Collected Stories

  Balthazar began to shave.

  ‘Do you think they’ll give me fifty pesos?’

  ‘That’s nothing for Mr Chepe Montiel, and the cage is worth it,’ said Ursula. ‘You should ask for sixty.’

  The house lay in the stifling shadow. It was the first week of April and the heat seemed less bearable because of the chirping of the cicadas. When he finished dressing, Balthazar opened the door to the patio to cool off the house, and a group of children entered the dining room.

  The news had spread. Dr Octavio Giraldo, an old physician, happy with life but tired of his profession, thought about Balthazar’s cage while he was eating lunch with his invalid wife. On the inside terrace, where they put the table on hot days, there were many flowerpots and two cages with canaries. His wife liked birds, and she liked them so much that she hated cats because they could eat them up. Thinking about her, Dr Giraldo went to see a patient that afternoon, and when he returned he went by Balthazar’s house to inspect the cage.

  There were a lot of people in the dining room. The cage was on display on the table: with its enormous dome of wire, three stories inside, with passageways and compartments especially for eating and sleeping and swings in the space set aside for the birds’ recreation, it seemed like a small-scale model of a gigantic ice factory. The doctor inspected it carefully, without touching it, thinking that in effect the cage was better than its reputation, and much more beautiful than any he had ever dreamed of for his wife.

  ‘This is a flight of the imagination,’ he said. He sought out Balthazar among the group of people and, fixing his paternal eyes on him, added, ‘You would have been an extraordinary architect.’

  Balthazar blushed.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s true,’ said the doctor. He was smoothly and delicately fat, like a woman who had been beautiful in her youth, and he had delicate hands. His voice seemed like that of a priest speaking Latin. ‘You wouldn’t even need to put birds in it,’ he said, making the cage turn in front of the audience’s eyes as if he were auctioning it off. ‘It would be enough to hang it in the trees so it could sing by itself.’ He put it back on the table, thought a moment, looking at the cage, and said:

  ‘Fine, then I’ll take it.’

  ‘It’s sold,’ said Ursula.

  ‘It belongs to the son of Mr Chepe Montiel,’ said Balthazar. ‘He ordered it specially.’

  The doctor adopted a respectful attitude.

  ‘Did he give you the design?’

  ‘No,’ said Balthazar. ‘He said he wanted a large cage, like this one, for a pair of troupials.’

  The doctor looked at the cage.

  ‘But this isn’t for troupials.’

  ‘Of course it is, Doctor,’ said Balthazar, approaching the table. The children surrounded him. ‘The measurements are carefully calculated,’ he said, pointing to the different compartments with his forefinger. Then he struck the dome with his knuckles, and the cage filled with resonant chords.

  ‘It’s the strongest wire you can find, and each joint is soldered outside and in,’ he said.

  ‘It’s even big enough for a parrot,’ interrupted one of the children.

  ‘That it is,’ said Balthazar.

  The doctor turned his head.

  ‘Fine, but he didn’t give you the design,’ he said. ‘He gave you no exact specifications, aside from making it a cage big enough for troupials. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Balthazar.

  ‘Then there’s no problem,’ said the doctor. ‘One thing is a cage big enough for troupials, and another is this cage. There’s no proof that this one is the one you were asked to make.’

  ‘It’s this very one,’ said Balthazar, confused. ‘That’s why I made it.’

  The doctor made an impatient gesture.

  ‘You could make another one,’ said Ursula, looking at her husband. And then, to the doctor: ‘You’re not in any hurry.’

  ‘I promised it to my wife for this afternoon,’ said the doctor.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Doctor,’ said Balthazar, ‘but I can’t sell you something that’s sold already.’

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders. Drying the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief, he contemplated the cage silently with the fixed, unfocused gaze of one who looks at a ship which is sailing away.

  ‘How much did they pay you for it?’

  Balthazar sought out Ursula’s eyes without replying.

  ‘Sixty pesos,’ she said.

