“And they did theirs by making a thousand pesos a month in the Senate for twenty years,” the woman answered. “There’s my friend Sabas with a two-story house that isn’t big enough to keep all his money in, a man who came to this town selling medicines with a snake curled around his neck.”
“But he’s dying of diabetes,” the colonel said.
“And you’re dying of hunger,” the woman said. “You should realize that you can’t eat dignity.”
The lightning interrupted her. The thunder exploded in the street, entered the bedroom, and went rolling under the bed like a heap of stones. The woman jumped toward the mosquito netting for her rosary.
The colonel smiled.
“That’s what happens to yon for not holding your tongue” he said. “I’ve always said that God is on my side.”
But in reality he felt embittered. A moment later he put out the light and sank into thought in a darkness rent by the lightning. He remembered Macondo. The colonel had waited ten years for the promises of Neerlandia to be fulfilled. In the drowsiness of the siesta he saw a yellow, dusty train pull in, with men and women and animals suffocating from the heat, piled up even on the roofs of the cars. It was the banana fever.
In twenty-four hours they had transformed the town. “I’m leaving,” the colonel said then. “The odor of the banana is eating at my insides.” And he left Macondo on the return train, Wednesday, June 27, 1906, at 2:18 p.m. It took him nearly half a century to realize that he hadn’t had a moment’s peace since the surrender at Neerlandia.
He opened his eyes.
“Then there’s no need to think about it any more,” he said.
“What?”
“The problem of the rooster,” the colonel said. “Tomorrow I’ll sell it to my friend Sabas for nine hundred pesos.”
The howls of the castrated animals, fused with Sabas’s shouting, came through the office window. If he doesn’t come in ten minutes I’ll leave, the colonel promised himself after two hours of waiting. But he waited twenty minutes more. He was getting set to leave when Sabas entered the office followed by a group of workers. He passed back and forth in front of the colonel without looking at him.
“Are you waiting for me, friend?”
“Yes, friend,” the colonel said. “But if you’re very busy, I can come back later.”
Sabas didn’t hear him from the other side of the door.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
Noon was stifling. The office shone with the shimmering of the street. Dulled by the heat, the colonel involuntarily closed his eyes and at once began to dream of his wife. Sabas’s wife came in on tiptoe.
“Don’t wake up, friend,” she said. “I’m going to draw the blinds because this office is an inferno.”
The colonel followed her with a blank look. She spoke in the shadow when she closed the window.
“Do you dream often?”
“Sometimes,” replied the colonel, ashamed of having fallen asleep. “Almost always I dream that I’m getting tangled up in spider webs.”
“I have nightmares every night,” the woman said. “Now I’ve got it in my head to find out who those unknown people are whom one meets in one’s dreams.”
She plugged in the fan. “Last week a woman appeared at the head of my bed,” she said. “I managed to ask her who she was and she replied, ‘I am the woman who died in this room twelve years ago.’ ”
“But the house was built barely two years ago,” the colonel said.
“That’s right,” the woman said. “That means that even the dead make mistakes.”
The hum of the fan solidified the shadow. The colonel felt impatient, tormented by sleepiness and by the rambling woman who went directly from dreams to the mystery of the reincarnation. He was waiting for a pause to say goodbye when Sabas entered the office with his foreman.
“I’ve warmed up your soup four times,” the woman said.
“Warm it up ten times if you like,” said Sabas. “But stop nagging me now.”
He opened the safe and gave his foreman a roll of bills together with a list of instructions. The foreman opened the blinds to count the money. Sabas saw the colonel at the back of the office but didn’t show any reaction. He kept talking with the foreman. The colonel straightened up at the point when the two men were getting ready to leave the office again. Sabas stopped before opening the door.
“What can I do for you, friend!”
The colonel saw that the foreman was looking at him.
“Nothing, friend,” he said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Make it fast, whatever it is,” said Sabas. “I don’t have a minute to spare.”
