The Scandal of the Century Read online

  JESUSITO

  A small altar set up in a corner of the square is an indispensable element at the celebrations held every year in the one-horse towns around La Sierpe. Men and women converge on this place to leave alms and seek miracles. It is a niche made from the fronds of royal palms, in the center of which, on a little box covered in shiny colored paper, is the most popular idol and the one with the biggest clientele in the region: a tiny little black man, carved out of a piece of wood two inches tall and set in a gold ring. He has a simple and familiar name: Jesusito. And he is invoked by the inhabitants of La Sierpe in the event of any emergency, under the serious commitment to place at his feet an object made of gold, to commemorate the miracle. This is why around Jesusito’s altar today there is a pile of golden figures worth a fortune: gold eyes donated by those who were blind and recovered their sight; gold legs, from one who was paralyzed and walked again; gold tigers, deposited by travelers who escaped the dangers of wild beasts; and innumerable gold children, of different sizes and various shapes, because the image of the little black man set in the ring is especially trusted by La Sierpe’s women who are about to go into labor.

  Jesusito is a venerable saint, his origin unknown. He has been handed down from one generation to the next and over many years has been the means of subsistence of his various proprietors. Jesusito is subject to the law of supply and demand. He is a coveted object, susceptible to appropriation by means of honorable transactions, which correspond in an adequate way to the buyers’ sacrifices. By tradition, the proprietor of Jesusito is also the proprietor of the alms and gold votive offerings, but not of the animals presented to the idol to enrich his own patrimony. The last time Jesusito was sold, three years ago, he was acquired by a rancher with excellent commercial vision, who resolved to change businesses, sold off his cattle and his lands, and began to travel from town to town, from one fair to the next, with his prosperous tent of miracles.

  THE NIGHT JESUSITO WAS STOLEN

  Eight years ago Jesusito was stolen. It was the first time that happened and will surely be the last, because the author of said act is known and pitied by everyone who has gone beyond the swamps of La Guaripa ever since. It happened on January 20, 1946, in La Ventura, during celebrations of the night of El Dulce Nombre. In the early hours, when enthusiasm was beginning to wane, a runaway rider burst into the village square and knocked over the musicians’ table amid an uproar of scattered instruments and roulette wheels and trampled dancers. It was a minute-long storm. But when it ended, Jesusito had disappeared from his altar. They searched for him in vain among the strewn objects, through the spilled food. In vain they took apart the niche and shook out cloths and patted down the perplexed inhabitants of La Ventura. Jesusito had disappeared, and that was not only a cause for general concern, but a symptom of the idol not approving of their Dulce Nombre supplications.

  Three days later, a man on horseback, with monstrously swollen hands, rode down the single long street of La Ventura, dismounted in front of the police post, and placed in the inspector’s hands the tiny man set in a gold ring. He did not have the strength to get back on his horse nor the courage to defy the fury of the group pounding on the door. All he needed and requested at the top of his lungs was a goldsmith to urgently make a pair of little gold hands.

  THE LOST SAINT

  On one previous occasion Jesusito was missing for a year. To find him all the inhabitants of the region were in action, for three hundred and sixty-five days and nights. The circumstances in which he disappeared that time were similar to those surrounding his loss on the night of El Dulce Nombre in La Ventura. A well-known local troublemaker, for no reason whatsoever, grabbed the idol and threw it into a neighbor’s garden. Without allowing their confusion or puzzlement to get ahead of them, the devout immediately insisted on cleaning the garden, inch by inch. Twelve hours later there was not a blade of grass, but Jesusito was still lost. Then they began to scratch the earth. And they scratched and scraped fruitlessly for that whole week and the next. Finally, after fifteen days of searching, it was decreed that collaboration in that endeavor would constitute a penance and that the discovery of Jesusito would bring the finder an indulgence. The garden turned into a place of pilgrimage from then on, and later into a public market. People set up stalls around it, and men and women from the most remote parts of La Sierpe came to scratch at the earth, to dig, to turn over the much-turned ground, to locate Jesusito. Those who know firsthand say that the lost Jesusito was still performing miracles, just not that of reappearing. It was a bad year for La Sierpe. The harvests were diminished, the quality of grain went down, and the profits were insufficient to look after local needs, which had never been as numerous as they were that year.

