My stepmother was sewing the long train of lace and it seemed in the blinding light of that intolerably clear and sound-filled September that she was submerged up to her shoulders in a cloud of that very September. ‘No,’ my stepmother said. And then, going back to her work, feeling eight years of bitter memories passing in front of her: ‘May God never permit anyone to enter that room again.’
Martín had returned in July, but he didn’t stay at our house. He liked to lean against the railing and stay there looking in the opposite direction. It pleased him to say: ‘I’d like to spend the rest of my life in Macondo.’ In the afternoon we’d go out to the plantations with my stepmother. We’d come back at dinnertime, before the lights in town went on. Then he’d tell me: ‘Even if it hadn’t been for you, I’d like to live in Macondo in any case.’ And that too, from the way he said it, seemed to be the truth.
Around that time it had been four years since the doctor had left our house. And it was precisely on the afternoon we had begun work on the wedding dress – that suffocating afternoon when I told her about the room for Martín – that my stepmother spoke to me for the first time about his strange ways.
‘Five years ago,’ she said, ‘he was still there, shut up like an animal. Because he wasn’t only that, an animal, but something else: an animal who ate grass, a ruminant like any ox in a yoke. If he’d married the barber’s daughter, that little faker who made the whole town believe the great lie that she’d conceived after a murky honeymoon with the spirits, maybe none of this would have happened. But he stopped going to the barbershop all of a sudden and he even showed a last-minute change that was only a new chapter as he methodically went through with his frightful plan. Only your father could have thought that after all that a man of such base habits should still stay in our house, living like an animal, scandalizing the town, giving people cause to talk about us as people who were always defying morals and good habits. His plans would end up with Meme’s leaving. But not even then did your father recognize the alarming proportions of his mistake.’
‘I never heard any of that,’ I said. The locusts had set up a sawmill in the courtyard. My stepmother was speaking, still sewing without lifting her eyes from the tambour where she was stitching symbols, embroidering white labyrinths. She said: ‘That night we were sitting at the table (all except him, because ever since the afternoon he came back from the barbershop for the last time he wouldn’t take his evening meal) when Meme came to serve us. She was different. “What’s the matter, Meme?” I asked her. “Nothing, ma’am. Why?” But we could see that she wasn’t right because she hesitated next to the lamp and she had a sickly look all over her. “Good heavens, Meme, you’re not well,” I said. But she held herself up as best she could until she turned toward the kitchen with the tray. Then your father, who was watching all the time, said to her: “If you don’t feel well, go to bed.” But she didn’t say anything. She went out with the tray, her back to us, until we heard the noise of the dishes as they broke to pieces. Meme was on the veranda, holding herself up against the wall by her fingernails. That was when your father went to get that one in the bedroom to have a look at Meme.
‘During the eight years he spent in our house,’ my stepmother said, ‘we’d never asked for his services for anything serious. We women went to Meme’s room, rubbed her with alcohol, and waited for your father to come back. But they didn’t come, Isabel. He didn’t come to look at Meme in spite of the fact that the man who had fed him for eight years, had given him lodging and had his clothes washed, had gone to get him in person. Every time I remember him I think that his coming here was God’s punishment. I think that all that grass we gave him for eight years, all the care, all the solicitude was a test of God’s, teaching us a lesson in prudence and mistrust of the world. It was as if we’d taken eight years of hospitality, food, clean clothes, and thrown it all to the hogs. Meme was dying (at least we thought she was) and he, right there, was still shut up, refusing to go through with what was no longer a work of charity but one of decency, of thanks, of simple consideration for those who were taking care of him.
‘Only at midnight did your father come back. He said weakly: “Give her some alcohol rubs, but no physics.” And I felt as if I’d been slapped. Meme had responded to our rubbing. Infuriated, I shouted: “Yes! Alcohol, that’s it! We’ve already rubbed her and she’s better! But in order to do that we didn’t have to live eight years sponging off people!” And your father, still condescending, still with that conciliatory nonsense: “It’s nothing serious. You’ll realize that someday.” As if that other one were some sort of soothsayer.’
