• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1029 0

it back on its feet, by changing its policy, by turning it into a scandal sheet. Everything had gone smoothly for a while, despite the debts hanging round its neck like a millstone. But in the last year, with the price of paper going up and up, the mounting expenses at the printer’s, the campaign waged against it by its enemies, and the loss of advertising revenue, things had gone sour. Moreover, they had lost several court suits brought by riffraff accusing them of libel. And now the panic-stricken owners had offered all the stock to the editors so that the creditors wouldn’t get everything when the rag went into bankruptcy. Which was about to happen any day now, since in the last few weeks the situation had become tragic: there was no money for the payroll, employees were making off with typewriters, selling the desks, stealing everything that was of any value, getting what they could before everything caved in.

“It won’t last another month, my friend,” he repeated, snorting with a sort of pleased disgust. “We’re already corpses—can’t you smell the rot?”

I was about to tell him that indeed I could, when the conversation was interrupted by a skeletonlike little figure, so thin that he entered the room through the narrow opening without any need to push the screen aside. He had a rather ridiculous German-style haircut and was dressed like a tramp, in worn blue overalls and an old patched shirt under a grayish sweater that was much too tight for him. The most unusual thing about his attire was his footgear: faded red tennis shoes, so old that one of them had a length of string tied around the end of it as though the sole were loose or about to fall off. The minute he laid eyes on him, Dr. Rebagliati began to read him the riot act.

“If you think you can go on making a fool of me, you’re wrong,” he said, approaching him with such a threatening air that the skeleton gave a little leap backward. “Weren’t you to bring the stuff on the arrival of the Monster of Ayacucho last night?”

“I brought it, sir. I was here with all the pertinent details half an hour after the patrolmen brought the decedent into the Prefecture,” the little man declaimed.

I was so dumfounded that I must have looked as though I were in a daze. The perfect diction, the warm timbre of the voice, the words “pertinent” and “decedent” could only have come from him. But how, with that physique and getup, could this scarecrow that Dr. Rebagliati was eating alive possibly be the Bolivian scriptwriter?

“Don’t lie; have the courage at least to own up to your faults. You didn’t bring the material and Gumball couldn’t finish his article and the facts are going to be all wrong. And I don’t like articles with factual errors, because that’s bad journalism!”

“I brought it, sir,” Pedro Camacho answered, in a terrified but polite tone of voice. “I found the office here closed. It was eleven-fifteen on the dot. I asked a passerby the exact time, sir. And then, because I knew how important this material was, I went to Gumball’s house. And I waited for him out on the sidewalk till two in the morning, but he didn’t come back home to sleep. It isn’t my fault, sir. The patrolmen who were bringing the Monster in got caught in a rock slide that blocked the highway and didn’t arrive till eleven instead of nine. Don’t accuse me of dereliction of duty. For me, Extra comes first, even before my health, sir.”

Little by little, not without an effort, I related, I compared what I remembered of Pedro Camacho with what was before me. The bulging eyes were the same, though they had lost their fanaticism, their obsessive gleam. The light in them now was dim, opaque, fleeting, panicked. And his facial expressions and gestures, his manner of gesticulating as he spoke, that unnatural movement of his arm and hand that made him look like a circus barker, were the same as before, as was his incomparable, measured voice, as spellbinding as ever.

“What happens is that you’re too tightfisted ever to take a bus or a jitney, you always arrive everywhere too late, that’s the pure and simple truth