  The doctor kept looking at the cage. ‘It’s very pretty.’ He sighed. ‘Extremely pretty.’ Then, moving toward the door, he began to fan himself energetically, smiling, and the trace of that episode disappeared forever from his memory.

  ‘Montiel is very rich,’ he said.

  In truth, José Montiel was not as rich as he seemed, but he would have been capable of doing anything to become so. A few blocks from there, in a house crammed with equipment, where no one had ever smelled a smell that couldn’t be sold, he remained indifferent to the news of the cage. His wife, tortured by an obsession with death, closed the doors and windows after lunch and lay for two hours with her eyes opened to the shadow of the room, while José Montiel took his siesta. The clamor of many voices surprised her there. Then she opened the door to the living room and found a crowd in front of the house, and Balthazar with the cage in the middle of the crowd, dressed in white, freshly shaved, with that expression of decorous candor with which the poor approach the houses of the wealthy.

  ‘What a marvelous thing!’ José Montiel’s wife exclaimed, with a radiant expression, leading Balthazar inside. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,’ she said, and added, annoyed by the crowd which piled up at the door:

  ‘But bring it inside before they turn the living room into a grandstand.’

  Balthazar was no stranger to José Montiel’s house. On different occasions, because of his skill and forthright way of dealing, he had been called in to do minor carpentry jobs. But he never felt at ease among the rich. He used to think about them, about their ugly and argumentative wives, about their tremendous surgical operations, and he always experienced a feeling of pity. When he entered their houses, he couldn’t move without dragging his feet.

  ‘Is Pepe home?’ he asked.

  He had put the cage on the dining-room table.

  ‘He’s at school,’ said José Montiel’s wife. ‘But he shouldn’t be long,’ and she added, ‘Montiel is taking a bath.’

  In reality, José Montiel had not had time to bathe. He was giving himself an urgent alcohol rub, in order to come out and see what was going on. He was such a cautious man that he slept without an electric fan so he could watch over the noises of the house while he slept.

  ‘Adelaide!’ he shouted. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Come and see what a marvelous thing!’ his wife shouted.

  José Montiel, obese and hairy, his towel draped around his neck, appeared at the bedroom window.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Pepe’s cage,’ said Balthazar.

  His wife looked at him perplexedly.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Pepe’s,’ replied Balthazar. And then, turning toward José Montiel, ‘Pepe ordered it.’

  Nothing happened at that instant, but Balthazar felt as if someone had just opened the bathroom door on him. José Montiel came out of the bedroom in his underwear.

  ‘Pepe!’ he shouted.

  ‘He’s not back,’ whispered his wife, motionless.

  Pepe appeared in the doorway. He was about twelve and had the same curved eyelashes and was as quietly pathetic as his mother.

  ‘Come here,’ José Montiel said to him. ‘Did you order this?’

  The child lowered his head. Grabbing him by the hair, José Montiel forced Pepe to look him in the eye.

  ‘Answer me.’

  The child bit his lip without replying.

  ‘Montiel,’ whispered his wife.

 
José Montiel let the child go and turned toward Balthazar in a fury. ‘I’m very sorry, Balthazar,’ he said. ‘But you should have consulted me before going on. Only to you would it occur to contract with a minor.’ As he spoke, his face recovered its serenity. He lifted the cage without looking at it and gave it to Balthazar.

  ‘Take it away at once, and try to sell it to whomever you can,’ he said. ‘Above all, I beg you not to argue with me.’ He patted him on the back and explained, ‘The doctor has forbidden me to get angry.’

  The child had remained motionless, without blinking, until Balthazar looked at him uncertainly with the cage in his hand. Then he emitted a guttural sound, like a dog’s growl, and threw himself on the floor screaming.

  José Montiel looked at him, unmoved, while the mother tried to pacify him. ‘Don’t even pick him up,’ he said. ‘Let him break his head on the floor, and then put salt and lemon on it so he can rage to his heart’s content.’ The child was shrieking tearlessly while his mother held him by the wrists.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ José Montiel insisted.

  Balthazar observed the child as he would have observed the death throes of a rabid animal. It was almost four o’clock. At that hour, at his house, Ursula was singing a very old song and cutting slices of onion.

