With joy I leapt out of my hiding place half an hour later when I heard my buddy Toto’s car stop, and the door had not even closed behind me when I blurted out the story of the assault on the patio at the retreat center, the thugs’ siege, and my timely reaction, with so many fits and starts that my buddy Toto thought it wise to tell me only to calm down, as if I would have been able to tell it calmly when what I wanted to communicate were my suspicions that the assault I had just escaped from unharmed by the skin of my teeth could have been related to the conspiracy I had witnessed through the rear window. “Want to go back and see what has happened?” my buddy Toto asked me, concerned but with firmness. I answered him, not a chance, I had already considered that possibility during my escape, but the risk was too high, it would be better for him to put me up and in the morning he could give me a hand, because the army didn’t know who he was and he could go to my apartment in the Engels Building to remove my few belongings and the money hidden in a secret nook of the closet, which I would use to buy a plane ticket to go away as far as possible. “Let’s take a look. We’ve got nothing to lose,” my buddy Toto insisted, to my surprise.
TWELVE
PLANET EARTH DOESN'T WANT TO KNOW anything nor does she understand what the comet tells her, for she is happy in her orbit and hates to be disturbed by someone who appears only every once in a while from who knows where, I thought that day at dawn while leaning on the bar at Peter’s, staring into the mirror where I saw my face reflected over a row of bottles, where in fact dozens of drinkers next to me and behind me were reflected, through the dense cigarette smoke and the enthusiastic voices of those who were initiating the longest bacchanalia of the year, their so-called Carnival — which has nothing to do with what I call by that name — drinkers enthusiastically offering toasts and whom I could barely make out in the well-lit room, for my attention was focused on my own face reflected in the mirror, concentrating as I was on each and every one of my features, on the expression on my face, which suddenly looked different to me, as if he who was there wasn’t me, as if that face for an instant were somebody else’s, a stranger’s, and not my everyday face, an instant when I was unrecognizable to myself and that caused me to panic, such extreme panic that I feared a bout of insanity among those strangers in a strange city if Cousin Quique hadn’t just then appeared alongside me, because nobody likes to look at himself in the mirror and find somebody else. “Those two faggots are blowing each other in the bathroom,” Cousin Quique complained as he settled in at the bar. “I wanted to go take a shit and those two assholes didn’t get out of the bathroom because they were sucking each other’s cocks,” Cousin Quique repeated with his hallmark vulgarity. I asked him how he could be sure without having seen anything, and he responded that he had clearly heard them making comments about the fellatio they were performing, for Cousin Quique spoke German fluently and his anger convinced me that he couldn’t possibly be lying. I suggested that maybe the native custom was to perform fellatio at the beginning of so-called Carnival, for all peoples have their customs and practices, I said, and if they called that parade of floats at four in the morning when the temperature was twenty degrees Fahrenheit Carnival, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if instead of dancing half naked, like at the carnivals I was used to, they chose to perform fellatio in a nice warm bathroom. But Cousin Quique still wasn’t paying attention to me but instead was ordering another beer from Peter and striking up a conversation with a pale girl standing next to him, a good-looking Dutch girl he wanted to get into bed, for women were his obsession and his weakness, so once again I was left drinking alone in the throng, clutching my mug, fearful of encountering my unfamiliar face in the mirror, thinking that I was the comet and Cousin Quique Planet Earth, which was why he seemed so bored when I tried to explain to him my experiences copyediting those one thousand one hundred pages, because for him it concerned a remote galaxy that he no longer had anything to do with and his only response was to scold me for not having included in my contract with the church the cost of treatment to cure me of the psychological and emotional trauma I was subjected to while reading over and over again the aforementioned report, and perhaps he was right, for in spite of finding myself on the other side of the world, a morbid state of melancholy prevented me from enjoying the peace around me, and at Cousin Quique’s slightest provocation I would bring up the corrected text and the experience I’d had a few weeks before, not yet lost my habit of pulling out my small notebook to read those sentences that moved me so much, many of which I already knew by heart, like the one that said, For me remembering, it feels I am living it once more, whose broken syntax was the corroboration that something had snapped in the psyche of the survivor who said it, a sentence that fully applied to my situation in this foreign and distant city where I had taken refuge thanks to Cousin Quique’s hospitality, where for me remembering was living once more the nightmarish testimonies read so many times. “Would you like another beer?” Peter asked me, the simpatico Swiss giant, owner of the tavern, the only one in the whole place who spoke Spanish, moving quickly back and forth behind the bar because there were so many customers, all desperately thirsty, and he placed in front of me the new mug overflowing with foam while I contemplated the street through the large plate-glass windows, still surprised by the hundreds of inhabitants who, ignoring the freezing inclement weather, swirled around in costumes on the dark sidewalks, enjoying themselves, applauding the floats as they passed by, and dancing to the sounds of drums and piccolos, as if they were in a witches’ Sabbath from the Middle Ages. “Everything okay?” Peter asked me, perhaps upset by the sneer on my face in the midst of so much hullabaloo, to which I answered yes, such an elaborate carnival seemed incredible to me at dawn and during the worst possible winter, that my lack of knowledge of the language was a pity, for it prevented me from understanding the meaning of the floats and the jokes being made. But seconds later he was already at the other end of the bar and I remained once again facing my