All night I was thinking that today we’d get out of school again and go to the river, but not with Gilberto and Tobías. I want to go alone with Abraham, to see the shine of his stomach when he dives and comes up again like a metal fish. All night long I’ve wanted to go back with him, alone in the darkness of the green tunnel, to brush his thigh as we walk along. Whenever I do that I feel as if someone is biting me with soft nibbles and my skin creeps.
If this man who’s come to talk to my grandfather in the other room comes back in a little while maybe we can be home before four o’clock. Then I’ll go to the river with Abraham.
He stayed on to live at our house. He occupied one of the rooms off the veranda, the one that opens onto the street, because I thought it would be convenient, for I knew that a man of his type wouldn’t be comfortable in the small hotel in town. He put a sign on the door (it was still there until a few years ago when they whitewashed the house, written in pencil in his own hand), and on the following week we had to bring in new chairs to take care of the demands of his numerous patients.
After he gave me the letter from Colonel Aureliano Buendía, our conversation in the office went on so long that Adelaida had no doubts but that it was a matter of some high military official on an important mission, and she set the table as if for a holiday. We spoke about Colonel Buendía, his premature daughter, and his wild firstborn son. The conversation had not gone on too long when I gathered that the man knew the Intendant-General quite well and that he had enough regard for him to warrant his confidence. When Meme came to tell us that dinner was served, I thought that my wife had improvised some things in order to take care of the newcomer. But a far cry from improvisation was that splendid table served on the new cloth, on the chinaware destined exclusively for family dinners on Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Adelaida was solemnly sitting up straight at one end of the table in a velvet dress closed up to the neck, the one that she wore before our marriage to attend to family business in the city. Adelaida had more refined customs than we did, a certain social experience which, since our marriage, had begun to influence the ways of my house. She had put on the family medallion, the one that she displayed at moments of exceptional importance, and all of her, just like the table, the furniture, the air that was breathed in the dining room, brought on a severe feeling of composure and cleanliness. When we reached the parlor, the man, who was always so careless in his dress and manners, must have felt ashamed and out of place, for he checked the button on his shirt as if he were wearing a tie, and a slight nervousness could be noticed in his unworried and strong walk. I can remember nothing with such precision as that instant in which we went into the dining room and I myself felt dressed too domestically for a table like the one Adelaida had prepared.
There was beef and game on the plates. Everything the same, however, as at our regular meals at that time, except for the presentation on the new china, between the newly polished candlesticks, which was spectacular and different from the norm. In spite of the fact that my wife knew that we would be having only one visitor, she had set eight places, and the bottle of wine in the center was an exaggerated manifestation of the diligence with which she had prepared the homage for the man whom, from the first moment, she had confused with a distinguished military functionary. Never before had I seen in my house an environment more loaded with unreality.
Adelaida’s clothing would have been ridiculous had it not been for her hands (they were beautiful, really, and overly white), which balanced, along with her regal distinction, the falsity and arrangement of her appearance. It was when he checked the button on his shirt and hesitated that I got ahead of myself and said: ‘My second wife, doctor.’ A cloud darkened Adelaida’s face and turned it strange and gloomy. She didn’t budge from where she was, her hand held out, smiling, but no longer with the air of ceremonious stiffness that she had had when we came into the dining room.
The newcomer clicked his heels like a military man, touched his forehead with the tips of his extended fingers, and then walked over to where she was.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. But he didn’t pronounce any name.
Only when I saw him clumsily shake Adelaida’s hand did I become aware that his manners were vulgar and common.
He sat at the other end of the table, between the new crystalware, between the candlesticks. His disarrayed presence stood out like a soup stain on the tablecloth.
Adelaida poured the wine. Her emotion from the beginning had been changed into a passive nervousness that seemed to say: It’s all right, everything will be done the way it was laid out, but you owe me an explanation.
And it was after she served the wine and sat down at the other end of the table, while Meme got ready to serve the plates, that he leaned back in his chair, rested his hands on the tablecloth, and said with a smile:
‘Look, miss, just start boiling a little grass and bring that to me as if it were soup.’
