Feast of the Innocents

by Evelio Rosero, Anna Milsom, Anne McLean

Genres: Historical Fiction; Black Humor; Literary Fiction; Satire

Synopsis

Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, adored by his female patients but despised by his wife and daughters, has a burning ambition: to prove to the world that the myth of Simón Bolívar, El Libertador,  is a sham and a scandal. In Pasto, south Colombia, where the good doctor plies his trade, the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents is dawning. A day for pranks, jokes and soakings ... Water bombs, poisoned empanaditas, ground glass in the hog roast - anything goes. What better day to commission a float for The Black and White Carnival that will explode the myth of El Libertador once and for all? One that will lay bare the massacres, betrayals and countless deflowerings that history has forgotten. But in Colombia you question the founding fables at your peril. At the frenzied peak of the festivities, drunk on a river of arguardiente, Doctor Justo will discover that this year the joke might just be on him.

Release date: January 1, 2015

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 273

Sample

Help me to raise the ghost of Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, to unearth the memory of his daughters, from the day the youngest turned seven and the eldest was deflowered in the finca stables, up to the day of the doctor’s death, kicked by a donkey in the middle of the street, but speak to me too of the straying of his wife, Primavera Pinzón, sing of her unsuspected love, give me strength to seek out the exact dreadful day the doctor disguised himself as an ape, by way of an inaugural joke, resolved to surprise his wife with the first fright of the Black and White Carnival. What day was it? Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, day of practical jokes, day of water and purifying baths, 28 December, 1966, six in the morning, a fine mist still refusing to abandon the doors and windows of the houses, wrapping itself like white fingers around the willow trees that marked out the street corners; every soul slept, except the doctor’s – pacing about his spacious consulting room, trying on a realistic ape costume he had ordered to be sent in secret from a famous shop in Canada: he had already donned the part of the ape corresponding to legs and trunk, his arms swelled with muscles and fur, coarse fur, authentic orangutan, and he had still to put on the enormous hairy head he clasped hesitantly against his heart.

With the ape head in his hands he went to look at himself in the mirror of the guest bathroom, on the ground floor of his three-storey house, but instead of confronting his yellow, fifty-year-old face once more in the mirror he preferred to cram it straight into the velvety interior of the black ape head, and what he encountered made him almost happy, on perceiving a perfect ape, the reddened eyes – a ruddy gauze covered the eyeholes, so that the doctor’s eyes seemed reddened by rage and he saw everything as if through red clouds – and he was further seduced by the ape teeth that protruded, excessively and dangerously pointed, and then the coat again, which could even be called genuine gorilla fur; he even thought he caught a lingering whiff of ape, and that smelly certainty, of male ape, made him sweat with all the dejection of a male human; he said “hello”, and a mechanism in the ape’s throat immediately transformed the greeting, distorted it, made it sound guttural, a simian grumbling or threat, something like hom-hom, which alarmed the doctor for a second, believing there was perhaps a real ape in his house, or inside himself – could be, he thought, ashamed.

He was not used to playing jokes like this. In fact, he did not joke with anyone or about anything in that city of his which was one perpetual prank, where his forebears had lived and died laughing at themselves, in that country of his which was yet another atrocious joke, but a joke all the same, his city parcelled up between hundreds of great and small pranks that inhabitants suffered on a daily basis, whether they liked it or not, naive jokes and obscene ones, lewd jokes and wry ones, the now-slumbering inhabitants who perhaps at this very moment were waking in their beds dismayed to be facing not just the joke of life, but the pranks of Innocents’ Day, especially the soakings, when everyone in Pasto was free to douse neighbour, friend and enemy with a bucket of cold water, a hosepipe or water bombs – the hard balloons thrown head-on or from behind, with or without the target’s consent – and the other jokes too, accepted with resignation, the tricks and awful pranks to which they all would be subjected, from the wisest to the most ingenuous, young and old, as prelude to the Black and White Carnival.

*

One December 28, Alcira Sarasti, wife of his neighbour Arcángel de los Ríos, invited him to an Innocents’ Day feast at her house and served some surprise empanaditas, filled with cotton wool, which he ate, the only innocent fool, greedily gullible, unlike the rest of the guests, later suffering from an excruciating stomach ache the entire night, what poison was that cotton wool soaked in? An emetic? An astringent? Homemade cyanide? The pious Alcira Sarasti had dreamed up that mockery made to measure and just for him – he was a tall and dignified man, but podgy and self-important as a piglet, his prominent belly betraying what could otherwise very well be an attractive fifty-year-old body; no doubt about it, that pious woman has hated me ever since I said God was another of man’s bad inventions, he thought.

