Her thin voice was heard over the racket of scraping desks:
“Forgiven.”
That’s how Professor Chivo was.
He lived alone, or lived with his cat, and this seemed to him “happiness enough,” as he used to say. The daily company of his students, their “vigorous normality,” made him “die less quickly,” he asserted. He did not predict the black storm fast approaching; he did not foresee himself becoming a whirlwind of emotions.
“Tomorrow we’ll start on the Battle of Bomboná,” he said to his students, “tomorrow we’ll look into whether Pasto was a royalist stronghold, and the matter of the great and justified aversion of little Bolívar.” He shouted this at his students, who were hastily abandoning the lecture theatre.
Little Bolívar: no-one could tolerate it any longer, for quite a while a letter to the vice-chancellor’s office had been doing the rounds asking for his head, the head of the crazy Chivo, a forceful letter because lecturers from other departments also signed it, indignant about the insults to Karl Marx and Simón Bolívar.
3
“Hold on to your hats, kids, youth of the Sixties, future of Colombia, we’re off to witness the Battle of Bomboná, considered ‘strange’ by writers of school history books, who want to make excuses for Bolívar’s defeat with that ‘strange’; another great big lie, but a heroic battle, and the cause of General Bolívar’s visceral hatred towards Pasto and the Pastusos of the day, his bottomless resentment, his innermost bitterness. For once in your lives pay attention to the details, kids, to the before and the after: judge for yourselves, read between the lines, don’t just trail along the track others want you to follow, like sheep, seek out and snatch the truth from the immense mountains of muck that official history has accustomed us to.”
So began Professor Arcaín Chivo’s lecture that early morning, while his impassive students watched him, still half asleep.
“Bolívar wanted to make all the victories his own. It’s not me saying that, Sañudo reconfirms it in his Estudios: he tells us Bolívar wrote to General Santander on the twenty-third of August, 1821 to say he was thinking of going to liberate the province of Quito, so Santander should command Sucre and Torres (who were already there) to stand only on the defensive.
“He wanted to make all the victories his own.
“He wrote to José de San Martín that he was marching with his army ‘to shatter as many chains as he should encounter binding the enslaved peoples who cry out across South America,’ and that he would go to Peru ‘with four thousand men to embrace the Children of the Sun.’ Bolívar set out for the south from Bogotá on December thirteenth, and arrived in Cali on the first of January, 1822, and as he wished to make Quito independent he wanted to go on to Guayaquil by sea, but on hearing there were enemy ships in the Pacific he decided to go overland on the seventh, after attacking Pasto, and he authorized commanders to send the new recruits to their barracks heavily restrained, so they should not escape, with any offenders to be shot.
“Here another shameful strategy Bolívar used should be pointed out, one that nevertheless a Colombian writer has lauded and praised as a brilliant idea, despite it being within the grasp of any swindler; well, it’s nothing other than a falsification of official public instruments, international ones. It’s an order given to General Santander to send forged communications to certain foreign diplomats; it was written on the nineteenth of January, and dated in Popayán, albeit Bolívar was actually absent from that city at the time, as he only left Cali for the south on the twenty-third, and arrived in Popayán on the twenty-sixth of that month.”
4
When Professor Chivo finished reading and commenting on Bolívar’s letter to Santander and the appalling events and repercussions in Pasto, he paused, scanning the lecture theatre to confirm what he’d imagined: hardly anyone was still there. The Quiroz brothers had already arranged to desert the room, and behind them disappeared the vast majority of the students; there remained on the horizon the bodies of just two, fast asleep: a girl with her head resting on her arm, long hair sweeping the dirty wooden floor, a boy sprawling, mouth agape as though recently arrived from a party and still drunk; this pair of sleeping students in another class was unthinkable, but judgement had already been passed on Chivo and his History of Colombia.
And, yet, also still in the room, still conscious, was the young woman who’d served as an allegory, who did not dare leave and make the absence complete; she was the last fully conscious student in the lecture theatre: she herself could not explain why she stayed or what for, in front of this man who talked alone and read alone in a room that was lonelier still. Did she feel sorry for him? He looked so lonely, she thought, so absolutely and utterly alone with his discourse on Bolívar, his reading of Sañudo, his indignation and his battles, poor madman, she thought.
“I’ve finished, you can go,” the professor said, so she could make her escape.
The girl stood up and seemed to be about to say something, but thought better of it and headed very slowly for the door. Behind her, the last two students carried on sleeping. It began to drizzle against the large windowpanes: cloud alone filled the sky; the Galeras volcano had disappeared. Suddenly the girl stopped in the doorway: a round, pale face, surprisingly pale, as if lacking mouth and eyes; she turned to the professor and said she had a question:
“Señor, I’ve listened all this time and I’d like to ask something.”
“Go ahead,” the professor responded without curiosity. They’re still trying to comfort me here with a question, he thought, little imagining how disconcerted he was about to become.
“Why make yourself hated?”
5
So, it was due to his own experience that Professor Chivo could not understand the suicidal decision of his friend Justo Pastor to show everyone a carnival float on January 6 featuring Bolívar’s deeds and misdeeds. Listening to the doctor, observing him, he seemed as if he were from another world, so fired up, almost sanctified, recalling the plight of Chepita del Carmen Santacruz. Chivo did not share his audacity, but for that reason he also envied him: Justo Pastor seemed immune to fear.
And the fact was that the doctor had witnessed Chivo’s final mortification, when not only had the vice chancellor backed the students, but the students themselves went to his house at midnight, masked (he recognized their voices, they were led by the Quiroz brothers), knocked down the door, and knocked him down too, kicking him upright again, shattering his ribs, forcing him to drag himself through the streets to the door of the University Hospital, where by a miracle he was treated; voices from the shadows went with him, shouting “keep dragging yourself along, snake, that’s what you were born for.”
They had killed his cat, a ginger Persian called “Mambrú,” hanging him, and they left a note tied to the animal’s taiclass="underline" Puppet. Pasto’s only newspaper did not report the attack. Not a single one of his colleagues from the university visited him, only Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, whom he would nevertheless stop seeing after that incident, as if the sacrifice Arcaín Chivo had made also meant sacrificing the friendship between the only two men in Pasto united in denouncing Bolívar.
Perhaps it was the professor’s fear that repelled the doctor and made him decide not to see him anymore, or perhaps it was his warning when they were alone, in the hospital itself, at the end of his visit, when the nurses were no longer listening. “Best we keep quiet about the so-called Liberator, Justo Pastor, they’re going to hurt you like they did me; give up your book, Sañudo already made a better job of it; live your life, keep it to yourself, or they’ll chop your balls off.”