In Evil Hour by Garcia Marquez Gabriel

Author:Garcia Marquez, Gabriel [Garcia Marquez, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-17T21:42:05+00:00

6

astray donkey sought shelter from the rain under the eaves of the parish house and it stayed there all night, kicking against the bedroom wall. It was a night without rest. After having managed a sudden sleep at dawn, Father Ángel woke up with the feeling that he was covered with dust. The spikenards sleeping in the drizzle, the smell of the toilet, and then the lugubrious interior of the church after the five o'clock tolling had faded away all seemed to be conspiring to make that a difficult dawn.

From the sacristy, where he dressed to say mass, he heard Trinidad harvesting her dead mice, while the stealthy weekday women entered the church. During the mass, with progressive exasperation, he noticed his acolyte's mistakes, his backwoods Latin, and he achieved at the last moment the feeling of frustration that tormented him during the evil hours of his life.

He was on his way to breakfast when Trinidad cut him off with a radiant expression. "Six more down today," she said, shaking the dead mice in the box. Father Ángel tried to rise above the confusion.

"Wonderful," he said. "At this rate we ought to find their nests and finish the extermination completely."

Trinidad had found the nests. She explained how she'd located the holes in different parts of the church, especially in the tower and the baptistery, and how she'd plugged them up with asphalt. That morning she'd found a frantic mouse beating against the wall after having looked all night for the door to its house.

They went out into the small paved courtyard, where the first shoots of spikenard were beginning to grow erect. Trinidad took her time throwing the dead mice into the toilet. When he went into his study, Father Ángel got ready to eat breakfast, having removed the small tablecloth under which every morning, like a kind of magician's trick, the breakfast that the widow Asís sent him appeared.

"I'd forgotten that I couldn't buy the arsenic," Trinidad said when she came in. "Don Lalo Moscote says that it can't be sold without a doctor's prescription."

"It won't be necessary," Father Ángel said. "They'll all smother to death in their dens."

He brought the chair over to the table and began to set up the cup, the plate with slices of plain tamales, and the coffeepot engraved with a Japanese dragon, while Trinidad was opening the window. "It's always best to be prepared in case they come back," she said. Father Ángel poured his coffee and suddenly he stopped and looked at Trinidad, with her shapeless robe and her invalid's high shoes, as she came over to the table.

"You worry too much about that," he said.

Father Ángel hadn't noticed then or earlier any indication of restlessness in the tight tangle of Trinidad's eyebrows. Unable to suppress a slight trembling of his fingers, he finished pouring himself the coffee, put in two spoonfuls of sugar, and began to stir the cup, with his gaze on the crucifix hanging on the wall.

"How long has it been since you confessed?"

"Last Friday," Trinidad answered.

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