*

Frankly, he loathed pranks and pranksters, or was he afraid of them? He considered them peculiar beings who came along to disturb the peace; in general they were men and women who displayed some perfidious facial tic: a half-closed eye, for example, at the precise moment of the prank – or the jeer, which is the same thing, there is no prank without jeering for these unimaginative people, he thought – they were men and women who must have undergone some trauma in childhood, marked out by a certain savage furrowing of the brow, that narrowing of the eyes, the tongue moistening the sibylline lips, the suitably malign voice, because pranks fly close to slander, the wind laden with accusatory lies, a prank – or the jeering in it – could turn out to be more merciless than a shock, any shock was preferable to any prank, he thought. Yet, nevertheless, months earlier he too had started to plot his prank, the ape joke, just like everyone else in Pasto, because each person planned their prank during the year to put into practice on December 28, and then to perform in all its variations over the days of the carnival, January 4, 5 and 6, to keep it up, show it off, recreate it in the frenzy of fun, talcum powder and streamers, monumental floats, rivers of aguardiente and loves, both known and unknown, of the Black and White Carnival.

*

The simple prank of the simple ape exalted him to the point of freeing him to imagine himself an authentic, terrifying ape, in the early hours of that December 28, waking his wife and two daughters with his black presence and enraged eyes and simian leaps, frightening them out of bed one after another, ending up chasing them all over the house, trampling furniture and toppling ornaments and throwing the order of things into chaos as only an ape can do, exactly as he would never have done had he not found himself disguised as one, scaring the two girls possibly to the point of tears – I couldn’t help it, Floridita and Luz de Luna, forgive me – and then, in the intimacy of the master bedroom, when everything signals the end of the prank and he makes as if to remove his costume, taking his wife, but taking her by force, the sweetest force, something that had not happened in years; standing before the mirror, Doctor Proceso was once again startled at himself, at the idea, the spectacle of envisaging himself on top of his own wife, disguised as an ape, struggling to subdue her by sweet force – what sweet force? – that sweet force had long since disappeared and he wondered whether it might have been better to have drunk a double shot of aguardiente well beforehand, in order to embark on this absurd, truly idiotic prank, which even included conjugal rape, he was out of his mind – what was the matter with him? – he and his wife had nothing to do with one another, either in bed or out of it, on earth or in heaven: the most excruciating boredom, heavy with hatred, had hovered over them for ages. Thinking of that, in front of the mirror, he beat his chest as apes tend to do out of aggression, but he did it so slowly and pitifully that the ape in the mirror looked funny and then sad, he thought, a shit-scared ape.

*

But the ape rallied, now imagining leaving his house to ingratiate himself with the world, via the shock of his joke, embracing people he did not usually acknowledge, not through silly pride, but because he had forgotten about the world since – recently graduated from medical school, at twenty-five years of age – he had resolved to use his spare time to write the definitive and genuine biography of the never-so-misnamed, so-called Liberator Simón Bolívar.

He had already turned fifty and the biography was not finished, would he die in the attempt? This ingenious prank that would make him friends with the world was indispensable – and, in passing, it would fire him with the enthusiasm to complete The Great Lie: Bolívar or the So-Called Liberator – he would go, for example, dressed as an ape to say hello to Arcángel de los Ríos, his neighbour and chess rival, prosperous dairy producer, one of the richest men in Pasto, “Don Furibundo Pita” they nicknamed him for his furious honking of his car horn, a quarrelsome drunk, but a good man when in his right mind – weren’t they close friends in their youth? – he would walk into houses with open doors and knock on closed doors and poke his ape’s face in through windows, chase women and girls and old ladies, make cats bristle, confront dogs, definitively concoct the story of an impeccable prank in Pasto, a city whose very history was forged from pranks, military or political or social pranks, bedroom or street pranks, as light as feathers or as thumping as elephants, his own would pass through, intimidating martyrs for just a fleeting moment, but a moment of particular shivery fright – is it really an ape escaped from some circus and might it kill me, they would think, didn’t a lorry full of bulls overturn one day and the angriest one charge forward, all set to gouge a notary’s door, which opened at that precise moment with Jesús Vaca right in the way, the old secretary who used to wear a hat and would have retired in three days’ time and of whom nothing was left, not even the hat? Yes, like the furious bull, a gorilla was possible in this life, just around the corner, more than one person would be terrified, sorrowful like a child facing a bloody end at the hands of an older ancestral brother.

