In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa

said it.
    “The blame, naturally, belongs to that criminal,” she exclaimed, pointing to the mayor, who was going along the opposite sidewalk on the arm of the circus impresario. “But I’m the one who suffers the expiation.”
    Mr. Carmichael left her. He put the bundles of bills, fastened with rubber bands, into a cardboard box, and from the door to the courtyard, he called out the names of the peasants in alphabetical order.
    While the men were receiving their Wednesday pay, the widow Montiel heard them pass without answering their greetings. She lived alone in the gloomy nine-room
house where Big Mama had died and which José Montiel had bought without imagining that his widow would have to endure her solitude in it until death. At night, while she went about through the empty rooms with the insecticide bomb, she would find Big Mama squashing lice in the hallways, and she would ask her: “When am I going to die?” But that happy communication with the beyond only managed to increase her uncertainty, because the answers, like those of all the dead, were silly and contradictory.
    A little after eleven o’clock, through her tears, the widow saw Father Ángel crossing the square. “Father, Father,” she called, feeling that she was taking a final step with that call. But Father Ángel didn’t hear her. He had knocked at the door of the widow Asís, on the opposite sidewalk, and the door had opened partway in a surreptitious manner to let him in.
    On the porch that overflowed with the song of birds, the widow Asís was lying on a canvas chair, her face covered with a handkerchief soaked in Florida water. From the way he knocked on the door she knew it was Father Ángel, but she prolonged the momentary relief until she heard the greeting. Then she uncovered her face, devastated by insomnia.
    “Forgive me, Father,” she said. “I didn’t expect you so early.”
    Father Ángel ignored the fact that he had been invited to lunch. He excused himself, a little confused, saying that he, too, had spent the morning with a headache and had preferred to cross the square before the heat began.
    “It doesn’t matter,” the widow said. “I just meant that I didn’t want you to find me looking like a wreck.”
    The priest took from his pocket a breviary that was losing
its binding. “If you want, you can rest a while more and I’ll pray,” he said. The widow objected.
    “I feel better,” she said.
    She walked to the end of the porch, her eyes closed, and on the way back she laid out the handkerchief with extreme tidiness on the arm of the folding chair. When she sat down opposite Father Ángel she looked several years younger.
    “Father,” she said then, without any drama, “I have need of your help.”
    Father Ángel put his breviary into his pocket.
    “At your service.”
    “It’s Roberto Asís again.”
    Against his promise to forget about the lampoon, Roberto Asís the day before had departed until Saturday, and returned home unexpectedly that same night. Since then, until dawn, when fatigue overcame him, he had been sitting in the darkness of the room, waiting for his wife’s supposed lover.
    Father Ángel listened to her, perplexed.
    “There’s no basis for that,” he said.
    “You don’t know the Asíses, Father,” the widow replied. “They carry hell in their imaginations.”
    “Rebeca knows my view of the lampoons,” he said. “But if you want, I can talk to Roberto Asís too.”
    “By no means,” said the widow. “That would just be stoking the coals. On the other hand, if you could talk about the lampoons in your Sunday sermon, I’m sure that Roberto Asís would feel called upon to reflect.”
    Father Ángel opened his arms.
    “Impossible,” he exclaimed. “It would be giving the thing an importance that it doesn’t have.”
    “Nothing’s more important than avoiding a crime.”
    “Do you think it can reach those extremes?”
    “Not only do I think so,” the widow said, “but