  ‘Pepe,’ said Balthazar.

  He approached the child, smiling, and held the cage out to him. The child jumped up, embraced the cage which was almost as big as he was, and stood looking at Balthazar through the wirework without knowing what to say. He hadn’t shed one tear.

  ‘Balthazar,’ said José Montiel softly. ‘I told you already to take it away.’

  ‘Give it back,’ the woman ordered the child.

  ‘Keep it,’ said Balthazar. And then, to José Montiel: ‘After all, that’s what I made it for.’

  José Montiel followed him into the living room.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Balthazar,’ he was saying, blocking his path. ‘Take your piece of furniture home and don’t be silly. I have no intention of paying you a cent.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Balthazar. ‘I made it expressly as a gift for Pepe. I didn’t expect to charge anything for it.’

  As Balthazar made his way through the spectators who were blocking the door, José Montiel was shouting in the middle of the living room. He was very pale his eyes were beginning to get red.

  ‘Idiot!’ he was shouting. ‘Take your trinket out of here. The last thing we need is for some nobody to give orders in my house. Son of a bitch!’

  In the pool hall, Balthazar was received with an ovation. Until that moment, he thought that he had made a better cage than ever before, that he’d had to give it to the son of José Montiel so he wouldn’t keep crying, and that none of these things was particularly important. But then he realized that all of this had a certain importance for many people, and he felt a little excited.

  ‘So they gave you fifty pesos for the cage.’

  ‘Sixty,’ said Balthazar.

  ‘Score one for you,’ someone said. ‘You’re the only one who has managed to get such a pile of money out of Mr Chepe Montiel. We have to celebrate.’

  They bought him a beer, and Balthazar responded with a round for everybody. Since it was the first time he had ever been out drinking, by dusk he was completely drunk, and he was talking about a fabulous project of a thousand cages, at sixty pesos each, and then of a million cages, till he had sixty million pesos. ‘We have to make a lot of things to sell to the rich before they die,’ he was saying, blind drunk. ‘All of them are sick, and they’re going to die. They’re so screwed up they can’t even get angry any more.’ For two hours he was paying for the jukebox, which played without interruption. Everybody toasted Balthazar’s health, good luck, and fortune, and the death of the rich, but at mealtime they left him alone in the pool hall.

  Ursula had waited for him until eight, with a dish of fried meat covered with slices of onion. Someone had told her that her husband was in the pool hall, delirious with happiness, buying beers for everyone, but she didn’t believe it, because Balthazar had never got drunk. When she went to bed, almost at midnight Balthazar was in a lighted room where there were little tables, each with four chairs, and an outdoor dance floor, where the plovers were walking around. His face was smeared with rouge, and since he couldn’t take one more step, he thought he wanted to lie down with two women in the same bed. He had spent so much that he had had to leave his watch in pawn, with the promise to pay the next day. A moment later, spread-eagled in the street, he realized that his shoes were being taken off, but he didn’t want to abandon the happiest day of his life. The women who passed on their way to five-o’clock Mass didn’t dare look at him, thinking he was dead.

  Montiel’s Widow

  When José Montiel died, everyone felt avenged except his widow; but it took several hours for everyone to believe that he had indeed died. Many continued to doubt it after seeing the corpse in the sweltering room, crammed along with pillows and linen sheets into a yellow coffin, with sides as rounded as a melon. He was very closely shaved, dressed in white, with patent-leather boots, and he looked so well that he had never seemed as alive as at that moment. It was the same Mr Chepe Montiel as was present every Sunday at eight-o’clock Mass, except that instead of his riding quirt he had a crucifix in his hands. It took screwing the lid on the coffin and walling him up in the showy family mausoleum for the whole town to become convinced that he wasn’t playing dead.

