of Argenida, who dragged all the town gossip into her house and who nevertheless had not spoken to her about the birds. She opened her parasol, dazzled by the brightness of an impending August, and while she walked along the stifling and deserted street she had the impression that the bedrooms of all the houses were giving off a strong and penetrating stench of dead birds.
This was at the end of July, and never in the history of the town had it been so hot. But the inhabitants, alarmed by the death of the birds, did not notice that. Even though the strange phenomenon had not seriously affected the town’s activities, the majority were held in suspense by it at the beginning of August. A majority among whom was not numbered His Reverence, Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar Castañeda y Montero, the bland parish priest who, at the age of ninety-four, assured people that he had seen the devil on three occasions, and that nevertheless he had only seen two dead birds, without attributing the least importance to them. He found the first one in the sacristy, one Tuesday after Mass, and thought it had been dragged in there by some neighborhood cat. He found the other one on Wednesday, in the veranda of the parish house, and he pushed it with the point of his boot into the street, thinking, Cats shouldn’t exist.
But on Friday, when he arrived at the railroad station, he found a third dead bird on the bench he chose to sit down on. It was like a lightning stroke inside him when he grabbed the body by its little legs; he raised it to eye level, turned it over, examined it, and thought astonishedly, Gracious, this is the third one I’ve found this week.
From that moment on he began to notice what was happening in the town, but in a very inexact way, for Father Anthony Isabel, in part because of his age and in part also because he swore he had seen the devil on three occasions (something which seemed to the town just a bit out of place), was considered by his parishioners as a good man, peaceful and obliging, but with his head habitually in the clouds. He noticed that something was happening with the birds, but even then he didn’t believe that it was so important as to deserve a sermon. He was the first one who experienced the smell. He smelled it Friday night, when he woke up alarmed, his light slumber interrupted by a nauseating stench, but he didn’t know whether to attribute it to a nightmare or to a new and original trick of the devil’s to disturb his sleep. He sniffed all around him, and turned over in bed, thinking that that experience would serve him for a sermon. It could be, he thought, a dramatic sermon on the ability of Satan to infiltrate the human heart through any of the five senses.
When he strolled around the porch the next day before Mass, he heard someone speak for the first time about the dead birds. He was thinking about the sermon, Satan, and the sins which can be committed through the olfactory sense when he heard someone say that the bad nocturnal odor was due to the birds collected during the week; and in his head a confused hodgepodge of evangelical cautions, evil odors, and dead birds took shape. So that on Sunday he had to improvise a long paragraph on Charity which he himself did not understand very well, and he forgot forever about the relations between the devil and the five senses.
Nevertheless, in some very distant spot in his thinking, those experiences must have remained lurking. That always happened to him, not only in the seminary, more than seventy years before, but in a very particular way after he passed ninety. At the seminary, one very bright afternoon when there was a heavy downpour with no thunder, he was reading a selection from Sophocles in the original. When the rain was over, he looked through the window at the tired field, the newly washed afternoon, and forgot entirely about Greek theater and the classics, which he did not distinguish but, rather, called in a general way, ‘the little ancients of old.’ One rainless afternoon, perhaps thirty or forty years later, he was crossing the cobblestone plaza of a town which he was visiting and, without intending to, recited the stanza from Sophocles which he had been reading in the seminary. That same week, he had a long conversation about ‘the little ancients of old’ with the apostolic deputy, a talkative and impressionable old man, who was fond of certain complicated puzzles which he claimed to have invented and which became popular years later under the name of crosswords.
That interview permitted him to recover at one stroke all his old heartfelt love for the Greek classics. At Christmas of that year he received a letter. And if it were not for the fact that by that time he had acquired the solid prestige of being exaggeratedly imaginative, daring in his interpretations, and a little foolish in his sermons, on that occasion they would have made him a bishop.
But he had buried himself in the town long before the War of 1885, and at the time when the birds began dying in the bedrooms it had been a long while since they had asked for him to be replaced by a younger priest, especially when he claimed to have seen the devil. From that time on they began not paying attention to him, something which he didn’t notice in a very clear way in spite of still being able to decipher the tiny characters of his breviary without glasses.
He had always been a man of regular habits. Small, insignificant, with pronounced and solid bones and calm gestures, and a soothing voice for conversation but too soothing for the pulpit. He used to stay in his bedroom until lunchtime daydreaming, carelessly stretched out in a canvas chair and wearing nothing but his long twill trousers with the bottoms tied at the ankles.
He didn’t do anything except say Mass. Twice a week he sat in the confessional, but for many years no one confessed. He simply thought that his parishioners were losing the faith because of modern customs, and that’s why he would have thought it a very opportune occurrence to have seen the devil on three occasions, although he knew that people gave very little credence to his words and although he was aware that he was not very convincing when he spoke about those experiences. For himself it would have been a surprise to discover that he was dead, not only during the last five years but also in those extraordinary moments when he found the first two birds. When he found the third, however, he came back to life a little, so that in the last few days he was thinking with appreciable frequency about the dead bird on the station bench.
He lived ten steps from the church in a small house without screens, with a veranda toward the street and two rooms which served as office and bedroom. He considered, perhaps in his moments of less lucidity, that it is possible to achieve happiness on earth when it is not very hot, and this idea made him a little confused. He liked to wander through metaphysical obstacle courses. That was what he was doing when he used to sit in the bedroom every morning, with the door ajar, his eyes closed and his muscles tensed. However, he himself did not realize that he
had become so subtle in his thinking that for at least three years in his meditative moments he was no longer thinking about anything.
At twelve o’clock sharp a boy crossed the corridor with a sectioned tray which contained the same things every day: bone broth with a piece of yucca, white rice, meat prepared without onion, fried banana or a corn muffin, and a few lentils which Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar had never tasted.
The boy put the tray next to the chair where the priest sat, but the priest didn’t open his eyes until he no longer heard steps in the corridor. Therefore, in town they thought that the Father took his siesta before lunch (a thing which seemed exceedingly nonsensical) when the truth was that he didn’t even sleep normally at night.
Around that time his habits had become less complicated, almost primitive. He lunched without moving from his canvas chair, without taking the food from the tray, without using the dishes or the fork or the knife, but only the same spoon with which he drank his soup. Later he would get up, throw a little water on his head, put on his white soutane dotted with great square patches, and go to the railroad station precisely at the hour when the rest of the town was lying down for its siesta. He had been covering this route for several months, murmuring the prayer which he himself had made up the last time the devil had appeared to him.
One Saturday – nine days after the dead birds began to fall – Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar was going to the station when a dying bird fell at his feet, directly in front of Rebecca’s house. A flash of intuition exploded in his head, and he realized that this bird, contrary to the others, might be saved. He took it in his hands and knocked at Rebecca’s door at the moment when she was unhooking her bodice to take her siesta.