Fiction: The Lone Angel

By Maximiliano Guzmán

 

No neighbor remembered why they had to do it every Night of Sade.
But they did it with the same violence, perversity, hatred, and brutality their parents, uncles, or grandparents—the second or third generation of Patio—had taught them.
“Make the angel suffer” was the commandment.
Because the angel was there, in Del Khalifa Square, naked with wings of cardboard, styrofoam, and artificial white feathers, subjected to the violation of his humanity while Kool & The Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” blasted from the neighborhood loudspeakers.

Neighbors beat the angel’s face, stabbed his body, urinated on his wounds, bathed him in feces and spit. Some grabbed the dirty, defeated angel and sodomized him in front of the crowd with their hairless genitals, golf clubs, pool cues, or fingers, an assault meant to strip him of any chance of keeping his spirit and faith alive.
In Patio, the Night of Sade was a party before the lights went out.
Once a week, the Night of Sade pulled neighbors out of their trances to amuse themselves with the angel.
And the angel, prisoner of the scene, chained in the square, prayed to Patio’s God, the only God close enough to his faith.

Ángel Solo, that was the angel’s name. A former construction worker in Patio, drunk and without family. His ex-wife abandoned him when he tried to abuse his niece after a drunken dawn.
He had stumbled into the marital bedroom, pants off, a small erection, lay down and hugged his teenage niece tightly. She screamed, his ex-wife turned on the lights. It was the end of the marriage.
Ángel Solo couldn’t say “It was a mistake.”
His niece shared their bed.
His ex-wife reported him to the police, and Ángel Solo fled by bus to another city.

Because of his construction experience, he was accepted to work in Patio after wandering the city for weeks with little food in his belly.
He built some houses for Patio’s first generation of inhabitants before disobeying the horses.
He witnessed the arrival of the first families of scientists and doctors. He was privileged. In his hands he built the future of a new, improved civilization.

Ángel Solo was a man with a sensitive soul. He still loved his ex-wife, but loneliness made him seek love in Ernestine Fagul, a twenty-year-old Lebanese girl, daughter of two marine biologists who tried to create a sea in Patio’s sky with saliva. They would use the saliva of every neighbor, extracted by a strange machine with a tube that never worked due to technical defects. And in Patio, there were no spare parts.
“As above, so below.”
But in Patio there was no sea, no sand, no beach. A place sealed hermetically with metal, plastic, and a transparent dome where inhabitants breathed synthetic air with a sun and moon adapted by the horses to give Patio a natural environment, or what the horses thought was natural.
On another planet they might have lived happily ever after in those conditions. That was the reason and philosophy for living there.

But Ángel Solo missed beer, bars, and sports on TV Sundays. Far from home, boredom and routine were driving him mad.
Drunk on plant sweat. No, Ángel Solo simply didn’t like the subtle, bitter taste of plants. He needed a cold beer and peanuts.
One morning, Ángel Solo saw a horse riding through the streets on a kick scooter and ran to ask for a break, a vacation.
In Patio no neighbor took vacations. They were forbidden. Ángel Solo didn’t know.
And the horse was benevolent.
“You will not work,” it said in its mechanical voice.
Ángel Solo thought happily he would rest in his small house, and when the horses tired of him, they would fire him and he would return to Las Vegas to play poker with his friend Kogan.
But the horses had another idea for Ángel Solo’s downtime.

Del Khalifa Square had been built in tribute to a poor Caliph who invested money in Patio’s shares and was found hanging upside down with his testicles in his mouth in a room at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Doha. A tribute to ancestors for Patio’s administration. An investor who dreamed of traveling to Mercury with his six wives and his cat Emilio.
That was the right place, the meeting point for Ángel Solo to become a living legend. So the horses thought.
One blackout Saturday, while Ángel Solo showered, a group of paramilitary neighbors hired by the horses broke into his house and kidnapped him.
Still with cologne on his wet body, they tied his hands and feet, put a bag over his head. Barely able to breathe, eyes and mouth wide open, he was dragged from his house and shoved into the back of a Kaiser Fraiser, one of the horses’ favorite cars.
After circling Patio’s streets, they dropped him in Del Khalifa Square, giving him back air but not freedom.

Olga Pronto, a fifty-year-old virgin, saw Ángel Solo lying there and felt she was seeing a being of light fallen from heaven. She looked up to see if there was a hole in the dome. She cried, covering her mouth, and at home made the angel’s wings. She was the first in Patio to assign magical powers to Ángel Solo.
And that was seen as an opportunity by the horses, who decided to announce over loudspeakers the start of the Night of Sade.
The angel would give miracles to neighbors who hurt him. That was how angels worked in Patio, and the neighbors’ followed instructions.
Ángel Solo must not die. And if he did, the horses would replace him.

There are no dates or graves for the first angel, the second, the third, or the rest… His name remains in the square. Neighbors don’t ask and don’t care who the person is who represents the angel. It can be a man, a woman, or a child. And Ángel Solo’s biography is used without updates.
Tonight is the Night of Sade.
And I am happy for it.

My one thousand three hundredth Night of Sade, when I will make the angel swallow my pain.

 

 

 

 

 

Maximiliano Guzmán (b. 1991, Recreo, Catamarca, Argentina) is the author of the novella Hamacas (Zona Borde Editorial) He serves as an editor for the digital magazine La Tuerca Andante (Argentina). Has been recently published in Expat Press, HAD, Bruiser, Bull, Midcult, Hobart, Serious, Don't submit, Burial Magazine, and others.