own face in the mirror, convinced that nothing bad would happen and that if I just stared hard enough at my eyes I would discover something or at least conjure up the possibility of finding somebody instead of myself, and as a result of certain associations and the fear of discovering myself to be different in the mirror, there settled into my mind the sentence that said, They were people just like us we were afraid of, which I repeated without taking my eyes off myself, even when I lifted the beer mug I didn’t lose sight of myself out of the corner of my eye nor did I stop repeating, They were people just like us we were afraid of, perhaps with so much emphasis that right away I felt Cousin Quique’s hand on my shoulder, I saw his reflection approaching me in the mirror and asking me in my ear what was happening to me, if I was talking to him, to which I responded, turning around to look him in the eyes, They were people just like us we were afraid of, which of course unnerved him, as always when I responded with the sentence of an indigenous person who had escaped from death by the skin of his teeth, and then irritated him because of what he termed “my sick obsession,” but that didn’t happen now, him getting irritated, I mean, but instead Cousin Quique asked me what I was talking about, truly concerned, as if he feared an unpredictable and violent outburst, so I explained that the army had forced one half of the village’s population to kill the other half, better for Indians to kill Indians and leave the living as marked men. “Let’s go outside now, the floats I was telling you about are about to pass by,” said Cousin Quique hurriedly, for he became quite uneasy every time I talked to him about politics or the army. “And the Dutch girl?” I asked him. “She’s coming with us,” he said, taking me by the arm and leading me toward the rack where the coats were hanging. But when I opened the door, the cold struck me so violently I told Cousin Quique that I wouldn’t go out for anything in the world, that he shouldn’t worry about me, I would stay nice and warm in the bar until we went home, he should go ahead and make a good impression on the Dutch girl so he could screw her afterward. And so it came to pass: I stayed behind slowly drinking my huge mug of beer, having one or another exchange with Peter, eluding the mirror, until I unavoidably took out my little notebook, for no specific reason, like the addict who lights another cigarette with the butt of the previous one or the loner who reads the newspaper at the bar, thus I leafed through my notebook and savored the sentences, repeating some out loud so I could enjoy their musicality and recall specific emotions, until Peter came back to ask me what I was reading at the precise moment I muttered the phrase that said, The more they killed, the higher they rose up, which in fact was a lament about the compensation awarded for one’s neighbor’s criminality, and which I pronounced in my most expressive voice to Peter’s astonishment, for he didn’t understand anything and I had to explain that the sentence synthesized the fact that in the society I came from, crime constituted the most efficient means of social climbing, thus The more they killed, the higher they rose up, I repeated, without an audience, for the Swiss giant had moved on to another customer. That was when I remembered that by that time there would be news about the report’s publication, and I felt intense eagerness to find out what had happened the morning of the day before at the cathedral, where the bishop made the announcement with great fanfare, according to what my buddy Toto had told me by email, in the same email that informed me about his meeting with my friend Erick, who had expressed his upset at my sudden disappearance, as if I should have given explanations to somebody who was conspiring in the most suspicious way, as if that conspiracy wasn’t to blame for my shivering from cold in a foreign city on the other side of the world, abandoned in a bar where I couldn’t talk to anybody, only wishing to go back to Cousin Quique’s apartment and turn on the computer and find out at least the title they had finally given the report, for I had suggested as a title one of the most powerful sentences found in the testimonies, the sentence that said, We all know who are the assassins, for me the most propitious, the right one to be the title of the report that really wanted to say precisely this, that We all know who are the assassins, a sentence I suggested at the last meeting convened by my friend Erick and the little guy with the Mexican mustache before going to cloister myself in the spiritual retreat center and that they listened to but didn’t feel as enthusiastic about as I did. “We all know who are the assassins!” I exclaimed, lifting my arm to get Peter’s attention, for I would now pay for my beers and make my way to Cousin Quique’s apartment without waiting for him to return to the bar, for with the Dutch girl at his side there was no way to guarantee such a return. And that’s what I was doing, waiting for Peter to bring me the check, when all of a sudden I realized to my amazement that leaning against the bar to my right and drinking was General Octavio Pérez Mena himself—shit! — the very same face I had seen through the rear window was now looking at me insolently through the mirror and when I responded with a threatening scowl, for the beers I’d drunk were many and his impunity here nonexistent, he turned away to avoid me, that sissy, which only added fuel to my ire and gave me the courage to shout at him, raising my mug in the air, We all know who are the assassins! for this was the toast that torturer deserved, to which he responded with the foolish smile of someone who doesn’t understand the language he is being addressed in, as if in this way he could throw me off track, what a fool he must have thought me, so as soon as I paid Peter for what I had consumed, I turned toward the spy and spat right in his face: Thereafter we live the time of distress, to see how he’d respond, I spat out that sentence from the report that had been racing around in my head for the last few days and in response to which he gave me his most confounded smile and then said something in German, which of course I didn’t understand and that surely was some pretext for putting me off, to which I repeated, already beside myself, Thereafter we live the time of distress, which was for me a kind of challenge that he took without paying any attention to me, addressing himself to Peter in a language beyond my comprehension.