The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Read Free Book Online Page A

with the national flag and large banners saying God Save the All Purewho watches over the cleanliness of the nation, while he dragged his slow feet of a meditative beast about in search of new formulas to keep the civilian population busy, opening a way among the lepers and blind men and cripples who begged the salt of health from his hands, baptizing with his name at the font in the courtyard the children of his godchildren among persistent adulators who proclaimedhim the one and only because now he could not count on the resources of any look-alike and he had to make himself double in a marketplace of a palace where every day cages and more cages of rare birds arrived ever since the secret was let out that his mother Bendición Alvarado followed the trade of bird-woman, and even though some sent them out of adulationand others sent them as a joke aftera short time there was no room to hang any more cages, and he tried to attend to so many public matters at the same time that among the crowds in the courtyards and the offices it was impossible to tell who were the servants and who were the ones served, and they knocked down so many walls to make more room and opened so many windows for a view of the sea that the simple act of going from one roomto another was like crossing the deck of a sailboat adrift in a crosswind autumn. They were the March trade winds which had always come in through the windows of the building, but now they said they were the winds of peace general sir, it was the same buzzing in the eardrums that he had had for many years, but even his physician told him that it was the buzz of peace general sir, because ever sincethey had found him dead the first time all things on heaven and earth had changed into things of peace general sir, and he believed it, and he believed it so much that in December he went back to going up to the house on the reef to seek solace in the misfortune of the brotherhood of nostalgic former dictators who would interrupt the game of dominoes to tell him that he was for example the doublesix and let’s say that the doctrinaire conservatives were double three, only I wasn’t aware of the clandestine alliance between Masons and priests, who in hell would have thought of it, without worrying about the soup that was jelling in the plate while one of them explained that for example this sugar bowl was the presidential palace, here, and the only cannon the enemy had left had a range offour hundred yards with the wind in its favor, here, so if you people see me in this state it’s only because of nineteen inches of bad luck, that is to say, and even those most encrusted by the barnacles of exile wasted their hopes scanning the horizon and spotting ships from their homelands, they could recognize them from the color of their smoke, from the rust on their foghorns, they would godown to the harbor in the drizzle of early dawn in search of the newspapers the crewmen had used to wrap up the lunch they took ashore, they found them in the garbage cans and read them up and down and left to rightdown to the last lines to predict the future of their countries from the news of who had died, who had got married, who had invited whom and whom they had not invited to a birthdayparty, deciphering their destiny according to the direction of a providential storm cloud that was going to roar down on their country in an apocalyptic tempest that would overflow the rivers which would burst the dams that would devastate the fields and spread misery and plague in the cities, and they will come here to beg me to save them from disaster and anarchy, you’ll see, but while they waitedfor the great hour they had to call aside the youngest exile and ask him to do them the favor of threading their needles to patch these pants that I don’t want to throw away for sentimental reasons, they washed their clothes in secret, they honed the razor blades that the new arrivals had used, they would shut themselves up in