All that I have said will come true.
—Tiresias
Uriela Caicedo, the youngest of the Caicedo Santacruz sisters, was leaning over a balcony festooned with roses and tuberoses when she spotted, advancing like a timid mouse between patches of sunlight, her Uncle Jesús coming up the tree-lined street. Too late, she wanted to withdraw from the balcony, leap back and disappear: her uncle waved his hand in greeting, and it was as if another invisible hand were forcing her to remain on the balcony, flushed, caught red-handed in her crime of bad manners. She had spent a good part of the morning leaning over that balcony, waiting. What was she waiting for? For whom? Nothing and nobody; she was merely digesting, perplexed, the news of that Friday, April 10, 1970: the Beatles had broken up. And, just when she had decided to go to her bedroom to get dressed for the party — guests would soon be arriving to celebrate her parents’ anniversary — she discovered her uncle’s shadow beneath the trees, in that street with no shadows save for those of the tidy mansions of that Bogotá neighborhood.
Well, Uncle Jesús surely wasn’t invited to the big family celebration, who would invite him? she thought.
Her uncle came to a halt below the balcony, exuberant in his decrepitude: he was wearing a gray suit that was too big for him, a tatty suit that had once belonged to the magistrate Nacho Caicedo, Uriela’s father, and he was moving his wide mouth without emitting a sound, as though chewing a tough morsel or adjusting his dentures to begin speaking. And, indeed, his voice did ring out in that deserted street, almost a threat, but also a plea, in any case the voice of a hustler, Uriela told herself, mesmerized by that pair of serpent’s eyes that lay in wait for her, ten feet below the balcony. Her uncle had his hands buried in the pockets of his coat, and he twisted them inside, clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke.
“Uriela, do you remember your dear old Jesús?”
Uriela nodded, leaning farther forward: she saw the wind ruffle the few hairs on that yellow skull, saw the nostrils of his hairy nose flare, and she smiled, because she had no other option, and yet her smile was sincere, the smile of a seventeen-year-old, and her voice a kind of sympathy:
“I could never forget you, Uncle Jesús.”
“That’s true,” he replied, spreading his arms and revealing, intentionally or not, the intricate stitching on the sleeves of his coat, worse than a scar. He had a raspy voice, like someone suffocating: “We saw each other exactly a month ago.”
Uncle Jesús was in his fifties, with flat, pointy ears; hair poked out from inside each ear like tiny cotton plants; they were big ears, like radars, yet he complained of deafness, or deafness assailed him whenever it was convenient not to hear; his mouth was as wide as an ear-to-ear grin, his jaw very long and sharp; his neck was that of a bird; his skin, the color of café con leche; he was clean-shaven and baggy-eyed, and his fingernails resembled claws; small in stature, though not too short, half-bald, by turns sly, then meditative, then sly again, he lived off visiting his relatives from month to month and demanding what he termed his family honorariums. A tribute that proved inescapable even to Doña Alma Santacruz, Uriela’s irascible and respectable mother, sister to Jesús, and much less to Jesús’s other siblings, or his working nieces and nephews, or the occasional family friend — none could avoid offering Jesús his payment for existing.
Uncle Jesús was one of a kind; one morning, he had told the La Caridad hospital to phone two of his nephews: he’d died of a heart attack, come deal with it. The nephews arrived there almost contrite, and yet, at the top of a staircase, Uncle Jesús had appeared, revived, arms spread out like a cross, his gruff voice demanding a hearty breakfast and a boozing fit for a king. His nephews had indulged him, refusing to be left behind: from then on, they had referred to Jesús as “No Hope.”
Officially, Jesús Dolores Santacruz handled tax returns, and he claimed to live off that, off bookkeeping, on a street in the heart of Bogotá, opposite the Ministry of Finance, with a fold-up table, a stool and his typewriter. Yet he was so bad at preparing declarations, and so cynical with his questions to his regulars, as if accusing them of avoiding taxes on a treasure trove, that his meager clientele very soon abandoned him.
All this after having been rich and admired as a young man, when he had worn a felt hat and dressed in monochrome, enjoyed a different girl every month, taken friends out for chicken on Sun-days, and hit the booze come rain or shine.
One of the things that caused Señora Alma Santacruz to suffer panic attacks were these visits from Jesús, the youngest of her siblings. Why? Nobody knew. She—who wielded a firm hand over her husband, six daughters, three dogs, two cats, and two parrots, and who imposed discipline on an army of employees shared between the house and the farm—seemed frightened of him. Or did she loathe him? A joke buried deep within the family maintained that Jesús had been adopted: he wasn’t even afforded the luxury of bastardy. Alma Santacruz’s family all had light skin and blue eyes; the men were distinguished for their stature, their foresight in business, their sound judgment, and the women for their beauty and the very fine voices with which they sang boleros; slim and dreamy, they danced the waltz as competently as the tango. In her youth, Alma Santacruz had been a beauty queen in San Lorenzo, the town of her birth, and her sisters were princesses. But, in terms of both looks and charac-ter, Jesús, the youngest, was completely different from the others: pug-nosed, small, sallow-skinned, he wasn’t practical or successful in the least, but rather a troublemaker, a gambler, and a womanizer; in his youth, he’d been a faithful reader of the pamphleteer José María Vargas Vila and an absolute devotee of the death poet Julio Flórez, whose most lurid verses he would recite from memory:
They sawed through his skull
squeezed out his brains,
his now cold heart
they ripped from his chest . . .
So, when it came to the Caicedos’ big party, Señora Alma Rosa de los Ángeles Santacruz hadn’t imagined or hadn’t remembered that Jesús even existed. And how could this be? She’d been preoccupied solely with her wedding anniversary.
Alma was sitting in bed, as was her husband, one on either side; she was fifty-two, her husband sixty; they had woken up in each other’s arms, more due to the Bogotá cold than to tenderness; they even simulated a hasty amorous encounter, as though humorously parodying those they enjoyed in their youth. To celebrate their anniversary, they had initially planned to travel to Greece, a country they had yet to visit, but, having grown tired of customs and air-ports, they invented this monumental party instead; now they were going over the various friends and relatives who would be joining them that day; if the pair were guilty of coming up with that party, at least they were happy culprits. And they had just been preparing to have breakfast brought up to them in bed, when Italia—the fifth of their daughters, nineteen, and two years older than Uriela— burst into the room and stood staring at them in silence. She didn’t so much as say good morning; she merely stood petrified in front of them, in her pajamas, with long tears dampening her face as she bit her lips until drawing blood. Her parents stared at her in disbelief, still half asleep. Was this a nightmare? What was Italia doing crying her eyes out in silence? She was supposed to be the happiest of their daughters, the most beautiful one, coveted, accommodating, affectionate and effusive, with the clear eyes of an ox.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Alma Santacruz, as her husband, the skilled magistrate Nacho Caicedo, wheezed and put on his slippers.
“I’m pregnant,” replied Italia, and started crying again.
Copyright © Evelio Rosero, 2022
Translation Copyright © Victor Meadowcroft, 2025
