But that amazement was to be surpassed by what followed, when the critical moments took place, the fleeting seconds while the two men were invisible behind the float; just as Zulia Iscuandé started to cry out “protect him, Our Lady of Perpetual Help” they heard a shot, then a second, and a third. It was as if the silence that followed made everything go cold.
“My God, he’s killed him,” the woman shouted now, raising her arms to heaven.
Don Furibundo emerged then from the bowels of the float, ran past the doctor, got into the jeep quick as a flash, pulled away and went honking off down the track.
Everyone ran to peer behind the float.
There was Tulio Abril, more alive than dead, without a scratch on him.
3
The vision of Simón Bolívar riding high on the float was just what Doctor Proceso needed as a better reason for living than his wife’s indifference and the raising of two contrary daughters. Before him lay the extraordinary possibility of showing, with a puff in papier mâché, what he had unsuccessfully planned to reveal twenty-five years ago, when he started writing The Great Lie: Bolívar or the So-Called Liberator, a Human Biography.
He based his own work on the foundations laid by Nariño historian José Rafael Sañudo, who was born in Pasto in 1872 and died in the same city in 1943. Sañudo had been the first historian in Colombia and practically the first on the continent — as Doctor Proceso used to stress enthusiastically — who dared irrefutably to unpick Bolívar’s historic image, without the false patriotic sentiment or the exaggerated style of flattery (ears deaf and eyes blind) that the great majority of historians have traditionally bestowed upon Bolívar since his death.
“A courageous biography,” the doctor wrote on the subject of José Rafael Sañudo. “Published in 1925, Estudios sobre la vida de Bolívar provoked the contempt and condemnation of his supporters, not just in the country at large, but in Pasto, among his fellow Pastusos, who professed ‘profound surprise and indignation at his abominable lampoon.’ In Manizales they hollered for him to be hanged, in Bogotá he was declared a traitor, the Colombian Academy of History called him an ungrateful son, the Bolívar Society also called him a son, but one unworthy of Colombia, and if on publication his book found one or two moderately serious commentators, all of them, without exception, discussed it in tones of sheer panic, and one, despite acknowledging that Sañudo committed no slander and each of his assertions was well founded, did not hesitate to label him a retrograde Pastuso, hirsute theologian, convoluted prose stylist and old casuist. These labels did nothing to dampen the spirits of the Pasto historian, a man who was also a mathematician and philosopher, a reader of authors in Greek and Latin, and who stirred up the storm in advance by giving his book the words of Lucian of Samosata — in Greek — as an epigraph: ‘do not write merely with an eye to the present, that those now living may commend and honour you; aim at eternity, compose for posterity, and from it ask your reward; and that reward? — that it be said of you, This was a man indeed, free and free-spoken; flattery and servility were not in him; he was truth all through.’”
“Lamentably,” Doctor Proceso wrote, “the statue of José Rafael Sañ-udo does not preside, as it should, over the portico of the Nariño Academy of History, which he founded: the statue of José Rafael Sañudo does not even exist.” But he added: “What do statues matter? The work endures.”
The only thing Doctor Proceso granted Sañudo’s detractors was that his style really was convoluted — amalgam of philosopher, mathematician and polyglot that he was — regrettably more suitable for consumption by other historians than by the general public. And for this very reason Doctor Proceso had proposed a volume that would describe, with crystal-clear clarity, not just the political, economic and military deeds of the so-called Liberator, but his other deeds of more human aspect, which would end up shedding light on the monumental historical mistake of conferring upon Bolívar a noble leading role in the independence of the Latin American peoples, a leading role which he did, of course, play, thought the doctor, but of the most atrocious kind.
This objective, however, this book he had spent half his life struggling to write, had turned out to be beyond his powers. Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, whose work (running his practice, the two or three women who were his occasional lovers as well as being his patients, the management of his finca in Sandoná, his considerable reading, various obligations at home or to do with his two daughters, and his genuine concerns about Primavera Pinzón, who did not cease to plague him with excessive expenses and assail him with other worse tribulations) took up the majority of his time, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López admitted to himself that he would never really perfect his Great Lie of Bolívar, that a Sañudo is born but once every hundred years, and that he himself was no writer, no historian, no musician, no poet by any stretch of the imagination.
But he held on to certain expectations concerning what he called “Human Investigations,” interviews he had obtained over the years, with people from all walks of life in Pasto and in various towns in Nariño province, about the so-called Liberator’s shameful passage across southern Colombia. Of those interviews, some on paper, some recorded, his hopes were centred on the ones he carried out, on tape, with two direct descendants of people who had suffered Bolívar’s rage: a woman, Polina Agrado, recently deceased in Pasto at ninety-three years of age, and Belencito Jojoa, still alive, an old man of eighty-six who lived in the Obrero neighbourhood with his third wife and numerous children and grandchildren.
Something which piqued the doctor’s curiosity, and troubled him, was that both testimonies had to do with the so-called Liberator’s lust rather than with any of the other passions — anger, cowardice, ambition, vanity — he had possessed in such abundance. But testimonies as truthful as these did not grow on trees, so he transcribed them just as he recorded them, even though they seemed like discordant voices in the work he had planned, a work which would wipe the dust and lies from the face of history — or historians, he said — and guide the youth of the day through the Latin American wars of independence under the banner of truth.
And now, eager as a child, in front of Maestro Tulio Abril’s shot-up float, “Don Furibundo Chasing his Wife,” Doctor Proceso threw himself into imagining, represented over three or four carnival floats — or on a single, huge one — each and every one of Bolívar’s most troubling exploits: troubling because they were false and because, even being so, they continued to circulate in schools and colleges as if flowing from the fountain of truth. With this float, he thought, Simón Bolívar would plainly and simply be exposed as a myth, an utter myth, each of his most infamous and obvious manoeuvrings woven together — Simón Bolívar, he said to himself, revealed at last, Simón Bolívar just as he was: his extraordinary capacity to convince his contemporaries and, in passing, generations to come (with letters and proclamations that were bombastic, scheming, raving and wily, pompous and pedantic, passionately wordy, pastiches of Alexander the Great and Napoleon) that he was someone he was not, that he had achieved things he had not, and that he should pass into history as the hero he was not.
Maestro Tulio Abril’s teeth were still chattering, not so much from the cold as from what he had just been through. Seated on a bench, he was drinking a cup of hot aguapanela; Doctor Proceso was doing the same beside him, while Zulia Iscuandé handed out more aguapanela to the workers.