And thus, terrorizing citizens in the streets, he would trace his famous route to the chilly centre of Pasto, to the lofty doors of the cathedral, and kneel down and pray before them as only a trained ape is in the habit of doing, convinced by the word of God, repentant, astonishing the faithful, shocking the priests, because not even the Bishop of Pasto – Monsignor Pedro Nel Montúfar, better known as “Obispo Avispa” or “the Wasp”, friend and fellow pupil from childhood – would be excluded from the joke, he would visit him in his palace, pester him, assault him and, if they let him get inside the Governor’s Palace dressed as an ape, he would annoy Governor Nino Cántaro too, another fellow pupil from primary school, but never a friend, top of the class, “the Toad”, it would be splendid to chase him down the corridors of power, but the soldiers who guard the governor’s residence would not allow it, quite likely one of those idiots would take the fact of a crazed ape on the streets of Pasto at face value and shoot not once, but three or five times, to be sure the churchgoing ape who dared to kneel would not be left alive.

No: a rebel ape would be unsafe; it was risky to attack the government in fancy dress.

*

He would settle for just being the immortal ape kneeling before the cathedral doors, and that is where the high point, the crowning moment of the prank, would take place: he would remove the ape head, revealing himself to posterity with his real face, Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, eminent gynaecologist, receiver of life, secret historian; “It’s Doctor Proceso,” eyewitnesses would cry, “disguised as a gorilla,” and they would say, “the worthy gynaecologist frightened almost everyone, his humour’s not just black, it’s multicoloured, he has a gift for it, he scandalized Monsignor Montúfar, he’s one of our own,” and as in a fairy tale, his prank would turn him into a beloved citizen for ever, the unforgettable ape praying on its knees at the cathedral doors, a parable with many possible interpretations, he thought, the docility of the wild beast before God’s goodness, the violent creature bowing down before celestial authority, the ape, ancestor of the human race, prostrated at God’s doors, an example for that same human race, ever more idiotic, to follow, God, God.

God.

But such a prostration – the doctor foresaw – a chimp praying at God’s doors, would be considered a serious case of ungodliness by many, a blow to Catholicism, a despicable joke that had to be penalized not only with an impossibly high fine, but also excommunication and a dressing-down from a committee of the representatives of decency – no matter, he concluded, the wisdom of the prank would ultimately prevail over the boorishness of the tricked, the news of his disguise would appear on the front page of Pasto’s only newspaper, skilfully interpreted under the byline of the wise Arcaín Chivo, philologist, sociologist and palaeontologist – another of his old friends – better known as “the Philanthropist”, former holder of a professorship in history at the university and holder of another in a subject which he himself dubbed “Animal Philosophy”, with fundamental irony. A photograph of the doctor dressed up as an ape, or one of the ape kneeling at the cathedral doors would give an explicit idea of the historic deed, his wife and daughters would be sure to take him seriously for the first time in their lives, he would exist for them, they would be reconciled, everyone would bring him up in their daily chit-chat, it was possible the Mayor of Pasto, Matías Serrano, “the One-Armed Man of Pasto” – who was not actually one-armed, but a friend of his, unlike the governor – would issue a decree that he replay his practical joke for the fancy-dress parade, and not a single band, troupe or float would be more memorable than his disguise of a kneeling chimp praying at the Black and White Carnival.

*

Doctor Proceso fled from the mirror as though fleeing a cage.

He went into the living room, where the fireplace was still warm and from the golden walls, in the same photograph, the puzzled eyes of his grandparents judged him, seated around a piano in the sepia-toned atmosphere of an old house. He too sat down, in his easy chair, a sort of throne in the middle of the room, and intended to cross his legs, but the bulky costume prevented him so he remembered again he was an ape, and was reminded once more by his own reflection in the glass protecting a watercolour painted en plein air of his wife, Primavera Pinzón, represented as the country maid with the pitcher of milk, the famous story of “The Milkmaid” down to the last detail, the thoughtful, vigorous girl building castles in the air, barefoot, rosy rounded calves, threadbare skirt ripped at random by the thorns of a bush, in reality shredded by the knowing hand of the watercolourist, who had slashed it almost to the crotch, up to the curve of a buttock, close by the magnificent hips; thus was the beautiful Primavera portrayed, petite rather than tall, with golden plaits, two cherries joined at the stalk over her ear as an earring, artful mouth, shoulder bent under the weight of the jar, fleeting shadows about to obscure the magical road that would lead her to the village to sell the milk and buy the chicks and sell them and buy the hen and then the piglet and sell them and get a shed with two cows and earn more money than she ever dreamed of – before the breaking of the milk jug.

