No One Writes to the Colonel (3 page)

‘What bothers me is that those poor boys are saving up.’

Then she began to think. She turned completely around with the insecticide bomb. The colonel found something unreal in her attitude, as if she were invoking the spirits of the house for a consultation. At last she
put the bomb on the little mantel with the prints on it, and fixed her syrup-colored eyes on the syrup-colored eyes of the colonel.

‘Buy the corn,’ she said. ‘God knows how we’ll manage.’

‘This is the miracle of the multiplying loaves,’ the colonel repeated every time they sat down to the table during the following week. With her astonishing capacity for darning, sewing, and mending, she seemed
to have discovered the key to sustaining the household
economy with no money. October prolonged its truce. The humidity was replaced by sleepiness. Comforted by the copper sun, the woman devoted three afternoons to her complicated hairdo. ‘High Mass has begun,’ the colonel said one afternoon when she was getting the knots out of her long blue tresses with a comb which had some teeth missing. The
second afternoon, seated in the patio with a white sheet in her lap, she used a finer comb to take out the lice which had proliferated during her attack. Lastly, she washed her hair with lavender water, waited for it to dry, and rolled it up on the nape of her neck in two turns held with a barrette. The colonel waited. At night, sleepless in his hammock, he worried for many hours over the rooster’s
fate. But on Wednesday they weighed him, and he was in good shape.

That same afternoon, when Agustín’s companions left the house counting the imaginary proceeds from the rooster’s victory, the colonel also felt in good shape. His wife cut his hair. ‘You’ve taken twenty years off me,’ he said, examining his head with his hands. His wife thought her husband was right.

‘When I’m well, I can bring
back the dead,’ she said.

But her conviction lasted for a very few hours. There was no longer anything in the house to sell, except the clock and the picture. Thursday night, at the limit of their resources, the woman showed her anxiety over the situation.

‘Don’t worry,’ the colonel consoled her. ‘The mail comes tomorrow.’

The following day he waited for the launches in front of the doctor’s
office.

‘The airplane is a marvelous thing,’ the colonel said,
his eyes resting on the mailbag. ‘They say you can get to Europe in one night.’

‘That’s right,’ the doctor said, fanning himself with an illustrated magazine. The colonel spied the postmaster among a group waiting for the docking to end so they could jump onto the launch. The postmaster jumped first. He received from the captain
an envelope sealed with wax. Then he climbed up onto the roof. The mailbag was tied between two oil drums.

‘But still it has its dangers,’ said the colonel. He lost the postmaster from sight, but saw him again among the colored bottles on the refreshment cart. ‘Humanity doesn’t progress without paying a price.’

‘Even at this stage it’s safer than a launch,’ the doctor said. ‘At twenty thousand
feet you fly above the weather.’

‘Twenty thousand feet,’ the colonel repeated, perplexed, without being able to imagine what the figure meant.

The doctor became interested. He spread out the magazine with both hands until it was absolutely still.

‘There’s perfect stability,’ he said.

But the colonel was hanging on the actions of the postmaster. He saw him consume a frothy pink drink, holding
the glass in his left hand. In his right he held the mailbag.

‘Also, on the ocean there are ships at anchor in continual contact with night flights,’ the doctor went on. ‘With so many precautions it’s safer than a launch.’

The colonel looked at him.

‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘It must be like a carpet.’

The postmaster came straight toward them. The
colonel stepped back, impelled by an irresistible
anxiety, trying to read the name written on the sealed envelope. The postmaster opened the bag. He gave the doctor his packet of newspapers. Then he tore open the envelope with the personal correspondence, checked the correctness of the receipt, and read the addressee’s names off the letters. The doctor opened the newspapers.

‘Still the problem with Suez,’ he said, reading the main headlines.
‘The West is losing ground.’

The colonel didn’t read the headlines. He made an effort to control his stomach. ‘Ever since there’s been censorship, the newspapers talk only about Europe,’ he said. ‘The best thing would be for the Europeans to come over here and for us to go to Europe. That way everybody would know what’s happening in his own country.’

