Free In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Page A

the door of the telegraph office he caught up with Judge Arcadio, who was interested in seeing if the card trick was in any way applicable to a game of poker. The telegrapher refused to reveal the secret. He limited himself to repeating the trick indefinitely in order to give Judge Arcadio a chance to discover the clue. The secretary also observed the maneuver. Finally he reached a conclusion. Judge Arcadio, on the other hand, didn’t even look at the three cards. He knew that they were the same ones he’d picked at random and that the telegrapher was giving them back to him without having seen them.
    “It’s a matter of magic,” the telegrapher said.
    Judge Arcadio was only thinking then of the chore of crossing the street. When he resigned himself to walking, he grabbed the secretary by the arm and obliged him to dive with him into the melted-glass atmosphere. They
emerged onto the shaded sidewalk. Then the secretary explained to him the key to the trick. It was so simple that Judge Arcadio felt offended.
    They walked in silence for a spell.
    “Naturally,” the judge said suddenly with a gratuitous rancor, “you didn’t check the information out.”
    The secretary hesitated for an instant, searching for the meaning of the sentence.
    “It’s very hard,” he finally said. “Most of the lampoons are torn down before dawn.”
    “That’s another trick I don’t understand,” Judge Arcadio said. “I’d never lose any sleep over a lampoon that nobody’s read.”
    “That’s just it,” the secretary said, stopping because he’d reached his house. “It isn’t the lampoons that won’t let people sleep; it’s fear of the lampoons.”
    In spite of its being incomplete, Judge Arcadio wanted to know what information the secretary had gathered. He enumerated the cases, with names and dates: eleven in seven days. There was no connection among the eleven names. Those who’d seen the lampoons agreed that they’d been written with a brush in blue ink and in printed letters, with capitals and small letters mixed up as if written by a child. The spelling was so absurd that the mistakes looked deliberate. They revealed no secrets: there was nothing said in them that hadn’t been in the public domain for some time. He’d made all the conjectures that were possible when Moisés the Syrian called to him from his shop.
    “Have you got a peso?”
    Judge Arcadio didn’t understand. But he turned his pockets inside out: twenty-five centavos and an American coin that he’d kept as a good luck charm ever since his university days. Moisés the Syrian took the twenty-five centavos.
    “Take whatever you want and pay me whenever you want to,” he said. He made the coins tinkle in the empty cash drawer. “I don’t want twelve o’clock to strike on me without having heard God’s name.”
    So at the stroke of twelve Judge Arcadio entered his house laden with gifts for his wife. He sat on the bed to change his shoes while she wrapped up her body in a swathe of printed silk. She pictured her appearance in the new dress after the birth. She gave her husband a kiss on the nose. He tried to avoid her, but she fell on top of him across the bed. They remained motionless. Judge Arcadio ran his hand over her back, feeling the warmth of the voluminous belly, even as he perceived the palpitation of her kidneys.
    She raised her head. Murmured with her teeth tight:
    “Wait and I’ll go close the door.”
    The mayor waited until the last house was set up. In twenty hours they’d built a whole street, wide and bare, which ended abruptly at the cemetery wall. After helping place the furniture, working shoulder to shoulder with the owners, the mayor, smothering, entered the nearest kitchen. Soup was boiling on a stove improvised from stones on the ground. He took the lid off the clay pot and breathed in the vapor for a moment. From across the stove a thin woman with large, peaceful eyes was observing him silently.
    “Lunchtime,” the