Meme didn’t move. She tried to laugh, but she couldn’t get it out; instead she turned toward Adelaida. Then she, smiling too, but visibly upset, asked him: ‘What kind of grass, doctor?’ And he, in his parsimonious ruminant voice:
‘Ordinary grass, ma’am. The kind that donkeys eat.’
V
There’s a moment when siesta time runs dry. Even the secret, hidden, minute activity of the insects ceases at that precise instant; the course of nature comes to a halt; creation stumbles on the brink of chaos and women get up, drooling, with the flower of the embroidered pillowcase on their cheeks, suffocated by temperature and rancor; and they think: It’s still Wednesday in Macondo. And then they go back to huddling in the corner, splicing sleep to reality, and they come to an agreement, weaving the whispering as if it were an immense flat surface of thread stitched in common by all the women in town.
If inside time had the same rhythm as that outside, we would be in the bright sunlight now, in the middle of the street with the coffin. It would be later outside: it would be nighttime. It would be a heavy September night with a moon and women sitting in their courtyards chatting under the green light, and in the street, us, the renegades, in the full sunlight of this thirsty September. No one will interfere with the ceremony. I expected the mayor to be inflexible in his determination to oppose it and that we could have gone home; the child to school and my father to his clogs, the washbasin under his head dripping with cool water, and on the left-hand side his pitcher with iced lemonade. But now it’s different. My father has once more been sufficiently persuasive to impose his point of view on what I thought at first was the mayor’s irrevocable determination. Outside the town is bustling, given over to the work of a long, uniform, and pitiless whispering; and the clean street, without a shadow on the clean dust, virgin since the last wind swept away the tracks of the last ox. And it’s a town with no one, with closed houses, where nothing is heard in the rooms except the dull bubbling of words pronounced by evil hearts. And in the room, the sitting child, stiff, looking at his shoes; slowly his eyes go to the lamp, then to the newspapers, again to his shoes, and now quickly to the hanged man, his bitten tongue, his glassy dog eyes that have no lust now; a dog with no appetite, dead. The child looks at him, thinks about the hanged man lying underneath the boards; he has a sad expression and then everything changes: a stool comes out by the door of the barbershop and inside the small altar with the mirror, the powder, and the scented water. The hand becomes freckled and large, it’s no longer the hand of my son, it’s been changed into a large, deft hand that coldly, with calculated parsimony, begins to strop the razor while the ear hears the metallic buzzing of the tempered blade and the head thinks: Today they’ll be coming earlier because it’s Wednesday in Macondo. And then they come, sit on the chairs in the shade and the coolness of the threshold, grim, squinting, their legs crossed, their hands folded over their knees, biting on the tips of their cigars; looking, talking about the same thing, watching the closed window across from them, the silent house with Señor
a Rebeca inside. She forgot something too: she forgot to disconnect the fan and she’s going through the rooms with screened windows, nervous, stirred up, going through the knick-knacks of her sterile and tormented widowhood in order to be convinced by her sense of touch that she won’t have died before the hour of burial comes. She’s opening and closing the doors of her rooms, waiting for the patriarchal clock to rise up out of its siesta and reward her senses by striking three. All this, while the child’s expression ends and he goes back to being hard and stiff, not even delaying half the time a woman needs to give the last stitch on the machine and raise her head full of curlers. Before the child goes back to being upright and pensive, the woman has rolled the machine to the corner of the veranda, and the men have bitten their cigars twice while they watch a complete passage of the razor across the cowhide; and Águeda, the cripple, makes a last effort to awaken her dead knees; and Señora Rebeca turns the lock again and thinks: Wednesday in Macondo. A good day to bury the devil. But then the child moves again and there’s a new change in time. When something moves you can tell that time has passed. Not till then. Until something moves time is eternal, the sweat, the shirt drooling on the