“You remember how she used to love to play dominoes?” Carmela asked, her eyes tearing up, on that late afternoon of gray clouds that were not going to burst, an afternoon of lethargy and nostalgia. And it was true: Haydée played dominoes with the ferocity of a card shark, making bets, challenging her opponents, and making fun of them; she was proud to show off the skills she had acquired during one of her periods of exile in Mexico.
“Haydée died believing the old man would live to be eighty,” Carmela recalled as we were preparing dinner.
“We thought the same thing about ourselves,” I said, just to irritate her, to break through the grim atmosphere.
That’s when I remembered the sketches I had made while in the waiting room at the hospital when we visited Haydée every day in the late afternoon; sketches of others, waiting just like we were, to go in and see their sick, or of some irritable nurse; sketches of the waiting room or any other notion my pen came up with. Once, Haydée asked me to show them to her, then warned me that under no circumstances should I draw her now, ravaged as she was by the cancer, and if I ever did she would never forgive me and would come to me in the middle of the night and pull off my covers. I promised her I never would; but that same night, after I came home from the hospital and Carmela had already gone to bed, I shut myself up in my studio and sketched her just as I had seen her that day in the hospitaclass="underline" all that withered beauty between the sheets. Before going to bed, I went out on the patio and burned the sketches.
The call came at seven thirty at night. I answered it. It was María Elena; she was crying so hard she could barely talk. The moment I heard her voice I knew that Pericles had gone on ahead; he always asserted that as far as making decisions went, the sooner the better.
María Elena told me she had been in her room, at the back of the house, watching her telenovela, the door closed because the sound of the television disturbed the old man, when she heard a loud noise, as if a can had fallen off the shelf in the cupboard. She went to check in the kitchen but found nothing out of place. Then she had a premonition. She knocked on the door of Old Man Pericles’s office, where he always went to read after dinner. There was no answer. She opened it and immediately smelled the gunpowder: his body was lying draped over the desk.
Carmela was watching me from the kitchen doorway. Without thinking, almost automatically, I pointed my index finger into my temple; she began to cry, inconsolably, heartrending sobs. I clung to my memory of the old man’s embrace.
Then I called Ricardito, the first person I thought of who could come immediately in his car to take us to the old man’s house.
It was going to be a long night.
I’ve just finished the painting of Old Man Pericles as a fallen angel. He is sitting in the rocking chair on the terrace, as he did that last afternoon, holding his glass of whiskey on his lap in both hands, the cigar in the ashtray on the coffee table; most conspicuous are his tortoiseshell glasses and his wings that fall over the shirttails of his white guayabera. There is a thin line of blood coming out of a small hole in his right temple. His eyes came out too sad, moist, but it’s too late to correct it. I’ve painted it for myself, my last effort; it’s called THE FALLEN ANGEL WITH NO OCCUPATION. When Carmela saw it, she cried out, “Haydée would have loved it.”
Author’s Note
I began this book in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in March 2005, and finished it in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the end of 2007. I am grateful to Henry Reese and Diane Samuels, directors of the City of Asylum program in Pittsburgh, for their generous support, without which I would not have been able to complete this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The principal characters are fictional. However, the historical setting of the first part (“Haydée and the Fugitives”), as well as many of the situations and characters alluded to therein are based on historical events in El Salvador in 1944. Let me be clear: in this book, history has been placed at the service of the novel, that is, I have taken liberties with it according to the needs of the fictional narrative. Do not, then, look for “historical truth.”
Herewith are the titles of several books that aided my understanding of that period and were of great use to me: Relámpagos de libertad [Flashes of Freedom], by Mariano Castro Morán (Editorial Lis, San Salvador, 2000); Insurreccion no violenta en El Salvador [Nonviolent Insurrection in El Salvador], by Patricia Parkman (Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, San Salvador, 2003); April y mayo de 1944 [April and May 1944], by Francisco Morán (Editorial Universitaria, San Salvador, 1979); and El Salvador, 1930–1960 [El Salvador, 1930–1960], by Juan Mario Castellanos (Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, San Salvador, 2002). I wish to thank Beatriz Cortez, in Los Angeles, and Miguel Huerzo Mixco, in San Salvador, for sending me these texts. Jimmy and Clemen’s escape was inspired by the testimony of Captain Guillermo Fuentes Castellanos, recounted in the book by Colonel Castro Morán, mentioned above, though Jimmy is not Captain Fuentes nor is Clemen Lieutenant Belisario Peña. The Gavidia brothers were executed by firing squad in real life, but Merceditas is a fictional character.