I was worried.
Lucio was looking around with the satisfaction of someone on whom life smiles. In order to convince me that there was no danger he screwed up his forehead and spoke to me confidentially for the tenth time:
‘I know the route. What are you worried about? All you have to do is jump over the fence that goes from the street to the patio. The porters sleep in a separate room on the third floor. The library is on the second floor on the other side of the building.’
‘It’s an easy job, it’s in the bag,’ Enrique said. ‘It’d be a great job if we could get away with the Encyclopaedic Dictionary.’
‘And how are we going to carry twenty-eight volumes? You’re mad… unless you order a removal van.’
Some cars drove past with their tops down and the brightness of their arc lights, falling on the trees, threw long trembling stains on the ground. The waiter brought us coffee. The tables around us were still empty, up on the stage the musicians were chatting, and the sound of heels stamping on the ground came from the billiard room, where enthusiasts were applauding a particularly complicated cannon.
‘Shall we play some three-hand tute?’7
‘Lay off your tute, man.’
‘It looks like it’s raining.’
‘All the better,’ said Enrique. ‘This is the sort of night that Montparnasse and Thénardier liked. Thénardier said: “Jean Jacques Rousseau did worse than me.” He was a ranún, Thénardier was; I love that gypsy word.’8
‘Is it still raining?’
I looked out onto the small square.
The water was falling at a slant, and between two rows of trees the wind moved it in a grey curtain.
Looking at the greenness of the branches and foliage lit up in the silver clarity of the arc lamps, I had a vision of parks shaken on a summer night by the noise of popular festivals, and the red rockets exploding in the blue sky. This unconscious evocation made me sad.
I have a clear memory of that last eventful night.
The musicians set free another song, one that on the blackboard was given the English name Kiss-me.
In this downbeat atmosphere, the melody swayed in a distant and tragic rhythm. I would have said that it was the voice of a chorus of poor emigrants on the deck of a transatlantic ferry, singing as the sun drowned in the heavy green waters.
I remember how my attention was drawn to the head of a violinist, Socratic and resplendently bald. There were smoked-glass spectacles balanced on his nose and you could tell how much his covered eyes had to work by the way in which his neck stuck out over the music stand.
Lucio asked me:
‘Are you still with Eleonora?’
‘No, we broke up already. She didn’t want to be my girlfriend any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because.’
Her image, united with the long sobs of the violins, penetrated me violently. It was a summons from my other voice, to look on her serene and sweet face. Oh! How her now distant smile had filled me with a painful ecstasy, and from the table, in words of the spirit, I spoke to her as follows, while I enjoyed a bitterness that had more savour than any voluptuous pleasure:
‘Ah! If only I could have told you how much I loved you, with the music of Kiss-me as our accompaniment… to use this song to keep you from going… then perhaps… but she had loved me too… is it not true that you loved me, Eleonora?’
‘It’s stopped raining… Let’s go.’
‘Let’s go.’
Enrique threw a few coins on the table. He asked me:
‘Do you have the revolver?’
‘Yes.’
‘It won’t get stuck?’
‘I tried it out the other day. The bullet went through two builders’ planks.’
Irzubeta added:
‘If this goes well I’ll buy myself a Browning; but just in case I’ve brought my knuckle-dusters.’
‘Are they sharpened?’
‘Pointy as anything.’
A policeman walked towards us across the lawn in the middle of the square.
Lucio called out in a loud voice, loud enough for the cop to hear him:
‘The geography teacher’s out to get me, che, really has it in for me!’
Once we’d crossed the square diagonally, we found ourselves in front of the school walls, and when we got there we noticed that it was beginning to rain again.
There was a line of bushy plane trees around the corner of the building, which made the darkness in that triangle extremely thick. The rain made its own music on the foliage.
A tall fence bared its sharp teeth as it tied the two tall and sombre school buildings together.
Walking slowly we scrutinised the darkness; then without saying a word I climbed up the bars, put a foot in one of the rings that linked every pair of railings and jumped right down into the patio, staying for a few seconds in the position I had fallen into, that is, crouching down, my eyes immobile, touching the wet tiles with my fingertips.
‘No one’s here, che,’ whispered Enrique, who had just followed me down.
‘It doesn’t look like it, but why’s Lucio not coming?’
We heard the regular beat of horseshoes on the cobbles in the street, and then another horse passing by, and the noise gradually died away in the shadows.
Lucio stuck his head over the iron lances. He put his foot into a crosspiece and then fell with such skill that the tiles scarcely crunched under the sole of his shoe.
‘Who was it, che?’
‘A policeman and then a watchman. I made it look like I was waiting for the bondi.’9
‘Let’s put our gloves on, che.’
‘Sure, I forgot in the excitement.’
‘And now where do we go? It’s darker than…’
‘This way.’
Lucio was our guide; I unholstered my revolver and the three of us headed towards the patio that was covered by the second-floor terrace.
In the darkness it was possible almost to make out a colonnade.
Suddenly I became bitingly conscious of such superiority over my fellow humans that I grasped Enrique’s arm in a brotherly fashion and said:
‘We’re going very slowly.’
And I incautiously abandoned my measured slow pace and made the noise of my steps ring out.
From the edge of the buildings the footsteps came back multiplied.
The certainty of our absolute impunity infected my comrades with an absolute optimism, and we laughed with such strident guffaws that from the dark street a stray dog barked at us three times.
Happy that we could slap danger in the face with such courage, we would have liked to have been accompanied by the bright sounds of a fanfare and the joyful clatter of a drum-band, we would have liked to wake everyone up, to show them the joy that fills one’s soul when you tear up the lawbooks and head smiling into sin.
Lucio, who was at our head, turned round:
‘I move that we attack the National Bank in a few days. Silvio, you can open the strongboxes with your arclamps.’
‘Bonnot must be applauding us from hell,’ Enrique said.
‘Long live the apaches Lacombe10 and Valet,’ I exclaimed.
‘Eureka,’ Lucio shouted.
‘What’s up?’
The young man replied:
‘That’s it… didn’t I tell you, Lucio? They’ll have to put up a statue to you… that’s it, you know what?’
We gathered round him.
‘Have you noticed? Did you notice, Enrique, that there’s a jewellery shop next to the Electra Cinema…? I’m serious, che, don’t laugh. There’s no roof on the cinema toilet… I remember that well; we can get onto the jewellery shop roof from there. We buy some tickets and we’re in and out before the show’s over. We can put chloroform through the keyhole with an eye dropper.’