Read Online In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - Free Book Online

each with the name of a product written in blue letters. On looking at him from behind, the mayor understood that that man with a chubby and pink neck might be living an instant of happiness. He knew him. He was installed in two rooms behind the store and his wife, a very fat woman, had been paralyzed for many years.
    Don Lalo Moscote came back to the counter with a vial that had no label, which, on being opened, exhaled a vapor of sweet herbs.
    “What’s that?”
    The druggist sank his fingers into the dried seeds in the vial. “Pepper cress,” he said. “Chew it well and swallow the juice slowly: there’s nothing better for rheumatism.” He threw several seeds into the palm of his hand and said, looking at the mayor over his glasses:
    “Open your mouth.”
    The mayor drew back. He turned the vial around to make sure that nothing was written on it, and returned his look to the pharmacist.
    “Give me something foreign,” he said.
    “This is better than anything foreign,” Don Lalo Moscote said. “It’s guaranteed by three thousand years of popular wisdom.”
    He began to wrap up the seeds in a piece of newspaper. He didn’t look like the head of a family. He looked like a
maternal uncle, wrapping up the pepper cress with the loving care one devotes to making little paper birds for children. When he raised his head he’d begun to smile.
    “Why don’t you have it pulled?”
    The mayor didn’t answer. He paid with a bill and left the pharmacy without waiting for his change.
    Past midnight he was still twisting in his hammock without daring to chew the seeds. Around eleven o’clock, at the high point of the heat, a cloudburst had fallen that had broken up into a light drizzle. Worn out by the fever, trembling in a sticky and icy sweat, the mayor, lying face down in the hammock, opened his mouth and began to pray mentally. He prayed deeply, his muscles tense in the final spasm, but aware that the more he struggled to make contact with God, the greater the force of the pain to push him in the opposite direction. Then he put on his boots, and his raincoat over his pajamas, and went to the police barracks.
    He burst in shouting. Tangled in a mangrove of reality and nightmare, the policemen stumbled in the hallway, looking for their weapons in the darkness. When the lights went on they were half dressed, awaiting orders.
    “González, Rovira, Peralta,” the mayor shouted.
    The three named separated from the group and surrounded the lieutenant. There was no visible reason to justify the selection: they were three ordinary half-breeds. One of them, with infantile features, shaven head, was wearing a flannel undershirt. The other two were wearing the same undershirt under unbuttoned tunics.
    They didn’t receive precise orders. Leaping down the stairs four steps at a time behind the mayor, they left the barracks in Indian file. They crossed the street without worrying about the drizzle and stopped in front of the dentist’s office. With two quick charges they battered down the door with their rifle butts. They were already inside the
house when the lights in the vestibule went on. A small bald man with veins showing through his skin appeared in his shorts at the rear door, trying to put on his bathrobe. At the first instant he remained paralyzed with one arm up and his mouth open, as in the flash of a photograph. Then he gave a leap backward and bumped into his wife, who was coming out of the bedroom in her nightgown.
    “Don’t move,” the lieutenant shouted.
    The woman said: “Oh!” with her hands over her mouth, and went back to the bedroom. The dentist went toward the vestibule, tying the cord on his bathrobe, and only then did he make out the three policemen who were pointing their rifles at him, and the mayor, water dripping from all over his body, tranquil, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat.
    “If the lady leaves her room they have orders to shoot her,” the lieutenant said.
    The dentist grasped