At that point Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López did not know which he would prefer, to find Bolívar’s carriage or to find Primavera in the crowd. Primavera would be best, he thought, to give her a fright, to cover her eyes with his great mitts and ask, throatily: “Guess who?” Frighten her in order to kiss her, or the other way around, he thought.
One of the ancient couples waltzing, she and he exactly alike, siblings in decrepitude, saintly smiles on toothless mouths, turning very slowly, came to an ill-timed halt beside him. In the old lady’s eyes was the look of someone about to pass out. He heard her say: “I can’t go on,” and her partner: “We’ll have a rest,” and she replied: “It’s not the dance I can’t go on with, it’s life,” and they separated themselves from the procession, hand in hand, heartbroken. No-one came to their aid. The doctor took off the great ape head: “Go and get some fresh air and no more dancing,” he ordered, like the doctor he was. Someone offered them a bottle of aguardiente, which he turned down; he took the old people by the arm and led them to a nearby tent, where the different soloists and trios were taking turns to play. He sought, found and fought over two chairs for them. Just then, Pasto’s most glorious musicians greeted the audience from the stage: Maestro Nieto, on the requinto, and Chato Guerrero on guitar. They were announcing the already legendary “Viejo Dolor,” to be played as a foxtrot, which made the old lady swoon with emotion: “Don’t let me die without hearing it.” The public uttered cries of “viva!” for Maestro Nieto, famous not only for his “Viejo Dolor,” but the phrase he once used to describe his musical abilities: I can’t read a note, but nobody notices. The doctor listened to the opening cadenzas of the foxtrot for a magical minute and moved away. He had the ape head in his hands, undecided whether or not to put it back on: he was dripping with sweat; he decided to plunge into the broad current of the crowd and strike out in the opposite direction to the way the parade was going in order to finally encounter the floats, one by one. There, astonished, he heard a woman shouting, calling him by name. He froze. The shout came again, from a nearby balcony. He moved forward until he was underneath it, beside an unfamiliar house: the doorway teemed with bodies going in and coming out with considerable difficulty. In the middle of that balcony brimming with women, the pious Alcira Sarasti laughed and stretched her bare arms towards him:
“Come up, Doctor, what are you doing with that ape head? Come up and we’ll watch the floats from here.”
“I don’t think I can come up,” the doctor shouted. “There’s an absolute forest of people.”
And he put the big ape head on again — she recognized me, he thought, what if I bump into the widow? What’ll I do with two lovers at once?
“Then I’ll come down,” Alcira shouted, and disappeared from the balcony.
He waited for her a good long time, under a crushing sun, but she did not come. At one point he thought he saw her head float past on a sea of heads, going under and coming up again, and then he saw her no more: it was as if the crowd had swallowed her up. The sea of heads was crashing on the shore of the avenue; at last the first carnival float was seen approaching. He did not need to move: the entire mass of merrymakers, like a river, dragged him along to the foot of the float. And still he did not manage to make out the theme, the spirit of the float; he was at its feet, but he could not guess what it was about, it presented such a vast spectacle to his eyes, an edifice; to take it on board in its full enormity you had to be on the balcony where Sarasti had shouted from. And he read the notice on it, a banner suspended between the feet of an unidentifiable animaclass="underline" WHEN THE POPPIES FLOWER. It was not his Bolívar float. In a sort of royal box, stuck halfway up, he saw four girls dancing: the sequins on their miniscule costumes flashed in the sun; clouds of talcum powder swirled out around their ankles, streamers flew through the air; “It’s the House of the Sun,” the crowd guessed, and the titanic animal seemed to agree — half fish, half lion; huge seahorses swam about, a resounding jeer was heard on all sides, the doctor wondered who the crowd was laughing at — is it me? — and he looked himself up and down: he was an ape, white with powder, but no-one seemed to see him. He continued to overhear absurd comments: “My bitch and my grandma are going there,” “They’re the governor’s canaries,” and he raised his eyes higher, as the orchestra exploded over his head; then he discovered the queen of the carnival, beauty of beauties, almost naked, jiggling about at the very top of the float, shimmying on a narrow beam; she held a small sign against the triangle of her crotch which read: TROY WAS HERE.
The ape allowed the destination of the crowd to pull him along. He thought that sooner or later, by chance in all the commotion, he would come across Primavera or Bolívar’s carriage, whichever cropped up first. He would receive them gratefully, as one might receive infinite repose, but he would abandon Bolívar’s carriage to the mercy of the world, and Primavera he would take home, to bed, and into his arms, he thought. And yet, after an hour adrift he lost hope: corner followed corner with-out a sighting, the carnival soon smothered him: Primavera was nowhere to be found, better to return home as soon as possible and wait for her — as the world seemed to be advising him. But immediately after coming to this decision it became impossible for him to go towards any destination other than where the crowd was heading. He made out a carnival donkey on the other side of the avenue, a donkey separate from the group of weavers who were parading along: the donkey was spinning rapidly around among the revellers. Me and that donkey are the only animals here, he thought, and he examined himself again, inside his ape suit — what was it for? Wouldn’t it be better to drink to the point of oblivion, turn into smoke blown away on the wind? Then the mob seemed to push him towards the spinning donkey, and, funnily enough, from the other pavement the crowd seemed push the donkey towards him. The multitude lapped around them, like dark waters opening up to the point of devouring them — like one more carnival game.
A few metres away, General Lorenzo Aipe and Primavera Pinzón observed him for the last time. They had discovered him long before, when he took off his ape head to speak to the old people, but under the balcony where he shouted to Sarasti “there’s an absolute forest of people” was where they properly recognized him, and it was where Primavera did not know what to do: she did not know herself, her life and her daughters, she did not know whether to run to him, embrace him or lose him again — she thought — for all eternity. When she realized she did not love him, she felt a tremendous sorrow for him, to the point of tears, but composed herself in time: General Lorenzo Aipe did not notice her emotional state. The general was sweating, dressed as Bolívar: he could think of no better costume to taunt Doctor Proceso with, a Simón Bolívar in civilian clothing: tall straw hat, with red-and-blue poncho, woollen jacket and breeches, and long leather boots.
That morning General Lorenzo Aipe had personally taken charge of Bolívar’s carriage. His soldiers located the float a day earlier, but he chose the dawn of the sixth to surprise the artisans and confiscate it. None of them put up any resistance: some were in nightclothes, others in their underwear; they were frightened men, women and children, of all ages. They had hidden the float in a shed on the outskirts of Pasto, on one side of the cold highway leading to Lake Cocha, and now it had been found: soaring up like a ship in full sail, it seemed to touch the sky; he was a monster, this Bolívar pulled along by girls, Emperor of the Andes. But that early morning, Arbeláez the sculptor, Martín Umbría and Maestro Abril, makers of the float, lost heart: the soldiers spread out around the inside of the shed, pointing guns at them.