"Evil Hour" by Gabriel García Márquez, summary

This book is the story of a Colombian river village where anonymous notes left at night on doors shatter the fragile peace following a civil war and bring back street terror. The novel grew out of early newspaper essays and drafts, which first glimpsed the future residents of Macondo: Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Judge Arcadio, the wealthy José Montiel, and the centenarian priest Antonio Isabel. The writer began the manuscript in Paris and completed it in 1961 in Mexico, although the Madrid publisher arbitrarily corrected the Colombian accent to Castilian in 1962, and the author only acknowledged the 1966 reprint.

In 1962, the work received the Colombian Esso Literary Prize, and in 1979, Brazilian director Rui Guerra made a full-length film based on the book.

A shot at the dovecote and beer bottles

On October 4th, at five in the morning, Father Angel rings the bell for Mass. His assistant, Trinidad, shakes dead mice into a box. Libels are spreading through the river village. Three houses down from the church, the landowner César Montero wakes up. He fastens his copper spurs, pockets six rifle cartridges, and saddles his mule in the pouring rain. He spots a soggy piece of paper with large letters on the front door of his own house, tears the paper off, rides out of the village, turns his mule around, and dismounts at the house of the musician Pastor.

A young man unscrews a clarinet mouthpiece near a dovecote. Cesar presses the butt of a double-barreled shotgun to his thigh and pulls the trigger, shattering the belt buckle on the boy’s stomach.

A gunshot awakens the mayor-lieutenant, who has been suffering from dental abscess for three days and taking pills. Wearing pajama bottoms, his cheek swollen and smeared with mentholated Vaseline, the official enters the square, takes the rifle from the policeman, disarms the killer, and locks him in the station house. That evening, Father Angel rings the bell twelve times: the cinema cancels the screening of "Tarzan and the Green Goddess" in mourning for the murdered clarinetist.

On Friday, after a wild night with his pregnant partner, Judge Arcadio drinks a cold beer in the billiard room and, for the first time in eleven months, sits at the dusty bench where police riddled his predecessor, Vitela, with bullets for refusing to rig an election. Over the course of half a day, the judge downs twelve bottles, listens to his old secretary’s complaints about libelous statements, and argues that he can identify the anonymous person using the logic of classical antiquity. Across the street from the courthouse, Rebeca Asís suffocates in the midday heat. The previous day, at dawn, a piece of paper had been taped to her wall, claiming that her seven-year-old daughter was not her husband’s. In a blind rage, Rebeca’s husband, Roberto Asís, who suffers from insomnia, almost starts interrogating her, and the woman suggests confessing to a priest in his presence. Roberto’s mother, the stern widow Asís, sedates her son and reminds him that the murdered Pastor was secretly preparing for his wedding to Margot Ramírez, and that the rumors of his affair with Montero’s wife were fabricated by neighbors. That evening, a delegation of Catholic women, led by Rebeca, scented with a sandalwood fan, comes to Father Ángel and asks him to stop the rumor mill.

Dentist’s Forceps and the Price of Freedom

The river overflows its banks and floods the lower neighborhoods. The poor are digging up corner posts and moving their bamboo huts to higher ground. Black accountant Señor Carmichael oversees the relocation from the porch of a barbershop, where Guardiola, the barber, posts a sign prohibiting political discussions and loudly berates the late wealthy José Montiel for buying up the land of intimidated opposition figures. Meanwhile, the mayor is having lunch in an old hotel, allowing fire victims to occupy a vacant lot near the cemetery for free, and releasing from her cell a woman with a Spanish comb whom the police had held in custody without orders since Saturday on suspicion of posting anonymous letters.

By nightfall, a toothache drives the lieutenant to the brink of madness: he bangs his head against the wall, throws a stool into the station’s glass cabinet, and rejects watercress seeds offered by pharmacist Lalo Moscote. At midnight, in a pouring rain, the mayor leads three police officers to the home of Escobar, a dentist and opposition figure. The soldiers kick down the front door with rifle butts, snatch a revolver from a desk, and rip open the leather upholstery of a chair with bayonets, searching for the second barrel.

The doctor boils his instruments in an alcohol lamp and takes up a pair of pliers. The lieutenant grabs his wrist: "Anesthesia!" The dentist calmly replies that injections are useless with an abscess like this and extracts the tooth alive. Leaving the devastated office, the mayor, in tears, promises to charge the municipal treasury for the door repairs.

On Tuesday, Judge Arcadio checks the origin of the word "libel" in a postal dictionary and advises the lieutenant to appoint a commissioner so that the municipality can officially purchase the cemetery lands, given to the settlers for development, from the mayor himself. At midday, riverboats carrying a circus tent, animals, and the mother-in-law of the arrested César Montero dock at the shore, and a bloated cow carcass gets stuck in the sandbar, poisoning the air with the stench of a corpse. Father Angel hears Montero’s confession at the police station and learns that the prisoner has been starved for five days. After sending the priest away, the mayor sits astride a chair in front of the prisoner’s iron cot and reminds him how, at the height of the guerrilla war, he saved him from execution and the confiscation of his herds.

Freedom and a special night boat trip cost the landowner five thousand pesos in yearling calves and another five heads on top.

