‘They might be coffins,’ one of us said.
The one who had dragged himself into the corner and was breathing beside us now said:
‘They’re trunks. Ever since I was little I’ve been able to tell the smell of stored clothing.’
Then we moved in that direction. The ground was soft and smooth, fine earth that had been walked on. Someone held out a hand. We felt the contact with long, live skin, but we no longer felt the wall opposite.
‘This is a woman,’ we said.
The other one, the one who had spoken of trunks, said:
‘I think she’s asleep.’
The body shook under our hands, trembled, we felt it slip away, not as if it had got out of our reach, but as if it had ceased to exist. Still, after an instant in which we remained motionless, stiffened, leaning against each other’s shoulders, we heard her voice.
‘Who’s there?’ it said.
‘It’s us,’ we replied without moving.
The movement of the bed could be heard, the creaking and the shuffling of feet looking for slippers in the darkness. Then we pictured the seated woman, looking at us as when she still hadn’t awakened completely.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
And we answered:
‘We don’t know. The curlews pecked out our eyes.’
The voice said that she’d heard something about that. That the newspapers had said that three men had been drinking in a courtyard where there were five or six curlews. Seven curlews. One of the men began singing like a curlew, imitating them.
‘The worst was that he was an hour behind,’ she said. ‘That was when the birds jumped on the table and pecked out their eyes.’
She said that’s what the newspapers had said, but nobody had believed them. We said:
‘If people had gone there, they’d have seen the curlews.’
And the woman said:
‘They did. The courtyard was full of people the next day, but the woman had already taken the curlews somewhere else.’
When we turned around, the woman stopped speaking. There was the wall again. By just turning around we would find the wall. Around us, surrounding us, there was always a wall. One let go of our hands again. We heard him crawling again, smelling the ground, saying:
‘Now I don’t know where the trunks are. I think we’re somewhere else now.’
And we said:
‘Come here. Somebody’s here next to us.’
We heard him come close. We felt him stand up beside us and again his warm breath hit us in the face.
‘Reach out that way,’ we told him. ‘There’s someone we know there.’
He must have reached out, he must have moved toward the place we indicated, because an instant later he came back to tell us:
‘I think it’s a boy.’
And we told him:
‘Fine. Ask him if he knows us.’
He asked the question. We heard the apathetic and simple voice of the boy, who said:
‘Yes, I know you. You’re the three men whose eyes were pecked out by the curlews.’
Then an adult voice spoke. The voice of a woman who seemed to be behind a closed door, saying:
‘You’re talking to yourself again.’
And the child’s voice, unconcerned, said:
‘No. The men who had their eyes pecked out by the curlews are here again.’
There was a sound of hinges and then the adult voice, closer than the first time.
‘Take them home,’ she said.
And the boy said:
‘I don’t know where they live.’
And the adult voice said:
‘Don’t be mean. Everybody knows where they live ever since the night the curlews pecked their eyes out.’
Then she went on in a different tone, as if she were speaking to us:
‘What happened is that nobody wanted to believe it and they say it was a fake item made up by the papers to boost their circulation. No one has seen the curlews.’
And he said:
‘But nobody would believe me if I led them along the street.’
We didn’t move. We were still, leaning against the wall, listening to her. And the woman said:
‘If this one wants to take you it’s different. After all, nobody would pay much attention to what a boy says.’
The child’s voice cut in:
‘If I go out onto the street with them and they say that they’re the men who had their eyes pecked out by the curlews, the boys will throw stones at me. Everybody on the street says it couldn’t have happened.’
There was a moment of silence. Then the door closed again and the boy spoke:
‘Besides, I’m reading Terry and the Pirates right now.’
Someone said in our ear:
‘I’ll convince him.’
He crawled over to where the voice was.
‘I like it,’ he said. ‘At least tell us what happened to Terry this week.’
He’s trying to gain his confidence, we thought. But the boy said:
‘That doesn’t interest me. The only thing I like are the colors.’
‘Terry’s in a maze,’ we said.
And the boy said:
‘That was Friday. Today’s Sunday and what I like are the colors,’ and he said it with a cold, dispassionate, indifferent voice.
When the other one came back, we said:
‘We’ve been lost for almost three days and we haven’t had a moment’s rest.’
And one said:
‘All right. Let’s rest awhile, but without letting go of each other’s hands.’
We sat down. An invisible sun began to warm us on the shoulders. But not even the presence of the sun interested us. We felt it there, everywhere, having already lost the notion of distance, time, direction. Several voices passed.
‘The curlews pecked out our eyes,’ we said.
And one of the voices said:
‘These here took the newspapers seriously.’
The voices disappeared. And we kept on sitting, like that, shoulder to shoulder, waiting, in that passing of voices, in that passing of images, for a smell or a voice that was known to us to pass. The sun was above our heads, still warming us. Then someone said:
‘Let’s go toward the wall again.’
And the others, motionless, their heads lifted toward the invisible light:
‘Not yet. Let’s just wait till the sun begins to burn us on the face.’
Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo
Winter fell one Sunday when people were coming out of church. Saturday night had been suffocating. But even on Sunday morning nobody thought it would rain. After mass, before we women had time to find the catches on our parasols, a thick, dark wind blew, which with one broad, round swirl swept away the dust and hard tinder of May. Someone next to me said: ‘It’s a water wind.’ And I knew it even before then. From the moment we came out onto the church steps I felt shaken by a slimy feeling in my stomach. The men ran to the nearby houses with one hand on their hats and a handkerchief in the other, protecting themselves against the wind and the dust storm. Then it rained. And the sky was a gray, jellyish substance that flapped its wings a hand away from our heads.
During the rest of the morning my stepmother and I were sitting by the railing, happy that the rain would revive the thirsty rosemary and nard in the flowerpots after seven months of intense summer and scorching dust. At noon the reverberation of the earth stopped and a smell of turned earth, of awakened and renovated vegetation mingled with the cool and healthful odor of the rain in the rosemary. My father said at lunchtime: ‘When it rains in May, it’s a sign that there’ll be good tides.’ Smiling, crossed by the luminous thread of the new season, my stepmother told me: ‘That’s what I heard in the sermon.’ And my father smiled. And he ate with a good appetite and even let his food digest leisurely beside the railing, silent, his eyes closed, but not sleeping, as if to think that he was dreaming while awake.
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It rained all afternoon in a single tone. In the uniform and peaceful intensity you could hear the water fall, the way it is when you travel all afternoon on a train. But without our noticing it, the rain was penetrating too deeply into our senses. Early Monday morning, when we closed the door to avoid the cutting, icy draft that blew in from the courtyard, our senses had been filled with rain. And on Monday morning they had overflowed. My stepmother and I went back to look at the garden. The harsh gray earth of May had been changed overnight into a dark, sticky substance like cheap soap. A trickle of water began to run off the flowerpots. ‘I think they had more than enough water during the night,’ my stepmother said. And I noticed that she had stopped smiling and that her joy of the previous day had changed during the night into a lax and tedious seriousness. ‘I think you’re right,’ I said. ‘It would be better to have the Indians put them on the veranda until it stops raining.’ And that was what they did, while the rain grew like an immense tree over the other trees. My father occupied the same spot where he had been on Sunday afternoon, but he didn’t talk about the rain. He said: ‘I must have slept poorly last night because I woke up with a stiff back.’ And he stayed there, sitting by the railing with his feet on a chair and his head turned toward the empty garden. Only at dusk, after he had turned down lunch, did he say: ‘It looks as if it will never clear.’ And I remembered the months of heat. I remembered August, those long and awesome siestas in which we dropped down to die under the weight of the hour, our clothes sticking to our bodies, hearing outside the insistent and dull buzzing of the hour that never passed. I saw the washed-down walls, the joints of the beams all puffed up by the water. I saw the small garden, empty for the first time, and the jasmine bush against the wall, faithful to the memory of my mother. I saw my father sitting in a rocker, his painful vertebrae resting on a pillow and his sad eyes lost in the labyrinth of the rain. I remembered the August nights in whose wondrous silence nothing could be heard except the millenary sound that the earth makes as it spins on its rusty, unoiled axis. Suddenly I felt overcome by an overwhelming sadness.
It rained all Monday, just like Sunday. But now it seemed to be raining in another way, because something different and bitter was going on in my heart. At dusk a voice beside my chair said: ‘This rain is a bore.’ Without turning to look, I recognized Martín’s voice. I knew that he was speaking in the next chair, with the same cold and awesome expression that hadn’t varied, not even after that gloomy December dawn when he started being my husband. Five months had passed since then. Now I was going to have a child. And Martín was there beside me saying that the rain bored him. ‘Not a bore,’ I said. ‘It seems terribly sad to me, with the empty garden and those poor trees that can’t come in from the courtyard.’ Then I turned to look at him and Martín was no longer there. It was only a voice that was saying to me: ‘It doesn’t look as if it will ever clear,’ and when I looked toward the voice I found only the empty chair.
On Tuesday morning we found a cow in the garden. It looked like a clay promontory in its hard and rebellious immobility, its hooves sunken in the mud and its head bent over. During the morning the Indians tried to drive it away with sticks and stones. But the cow stayed there, imperturbable in the garden, hard, inviolable, its hooves still sunken in the mud and its huge head humiliated by the rain. The Indians harassed it until my father’s patient tolerance came to its defense. ‘Leave her alone,’ he said. ‘She’ll leave the way she came.’
At sundown on Tuesday the water tightened and hurt, like a shroud over the heart. The coolness of the first morning began to change into a hot and sticky humidity. The temperature was neither cold nor hot; it was the temperature of a fever chill. Feet sweated inside shoes. It was hard to say what was more disagreeable, bare skin or the contact of clothing on skin. All activity had ceased in the house. We sat on the veranda but we no longer watched the rain as we did on the first day. We no longer felt it falling. We no longer saw anything except the outline of the trees in the mist, with a sad and desolate sunset which left on your lips the same taste with which you awaken after having dreamed about a stranger. I knew that it was Tuesday and I remembered the twins of Saint Jerome, the blind girls who came to the house every week to sing us simple songs, saddened by the bitter and unprotected prodigy of their voices. Above the rain I heard the blind twins’ little song and I imagined them at home, huddling, waiting for the rain to stop so they could go out and sing. The twins of Saint Jerome wouldn’t come that day, I thought, nor would the beggar woman be on the veranda after siesta, asking, as on every Tuesday, for the eternal branch of lemon balm.
