In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Read Free Book Online Page B

the razor sing on the palm of his hand. He shaved the neck in silence, cleaning off the soap on his fingers and then cleaning his fingers on his pants. Finally
he rubbed a piece of alum on the back of the neck. He finished in silence.
    While he was buttoning up his collar, Mr. Carmichael saw the notice nailed to the back wall:
Talking Politics Prohibited
. He brushed the pieces of hair from his shoulders, hung his umbrella over his arm, and pointing to the notice, asked:
    “Why don’t you take it down?”
    “It doesn’t apply to you,” the barber said. “We’ve already agreed that you’re an impartial man.”
    Mr. Carmichael didn’t hesitate that time to leap onto the boardwalk. The barber watched him until he turned the corner, and then he grew ecstatic over the roiled and threatening river. It had stopped raining, but a heavy cloud hung motionless over the town. A short time before one o’clock Moisés the Syrian came in, lamenting that the hair was falling out of his skull and yet, on the other hand, it was growing on the back of his neck with extraordinary rapidity.
    The Syrian had his hair cut every Monday. Ordinarily he would lower his head with a kind of fatalism and snore in Arabic while the barber talked to himself out loud. That Monday, however, he awoke with a start at the first question.
    “Do you know who was just here?”
    “Carmichael,” the Syrian said.
    “Rotten old black Carmichael,” the barber confirmed as if he had spelled out the phrase. “I detest that kind of man.”
    “Carmichael isn’t a man,” Moisés the Syrian said. “He hasn’t bought a pair of shoes in more than three years. But in politics he does what has to be done: he keeps books with his eyes closed.”
    He settled his beard on his chin to snore again, but the barber planted himself in front of him with his arms folded, saying: “Tell me one thing, you shitty Turk: When all’s said
and done, whose side are you on?” The Syrian answered, unflustered:
    “Mine.”
    “You’re wrong,” the barber said. “You ought to at least keep in mind the four ribs they broke on your fellow countryman Elías’s son on orders from Don Chepe Montiel.”
    “Elías is all upset that his son turned out to be a politician,” the Syrian said. “But now the boy’s having a grand time dancing in Brazil and Chepe Montiel is dead.”
    Before leaving the room which was in disorder from his long nights of suffering, the mayor shaved the right side of his face, leaving the other side with its week-old beard. Then he put on a clean uniform, his patent leather boots, and went down to eat in the hotel, taking advantage of the pause in the rain.
    There was no one in the dining room. The mayor made his way through the small tables for four and occupied the most discreet spot in the back of the room.
    “Masks,” he called.
    He was answered by a very young girl with a short tight dress and breasts like stones. The mayor ordered lunch without looking at her. On her way back to the kitchen the girl turned on the radio placed on a shelf at the end of the dining room. A news bulletin came on, with quotations from a speech given the night before by the president of the republic, and then a list of new items prohibited for import. The heat grew more intense as the announcer’s voice filled the space. When the girl returned with the soup, the mayor was trying to check the heat by fanning himself with his cap.
    “The radio makes me sweat too,” the girl said.
    The mayor began to drink his soup. He’d always thought that that solitary hotel, sustained by occasional traveling salesmen, was a different place from the rest of the town.
Actually, it antedated the town. On its run-down wooden balcony, merchants who came from the interior to buy the rice harvest used to spend the night playing cards and waiting for the coolness of dawn in order to be able to sleep. Colonel Aureliano Buendía himself, on his way to Macondo to draw up the terms of surrender