No One Writes to the Colonel

by Gabriel García Márquez

  He followed him through the street parallel to the harbor, a labyrinth of stores and booths with colored merchandise on display. Every time he did it, the colonel experienced an anxiety very different from, but just as oppressive as, fright. The doctor was waiting for the newspapers in the post office.

  ‘My wife wants me to ask you if we threw boiling water on you at our house,’ the colonel said.

  He was a young physician with his skull covered by sleek black hair. There was something unbelievable in the perfection of his dentition. He asked after the health of the asthmatic. The colonel supplied a detailed report without taking his eyes off the postmaster, who was distributing the letters into cubbyholes. His indolent way of moving exasperated the colonel.

  The doctor received his mail with the packet of newspapers. He put the pamphlets of medical advertising to one side. Then he scanned his personal letters. Meanwhile the postmaster was handing out mail to those who were present. The colonel watched the compartment which corresponded to his letter in the alphabet. An air-mail letter with blue borders increased his nervous tension.

  The doctor broke the seal on the newspapers. He read the lead items while the colonel – his eyes fixed on the little box – waited for the postmaster to stop in front of it. But he didn’t. The doctor interrupted his reading of the newspapers. He looked at the colonel. Then he looked at the postmaster seated in front of the telegraph key, and then again at the colonel.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ he said.

  The postmaster didn’t raise his head.

  ‘Nothing for the colonel,’ he said.

  The colonel felt ashamed.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting anything,’ he lied. He turned to the doctor with an entirely childish look. ‘No one writes to me.’

  They went back in silence. The doctor was concentrating on the newspapers. The colonel with his habitual way of walking which resembled that of a man retracing his steps to look for a lost coin. It was a bright afternoon. The almond trees in the plaza were shedding their last rotted leaves. It had begun to grow dark when they arrived at the door of the doctor’s office.

  ‘What’s in the news?’ the colonel asked.

  The doctor gave him a few newspapers.

  ‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to read between the lines which the censor lets them print.’

  The colonel read the main headlines. International news. At the top, across four columns, a report on the Suez Canal. The front page was almost completely covered by paid funeral announcements.

  ‘There’s no hope of elections,’ the colonel said.

  ‘Don’t be naïve, colonel,’ said the doctor. ‘We’re too old now to be waiting for the Messiah.’

  The colonel tried to give the newspapers back, but the doctor refused them.

  ‘Take them home with you,’ he said. ‘You can read them tonight and return them tomorrow.’

  A little after seven the bells in the tower rang out the censor’s movie classifications. Father Ángel used this means to announce the moral classification of the film in accordance with the ratings he received every month by mail. The colonel’s wife counted twelve bells.

  ‘Unfit for everyone,’ she said. ‘It’s been about a year now that the movies are bad for everyone.’

  She lowered the mosquito netting and murmured, ‘The world is corrupt.’ But the colonel made no comment. Before lying down, he tied the rooster to the leg of the bed. He locked the house and sprayed some insecticide in the bedroom. Then he put the lamp on the floor, hung his hammock up, and lay down to read the newspapers.

  He read them in chronological order, from the first page to the last, including the advertisements. At eleven the trumpet blew curfew. The colonel finished his reading a half-hour later, opened the patio door on the impenetrable night, and urinated, besieged by mosquitoes, against the wall studs. His wife was awake when he returned to the bedroom.

  ‘Nothing about the veterans?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said the colonel. He put out the lamp before he got into the hammock. ‘In the beginning at least they published the list of the new pensioners. But it’s been about five years since they’ve said anything.’

  It rained after midnight. The colonel managed to get to sleep but woke up a moment later, alarmed by his intestines. He discovered a leak in some part of the roof. Wrapped in a wool blanket up to his ears, he tried to find the leak in the darkness. A trickle of cold sweat slipped down his spine. He had a fever. He felt as if he were floating in concentric circles inside a tank of jelly. Someone spoke. The colonel answered from his revolutionist’s cot.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ asked his wife.

