One of his patients also telephoned him, Chila Chávez; a woman beset by misfortune, she had married and been widowed that very December, and now suspected she was pregnant, when could he attend her? “Next year, señora, when all this miserable partying is over,” he said circumstantially, and added: “Let me remind you, next year starts tomorrow.” With the woman’s laughter over the telephone, the air turned feminine, captivating, and the doctor wavered, befuddled. Before hanging up, Chila Chávez asked him where he would be spending New Year’s Eve, just for something to say, out of politeness, and the doctor did not know how to disguise the hurt in his voice: he said he did not know. She did not hesitate to invite him to her house, as if she sensed his sorrow straight-away, “I’ll be on my own,” she said, “but in good company with you.”
And she certainly lived alone, in one of those devastatingly huge Pasto mansions, set on the top of the Bethlemites’ hill, a glass house resembling a cage that her husband had had built for her before his accidental death: the brakes failed on his truck and he hurtled into the Guáitara. The doctor wondered whether he would go, whether he was capable of it, while the widow’s still-ardent voice told him over the telephone to think about it. Like a stroke of fate, what claimed to be a consultation might turn into a party for two. But the doctor would not go, he checked it against his conscience; the only thing in this world or the next he was concerned about was the Bolívar float: he wanted to know what had befallen Cangrejito Arbeláez and his sculptures. Had the robbers come back?
At midday he said goodbye to Genoveva Sinfín, not without informing her that they should expect him, he would spend New Year’s Eve with her and the rest of the staff, “with each and every one of you,” he said, brimming with bogus bonhomie, and he gave her carte blanche to prepare the dinner. “We’ll eat in the garden,” he said, “whatever the weather.” And he remembered the gardener, his day labourers: “Tell Homero he’s invited, tell Seráfico, tell the plumber, that Cabrera fellow and Chamorro that we’ll eat guinea pig today like they’ve never tasted in their lives, tell them to bring their girlfriends or their grandmothers, I’ll expect them here.” Sinfín could not hide her astonishment, and the doctor thought she seemed pleased. He was to be disappointed: Sinfín asked permission on behalf of herself and the staff to celebrate the last day of the year with their respective families. He could do nothing but spread his arms open wide, in suffering: “Do what you like,” he said. He would have to spend it alone, if he did not decide to go to Furibundo Pita’s party, or to the widow Chila Chávez — dear God, he said to himself, why such panic over being alone?
So he drove his Land Rover to Cangrejito Arbeláez’s house: with low expectations, feeling resigned. In Galerías, the marketplace, while he was waiting for the lights to change, he thought for a split second he saw an ape come stumbling out of a bar, with a gourd full of chicha in his hand. “It can’t be,” he thought, “Homero?” The ape immediately disappeared back inside the bar and the doctor decided not to check for himself which ape it was. It had to be Homero, he thought, there could not be another costume like that in the whole of Pasto. But they would see each other soon enough, he thought, he would explain soon enough.
Following that apparition, when the light changed to green and the jeep was starting to pick up speed, a shadow stepped out in front of him. He had to slam on the brakes: it was a very pale, tall young man, who stood looking at him fixedly after the sudden halt, and even came towards him, up to the driver’s window, when he set off again, as if he wanted to ask him something; the doctor braked again and wound down the window to hear him, but the young man kept on going, without so much as a gesture. That young man was Enrique Quiroz, the eldest of the Quiroz brothers, Enriquito, the instigator — according to Professor Chivo — of the beating he had received at the hands of masked thugs. The doctor knew about the incident, but he did not know Quiroz.
And very soon he forgot about the passer-by who almost got himself run over at a traffic light.
PART III
1
They pretended to be a theatre group, in order not to arouse suspicion, as they put it. Every Saturday morning they met at the parish church of Nuestro Señor de los Despojos, in the community hall, to “rehearse”: they were putting on a theatrical version of The Imitation of Christ, the idea of Rodolfo Puelles, poet of the group, but a secret poet to boot, as no-one knew — nor could they know — about his poems.
Puelles himself hid them: if his comrades discovered what they were about — which had nothing to do with the social emancipation of the people — they would not only brand him bourgeois, but a pervert. Because he wrote erotic verse, which he described as “about humorous love.” His work in progress was titled Nineteen Sugar Bums and an Enchanted Vagina, and the “First Bum” began: “Teresa into whose bum the dick begins/To vanish…”
There were twelve of them, all men. The only woman, Toña Noria, a lanky black girl from Barbacoas, who studied agriculture, had been expelled from the group by common consent because “her natural lubricity disrupts the activity of members.” She did not care: from the left-wing group she moved on to the university choir and then the women’s chess team. Her absence was lamented solely and secretly by Rodolfo Puelles, who had already immortalized her in the most torrid of his poems, “The Enchanted Vagina,” which he wrote without yet having exchanged more than a word with Toña Noria, as all he could do was idealize her during lengthy study sessions. Rodolfo Puelles tried to make up for such things with his poems of humorous love and by mocking the world and the poetry of his country, but more than anything mocking his own solitude, because at the age of twenty-two he had never known a woman, let alone love.
The group was a completely anonymous band of students, which sought to link itself to the National Liberation Army, with none of its members knowing whether the likelihood of that link was real or pure fantasy. They talked of “urban nuclei,” “urban networks” and “cells” within the student body; they were marked by a clear “pro-China orientation”; they attacked not just “the system” but the traditional Communist party, the “fascistization” of the university, “proverbial obscurantism,” “McCarthyism,” “anarchist tendencies within the student body,” “revolutionary spontaneity,” “verbal ultra-radicalism,” “divisive factions.”
And the sole “contact” with the “forces of the revolution” was Enrique Quiroz, who claimed to know leaders and was in constant communication with them about what steps to follow, but did not give out further information on the imminent link-up for reasons of “revolutionary security.” Be that as it may, the journeys Quiroz had been making to Bogotá and other cities, for months, guaranteed some truth to it all. His efforts were anxiously followed by everyone; there was even talk of representatives of the guerrilla war visiting Pasto in a few weeks: they would interview members of the group personally and “baptise” the chosen ones. The group, in spite of not belonging to any real political force, deemed itself radical, along Marxist-Leninist-Maoist lines, and had not yet identified the name of the armed wing it intended to support, whether it be independent or in the service of the organized revolution. In Pasto there were twelve members. At least as many again were waiting for them in Bogotá, plus two or three sympathizers in other major cities around the country. The Pasto twelve went to a lot of trouble over their cover as actors and assured everyone they would be presenting their Imitation of Christ to Pasto and the whole wide world in 1967—on March 19, Saint Joseph’s Day — it being a work of reflection and devotion never before seen on the stage. At least, that is what the parish priest, Joseph Bunch, said about it; a closet homosexual — clandestine, like the poet — Bunch gave them his support and also spied on them from time to time, ogling them when gym was part of their rehearsals; but neither the Quiroz brothers nor anyone else from the group, the poet included, had read a single page of The Imitation, and quite possibly Father Bunch never had either, they joked. With a theatrical enterprise like this, designed to extol the priest’s good Catholic deeds, they felt safe from the enemy: camouflaged.