“If you would like to, Doctor,” Villota said, “come in and pray with us for our Belencito’s soul. Fancy, he always did things his own way: now, for example, it occurred to him to go and die right in the middle of carnival, he made it hard on us, you can hardly find a priest, they’re all off duty, but we got one, and now when Belencito’s just passed away and we’re starting his vigil, there’s a power cut, isn’t that another of Belencito’s bright ideas? Maybe. Does Belencito want to tell us something? Maybe that too. Thank God that Father Bunch has the patience of Job, we’ll begin in a minute, there’ll be a lot of rosaries said tonight for the soul of a sinner: a great sinner, it’s true, but one we loved and love still. All his children are here, that’s what he left behind him, children and grandchildren by the dozen, who will follow his example, God willing.”
And Benigna Villota’s face disappeared, followed by the rest of the old women, silent, judgemental.
They had left the door open.
All this, which Primavera heard from behind the Capulin cherry tree, exactly in line with the half-illuminated window, inside which the vigil was taking place for Belencito Jojoa, gave her a fit of the giggles; so that they should not hear her, she covered her mouth with her hand, one knee on the ground, shaking like a woman possessed, among flowerpots and clumps of mint. She was, without knowing it, right beside the deceased’s bedroom, lost in the insanity of her laughter, outside the room that must contain Father Bunch, the old women and the children and grandchildren; from the hazy window seemed to spring a silence that smelled of tallow; shadows passed back and forth. The doctor went there looking for her, underneath that window: he found her with her back to him, her knee on the ground, still in the grip of the muffled laugh that was making her curl up. And he seized her by the shoulders, he did not know whether from delight or exasperation, still not knowing what he was going to do, what was he going to do with her? Finally kill her? — he yelled to himself. Strangle her? Kiss her till he left bite marks? Bite her till she bled? Laugh with her? Laugh more, maddened, without end? Primavera’s messy hair, the nape of her neck, the sort of perfume of sweated aguardiente on air redolent with mint disturbed him: “The man you wanted to make happy is dead,” he said in her ear, she turned her head, her mouth open from laughing, her lips wet with rain, and he kissed her at last.
“So, Primavera, was this what we wanted?”
She was choking from laughing so much; she lowered her other knee to the ground and stayed on all fours in the garden, riotous with flowers; she was going to get up but he stopped her; effortlessly he slid Primavera’s breeches down to the back of her knees:
“And let the whole world see your marvellous rear, eh?” And he gave it a resounding smack.
“What…?” Primavera twisted around.
“Shout louder so everyone can hear,” he yelled.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
The rain got heavier.
“So this was my fate?” the doctor said in her ear. “To have to subvert the order of things with my wife?” She said yes, after a rain-filled silence that unhinged them, arching her back beneath him, as he found her: from pure longing they fell on one side, he did not let go, and that was when Primavera looked up to the candlelit window, her eyes looked without seeing, transported, but she finally saw the faces of the children looking at them from behind a terrified silence. She was taken by surprise, but in the middle of her own apocalypse it no longer mattered to her, she did nothing, she could not. Let the children see her, she resigned herself happily, and said, without knowing what she was saying: “We could start again, a new life.”
“Right now,” he said.
“Until we die?”
“Until we burst.”
“I like bursting best,” Primavera said, and sought out the window again: more faces of astonished children. Witnesses.
The rain fell hot upon them, another body on top of their own; Primavera did not come back from her cataclysm; “kill me and get it over with”—her voice echoed in the downpour.
“Is that what you want?” he growled.
She slipped, face down in the wet grass, she thought she was falling from atop a speeding horse, she slipped down like a happy prayer, “my murderer,” she said, and recalled the stallion she saw as a child covering the big yellow mare with lather and vigour, but a shriek that sounded like a bird returned her to reality from her calamity: there was the face of an old woman crossing herself in alarm, inside the window, where not long before there were only children.
Other women’s faces were screaming behind the first, and other yellow faces took turns to look, all of them gathered together at the window. One of the old women rapped on the glass with her knuckles as though she wanted to break it.
The instant she heard them, Primavera was fully dressed once more.
The doctor, bewildered, heard shouting in the rain, without understanding it. In a second he saw that shadows of old women in mourning passed in front of him; they ran after Primavera, and ran on; among the most zealous was Benigna Villota, the one who hurled most insults, burning with rage, but the lithe panther had already bounded over the little wall surrounding the front garden.
Down that lonely street the old women ran in pursuit of Primavera; “whore bitch sinner,” they shouted, “a thousand times profane, grab her, do her in.”
It was the doctor’s last sight of Primavera: she ran gracefully down the street full of yellow candles, sending her most inebriated peal of laughter heavenward, in the rain. Very soon she left the irate women far behind her.
The doctor took the street going in the opposite direction, feeling happy, completely happy: he was thinking about finding Primavera at home, in order to start living, all over again.
6
He thought it was getting dark, but it was dawn: a thin tracing of mist still eddied around the corner where the secret poet Rodolfo Puelles stood wondering whether it was getting dark or light. And just as he was hesitating, at that cold early morning hour of January 6, on that unfamiliar corner, he saw the ghostly Carriage of the Afterlife hurtling downhill from the streets furthest up — the one they say everyone sees, dreaming or otherwise — he saw it go by like a swirl of dust, cutting a great furrow through the mist, creaking and dark, full of witches from Sapuyes, El Loco and the Devil-in-Disguise, the Beggar, old man Cartabrava, the Mule Woman, the Faerie and weeping Turumama, crowded with all the monsters and ideas of this life and the next, he saw it turn corners without braking, carrying in its teeth the sorrows and ills of the body, as they say that at its passing all grow young, things and people, and even the dead cheer its fleeting appearance: there they go, there go the Spirits, Old Bombo, the Headless Priest, the Screamer, club-footed Tunda, the Taitapuro bonfire dummies, the Snoring Pig, the Mater Dolorosa, there we go: cheers! — Puelles greeted them, stretching out his arm with its empty bottle, but he heard no carnival whistles, no outburst of astonished voices, nor the invisible heart of the drums. If the world is sleeping — he realized — it’s because it is getting light, the celebration of the sixth has barely dawned, I haven’t missed it, my blood is tickling me, and he threw the empty bottle against a tree, which received it, stretching out one of its branches; that is what he saw.