And while he peed he remembered things about Ilyich from Cali.
He had known him since the first week at university: Ilyich announced to the world that he wrote poems; then that he painted and made sculptures; months later he played the sax; finally, he was an expert on film and photography. For ages they had kept their distance from one another, but they met again — and were both surprised — when they joined the leftist group led by Quiroz: surely that was Ilyich’s true destiny.
And Puelles called him to mind more vividly, suffering over the memory: he had a sharp face, perpetually morose; his eyes and mouth were marked by an unfathomable mistrust, grounded in malice, suspicious of everything, everyone, maybe even himself; his extraordinary, different-coloured eyes were small, a bird of prey’s; his mouth was large, purplish, always wet; his voice was deep, but phoney; everything about him, from top to toe, added up to something repulsive, he thought. Platter was a born traitor, quick to mock and bad-mouth people, he had the habit — which Puelles hated — of speaking ill of whoever had just left the room: he resorted to scathing invention, subtle lies — which the rest, who were afraid of him, applauded as a display of intelligence, how about that? He found it astonishing.
And he remembered him in Bogotá—the two of them active members of the group by then — the day Ilyich introduced him to his friend “Comrade Rosaura.” The pride with which he presented this friend — a mature woman, very short, almost a dwarf, who worked as a domestic servant “in the guts of bourgeois society”—disconcerted Puelles; they met in Rosaura’s room, in a stripped-out tenement building in south Bogotá: the place consisted of a bed, table and chair, a small spirit stove on the floor, an empty little saucepan; mice scampered quickly across the floor, mosquitos attacked, but it was precisely this pitiful narrowness that exalted Ilyich. Resting on the table, open almost at the middle, lay Marx’s hefty tome, Das Kapital, which Rosaura had pointed to, “I’m reading it,” she said. And with cheerful sincerity added: “I don’t understand a word of it, but I’m going to finish it, like I promised Ilyich.” A questioning look escaped Puelles, which he shot — regretting it too late — at Platter Ilyich, believing he would share in it: what was this about reading Das Kapital to the end without understanding it? But the blue and black look he found on Platter’s wan face was fully accepting, a look of triumphant pride. This ended up discouraging him for ever — he would never again expect anything of such an ass, he thought.
And now Platter was brooding down there, a few metres below him, no doubt more bored than he was. Puelles did up his fly; he preferred to go back to thinking about the Medellín poets — there was a light on in those great minds, he thought, and he could at least yell out his poems of humorous love without fear of crucifixion. And he continued with the image of light: us poets are light years away from those pigs, he thought. And he had just thought this when a chilly wind, inopportune like a gust against his skin, that seemed to come from deep inside himself rather than from out there, knocked him flat: could he consider himself “a poet light years away from those pigs?” He asked it in spite of himself. A profound despair welled up inside him; he was overwhelmed by the fear of himself; he was, above all, a murderer: he had killed, and not in self-defence, he thought. I killed him in an underhanded way, I killed him idiotically, yes, but I killed him. He very rarely forgot about the event, and when he did it was always an ephemeral forgetting, sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, sleeping or waking, the mild figure of the policeman appeared to him, leaving the shop with a bottle of milk in his hand.
As if invoking otherworldly forces, Rodolfo Puelles took refuge in poetry and from the whole of his memory chose the words of William Blake, clung to them as if they were a plank floating on the ocean: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” What’s more, hadn’t he read in some great Russian novel that you can kill and rob and, nevertheless, be happy? Where had he read that? And he repeated to himself over and over that he was a poet, above all and in spite of it all, and that no matter what, he was light years away from those pigs, I’m a poet, that’s what I am, come what may.
And when he understood, yes, that Platter Ilyich was following him, a pure peal of laughter burst from him, ringing in the night. Platter heard laughter above his head, but he did not know who it was.
3
“Floridita, we’re going to cover you in flour.”
“But today’s not January the sixth.”
“We’re going to flour you anyway.”
They were on one side of the children’s park. She did not know the three boys blocking her way. She could not remember them from anywhere but, somehow, they knew her name, and had said they were going to flour her — on the first of January, no less, when the carnival had not yet begun. She could not understand it: people painted their faces on the fifth, because it was Black Day, and they threw talc at each other’s faces on the sixth, because it was White Day. Why were these boys all around her on the first? What’s more, they did not even have the little bottles of scented talc she was familiar with, only grubby bags of flour. And they really were going to flour her, she thought, and if that flour went in her eyes she might go blind.
“If today was January the sixth, I would let you,” she told them. “But it isn’t. That’s why you can’t flour me either. Don’t you know what day it is? It’s Sunday, January the first.”
Above Pasto’s rooftops, crystal clear — pure, clear blue — the volcano Galeras rose up so close that it seemed to be listening.
Floridita walked off, and the three boys let her through, but they followed her, their hands in the tops of the open bags. She stopped again and faced them. The boys retreated, very slightly, not as she was hoping. She set off again, blushing, taking faster steps, and with faster steps the boys followed her. She checked there was no-one around who might help her. Then she confronted them one by one, her eyes glinting, lips compressed. For the first time in her life she had decided to go out of the house by herself, without her sister Luz de Luna, and this happened. For a moment she stood looking at the imposing silhouette of Galeras without really seeing it, and, when she did, it felt to her like it was coming down on top of them, that it would flatten them all; in the ruddy evening light it looked like a mountain of blood.
She set off. Her indifference cleared the way for her. But once more she heard:
“We’re going to flour you, don’t run away.”
“Who’s running?” she asked. And she paused again.
“Don’t cry now, Floridita,” the same boy said. Who was he? Did they know one another?
“Me, cry?” she asked, laughing, and her face immediately took on a scornful sneer: “Cry?”