That afternoon, because of the vehemence of her voice, the exaltation of her words, it seemed as if my stepmother were seeing again what happened on that remote night when the doctor refused to attend to Meme. The rosemary bush seemed suffocated by the blinding clarity of September, by the drowsiness of the locusts, by the heavy breathing of the men trying to take down a door in the neighborhood.
‘But one of those Sundays Meme went to mass all decked out like a lady of quality,’ she said. ‘I can remember it as if it were today. She had a parasol with changing colors.
‘Meme. Meme. That was God’s punishment too. We’d taken her from where her parents were starving her to death, we took care of her, gave her a roof over her head, food, and a name, but the hand of Providence intervened there too. When I saw her at the door the next day, waiting for one of the Indians to carry her trunk out for her, even I didn’t know where she was going. She was changed and serious, right over there (I can see her now), standing beside the trunk, talking to your father. Everything had been done without consulting me, Chabela; as if I were a painted puppet on the wall. Before I could ask what was going on, why strange things were happening in my own house without my knowing about them, your father came to tell me: “You’ve nothing to ask Meme. She’s leaving, but maybe she’ll come back after a while.” I asked him where she was going and he didn’t answer me. He was dragging along in his clogs as if I weren’t his wife but some painted puppet on the wall.
‘Only two days later,’ she said, ‘did I find out that the other one had left at dawn without the decency of saying good-bye. He’d come here as if the place belonged to him and eight years later he left as if he were leaving his own house, without saying good-bye, without saying anything. Just the way a thief would have done. I thought your father had sent him away for not attending to Meme, but when I asked him that on the same day, he limited himself to answering: “You and I have to have a long talk about that.” And four years have passed without his ever bringing up the subject with me again.
‘Only with your father and in a house as disordered as this one, where everybody does whatever he wants to, could such a thing have happened. In Macondo they weren’t talking about anything else and I still didn’t know that Meme had appeared in church all decked out, like a nobody raised to the status of a lady, and that your father had had the nerve to lead her across the square by the arm. That was when I found out that she wasn’t as far away as I’d thought, but was living in the house on the corner with the doctor. They’d gone to live together like two pigs, not even going through the door of the church even though she’d been baptized. One day I told your father: “God will punish that bit of heresy too.” And he didn’t say anything. He was still the same tranquil man he always was, even after having been the patron of public concubinage and scandal.
‘And yet I’m pleased now that things turned out that way, just so that the doctor left our house. If that hadn’t happened, he’d still be in the little room. But when I found out that he’d left it and that he was taking his trash to the corner along with that trunk that wouldn’t fit through the street door, I felt more peaceful. That was my victory, postponed for eight years.
‘Two weeks later Meme opened the store, and she even had a sewing machine. She’d bought a new Domestic with the money she put away in this house. I considered that an affront and that’s what I t
old your father. But even though he didn’t answer my protests, you could see that instead of being sorry, he was satisfied with his work, as if he’d saved his soul by going against what was proper and honorable for this house, with his proverbial tolerance, his understanding, his liberality. And even a little empty-headedness. I said to him: “You’ve thrown the best part of your beliefs to the swine.” And he, as always:
‘“You’ll understand that too someday.”’
VIII
December arrived like an unexpected spring, as a book once described it. And Martín arrived along with it. He appeared at the house after lunch, with a collapsible suitcase, still wearing the four-button jacket, clean and freshly pressed now. He said nothing to me but went directly to my father’s office to talk to him. The date for the wedding had been set since July. But two days after Martín’s arrival in December, my father called my stepmother to the office to tell her that the wedding would take place on Monday. It was Saturday.
My dress was finished. Martín had been to the house every day. He spoke to my father and the latter would give us his impressions at mealtime. I didn’t know my fiancé. I hadn’t been alone with him at any time. Still, Martín seemed to be linked to my father by a deep and solid friendship, and my father spoke of him as if it were he and not I who was going to marry Martín.
