And only then did it occur to him — Primavera, he thought, Primavera went to open the door to the maestro, she dealt with him and dismissed him, without telling me, Primavera, Primavera, who would not one day wish to become your murderer? This certainty upset him like a betrayaclass="underline" Primavera had told Cangrejito he was not at home; the sculptor had to go elsewhere with his truck. And it was more than likely, too, that Primavera was not with their daughters: no doubt she had left them at her sister’s house and gone off to meet General Aipe. That possibility revolted him; “Primavera,” he said, and, for a moment, involuntarily, painfully, he imagined her amorously entwined with General Aipe, or with any other body on earth, and his drunkenness aggravated his suspicions: he imagined her spreadeagled on a squeaky hotel bed, suffocated, and an intimate thrill ran through him, in spite of himself. He was alone in his house, a house even lonelier than he was.
“Damn you, world,” he said.
And he repeated this to himself while back in his jeep driving around streets that were getting busier all the time with the New Year: eyes like invitations, shouts, entreaties, explosive music that shattered windows.
He was going to the widow’s house, as if to the castle of an irreproachable maiden.
But he was more excited by Primavera Pinzón than by Chila Chávez. He could not even remember the widow’s face. Was she beautiful? Less beautiful than Primavera? Much more so? She was not an older woman, but not a girl either; her voice redeemed her, it revealed her utterly.
It was a struggle for him to park the jeep without crashing it. Walking to the front door he felt like a thief about to commit a robbery: a dead man stood behind this woman, he thought, and would be no less present for being dead; not a month had passed since his disappearance, who knows what other shapes he would take, is he that willow tree guarding the door? The willow calls me, keeps calling me, or is it the wind moving the branches? He chivvied himself along.
He raised his hand to the doorbell and did not ring it.
There was no light in the windows. He was sure the widow was not going to be expecting him. And what if he found her waiting for him? After so many tribulations, the widow was a shoulder to cry on, he thought, but to cry with too.
The living room curtains opened and Chila Chávez’s face appeared behind it, pale above her black dress, astonished. When she discovered it was him, she seemed more astonished still, but happily so, letting out a great silent laugh. Straight away, she opened the door. She appeared barefoot, her curly hair swept back:
“Come in, my dear doctor,” she said, “but what an old-year face you’ve got on you, I’m going to make it new.”
She was utterly drunk.
Her voice was slurred, as if in rapture — fine Pasto girl of my heart, he thought. She said she had slept and just woken up.
“Come in, come in, my dear doctor,” she said. She indicated a peaceful room where a black radiogram took pride of place and an Agustín Lara record was playing. A local girl, drunk, he said to himself, a disaster waiting to happen? She’ll fall asleep. No, he thought, in spite of her widowhood, or because of it, he was the cause of her small happiness: it’s me that’s exalting her. But the next moment he found out it was not so, in that very instant it is not me embracing her but her immortal deceased, he thought, or managed to think, buried in the widow’s perfumed hair, and he heard her whispers, almost without understanding her, but he did understand her, aghast, little doctor of mine, I was waiting for you here, my mouth and my legs wide open, little husband of my soul, why did you go and die on me?
Opposite the widow’s house, to one side of the lamp post, Puelles the poet settled down to read, back against the walclass="underline" “I’ll keep an eye on you from here, Doctor, but only until eleven, I’ve got my New Year’s Eve too.”
An only child, he lived with his parents and his grandfather, Capusigra the cobbler. His parents hated him — or so he believed. Things were different with his grandfather: they played dominoes, read aloud from the newspaper, or from his grandfather’s favourite book—Don Quixote—whatever page it fell open at. His grandfather was an ancient old man, but lucid, and was expecting him — he’ll definitely want to have a drink with me and see out the year, he thought. He looked at his watch: nine o’clock. He had left the Vespa in the shadow of an elm tree so the doctor would not see it. What am I doing here? What is my body doing in this street? He thought it shameful and even more idiotic to find himself there, spying on the gynaecologist, carrying out the orders of a lunatic. Wouldn’t it be preferable to jump this ship as soon as possible, to forget the tragedy of the policeman and start life afresh? In a city where no-one knew him. Singapore? Change his name, change his face, be reborn? One thing was certain — he swore — he would never give up his poetry.
He had read in a Sunday paper about a movement of young poets in which the latest ideas were brought together with the positions and impositions of established national poetry. The journalist explained that this was a crowd of young people “mad with a different joy,” and although the poet Puelles did not consider himself mad with joy of any kind, he would have given a leg to find himself among crazed poets reading any of his Nineteen Sugar Bums and an Enchanted Vagina, or simply atoning for or celebrating the poetry of any century, from the first to the last. Poets from every country who were proclaimed by the demented youngsters, philosophers and novelists whom they revered, all of them were already old friends of Puelles — he had read them backwards — and this comforted him, he was not so far off track, in spite of everything, he thought. The in spite of everything was that street, that doctor, that absurd persecution, that dead man hanging around his neck for ever. Puelles looked off in a different direction and scared away the apparition.
From the little hill on which the widow’s house was built you could glimpse a strip of the city, lit up by New Year’s Eve fire: rockets shot straight up into the black sky, and their multicoloured explosions seemed to lightly touch every peak, but “Father Galeras” was unmoved, a great impassive shadow, fleetingly crowned with fireworks—I can do better, Puelles imagined it meant to say.
Occasional cars went up and down the winding road; the festive December noises barely reached this elevated neighbourhood of large, spread-out houses; the road was a narrow carriageway heading down, each curve leaning out over the one below, and there were exactly three bends; on the summit, the concrete smudge of the Bethlemite Sisters’ college stood out, a big empty mass. Below, oblivious Pasto, Puelles thought, lights upon lights.
The book he was reading, The Black Heralds, made him suffer, not so much for the lines he read, but because he had to read with only half his mind; with the other half he had to keep watch on the house into which a certain Doctor Proceso had disappeared. Who was that guy really? A quack, he thought, a distinguished insect. He could not read any more: it felt like he was sitting on ice, his buttocks were numb, his legs asleep. He put the Heralds away in his knapsack and walked down the road, where the night was a distant rumble. On the first and highest of the bends he pushed his way into a dark hollow, between bushes, to pee. From there he observed the continuation of the road, the curve immediately below, flanked with other houses, and then he saw him, sitting on the pavement: Platter Ilyich.
Platter was not reading, he was smoking; not far away from him, in the grass, lay Patricio Quiroz’s orange scooter — the Quiroz brothers were the only “motorized” ones in the group. What was Ilyich doing there? Coincidence? Logistical support? For a second, Puelles was buoyed up: whatever the case, now he had someone to chat with to pass the time, even if it was the loathsome Ilyich, but then something like a light flicked on in his brain. “He’s following me,” he said to himself, “he’s been following me all this time, while I follow the doctor.” And he put two and two together, still incredulous: “He’s following us. He checked how far we went up, and dug himself in down there, where the doctor and I will have to go past sooner or later. What morons, why do they have to tail me? Do they doubt me? Well, when eleven o’clock comes, Platter will have to follow me home: I’m off then, and Vladimir can kiss my ass.”