In her bedroom, the widow heard the knocking and instinctively turned her glance toward the screens. No bird had got into that bedroom for two days. But the screen was still torn. She had thought it a useless expense to have it repaired as long as the invasion of birds, which kept her nerves on edge, continued. Above the hum of the electric fan, she heard the knocking at the door and remembered with impatience that Argenida was taking a siesta in the bedroom at the end of the corridor. It didn’t even occur to her to wonder who might be imposing on her at that hour. She hooked up her bodice again, pushed open the screen door, and walked the length of the corridor, stiff and straight, then crossed the living room crowded with furniture and decorative objects and, before opening the door, saw through the metal screen that there stood taciturn Father Anthony Isabel, with his eyes closed and a bird in his hands. Before she opened the door, he said, ‘If we give him a little water and then put him under a dish, I’m sure he’ll get well.’ And when she opened the door, Rebecca thought she’d collapse from fear.
He didn’t stay there for more than five minutes. Rebecca thought that it was she who had cut short the meeting. But in reality it had been the priest. If the widow had thought about it at that moment, she would have realized that the priest, in the thirty years he had been living in the town, had never stayed more than five minutes in her house. It seemed to him that amid the profusion of decorations in the living room the concupiscent spirit of the mistress of the house showed itself clearly, in spite of her being related, however distantly, but as everyone was aware, to the Bishop. Furthermore, there had been a legend (or a story) about Rebecca’s family which surely, the Father thought, had not reached the episcopal palace, in spite of the fact that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a cousin of the widow’s whom she considered lacking in family affection, had once sworn that the Bishop had not come to the town in this century in order to avoid visiting his relation. In any case, be it history or legend, the truth was that Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar did not feel at ease in this house, whose only inhabitant had never shown any signs of piety and who confessed only once a year but always replied with evasive answers when he tried to pin her down about the puzzling death of her husband. If he was there now, waiting for her to bring him a glass of water to bathe a dying bird, it was the result of a chance occurrence which he was not responsible for.
While he waited for the widow to return, the priest, seated on a luxurious carved wooden rocker, felt the strange humidity of that house which had not become peaceful since the time when a pistol shot rang out, more than twenty years before, and José Arcadio Buendía, cousin of the colonel and of his own wife, fell face down amidst the clatter of buckles and spurs on the still-warm leggings which he had just taken off.
When Rebecca burst into the living room again, she saw Father Anthony Isabel seated in the rocker with an air of vagueness which terrified her.
‘The life of an animal,’ said the Father, ‘is as dear to Our Lord as that of a man.’
As he said it, he did not remember José Arcadio Buendía. Nor did the widow recall him. But she was used to not giving any credence to the Father’s words ever since he had spoken from the pulpit about the three times the devil had appeared to him. Without paying attention to him she took the bird in her hands, dipped him in the glass of water, and shook him afterward. The Father observed that there was impiety and carelessness in her way of acting, an absolute lack of consideration for the animal’s life.
‘You don’t like birds,’ he said softly but affirmatively.
The widow raised her eyelids in a gesture of impatience and hostility. ‘Although I liked them once,’ she said, ‘I detest them now that they’ve taken to dying inside of our houses.’
‘Many have died,’ he said implacably. One might have thought that there was a great deal of cleverness in the tone of his voice.
‘All of them,’ said the widow. And she added, as she squeezed the animal with repugnance and placed him under the dish, ‘And even that wouldn’t bother me if they hadn’t torn my screens.’
And it seemed to him that he had never known such hardness of heart. A moment later, holding the tiny and defenseless body in his own hand, the priest realized that it had ceased breathing. Then he forgot everything – the humidity of the house, the concupiscence, the unbearable smell of gunpowder on José Arcadio Buendía’s body – and he realized the prodigious truth which had surrounded him since the beginning of the week. Right there, while the widow watched him leave the house with a menacing gesture and the dead bird in his hands, he witnessed the marvelous revelation that a rain of dead birds was falling over the town, and that he, the minister of God, the chosen one, who had known happiness when it had not been hot, had forgotten entirely about the Apocalypse.
