the piece of stale bread to his lips, and in an energetic expression of repulsion, he spat in his face repeatedly. ‘You better always be careful!’ I’d repeat more often each day. Two, three, four times a day this alarm would sound between us. I’d let it out, knowing that this way Palomino would take better care of himself and thereby stay further away from the danger. It seemed to me that when I hadn’t recently reminded him of the fateful disquiet, he just might forget it and then—woe betide him! … Where was Palomino? … Thrust forward by my vigilante fraternity, in a snap I made my way to him and whispered in his ear these garbled words, ‘You better be careful!’ Thus I felt more at ease, since I could be sure that for the next few hours nothing would happen to my friend. One day I repeated this more times than I ever had before. Palomino heard me, and after the ensuing commotion, he surely was thanking me in his mind and heart. But, I must remind you once more: on this road I crossed the limits of love and goodness for Palomino and I turned into his principle torturer—his personal henchman. I started realizing the double meaning of my behavior. ‘But,’ I said to myself in my conscience, ‘be that as it may, an irrevocable command of my soul has invested in me the power to be his guardian, caretaker of his security, and I shall never turn back for anything.’ My alarming voice would forever beat alongside his, on his angst-filled nights, as an alarm clock, as a shield, as a defense. Yes. I wouldn’t turn back, not for anything. Once, late into the night, I awoke in a sweat, as a result of having felt a mysterious vibrant shock in the middle of a dream. Perhaps an open valve of strife was throwing a bucket of cold water on my chest. I woke up, possessed by immense joy, a winged joy, as though an exhausting weight had suddenly been lifted, or as if a gallows had jumped out of my neck, all busted up. It was a diaphanous, pure, blind joy, I don’t know why, and in the darkness it stretched out and fluttered in my heart. I fully woke up, regained consciousness, and my joy reached its end: I’d dreamed that Palomino had been poisoned. By the following day, that dream had overwhelmed me, with increasing palpitations at the crossroads: Death—Life. In reality I felt utterly seized by him. Harsh winds of unnerving fever charged my wrists, temples, and chest. I must’ve looked sick, no doubt, since my temples and head were heavier than ever and my soul mourned its grave sorrows. In the evening, it fell to Palomino and me to work together at the press. As they do now, the black steel bits were clanging, smacking into one another as if in an argument, scraping against one another. Hell-bent on saving themselves, they were spinning madly and faster than ever. Throughout the entire morning and into the afternoon, that stubborn irreducible dream stayed with me. And, yet, for some reason, I didn’t shy away from him. I felt him at my side, laughing and crying in turn, showing me, impulsively, one of his hands, the left one black, the other one white, extremely white, and both always coming together with strange isochronism, at an impeccable terrifying crossroads: Death—Life! Life—Death! Throughout the day (and here I also forget why) not once did the vigilant alert from before reach my lips. Not once. My prior dream seemed to seal my mouth shut to keep from spilling such a word, with its right whitening luminous hand of fleeting, limitless, blue luminosity. Suddenly, Palomino whispered in my ears with a contained explosion of pity and impotence: ‘I’m thirsty.’ Immediately, driven by my constant obliging fraternity with him, I filled a reddish clay pitcher and brought it for him to drink. He thanked me fondly, clutching the handle of the mug, and he quenched his thirst until he could drink no more … And at twilight, when this life of prickly carefulness became more unbearable, when Palomino had drilled holes in his head, on the brink of a breakdown, when a febrile yellowness of an old bone aged yellow placated his astronomically restless face, when even the doctor had declared that our martyr had nothing more than fatigue brought on by an upset stomach, when that excessively peccary uniform was torn to shreds in corrosive agony, even when Palomino had formed his tall ephemeral smile—oh harmony of the Heavens!—with the wrinkles on his forehead, which didn’t manage to jump down to his cheeks or to the human sadness of his shoulders; and when, like today, it was raining and foggy in the unreachable open spaces, and a causeless, labored, surly omen worsened down here, at twilight, he approached me and said, with bloody splinters of voice, ‘Solís … Solís! Now … Now they’ve killed me! … Solís …’ When I saw his two hands holding his stomach, writhing in pain, I felt the blow strike me at the bottom of my heart, the feeling of a roaring fire devouring my innermost recesses. His complaints, barely articulated, as if they didn’t want to be perceived by anyone else but me, were floating toward my inside, like flared-up tongues of a flame long contained between the two of us, in the shape of invisible tablets. So surely and with such lively certainty had we mutually awaited that outcome! Yet after feeling as if the asp had filtered through the veins of my own body, a sudden, mysterious satisfaction came over me. A mysterious satisfaction! Yes, indeed!”
At that moment, Solís made a face of enigmatic obfuscation mixed with such deaf intoxication in his gaze that it sent me wobbling in my chair, as during a furious stoning.
“And Palomino didn’t wake up the following day,” he mysteriously added afterward, hoarse, without provocation, bearing many tons. “So had he been poisoned? And perhaps with the water I gave him to drink? Or had that only been a nervous breakdown? I don’t know. They only say that the next day, while I felt obliged to stay in bed during the early hours, due to the overbearing distress from the night before, one of his sons came to inform his father that his pardon had been handed down, but he was nowhere to be found. The administration had replied to him, ‘Indeed. The pardon of your father, handed down, he’s been released this morning.’”
The narrator had in this a poorly contained expression of torment that drove me to say to him, with thoughtful consternation, “No … No … Don’t start crying!” And, making a subtle parenthesis, Solís again asked me with tenderness as deep as before, “Are you cold?”
“And then?” I interrupt him.
“And then … nothing.”
After that, Solís falls dead silent. Then, as an afterthought, full of love and bitterness at once, he adds, “But Palomino has always been a good man and my best friend, the most loyal, the kindest. I’ve loved him so much, taken such great interest in his situation, helped to examine his endangered future. I even ended up investigating the contents of the pockets and deeds of other people. Palomino hasn’t come back here, doesn’t even remember me. That ungrateful bastard! Can you imagine?”
Again come the sounds of the penitentiary band playing the Peruvian national anthem. Now they are no longer sight-singing. The chorus of the song is played by the entire band in symphony. The notes of that anthem echo, and the prisoner still silent, sunken in deep deliberation, suddenly flicks his eyelids in a lively flutter and cries out with a stunned expression,
“It’s the anthem that they’re playing! Do you hear it! It’s the anthem. But of course! It seems to be making out a phrase: Weee-aaare-frrreee …”
And as he hums these notes, he smiles and finally laughs with gleeful absurdity.
Then to the nearby fence he turns his astonished eyes that glow with burning tears. He jumps from his chair and, stretching out his arms, exclaims with jubilation that sends a shiver down to my spine:
“Hi Palomino! …”
Someone approaches us through the silent, unmoving, locked gate.
[JM]
________________
WAX
That night we couldn’t smoke. All the bodegas in Lima were closed. My friend, who led me through the taciturn mazes of the renowned yellow mansion on Calle Hoyos, where numerous smokers converge, said good-bye to me and, with soul and pituitaries porcelained,60 he jumped the first streetcar he saw and fled through midnight.
I still felt somewhat woozy from our last drinks. Oh, my bohemia of yore, bronzemongery61 ever cornered by uneven scales, withdrawn into the shell of dry palates, the circle of my costly human freedom on two sidewalks of reality that lead to three temples of impossible! But you must excuse this venting that still emits a bellicose odor of buckshot smelted into wrinkles.
As I was saying, once I was all alone I still felt drunk, aimlessly traipsing through Chinatown. So much was clearing up in my spirit. Then I realized what was
