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

up his hammock. He locked the house and fumigated the room. Then he put the lamp on the floor and lay down.
    ‘I understand,’he said sadly. ‘The worst of a bad situation is that it makes us tell lies.’
    She let out a long sigh.
    ‘I was with Father Ángel,’ she said. ‘I went to ask him for a loan on our wedding rings.’
    ‘And what did he tell you?’
    ‘That it’s a sin to barter with sacred things.’
    She went on talking under her mosquito netting. ‘Two days ago I tried to sell the clock,’ she said. ‘No one is interested becausethey’re selling modern clocks with luminous numbers on the installment plan. You can see the time in the dark.’ The colonel acknowledged that forty years of shared living, of shared hunger, of shared suffering, had not been enough for him to come to know his wife. He felt that something had also grown old in their love.
    ‘They don’t want the picture, either,’ she said. ‘Almost everybody has thesame one. I even went to the Turk’s.’
    The colonel felt bitter.
    ‘So now everyone knows we’re starving.’
    ‘I’m tired,’ the woman said. ‘Men don’t understand problems of the household. Several times I’ve had to put stones on to boil so the neighbors wouldn’t know that we often go for many days without putting on the pot.’
    The colonel felt offended.
    ‘That’sreally a humiliation,’ he said.
    Thewoman got out from under the mosquito netting and went to the hammock. ‘I’m ready to give up affectation and pretense in this house,’ she said. Her voice began to darken with rage. ‘I’m fed up with resignation and dignity.’
    The colonel didn’t move a muscle.
    ‘Twenty years of waiting for the little colored birds which they promised you after every election, and all we’ve got out of it is a deadson,’ she went on. ‘Nothing but a dead son.’
    The colonel was used to that sort of recrimination.
    ‘We did our duty.’
    ‘And they did theirs by making a thousand pesos a month in the Senate for twenty years,’ the woman answered. ‘There’s my friend Sabas with a two-story house that isn’t big enough to keep all his money in, a man who came to this town selling medicines with a snake curled aroundhis neck.’
    ‘But he’s dying of diabetes,’ the colonel said.
    ‘And you’re dying of hunger,’ the woman said. ‘You should realize that you can’t eat dignity.’
    The lightning interrupted her. The thunder exploded in the street, entered the bedroom, and went rolling under the bed like a heap of stones. The woman jumped toward the mosquito netting for her rosary.
    The colonel smiled.
    ‘That’s what happensto you for not holding your tongue,’ he said. ‘I’ve always said that God is on my side.’
    But in reality he felt embittered. A moment later he put out the light and sank into thought in a darknessrent by the lightning. He remembered Macondo. The colonel had waited ten years for the promises of Neerlandia to be fulfilled. In the drowsiness of the siesta he saw a yellow, dusty train pull in, withmen and women and animals suffocating from the heat, piled up even on the roofs of the cars. It was the banana fever.
    In twenty-four hours they had transformed the town. ‘I’m leaving,’ the colonel said then. ‘The odor of the banana is eating at my insides.’ And he left Macondo on the return train, Wednesday, June 27, 1906 at 2:18 p.m. It took him nearly half a century to realize that he hadn’thad a moment’s peace since the surrender at Neerlandia.
    He opened his eyes.
    ‘Then there’s no need to think about it any more,’ he said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘The problem of the rooster,’ the colonel said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll sell it to my friend Sabas for nine hundred pesos.’
    The howls of the castrated animals, fused with Sabas’s shouting, came through the office window. If he doesn’t come in ten minutes I’llleave, the colonel promised himself after two hours of waiting. But he waited twenty minutes more. He was