That day he went to the station, as always, but he was not fully aware of his actions. He knew vaguely that something was happening in the world, but he felt muddled, dumb, unequal to the moment. Seated on the bench in the station, he tried to remember if there was a rain of dead birds in the Apocalypse, but he had forgotten it entirely. Suddenly he thought that his delay at Rebecca’s house had made him miss the train, and he stretched his head up over the dusty and broken glass and saw on the clock in the ticket office that it was still twelve minutes to one. When he returned to the bench, he felt as if he were suffocating. At that moment he remembered it was Saturday. He moved his woven palm fan for a while, lost in his dark interior fog. Then he fretted over the buttons on his soutane and the buttons on his boots and over his long, snug, clerical trousers, and he noticed with alarm that he had never in his life been so hot.
Without moving from the bench he unbuttoned the collar of his soutane, took his handkerchief out of his sleeve, and wiped his flushed face, thinking, in a moment of illuminated pathos, that perhaps he was witnessing the unfolding of an earthquake. He had read that somewhere. Nevertheless the sky was clear: a transparent blue sky from which all the birds had mysteriously disappeared. He noticed the color and the transparency, but for a moment forgot about the dead birds. Now he was thinking about something else, about the possibility that a storm would break. Nevertheless the sky was diaphanous and tranquil, as if it were the sky over some other town, distant and different, where he had never felt the heat, and as if they were other eyes, not his own, which were looking at it. Then he looked toward the north, above the roofs of palms and rusted zinc, and saw the slow, silent, rhythmic blot of the buzzards over the dump.
For some mysterious reason, he relived at that moment the emotions he felt one Sunday in the seminary, shortly before taking his minor orders. The rector had given him permission to make use of his private library and he often stayed for hours and hours (especially on Sundays) absorbed in the reading of some yellowed books smelling of old wood, with annotations in Latin in the tiny, angular scrawl of the rector. One Sunday, after he had been reading for the whole day, the rector entered the room and rushed, shocked, to pick up a card which evidently had fallen from the pages of the book he was reading. He observed his superior’s confusion with discreet indifference, but he managed to read the card. There was only one sentence, written in purple ink in a clean, straightforward hand: ‘Madame Ivette est morte cette nuit.’ More than half a century later, seeing a blot of buzzards over a forgotten town, he remembered the somber expression of the rector seated in front of him, purple against the dusk, his breathing imperceptibly quickened.
Shaken by that association, he did not then feel the heat, but rather exactly the reverse, the sting of ice in his groin and in the soles of his feet. He was terrified without knowing what the precise cause of that terror was, tangled in a net of confused ideas, among which it was impossible to distinguish a nauseating sensation, from Satan’s hoof stuck in the mud, from a flock of dead birds falling on the world, while he, Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, remained indifferent to that event. Then he straightened up, raised an awed hand, as if to begin a greeting which was lost in
the void, and cried out in horror, ‘The Wandering Jew!’
At that moment the train whistled. For the first time in many years he did not hear it. He saw it pull into the station, surrounded by a dense cloud of smoke, and heard the rain of cinders against the sheets of rusted zinc. But that was like a distant and undecipherable dream from which he did not awaken completely until that afternoon, a little after four, when he put the finishing touches on the imposing sermon he would deliver on Sunday. Eight hours later, he was called to administer extreme unction to a woman.
