Vow of Darkness by Rodrigo Parra Sandoval

Author:Rodrigo Parra Sandoval [Parra Sandoval, Rodrigo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary colombian literature, novel, fiction, literary fiction, Colombia
Publisher: eLibros Editorial
Published: 2014-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Plaza Mayor is in a dense fog that envelops the rising sun and turns into a dusty brightness. They have placed a wooden platform in the centre, and on it a long table with a bottle of alcohol, crepe spools, a lit burner, a lancet, towels, and cotton reels in a palm leaf basket. The cathedral sacristan and five altar boys, dressed up in their red and white soutanes, blow at the thurible embers with the inflated cheeks of cherubim. Someone puts five chairs in a row on the platform, in front of the table. The Archbishop is seated in the middle. He’s surrounded by two European scientists, Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland, who are to be present at the ceremony as guests of honour of the city. At the ends of the line are the Mother Superior of the nursing sisters and the priest director of Catholic Action. The square is full, the people wait, sing hymns and shout “long live” and “down with”. In their anonymous and therefore irresponsible voices there is chaos, an unadmitted sneaky fear of sickness and death, and of anything different. The sun finally breaks through the opaqueness of the fog, and lights up the platform like a theatre light. Don José Celestino Mutis stands in front of the table, and watches some stretcher bearers who shout their way through the crowd. They’re carrying a dying old woman, obviously sick with smallpox. They put her on the table, roll up the sleeve on her left arm, and expose the poisonous garden of blisters. The Archbishop intones the Te Deum. The people close their eyes and accompany him. When they finish singing, he take some material that we cannot see, from a mother of pearl box, and sprinkle it piously into the thurible.

Bonpland comes down from the platform, and mixes with the crowd. Humboldt goes up, and puts some dark herbs into the thuribles, producing little clouds of smoke. The sacristan and the altar boys swing the thuribles on the platform, and then come down to mix with the crowd. Mutis looks at the mob with a hawk’s acute haughtiness, and sees that the sun has decisively broken through the mist, and has shone directly on his body covered in white by his surplice. He raises his arms theatrically in a cross, just like an actor on whom the flood lights shine while the others stay in the darkness, and says: “Now, beloved brothers in Christ, this is why we’ve come here.” And in a powerful voice, he proclaims: “I’ll proceed to inoculate myself against smallpox.” He offers me his left index finger, and make a clear precise cut, and let some drops of blood fall. I choose a small smallpox pink blister from the old woman. I cut a piece of thread, and smear it with the pus of the woman lying on the table. I pass the thread impregnated with pus through the wound in Mutis’ finger, and I leave it there.

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