  ‘The Englishman disguised as a tiger who appeared at Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s camp,’ the colonel answered. He turned over in his hammock, burning with his fever. ‘It was the Duke of Marlborough.’

  The sky was clear at dawn. At the second call for Mass, he jumped from the hammock and installed himself in a confused reality which was agitated by the crowing of the rooster. His head was still spinning in concentric circles. He was nauseous. He went out into the patio and headed for the privy through the barely audible whispers and the dark odors of winter. The inside of the little zinc-roofed wooden compartment was rarefied by the ammonia smell from the privy. When the colonel raised the lid, a triangular cloud of flies rushed out of the pit.

  It was a false alarm. Squatting on the platform of unsanded boards, he felt the uneasiness of an urge frustrated. The oppressiveness was substituted by a dull ache in his digestive tract. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he murmured. ‘It’s the same every October.’ And again he assumed his posture of confident and innocent expectation until the fungus in his innards was pacified. Then he returned to the bedroom for the rooster.

  ‘Last night you were delirious from fever,’ his wife said.

  She had begun to straighten up the room, having recovered from a week-long attack. The colonel made an effort to remember.

  ‘It wasn’t fever,’ he lied. ‘It was the dream about the spider webs again.’

  As always happened, the woman emerged from her attack full of nervous energy. In the course of the morning she turned the house upside down. She changed the position of everything, except the clock and the picture of the young girl. She was so thin and sinewy that when she walked about in her cloth slippers and her black dress all buttoned up she seemed as if she had the power of walking through the walls. But before twelve she had regained her bulk, her human weight. In bed she was an empty space. Now, moving among the flowerpots of ferns and begonias, her presence overflowed the house. ‘If Agustín’s year were up, I would start singing,’ she said while she stirred the pot where all the things to eat that the tropical land is capable of producing, cut into pieces, were boiling.

  ‘If you feel like singing, sing,’ said the colonel. ‘It’s good for your spleen.’

  The doctor came after lunch. The colonel and his wife were drinking coffee in the kitchen when he pushed open the street door and shouted:

  ‘Everybody dead?’

  The colonel got up to welcome him.

  ‘So it seems, doctor,’ he said, going into the living room. ‘I’ve always said that your clock keeps time with the buzzards.’

  The woman went into the bedroom to get ready for the examination. The doctor stayed in the living room with the colonel. In spite of the heat, his immaculate linen suit gave off a smell of freshness. When the woman announced that she was ready, the doctor gave the colonel three sheets of paper in an envelope. He entered the bedroom, saying, ‘That’s what the newspapers didn’t print yesterday.’

  The colonel had assumed as much. It was a summary of the events in the country, mimeographed for clandestine circulation. Revelations about the state of armed resistance in the interior of the country. He felt defeated. Ten years of clandestine reports had not taught him that no news was more surprising than next month’s news. He had finished reading when the doctor came back into the living ro
om.

  ‘This patient is healthier than I am,’ he said. ‘With asthma like that, I could live to be a hundred.’

  The colonel glowered at him. He gave him back the envelope without saying a word, but the doctor refused to take it.

  ‘Pass it on,’ he said in a whisper.

  The colonel put the envelope in his pants pocket. The woman came out of the bedroom, saying, ‘One of these days I’ll up and die, and carry you with me, off to hell, doctor.’ The doctor responded silently with the stereotyped enamel of his teeth. He pulled a chair up to the little table and took several jars of free samples out of his bag. The woman went on into the kitchen.

  ‘Wait and I’ll warm up the coffee.’

  ‘No, thank you very much,’ said the doctor. He wrote the proper dosage on a prescription pad. ‘I absolutely refuse to give you the chance to poison me.’

  She laughed in the kitchen. When he finished writing, the doctor read the prescription aloud, because he knew that no one could decipher his handwriting. The colonel tried to concentrate. Returning from the kitchen, the woman discovered in his face the toll of the previous night.

  ‘This morning he had a fever,’ she said, pointing at her husband. ‘He spent about two hours talking nonsense about the civil war.’