  THE MULTIPLICATION OF JESUSITO

  There are many colorful anecdotes about the bad year when Jesusito was missing. In a house somewhere in La Sierpe a falsified Jesusito appeared, carved by a funny man from Antioquia who defied popular indignation in this way and was on the verge of coming off very badly from his little adventure. That episode was the first in a series of falsifications, production on a grand scale of apocryphal Jesusitos, which appeared all over the place and came to confuse souls to such an extent that at a certain moment people began to wonder if that considerable quantity of false idols might not be authentic. At first the instinct that the inhabitants of La Sierpe have to distinguish the artificial from the legitimate was the only resource the proprietor of Jesusito could rely on to identify his image. People examined the little statue and said, simply, “This isn’t him.” And the proprietor refused it, because even if that had been the legitimate Jesusito, it would have been of no use if his devotees were sure it was one of the false ones. But a moment came when controversies rose up around the identity of the idols. Eight months after he went missing, Jesusito’s prestige began to be in doubt. The faith of those devoted to him was shaken, and a mound of idols of arguable reputation was incinerated, because someone maintained that the legitimate Jesusito was invulnerable to fire.

  A SYNDICATE OF IDOLS

  Once the problem of the numerous false Jesusitos was resolved, the imagination of fanatics came up with new ideas to locate the idol. Saint Plank, the Holy Kidney, the whole complicated gallery of horns, hooves, rings, and cooking utensils that constituted the prosperous calendar of La Sierpe saints, was brought to the garden on rotation to reinforce, in tight trade union solidarity, the exhaustive search for Jesusito. But that too proved futile.

  When exactly a year had passed since the night of the loss, some expert in Jesusito’s demands and habits conceived of a providential appeal; he said what Jesusito desired was a huge festival of bullfights.

  The region’s ranchers contributed money and fierce bulls and five days of paid vacation for their laborers. The festival was the best attended, most intense, and rowdiest anyone remembers in La Sierpe, but its five days passed without Jesusito appearing. One morning, after the last night, when the laborers were going back to their work and the fanatics were inventing new and extravagant penances and ways to make Jesusito appear, a woman who was walking six leagues away from the garden found a carved little black man lying in the middle of the path. In the yard of the nearest house a bonfire was burning, and she threw the figure into it. When the fire went out, the idol was still there, perfect in its entirety of the authentic Jesusito.

  JESUSITO’S PRIVATE HACIENDA

  That was the beginning of Jesusito’s private wealth. The proprietor of the garden transferred his rights, on the condition that the land was considered as the image’s own patrimony and not that of his proprietor. Since then Jesusito receives heads of cattle and good grazing pastures with flowing streams from his devoted followers. Of course the administrator of these possessions is the idol’s proprietor. But no one can point out any irregularities in the management of the hacienda at present. In this way Jesusito is the owner of a garden, two houses, and a well-cared-for pasture where c
ows, bulls, horses, and mules graze distinguished by their particular brand. Something similar to what happens with the Villa de San Benito Christ, against whom a charge of rustling was brought a few years ago, because someone else’s cattle appeared to have been branded with his iron.

  A WAKE IN LA SIERPE

  Housewives in La Sierpe go out shopping whenever a person dies. The wake is the center of a commercial and social activity in a region whose inhabitants have no other opportunity to meet, to get together and enjoy themselves than that eventually provided by the death of someone they know. That’s why the wake is a picturesque and boisterous fairground spectacle, where the least important, most circumstantial and trivial thing is the corpse.

