'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. I'll 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, an 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 front 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 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 if 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 the
y 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 doctor 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 Agustin,' 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 the 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.
'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 colo
nel, 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.
Hernan 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 Hernan's calm eyes. They looked at each other without blinking.