Durval couldn’t sleep. He had been tossing in bed for almost two hours, pondering everything Dolores had said in the kitchen. Indeed, he had always been a bit suspicious of his biology professor friend. But he had never seriously considered that Botelho could be the murderer. After all, they had known each other for almost fifty years.
Suzana, Botelho’s wife, was never much of a talker. Always knitting or reading a book, she hardly participated in the conversations when the two couples gathered. Still, the dinners at the country house were always pleasant. Botelho would recount his achievements during his time as an army researcher, and Durval would talk about his days in Israel as a Benedictine missionary. The conversation always ended with a nostalgic “good times,” said amid some throat clearing.
In any case, it was hard to know if everything Botelho said about his time in the army was true or the melancholic imagination of a retired scientist who had failed to revolutionize the world. Durval never paid much attention to the professor’s eccentric stories. But he was absolutely certain that he had never mentioned a man with spiral goat horns in the middle of his forehead.
Durval gave up on sleeping. He got out of bed, trying not to make noise so that Dolores wouldn’t wake up, and went downstairs.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had turned on that computer.
He typed “man with horns”. The internet wasn’t the fastest, but after a few seconds, a list with 475 thousand results appeared on the screen.
There was a jazz album by Miles Davies called “The Man with Horns.” A Chinese woman named Liang Xiuzhen was said to have developed a unicorn horn right in the middle of her forehead. It was a single piece of bone protruding from the woman’s forehead like a large nail pointing downwards. A 69-year-old French woman had a horn growing on her forehead for almost two decades. A man with a horn on his nape. It seemed that it wasn’t so uncommon after all. All cases of diseases related to bone growth, also called by medicine Cornu Cutaneum. An abnormal growth of keratin from the bone that breaks through the skin. Usually on the head. But what Dolores had reported was nothing like any of those photos.
Durval remembered the sculpture of Moses in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where the prophet is portrayed by Michelangelo with a beautiful pair of horns projecting upward through his hair. The Bible itself, in St. Jerome’s translation, states that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, he had horns. Exodus, chapter 34, verse 29.
It seemed that horns had been accompanying humanity for some time. Durval turned off the computer, grabbed his alto flute, and went to the balcony. With a mute made of cardboard, he played Canon in D Major by Pachelbel in the silence of the early morning while he waited for the day to break. As soon as the sun rose, he was going to clarify that story.
JOSÉ GASPARFilmmaker and writerwww.historiasdooutromundo.comjagramos@gmail.com