Then he felt her go past again, towards the front door.
“Where are you going?” he said, just for the sake of it, because he thought that was what he ought to ask, or rather, what anyone would ask, and he did not want to disappoint her, he wanted her to leave for wherever she was heading, calmly, at peace.
“The girls,” she snapped, “remember them?”
She clenched her fists. She trembled beside the door.
“You abandoned them to the mercy of those drunks; doesn’t it ever occur to you to worry about your daughters?”
Those drunks are your brothers and sisters, your family, he was on the point of retorting, but contained himself.
“Don’t you ever think that some pervert might just rape them?” Primavera asked, without expecting an answer. “I’m off to the finca, if you really care.”
And then:
“That’s if I’m not too late. And please don’t follow me, don’t even think about it.”
Motionless, he saw her open and close the door and disappear.
He did not know how much time went by, but he was disturbed by the telephone, which dragged him away from Belencito Jojoa telling tales of Bolívar that rainy afternoon, pulled him from his dreams — although not sleeping — in that same easy chair where he was still sitting from the night before. The morning advanced across the windows: now the light hurt his eyes, and yet — he thought, wiping away a tear — for him it was as if the night was still going on. Are my eyes watering because of the brightness of the light or because I’m crying? The telephone persisted, beside him. He stretched out an arm and answered it. Even before putting the receiver to his ear he heard a voice that sounded like it was coming from the other side of a storm. Not only did the interfering noise resemble that of a storm, but the quiet voice itself could be heard breaking up into crackling sounds. It was the voice of General Lorenzo Aipe, or rather, a sort of guttural groaning he was making — more words, fewer words, and always fragmented:
“Doctor, if I’m damaged for life, you’re dead, do you hear me, you sonofabitch doctor? You’re dead if you injured my tongue.”
Doctor Proceso let the morning advance over him, let the sun touch the edge of his shoes, his knees, his waist, his chest, and on up to his eyes. He had resolved to go out to the finca after Primavera, for his daughters — but no, he said to himself. “No,” he repeated out loud, “I won’t go.”
He would visit the sculptor Cangrejito Arbeláez, as agreed with the maestros: renew his enthusiasm for Bolívar’s carriage. From that moment on, his pain of a love for Primavera, that absurd uncertainty of love, would be left behind. From now on he would think only of himself and the float, with no backing down, unlike what he had been permitted his entire life, his whole life condemned to the suffering caused by a single name: Primavera.
But when he crossed Pasto’s sleeping streets in his jeep, that Thursday, December 29, 1966, he was still remembering the scalpel that had seemed to have had a life of its own, the pink and white tongue, Primavera’s astonished eyes, the blood, General Aipe’s tortured voice threatening him.
“Bad job,” he said to himself again. “Very bad job.”
5
Without yet having exchanged a word with the doctor about the float, the sculptor Cangrejito Arbeláez had already chiselled reliefs of the early events of Bolívar’s life onto wooden panels. At that moment, he was marking out the betrayal of Miranda, and Doctor Proceso was observing, fascinated, the gradual appearance of Simón Bolívar and the other conspirators, beneath the rapid chisel blows, Bolívar with Miranda’s sword and pistol — Miranda who waited, sitting up in bed, hands and feet in chains — the Spanish soldiers approaching and, underneath, running the full length of the panel, in carved lettering: SIMÓN BOLÍVAR BETRAYS HIS GENERAL, FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA.
“How many men went there with Bolívar?” Doctor Proceso asked.
“Five: Miguel Peña, Juan Paz del Castillo, Carabaño, Mires, Casas. As you can see, you’re not Sañudo’s only reader. Surprised?”
The doctor leaned over one of the panels that was already completed: Simón Bolívar and eight of his officers abandoning the square inside Puerto Cabello — with its three thousand guns and four hundred quintals of gunpowder — to the mercy of an uprising by unarmed Spaniards; they fled flat out, the nine faces showing disproportionate fear; even the galloping horses had expressions of terror, and, if you looked more closely, there was something extraordinary about them: the gaping faces of the nine horses were faces of petrified virgins, about to be sacrificed. The wooden lettering stated: BOLÍVAR FLEES FROM PUERTO CABELLO AS IF THE DEVIL WERE ON HIS HEELS.
“But I want to show you something I made, long before reading Sañ-udo,” Maestro Arbeláez said.
He left his tools on the table and stood for a moment in thought, wiping his hands on his leather apron. He came from Tumaco originally: a burly black man, with bloodshot eyes, and — the doctor thought — the unwavering sullenness of an abandoned child. He marvelled at this apparition of a giant, who carved wood as if breathing life into it, and he allowed himself to be led along a pathway of shrouded statues.
The studio was in a large, damp, rented house, and was so dark that it was surprising a visual artist could create his work in there. The maestro had to labour by electric light: beneath the pale bulbs his shadow seemed to float as if among age-old torches. He stopped in front of one of the sculptures and became thoughtful once more. Before uncovering it, he turned to the doctor.
“I didn’t make this because I’m black,” he said. “But almost.”
And he smiled, without losing his sullen expression.
“I have to admit,” he went on, “that the fact General Manuel Piar was black aroused my curiosity, in the beginning, and later on, more than anything, Bolívar’s reasons for ordering him to be shot: he said Piar wanted to establish pardocracy, and used this to frighten the upper-class patriots, who feared being under the command of a black man, how about that? Bolívar assumed just the right kind of ingenuity for his day and age.”
“They left Piar unprotected,” the doctor said. “Piar, who up to that point had acted impeccably, unlike Bolívar and his flawed imaginings. That was how Bolívar managed to disguise the real reasons for the execution.”
“Bolívar was afraid of Piar’s intelligence, his independence of thought, not just his military qualities,” Maestro Arbeláez picked up the thread, “Piar wasn’t a toady, like the others. Faced with Bolívar’s campaigns, all of them useless up to that point, Piar had nicknamed Bolívar the ‘Napoleon of withdrawals,’ no less. I don’t know if the name reached Bolívar’s ears, but Piar had already warned the others about his idiotic and pretentious Napoleonism, and about his main strategy, which seemed to consist of retreating at the slightest sign of danger.”
Here the maestro’s smile put in another appearance, and now his sullenness ceased to be unwavering; the more he talked, the closer he came to roaring with laughter.
“Remember the Battle of Junín,” he said, “which wasn’t a ‘battle,’ according to the technical terminology of warfare. Sañudo initially says it was a ‘skirmish,’ subsequently he says ‘fight’; in his History of America Estébanez says it was really an ‘engagement’; Cortés Vargas goes further and calls it a ‘gamble.’ Skirmish, engagement or gamble, Bolívar fled the field when he thought his cavalry was defeated; he didn’t stick around long enough to observe that a squadron of lancers took the royalists by surprise; he alone fled to behind the cover of his infantry, galloping at the double, and withdrew to a hill ‘until the evening shadows covered the field’… Colonel Carvajal finally managed to find him to inform him that while the general was retreating, the enemy was put to flight. He said: ‘Fear not, Liberator, victory is yours.’”