  The colonel started.

  ‘It wasn’t a fever,’ he insisted, regaining his composure. ‘Furthermore,’ he said, ‘the day I feel sick I’ll throw myself into the garbage can on my own.’

  He went into the bedroom to find the newspapers.

  ‘Thank you for the compliment,’ the doctor said.

  They walked together toward the plaza. The air was dry. The tar on the streets had begun to melt from the heat. When the doctor said goodbye, the colonel asked him in a low voice, his teeth clenched: ‘How much do we owe you, doctor?’

  ‘Nothing, for now,’ the doctor said, and he gave him a pat on the shoulder. ‘I’ll send you a fat bill when the cock wins.’

  The colonel went to the tailor shop to take the clandestine letter to Agustín’s companions. It was his only refuge ever since his co-partisans had been killed or exiled from town and he had been converted into a man with no other occupation than waiting for the mail every Friday.

  The afternoon heat stimulated the woman’s energy. Seated among the begonias in the veranda next to a box of worn-out clothing, she was again working the eternal miracle of creating new apparel out of nothing. She made collars from sleeves, and cuffs from the backs and square patches, perfect ones, although with scraps of different colors. A cicada lodged its whistle in the patio. The sun faded. But she didn’t see it go down over the begonias. She raised her head only at dusk when the colonel returned home. Then she clasped her neck with both hands, cracked her knuckles, and said:

  ‘My head is as stiff as a board.’

  ‘It’s always been that way,’ the colonel said, but then he saw his wife’s body covered all over with scraps of color. ‘You look like a magpie,’

  ‘One has to be half a magpie to dress you,’ she said. She held out a shirt made of three different colors of material except for the collar and cuffs, which were of the same color. ‘At the carnival all you have to do is take off your jacket.’

  The six-o’clock bells interrupted her. ‘The Angel of the Lord announced unto Mary,’ she prayed aloud, heading into the bedroom. The colonel talked to the children who had come to look at the rooster after school. Then he remembered that there was no corn for the next day, and entered the bedroom to ask his wife for money.

  ‘I think there’s only fifty cents,’ she said.

  She kept the money under the mattress, knotted into the corner of a handkerchief. It was the proceeds of Agustín’s sewing machine. For nine months, they had spent that money penny by penny, parceling it out between their needs and the rooster’s. Now there were only two twenty-cent pieces and a ten-cent piece left.

  ‘Buy a pound of corn,’ the woman said. ‘With the change, buy tomorrow’s coffee and four ounces of cheese.’

  ‘And a golden elephant to hang in the doorway,’ the colonel went on. ‘The corn alone costs forty-two.’

  They thought for a moment. ‘The rooster is an animal, and therefore he can wait,’ said the woman at first. But her husband’s expression caused her to reflect. The colonel sat on the bed, his elbows on his knees, jingling the coins in his hands. ‘It’s not for my sake,’ he said after a moment. ‘If it depended on me I’d make a rooster stew this very evening. A fifty-peso indigestion would be very good.’ He paused to squash a mosquito on his neck. Then his eyes followed his wife around the room.

  ‘What bothers me is that those poor boys are saving up.’

  Then she began to think. She turned completely around with the insecticide bomb. The colonel found something unreal in her attitude, as if she were invoking the spirits of the house for a consultation. At last she put the bomb on the little mantel with the prints on it, and fixed her syrup-colored eyes on the syrup-colored eyes of the colonel.

  ‘Buy the corn,’ she said. ‘God knows how we’ll manage.’

  ‘This is the miracle of the multiplying loaves,’ the colonel repeated every time they sat down to the table during the following week. With her astonishing capacity for darning, sewing, and mending, she seemed to have discovered the key to sustaining the household economy with no money. October prolonged its truce. The humidity was replaced by sleepiness. Comforted by the copper sun, the woman devoted three afternoons to her complicated hairdo. ‘High Mass has begun,’ the colonel said one afternoon when she was getting the knots out of her long blue tresses with a comb which had some teeth missing. The second afternoon, seated in the patio with a white sheet in her lap, she used a finer comb to take out the lice which had proliferated during her attack. Lastly, she washed her hair with lavender water, waited for it to dry, and rolled it up on the nape of her neck in two turns held with a barrette. The colonel waited. At night, sleepless in his hammock, he worried for many hours over the rooster’s fate. But on Wednesday they weighed him, and he was in good shape.

