“Not a scratch,” the doctor said. “It seems the avenging Arcángel shot more at heaven than at you.”
“At heaven?” The maestro became angry. “He shot at me, I felt a bullet warm my ear.”
“Well, thanks be to Our Lady of Perpetual Help he only warmed your ear,” Zulia Iscuandé said. “Drunk as he was he could have shot us too, not just you, or shot himself, all with the same damned rotten nerve.”
“Check the float,” the maestro ordered. He trembled with anger and shock. “Check it over inch by inch to see what damage that devil did. Salvador, check the float.”
Salvador ran to the float, followed by the rest of the children.
“I’m never going to destroy it,” the maestro said, “even if they offer me paradise on earth.”
“You’re not going to destroy it,” Doctor Proceso responded, and added, after an expectant pause: “You’re going to convert it.”
They looked at him without understanding, without recognizing him. And it was because the doctor looked like someone else, very different from the man who first arrived (soaked through, in a bad mood and longing to leave); now he shivered, not with cold, but emotion, he was constantly raising his eyes to “Don Furibundo Chasing his Wife” and going off into raptures: had he gone mad? He was jabbering and whispering, blurting out exclamations and biting them back, like someone prey to the most profound illusions.
“And how do you want me to convert it?” the maestro asked. He asked out of politeness, because he was still grateful for the help he had received from the doctor ten years before, but his pride was hurt: he never liked anyone to come along and suggest changes to his floats. Had it not been the doctor he would have thrown him out of the workshop long ago: after all, he had arrived in the company of the drunken devil.
The doctor steadied his voice. Now or never, he thought. He was well aware they were waiting for his answer. He had to tread carefully.
“Maestro Abril,” he began, “we’ll make Arcángel de los Ríos pay what he promised, but three times over. We were witnesses here: attempted homicide, wasn’t it? Tomorrow, when he wakes up after his binge, the avenging Arcángel will be like putty in our hands. I’ll speak to him, I’ll tell him I will use my good offices so that none of the artisans file a suit against him, but I’ll warn him, on your behalf, that he’ll have to pay triple what he promised, I mean three times the prize money for the winning float.”
There was an eerie silence.
And a piercing whistle was heard from Iscuandé.
“Sounds good,” she said.
“Many a slip…” Martín Umbría said. He was the master craftsman who had been working with Tulio Abril the longest, and they listened to him respectfully. “The main thing is that the drunkard pays up and doesn’t come here again, plastered, and shooting every which way.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell him he won’t be on the float chasing his wife any more, but that he’ll have to pay triple not to end up accused.”
“There’s something that doesn’t convince me,” Maestro Abril said. “How come he’s not going to be on my float?”
Zulia Iscuandé grew exasperated by her husband’s words. She preferred to listen only to the doctor.
“Tell us what you’re suggesting,” she said. And even so it seemed to Tulio Abril that Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López really had gone mad, or just about: he looked at them without blinking, his hands were shaking.
Now or never, the doctor said to himself again, meanwhile. It was the opportunity of his life. His face was all lit up, as it had been when he made his first communion, when he received his medical degree, when he went to church to marry the woman he was in love with, when he saw her naked, at last. And his face was so full of wonder because he was looking and looking again at the huge figure while he said:
“Furibundo Pita is identical to Simón Bolívar.”
No-one said anything. The children stopped searching for the places where Furibundo’s bullets had left their mark on the float and for the first time attentively regarded the immense figure towering over them, now provided with an alternative identity.
“It’s just like him,” the boy who had been the lookout said at last. “It’s the Liberator himself from the books at school.”
“Simón Bolívar can stay up there just as he is,” the doctor went on. “Furibundo’s wife might come in handy later on, we’ll see how and where; with that terrified expression and fleeing the way she is, she’s like our country.”
No-one seemed to understand, or would admit to understanding, the comparison.
“The only thing up there that can’t be used is the jeep,” the doctor continued, all in a rush. “Luckily, it’s not finished, we’ll transform it. We’ll put a victor’s chariot in its place, a sort of nineteenth-century carriage, where that selfsame Bolívar will go, but in uniform and with a laurel wreath on his head, sitting on his velvet cushion; and the cart will be pulled by twelve girls — I said girls, not young women — with garlands around their hair and skimpy tunics on, like nymphs. That’s how Bolívar liked them.”
He lowered his vision-filled gaze and met the astonished eyes of the artisans for the first time.
“Which Simón Bolívar are you talking about?” Maestro Abril finally asked. “The one from Independence?”
“The very same,” the doctor replied.
It was too late to backtrack now.
But how to explain history in just a single moment and to such an audience?
This carriage the doctor proposed existed just as he described it, in Caracas, on August 6, 1813, when the same people who had celebrated the entry of the Spaniard Monteverde months earlier were now celebrating the entry of Bolívar, giving him a hero’s welcome for accomplishing victories that were not his — the real heroes of those early days had been Piar, Mariño and Girardot — Bolívar’s “victories” were just skirmishes, but the villagers in his path eagerly swelled his ranks, and Bolívar made the most of this and entered Caracas, and he was the one to call himself “the Liberator.”
The Liberator: a title the Caracas city council would later confer on him.
The little fellow had lost no time, the doctor thought. That’s what he used to call Bolívar, when he brooded over him and immersed himself in the man’s historic past as if in a bad dream that became more nightmarish because it was impossible to wake up from.
The little fellow, who ended up betraying General Francisco de Miranda, commander-in-chief of Venezuela’s insurgent forces, personally handing him over to the Spanish in La Guaira, after cunningly persuading him to postpone his journey to England, taking him captive at three in the morning, ordering him to be placed in irons and shackles and offering him up to Monteverde in order to get safe conduct and the approval of the Spanish authorities in exchange; the little fellow who had been the real reason for General Miranda’s fall after abandoning the fortress at Puerto Cabello — the best equipped of the insurgent strongholds — abandoning it despite having more than sufficient forces to thwart a spontaneous uprising by unarmed Spanish prisoners, the little fellow who fled in the night to his San Mateo estate with eight of his officers, without warning his troops who ended up without a leader, let alone any orders to follow; that same little fellow was now received in Caracas as if he were a Napoleon.
Yes, the doctor said to himself, it was the surrender of Puerto Cabello that forced Miranda to sign a treaty that would re-establish Spanish control in Venezuela, and Bolívar was the cause of the defeat: a great deal of shamelessness was required in order for Bolívar to seize Miranda, accusing him of betrayal, the very betrayal that Bolívar did commit by handing his commander over to the Spanish.