'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,' Hernan 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 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 willful, 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 everybody 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.'
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.'
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
COLLECTED STORIES
IN EVIL HOUR
INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
LEAF STORM
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
STRANGE PILGRIMS
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
'My favourite book by one of the world's greatest authors. You're in the hands of a master' Mariella Frostrup 'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on ...'
When newly-wed Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Angela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.
As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night's revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Angela's brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.
'A masterpiece' Evening Standard
'A work of high explosiveness - the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel' The Times
'Brilliant writer, brilliant book' Guardian
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
COLLECTED STORIES
'The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical' John Updike Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Marquez's stories are a delight.
'These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Marquez' Guardian
'Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Sunday Telegraph
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do' Salman Rushdie
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
IN EVIL HOUR
'A masterly book' Guardian
'Cesar Montero was dreaming about elephants. He'd seen them at the movies on Sunday ...'
Only moments later, Cesar is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed.
But Cesar is not the only man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown - under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning's lampoons.
As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants' sanity in tatters?
'In Evil Hour was the book which was to inspire my own career as a novelist. I owe my writing voice to that one book!' Jim Crace 'Belongs to the very best of Marquez's work ... Should on no account be missed' Financial Times
'A splendid achievement' The Times
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
'These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is the essence of Marquez' Guardian
'Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow ...'
Whilst her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Erendira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chore
s leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table - and is fast asleep when it topples over ...
Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount that Erendira must repay her for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Erendira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?
'It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what "fabulous" really means' Time Out
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie 'One of this century's most evocative writers' Anne Tyler
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
LEAF STORM
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie 'Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm'
As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognizable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay.
Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial - and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.
'The most important writer of fiction in any language' Bill Clinton 'Marquez is a retailer of wonders' Sunday Times
'An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate, and extremely funny' Sunday Telegraph
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
'A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn't find. A thrilling miracle of a book' The Times