‘I’ll stay collapsed here until Judgment Day. If the termites haven’t eaten up the chair by then.’
My father stops, his neck stretched out, listening to the familiar footsteps that are advancing through the back room. Then he forgets what he was going to tell Cataure and tries to turn around, leaning on his cane, but his useless leg fails him in the turn and he’s about to fall down, as happened three years ago when he fell into the lemonade bowl, with the noise of the bowl as it rolled along the floor and the clogs and the rocker and the shout of the child, who was the only one who saw him fall.
He’s limped ever since then, since then he’s dragged the foot that hardened after that week of bitter suffering, from which we thought he’d never recover. Now, seeing him like that, getting his balance back with the help of the mayor, I think that that useless leg holds the secret of the compromise that he’s going to fulfill against the will of the town.
Maybe his gratitude goes back to that time. From the time he fell on the veranda, saying that he felt as if he’d been pushed off a tower, and the last two doctors left in Macondo advised him to prepare for a good death. I remember him on the fifth day in bed, shrunken between the sheets; I remember his emaciated body, like the body of the Pup, who’d been carried to the cemetery the year before by all the inhabitants of Macondo in a compressed and moving procession of flowers. Inside the coffin his majesty had the same depth of irremediable and disconsolate abandonment that I saw in the face of my father during those days when the bedroom filled up with his voice and he spoke about that strange soldier who appeared one night in the camp of Colonel Aureliano Buendía during the war of ’85, his hat and boots decorated with the skin, teeth, and claws of a tiger, and they asked him: ‘Who are you?’ And the strange soldier didn’t answer; and they asked him: ‘Where do you come from?’ And he still didn’t answer; and they asked him: ‘What side are you fighting on?’ and they still didn’t get any answer from the strange soldier, until an orderly picked up a torch and held it close to his face, examined it for an instant, and exclaimed, scandalized: ‘Jesus! It’s the Duke of Marlborough!’
In the midst of that terrible hallucination, the doctors gave orders to bathe him. It was done. But on the next day you could only see a small change in his stomach. Then the doctors left the house and said that the only thing advisable was to prepare him for a good death.
The bedroom was sunken in a silent atmosphere in which you could hear only the slow and measured flapping of the wings of death, that mysterious flapping that has the smell of a man in the bedrooms of the dying. After Father Ángel administered the last rites, many hours passed before anyone moved, looking at the angular profile of the hopeless man. Then the clock struck and my stepmother got ready to give him his spoonful of medicine. That was when we heard the spaced and affirmative footsteps on the veranda. My stepmother held the spoon in the air, stopped murmuring her prayer, and turned to the door, paralyzed by a sudden blush. ‘I’d recognize those steps even in purgatory,’ she managed to say at the precise moment that we looked toward the door and saw the doctor. He was on the threshold, looking at us.
I say to my daughter: ‘The Pup would have made them come even if he had to whip them,’ and I go over to where the coffin is, thinking: Since the time the doctor left our house I’ve been convinced that our acts were ordained by a higher will against which we couldn’t have rebelled, even if we tried with all our strength, or even if we assumed the sterile attitude of Adelaida, who shut herself up to pray.
And while I cover the distance that separates me from the coffin, looking at my men, impassive, sitting on the bed, I feel that I’ve breathed in the first breath of air that boils up over the dead man, all that bitter matter of fate that destroyed Macondo. I don’t think the mayor will delay with the authorization for the burial. I know that outside, on the streets tormented by the heat, people are waiting. I know that there are women in the windows, anxious for a spectacle, and that they stay there, looking out, forgetting that the milk is boiling on the stove and that the rice is dry. But I think that even this last show of rebellion is beyond the possibilities of this crushed and flayed group of men. Their capacity for fight has been broken ever since that Sunday election day when they moved, drew up their plans, and were defeated, and afterward they still were convinced that they were the ones who determined their own acts. But all of that seemed to have been disposed, ordained, channeling the deeds that would lead us step by step to this fateful Wednesday.
Ten years ago, when ruin came down upon us, the collective strength of those who looked for recovery might have been enough for reconstruction. All that was needed was to go out into the fields laid waste by the banana company, clean out the weeds, and start again from scratch. But they’d trained the leaf storm to be impatient, not to believe in either past or future. They’d trained it to believe in the moment and to sate the voracity of its appetite in it. We only needed a short time to realize that the leaf storm had left and that without it reconstruction was impossible. The leaf storm had brought everything and it had taken everything away. After it all that was left was a Sunday in the rubble of a town and the ever-present electoral schemer on Macondo’s last night, setting up four demijohns of liquor in the public square at the disposal of the police and the reserves.
If the Pup managed to hold them back that night in spite of the fact that their rebellion was still alive, today he would have been capable of going from house to house armed like a dogcatcher obliging them to bury this man. The Pup held them under an ironclad discipline. Even after the priest died four years ago – one year before my illness – that discipline could be seen in the impassioned way in which they all cut the flowers and shrubs in their gardens and took them to his grave in a final tribute to the Pup.