‘To the Europeans, South America is a man
with a mustache, a guitar, and a gun,’ the doctor said, laughing over his newspaper. ‘They don’t understand the problem.’

The postmaster delivered his mail. He put the rest in the bag and closed it again. The doctor got ready to read two personal letters, but before tearing open the envelopes he looked at the colonel. Then he looked at the postmaster.

‘Nothing for the colonel?’

The colonel
was terrified. The postmaster tossed the bag onto his shoulder, got off the platform, and replied without turning his head: ‘No one writes to the colonel.’

Contrary to his habit, he didn’t go directly home. He had a cup of coffee at the tailor’s while Agustín’s companions
leafed through the newspapers. He felt cheated. He would have preferred to stay there until the next Friday to keep from having
to face his wife that night with empty hands. But when the tailor shop closed, he had to face up to reality. His wife was waiting for him.

‘Nothing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ the colonel answered.

The following Friday he went down to the launches again. And, as on every Friday, he returned home without the longed-for letter. ‘We’ve waited long enough,’ his wife told him that night. ‘One must have
the patience of an ox, as you do, to wait for a letter for fifteen years.’ The colonel got into his hammock to read the newspapers.

‘We have to wait our turn,’ he said. ‘Our number is 1823.’

‘Since we’ve been waiting, that number has come up twice in the lottery,’ his wife replied.

The colonel read, as usual, from the first page to the last, including the advertisements. But this time he didn’t
concentrate. During his reading, he thought about his veteran’s pension. Nineteen years before, when Congress passed the law, it took him eight years to prove his claim. Then it took him six more years to get himself included on the rolls. That was the last letter the colonel had received.

He finished after curfew sounded. When he went to turn off the lamp, he realized that his wife was awake.

‘Do you still have that clipping?’

The woman thought.

‘Yes. It must be with the other papers.’

She got out of her mosquito netting and took a
wooden chest out of the closet, with a packet of letters arranged by date and held together by a rubber band. She located the advertisement of a law firm which promised quick action on war pensions.

‘We could have spent the money in the time I’ve wasted
trying to convince you to change lawyers,’ the woman said, handing her husband the newspaper clipping. ‘We’re not getting anything out of their putting us away on a shelf as they do with the Indians.’

The colonel read the clipping dated two years before. He put it in the pocket of his jacket which was hanging behind the door.

‘The problem is that to change lawyers you need money.’

‘Not at all,’
the woman said decisively. ‘You write them telling them to discount whatever they want from the pension itself when they collect it. It’s the only way they’ll take the case.’

So Saturday afternoon the colonel went to see his lawyer. He found him stretched out lazily in a hammock. He was a monumental negro, with nothing but two canines in his upper jaw. The lawyer put his feet into a pair of wooden-soled
slippers and opened the office window on a dusty pianola with papers stuffed into the compartments where the rolls used to go: clippings from the
Official Gazette
, pasted into old accounting ledgers, and a jumbled collection of accounting bulletins. The keyless pianola did double duty as a desk. The lawyer sat down in a swivel chair. The colonel expressed his uneasiness before revealing the purpose
of his visit.

‘I warned you that it would take more than a few days,’ said the lawyer when the colonel paused. He was
sweltering in the heat. He adjusted the chair backward and fanned himself with an advertising brochure.

‘My agents write to me frequently, saying not to get impatient.’

‘It’s been that way for fifteen years,’ the colonel answered. ‘This is beginning to sound like the story about
the capon.’

The lawyer gave a very graphic description of the administrative ins and outs. The chair was too narrow for his sagging buttocks. ‘Fifteen years ago it was easier,’ he said. ‘Then there was the city’s veterans’ organization, with members of both parties.’ His lungs filled with stifling air and he pronounced the sentence as if he had just invented it: ‘There’s strength in numbers.’

‘There wasn’t in this case,’ the colonel said, realizing his aloneness for the first time. ‘All my comrades died waiting for the mail.’

