In Evil Hour Read Online Free PDF

when he promised his wife he wouldn’t remember the lampoon again, she’d used every form of persuasion to try to calm him down. Finally she proposed a desperate formula: as the final proof of her innocence, she offered to confess to Father Angel aloud and in the presence of her husband. The very offering of that humiliation had been sufficient. In spite of his confusion, he didn’t dare take the next step and he had to give in.
    “It’s always better to talk things out,” she said without opening her eyes. “It would have been a disaster if you’d stayed with your belly all tight.”
    He fastened the door as he went out. In the spacious shadowed house, completely shut up, he perceived the hum of his mother’s electric fan, as she slept her siesta in the house next door. He poured himself a glass of lemonade from the refrigerator, under the drowsy look of the black cook.
    From her cool personal surroundings the woman asked him if he wanted some lunch. He took the cover off the pot. A whole turtle was floating flippers up in the boiling water. For once he didn’t shudder at the idea that the animal had been thrown alive into the pot, and that its heart would still be beating when they brought it quartered to the table.
    “I’m not hungry,” he said, covering the pot. And he added from the door: “The mistress won’t have lunch either. She’s had a headache all day.”
    The two houses were connected by a porch with green paving stones from where one could see the wires of the henhouse at the back of the common courtyard. In the part of the porch that belonged to his mother’s house there were several birdcages hanging from the eaves and several pots with intensely colored flowers.
    From the chaise longue where she had just taken her siesta, his eleven-year-old daughter greeted him with a grumbling greeting. She still had the weave of the linen marked on her cheek.
    “It’s going on three,” he pointed out in a very low voice. And he added melancholically: “Try to keep track of things.”
    “I dreamed about a glass cat,” the child said.
    He couldn’t repress a slight shudder.
    “What was it like?”
    “All glass,” the girl said, trying to give form to the dream animal with her hands, “like a glass bird, but a cat.”
    He found himself lost, in full sunlight, in a strange city. “Forget about it,” he murmured. “Something like that isn’t worth the trouble.” At that moment he saw his mother in the door of her bedroom and he felt rescued.
    “You’re feeling better,” he asserted.
    The widow Asís returned a bitter expression. “Every day
I’m getting better and better so I can vote,” she complained, making a bun of her abundant iron-colored hair. She went out onto the porch to change the water in the cages.
    Roberto Asís dropped onto the chaise longue where his daughter had been sleeping. The back of his neck in his hands, he followed with his withered eyes the bony woman in black who was conversing with the birds in a low voice. They fluttered in the fresh water, sprinkling the woman’s face with their happy flapping. When she had finished with the cages, the widow Asís wrapped her son in an aura of uncertainty.
    “You had things to do in the woods,” she said.
    “I didn’t go,” he said. “I had some things to do here.”
    “You won’t go now till Monday.”
    With his eyes, he agreed. A black servant, barefoot, crossed the room with the child to take her to school. The widow Asís remained on the porch until they left. Then she motioned to her son and he followed her into the broad bedroom where the fan was humming. She dropped into a broken-down reed rocker beside the fan with an air of extreme weariness. On the whitewashed walls hung photographs of ancient children framed in copper. Roberto Asís stretched out on the sumptuous, regal bed where, decrepit and in a bad humor, some of the children in the photographs, including his own father last December, had