No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez, J. S. Bernstein Read Free Book Online

realized that her husband was still far away.
    ‘Now, what you should do is enjoy the mush.’
    ‘It’s very good,’ the colonel said. ‘Where’d it come from?’
    ‘From the rooster,’ the woman answered. ‘The boys brought him so much corn that he decided to share it with us. That’s life.’
    ‘That’s right.’ The colonel sighed. ‘Life is the best thing that’s ever been invented.’
    He looked at therooster tied to the leg of the stove and this time he seemed a different animal. The woman also looked at him.
    ‘This afternoon I had to chase the children out with a stick,’ she said. ‘They brought an old hen to breed her with the rooster.’
    ‘It’s not the first time,’ the colonel said. ‘That’s the same thing they did in those towns with Colonel Aureliano Buendía. They brought him little girlsto breed with.’
    She got a kick out of the joke. The rooster produced a guttural noise which sounded in the hall like quiethuman conversation. ‘Sometimes I think that animal is going to talk,’ the woman said. The colonel looked at him again.
    ‘He’s worth his weight in gold,’ he said. He made some calculations while he sipped a spoonful of mush. ‘He’ll feed us for three years.’
    ‘You can’t eathope,’ the woman said.
    ‘You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,’ the colonel replied. ‘It’s something like my friend Sabas’s miraculous pills.’
    He slept poorly that night trying to erase the figures from his mind. The following day at lunch, the woman served two plates of mush, and ate hers with her head lowered, without saying a word. The colonel felt himself catching her dark mood.
    ‘What’sthe matter?’
    ‘Nothing,’ the woman said.
    He had the impression that this time it had been her turn to lie. He tried to comfort her. But the woman persisted.
    ‘It’s nothing unusual,’ she said. ‘I was thinking that the man has been dead for two months, and I still haven’t been to see the family.’
    So she went to see them that night. The colonel accompanied her to the dead man’s house, and thenheaded for the movie theater, drawn by the music coming over the loudspeakers. Seated at the door of his office, Father Ángel was watching the entrance to find out who was attending the show despite his twelve warnings. The flood of light, the strident music, and the shouts of the children erected a physical resistance in the area. One of the children threatened the colonel with a wooden rifle.
    ‘What’snew with the rooster, colonel?’ he said in an authoritative voice.
    The colonel put his hands up.
    ‘He’s still around.’
    A four-color poster covered the entire front of the theater:
Midnight Virgin
. She was a woman in an evening gown, with one leg bared up to the thigh. The colonel continued wandering around the neighborhood until distant thunder and lightning began. Then he went backfor his wife.
    She wasn’t at the dead man’s house. Nor at home. The colonel reckoned that there was little time left before curfew, but the clock had stopped. He waited, feeling the storm advance on the town. He was getting ready to go out again when his wife arrived.
    He took the rooster into the bedroom. She changed her clothes and went to take a drink of water in the living room just as thecolonel finished winding the clock, and was waiting for curfew to blow in order to set it.
    ‘Where were you?’ the colonel asked.
    ‘Roundabout,’ the woman answered. She put the glass on the washstand without looking at her husband and returned to the bedroom. ‘No one thought it was going to rain so soon.’ The colonel made no comment. When curfew blew, he set the clock at eleven, closed the case,and put the chair back in its place. He found his wife saying her rosary.
    ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ the colonel said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Where were you?’
    ‘Istayed around there talking,’ she said. ‘It had been so long since I’d been out of the house.’
    The colonel hung