I felt no emotion over the closeness of the wedding date. I was still wrapped up in that gray cloud which Martín came through, stiff and abstract, moving his arms as he spoke, closing and opening his four-button jacket. He had lunch with us on Sunday. My stepmother assigned the places at the table in such a way that Martín was next to my father, separated from me by three places. During lunch my stepmother and I said very little. My father and Martín talked about their business matter; and I, sitting three places away, looked at the man who a year later would be the father of my son and to whom I was not even joined by a superficial friendship.
On Sunday night I tried on the wedding dress in my stepmother’s bedroom. I looked pale and clean in the mirror, wrapped in that cloud of powdery froth that reminded me of my mother’s ghost. I said to myself in front of the mirror: ‘That’s me. Isabel. I’m dressed as a bride who’s going to be married tomorrow morning.’ And I didn’t recognize myself; I felt weighted down with the memory of my dead mother. Meme had spoken to me about her on this same corner a few days before. She told me that after I was born my mother was dressed in her bridal clothes and placed in a coffin. And now, looking at myself in the mirror, I saw my mother’s bones covered by the mold of the tomb in a pile of crumpled gauze and compact yellow dust. I was outside the mirror. Inside was my mother, alive again, looking at me, stretching her arms out from her frozen space, trying to touch the death that was held together by the first pins of my bridal veil. And in back, in the center of the bedroom, my father, serious, perplexed: ‘She looks just like her now in that dress.’
That night I received my first, last, and only love letter. A message from Martín written in pencil on the back of a movie program. It said: Since it will be impossible for me to get there on time tonight, I’ll go to confession in the morning. Tell the colonel that the thing we were talking about is almost set and that’s why I can’t come now. Are you frightened? M. With the flat, floury taste of that letter in my mouth I went to my bedroom, and my palate was still bitter when I woke up a few hours later as my stepmother shook me.
Actually, many hours passed before I woke up completely. In the wedding dress I felt again as if I were in some cool and damp dawn that smelled of musk. My mouth felt dry, as when a person is starting out on a trip and the saliva refuses to wet the bread. The bridal party had been in the living room since four o’clock. I knew them all but now they looked transformed and new, the men dressed in tweeds and the women with their hats on, talking, filling the house with the dense and enervating vapor of their words.
The church was empty. A few women turned around to look at me as I went down the center aisle like a consecrated youth on his way to the sacrificial stone. The Pup, thin and serious, the only person with a look of reality in that turbulent and silent nightmare, came down the altar steps and gave me to Martín with four movements of his emaciated hands. Martín was beside me, tranquil and smiling, the way I’d seen him at the wake of the Paloquemado child, but wearing a short collar now, as if to show me that even on his wedding day he’d taken pains to be still more abstract than he already was on ordinary days.
That morning, back at the house, after the wedding party had eaten breakfast and contributed the standard phrases, my husband went out and didn’t come back until siesta time. My father and stepmother didn’t seem to notice my situation. They let the day pass without changing the order of things, so that nothing would make the extraordinary breath of that Monday felt. I took my wedding gown apart, made a bundle of it, and put it in the bottom of the wardrobe, remembering my mother, thinking: At least these rags can be my shroud.
The unreal groom returned at two in the afternoon and said that he had had lunch. Then it seemed to me as I watched him come with his short hair that December was no longer a blue month. Martín sat down beside me and we remained there for a moment without speaking. For the first time since I had been born I was afraid for night to begin. I must have shown it in some expression, because all of a sudden Martín seemed to come to life; he leaned over my shoulder and asked: ‘What are you thinking about?’ I felt something twisting in my heart: the stranger had begun to address me in the familiar form. I looked up toward where December was a gigantic, shining ball, a luminous glass month; I said: ‘I was thinking that all we need now is for it to start raining.’