He hesitated with his hand resting on the doorknob. The colonel felt the five longest seconds of his life passing. He clenched his teeth.
“It’s about the rooster,” he murmured.
Then Sabas finished opening the door. “The question of the rooster,” he repeated, smiling, and pushed the foreman toward the hall. “The sky is falling in and my friend is worrying about that rooster.” And then, addressing the colonel:
“Very well, friend. Ill be right back.”
The colonel stood motionless in the middle of the office until he could no longer hear the footsteps of the two men at the end of the hall. Then he went out to walk around the town which was paralyzed in its Sunday siesta. There was no one at the tailor’s. The doctor’s office was closed. No one was watching the goods set out at the Syrians’ stalls. The river was a sheet of steel. A man at the waterfront was sleeping across four oil drums, his face protected from the sun by a hat. The colonel went home, certain that he was the only thing moving in town.
His wife was waiting for him with a complete lunch.
“I bought it on credit; promised to pay first thing tomorrow,” she explained.
During lunch, the colonel told her the events of the last three hours. She listened to him impatiently.
“The trouble is you lack character,” she said finally. “You present yourself as if you were begging alms when you ought to go there with your head high and take our friend aside and say, ‘Friend, I’ve decided to sell you the rooster.’”
“Life is a breeze the way you tell it” the colonel said.
She assumed an energetic attitude. That morning she had put the house in order and was dressed very strangely, in her husband’s old shoes, and oilcloth apron, and a rag tied around her head with two knots at the ears. “You haven’t the slightest sense for business,” she said. “When you go to sell something, you have to put on the same face as when you go to buy.”
The colonel found something amusing in her figure.
“Stay just the way you are,” he interrupted her, smiling. “You’re identical to the little Quaker Oats man.”
She took the rag off her head.
“I’m speaking seriously,” she said. “I’m going to take the rooster to our friend right now, and I’ll bet whatever you want that I come back inside of half an hour with the nine hundred pesos.”
“You’ve got zeros on the brain,” the colonel said. “You’re already betting with the money from the rooster.”
It took a lot of trouble for him to dissuade her. She had spent the morning mentally organizing the budget for the next three years without their Friday agony. She had made a list of the essentials they needed, without forgetting a pair of new shoes for the colonel. She set aside a place in the bedroom for the mirror. The momentary frustration of her plans left her with a confused sensation of shame and resentment.
She took a short siesta. When she got up, the colonel was sitting in the patio.
“Now what are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m thinking,” the colonel said.
“Then the problem is solved. We will be able to count on that money fifty years from now.”
But in reality the colonel had decided to sell the rooster that very afternoon. He thought of Sabas, alone in his office, preparing himself for his daily injection in fron
t of the electric fan. He had his answer ready.
“Take the rooster,” his wife advised him as he went out.“Seeing him in the flesh will work a miracle.”
The colonel objected. She followed him to the front door with desperate anxiety.
“It doesn’t matter if the whole army is in the office,” she said. “You grab him by the arm and don’t let him move until he gives you the nine hundred pesos.”
“They’ll think we’re planning a hold-up.” She paid no attention.
“Remember that you are the owner of the rooster,” she insisted. “Remember that you are the one who’s going to do him the favor.”
“All right.”
Sabas was in the bedroom with the doctor. “Now’s your chance, friend,” his wife said to the colonel. “The doctor is getting him ready to travel to the ranch, and he’s not coming back until Thursday.” The colonel struggled with two opposing forces; in spite of his determination to sell the rooster, he wished he had arrived an hour later and missed Sabas.
“I can wait,” he said.
But the woman insisted. She led him to the bedroom where her husband was seated on the throne-like bed, in his underwear, his colorless eyes fixed on the doctor. The colonel waited until the doctor had heated the glass tube with the patient’s urine, sniffed the odor, and made an approving gesture to Sabas.