This man was the only one who didn’t go to the burial. The only one, precisely, who owed his life to that unbreakable and contradictory subordination of the town to the priest. Because the night they set out the four demijohns of liquor on the square and Macondo became a town overrun by armed barbarians, a town in terror which buried its dead in a common grave, someone must have remembered that there was a doctor on this corner. That was when they laid the stretchers by the door and shouted to him (because he didn’t open up, he spoke from inside); they shouted to him: ‘Doctor, take care of these wounded people because there aren’t enough doctors to go around,’ and he replied: ‘Take them somewhere else, I don’t know about any of that.’ And they said to him: ‘You’re the only doctor left. You have to do a charitable act.’ And he answered (and still hadn’t opened the door), imagined by the crowd to be in the middle of the room, the lamp held high, his hard yellow eyes lighted up: ‘I’ve forgotten everything I knew about all that. Take them somewhere else,’ and he stayed there (because the door was never opened) with the door closed, while men and women of Macondo were dying in front of it. The crowd was capable of anything that night. They were getting ready to set fire to the house and reduce its only occupant to ashes. But then the Pup appeared. They say that it was as if he’d been there invisible, standing guard to stop the destruction of the house and the man. ‘No one will touch this door,’ they say the Pup said. And they say that was all he said, his arms open as if on a cross, his inexpressive and cold cow-skull face illuminated by the glow of rural fury. And then the impulse was reined in, it changed direction, but it still had sufficient force for them to shout the sentence that would assure the coming of this Wednesday for all the ages.
Walking toward the bed to tell my men to open the door, I think: He’ll be coming any minute now. And I think that if he doesn’t get here in five minutes we’ll take the coffin out without any authorization and put the dead man in the street so he’ll have to bury him right in front of the house. ‘Cataure,’ I say, calling the oldest of my men, and he barely has time to lift his head when I hear the mayor’s footsteps coming through the next room.
I know that he’s coming straight toward me and I try to turn quick
ly on my heels, leaning on my cane, but my bad leg fails me and I go forward, sure that I’m going to fall and hit my face against the coffin, when I stumble across his arm and clutch it firmly, and I hear his voice of peaceful stupidity saying: ‘Don’t worry, colonel, I can assure you that nothing will happen.’ And I think that’s how it is, but I know he’s saying it to give himself courage. ‘I don’t think anything will happen,’ I tell him, thinking just the opposite, and he says something about the ceiba trees in the cemetery and hands me the authorization for the burial. Without reading it I fold it, put it in my vest pocket, and tell him: ‘In any case, whatever happens, it had to happen. It’s as if it had been announced in the almanac.’
The mayor goes over to the Indians. He tells them to nail up the coffin and open the door. And I see them moving about, looking for the hammer and nails which will remove the sight of that man forever, that unsheltered gentleman from nowhere whom I saw for the last time three years ago beside my convalescent’s bed, his head and face cracked by premature decrepitude. He had just rescued me from death then. The same force that had brought him there, that had given him the news of my illness, seemed to be the one which held him up beside my bed saying:
‘You just have to exercise that leg a little. You may have to use a cane from now on.’
I would ask him two days later what I owed him and he would answer: ‘You don’t owe me anything, colonel. But if you want to do me a favor, throw a little earth on me when morning finds me stiff. That’s all I need for the buzzards not to eat me.’
In the promise he made me give, in the way he proposed it, in the rhythm of his footsteps on the tile in the room, it was evident that this man had begun to die a long time back, even though three years would pass before that postponed and defective death would be completely realized. That day was today. And I even think that he probably didn’t need the noose. A slight breeze would have been enough to extinguish the last glow of life that remained in his hard yellow eyes. I’d sensed all that ever since the night I spoke to him in his little room, before he came here to live with Meme. So when he made me promise what I’m about to do now, I didn’t feel upset. I told him simply:
‘It’s an unnecessary request, doctor. You know me and you must know that I would have buried you over the heads of everybody even if I didn’t owe my life to you.’
And he, smiling, his hard yellow eyes peaceful for the first time:
‘That’s all very true, colonel. But don’t forget that a dead man wouldn’t have been able to bury me.’
Now no one will be able to correct this shame. The mayor has handed my father the burial order and my father has said: ‘In any case, whatever happens, it had to happen. It’s as if it had been announced in the almanac.’ And he said it with the same indolence with which he turned himself over to the fate of Macondo, faithful to the trunks where the clothing of all those who died before I was born is kept. Since then everything has gone downhill. Even my stepmother’s energy, her ironclad and dominant character have been changed into bitter doubt. She seems more and more distant and silent, and her disillusionment is such that this afternoon she sat down beside the railing and said: ‘I’ll stay collapsed here until Judgment Day.’
My father hadn’t ever imposed his will on anything again. Only today did he get up to fulfill that shameful promise. He’s here, sure that everything will happen with no serious consequences, watching the Guajiros starting to move to open the door and nail up the coffin. I see them coming closer, I stand up, I take the child by the hand and pull the chair toward the window so as not to be seen by the town when they open the door.
