But, notwithstanding, to his surprise, the guests were already beginning to get to their feet and say goodbye. Did no-one want to listen?
“Another day,” the bishop said.
They were leaving, apparently scandalized. They were leaving.
Why?
None of the company could imagine what Doctor Proceso went through in that moment, trailing behind them.
“What’s the matter?” they heard him say.
Polina Agrado and Belencito Jojoa’s testimonies amounted to the most valuable part of his research, how come they were not paying any attention? This is what he was asking himself as he followed them to the front door. At last he caught up with them:
“I’m not going to let you leave, señores.”
His wife stayed behind; she had not got up from her seat of honour in the living room.
In fact, she was the sole cause of the stampede: inadvertently, or on purpose, she had for one implausible moment rearranged her bosoms beneath her sweater, and she did it in such a way that one flawless breast seemed to light up the audience for a second, starting with the bishop, who was the first to get up, blinded, like one who sees hell and flees at the very sight, and then the other guests, who were also dazzled, but accompanied the bishop in his flight — as a moral duty — going against their innermost desire to stay and find out whether it was the natural gesture of a woman who carelessly rearranges her bosom beneath her sweater in public, or a red-hot gesture, fascinatingly frivolous, but deliberate which mocked not just her husband, but all the men in the world, including the Bishop of Pasto.
9
Like everyone else in Pasto, Doctor Proceso knew that Belencito Jojoa, elderly resident of the San José Obrero neighbourhood, was in possession of a Bolívar memory — a memory that touched the old man’s soul because it had to do with his family.
The doctor knew the memory, all of Pasto knew it, but he needed to hear it from the lips of Belencito Jojoa himself: for months he tried to get an interview and finally Belencito received him, sitting up in the cedar bed he himself had made — he was a carpenter — a large bed, and larger still for Belencito, shrivelled and yellow and creased like parchment, a bed he had not left in three years, he said, because of illness, without specifying which illness it was, and when the doctor asked, in case he could help, Belencito answered that it was the worst, señor, boredom:
“Hell is boredom, señor.”
He belched and, as if to make amends, crossed himself.
“I’m bored while dying, don’t you think that’s depressing? Somebody should distract me, a woman, there are plenty of them out there in the world, but they won’t let me look for one, or even shout out the window to call one over.”
He said his third wife did not sleep with him:
“She’s just a helper, a helper who sleeps elsewhere.”
And then — in spite of his self-absorption — he let out an almighty fart while saying:
“That’s the problem. If she slept with me like she did years ago as well as helping me, a different cock would crow: one can be very old, but still fancy a tickle, or to be tickled.”
And he began to laugh, horribly toothless:
“Before, she used to help me so much. Suffice to say we had six children, which added to the eleven and the ten from my other two wives makes twenty-seven. I’ve buried seven of them, and I have forty-six grandchildren and how many great-grandchildren? I no longer know, and I don’t care either. Why bother to find out? What if I were to set about summoning up all the women I’ve had who disappeared as soon as they appeared? It would be a century of children, señor, but one thing’s for sure: my women wanted to sleep with me, I didn’t make them; grown women, not little girls still wet behind the ears, I never forced them to embrace me. But who are you? You should bring me a little quarter-bottle of aguardiente next time you visit, señor.”
He closed his eyes and fell asleep. Or was he pretending?
On his second visit the doctor took with him, hidden away, the small bottle of aguardiente that Belencito Jojoa had suggested. Facing the bed, seated on a chilly wooden chair, the doctor waited for three or five children, morose and famished-looking, to leave them; they were some of Belencito’s grandchildren and seemed older than their grandfather; only once they left did he proffer the bottle.
“Thank you,” Belencito said in surprise. “Did I ask for this in a dream? Must have done.”
He drank shakily: much of the mouthful ran down his chest onto the covers.
“Your wife’s going to notice,” the doctor said. “This will smell of aguardiente—what if you die on us, Don Belencito?”
“There isn’t a man alive, no matter how old, who doesn’t believe he’ll live to see another day: I heard that here, in Pasto, long before the one who said it told me. I’ll make the effort not to die and tell you what you’re after. You’ve been a friend to bring me this elixir of life, God’s blood; if I got past eighty and am on my way to ninety it’s thanks to this stuff, my secret for putting up with the stupidity of men, the pain of toothache and the woman who suddenly stopped loving, without warning.”
And he drank another long swig: half for him, half for the covers.
“You already know what I’ve come for, Don Belencito, you know what I want you to tell me. You couldn’t do it last week because you fell asleep and also because the nurse arrived to wake you up. I took it all in, how could I not? It so happens I am a doctor; as far as I can see, you are not just suffering from boredom, Don Belencito, but why tell you what you’re suffering from again? I’m a contrary doctor: I think the worst thing is to go around repeating such things to patients. But don’t forget, please, what I’m asking you to tell me.”
“I remember, I remember, and you should bring me another little bottle for that, there’s not much of a kick in this one, poor wee thing. Smoke a cigarette, and pass it to me every so often.”
“I don’t smoke, I don’t have any cigarettes.”
“I do. Inside that black shoe, there behind the door, you’ll find cigarettes. Get one out, light it with the candle by the Christ statue, and give me a puff when I tip you the wink, okay?”
Doctor Proceso did as he was told. The shoe was at least fifty years old, full of filterless cigarettes, dried out like the shoe, almost fossilized. And he had not yet finished lighting the cigarette when in came Belencito Jojoa’s third wife, Doña Benigna Villota, fat and spry at her seventy years of age:
“Is that cigarette for you, Doctor? Don’t let him smoke, or he’ll die on us. You’ll see. Aren’t you supposed to be a doctor?”
Had she been eavesdropping on their conversation? Whether she had or not, she left them, after flinging open the window of that shadowy room: a narrow window, which gave onto the front garden; birds could be heard singing in the street. Ever since he was a child, the doctor had been familiar with that single-storey corner house, with a dark garden full of Capulin cherry trees, which reputedly harboured the wailing of ghosts. They also said it was the wailing of Belencito, when he was drunk — whatever the case, he thought, no wailing had been heard for a long time.
It was six o’clock, getting dark.
He passed the cigarette to Belencito, who was madly winking a bright eye: he inhaled vigorously, two, three, six times. The doctor was afraid he would choke, so he sat on the edge of the bed and stretched out his arms as if the old man were already starting to fall and he alone, with a providential lunge, could save him. Nothing happened: Belencito gave back the cigarette and he bent down to put it out on the floor; a guitar lay under the bed, still golden and with all its strings. At last Belencito finished the aguardiente. The last swig was uproarious.