Red April

by Santiago Roncagliolo

  He tried to expel from his mind the entire judicial process, which seemed to unfold before his eyes. He did not entirely succeed. As he saw Captain Pacheco making his statement, it occurred to him to pile up all the chests until he could reach the window and get out through there. He crossed the room and began to move them. They weighed too much to carry. He would have to drag them. When he moved the first one, he accidentally knocked over one of the bottles of acid. The liquid spread along the floor until it reached Quiroz's hands and head. The prosecutor retreated to the stairs. If he moved forward, he would leave prints all around the room. Now the liquid ran everywhere, all the way to the bottom of the window. He climbed up two steps.

  Then he remembered that he had the pistol. He would have to use it again. He went up to the door and calculated the most distant angle from which he could hit the lock. He fired when he was halfway up the stairs. The first shot went through the wood but did not hit the lock. The second was almost a direct hit. The prosecutor went to open the door. He had to kick it, and when he shoved it with his hand, he got a splinter. As he pulled out the splinter and sucked the blood, he understood he was leaving his fingerprints and even his blood all over the wooden door. He took out his handkerchief to wipe it down. From outside he heard the sound of people returning to their houses and hotels in the small hours. Men and women laughing. Strange accents. He thought he should hurry. Leaning against the door, he kicked the lock with the sole of his shoe until he broke it and opened the door. He went into the dark living room, then out to the street. When he was on the sidewalk, he looked around. The couple he had surprised in the alleyway were a few meters from the door. They were petrified when they saw him. He realized he was still holding the weapon. He gestured to them to calm them down as he tried to put it away. They put their hands up. They looked rigid.

  “Listen, this is not what it seems … please …”

  “Easy, easy,” said the man, “nothing's going on … We didn't see anything …”

  They took a few steps backward as he came closer.

  “Don't go, listen to me … We have to call the police …”

  When they reached the first corner, they stopped moving. The prosecutor thought that at last they would listen to him. He moved faster, but they turned and started to run. He tried to follow, but they quickly disappeared down one of the streets.

  Now they had seen him clearly. Chacaltana thought that each of his advances was a step backward. He tried to think calmly. He closed the holster to avoid any more trouble. No neighbor had looked out. Perhaps they thought the shots were fireworks. Yes. Perhaps the best thing after all was to wait for the authorities and explain everything properly in order to open an investigation. Then he recalled the faces of the judge and the officer in the captain's office. Unable to control himself, he broke into a run.

  After running for a few minutes he tried to think where he was going. Not to his house. The killer or the police would probably be waiting for him there if they were not already following him. And not to the Office of the Prosecutor or headquarters. He passed the Arch and continued toward the far end of the city, heading for the San Juan district. Fifteen minutes later, he arrived at Edith's house, which was almost at the edge of the city. He placed his finger on the doorbell and decided to leave it there until the young woman gave a sign of life. He realized he was crying. He kicked at the door. He shouted Edith's name. Then he thought that this would attract the attention of the entire neighborhood. He tried to regain his composure. He was a prosecutor. He knew how to accuse, he had to know how to evade accusations. He took a deep breath. An old woman, her head covered in rollers, looked out a second-story window.

  “What's going on? What do you want?”

  “I'm looking for Edith.”

  “And do you think this is a decent hour? And do you think that's any way to ring a doorbell?”

  “I'm sorry … I …”

  I what? What could he say? He thought about saying the police were after him, or that he was with the police and chasing someone. The woman continued to watch him as he asked himself if it would not be better to run away from there too. Then the door opened. There was Edith, half asleep, wearing an undershirt, flannel bottoms, and flip-flops. Her hair was loose and shiny. Behind her was a staircase. Félix Chacaltana had never seen the interior of Edith's house when he had walked her home. It was an old, subdivided, three-story house where the same doorbell apparently was heard in all the apartments. He realized the old woman did not live with Edith when the young woman let him in and apologized to her. He heard her say he was her cousin who had just come from Andahuaylas for Holy Week. She promised it would not happen again. The woman did not reply. She simply pulled her head in from the window and back into her own life.

  Félix and Edith went up to the third floor, to a tiny room with an electric hot plate in a corner. There was no bathroom and no refrigerator. Chacaltana supposed she shared those facilities with some neighbors, perhaps with the same old woman who had reprimanded him. He thought no more about it. As soon as she closed the door, still half asleep, he put his arms around the girl and held her very tight, as if he wanted to fuse with her. As they embraced, she felt the shape of the pistol against her body. She tried to pull away.

  “What's happened to you? What's going on?”

  Félix did not let Edith go. He clung to her for a long time before he realized that tears were falling from his eyes.

  “Do you want a mate?”

  He nodded. She heated the water on the hot plate while he kept holding her. She served the mate and sat down. She caressed his hair gently while he, on his knees, rested his head on her lap and clasped her around the waist, trembling.

  “Don't you want to tell me what happened? Does it have to do with your work?”

