“Profesor,” he said into my ear, “they didn’t kill you while you slept?”
“Of course not,” I managed to say once I had recovered from the question. And I tried to laugh: “Do you not see that I am here with you?”
And, nevertheless, we stood looking at each other for a few seconds, as if we could not believe it.
“And who was going to kill me?” I asked. “And why?”
“That’s what I was told,” he replied.
He did not seem drunk, or drugged. Pale, his good eye blinked, without taking it off mine. His hands would not let go of my arm.
“What kind of joke is this?” I asked.
And he: “Then you’re alive, profesor.”
“Still,” I said.
And he, out of the blue: “You know something? I’ve never killed anyone.”
“What?” I asked.
He said: “Pure lies, to attract customers.”
I remembered with difficulty what he was referring to. “Well, you drove them away,” I said. “We all thought you sliced throats.”
I pulled my arm out of his hands. Nobody was listening to us.
“I’m glad you’re alive, profesor,” he went on to say.
He looked like a punished child, provoking inexplicable pity. I left him there, with his unprecedented question, his blinking eye; he turned his back on the people and left; I forgot him.
“So they killed me while I slept,” I said aloud, and for an instant I was convinced I was telling Otilia: “I never had that pleasure.”
Chepe clutches the bag and stands up, his lips stretched as if he were laughing in astonishment. And he walks rapidly, followed by men and women. Where? I follow him too, like the rest. He has to go somewhere.
“He’s going to the police station,” someone surmises.
“What for?” says someone else.
“To ask them.”
“Ask them what? They’re not going to answer.”
“What can they answer?”
In the middle of this circle of bodies, of faces that understand nothing, and which are prepared to understand nothing, near the police-station door, I see myself, another body, another dazed face. As if by common accord we have allowed Chepe to go in alone. He goes in, and comes out again almost at once, his face contorted. We realize before he says anything: there is not a single policeman in the post, where did they go? It did seem strange that there was not an agent or two at the entrance: for the first time we perceive that this silence is too much in San José, a cloud of alarm runs through us all, equally, in all the faces, in the faded voices. I remember Gloria Dorado was leaving in a military truck; was it perhaps the last truck? They did not say anything to us, no warning, and everyone else seems to be thinking the same thing I am: at whose mercy have we been left?
We only now discover that the streets are being invaded by slow silent figures, which emerge blurry from the last horizon of the corners, appear here, there, almost lazy, vanish for a time and reappear, numerous, from the edges of the cliff. Then those of us surrounding Chepe begin our retreat, also slowly and silently, each to his own, to their houses, and, what is extraordinary, we do so as if it is the most natural thing in the world.
“Everybody to the plaza,” one of the henchmen yells, but it is as if nobody were listening.
I walk behind a couple, without recognizing them, and I remain beside them, not bothering to find out in which direction they are walking.
“I said everybody to the plaza,” the voice calls again, from a different place.
Nobody pays any attention; we hear our own increasingly keen footsteps: from one moment to the next people are running, and I among them, this old man that I am.
“After all, we are unarmed,” I say. “What can we do?” I have said it aloud and enraged, as if excusing myself to Otilia.
We who were with Chepe no longer see him, but then we hear him: at the top of his voice, screaming, squealing like a hog near slaughter, hairraising because it comes from a terrified man, he is asking the invaders if they are the ones who have his wife and daughter, if they are the ones who sent him the fingers of his wife and daughter that morning, he asks them and we stop, a majority, like a truce, on different corners, nobody can believe it, the wind keeps propelling shreds of dust along the pavements, the sun hides behind a band of clouds. It might rain, I think. Send down a flood, Lord, and drown us all.
We do not see Chepe, or I do not see him. The motionless bodies of men and women, the bodies of the invaders, block him from view, but we do hear his voice, which repeats the question, this time followed by curses and accusations, from Chepe, to our sorrow, to his sorrow, because we hear a shot.
“There goes Chepe,” says the man beside me.
The woman is already running, and then the man, and again everyone, in different directions, but no one screams, no one cries out, all in silence, as if trying not to make any noise as they run.
“To the plaza, damn it,” says another voice.
The men in uniform are also running, herding the people, as if we were cattle, nobody can believe it, but it has to be believed, it does: the couple beside me find their house at last, on the other side of the church.
I want to go in with them; the man stops me.
“Not you, profesor,” he says. “You go to your own house, or you’ll get us into trouble.”
What is he saying, I wonder, and I see his enormous head in profile, his frightened eyes, and his wife’s hands appear and help him and they close the door in my face. The man does not want to allow me to enter his house, this is his fear, I am someone who can get them into trouble, he said. I am alone again, it would appear: do not lose, Ismael, the memory of the streets that lead back home. In vain I look at all the corners: it is all the same corner, the same danger, they look identical. Misfortune might emerge from any one of them again. I head down one of the streets: do not go the wrong way, Ismael; I return as if feeling my way back to my own house, during a long night, it is extraordinary, the street is empty; only me, along the edge of doors and windows shut tight. I knock on the closed shutters of one of those windows: does not old Celmiro, older than me, a friend, live here? Yes, I find, to my relief, it is a miracle, Celmiro’s house, Celmiro will let me come in. And I bang against the broad wooden frame: a sliver hurts my fist, but nobody opens the window, I know it is the window of Celmiro’s room.
I hear someone clearing his throat, and put my ear to the crack.
“Celmiro,” I say. “Is that you? Open the window.”
No answer.
“There isn’t time to go to the door,” I say. “I’m coming in the window.”
“Ismael? Did they not kill you while you slept?”
“Of course not, who made that up?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Open up, Celmiro. Hurry.”
“And how do you think I’m going to do that, Ismael? I’m dying.”
I am still alone in the middle of the street. And what is worse, I do not have the strength to keep fleeing. The noise is getting louder, I think, approaching from somewhere, it will not be long before it envelops me.
“What is happening out there, Ismael? I heard shots and shrieks: are they dancing in the streets?”
“They are killing, Celmiro.”
“And you, did they make you dance too?”
“I should think so.”