“Lean out the window and forget the rooster,” the colonel said when the children left. “On mornings like this, one feels like having a picture taken.”
She leaned out the window but her face betrayed no emotion. “I would like to plant the roses,” she said, returning to the stove. The colonel hung the mirror on the hook to shave.
“If you want to plant the roses, go ahead,” he said.
He tried to make his movements match those in the mirror.
“The pigs eat them up,” she said.
“All the better,” the colonel said. “Pigs fattened on roses ought to taste very good.”
He looked for his wife in the mirror and noticed that she still had the same expression. By the light of the fire her face seemed to be formed of the same material as the stove. Without noticing, his eyes fixed on her, the colonel continued shaving himself by touch as he had done for many years. The woman thought, in a long silence.
“But I don’t want to plant them,” she said.
“Fine” said the colonel. “Then don’t plant them.”
He felt well. December had shriveled the flora in his gut. He suffered a disappointment that morning trying to put on his new shoes. But after trying several times he realized that it was a wasted effort, and put on his patent-leather ones. His wife noticed the change.
“If you don’t put on the new ones you’ll never break them in,” she said.
“They’re shoes for a cripple,” the colonel protested. “They ought to sell shoes that have already been worn for a month.”
He went into the street stimulated by the presentiment that the letter would arrive that afternoon. Since it still was not time for the launches, he waited for Sabas in his office. But they informed him that he wouldn’t be back until Monday. He didn’t lose his patience despite not having foreseen this setback. “Sooner or later he has to come back,” he told himself, and he headed for the harbor; it was a marvelous moment, a moment of still-unblemished clarity.
“The whole year ought to be December,” he murmured, seated in the store of Moses the Syrian. “One feels as if he were made of glass.”
Moses the Syrian had to make an effort to translate the idea into his almost forgotten Arabic. He was a placid Oriental, encased up to his ears in smooth, stretched skin, and he had the clumsy movements of a drowned man. In fact, he seemed as if he had just been rescued from the water.
“That’s the way it was before,” he said. “If it were the same now, I would be eight hundred and ninety-seven years old. And you?”
“Seventy-five,” said the colonel, his eyes pursuing the postmaster. Only then did he discover the circus. He recognized the patched tent on the roof of the mail boat amid a pile of colored objects. For a second he lost the postmaster while he looked for the wild animals among the crates piled up on the other launches. He didn’t find them.
“It’s a circus,” he said. “It’s the first one that’s come in ten years.”
Moses the Syrian verified his report. He spoke to his wife in a pidgin of Arabic and Spanish. She replied from the back of the store. He made a comment to himself, and then translated his worry for the colonel.
“Hide your cat. Colonel. The boys will steal it to sell it to the circus.”
The colonel was getting ready to follow the postmaster.
“It’s not a wild-animal show,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” the Syrian replied. “The tightrope walkers eat cats so they won’t break their bones.”
He followed the postmaster through the stalls at the waterfront to the plaza. There the loud clamor from the cockfight took him by surprise. A passer-by said something to him about his rooster. Only then did he remember that this was the day set for the trials.
He passed the post office. A moment later he had sunk into the turbulent atmosphere of the pit. He saw his rooster in the middle of the pit, alone, defenseless, his spurs wrapped in rags, with something like fear visible in the trembling of his feet. His adversary was a sad ashen rooster.
The colonel felt no emotion. There was a succession of identical attacks. A momentary engagement of feathers and feet and necks in the middle of an enthusiastic ovation. Knocked against the planks of the barrier, the adversary did a somersault and returned to the attack. His rooster didn’t attack. He rebuffed every attack, and landed again in exactly the same spot. But now his feet weren’t trembling.
Hernán jumped the barrier, picked him up with both hands, and showed him to the crowd in the stands. There was a frenetic explosion of applause and shouting. The colonel noticed the disproportion between the enthusiasm of the applause and the intensity of the fight. It seemed to him a farce to which-voluntarily and consciously—the roosters had also lent themselves.
Impelled by a slightly disdainful curiosity, he examined the circular pit. An excited crowd was hurtling down the stands toward the pit. The colonel observed the confusion of hot, anxious, terribly alive faces. They were new people. All the new people in town. He relived—with foreboding—an instant which had been erased on the edge of his memory. Then he leaped the barrier, made his way through the packed crowd in the pit, and confronted Hernán’s calm eyes. They looked at each other without blinking.
“Good afternoon, Colonel.”
The colonel took the rooster away from him. “Good afternoon,” he muttered. And he said nothing more because the warm deep throbbing of the animal made him shudder. He thought that he had never had such an alive thing in his hands before.
“You weren’t at home,” Hernán said, confused.
A new ovation interrupted him. The colonel felt intimidated. He made his way again, without looking at anybody, stunned by the applause and the shouts, and went into the street with his rooster under his arm.