With the result that the Father did not find out who arrived that afternoon on the train. For a long time he had watched the four cars go by, ramshackle and colorless, and he could not recall anyone’s getting off to stay, at least in recent years. Before it was different, when he could spend a whole afternoon watching a train loaded with bananas go by; a hundred and forty cars loaded with fruit, passing endlessly until, well on toward nightfall, the last car passed with a man dangling a green lantern. Then he saw the town on the other side of the track – the lights were on now – and it seemed to him that, by merely watching the train pass, it had taken him to another town. Perhaps from that came his habit of being present at the station every day, even after they shot the workers to death and the banana plantations were finished, and with them the hundred-and-forty-car trains, and there was left only that yellow, dusty train which neither brought anyone nor took anyone away.
But that Saturday someone did come. When Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar left the station, a quiet boy with nothing particular about him except his hunger saw the priest from the window of the last car at the precise moment that he remembered he had not eaten since the previous day. He thought, If there’s a priest, there must be a hotel. And he got off the train and crossed the street, which was blistered by the metallic August sun, and entered the cool shade of a house located opposite the station whence issued the sound of a worn gramophone record. His sense of smell, sharpened by his two-day-old hunger, told him that was the hotel. And he went in without seeing the sign ‘HOTEL MACONDO,’ a sign which he was never to read in his life.
The proprietress was more than five months pregnant. She was the color of mustard, and looked exactly as her mother had when her mother was pregnant with her. He ordered, ‘Lunch, as quick as you can,’ and she, not trying to hurry, served him a bowl of soup with a bare bone and some chopped green banana in it. At that moment the train whistled. Absorbed in the warm and healthful vapor of the soup, he calculated the distance which lay between him and the station, and immediately felt himself invaded by that confused sensation of panic which missing a train produces.
He tried to run. He reached the door, anguished, but he hadn’t even taken one step across the threshold when he realized that he didn’t have time to make the train. When he returned to the table, he had forgotten his hunger; he saw a girl next to the gramophone who looked at him pitifully, with the horrible expression of a dog wagging his tail. Then, for the first time that whole day, he took off his hat, which his mother had given him two months before, and lodged it between his knees while he finished eating. When he got up from the table, he didn’t seem bothered by missing the train, or by the prospect of spending a weekend in a town whose name he would not take the trouble to find out. He sat down in a corner of the room, the bones of his back supported by a hard, straight chair, and stayed there for a long time, not listening to the records until the girl who was picking them out said:
‘It’s cooler on the veranda.’
He felt ill. It took an effort to start conversation with strangers. He was afraid to look people in the face, and when he had no recourse but to speak, the words came out different from the way he thought them. ‘Yes,’ he replied. And he felt a slight shiver. He tried to rock, forgetting that he was not in a rocker.
‘The people who come here pull a chair to the veranda since it’s cooler,’ the girl said. And, listening to her, he realized how anxiously she wanted to talk. He risked a look at her just as she was winding up the gramophone. She seemed to have been sitting there for months, years perhaps, and she showed not the slightest interest in moving from that spot. She was winding up the gramophone but her life was concentrated on him. She was smiling.
‘Thank you,’ he said, trying to get up, to put some ease and spontaneity into his movements. The girl didn’t stop looking at him. She said, ‘They also leave their hats on the hook.’
This time he felt a burning in his ears. He shivered, thinking about her way of suggesting things. He felt uncomfortably shut in, and again felt his panic over the missed train. But at that moment the proprietress entered the room.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘He’s pulling a chair onto the veranda, as they all do,’ the girl said.
He thought he perceived a mocking tone in her words.
‘Don’t bother,’ said the proprietress. ‘I’ll bring you a stool.’
The girl laughed and he felt disconcerted. It was hot. An unbroken, dry heat, and he was sweating. The proprietress dragged a wooden stool with a leather seat to the veranda. He was about to follow her when the girl spoke again.
‘The bad part of it is that the birds will frighten him,’ she said.
He managed to see the harsh look when the proprietress turned her eyes on the girl. It was a swift but intense look.
‘What you should do is be quiet,’ she said, and turned smiling to him. Then he felt less alone and had the urge to speak.
‘What was that she said?’ he asked.
‘That at this hour of the day dead birds fall onto the veranda,’ the girl said.
