“He was found with a bullet in his back, face down in the manure, in front of his stable.”
He looked up at the woman.
“In his pocket they found a note. On the note was written the name of a woman. Yours.”
He made a light writing motion in the air.
“Doña Sol.”
He let his hand fall back to the table.
“It was his handwriting. He had written the name. Doña Sol.”
The three musicians, at the back, struck up a kind of waltz, dragging the tempo and playing very softly.
“From that day I began to expect you.”
The woman had raised her head and was staring at him.
“I knew that nothing could stop you, and that one day you would come to me as well. I never thought that you would shoot me in the back or send someone to kill me who didn’t even know me. I knew that you would come, and would look me in the face, and first you would talk to me. Because I was the one who had opened the trapdoor, that night, and then closed it. And you would not forget it.”
The man hesitated a moment more, then said the only thing he still wanted to say.
“I have carried this secret inside me for my whole life, like a disease. I deserved to be sitting here, with you.”
Then the man was silent. He felt his heart beating rap-idly, in his fingertips and in his temples. He thought how he was sitting in a café across from an old woman who was mad and who, from one moment to the next, might get up and kill him. He knew that he would do nothing to stop her.
The war is over, he thought.
The woman looked around and every so often glanced at her empty plate. She said nothing. From the moment the man had stopped talking she had stopped looking at him.
You would have said that she was sitting at the table alone, waiting for someone. The man had let himself fall back into the chair. Now he seemed smaller and tired. He observed, as if from a distance, the woman’s eyes wander about the café and over the table: resting everywhere except on him. He realized that he still had his overcoat on, and so he sank his hands in the pockets. He felt the collar pulling at his neck, as if he had put a stone in each pocket. He thought of the people around, and found it funny how no one, at that moment, could have any idea of what was happening. Seeing two old people at a table one would find it difficult to imagine that at that moment they were capable of anything. And yet it was so. Because she was a phantom and he a man whose life had ended a long time ago. If people knew it, he thought, he would be afraid.
Then he saw that the woman’s eyes had become bright.
Who could say where the thread of her thoughts was leading?
Her face was without expression. Only, the eyes were at that point.
Was it tears?
He thought again that he wouldn’t like to die there, with all those people watching.
Then the woman began to speak, and this was what they said to each other.
“Uribe picked up the Count’s cards and let them slide slowly between his fingers, revealing them one by one. I don’t think he realized at that moment what he was losing. Certainly he realized what he was not winning. I didn’t count much for him. He got up and said goodbye to the company, politely. No one laughed, no one dared say a word. They had never seen a poker hand like that. Now, tell me: why should this story be any less true than the one you told?”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“My father was a wonderful father. Don’t you believe me? And why?—why should this story be less true than yours?”
“…”
“No matter how you try to live just one single life, others will see inside it a thousand more, and this is the reason that you cannot avoid getting hurt.”
“…”
“Do you know that I know everything about that night, and yet I remember almost nothing? I was there beneath the trapdoor, I couldn’t see, I heard something, and what I heard was so absurd, it was like a dream. It all vanished in that fire. Children have a special talent for forgetting. But then they told me, and so I knew everything. Did they lie to me? I don’t know. I was never able to ask. You came into the house, you fired at him, then Salinas shot him, and finally El Gurre stuck the barrel of the machine gun in his mouth and blew off his head with a short, dry volley.
How do I know? He told me. He liked to tell about it. He was an animal. You were all animals. You men always are, in war. How will God forgive you?”
“Stop it.”
“Look at yourself, you seem to be a normal man, you have your worn overcoat, and when you take off your glasses you put them carefully in their gray case. The windows of your kiosk are clean, when you cross the street you look carefully to the right and the left, you are a normal man. And yet you saw my brother die for no reason, only a child with a gun in his hand, a burst of gunfire and he was gone, and you were there, and you did nothing. You were twenty, holy God, you weren’t a ruined old man, you were a boy of twenty and yet you did nothing. Please, explain how it is possible, do you have some way of explaining to me that something like that can happen, it’s not the nightmare of a man with a fever, it’s something that happened, can you tell me how it’s possible?”
“We were soldiers.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were fighting a war.”
“What war? The war was over.”
“Not for us.”
“Not for you?”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Then tell me what I don’t know.”
“We believed in a better world.”
“What do you mean?”
“…”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t turn back, when people begin to murder each other you can’t go back. We didn’t want to get to that point, others started it, but then there was nothing else to do.”
“What do you mean, a better world?”
“A just world, where the weak don’t have to suffer for the evil of the others, where everyone has a right to happiness.”
“And you believed that?”
“Of course I believed it, we all believed it, it could be done and we knew how.”
“You knew?”
“Does that seem so strange to you?”
“Yes.”
“And yet we knew. And we fought for that, to be able to do what was right.”
“Killing children?”
“Yes, if it was necessary.”
“But what are you saying?”
“You can’t understand.”
“I can understand, you explain and I’ll understand.”
“…”
“…”
“You can’t sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth.”
“…”
“First there has to be a time of suffering, do you understand?”
“No.”
“There were a lot of things that we had to destroy in order to build what we wanted, there was no other way, we had to be able to suffer and to inflict suffering, whoever could endure more pain would win, you cannot dream of a better world and think that it will be delivered just because you ask for it. The others would never have given in, we had to fight, and once you understood that it no longer made any difference if they were old people or children, your friends or your enemies, you were breaking up the earth—then there was nothing but to do it, and there was no way to do it that didn’t hurt. And when everything seemed too horrific, we had our dream that protected us, we knew that however great the price the reward would be immense, because we were not fighting for money, or a field to work, or a flag. We were doing it for a better world, do you understand what that means?, we were restoring to millions of men a decent life, and the possibility of happiness, of living and dying with dignity, without being trampled or scorned, we were nothing, they were everything, millions of men, we were there for them. What’s a boy who dies against a wall, or ten boys, or a hundred, we had to break up the earth and we did, millions of other children were waiting for us to do it, and we did, maybe you should…”