The whole town–the lower-class people–came out to watch him go by followed by the school children. A gigantic Negro standing on a table with a snake wrapped around his neck was selling medicine without a license at a corner of the plaza. A large group returning from the harbor had stopped to listen to his spiel. But when the colonel passed with the rooster, their attention shifted to him. The way home had never been so long.
He had no regrets. For a long time the town had lain in a sort of stupor, ravaged by ten years of history. That afternoon—another Friday without a letter—the people had awakened. The colonel remembered another era. He saw himself with his wife and his son watching under an umbrella a show which was not interrupted despite the rain. He remembered the party’s leaders, scrupulously groomed, fanning themselves to the beat of the music in the patio of his house. He almost relived the painful resonance of the bass drum in his intestines.
He walked along the street parallel to the harbor and there, too, found the tumultuous Election Sunday crowd of long ago. They were watching the circus unloading. From inside a tent, a woman shouted something about the rooster. He continued home, self-absorbed, still hearing scattered voices, as if the remnants of the ovation in the pit were pursuing him.
At the door he addressed the children:
“Everyone go home,” he said. “Anyone who comes in will leave with a hiding.”
He barred the door and went straight into the kitchen. His wife came out of the bedroom choking.
“They took it by force,” she said, sobbing. “I told them that the rooster would not leave this house while I was alive.” The colonel tied the rooster to the leg of the stove. He changed the water in the can, pursued by his wife’s frantic voice.
“They said they would take it over our dead bodies,” she said. “They said the rooster didn’t belong to us but to the whole town.”
Only when he finished with the rooster did the colonel turn to the contorted face of his wife. He discovered, without surprise, that it produced neither remorse nor compassion in him.
“They did the right thing,” he said quietly. And then, looking through his pockets, he added with a sort of bottomless sweetness:
“The rooster’s not for sale
.”
She followed him to the bedroom. She felt him to be completely human, but untouchable, as if she were seeing him on a movie screen. The colonel took a roll of bills out of the closet, added what he had in his pockets to it, counted the total, and put it back in the closet.
“There are twenty-nine pesos to return to my friend Sabas,” he said. “He’ll get the rest when the pension arrives.”
“And if it doesn’t arrive?” the woman asked.
“It will.”
“But if it doesn’t?”
“Well, then, he won’t get paid.”
He found his new shoes under the bed. He went back to the closet for the box, cleaned the soles with a rag, and put the shoes in the box, just as his wife had brought them Sunday night. She didn’t move.
“The shoes go back,” the colonel said. “That’s thirteen pesos more for my friend.”
“They won’t take them back,” she said.
“They have to take them back,” the colonel replied. “I’ve only put them on twice.”
“The Turks don’t understand such things,” the woman said.
“They have to understand”
“And if they don’t?”
“Well, then, they don’t.”
They went to bed without eating. The colonel waited for his wife to finish her rosary to turn out the lamp. But he couldn’t sleep. He heard the bells for the movie classifications, and almost at once—three hours later—the curfew. The gravelly breathing of his wife became anguished with the chilly night air. The colonel still had his eyes open when she spoke to him in a calm, conciliatory voice:
“You’re awake.”
“Yes.”
“Try to listen to reason,” the woman said. “Talk to my friend Sabas tomorrow.”
“He’s not coming back until Monday.”
“Better,” said the woman. “That way you’ll have three days to think about what you’re going to say.”
“There’s nothing to think about,” the colonel said.
A pleasant coolness had taken the place of the viscous air of October. The colonel recognized December again in the timetable of the plovers. When it struck two, he still hadn’t been able to fall asleep. But he knew that his wife was also awake. He tried to change his position in the hammock.
“You can’t sleep,” the woman said.
“No.”
She thought for a moment.
“We’re in no condition to do that” she said. “Just think how much four hundred pesos in one lump sum is.”
“It won’t be long now till the pension comes” the colonel said.
“You’ve been saying the same thing for fifteen years.”
“That’s why,” the colonel said. “It can’t be much longer now.”
She was silent. But when she spoke again, it didn’t seem to the colonel as if any time had passed at all.
“I have the impression the money will never arrive,” the woman said.
“It will.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
He couldn’t find his voice to answer. At the first crowing of the rooster he was struck by reality, but he sank back again into a dense, safe, remorseless sleep. When he awoke, the sun was already high in the sky. His wife was sleeping. The colonel methodically repeated his morning activities, two hours behind schedule, and waited for his wife to eat breakfast.
She was uncommunicative when she awoke. They said good morning, and they sat down to eat in silence. The colonel sipped a cup of black coffee and had a piece of cheese and a sweet roll. He spent the whole morning in the tailor shop. At one o’clock he returned home and found his wife mending clothes among the begonias.
“It’s lunchtime,” he said,
“There is no lunch.”
He shrugged. He tried to block up the holes in the patio wall to prevent the children from coming into the kitchen. When he came back into the hall, lunch was on the table.
