The Guardian of Amsterdam Street by Sergio Schmucler

Author:Sergio Schmucler [Schmucler, Sergio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2021-04-15T17:30:55+00:00

25

How would he care for such an important treasure?

What if it was true that Hitler hadn’t died, and was actually frozen, and he appeared one day with all of those Germans raising and lowering their arms towards and away from the sky, and they wanted to invade the street? And what if General Cárdenas hadn’t just come to Amsterdam Street for a haircut from Santibáñez, but he actually wanted to see with his own eyes how he could plan to expropriate it like he had done with the oil? And what if the potential enemy wasn’t as obvious as an army or an ex-president but hid behind the disguise of any ordinary person, and rented the rooms with the secret intention of seizing first the house and then the whole street? Because protecting the bougainvillea was one thing, Galo only had to water it and fix nails and string so it would keep growing, but preventing the victory of an army with cannons and soldiers and planes was another thing altogether.

If the treasure were to fall into their hands, the world would become even worse than it was already: more Mr. Gueisers dragging sheets behind them, more men who would be nothing because they couldn’t be carpenters, more cities beneath mushroom-shaped clouds.

He, as the street’s guardian, had to be vigilant, to watch over that incredible machine that could save or destroy humanity.

At first he found ways to scare off several tenants he considered suspicious for various reasons, such as Mr. Epigmenio González Avelar, who had come to the city from Torreón, or Mrs. María Mercedes Ontiveros, Blanco’s widow, who rented the rooms and set up a grocery store.

But finally he had to confront an enemy against whom he was powerless, when his mother decided to rent the rooms to the priest. Not even scrawling “The church is the scum of the earth” in black paint on the walls of the largest room worked. Clodomiro Santibáñez had told him this phrase once.

The priest needed to use the rooms as classrooms so that the neighbourhood children could take their catechism class while a new classroom was built in the local parish.

Galo realized that the situation was serious, partly because of everything he had heard about the church when he worked in the hairdresser, but above all because, since the very first sessions of the first course, and there were six in total, the priest warned his disciples that they weren’t there just to prepare themselves for the sacrament they would make in a few months, but also that, from that moment onwards, they would form a part of God’s General Plan to reconquer the world, and to be true soldiers of the Supreme Being they had to fight against the mortal enemies of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and that these were communists, in the first place, and the Jews were a close second, who had come together in an infernal alliance, and just like they had killed the Saviour, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill the Catholics either.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.