And yes, it was glaringly obvious: it was not revulsion on Quiroz’s face, but resentment, envy, Puelles shouted to himself — worse than revulsion, he must be suffering more.
That certainty astonished Puelles: Enrique Quiroz loathed him for being the one who fired the gun, for being the one who had dared, but he loathed him above all for being the one and only witness to his cowardice, the intimidation of Vladimir, hesitant little Enrique, utterly spineless, weren’t the two of them shoulder to shoulder the night of the action? That certainty, rather than making Puelles proud, scared him. His resolve had won him an enemy: Vladimir no less. Was it possible little Enrique believed his leadership under threat? Why not? Stupidity is infinite, he thought.
But after the group said goodbye and dispersed, a worse fear occurred to the secret poet, a real one: perhaps Enrique Quiroz wanted to repeat the exploit with the policeman, but this time with a gynaecologist? “Not that,” he said out loud; such colossal imbecility would not be possible, or would it? Stupidity, he thought again, and then regretted everything and everyone and his own self; “fuck,” he bawled; a terrible desolation seized him: he thought of the mass of youth who were struggling frantically during these years, in every one of the universities in the country, in the schools and colleges, where students and teachers stood by the same ideal. What would happen? Where would it all lead? Wasn’t this energy being wasted? Wasn’t it being sacrificed at the hands of stupidity?
As for him, he would have liked the earth to swallow him up.
Doctor Proceso was overwhelmed too. Once again rain greeted him in Maestro Abril’s neighbourhood, once again the volcano was blowing out ice, again the narrow street, just the same, was engulfed in fog; but the carriage did not loom over the wall as before: they had “disappeared” the float, and no-one came to the gates, no child materialized, no woman came with news, he thought, as if the world had gone to another world. Was it because it was the thirty-first, the last day of the year, a hiatus?
He got back in the jeep: a black hen was pecking about in the rain; a dog ran off avoiding streams of yellow water, banana skins, dismembered plastic dolls.
He drove through empty streets. He parked on a corner; he did not know how long he lingered there, peering into nothingness. Then he drove across Pasto to the other side, got onto the sodden highway, which led to Lake Cocha. It was late afternoon. At the top of a lonely rise he got out and ran into the squall, to contemplate the lake; he could not see it; fog covered the vast expanse with lead. So he returned to Pasto, no destination in mind. And in the first street he ventured into, he felt the accumulated hunger of the day for the first time, and for that very reason believed he was alive, with something to live for: food. He had not even had breakfast; he deserved lunch, he thought, even if it was the last day of the year.
He stopped at a basic-looking restaurant, with covered terrace, lettering badly painted across the canvas: LA ESPERANZA’S FRITOS.
Beneath the big circus awning, solitary tables were set around a hazy platform: he caught a glimpse of very slow shadows that passed from one side of it to the other. A thin, ageless woman put a plate of frito on his table: chunks of roast pork, popped corn, boiled potatoes and, with a celebratory thump, although the doctor had not ordered it, a half-bottle of aguardiente and a tall, metal cup — like a chalice.
As he ate, amid the fog that swathed the place, straining his eyes, he was better able to make out the stage. There was a band of musicians, he discovered, and he learned more: they were all blind. The sightless were playing guitar, quena pipes and ten-stringed charangos, bass drums and a violin, they were ancient and decrepit, undeniably blind, they must be — he checked, incredulous — they wore those thick green glasses, the ones for blind people — those not wearing glasses exposed their eyes like sores — the youngest of them must have been seventy. What kind of place have I fallen into? On one of the drums he deciphered the white lettering: MUNICIPALITY OF LA LAGUNA, BLIND ORCHESTRA.
No doubt his arrival — the appearance of the first diner, the only one — prompted them to start playing: they began with “La Guaneña.” Behind the blind men a chorus of hundred-year-old women, nine or ten of them, trilled weakly, and it seemed more like a death rattle than “La Guaneña.” “This is how they bid the year farewell,” he said to himself, “and how they’ll greet the new one,” and on one side of the platform he spotted an old couple dancing; it was a listless dance, little clouds of dust were scuffed up by their shoes. It disheartened him to hear “La Guaneña”—war anthem from the days of Agualongo — transformed into a requiem. He drank more aguardiente, and that did nothing to lift his spirits either. He sensed something like bad news in the fog: a presentiment. Luckily the world is a long way off, he thought, I’ll go to bed. He wanted to get up, but his legs felt like someone else’s: he found that during the time that “La Guaneña” lasted he had drunk three half-litres of aniseed aguardiente, plus the first one, which meant that, without knowing it, he had consumed two whole bottles of aguardiente to the lonely strains of that “Guaneña” for the blind. “Right then,” he said to himself, “either I stand up, or I’m dead.”
And he stood up.
He paid the woman. One of the old dears in the choir called out to him, in her faraway, tremulous voice:
“Happy New Year, Doctor Justo Pastor, may God be with you, today as yesterday, tomorrow as today.”
Was she an old patient, or a patient from the other side? The doctor waved goodbye: he could not even manage to reply — it was as if he had forgotten how to talk.
Night was falling. At the Land Rover’s slow passing the city centre began to light up; he wound down the window: the smell of dust and fried food oppressed him; furtive shadows crossed at corners; the first drunks came out onto the street, music swelled, isn’t that Mandarina’s house? The first “visit” of his adolescence had happened there: he had trembled from head to foot; black Mandarina was not only the madam of the establishment, she also initiated the babes, she initiated him, she must be an old lady by now, he thought, why did they call her Mandarina? He remembered her large sex, round and smooth like a split orange, and shivered. Now, in the wide doorway of the big old townhouse, illuminated by a red glow, two girls wearing miniscule skirts, backs hunched over, were lighting cigarettes; they stood scrutinizing him, to see what would happen; one of them came over: lascivious, she offered ancient, unfamiliar words in his ear, and the other, with thick dark hair falling to the back of her knees, carried on staring at him with the constancy of a happy moment, as if she had known him for centuries. “Happy New Year,” the doctor said through the window, and neither girl could understand him, so spellbound did his voice come across. “Not so very long ago,” he carried on, as if telling a joke, “December in Pasto was the month of the dead, but you’ve got to sing and dance, carnival is on its way, nobody cries here, or do they?”
They did not understand him. He was babbling. The girls turned their backs.
When he got home he saw a Vespa parked on the other side of the road and, sitting on the little wall, a boy reading by the scant light of the street lamp, frowning, looking worn out; he was wearing a beret. The poet Rodolfo Puelles did not seem to notice the doctor’s arrival, the noise of the jeep parking, so immersed did he appear to be in his reading. The doctor entered his house hoping to find Sinfín, and did not; he would have liked to ask her whether Maestro Arbelaéz came to look for him the day before, or that very morning.