  After the burial, the only thing which seemed incredible to everyone except his widow was that José Montiel had died a natural death. While everyone had been hoping he would be shot in the back in an ambush, his widow was certain she would see him die an old man in his bed, having confessed, and painlessly, like a modern-day saint. She was mistaken in only a few details. José Montiel died in his hammock, the second of August, 1951, at two in the afternoon, as a result of a fit of anger which the doctor had forbidden. But his wife also was hoping that the whole town would attend the funeral and that the house would be too small to hold all the flowers. Nevertheless only the members of his own party and of his religious brotherhood attended, and the only wreaths they received were those from the municipal government. His son, from his consular post in Germany, and his two daughters, from Paris, sent three-page telegrams. One could see that they had written them standing up, with the plentiful ink of the telegraph office, and that they had torn up many telegram forms before finding twenty dollars’ worth of words. None of them promised to come back. That night, at the age of sixty-two, while crying on the pillow upon which the head of the man who had made her happy had rested, the widow of Montiel knew for the first time the taste of resentment. I’ll lock myself up forever, she was thinking. For me, it is as if they had put me in the same box as José Montiel. I don’t want to know anything more about this world.

  She was sincere, that fragile woman, lacerated by superstition, married at twenty by her parents’ will to the only suitor they had allowed her to see at less than thirty feet; she had never been in direct contact with reality. Three days after they took her husband’s body out of the house, she understood through her tears that she ought to pull herself together, but she could not find the direction of her new life. She had to begin at the beginning.

  Among the innumerable secrets José Montiel had taken with him to the grave was the combination of the safe. The Mayor took on the problem. He ordered the safe put in the patio, against the wall, and two policemen fired their rifles at the lock. All morning long the widow heard from the bedroom the muffled reports successively ordered by the Mayor’s shouts.

  That’s the last straw, she thought. Five years spent praying to God to end the shooting, and now I have to thank them for shooting in my house.

  That day, she made a concerted effort to summon death, but no one replied. She was beginning to fall asleep when a tremendous explosion shook the foundations of the house. They had had to dynamite the safe.

  Montiel’s
widow heaved a sigh. October was interminable with its swampy rains, and she felt lost, sailing without direction in the chaotic and fabulous hacienda of José Montiel. Mr Carmichael, an old and diligent friend of the family, had taken charge of the estate. When at last she faced the concrete fact that her husband had died, Montiel’s widow came out of the bedroom to take care of the house. She stripped it of all decoration, had the furniture covered in mourning colors, and put funeral ribbons on the portraits of the dead man which hung on all the walls. In the two months after the funeral, she had acquired the habit of biting her nails. One day – her eyes reddened and swollen from crying so much – she realized that Mr Carmichael was entering the house with an open umbrella.

  ‘Close that umbrella, Mr Carmichael,’ she told him. ‘After all the misfortune we’ve had, all we need is for you to come into the house with your umbrella open.’

  Mr Carmichael put the umbrella in the corner. He was an old Negro, with shiny skin, dressed in white, and with little slits made with a knife in his shoes to relieve the pressure of his bunions.

  ‘It’s only while it’s drying.’

  For the first time since her husband died, the widow opened the window.

  ‘So much misfortune and, in addition, this winter,’ she murmured biting her nails. ‘It seems as though it will never clear up.’

  ‘It won’t clear up today or tomorow,’ said the executor. ‘Last night my bunions wouldn’t let me sleep.’

  She trusted the atmospheric predictions of Mr Carmichael’s bunions. She contemplated the desolate little plaza, the silent houses whose doors did not open to witness the funeral of José Montiel, and then she felt desperate, with her nails, with her limitless lands, and with the infinite number of obligations which she inherited from her husband and which she would never manage to understand.

  ‘The world is all wrong,’ she said, sobbing.

  Those who visited her in those days had many reasons to think she had gone mad. But she was never more lucid than then. Since before the political slaughter began, she had spent the sad October mornings in front of the window in her room, sympathizing with the dead and thinking that if God had not rested on Sunday He would have had time to finish the world properly. ‘He should have used that day to tie up a few of the loose ends,’ she used to say. ‘After all, He had all eternity to rest.’ The only difference, after the death of her husband, was that then she had a concrete reason for harboring such dark thoughts.