“We’ll have to shoot him,” the doctor said, turning to the colonel. “Diabetes is too slow for finishing off the wealthy.”
“You’ve already done your best with your damned insulin injections,” said Sabas, and he gave a jump on his flaccid buttocks. “But I’m a hard nut to crack.” And then, to the colonel:
“Come in, friend. When I went out to look for you this afternoon, I couldn’t even see your hat.”
“I don’t wear one, so I won’t have to take it off for anyone.”
Sabas began to get dressed. The doctor put a glass tube with a blood sample in his jacket pocket. Then he straightened out the things in his bag. The colonel thought he was getting ready to leave.
“If I were in your shoes, I’d send my friend a bill for a hundred thousand pesos, Doctor,” the colonel said. “That way he wouldn’t be so worried.”
“I’ve already suggested that to him, but for a million,” the doctor said. “Poverty is the best cure for diabetes.”
“Thanks for the prescription,” said Sabas, trying to stuff his voluminous belly into his riding breeches. “But I won’t accept it, to save you from the catastrophe of becoming rich.”
The doctor saw his own teeth reflected in the little chromed lock of his bag. He looked at the clock without showing impatience. Sabas, putting on his boots, suddenly turned to the colonel:
“Well, friend, what’s happening with the rooster?”
The colonel realized that the doctor was also waiting for his answer. He clenched his teeth.
“Nothing, friend,” he murmured. “I’ve come to sell him to you.”
Sabas finished putting on his boots.
“Fine, my friend,” he said without emotion. “It’s the most sensible thing that could have occurred to you.”
“I’m too old now for these complications,” the colonel said to justify himself before the doctor’s impenetrable expression. “If I were twenty years younger it would be different.”
“You’ll always be twenty years younger,” the doctor replied.
The colonel regained his breath. He waited for Sabas to say something more, but he didn’t. Sabas put on a leather zippered jacket and got ready to leave the bedroom.
“If you like, we’ll talk about it next week, friend,” the colonel said.
“That’s what I was going to say,” said Sabas. “I have a customer who might give you four hundred pesos. But we have to wait till Thursday.”
“How much?” the doctor asked.
“Four hundred pesos.”
“I had heard someone say that he was worth a lot more,” the doctor said.
“You were talking in terms of nine hundred pesos” the colonel said, backed by the doctor’s perplexity. “He’s the best rooster in the whole province.”
Sabas answered the doctor.
“At some other time, anyone would have paid a thousand,” he explained. “But now no one dares pit a good rooster. There’s always the danger he’ll come out of the pit shot to death.” He turned to the colonel, feigning disappointment:
“That’s what I wanted to tell you, friend.”
The colonel nodded.
“Fine,” he said.
He followed him down the hall. The doctor stayed in the living room, detained by Sabas’s wife, who asked him for a remedy “for those things which come over one suddenly and which one doesn’t know what they are.” The colonel waited for him in the office. Sabas opened the safe, stuffed money into all his pockets, and held out four bills to the colonel.
“There’s sixty pesos, friend,” he said. “When the rooster is sold we’ll settle up.”
The colonel walked with the doctor past the stalls at the waterfront, which were beginning to revive in the cool of the afternoon. A barge loaded with sugar cane was moving down the thread of current. The colonel found the doctor strangely impervious.
“And you, how are you. Doctor?”
The doctor shrugged.
“As usual” he said. “I think I need a doctor.”
“It’s the winter,” the colonel said. “It eats away my insides.”
The doctor examined him with a look absolutely devoid of any professional interest. In succession he greeted the Syrians seated at the doors of their shops. At the door of the doctor’s office, the colonel expressed his opinion of the sale of the rooster.
“I couldn’t do anything else,” he explained.
“That animal feeds on human flesh.”
“The only animal who feeds on human flesh is Sabas,” the doctor said. “I’m sure he’d resell the rooster for the nine hundred pesos.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure of it,” the doctor said. “It’s as sweet a deal as his famous patriotic pact with the Mayor.”
