Tono the Infallible by Evelio Rosero

Author:Evelio Rosero
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811234535
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:01+00:00

Book Two

1

Here, with Me

I didn’t believe, however, that Toño Ciruelo had put an end to La Oscurana, or didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to invoke that other word, murderer, here, with me, in my home. Such a confession must surely be the climax to a performance, the performance Ciruelo had prepared in order to torment me, in his own way, and yet the superhuman effort he had made in telling me — not so much physical, grasping me by the throat and asphyxiating me, but rather intimate — no longer seemed to me like a performance, it was true, it had to be.

He collapsed.

It appeared he was being humiliated by a guilty dream: sudden nightmares startled his eyelids, his swollen body; I heard him swear, spout dark phrases in who knows what language. He settled down and I decided to leave him; I took my things through to the study. I didn’t last long, though, and began pacing back and forth — just like an inmate.

All on one level, my home was one quarter of an ancient mansion in La Candelaria that had been converted by its owner into four separate apartments and rented out. There was a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, study, and kitchen. I tried to work, but this was no longer possible: his . . . presence . . . pulsed there; it was getting late; I went to the small utility room behind the kitchen, turned on the washing machine, began taking dry clothes off the line, rinsed some plates. In a corner near the entrance to my apartment I discovered, like a crouching animal, Toño Ciruelo’s Arhuaca shoulder bag, the fraying bag he had dropped on arriving.

Stunned, troubled in my soul, I thought that it smelled of blood and earth.

I shoved it into the umbrella stand, though not without first inspecting its contents: a pair of dark, round Lennonesque glasses, a rusty Swiss Army knife (the multipurpose kind, with a spoon, fork, can opener . . .), a Toledo pocketknife with an engraved greenish handle, the blade of which I did not wish to open but imagined curved, sharp; a leather wallet, smooth, tattered, swollen, not just with pesos but postcards of Klimts and Van Goghs; another small rice-paper Bible; and there were also worn-down black pencils, a metal sharpener, a chewed cream Pelikan eraser, a set of keys (surely the keys to his home, bound by a heavy copper ring), and a large-format composition notebook with graph paper, a hundred pages, its hard covers imprinted with a photo of Charles Lindbergh standing beside his plane.

I opened the notebook: I’m not sure why I was reluctant to read even a single sentence; I merely confirmed that it was Ciruelo’s handwriting, minuscule; this was surprising, for I recalled how, at school, his broad-stroke handwriting would fill a whole page within a few sentences; inside the notebook, what stood out was an insect-like smallness, square by square, as if, when writing, Ciruelo were

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.