  That same afternoon, when Agustín’s companions left the house counting the imaginary proceeds from the rooster’s victory, the colonel also felt in good shape. His wife cut his hair. ‘You’ve taken twenty years off me,’ he said, examining his head with his hands. His wife thought her husband was right.

  ‘When I’m well, I can bring back the dead,’ she said.

  But her conviction lasted for a very few hours. There was no longer anything in the house to sell, except the clock and the picture. Thursday night, at the limit of their resources, the woman showed her anxiety over the situation.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the colonel consoled her. ‘The mail comes tomorrow.’

  The following day he waited for the launches in front of the doctor’s office.

  ‘The airplane is a marvelous thing,’ the colonel said, his eyes resting on the mailbag. ‘They say you can get to Europe in one night.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the doctor said, fanning himself with an illustrated magazine. The colonel spied the postmaster among a group waiting for the docking to end so they could jump onto the launch. The postmaster jumped first. He received from the captain an envelope sealed with wax. Then he climbed up onto the roof. The mailbag was tied between two oil drums.

  ‘But still it has its dangers,’ said the colonel. He lost the postmaster from sight, but saw him again among the colored bottles on the refreshment cart. ‘Humanity doesn’t progress without paying a price.’

  ‘Even at this stage it’s safer than a launch,’ the doctor said. ‘At twenty thousand feet you fly above the weather.’

  ‘Twenty thousand feet,’ the colonel repeated, perplexed, without being able to imagine what the figure meant.

  The doctor became interested. He spread out the magazine with both hands until it was absolutely still.

  ‘There’s perfect stability,’ he said.

  But the colonel was hanging on the actions of the postmast
er. He saw him consume a frothy pink drink, holding the glass in his left hand. In his right he held the mailbag.

  ‘Also, on the ocean there are ships at anchor in continual contact with night flights,’ the doctor went on. ‘With so many precautions it’s safer than a launch.’

  The colonel looked at him.

  ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘It must be like a carpet.’

  The postmaster came straight toward them. The colonel stepped back, impelled by an irresistible anxiety, trying to read the name written on the sealed envelope. The postmaster opened the bag. He gave the doctor his packet of newspapers. Then he tore open the envelope with the personal correspondence, checked the correctness of the receipt, and read the addressee’s names off the letters. The doctor opened the newspapers.

  ‘Still the problem with Suez,’ he said, reading the main headlines. ‘The West is losing ground.’

  The colonel didn’t read the headlines. He made an effort to control his stomach. ‘Ever since there’s been censorship, the newspapers talk only about Europe,’ he said. ‘The best thing would be for the Europeans to come over here and for us to go to Europe. That way everybody would know what’s happening in his own country.’

  ‘To the Europeans, South America is a man with a mustache, a guitar, and a gun,’ the doctor said, laughing over his newspaper. ‘They don’t understand the problem.’

  The postmaster delivered his mail. He put the rest in the bag and closed it again. The doctor got ready to read two personal letters, but before tearing open the envelopes he looked at the colonel. Then he looked at the postmaster.

  ‘Nothing for the colonel?’

  The colonel was terrified. The postmaster tossed the bag onto his shoulder, got off the platform, and replied without turning his head: ‘No one writes to the colonel.’

  Contrary to his habit, he didn’t go directly home. He had a cup of coffee at the tailor’s while Agustín’s companions leafed through the newspapers. He felt cheated. He would have preferred to stay there until the next Friday to keep from having to face his wife that night with empty hands. But when the tailor shop closed, he had to face up to reality. His wife was waiting for him.