‘Those are just some notions of hers,’ said the proprietress. She bent over to straighten a bouquet of artificial flowers on the little table in the middle of the room. There was a nervous twitch in her fingers.
‘Notions of mine, no,’ the girl said. ‘You yourself swept two of them up the day before yesterday.’
The proprietress looked exasperatedly at her. The girl had a pitiful expression, and an obvious desire to explain everything until not the slightest trace of doubt remained.
‘What is happening, sir, is that the day before yesterday some boys left two dead birds in the hall to annoy her, and then they told her that dead birds were falling from the sky. She swallows everything people tell her.’
He smiled. The explanation seemed very funny to him; he rubbed his hands and turned to look at the girl, who was observing him in anguish. The gramophone had stopped playing. The proprietress withdrew to the other room, and when he went toward the hall the girl insisted in a low voice:
‘I saw them fall. Believe me. Everyone has seen them.’
And he thought he understood then her attachment to the gramophone, and the proprietress’s exasperation. ‘Yes,’ he said sympathetically. And then, moving toward the hall: ‘I’ve seen them, too.’
It was less hot outside, in the shade of the almond trees. He leaned the stool against the doorframe, threw his head back, and thought of his mother: his mother, exhausted, in her rocker, shooing the chickens with a long broomstick, while she realized for the first time that he was not in the house.
The week before, he could have thought that his life was a smooth straight string, stretching from the rainy dawn during the last civil war when he came into the world between the four mud-and-rush walls of a rural schoolhouse to that June morning on his twenty-second birthday when his mother approached his hammock and gave him a hat with a card: ‘To my dear son, on his day.’ At times he shook off the rustiness of his inactivity and felt nostalgic for school, for the blackboard and the map of a country overpopulated by the excrement of the flies, and for the long line of cups hanging on the wall under the names of the children. It wasn’t hot there. It was a green, tranquil town, where chickens with ashen long legs entered the schoolroom in order to lay their eggs under the washstand. His mother then was a sad and uncommunicative woman. She would sit at dusk to take th
e air which had just filtered through the coffee plantations, and say, ‘Manaure is the most beautiful town in the world.’ And then, turning toward him, seeing him grow up silently in the hammock: ‘When you are grown up you’ll understand.’ But he didn’t understand anything. He didn’t understand at fifteen, already too tall for his age and bursting with that insolent and reckless health which idleness brings. Until his twentieth birthday his life was not essentially different from a few changes of position in his hammock. But around that time his mother, obliged by her rheumatism, left the school she had served for eighteen years, with the result that they went to live in a two-room house with a huge patio, where they raised chickens with ashen legs like those which used to cross the schoolroom.
Caring for the chickens was his first contact with reality. And it had been the only one until the month of July, when his mother thought about her retirement and deemed her son wise enough to undertake to petition for it. He collaborated in an effective way in the preparation of the documents, and even had the necessary tact to convince the parish priest to change his mother’s baptismal certificate by six months, since she still wasn’t old enough to retire. On Thursday he received the final instructions, scrupulously detailing his mother’s teaching experience, and he began the trip to the city with twelve pesos, a change of clothing, the file of documents, and an entirely rudimentary idea of the word ‘retirement,’ which he interpreted crudely as a certain sum of money which the government ought to give him so he could set himself up in pig breeding.
Dozing on the hotel veranda, dulled by the sweltering heat, he had not stopped to think about the gravity of his situation. He supposed that the mishap would be resolved the following day, when the train returned, so that now his only worry was to wait until Sunday to resume his trip and forget forever about this town where it was unbearably hot. A little before four, he fell into an uncomfortable and sluggish sleep, thinking while he slept that it was a shame not to have brought his hammock. Then it was that he realized everything, that he had forgotten his bundle of clothes and the documents for the retirement on the train. He woke up with a start, terrified, thinking of his mother, and hemmed in again by panic.