In Evil Hour Read Online Free PDF Page B

died.
    “What’s going on with you?” the widow asked.
    “Do you believe what people are saying?” he asked in turn.
    “At my age you have to believe everything,” the widow replied. And she asked indolently: “What are they saying?”
    “That Rebeca Isabel isn’t my child.”
    The widow began to rock slowly. “She’s got the Asís
nose,” she said. After thinking a moment, she asked distractedly: “Who says so?” Roberto Asís bit his nails.
    “They put up a lampoon.”
    Only then did the widow understand that the dark shadows under her son’s eyes weren’t the sediment of long sleeplessness.
    “Lampoons are not the people,” she proclaimed.
    “But they only tell what people are already saying,” said Roberto Asís, “even if a person doesn’t know.”
    She, however, knew everything that the town had said about her family for many years. In a house like hers, full of servants, godchildren, and wards of all ages, it was impossible to lock oneself up in a bedroom without the rumors of the streets reaching even there. The turbulent Asíses, founders of the town when they were nothing but swineherds, seemed to have blood that was sweet for gossip.
    “Everything they say isn’t true,” she said, “even though a person might know.”
    “Everybody knows that Rosario Montero was going to bed with Pastor,” he said. “His last song was dedicated to her.”
    “Everybody said so, but nobody knew for sure,” the widow replied. “On the other hand, now it’s known that the song was for Margot Ramírez. They were going to be married and only they and Pastor’s mother knew it. It would have been better if they hadn’t guarded so jealously the only secret that’s ever been kept in this town.”
    Roberto Asís looked at his mother with a dramatic liveliness. “There was a moment this morning when I thought I was going to die,” he said. The widow didn’t seem moved.
    “The Asíses are jealous,” she said. “That’s been the great misfortune of this house.”
    They remained silent for a long time. It was almost four
o’clock and the heat was beginning to subside. When Roberto Asís turned off the fan the whole house was awakening, full of female voices and bird flutes.
    “Pass me the bottle that’s on the night table,” the widow said.
    She took two pills, gray and round like two artificial pearls, and gave the bottle back to her son, saying: “Take two; they’ll help you sleep.” He took them with the water his mother had left in the glass and rested his head on the pillow.
    The widow sighed. She maintained a pensive silence. Then, as always, generalizing about the whole town when thinking of the half-dozen families that made up her class, she said:
    “The worst part about this town is that the women have to stay home alone while the men go off into the woods.”
    Roberto Asís began to fall asleep. The widow observed his unshaven chin, the long nose made of angular cartilage, and thought about her dead husband. Adalberto Asís, too, had known despair. He was a giant woodsman who had worn a celluloid collar for fifteen minutes in his lifetime so they could take the daguerreotype that survived him on the night table. It was said of him that in that same bedroom he’d murdered a man he found sleeping with his wife, that he’d buried him secretly in the courtyard. The truth was different: Adalberto Asís had, with a shotgun blast, killed a monkey he’d caught masturbating on the bedroom beam with his eyes fixed on his wife while she was changing her clothes. He’d died forty years later without having been able to rectify the legend.
    Father Ángel went up the steep stairs with open steps. On the second floor, at the end of a corridor with rifles and cartridge belts hanging on the wall, a policeman was lying
on an army cot, reading face up. He was so absorbed in his reading that he didn’t notice the presence of the priest until he greeted him. He rolled the magazine and sat up on the