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id="heading_id_57">The Number Three</
>
I
Cell number three was a former stable. Lamps behind bars set in the high ceiling brought a dim light to a place that stank of alcohol, sweat, and cigarettes. On each side of the room prisoners’ hammocks hung in rows: most of them were politicals, though there was also space in that joint for the occasional gray-haired thief, bloodthirsty madman, stupid hothead, or spineless hypocrite. Since these fellows made life miserable for the politicals, Colonel Irineo Castañon, the man with the peg leg, enjoyed ditching them there. Dust-specked light slid down the dirty, whitewashed walls, desolate, arid, and a perfect match for the prisoners’ emaciated features. Shirt cuffs flapping, arm defiantly raised, vituperative Dr. Sánchez Ocaña declaimed against tyranny: “The funereal phoenix of colonial absolutism rises anew from ashes cast to the four winds, summoning the shades and spirits of our illustrious liberators. They were illustrious, and their exemplary lives will enlighten these hours that may be our last. The sea returns its heroes to the land; the voracious monsters in the blue depths are more merciful than General Santos Banderas...Our eyes—”
He broke off. The peg leg approached along the passageway. The governor walked by, smoking his pipe. The warning tap of his limping gait faded away.
II
Lying in a hammock a prisoner pulled out the book he’d hidden away. From the adjacent hammock Don Roque Cepeda’s shadowy form asked, “Still reading Famous Escapes?”
“One must study the classics.”
“That book fascinates you. Are you dreaming of making an escape?”
“Well, who knows?”
“It would be good to get one over on Colonel Peg Leg!”
The reader sighed and closed his book. “It’s not even worth thinking about. Most likely we’ll be executed this very afternoon.”
Don Roque shook his head, burning with conviction. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sure that the revolution will triumph and I will see it triumph. Perhaps later it will cost me my life. Perhaps. There’s no escaping fate.”
“Any idea what fate has in store for you?”
“I’m not destined to die in Santa Mónica, I know. I’m half a century old and I’ve achieved nothing. I’ve been a dreamer all these years. I must be reborn as one who toils for the people’s cause—and dies when the people are reborn.”
He spoke with the feverish glow of a dying man receiving final sacraments, clinging for comfort to the afterlife. His face glowed, his hand on the pillow was that of a crude wooden saint, his torso swelled out under the shroud-like blanket: resurrection was already here. The other prisoner gave him a friendly, skeptical, somewhat mocking smile. “If only I shared your faith, Don Roque! But I’m afraid they’ll execute us both in Foso-Palmitos.”
“That will never be my fate. But stop this gloomy nonsense and go back to dreaming of escape.”
“We’re opposites. You sit waiting for some unknown force to open these bars. I plan my escape tirelessly, certain all the time that the end is nigh. Which is what keeps me going. To avoid total collapse, I keep an eye open for a lucky breakthrough that of course won’t ever happen.”
“We can defeat Destiny, if we know how to summon our spiritual energies to fight it. There are forces latent within us, powers beyond knowledge. Given your state of mind, I’d recommend reading something more spiritual than Famous Escapes. I’ll get you The Path of Theosophy. It will reveal new, unknown horizons.”
“Like I said, we are polar opposites. These esoteric authors of yours leave me cold. I guess I don’t have a religious bent. That must be it. As far as I’m concerned, everything ends in Foso-Palmitos.”
“But if you acquiesce in this lack of religious fever, you will prove a most mediocre revolutionary. You must believe that life is a holy seed given to us to nurture for the benefit of mankind. The revolutionary is a seer.”
“I can accept that.”
“And who gives us this existence with its specific burden of meaning? Who seals it with an obligation? Can we betray that with impunity? Can you really think there’s no such thing as retribution?”
“After death?”
“After death.”
“I don’t try to resolve such matters.”
“Perhaps you don’t formulate them zealously enough.”
“Perhaps.”
“And doesn’t the enigma of life obsess you?”
“I prefer not to think about it.”
“And does that work?”
“So far, so good.”
“And now?”
“Prisons are contagious places...If you keep talking in this vein, I’ll end up saying the Creed.”
“If I annoy you, I will forebear.”
“Don Roque, I find pleasure in what you say, but your bouquet holds a thorn and the thorn pricks. Why do you believe my revolutionary actions will always be mediocre? What, in your view, is the relationship between religious awareness and political ideals?”
“My dear friend, they are one and the same!”
“One and the same? Possibly. I don’t see it myself.”
“Through profound contemplation you’ll grasp many truths that can’t be revealed otherwise.”
“Each individual is a world unto himself, and we’re just very different. Don Roque, you soar to great heights; me, I cling to the ground. But when you dub me a mediocre revolutionary, you’re the one who’s lost in the dark. Religion and our political struggles have nothing in common.”
“The intuition of eternity marks every man. Only men who light their every step with its flame shall enter the annals of history. The intuition of eternity! This is religious consciousness, this is our burden as intellectuals! Its cornerstone is the redemption of the Indian, a profoundly Christian sentiment.”
“Liberty, equality, and fraternity were, in my book, the touchstones of the French Revolution. Don Roque, we may be good friends, but we’ll never agree on this one. Didn’t the French Revolution preach atheism? Marat, Danton, Robespierre—”
“Profoundly religious spirits, although they may have preferred not to know.”
“Blessed ignorance! Don Roque, grant me that and pluck out that thorn you stuck in my side.”
“Granted. Please don’t bear me any ill will.”
They shook hands and fell silent, each reclining in his hammock. At the back of the gallery, Dr. Sánchez Ocaña went on haranguing a group of prisoners. The man’s tropes and metaphors flowed freely, but his manner was frosty. In cell number three, reeking of sweat, booze, and tobacco, there was no mistaking that.
III
Don Roque Cepeda lay in his hammock surrounded by a group of adepts. Hope and optimism imbued his soft patter. He smiled a brightly seraphic smile. Don Roque was profoundly religious, his religion fashioned from mystical intuitions and Hindustani maxims. He lived in a state of red-hot bliss and his worldly pilgrimage presented him with arcane duties as inevitable as the stars’ circuits overhead. A devotee of theosophy, he sought to forge a link with universal consciousness in the profoundest depths of his soul. In a burst of divine inspiration it had come to him that humanity was answerable for all its actions in eternity. For Don Roque, men were angels in exile: guilty of a crime in heaven, they paid for their theological guilt along paths of time that were paths in this world. Every step, every minute in human life provoked eternal reverberations sealed by death in a circle of infinite responsibilities. Souls, stripped of their terrestrial wrapping, acted out their mundane past in the limpid, hermetic vision of pure consciences. And this circle of eternal contemplation—whether full of joy or of pain—was the immutable grand finale of human destiny and the redemption of the exiled angel. A sacred number sealed the pilgrimage through the clay of human forms. Each life, even the humblest, created a world, and when it passed beneath the archway of death, cyclical consciousness of this creation took possession of the soul, and the soul, imprisoned at its center, became contemplative and still. Don Roque was a man who had read widely and disconcertingly, in ways that linked theosophy with the cabala, occultism, and the philosophy of Alexandria. He was on the cusp of fifty. He had the broad forehead and gleaming pate of a Romanesque saint, to which dark black eyebrows lent an austere energy. His body disclosed a sturdy skeleton and vibrated with the fortitude of the olive and the vine. His revolutionary preaching shone with the light of early-morning walks down hallowed paths.