For Chepita, at any rate, the whole display of dancing and chocolate was fun, just another game. The Liberator not only failed to dance that night, he did not try the chocolate either; he left his officials to head the table and withdrew. His hosts never dreamed of such indifference, and, of course, were not at all offended: they thought the gold coins had been sufficient.
“That was not how things turned out.” The doctor drank, just as Belencito Jojoa had, and everyone else in the room drank too, including the Bishop of Pasto.
“What happened,” Doctor Proceso told them, “was that on the tenth of June, Bolívar left Pasto for Quito, and barely two hours after he set out a detachment of riders deliberately returned to Joaquín Santacruz’s house. They got in through the back, through the stables, killed two pigs and a donkey, nobody knows why, then murdered one of the servants who was going to help them dismount, and carried off Chepita del Carmen Santacruz. Less than a league away, Bolívar was waiting for her. He used her straight away, and carried on using her out in the open during that whole forced march up to the gates of Quito, six days later. Only then did he return her to Pasto.”
“Pregnant,” Belencito had said, and drank some more. “That was the sad thing: she was thirteen, but it happened; it can and does happen; marked for life, not so much as far as the city was concerned, that was the least of it, but in the eyes of her own family, my ancestors. Bolívar’s fault, of course, but also my people’s. Her pregnancy set her apart like a scar on the soul, just as soon as it was confirmed. With a different father, it would have been a different story. But a child of Bolívar’s was a child of hate. Who knows which was worse, the Liberator’s breach of good faith or Lucrecia Burbano’s terrible and insane decision: she shut Chepita away for life in her bedroom on the first floor, in that old Santiago house.”
“Didn’t she ever see anyone again?” Primavera asked, heatedly. “Didn’t anyone ever see her again? And her child? What became of her child?”
“It was a daughter,” the mayor ventured, “at least, as far as I know. Some say they sent her to a convent in Popayán when she was old enough; others that she stayed with her mother in confinement and that, after the mother’s death, the daughter went the same way.”
“So sad,” the bishop concluded. “Something is known of that calamity.”
The doctor let them talk.
“What convent in Popayán? No convent took her in,” Belencito had recalled. “At least the two locked-up women had their room looking out on the Church of the Apostle: there was a little square, they could see the world through the window, and the world could see them too, but only through the window, because their window was the only one in the house that didn’t have a balcony, they didn’t give them the privilege of a balcony. Lots of people from Pasto, all dead now, could remember them looking out of the window; first it was the girl holding her little daughter, then the woman and the little girl, then it was the old lady and the woman, and finally the two old ladies, they were the ones I knew through the window: I saw them disappear like dust on the wind.”
“It seems,” Primavera said, “that Don Joaquín and Doña Lucrecia did not mind sharing their double tragedy with everyone else, the tragedy of their daughter and granddaughter in the window. Didn’t it occur to them that people might have fun, spying on them? Wouldn’t it have been better to keep them somewhere else…?”
“Bury them, so nobody should see them?” The professor regretted jumping in with such bleak humour, too late, because Primavera was already blushing, embarrassed.
6
“Polina Agrado’s ancestors had a worse time with Bolívar,” Doctor Proceso said.
The elderly Polina Agrado had received him at her house, which must have been the oldest in Pasto, with three rows of windows, thirty-six unoccupied rooms, empty barns, abandoned kitchens, dark hallways, phantasmal whinnying and phantom riders, and a large kitchen garden full of tangled rose bushes: such was the house in 1966, grey and white, looming up opposite Santiago church.
To his surprise, Doctor Proceso was announced in the old-fashioned way, by a manservant as ancient as Polina Agrado. The old lady received him dressed as though for a funeral, more than surrounded — protected — by three of her nine daughters. He thought he was in Paris, at a marquise’s salon. The old lady’s head was covered by a Franciscan veil. She held out a gloved hand, which the doctor kissed — as her daughters had demanded when he made the appointment by telephone: “Greet her with a kiss on the hand and sit on the stool you’ll see in front of her. Don’t say a word. Just listen. She knows what you’re after.”
“I like to talk looking out at Santiago church,” Polina Agrado had said, “and especially when I have to speak about things I no longer want to. It is even sadder to talk to someone who asks, without a drop of pity, that I tell the tale of my family’s misfortune. But I knew your parents, Doctor, honest folk, and that’s why I’m speaking, out of respect for them. I know nothing at all about you, but, at the very least, I expect your discretion. I do not know what you are going to do with my truth, I cannot imagine what you have in mind, and I prefer not to find out. I leave it in God’s hands; that’s the only reason I agree to talk about things one cannot forget, even at my age. If I keep my eyes on the window, do not think I am ignoring you: I just look at the church so God, who resides within, may give me strength.”
The daughters served coffee. In utter silence they settled themselves down to stay. “Leave,” Polina Agrado told them, “you do not need to hear what I’m going to say again, because then you would have to go to Confession again.” So the daughters went out, and the door was closed. The whole place smelled of old age. The doctor distracted himself by contemplating the arabesques in the cracked ceiling: there were pink and blue landscapes, angels and swords, suns.
“Now I’ll begin,” Polina Agrado said.
But she did not.
Silence.
Sighs.
Was she crying?
Primavera poured more aguardiente into the glasses. The professor did not take his eyes off her hands. Mayor Serrano was speaking; Doctor Proceso was speaking, heatedly. The bishop was deep in thought. Professor Chivo contributed, but switched his attention painfully back and forth between the story of Polina Agrado and Primavera’s hands, her indifferent eyes.
“Polina Agrado’s ancestors were a grandmother and her grand-daughter.”
“And both suffered their own calamities in the tragedy. A lot of people think it’s beyond belief, but it happened,” Chivo interjected.
“It’s been passed down by word of mouth like the tale of an unlucky Little Red Riding Hood, but it’s a true tale, and that makes all the difference. ‘In order to understand my ancestor’s gesture,’ Polina Agrado had said, ‘to understand the gesture made by Hilaria Ocampo — better known as the widow Hilaria, because she lost her husband very young and raised her children alone — you have to understand the predicament she and her granddaughter faced.’”
“In order to understand the ‘gesture?’ Is that what you’re saying she said, Justo Pastor?” the professor marvelled. “If you can call that a gesture… I know all about the gesture, although I’d prefer to call it a ‘desperate measure,’ and sweeten it a bit, and even so it would still be appalling.”