In Evil Hour Read Online Free Page A

fix it later.”
    They arose completely naked from the midst of the confused nebula of the mosquito net. Judge Arcadio went to the chest to get some clean underwear. When he got back his wife was dressed, putting the mosquito netting in order. He passed by without looking at her and sat down on the other side of the bed to put his shoes on, his breathing still heavy from love. She pursued him. She rested her round, tense stomach against his arm and sought his ear with her teeth. He pushed her away softly.
    “Leave me alone,” he said.
    She let out a laugh loaded with good health. She followed her husband to the other side of the room, poking her forefingers into his kidneys. “Giddy-ap, donkey,” she said. He gave a leap and pushed her hands away. She left him alone and laughed again, but suddenly she became serious and shouted:
    “Oh, my God!”
    “What is it?” he asked.
    “The door was wide open,” she shouted. “That’s the limit of shamelessness.”
    She went into the bathroom bursting with laughter.
    Judge Arcadio didn’t wait for breakfast. Comforted by the mint in his toothpaste, he went out onto the street. There was a copper sun. The Syrians sitting by the doors of their shops were contemplating the peaceful river. As he passed by Dr. Giraldo’s office he scratched his nail on the screen of the door and shouted without stopping:
    “Doctor, what’s the best cure for a headache?”
    The physician answered from inside:
    “Not having drunk anything the night before.”
    At the dock a group of women were commenting in loud voices about the contents of a new lampoon nailed up the night before. Since the day had dawned clear and rainless, the women who went by on their way to five o’clock mass had read it and now the whole town was informed. Judge Arcadio didn’t stop. He felt like an ox with a ring in his nose being led to the poolroom. There he asked for a cold beer and an aspirin. It had just struck nine but the establishment was already full.
    “The whole town has a headache,” Judge Arcadio said.
    He took the bottle to a table where three men seemed perplexed over their glasses of beer. He sat down in the empty seat.
    “Is that mess still going on?” he asked.
    “There were four of them this morning.”
    “The one everybody read,” one of the men said, “was the one about Raquel Contreras.”
    Judge Arcadio swallowed the aspirin and drank his beer from the bottle. The first swallow was distasteful, but then his stomach adjusted and he felt new and without a past.
    “What did it say?”
    “Foolishness,” the man said. “That the trips she took this year weren’t to get her dentures fitted, as she said, but to get an abortion.”
    “They didn’t have to go to the trouble of putting up a lampoon,” Judge Arcadio said. “Everybody was going around saying that.”
    Even though the hot sun hurt him in the depths of his eyes when he left the establishment, he didn’t feel the confused queasiness of dawn then. He went directly to the courthouse. His secretary, a skinny old man who was plucking a chicken, received him over the frames of his glasses with a look of incredulity.
    “To what do we owe this miracle?”
    “We have to get this mess in order,” the judge said.
    The secretary went out into the courtyard, dragging his slippers, and he handed the half-plucked chicken over the wall to the cook at the hotel. Eleven months after taking over his post, Judge Arcadio had settled himself at his desk for the first time.
    The run-down office was divided into two sections by a wooden railing. In the outer section there was a platform, also of wood, under the picture of Justice blindfolded with a scale in her hand. Inside, two old desks facing each other, some shelves with dusty books, and the typewriter. On the wall over the judge’s desk, a copper crucifix. On the wall opposite, a framed lithograph: a smiling, fat, bald man, his chest crossed by the presidential sash, and underneath a
gilt