  When a person dies in La Sierpe, two others go off in opposite directions: one to La Guaripa, to buy the coffin, and the other into the swamp, to spread the news. Preparations begin at the home with cleaning up the yard and the gathering up of any object that might get in the way of visitors’ freedom of movement that night and for the next eight nights. In the furthest corner, where he won’t be an obstacle to anyone, where he won’t be in the way, the dead person is laid down on the floor, stretched out on two boards. People begin to arrive at dusk. They go directly into the courtyard, and against the fence they set up stalls of pots and pans, of fried food, of cheap lotions, gasoline, and matches. By nightfall the yard is transformed into a public market, in the center of which there is a gigantic trough brimming with the local moonshine, home-distilled aguardiente, in which float many little cups made out of green gourds. This last, and the pretext of the death, are the only contributions the family provides.

  THE SCHOOL OF LOVE

  On one side of the courtyard, beside the biggest table, the maidens gather to roll tobacco leaves. Not all of them: just the ones who aspire to catch a husband. Those who prefer to carry on with less risky activities for the moment can do whatever they please during the wake, except rolling cigars. Although, in general, maidens who do not aspire to find a husband do not attend the fair.

  For men who aspire to find a wife there is also a reserved spot, beside the coffee grinder. Women of La Sierpe feel an irresistible attraction, very conventional, but also very symbolic, for men who are able to grind large quantities of coffee at exceptional speeds. Participants in that tiring contest are admitted by turn to the table, where they try to grind down, both at the same time, the hearts of the maidens rolling cigars and the excessive quantities of roast coffee beans with which an impartial and opportunistic judge keeps filling the grinder. More than the diligent and gallant young men, the ones who come off best are the owners of the coffee, who have waited for many days for the opportunity of a dead man and an optimist to untangle their industry’s tightest and most difficult knot.

  Distributed in groups, the other men talk about business, argue, improve and close deals, and celebrate agreements or make controversies less gruff by periodic trips to the gigantic trough of aguardiente. There is also a spot for the idle, for those who have nothing to buy and nothing to sell; they sit in groups, around an oil lamp, to play dominoes or “9” with a Spanish deck of cards.

  PACHA PÉREZ

  Crying for the dead—one of the activities on the Atlantic coast that offers the strangest and most extravagant touches—is for natives of La Sierpe an occupation not for the dead person’s family, but for a woman who by vocation and experience becomes a professional mourner. Rivalry among the women of this trade is marked by more alarming characteristics and has darker consequences than the cheerful competition of the coffee grinders.

  Pacha Pérez was a genius of mourners among the mourners of La Sierpe, an authoritarian and scrawny woman; it was said that she was turned into a snake by the devil at the age of 185. Like La Marquesita, Pacha Pérez was swallowed by legend. No one has had a voice like hers since, no woman has been born in the tangled swamps of La Sierpe since who has her hallucinatory and satanic faculty of condensing the entire history of a dead man in a shriek. Pacha Pérez always had an edge on the competition. When they speak about her, the mourners of today have a way of justifying her, which is at the same time a way of justifying themselves: “It’s that Pacha Pérez had a pact with the devil.”

  THE THEATER OF THE MOURNERS

  Mourners don’t intercede to regret the death, but to pay homage to the notable visitors. When the crowd notices the presence of someone who by his economic position is considered a citizen of exceptional merit in the region, the mourner on duty is notified. What follows is an entirely theatrical episode: commercial proposals are interrupted; the maidens take a break from rolling cigars, and their suitors from grinding coffee; the men playing “9” and the women stoking the fires and the stallholders turn in expectant silence toward the center of the yard, where the mourner, with her arms raised and face dramatically constricted, begins to cry. In a long and piercing shriek, the recent arrival then hears the story: with its good moments and bad moments, with its virtues and its defects, with its joys and its bitterness; the story of the deceased who is rotting in the corner, surrounded by pigs and hens, faceup on top of two planks.

