Enrique and Patricio were the eldest sons of Sebastián Quiroz Carvajal, the architect; there were eight sisters behind them. Neither of the brothers had yet finished his university studies, and they were getting ready to go to Bogotá to continue them. The others in the group were working hard to do the same. They would all go: things “happened” in Bogotá; Pasto was “asleep.” What is more, it was not possible for them to use their noms de guerre in the small city because people knew who they were, had done since they were children. It was different in Bogotá: there, Enrique Quiroz was “Vladimir,” and at twenty-seven years of age had, not one, but two families of his own. One with “Tania” and the other with “Simona.” With the former he had three children: Lenin, Miguel Mao and Lenina, and with the latter, two: Simón Ernesto and little Stalin, just six months old. In Pasto, his third family was on the way, secretly, with his pregnant cousin Inés Bravo. No-one at home knew anything about all these households — three women and six children — but it was the architect Sebastián Quiroz Carvajal who, never dreaming it, supported them all. This did not stop Enrique Quiroz, after receiving his generous monthly allowance, referring to his father as an “old retrograde,” “iniquitous bourgeois” and “petty oligarch.” Enrique did not worry about his families’ straitened circumstances, circumstances he did not share with them, or worry about bringing further children into the world. He talked of “more soldiers for the revolution” and it was precisely for this reason that his brother Patricio, “Boris,” admired him. Patricio already had his first soldier on order, with a pure-blooded indigenous woman from the Sibundoy Valley, and he was euphoric about it: this presaged the incorporation of indigenous peoples into “the cause”; there was a new race on the horizon. Patricio Quiroz was the only member of the group not studying law and political sciences: he was doing economics, but considered himself an artist, and for years had been saying he was composing the great anthem of the Colombian Revolution. A heavy drinker, he played the accordion and crooned serenades.
The members of the theatre group appeared so committed that they even “rehearsed” on Saturday, December 31, the last day of the year, despite the sounds of celebration drifting through the streets. That morning they were settling how to bid the year and Pasto farewell, as once carnival was over they would travel to Bogotá, all of them already enrolled in the National University of Colombia. The plan was to shape an urban guerrilla war, in Bogotá, an idea they had been working on for months. While in Pasto, the city of their birth (although three of the twelve were not Pastusos: one came from Cali, another from Chocó, the third from the plains), they planned to put an end to the dangerous treachery of a multimillionaire gynaecologist, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, close friend of the madman Chivo, who meant to mock the Liberator Simón Bolívar, father of the revolution, with a carnival float.
“He’s got it coming to him.”
Enrique Quiroz, chief instigator of the action against Doctor Proceso, had spoken.
“That doctor is boss and ringleader for the idiot Chivo. Both of them are barmier than billy goats, but poisonous ones.”
The church bell tolled ten o’clock, ringing for morning Mass. Three of the group members gave an account of their military action:
“Yesterday we managed to seize two sculptures from that sell-out Cangrejito, the black piece of shit, artist of the enemy.”
“They’re wooden. Huge.”
“The shooting of the twenty Capuchin missionaries of Caroní, on Bolívar’s orders.”
“And of the La Guaira eight hundred, on Bolívar’s orders.”
“The captions were: Bolívar shoots the twenty Capuchin friars, 1817 and Bolívar shoots the La Guaira eight hundred, 1814, with dates and everything. Some balls, those bastards.”
“They looked very nice, really well made, for what it’s worth. In the one of the twenty Capuchins there was a Bolívar figure on horseback; a soldier was telling him about the capture of the twenty friars; Bolívar was asking, in wooden lettering: And you haven’t killed them yet? In the one about the eight hundred there were some old folk tied to their chairs, and that’s how they were carried and put up against the wall, because they couldn’t walk anymore. How about that? The captions also said: Gunpowder was expensive so they used sabres and pikes and The executions began on February 13 and finished on 16. Where did they get that from, those oafs?”
“What is to be done with history?” Puelles asked. “We don’t know who these people were, or who they were not either.”
“We didn’t know about these executions, at least. Did you?”
There was a silence, sharp as a guillotine, that Enrique Quiroz rushed to diffuse.
“If Bolívar shot them or used sabres or pikes on them, it was because they deserved it,” he said. “Bolívar cannot be called into question.”
“Those planks burned well on the bonfire we made.”
“Was that big black guy there, in the workshop? Did he put up a fight again?”
“He’d gone out. His apprentices were there, a bunch of yobs.”
“Watch what you say,” Quiroz said. “The apprentices are the people. Workers and campesinos add up to the future of the revolution. In this particular case, ignorance makes them innocent.”
“Perhaps the black guy hasn’t come back; he saw the way the wind was blowing. He took most of his work with him: he wants to show it all together on the float. That’s what he thinks.”
“Shitty reactionary. We’re going to blow his carriage sky high, along with everyone putting it together.”
“We don’t know where he went,” the apprentices told the doctor. “He disappeared in secret.”
They were in Cangrejito’s studio, empty of work. Despite it being mid-day, it seemed like night-time in there. There were three apprentices, big simple lads, propped against the walls, having their lunch of steamed corn parcels and cold oat milk.
“He took his sculptures with him yesterday, Friday, in a truck: imagine a truck full of carnival. And the thieves came last night; they didn’t find anything; they could only take two ‘Executions,’ which Cangrejito left behind because he hadn’t finished them.”
They did not seem frightened to the doctor, more like intrigued.
“They swore they’d give us a pounding if we carried on with the carriage,” the oldest apprentice said, chubby and smiling. “They were armed, that’s how they got away with stealing what they stole, they didn’t look very tough.”
“Police or military?”
“They were masked up, Doctor. I don’t think they were soldiers. You could see their hair, lots of it, underneath. Long-haired guys. They were just robbers, that’s all, and scared.”