“It is the neighbor who lived in that little house; the one who arrived only two weeks ago. Look at the scar on his face.”
“Ave Maria!” exclaimed some of the women.
“Shall we pray for his soul?” asked a young girl as soon as she had finished looking at the dead body from all directions.
“You fool! You heretic!” Sister Puté scolded her. “Don’t you know what Father Dámaso said? To pray for a damned person is to tempt God. He who commits suicide is irrevocably condemned. For this reason, he cannot be buried in a sacred place. I had begun to think that this man was going to have a bad ending. I never could guess what he lived on.”
“I saw him twice speaking with the sacristan mayor,” observed a girl.
“It couldn’t have been to confess himself or to order a mass!”
The neighbors gathered together and a large circle surrounded the corpse which was still swinging. In half an hour some officers and two cuaderilleros arrived. They took the body down and put it in a wheelbarrow.
“Some people are in a hurry to die,” said one of the officers, laughing, while he took out the pen from behind his ear.
He asked some trifling questions; took the declaration of the servant, whom he tried to implicate, now looking at her with evil in his eyes, now threatening her and now attributing to her words which she did not say—so much so that the servant, believing that she was going to be taken to jail, began to weep and finished by declaring that she was looking for peas, but that ... and she called Teo to witness.
In the meantime, a peasant with a wide hat and a large plaster on his neck, was examining the body, and the rope by which it was hanging.