That day we lost track of meals. At siesta time my stepmother served a plate of tasteless soup and a piece of stale bread. But actually we hadn’t eaten since sunset on Monday and I think that from then on we stopped thinking. We were paralyzed, drugged by the rain, given over to the collapse of nature with a peaceful and resigned attitude. Only the cow was moving in the afternoon. Suddenly a deep noise shook her insides and her hooves sank into the mud with greater force. Then she stood motionless for half an hour, as if she were already dead but could not fall down because the habit of being alive prevented her, the habit of remaining in one position in the rain, until the habit grew weaker than her body. Then she doubled her front legs (her dark and shiny haunches still raised in a last agonized effort) and sank her drooling snout into the mud, finally surrendering to the weight of her own matter in a silent, gradual, and dignified ceremony of total downfall. ‘She got that far,’ someone said behind me. And I turned to look and on the threshold I saw the Tuesday beggar woman who had come through the storm to ask for the branch of lemon balm.
Perhaps on Wednesday I might have grown accustomed to that overwhelming atmosphere if on going to the living room I hadn’t found the table pushed against the wall, the furniture piled on top of it, and on the other side, on a parapet prepared during the night, trunks and boxes of household utensils. The spectacle produced a terrible feeling of emptiness in me. Something had happened during the night. The house was in disarray; the Guajiro Indians, shirtless and barefoot, with their pants rolled up to their knees, were carrying the furniture into the dining room. In the men’s expression, in the very diligence with which they were working, one could see the cruelty of their frustrated rebellion, of their necessary and humiliating inferiority in the rain. I moved without direction, without will. I felt changed into a desolate meadow sown with algae and lichens, with soft, sticky toadstools, fertilized by the repugnant plants of dampness and shadows. I was in the living room contemplating the desert spectacle of the piled-up furniture when I heard my stepmother’s voice warning me from her room that I might catch pneumonia. Only then did I realize that the water was up to my ankles, that the house was flooded, the floor covered by a thick surface of viscous, dead water.
On Wednesday noon it still hadn’t finished dawning. And before three o’clock in the afternoon night had come on completely ahead of time and sickly, with the same slow, monotonous, and pitiless rhythm of the rain in the courtyard. It was a premature dusk, soft and lugubrious, growing in the midst of the silence of the Guajiros, who were squatting on the chairs against the walls, defeated and impotent against the disturbance of nature. That was when news began to arrive from outside. No one brought it to the house. It simply arrived, precise, individualized, as if led by the liquid clay that ran through the streets and dragged household items along, things and more things, the leftovers of a remote catastrophe, rubbish and dead animals. Events that took place on Sunday, when the rain was still the announcement of a providential season, took two days to be known at our house. And on Wednesday the news arrived as if impelled by the very inner dynamism of the storm. It was learned then that the church was flooded and its collapse expected. Someone who had no reason to know said that night: ‘The train hasn’t been able to cross the bridge since Monday. It seems that the river carried away the tracks.’ And it was learned that a sick woman had disappeared from her bed
and had been found that afternoon floating in the courtyard.
Terrified, possessed by the fright and the deluge, I sat down in the rocker with my legs tucked up and my eyes fixed on the damp darkness full of hazy foreboding. My stepmother appeared in the doorway with the lamp held high and her head erect. She looked like a family ghost before whom I felt no fear whatever because I myself shared her supernatural condition. She came over to where I was. She still held her head high and the lamp in the air, and she splashed through the water on the veranda. ‘Now we have to pray,’ she said. And I noticed her dry and wrinkled face, as if she had just left her tomb or as if she had been made of some substance different from human matter. She was across from me with her rosary in her hand saying: ‘Now we have to pray. The water broke open the tombs and now the poor dead are floating in the cemetery.’
I may have slept a little that night when I awoke with a start because of a sour and penetrating smell like that of decomposing bodies. I gave a strong shake to Martín, who was snoring beside me. ‘Don’t you notice it?’ I asked him. And he said: ‘What?’ And I said: ‘The smell. It must be the dead people floating along the streets.’ I was terrified by that idea, but Martín turned to the wall and with a husky and sleepy voice said: ‘That’s something you made up. Pregnant women are always imagining things.’
At dawn on Thursday the smells stopped, the sense of distance was lost. The notion of time, upset since the day before, disappeared completely. Then there was no Thursday. What should have been Thursday was a physical, jellylike thing that could have been parted with the hands in order to look into Friday. There were no men or women there. My stepmother, my father, the Indians were adipose and improbable bodies that moved in the marsh of winter. My father said to me: ‘Don’t move away from here until you’re told what to do,’ and his voice was distant and indirect and didn’t seem to be perceived by the ear but by touch, which was the only sense that remained active.