Glassograph and night patrols

On Wednesday morning, the wife of the murderer Rosario Montero sails away from the village forever, carrying her old tin chest. José Montiel’s widow watches her from the balcony, complaining to the manager, Carmichael, about a libelous piece of writing that attributed her late husband’s fathering of the accountant’s own colored children, and vowing to abandon the cursed estate, where the ghost of Big Mama haunts her at night. Meanwhile, the widow, Asís, invites Father Ángel to a meatball dinner and begs him to preach a sermon against the leaflets on Sunday, as her son, Roberto, has returned from the mountains and spent the entire night watching in the darkness of Rebeca’s bedroom for an imaginary lover. After reading a Dickens story, Dr. Octavio Giraldo makes his rounds, performing a urine test on the diabetic wealthy Don Sabas, who laughs at the anonymous letters about his dissolute sons and snake-poisoned donkeys. In the evening, the lieutenant watches a film to the sound of a church bell, and at home he receives the circus fortune teller Cassandra and asks her to lay out the cards for his affairs.

Trinidad’s assistant fills the mouse holes in the church with asphalt and, in a sudden confession, tearfully admits to Father Angel that she needs arsenic for the rodents, and at night, Uncle Ambrosio, scared by the roosters, crawls under her mosquito net.

That same morning, dentist Escobar takes a plaster cast of the toothless gums of former scribe Señor Benjamín and discreetly hands him a fresh underground leaflet.

On Thursday evening, after a circus parade with an elephant and clowns, Father Angel summons the lieutenant for a talk and demands that the "moral terror" be stopped before Sunday mass. On Friday at 10:00 AM, a drumbeat announces a curfew from 8:00 PM to 5:00 AM. The terrified widow Montiel packs a plaster statue of St. Raphael in a stocking into a suitcase, gives her keys to Carmichael, and attempts to throw herself off the balcony, prompting Dr. Giraldo to place her on a luminary. The mayor mobilizes the barber Guardiola and other young reservists from the opposition for night patrol, issuing them American rifles with blank cartridges. That night, at the station, Cassandra, detained without a pass, reveals to the lieutenant the result of a divination about the author of the libelous texts: "The whole town — and no one."

On Sunday, Father Angel Trinidad, ill, dons burial vestments, sees the stony faces of the seven enormous sons of the widow Asís from the pulpit, and finishes his sermon without a word about the leaflets. The insulted widow Asís demonstratively leads her family out of the church before the end of Mass and files a complaint with the apostolic prefect. During the day, Judge Arcadio begs the lieutenant for a night pass and is sternly refused. That evening, the police seize twenty-year-old, pockmarked Pepe Amador, wearing a baseball cap, in the bullring for scattering glass-printed opposition proclamations. The mayor cancels the citizen’s vigil and unleashes three of his regular thugs with live ammunition onto the streets.

At dawn on Monday, the patrol encounters Mateo Asís in the square, having slipped out of the bed of the divorced Nora Jacob ten minutes before lights out. That morning, Guardiola slips an underground leaflet into Judge Arcadio’s pocket while shaving at the barber shop; the judge gets drunk in the billiard room and flushes the paper down the toilet. Meanwhile, the mayor accuses Don Sabas of stealing and rebranding two hundred cows belonging to the distraught widow Montiel, imposing a fifty-peso tax on each stolen head, and arresting the honest manager, Carmichael, who flatly refuses to formalize the sale of the inheritance to the municipality at a low price. In the evening, Dr. Giraldo measures Father Angel’s blood pressure and asks the priest point-blank whether he has been trying to treat his parishioners’ moral ills with a plaster for nineteen years, which is why the pastor tosses and turns on his mat all night, recalling Nora Jacob’s long-ago confession about her illegitimate daughter.

A canvas bundle and empty mousetraps

On Wednesday morning, the circus packs up and sails away on longboats; from mid-river, the director calls the lieutenant a police bastard through a megaphone. Five more families leave the village afterward.

At the station, three jailers beat Pepe Amador to death during interrogation, trying to find out the distribution channels of the leaflets.

The arrested man’s mother gives Señor Benjamín her last eight pesos for drafting the petition, but the old man returns the stamped paper to the post office after hearing from street urchins about the boy’s death. The lieutenant takes the revolver from the blond, giant policeman, shows the corpse to the rain-soaked Carmichael as a warning, and discovers that Judge Arcadio had secretly fled the village two days earlier, abandoning his pregnant wife. That evening, the mayor wraps the corpse in a tarpaulin, ties it with wire, and orders it buried in the backyard of the police station. When Dr. Giraldo and Father Ángel appear on the stairs demanding the body be handed over for autopsy, the lieutenant points his rifle at them, announces Amador’s escape, and threatens to shoot on the count of three.

Friday, October 21st. Padre Angel wakes up at ten to five and goes out to the bells. His new assistant, Mina, checks the mousetraps set by the baptismal font — the cheese is intact, not a single mouse has been caught. The girl tells the stunned priest that rifle fire rang out all night: the police ripped up the floors of the barbershop, found a weapons cache, overcrowded the cells with prisoners, men are fleeing en masse into the woods to join the guerrillas, and by morning, despite the bullets and patrols, fresh libels have appeared on the doors of houses again.