The child is puzzled. When I get up he looks me in the face with an indescribable expression, a little upset. But now he’s perplexed, beside me, watching the Indians, who are sweating because of the effort to open the bolts. And with a penetrating and sustained lament of rusty metal, the doors open wide. Then I see the street again, the glowing and burning white dust that covers the houses and has given the town the lamentable look of a rundown piece of furniture. It’s as if God had declared Macondo unnecessary and had thrown it into the corner where towns that have stopped being of any service to creation are kept.
The child, who at the first moment must have been dazzled by the sudden light (his hand trembled in mine when the door was opened), raises his head suddenly, concentrated, intent, and he asks me: ‘Did you hear it?’ Only then do I realize that in some neighboring courtyard a curlew is telling the time. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It must be three o’clock already,’ and almost at that precise moment the first hammer blow sounds on the nail.
Trying not to listen to the lacerating sound that makes my skin crawl, trying to prevent the child from noticing my confusion, I turn my face to the window and in the next block I see the melancholy and dusty almond trees with our house in the background. Shaken by the invisible breath of destruction, it too is on the eve of a silent and final collapse. All of Macondo has been like that ever since it was squeezed by the banana company. Ivy invades the houses, weeds grow in the alleys, walls crumble, and in the middle of the day a person finds a lizard in her room. Everything has seemed destroyed since we stopped cultivating the rosemary and the nard; since the time an invisible hand cracked the Christmas dishes in the cupboard and put moths to fatten on the clothes that nobody wore anymore. When a door becomes loose there isn’t a solicitous hand ready to repair it. My father doesn’t have the energy to move the way he did before the collapse that left him limping forever. Señora Rebeca, behind her eternal fan, doesn’t bother about anything that might repel the hunger of malevolence that’s provoked in her by her sterile and tormented widowhood. Águeda is crippled, overwhelmed by a patient religious illness; and Father Ángel doesn’t seem to have any other satisfaction except savoring the persevering indigestion of meatballs every day during his siesta. The only thing that seems unchanged is the song of the twins of Saint Jerome and that mysterious beggar woman who doesn’t seem to grow old and who for twenty years has come to the house every Tuesday for a branch of lemon balm. Only the whistle of a yellow, dusty train that doesn’t take anyone away breaks the silence four times a day. And at night the toom-toom of the electric plant that the banana company left behind when it left Macondo.
I can see the house through the window and I am aware that my stepmother is there, motionless in her chair, thinking perhaps that before we get back that final wind which will wipe out this town will have passed. Everyone will have gone then except us, because we’re tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks where the household goods and clothing of grandparents, my grandparents, are kept, and the canopies that my parents’ horses used when they came to Macondo, fleeing from the war. We’ve been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth. The trunks have been in the room ever since the last days of the war; and they’ll be there this afternoon when we come back from the burial, if that final wind hasn’t passed, the one that will sweep away Macondo, its bedrooms full of lizards and its silent people devastated by memories.
Suddenly my grandfather gets up, leans on his cane, and stretches out his bird head where his glasses seem to be fastened on as if they were part of his face. I think it would be hard for me to wear glasses. With the smallest movement they’d slip off my ears. And thinking about that I tap my nose. Mama looks at me and asks: ‘Does it hurt you?’ And I tell her no, that I was just thinking that I wouldn’t be able to wear glasses. And she smiles, breathes deeply, and tells me: ‘You must be soaked.’ And she’s right; my clothes are burning on my skin, the thick, green corduroy, fastened all the way up, is sticking to my body with sweat and gives me an itchy feeling. ‘Yes,’ I say. And my mother leans over me, loosens my tie and fans my collar, saying: ‘When we get home you can rest and have a bath.’ ‘Cataure,’ I hear.
At that point, through the rear door, the man with the revolver comes in again. When he gets in the doorway he takes off his hat and walks care
fully, as if he was afraid of waking up the corpse. But he did it to surprise my grandfather, who falls forward, pushed by the man, staggers, and manages to grab the arm of the same man who’d tried to knock him down. The others have stopped smoking and are still sitting on the bed in a row like four crows on a sawhorse. When the man with the revolver comes in the crows lean over and talk secretly and one of them gets up, goes over to the table, and picks up the box of nails and the hammer.
My grandfather is talking to the man beside the coffin. The man says: ‘Don’t worry, colonel. I can assure you that nothing will happen.’ And my grandfather says: ‘I don’t think anything will happen.’ And the man says: ‘They can bury him on the outside, against the left wall of the cemetery where the ceiba trees are the tallest.’ Then he gives my grandfather a piece of paper, saying: ‘You’ll see that everything will turn out fine.’ My grandfather leans on his cane with one hand, takes the paper with the other, and puts it into his vest pocket, where he keeps his small, square gold watch with a chain. Then he says: ‘In any case, whatever happens, it had to happen. It’s as if it had been announced in the almanac.’
The man says: ‘There are some people in the windows, but that’s just curiosity. The women always look at anything.’ But I don’t think my grandfather heard him, because he’s looking through the window at the street. The man moves then, goes over to the bed, and, fanning himself with his hat, he tells the men: ‘You can nail it up now. In the meantime, open the door so we can get a breath of air.’
Leaf Storm Page 10