  Now not even images of fire and blows passed through the mind of Prosecutor Chacaltana. There was only a great void, a hungry darkness, the maw of nothingness closing over his head. He needed to talk. He needed to tell everything that had happened to him in the past month and a half. He needed to cry like a baby. He began to tell it all, urged on by the young woman's caresses. When the first light of dawn sifted through the small window in the room, he had finished his story. Edith's lap was warm and dry. Seconds later, as if a great weight had been lifted from him, he was asleep.

  He woke at eight in the morning. He had not slept very long. And he could not sleep any more. He did not even think he could move. After the initial shock of not knowing where he was, he looked around Edith's small apartment. He was in the bed. His jacket and the holster were hanging from the only chair, and under that were his shoes, one beside the other, as orderly and unwrinkled as the other things Edith had touched. She was there too, standing across from him, taking off her undershirt and bottoms. She had gotten a dishpan of water from somewhere and was carefully washing her underarms and crotch, her neck and feet, in the still tenuous morning light.

  “Good morning,” said the prosecutor.

  When she heard him, she did her best to cover her body. Her right arm crossed her chest and her left hand covered her sex.

  “Turn around,” she replied. “I have no place else to go in here.”

  The prosecutor did not turn around. He smiled at her. She returned the smile. She had turned red.

  “Turn around,” she insisted.

  Sluggishly, the prosecutor turned around. He remained in that position for a few seconds until he turned back to her, not so sluggishly now. She covered herself again.

  “If you don't behave, you won't come back. Remember you're my cousin.”

  The prosecutor thought of the previous night. His head was teeming with fragments of his encounter with Father Quiroz in the basement, his arrival at Edith's house, the young woman's tender lap. He wanted to touch her. Take refuge in her.

  “Come here,” he said. It sounded like an order.

  “I have to go to work and I'm already late. My boss will be there because we're expecting a crowd
. Don't move from here. Doña Dora is furious. She scolded me for twenty minutes when I went down for water.”

  “Come here,” he repeated.

  She wrapped a towel around her body and approached him. She touched his forehead and let him bring her hand slowly to his lips. He kissed her palm and the back of her hand. He put her hand gently into his mouth and sucked each one of her fingers.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Thank you for helping me,” he said. “I'll never forget it.”

  She leaned over to kiss him. He took her by the waist and pulled her to the bed. She refused, first with her body and then with her voice, but then she let herself sink down.

  “I have to go,” she reminded him, laughing.

  He lay on top of her body and put his tongue in her mouth. He no longer felt like a little boy needing protection. On the contrary, he wanted to recover his adulthood. Show her that he could also be a protective man, a man. He kissed her neck, her shoulders, the back of her neck, where a few short black hairs escaped, like long down. She responded with kisses on his forehead and cheeks. She tried to move him to one side. He resisted.

  “Don't go to work,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “Don't go.”

  He wondered if they had discovered the body yet. Then he removed the thought from his mind. He needed something else, something besides so much death. He needed something with life. He was breathing heavily. Her mouth was partially open. He bit her lips.

  “Ow!” Edith groaned. “Does your mama know you do those things?”

  “She doesn't see us here.”

  “She's always with you. That's the problem.”

  The prosecutor became perturbed. He did not think this was the right context for talking about his mother. He replied:

  “She likes you very much.” It seemed to him a delicate moment, one of those moments when important things are said. “She would not object if … if I married you.”

  The color rose in Edith's cheeks. She seemed surprised.

  “She?”

  He smiled but did not receive a smile in return. This disconcerted him, it disconcerted him not to receive from people what he had planned. Smiles are repaid with smiles, that must be written down somewhere as a norm. She caressed his forehead and said words he did not expect.

  “Listen, Félix … I love you very much but … the truth is … to marry you … I'd need for her not to be here.”

  “What?”

  “I understand your feelings. But I couldn't go to live in a house that belongs to another woman. Least of all one … who isn't really there.”

  “She is there,” said the prosecutor. “Do you believe that only things you can see are there?”

  She lowered her eyes.

  “No, of course not. I'm going to get dressed.”

  She stood. He tried to hold her back but failed. Something in the air had broken, and the prosecutor tried to put the pieces back together.

  “Listen … You have to understand … I love you but … my mother … just now …”

  He knew there were words caught in his throat, trying to get out, but it was not clear to him how to pull them free, he would have liked to scoop them out with a spoon. He had always been good with words, but he seemed incapable of summoning the exact ones to talk about what mattered to him most. And the worst thing was that right now he did not have the time of a functionary at his desk or a poet facing a sheet of paper. The words he needed should have burst directly from his heart, but his heart was dry.

  She picked up her clothes from the chair. The prosecutor felt he would never again see her undressed.

  “It's not a problem,” she said. “I understand.”

  It was as if she had spoken from the other side of the world. From the tip of a glacier. He went over to her. He tried to embrace her but she eluded him. He held her tight and kissed her shoulders. He felt a great need to control her, to not let her go, and he felt that no words could restrain her. He removed the towel from her body with a single movement and lowered his head to her chest and belly, kissing her constantly. She tried to push him away by the shoulders.