The watercolour of “The Milkmaid Primavera” – or the glass that protected it – reflected his actual appearance, a flesh-and-blood ape sprawled in the easy chair, a pensive beast with its head resting on one hand like “The Thinker”, whatever am I doing as an orangutan? – he said to himself in alarm, and sat up, experiencing a premonition of disaster, his future absurdity in the eyes of his family: his fifteen-year-old Luz de Luna and his seven-year-old Floridita and above all his wife, who would take advantage of the ape joke to remind him of it for the ensuing year, to rub it in day and night, and not as a celebration but pure derision, stressing how much she detested him; it is quite possible I am ill-prepared for an ape costume, better to take off the body and head as soon as possible and chuck this feeble attempt at conquest in the bin, although better still to burn it so not a scrap remains, how to explain a brand-new gorilla suit in the bin? Who brought this nonsense in? What were they thinking? Questions his wife and little Floridita would ask out loud, Floridita who was already beginning to hate him; the last time he tried to give her a paternal goodnight kiss she had turned her face to one side and said, “yuck, mummy’s right when she tells us you smell of pregnant women’s undies”, but what did that little girl know about the smell of pregnant women’s underwear? What kind of language was this? For God’s sake, Justo Pastor – he said to himself – he needed to burn the rubbish, get into his pyjamas on the double and get back into bed with Primavera, who would no doubt get angry at being woken in the middle of the night but who, nonetheless, would be hotter than ever under the covers, her moist crotch almost open, and would fall back into a deep sleep, allowing the gynaecologist’s expert finger to softly graze the tip of each pubic hair and then after an hour of gentle flight to land on one labia and check it over and then straight on to the other, affecting nonchalance, and after another hour of valiant and almost painful effort begin to sink itself into that font and fountain of molten lava that his wife became when she slept, his beloved – beloved in such a way, one thing in real life and another in dreams – until the final climax, hers and his, the never more alone Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, silently masturbating beside his wife’s blazing body, the woman who, were she to wake at such liberties would surely scream, he thought, what have we come to?

*

He went up the stairs, a thoughtful, irresolute ape, one hand on his chin, the other scratching the shaggy head, more surprised at himself now than when he saw himself in the mirror, he went up as if he were on the point of collapse, to the first floor where the guest bedroom was, along with the laundry room, the toy room and, furthest away, his library, which was also the chess nook, with its rosewood table, marble pieces and two solitary chairs.

He went in there and stopped by the chessboard, where he had last played years before with his neighbour Arcángel de los Ríos, Don Furibundo Pita, winning a bet he could no longer recall. He remembered, yes, they started another game straight away, but did not finish it because they were interrupted by a tremor, the brief but worrying tremor that traversed the city, a terrestrial shudder that made lamps swing and the foundations of the houses creak; tremors were frequent in Pasto, a city wisely wary of its fiery volcano – the age-old Galeras, which poked its nose from under your sheets at the most unexpected moments – they were disturbed by this tremor, which on other occasions lasted a long time, too long, and left its mark by demolishing poorly constructed houses, but God knows how He distributes his earthquakes, he thought, how He metes them out, assigns their victims, how He ends the ones that must end and how He leaves alone the ones yet to begin, but, he wondered, is God really fair? God, God, the tremor – like the heart of the volcano – it would gnaw away at you in the most intimate hours of the soul, it was an unsuspected, unexpected, ill-timed and always-unwanted guest who was dreaded as the city’s worst joke, or worst fright – from Pasto, with love to my children: a volcano is my heart – the city’s immemorial joke, fright and joke simultaneously, it froze hearts while it lasted, thoughts were fractured for the duration of the rocking, hairs rose on the nape of your neck, you went grey, on one occasion, the last, he had had to curtail the climactic embrace with Primavera, the almost-sweet finish in unison, through the singular fault of a a tremor, the fear of dying was that strong, stronger than the culminating embrace, it tore them apart at the peak of the restorative embrace and did not fit itself to the desperate rhythm of their bodies – as the most innocent would think it might – but dangled them from the all-encompassing fear of death, which is stronger than any love.

It had been his last attempt to love and fall in love again.

*

Finally the ape resolved to tackle the third storey of the house, the octa-gonal floor with wood-panelled walls, large paintings of Christs and Madonnas hanging here and there, intimate and familiar, where his daughters’ rooms and his own marital bedroom were to be found, all three doors open wide.