skin, and the unbribable and icy dead man, behind his bitten tongue. That’s why time doesn’t pass for the hanged man: because even if the child’s hand moves, he doesn’t know it. And while the dead man doesn’t know it (because the child is still moving his hand), Águeda must have gone through another bead on her rosary; Señora Rebeca, lounging in her folding chair, is perplexed, watching the clock remain fixed on the edge of the imminent minute, and Águeda has had time (even though the second hasn’t passed on Señora Rebeca’s clock) to go through another bead on her rosary and think: I’d do that if I could get to Father Ángel. Then the child’s hand descends and the razor makes a motion on the strop and one of the men sitting in the coolness of the threshold says: ‘It must be around three-thirty, right?’ Then the hand stops. A dead clock on the brink of the next minute once more, the razor halted once more in the limits of its own steel; and Águeda still waiting for a new movement of the hand to stretch her legs and burst into the sacristy with her arms open, her knees moving again, saying: ‘Father, father.’ And Father Ángel, prostrate in the child’s immobility, running his tongue over his lips and the viscous taste of the meatball nightmare, seeing Águeda, would then say: ‘This is undoubtedly a miracle,’ and then, rolling about again in the sweaty, drooly drowsiness: ‘In any case, Águeda, this is no time for saying a mass for the souls in Purgatory.’ But the new movement is frustrated, my father comes into the room and the two times are reconciled; the two halves become adjusted, consolidate, and Señora Rebeca’s clock realizes that it’s been caught between the child’s parsimony and the widow’s impatience, and then it yawns, confused, dives into the prodigious quiet of the moment and comes out afterward dripping with liquid time, with exact and rectified time, and it leans forward and says with ceremonious dignity: ‘It’s exactly two forty-seven.’ And my father, who, without knowing it, has broken the paralysis of the instant, says: ‘You’re lost in the clouds, daughter.’ And I say: ‘Do you think something might happen?’ And he, sweating, smiling: ‘At least I’m sure that the rice will be burned and the milk spilled in lots of houses.’
The coffin’s closed now, but I can remember the dead man’s face. I’ve got it so clearly that if I look at the wall I can see his open eyes, his tight gray cheeks that are like damp earth, his bitten tongue to one side of his mouth. This gives me a burning, restless feeling. Maybe if my pants weren’t so tight on one side of my leg.
My grandfather’s sat down beside my mother. When he came back from the next room he brought over the chair and now he’s here, sitting next to her, not saying anything, his chin on his cane and his lame leg stretched out in front of him. My grandfather’s waiting. My mother, like him, is waiting too. The men have stopped smoking on the bed and they’re quiet, all in a row, not looking at the coffin. They’re waiting too.
If they blindfolded me, if they took me by the hand and walked me around town twenty times and brought me back to this room I’d recognize it by the smell. I’ll never forget how this room smells of trash, piled-up trunks, all the same, even though I’ve only seen one trunk, where Abraham and I could hide and there’d still be room left over for Tobías. I know rooms by their smell.
Last year Ada sat me on her lap. I had my eyes closed and I saw her through my lashes. I saw her dark, as if she wasn’t a woman but just a face that was looking at me and rocking and bleating like a sheep. I was really going to sleep when I got the smell.
There’s no smell at home that I can’t recognize. When they leave me alone on the veranda I close my eyes, stick out my arms, and walk. I think: When I get the smell of camphorated rum I’ll be by my grandfather’s room. I keep on walking with my eyes closed and my arms stretched out. I think: Now I’ve gone past my mother’s room, because it smells like new playing cards. Then it will smell of pitch and mothballs. I keep on walking and I get the smell of new playing cards at the exact moment I hear my mother’s voice singing in her room. Then I get the smell of pitch and mothballs. I think: Now I’ll keep on smelling mothballs. Then I’ll turn to the left of the smell and I’ll get the other smell of underwear and closed windows. I’ll stop there. Then, when I take three steps, I get the new smell and I stop, with my eyes closed and my arms outstretched, and I hear Ada’s voice shouting: ‘Child, what are you walking with your eyes closed for?’