  “That's enough …,” she whispered.

  But he did not let her go. He held her around the legs and lowered his mouth to her sex until he felt her pubic hairs brushing his tongue. Her vulva tasted of soap and of her. He felt a tug on his hair. He raised his head. She was looking at him in a fury.

  “Let me go,” she said dryly. “I'm going to …”

  Normally the prosecutor would have let her go and apologized for his behavior. He would have said he had not intended any disrespect. But without knowing why, his reaction surprised even him. He lowered his head again and held her more tightly around the legs. He sucked. This time she shouted:

  “Let me alone!”

  And she shook him by his hair. He pulled Edith's hands away from his head. They came away filled with black hairs that jutted out between her fingers. He brought her hands down to the bed and climbed on her again to trap her between his body and the mattress. The bed creaked and rocked back and forth. Now Edith's eyes reflected fear. Inexplicably, that excited him even more. Trembling, Edith tried to free herself from his embrace. He squeezed her neck with one hand while he unzipped his fly with the other. He saw the red marks his paws had left on the young woman's wrists before she scratched his face and put her finger in his eye. Then he became violent. He slapped her on the bed and lowered his trousers as he got into position. He saw his own aged penis contrasting with Edith's fresh, clean flesh. His round stomach fell on her flat belly. He thrust forward. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. He thrust again, over and over again, shaking her as the bed creaked, feeling how her small body grew more and more diminutive as it trembled beneath his body, wrinkled but strong, still strong, stronger than ever.

  When he finished, he rolled off her and lay to one side. He was perspiring. His head was spinning with memories of the previous night and what he had just done. She did not move. It was difficult to tell if the drops rolling down her face were perspiration or tears. He felt a strange pleasure when he asked himself the question in silence. She trembled. She felt raw, torn apart.

  “Yesterday I shot a man,” he said. “I don't know who he was or if I hit him. But I might have killed someone. I felt it was a kind of test, a kind of training for something. I felt that something was changing in me.”

  All the people I talk to die.

  “Get out,” she responded, first in a whisper, then in a howl. “Get out! Son of the devil!”

  It sounded innocent as an insult. But Prosecutor Chacaltana knew what it meant. Supaypawawa. Son of the devil. It was a direct translation of the worst thing you can say to a person in Quechua. He knew he really would have to get out. His crotch was wet but she would not let him wash. She was wet too, and a thin line of blood trickled between her legs. The prosecutor did not want to ask her if she was a virgin. He wanted to think she was.

  As he was closing Edith's door, he saw her sobbing on the bed. He began to walk down the stairs as he put on his jacket and made certain the holster for the pistol was carefully closed. At the door he passed the neighbor from the previous night. He greeted her by name, Doña Dora. When he walked out to the street, it seemed to him the city was filled with light, much more than had come into Edith's small room. He walked toward police headquarters. He had decided to turn himself in.

  He moved forward slowly, as if he had cement in his shoes, along the streets where the town was preparing for the procession of the Holy Sepulcher. He felt dizzy. He thought he would go into the captain's office, hand over his weapon, and recount step by step everything that had happened last night. It would almost be a relief if they did not believe him. It would almost be a relief to be arrested and be able to forget. If the captain insisted, he would even tell him what he had done to Edith. He felt too tired to try to run away or even to think where he could run to.

  Before he reached
police headquarters, he passed by his house. There were no guards at the door. He thought perhaps they had entered to search it during the night. He opened the door and walked in. Everything was just as he had left it: his room, his mother's room. He picked up the smiling photograph of his mother in Sacsayhuamán. He kissed it.

  “You can see, Mamacita, I haven't managed to do anything to make you proud of me. I hope I won't disappoint you too much.”

  He continued talking to her as he cleaned himself up. He thought he might be allowed some of her photos in a cell. He cleaned his private parts with special care. They smelled of Edith. He tried not to cry. He tried not to cry any more. He went out again. As he approached the Plaza Mayor, he passed more and more police rushing past him, carrying their orders from one side of the city to the other. He was waiting for the moment when one of them would aim at his chest and order him to drop his weapon. He was hoping they would save him the trouble of confessing to something he had not done, that they had already connected him to the crime scene, and that the couple from last night had identified him beyond any doubt. He lamented that there had not been more light on the street. He regretted not having continued firing the gun until the police had arrived. He passed some soldiers too. He felt as if he had impunity. He knew what it meant to walk among his pursuers without anyone turning around to look at him, like a ghost. He wanted to shout that he was a murderer, that he had already killed four people, that perhaps he had just committed rape, of that he could not be sure because of legal regulations. Legal regulations. He could not control his laughter. He began to laugh right in the middle of the square. He wanted to dance but thought of his mother. She would not have liked seeing him like this. He controlled himself but continued to laugh as he approached police headquarters. He thought about Pacheco. He would be happy to see him. Certainly he would give himself all the credit, he would say he had captured him after a long pursuit filled with bullets and patrol cars. He laughed again, louder and louder.