Curfew.

• Author: Donoso, Jose
• Position: LATITUDES - Excerpt - Reprint

WAS THIS WOMAN AN ACCOMPLICE? What did she know? Did she know that his soft hand perspired when he placed it on the knee of a woman he felt to be powerful? Did Christinita, exempted the same way Judit was, enjoy strange privileges in exchange for keeping Ricardo's secret? Liliana didn't know that if her plans for Ricardo worked out, she too was condemned to pardon. The complicity between the two of them was negligible, unimportant, partial, which shouldn't have surprised her, since these were unimportant human beings who only acquired life in the reflected light of cruelty. Was it important that this man, with his high, falsely noble forehead, vigorous neck, black mustache above loquacious lips, engrossed in a dissertation on Boris, would pay for pardoning her? Was it possible for her to aim the pistol at him and avenge all pardons, including the imprudent Lilianita's? Because from the beginning in Ada Luffs house--and she, and son César, and all the women knew it--this was no seduction but a murder.

The pup was really splendid, said Ricardo. He'd won prizes at every show his daughter Cristy had entered him in. They were rare, these miniature Dobermans, as ferocious as the regular kind and much easier to train, even if at the beginning you had to punish them so they'd see the difference between what they could and couldn't do. Farías had punished her with the worst punishment imaginable. No, he hadn't punished her. He'd condemned her, because ever since her return from Caracas, with the remains of her ideology in rags after so much time and distance, she could not focus on anything but finding the man responsible for the rapes.

When she'd returned, she'd reestablished her network of accomplices from her underground days and sought their knowledge of the urban night--don César, with his contacts and pals and his knowledge of jokes, bars, and wine, and Aury with her beauty-parlor chatter, and Dario's father and Dario himself, with the kids in his slums, and Ada Luz--enlisting their help in her plan to destroy the past and begin again at zero. But every lead until now had turned into a dead end, and she and the others always came back empty-handed. It was never the right man.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Finally, a year after Judit had returned from Caracas, they managed to pick up the trail of Medina, the man who had given her the passport so she could leave. He'd been discovered to be a leftist infiltrator in the passports section, had...