The last night we spoke on the veranda it was hotter than usual. A few days later he would return for good from the barbershop and shut himself up in his room. But on that last night on the veranda, one of the hottest and heaviest I can remember, he seemed understanding as on few occasions. The only thing that seemed alive in the midst of that immense oven was the dull reverberation of the crickets, aroused by the thirst of nature, and the tiny, insignificant, and yet measureless activity of the rosemary and the nard, burning in the middle of the deserted hour. Both of us remained silent for a moment, exuding that thick and viscous substance that isn’t sweat but the loose drivel of decomposing living matter. Sometimes he would look at the stars, in a sky desolate because of the summer splendor; then he would remain silent, as if completely given over to the passage of that night, which was monstrously alive. That was how we were, pensive, face to face, he in his leather chair, I in the rocker. Suddenly, with the passage of a white wing, I saw him tilt his sad and lonely head over his left shoulder. I thought of his life, his solitude, his frightful spiritual disturbances. I thought of the tormented indifference with which he watched the spectacle of life. Previously I had felt drawn to him out of complex feelings, sometimes contradictory and as variable as his personality. But at that moment there wasn’t the slightest doubt in me that I’d begun to love him deeply. I thought that inside of myself I’d uncovered the mysterious force that from the first moment had led me to shelter him, and I felt the pain of his dark and stifling room like an open wound. I saw him as somber and defeated, crushed by circumstances. And suddenly, with a new look from his hard and penetrating yellow eyes, I felt the certainty that the secret of his labyrinthine solitude had been revealed to me by the tense pulsation of the night. Before I even had time to think why I was doing it, I asked him:
‘Tell me something, doctor. Do you believe in God?’
He looked at me. His hair fell over his forehead and a kind of inner suffocation burned all through him, but his face still showed no shadow of emotion or upset. Having completely recovered his parsimonious ruminant voice, he said:
‘It’s the first time anyone ever asked me that question.’
‘What about you, doctor, have you ever asked it?’
He seemed neither indifferent nor concerned. He only seemed interested in my person. Not even in my question an
d least of all in its intent.
‘That’s hard to say,’ he said.
‘But doesn’t a night like this make you afraid? Don’t you get the feeling that there’s a man bigger than all of us walking through the plantations while nothing moves and everything seems perplexed at the passage of that man?’
He was silent then. The crickets filled the surrounding space, beyond the warm smell which was alive and almost human as it rose up from the jasmine bush I had planted in memory of my first wife. A man without dimensions was walking alone through the night.
‘I really don’t think any of that bothers me, colonel.’ And now he seemed perplexed, he too, like things, like the rosemary and the nard in their burning place. ‘What bothers me,’ he said, and he kept on looking into my eyes, directly, sternly, ‘what bothers me is that there’s a person like you capable of saying with such certainty that he’s aware of that man walking in the night.’
‘We try to save our souls, doctor. That’s the difference.’
And then I went beyond what I had proposed. I said: ‘You don’t hear him because you’re an atheist.’
And he, serene, unperturbed:
‘Believe me, colonel, I’m not an atheist. I get just as upset thinking that God exists as thinking that he doesn’t. That’s why I’d rather not think about it.’
I don’t know why, but I had the feeling that that was exactly what he was going to answer. He’s a man disturbed by God, I thought, listening to what he’d just told me spontaneously, with clarity, precision, as if he’d read it in a book. I was still intoxicated with the drowsiness of the night. I felt that I was in the heart of an immense gallery of prophetic images.
Over there on the other side of the railing was the small garden where Adelaida and my daughter had planted things. That was why the rosemary was burning, because every morning they strengthened it with their attention so that on nights like that its burning vapor would pass through the house and make sleep more restful. The jasmine gave off its insistent breath and we received it because it was the same age as Isabel, because in a certain way that smell was a prolongation of her mother. The crickets were in the courtyard, among the bushes, because we’d neglected to clean out the weeds when it had stopped raining. The only thing incredible, miraculous, was that he was there, with his enormous cheap handkerchief, drying his forehead, which glowed with perspiration.
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