The Secret History of Costaguana Read Online Free PDF

age of thirty-four he had never killed anybody (there is always a first time, and my father handled a pistol as well as anyone), but because to do so without witnesses would be like condemning himself in advance. He needed people to see: to see the provocation, the attack, the legitimate defense. He stood up, went out to the side aisle of the nave, and began to take big steps toward the front door; instead of following him, the man in the poncho returned down the central aisle, and pew by pew they walked, tracing parallel lines, while my father was thinking what to do when they ran out of pews. He counted them quickly: six pews, now five, now four.
    Three pews.
    Now two.
    Now one.
    My father put his hand in his pocket and cocked the pistol. As they both neared the church door, as the parallel lines converged, the man swept his poncho out of the way and pulled back the hand that held the knife. My father raised the cocked pistol, pointed at the center of the man’s chest, thought of the sad consequences of what he was about to do, thought of the passersby who would invade the church as soon as they heard the shot, thought of the court that would condemn him for voluntary homicide on the basis of testimony from those passersby, thought of my grandfather stabbed by the bayonet and the Chinaman stabbed by the bamboo stake, thought of the firing squad that would shoot him against a rough wall, and said to himself that he was not made for the court or the gallows, that it would be a question of honor to kill his attacker but that the next bullet would be for his own chest.
    Then he fired.
    “Then I fired,” my father would tell me.
    But he did not hear the shot from his own pistol, or rather it seemed that his shot produced such an echo as had never before been heard, a reverberation unprecedented in the world, because at that moment, from the Plaza Bolívar, arrived the thunder of other explosions from many other guns. It was just past midnight, the date was April 17, and the honorable General José María Melo had just led a military coup and declared himself dictator of that poor confused republic.
     
    T hat’s how it is: the Angel of History saved my father, even though, as will be seen, he did so in a transitory way, simply by swapping one of his enemies for another. My father fired, but no one heard his shot. When he went outside, all the doors were closed and all the balconies deserted; the air smelled of gunpowder and horse shit, and in the distance there were now shouts and heels on cobblestones to be heard and, of course, insistent gunfire. “I knew that very instant. They were the sounds that announced a civil war,” my father would tell me in an oracular tone. . . . He liked to assume those poses, and many times over the course of our life together (which was not long) he put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me, arching a solemn eyebrow, to tell me that he had predicted this, that he had guessed that. He told me of some event he had witnessed indirectly and then said, “You could see it coming a mile off.” Or rather, “I don’t know how they failed to realize.” Yes, that was my father: the man who, after a certain age, beaten senseless by Great Events—saved on a few occasions, damned on most—ends up developing that curious defense mechanism of predicting things many years after they’d happened.
    But allow me a brief aside, another digression. Because I have always believed that on that night the history of my country demonstrated that it at least has a sense of humor. I have spoken of the Great Incident. I take out the magnifying glass and examine it more closely. What do I see? To what does my father owe his improbable impunity? Briefly: One night in January, General Melo drunkenly leaves a military banquet, and when he gets to the Plaza Santander, where his barracks are, runs into a corporal called Quirós, a poor unkempt lad walking the streets at that hour without a pass. The General gives