During the course of lunch, the colonel realized that his wife was making an effort not to cry. This certainty alarmed him. He knew his wife’s character, naturally hard, and hardened even more by forty years of bitterness. The death of her son had not wrung a single tear out of her.
He fixed a reproving look directly on her eyes. She bit her lips, dried her eyelids on her sleeve, and continued eating lunch.
“You have no consideration” she said.
The colonel didn’t speak.
“You’re wilful, stubborn, and inconsiderate,” she repeated. She crossed her knife and fork on the plate, but immediately rectified their positions superstitiously. “An entire lifetime eating dirt just so that now it turns out that I deserve less consideration than a rooster.”
“That’s different,” the colonel said.
“It’s the same thing,” the woman replied. “You ought to realize that I’m dying; this thing I have is not a sickness but a slow death.”
The colonel didn’t speak until he finished eating his lunch.
“If the doctor guarantees me that by selling the rooster you’ll get rid of your asthma, I’ll sell him immediately,” he said. “But if not, not.”
That afternoon he took the rooster to the pit. On his return he found his wife on the verge of an attack. She was walking up and down the hall, her hair down her back, her arms spread wide apart, trying to catch her breath above the whistling in her lungs. She was there until early evening. Then she went to bed without speaking to her husband.
She mouthed prayers until a little after curfew. Then the colonel got ready to put out the lamp. But she objected.
“I don’t want to die in the dark,” she said.
The colonel left the lamp on the floor. He began to feel exhausted. He wished he could forget everything, sleep forty-four days in one stretch, and wake up on January 20th at three in the afternoon, in the pit, and at the exact moment to let the rooster loose. But he felt himself threatened by the sleeplessness of his wife.
“It’s the same story as always,” she began a moment later. “We put up with hunger so others can eat. It’s been the same story for forty years.”
The colonel kept silent until his wife paused to ask him if he was awake. He answered that he was. The woman continued in a smooth, fluent, implacable tone.
“Everybody will win with the rooster except us. We’re the only ones who don’t have a cent to bet.”
“The owner of the rooster is entitled to twenty per cent.”
“You were also entitled to get a position when they made you break your back for them in the elections,” the woman replied. “You were also entitled to the veteran’s pension after risking your neck in the civil war. Now everyone has his future assured and you’re dying of hunger, completely alone.”
“I’m not alone” the colonel said.
He tried to explain, but sleep overtook him. She kept talking dully until she realized that her husband was sleeping. Then she got out of the mosquito net and walked up and down the living room in the darkness. There she continued talking. The colonel called her at dawn.
She appeared at the door, ghostlike, illuminated from below by the lamp which was almost out. She put it out before getting into the mosquito netting. But she kept talking.
“We’re going to do one thing,” the colonel interrupted her.
“The only thing we can do is sell the rooster,” said the woman.
“We can also sell the clock.”
“They won’t buy it.”
“Tomorrow I’ll try to see if Alvaro will give me the forty pesos.”
“He won’t give them to you.”
“Then we’ll sell the picture.”
When the woman spoke again, she was outside the mosquito net again. The colonel smelled her breath impregnated with medicinal herbs.
“They won’t buy it,” she said.
“We’ll see,” the colonel said gently, without a trace of change in his voice. “Now, go to sleep. If we can’t sell anything tomorrow, we’ll think of something else.”
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He tried to keep his eyes open but sleep broke his resolve. He fell to the bottom of a substance without time and without space, where the words of his wife had a different significance. But a moment later he felt himself being shaken by the shoulder.
“Answer me.”
The colonel didn’t know if he had heard those words before or after he had slept. Dawn was breaking. The window stood out in Sunday’s green clarity. He thought he had a fever. His eyes burned and he had to make a great effort to clear his head.
“What will we do if we can’t sell anything?” the woman repeated.
“By then it will be January 20th,” the colonel said, completely awake. “They’ll pay the twenty per cent that very afternoon.”
“If the rooster wins,” the woman said. “But if he loses. It hasn’t occurred to you that the rooster might lose.”
“He’s one rooster that can’t lose.”
“But suppose he loses.”
“There are still forty-four days left to begin to think about that,” the colonel said.
The woman lost her patience.
“And meanwhile what do we eat?” she asked, and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel night shirt. She shook him hard.
It had taken the colonel seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute—to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:
“Shit.”
Big Mama’s Funeral
tuesday siesta
The train emerged from the quivering tunnel of sandy rocks, began to cross the symmetrical, interminable banana plantations, and the air became humid and they couldn’t feel the sea breeze any more. A stifling blast of smoke came in the car window. On the narrow road parallel to the railway there were oxcarts loaded with green bunches of bananas. Beyond the road, in uncultivated spaces set at odd intervals there were offices with electric fans, red-brick buildings, and residences with chairs and little white tables on the terraces among dusty palm trees and rosebushes. It was eleven in the morning, and the heat had not yet begun.
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories Page 6