The colonel refused to believe it. “My friend made that pact to save his skin,” he said.“That’s how he could stay in town.”
“And that’s how he could buy the property of his fellow-partisans whom the Mayor kicked out at half their price,” the doctors replied. He knocked on the door, since he didn’t find his keys in his pockets. Then he faced the colonel’s disbelief.
“Don’t be so naive,” he said. “Sabas is much more interested in money than in his own skin.”
The colonel’s wife went shopping that night. He accompanied her to the Syrians’ stalls, pondering the doctor’s revelations.
“Find the boys immediately and tell them that the rooster is sold,” she told him. “We mustn’t leave them with any hopes.”
“The rooster won’t be sold until my friend Sabas comes back,” the colonel answered.
He found Alvaro playing roulette in the pool hall. The place was sweltering on Sunday night. The heat seemed more intense because of the vibrations of the radio turned up full blast. The colonel amused himself with the brightly colored numbers painted on a large black oilcloth cover and lit by an oil lantern placed on a box in the center of the table. Alvaro insisted on losing on twenty-three. Following the game over his shoulder, the colonel observed that the eleven turned up four times in nine spins.
“Bet on eleven,” he whispered into Alvaro’s ear. “It’s the one coming up most.”
Alvaro examined the table. He didn’t bet on the next spin. He took some money out of his pants pocket, and with it a sheet of paper. He gave the paper to the colonel under the table.
“It’s from Agustín,” he said.
The colonel put the clandestine note in his pocket. Alvaro bet heavily on the eleven.
“Start with just a little,” the colonel said.
“It may be a good hunch,” Alvaro replied. A group of neighboring players
took their bets off the other numbers and bet on eleven after the enormous colored wheel had already begun to turn. The colonel felt oppressed. For the first time he felt the fascination, agitation, and bitterness of gambling.
The five won.
“I’m sorry” the colonel said, ashamed, and, with an irresistible feeling of guilt, followed the little wooden rake which pulled in Alvaro’s money.
“That’s what I get for butting into what doesn’t concern me.”
Alvaro smiled without looking at him.
“Don’t worry, Colonel. Trust to love.”
The trumpets playing a mambo were suddenly interrupted. The gamblers scattered with their hands in the air. The colonel felt the dry snap, articulate and cold, of a rifle being cocked behind his back. He realized that he had been caught fatally in a police raid with the clandestine paper in his pocket. He turned halfway around without raising his hands. And then he saw, close up, for the first time in his life, the man who had shot his son. The man was directly in front of him, with his rifle barrel aimed at the colonel’s belly. He was small, Indian-looking, with weather-beaten skin, and his breath smelled like a child’s. The colonel gritted his teeth and gently pushed the rifle barrel away with the tips of his fingers.
“Excuse me,” he said.
He confronted two round little bat eyes. In an instant, he felt himself being swallowed up by those eyes, crushed, digested, and expelled immediately.
“You may go, Colonel.”
He didn’t need to open the window to tell it was December. He knew it in his bones when he was cutting up the fruit for the rooster’s breakfast in the kitchen. Then he opened the door and the sight of the patio confirmed his feeling. It was a marvelous patio, with the grass and the trees, and the cubicle with the privy floating in the clear air, one millimeter above the ground.
His wife stayed in bed until nine. When she appeared in the kitchen, the colonel had already straightened up the house and was talking to the children in a circle around the rooster. She had to make a detour to get to the stove.
“Get out of the way!” she shouted. She glowered in the animal’s direction. “I don’t know when I’ll ever get rid of that evil-omened bird.”
The colonel regarded his wife’s mood over the rooster. Nothing about the rooster deserved resentment. He was ready for training. His neck and his feathered purple thighs, his saw-toothed crest: the animal had taken on a slender figure, a defenseless air.
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories Page 5