The Secret History of Costaguana Read Online Free PDF Page A

divine favor.
    My father tore it off the door, went back inside, looked for the key to the storage room under the stairs, and took out one of the two pistols that had arrived in my grandfather’s trunk. On his way out he took care, thinking to eliminate any revealing traces, to pull off all the scraps of paper still stuck to the wood of the door under the nail; but then he realized the precaution was useless, because he came upon the same notice ten or fifteen times in the short walk from his house to the printing press that turned out La Opinión . More than that, along the way he also came upon accusing fingers and voices, the powerful prosecution of the Catholics who now, without any actual proceedings taking place, had declared him their enemy. My father, accustomed to attracting attention, was not quite so used to attracting malevolence. The public prosecutors appeared on the wooden balconies (crosses dangling over their chests), and the fact that they did not dare to shout at him was not a relief to my father, but rather confirmation that darker fates than mere public disgrace awaited. He walked into the printer’s with the crumpled notice in his hand, asking the brothers Acosta, the owners of the press, if they could identify the machines responsible: to no avail. He spent the afternoon in the Commerce Club, tried to find out what his comrades thought, and heard that the radical societies had already reached a decision: they would respond with blood and fire, burning down the church and killing every cleric, if Miguel Altamirano was to suffer any attack. He felt less alone, but he also felt that the city was about to suffer a catastrophe. And so that night he made his way to Santo Tomás Church to look for Father Echavarría, walking beneath yellow street lamps that lit up the gleaming white walls of the houses, thinking that two men who had exchanged insults can, just as easily, exchange apologies; but the church was deserted.
    Or almost.
    Because in one of the last pews was a shape, or what my father, blinded as he entered by the sudden darkness, for the time the retina with all its rods and cones takes to accommodate to the new conditions, had taken for a shape. After strolling up one of the aisles toward the chancel, after going behind—into areas where he was an intruder—and looking for the door to the presbytery and descending the two worn stone steps and stretching out a prudent and polite knuckle to knock a couple of times, my father selected a random pew, one that had a view of the gilding on the altar, and sat down to wait, although he really did not know what words he could use to convince that fanatic.
    And then he heard someone say: “That’s him.”
    He turned around and saw that the shape was dividing into two. From one side, a cassocked figure that was not Father Echavarría already had his back to him and was leaving the church; from the other, a man in a poncho and hat, a sort of giant bell with legs, began to walk up the center aisle toward the chancel. My father imagined that, beneath the straw hat, in that black space where human features would soon emerge, the eyes of the man were scrutinizing him. My father looked around. From an oil painting he was being watched by a bearded man who was sticking his index finger (well covered with flesh and skin, unlike the one on his Chinaman’s dead hand) into Christ’s open wound. In another painting was a man with wings and a woman who kept her page in a book with another finger just as fleshed out: my father recognized the Annunciation, but the angel was not Chinese. No one seemed prepared to get him out of this fix; the man in the poncho, meanwhile, approached silently, as if sliding over a sheet of oil. My father saw he was wearing rope-soled shoes, saw the rolled-up trousers, and saw, hanging beneath the edge of the poncho, the dirty point of a knife.
    Neither of the two spoke. My father knew he could not kill the man there, not because at the