He had promised himself he would burn the disguise right away, embark on another session of sleep-love in bed with Primavera Pinzón, but he paused, lost in thought, before the bedroom of the elder of his daughters, Luz de Luna – the name insisted upon by his wife, who had still considered herself a poet on entering into marriage and decreed that if she gave birth to a girl she would be called after the poem she wrote on her wedding night, “Luz de Luna: This day the pure moonlight arrives at my wedding bed / And frees my soul from the dark circus where it wanders / It illuminates and redeems it from the onslaught of the donkey who / With his brutish conquering lance / Pierces my maidenhood.” Doctor Proceso knew it by heart; it was his wife’s last poem because, according to her, she lost not only her virginity on her wedding night, but also her poetic talent, a misfortune not only for her family but for humanity – you were to blame Doctor Donkey, said his wife, who never called him by his name, but only “Doctor Donkey”, with feigned affection, unlike the women who visited the doctor’s consulting room, his utterly faithful patients of all ages who, as a courtesy, and in feminine retaliation, called him “Doctor Gentle”.

Before the charming but everyday scene of Luz de Luna sleeping, the inert ape, slack-mouthed, ran a hand over his jaw, it really was an ape in the doorway, reflecting; he went back over the fifteen years that had gone by since that highly unusual wedding night, the night that had surely engendered Luz de Luna, because many nights would pass before he tangled with Primavera Pinzón in bed again. When they got married, the doctor was thirty-five and his wife twenty: now she was a woman of thirty-five and he was a fifty-year-old. He remembered that first night as if it were this one: as soon as he finished, his wife got free of him with a cry that could have been disgust or defiance and leapt from the bed to the table to write that poem by the light of the moon – and, in fact, moonlight was shining through the window – that poem, he thought, where he ended up, in such a roundabout way, likened to a donkey.

*

So, his Luz de Luna was fifteen.

The bedroom window was open; it looked onto the garden, where the glossy boughs of the Capulin cherry tree reached upwards; the ape went to the window and closed it. Then, leaning over his daughter, who slept face down – long dark hair, pale profile – he saw her for what she was: already a young woman, her mouth tinged a blueish hue, open, as if she were speaking voicelessly. Stretched over the side of the bed, one of her feet stuck out from under the covers, dangling like something pink and formless, not exactly a foot, he thought, but a piece of something separate from his daughter. He thought the sight of the horrible ape would be a nasty awakening for Luz de Luna, and moved away on tiptoe: it was better to go back to his room, take off the costume and consign the joke to oblivion, the joke he had thought over to the point of exhaustion during nights of insomnia and which exalted him more every day. No. He was no good for jokes – or jokes were no good for him? What sort of man was he? Really, a normal man or a defenceless spirit exposed to the universal waywardness that makes the weak its victims? Then, cautiously, he withdrew, alarmed because his daughter spoke a word in her sleep, a word he could not understand: “stables”?

He was already heading for his bedroom when he discovered, by the half-light of a lamp, that a boy was asleep in the room belonging to his younger daughter, Floridita, in the same bed, what was the world coming to? Who could it be? That December 28, Floridita turned seven, and the boy, that boy – who was it? – seemed a little younger, around six –wasn’t it the son of Matilde Pinzón, Primavera’s sister? Primavera already knew he did not approve of the excessive camaraderie between the boy and his daughter, that constant coming and going together around the house. And now he had to find them sleeping in the same bed. For years now Primavera had utterly tormented him, and the torments he recalled were more serious than two children cuddled up in bed; Primavera, Primavera, he yelled to himself, who would not one day wish to become your murderer?

*

And at last he entered the marital bedroom. He forgot about the ape he found himself inside, and seeing an ape in the mirror made him swear and jump backwards: he had frightened himself, there he still was, dressed as an ape.

He carried on, hurriedly, so as not to see himself any longer. His bulky silhouette was afloat in the blue light of dawn. In the doorway he had already started to remove the ape head, determined to make it disappear, when he heard the sleeping woman moan, the humid moan of Primavera Pinzón that issued softly from the centre of the bed, her velvety tone, her indecipherable song and, instantly, he forgot about the costume, observing Primavera with delight. Was she dreaming she was making love? Dreaming of love? Or did she not love? And, from his own experience, hearing her murmur “here, here”, he opted for love, and leant over the bed, over his own bed in which this time his wife alone slept, or his wife slept alone with her dream of love: the alpaca mattress moulded itself around her supine position, one arm bent beneath her head, her face, eyes closed, pointed at the ceiling, lips parted, moist, reddened, legs splayed, the inherent scent of heat which could only emanate from her neck, from the blonde hair spread over the pillow, now Doctor Proceso López was not yelling Primavera, Primavera, who would not one day wish to become your murderer, but he promised himself solely to make her fall in love again for a minute, or die, God, God.

God.

He swore he would give his life just for one embrace and an exuberant caress from Primavera at that exact moment of desolation, or to at least get into bed with her and never mind that she would wake against her will and in a bad mood, he t. . .