It was also Zulia Iscuandé who started the battle. She offered a swig of aguardiente to the soldier nearest her, who was perched up on the shrouded carriage, holding the bottle out to him, and when the soldier went to take it, he got smacked around the face with it instead. In minutes the soldiers were disarmed and hurled from the carriage as if by an unstoppable whirlwind — with the same rage and courage as in the days of Agustín Agualongo, Cangrejito reflected while he fought. It was a silent and speedy battle. Just one shot was fired, which got lost in the cries of “viva!” from the assailants: the officer fired; he was driving the truck the float was embedded on, and his shot hit Maestro Umbría in the arm, up on the running board alongside him; in spite of the burning bullet, the maestro stretched out his other arm and took the officer by the throat, pulling him out through the little window by brute force. The few inquisitive onlookers who caught a glimpse did not understand what was going on, just a “dressed” float, as they put it, and a few soldiers chatting with some early birds. They were not chatting, they were grateful to still be alive: the attackers occupied the cab of the truck, the various vantage points on the carriage, and made off.
In the isolated neighbourhood, which Puelles was struggling to recognize — wasn’t it here I played spinning tops, as a kid, and won? — the dirty, narrow streets of unfinished cement houses, looking like black, upside-down skeletons as night fell, started to oppress him, but he was crushed altogether by the shock he got on the last corner, in the dusk, when the houses were already petering out: three or four boys were playing war, they fell and died, came back to life, killed again.
Now Puelles saw wheat fields, not far away, behind the last house.
“And what have you got in your pocket, Puelles, a stone?”
Platter had slipped a hand into his trouser pocket and went on, amazed:
“Yes, it is a stone, for pity’s sake. For killing wood pigeons? Self-defence?”
“And that cross?” Puelles said to Platter, pointing to the gold crucifix dangling from his neck. “Did Father Bunch give it to you?”
Platter stopped walking.
“Christ was the first of us,” Quiroz said. “Don’t sneer, Puelles. We have a religion too.”
He signalled to Platter for him to keep on walking with them.
“Ah, religion,” Puelles said, and once more the hidden poet peeped out. “Mankind’s worst and most perfect intolerance.”
“Yeah right,” Platter said. “Now you’ve taken it into your head to talk like that crazy Chivo, you philosophizing prick. Who do you think you are? You want to have it out with me?” And he broke into a string of rapid insults, which Puelles ignored; but he could not help laughing on hearing the last: revolting revisionist.
I can laugh, Puelles thought, it’s still possible.
“Steady, Ilyich,” Quiroz said. “There’s time.”
They had left the neighbourhood of grey houses behind them now. Everything was green in the failing light. Now they were treading on soft, lush grass, the damp earth. Around him Puelles saw rolling hills knitted together, the ruddy sky. They carried on towards the fields of high yellow wheat, swaying just a little further on, ruffled by the wind. Puelles no longer felt the desire to talk, to ask anything. Much less to flee. It was as if a great lethargy towards everything and everyone, including himself, were stored up in his limbs, in his intelligence. He remembered the dead policeman again, like so many times before, and now he could not go on, he could not go on. He could not go on. And he smiled dumbly; he wondered whether, when he died, as had happened when he killed, he was going to piss himself with fright. Neither Platter nor Quiroz paid him any attention.
Now they were crossing the field sown with wheat. The stalks were tall, they brushed Puelles’s chest.
“Ah, Puelles,” Quiroz said. “Why did you have to talk so much?”
Puelles did not answer.
“Relax, Puelles, we’re not going to do anything to you,” Quiroz went on. His voice had gone hoarse; he seemed to want for air. “We’re just going to execute you.”
Puelles felt an immense tiredness: when I die I’ll think of Grand-father, or will I think of Toña Noria’s enchanted vagina, enchanted because she never gave it to me?
The tremendous fatigue befuddled him. He thought it was not just a fatigue of his bones, but reached far beyond him, to the entire universe.
“Here, here,” he told them.
He wanted to rest in that place, hidden in the middle of yellow wheat, at dusk, looking at the sky. He felt exhausted, and yet, surprising himself, remembered he had often run the marathon at school and won, the hundred-metre dash too, a hare, and, as if dreaming, he broke into a run, and believed he ran faster than a hare, turned to look, they were close, deranged faces, arms stretched out, they could touch him, but he would get home and carry on to Bogotá and then Singapore, he thought, and thought on, managing to have time to think — they’ll say Puelles got away.
The shot rang out and a flock of pigeons flew up over the wheat fields.
They fled with the float, they fled.
When General Lorenzo Aipe found out, he did not order the reprisal his men were expecting: this time he would not play cat and mouse; he would wait until the carriage materialized and impound it immediately, “They’ll have to appear sooner or later,” he said, and ordered the official starting point of the floats to be monitored, as well as the route, in case they had to intercept it. He was worrying needlessly, because after that morning Bolívar’s carriage vanished; nothing more was ever heard of it: few early risers saw it cross Pasto, wrapped in canvas, and go up the highway to Lake Cocha. And in that jungle chasm, in the solitude of the plains, the makers hid it — in a cave? — underground, they say, waiting for next year’s carnival.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
EVELIO ROSERO is the author of seven novels and two collections of short stories. In Colombia his work has been recognized by the National Literature Award. He won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Tusquets International Novel Prize for The Armies.
ANNE McLEAN is a translator of Latin American and Spanish literature by authors including Julio Cortázar, Javier Cercas and Enrique Vila-Matas. Her translation of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Sound of Things Falling won the 2014 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
ANNA MILSOM is an academic and translator currently living in Ecuador. This is her second co-translation with Anne MacLean.