  What at dusk was a cheerful and picturesque market in the early-morning hours begins to turn toward tragedy. The trough has been filled several times and several times its devious aguardiente consumed. Then knots of conversation, of gambling or love, are formed. Tight knots that cannot be undone, which would forever break relations of that intoxicated humanity if at this instant the dead man’s offended importance did not reassert itself with tremendous authority. Before dawn someone remembers there is a corpse in the house. And it is as if the news is spreading for the first time, because then all activities are suspended and a group of drunk men and tired women shoo away the pigs and hens, roll the planks with the dead man into the center of the room, so Pánfilo can pray.

  Pánfilo is a gigantic man, built like a tree and slightly effeminate, who is now about fifty and for the last thirty years has attended every wake in La Sierpe and has prayed the rosary over all its dead. Pánfilo’s virtue, what has made him preferred over all others who pray in the region, is that the rosary he says, the mysteries and prayers, is invented by himself in an original and twisted utilization of Catholic literature and the superstitions of La Sierpe. His complete rosary, christened by Pánfilo, is called “Prayer to Our Lord of All Powers.” Pánfilo has no known home, but lives in the house of whoever died most recently, until news arrives of another; he stands in front of the corpse, keeping a count of the mysteries on his raised right hand. There is an instance of call and response between the prayer leader and the crowd, which counters in a chorus, “Take him this way,” each time Pánfilo pronounces the name of a saint, almost always of his own invention. As the culmination of the “Prayer to Our Lord of All Powers,” the prayer leader looks up, saying, “Guardian angel, take him this way.” And points with his index finger toward the ceiling.

  Pánfilo is barely fifty years old and is as stout and healthy as a ceiba tree, but—as happened to La Marquesita and Pacha Pérez in their times—he already carries his legend around his neck.

  March 28, 1954, Sunday Supplement, El Espectador, Bogotá

  A Man Arrives in the Rain

  She had been startled in the same way other times she’d sat down to listen to the rain. She heard the iron gate creak; she heard the man’s steps on the brick path and the noise of boots scraping the floor, at the threshold. For many nights she waited for the man to knock on the door. But later, when she learned how to decipher the innumerable noises the rain made, she thought the imaginary visitor would never cross the threshold, and she grew accustomed to not waiting for him. It was a definitive resolution, made on that stormy September night, five years ago, when she began to reflect on her life, and said to herself, “At this rate, I’ll end up growing old.” Since then the noises of the rain changed and other voices replaced the man’s footsteps on the brick path.

  It’s
true that in spite of her decision not to wait for him anymore, on occasion the iron gate did creak again and the man did scrape his boots outside the threshold, like before. But by then she was attending to new revelations from the rain. Then she heard Noel again, when he was fifteen, teaching his parrot the catechism; and she heard the distant and sad song of the gramophone they’d sold to a trinket dealer, when the last man in the family died. She had learned to rescue from the rain the voices lost in the house’s past, the purest and dearest voices. So there were many wonderful and surprising novelties that stormy night when the man who had so often opened the iron gate walked up the brick path, coughed at the threshold, and knocked twice on the door.

  Her face darkened by an irrepressible nervousness, she made a brief gesture with her hand, turned to look toward the other woman, and said, “Here he is now.”

  The other was beside the table, her elbows leaning on the thick, unpolished oak panels. When she heard the raps, she turned her eyes to the lamp and seemed shaken by a gloomy anxiety.

  “Who can that be at this hour?” she said.

  And, serene once more, with the security of someone speaking a sentence that has been maturing for many years, she said:

  “That’s the least of it. Whoever it is must be drenched.”

  The other stood up, followed meticulously by her gaze. She saw her pick up the lamp. She saw her disappear down the corridor. She heard, from the semidarkness of the parlor between the sound of the rain that the darkness made more intense, the footsteps of the other, moving away from her, tripping on the loose and worn-out bricks of the entrance hall. Then she heard the noise of the lamp as it banged against the wall and then the latch bar, scraping through the rusty loops.