That night, when I began to fall asleep, I caught a smell that doesn’t exist in any of the rooms in the house. It was a strong and warm smell, as if someone had been shaking a jasmine bush. I opened my eyes, sniffing the thick and heavy air. I said: ‘Do you smell it?’ Ada was looking at me but when I spoke to her she closed her eyes and looked in the other direction. I asked her again: ‘Do you smell it? It’s as if there were some jasmines somewhere.’ Then she said:
‘It’s the smell of the jasmines that used to be growing on the wall here nine years ago.’
I sat on her lap. ‘But there aren’t any jasmines now,’ I said. And she said: ‘Not now. But nine years ago, when you were born, there was a jasmine bush against the courtyard wall. It would be hot at night and it would smell the same as now.’ I leaned on her shoulder. I looked at her mouth while she spoke. ‘But that was before I was born,’ I said. And she said: ‘During that time there was a great winter storm and they had to clean out the garden.’
The smell was still there, warm, almost touchable, leading the other smells of the night. I told Ada: ‘I want you to tell me that.’ And she remained silent for an instant, then looked toward the whitewashed wall with moonlight on it and said:
‘When you’re older you’ll learn that the jasmine is a flower that comes out.’
I didn’t understand, but I felt a strange shudder, as if someone had touched me. I said: ‘All right,’ and she said: ‘The same thing happens with jasmines as with people who come out and wander through the night after they’re dead.’
I stayed there leaning on her shoulder, not saying anything. I was thinking about other things, about the chair in the kitchen where my grandfather puts his shoes on the seat to dry when it rains. I knew from then on that there’s a dead man in the kitchen and every night he sits down, without taking off his hat, looking at the ashes in the cold stove. After a moment I said: ‘That must be like the dead man who sits in the kitchen.’ Ada looked at me, opened her eyes, and asked: ‘What dead man?’ And I said to her: ‘The one who sits every night in the chair where my grandfather puts his shoes to dry.’ And she said: ‘There’s no dead man there. The chair’s next to the stove because it’s no good for anything else anymore except to dry shoes on.’
That was last year. Now it’s different, now I’ve seen a corpse and all I have to do is close my eyes to keep on seeing him inside, in the darkness of my eyes. I was going to tell my mother, but she’s begun to talk to my grandfather: ‘Do you think something might happen?’ she asks. An
d my grandfather lifts his chin from his cane and shakes his head. ‘At least I’m sure that the rice will be burned and the milk spilled in lots of houses.’
VI
At first he used to sleep till seven o’clock. He would appear in the kitchen with his collarless shirt buttoned up to the neck, his wrinkled and dirty sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his filthy pants at chest level with the belt fastened outside, well below the loops. You had the feeling that his pants were about to fall down, slide off, because there was no body to hold them up. He hadn’t grown thinner, but you didn’t see the military and haughty look he had the first year on his face anymore; he had the dreamy and fatigued expression of a man who doesn’t know what his life will be from one minute to the next and hasn’t got the least interest in finding out. He would drink his black coffee a little after seven and then go back to his room, passing out his inexpressive ‘Good morning’ along the way.
He’d been living in our house for four years and in Macondo he was looked upon as a serious professional man in spite of the fact that his brusque manner and disordered ways built up an atmosphere about him that was more like fear than respect.
He was the only doctor in town until the banana company arrived and work started on the railroad. Then empty seats began to appear in the small room. The people who visited him during the first four years of his stay in Macondo began to drift away when the company organized a clinic for its workers. He must have seen the new directions that the leaf storm was leading to, but he didn’t say anything. He still opened up the street door, sitting in his leather chair all day long until several days passed without the return of a single patient. Then he threw the bolt on the door, bought a hammock, and shut himself up in the room.
During that time Meme got into the habit of bringing him breakfast, which consisted of bananas and oranges. He would eat the fruit and throw the peels into the corner, where the Indian woman would pick them up on Saturdays, when she cleaned the bedroom. But from the way he acted, anyone would have suspected that it made little difference to him whether or not she would stop cleaning some Saturday and the room would become a dungheap.