The lawyer didn’t change his expression.

‘The law was passed too late,’ he said. ‘Not everybody was as lucky as you to be a colonel at the age of twenty. Furthermore, no special allocation was included, so the government has had to make adjustments in the budget.’

Always the same story. Each time the colonel listened to him, he felt a mute resentment. ‘This is not charity,’ he said. ‘It’s not a question of doing us a favor. We broke our backs to save the Republic.’ The lawyer threw up his hands.

‘That’s the way it is,’ he said. ‘Human ingratitude knows no limits.’

The colonel also knew that story. He had begun
hearing it the day after the Treaty of Neerlandia,
when the government promised travel assistance and indemnities to two hundred revolutionary officers. Camped at the base of the gigantic silk-cotton tree at Neerlandia, a revolutionary battalion, made up in great measure of youths who had left school, waited for three months. Then they went back to their homes by their own means, and they kept on waiting there. Almost sixty years later,
the colonel was still waiting.

Excited by these memories, he adopted a transcendental attitude. He rested his right hand on his thigh – mere bone sewed together with nerve tissue – and murmured:

‘Well, I’ve decided to take action.’

The lawyer waited.

‘Such as?’

‘To change lawyers.’

A mother duck, followed by several little ducklings, entered the office. The lawyer sat up to chase them out.
‘As you wish, colonel,’ he said, chasing the animals. ‘It will be just as you wish. If I could work miracles, I wouldn’t be living in this barnyard.’ He put a wooden grille across the patio door and returned to his chair.

‘My son worked all his life,’ said the colonel. ‘My house is mortgaged. That retirement law has been a lifetime pension for lawyers.’

‘Not for me,’ the lawyer protested. ‘Every
last cent has gone for my expenses.’

The colonel suffered at the thought that he had been unjust.

‘That’s what I meant,’ he corrected himself. He dried his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘This heat is enough to rust the screws in your head.’

A
moment later the lawyer was turning the office upside down looking for the power of attorney. The sun advanced toward the center of the tiny
room, which was built of unsanded boards. After looking futilely everywhere, the lawyer got down on all fours, huffing and puffing, and picked up a roll of papers from under the pianola.

‘Here it is.’

He gave the colonel a sheet of paper with a seal on it. ‘I have to write my agents so they can cancel the copies,’ he concluded. The colonel shook the dust off the paper and put it in his shirt
pocket.

‘Tear it up yourself,’ the lawyer said.

‘No,’ the colonel answered. ‘These are twenty years of memories.’ And he waited for the lawyer to keep on looking. But the lawyer didn’t. He went to the hammock to wipe off his sweat. From there he looked at the colonel through the shimmering air.

‘I need the documents also,’ the colonel said.

‘Which ones?’

‘The proof of claim.’

The lawyer
threw up his hands.

‘Now, that would be impossible, colonel.’

The colonel became alarmed. As Treasurer of the revolution in the district of Macondo, he had undertaken a difficult six-day journey with the funds for the civil war in two trunks roped to the back of a mule. He arrived at the camp of Neerlandia dragging the mule, which was dead from hunger, half an hour before the treaty was signed.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía – quarter-master general of the revolutionary forces on the Atlantic coast – held out the receipt for the funds, and included the two trunks in his inventory of the surrender.

‘Those
documents have an incalculable value,’ the colonel said. ‘There’s a receipt from Colonel Aureliano Buendía, written in his own hand.’

‘I agree,’ said the lawyer. ‘But those documents have
passed through thousands and thousands of hands, in thousands and thousands of offices, before they reached God knows which department in the War Ministry.’

‘No official could fail to notice documents like those,’ the colonel said.

‘But the officials have changed many times in the last fifteen years,’ the lawyer pointed out. ‘Just think about it; there have been seven presidents, and each president
changed his cabinet at least ten times, and each minister changed his staff at least a hundred times.’

‘But nobody could take the documents home,’ said the colonel. ‘Each new official must have found them in the proper file.’

The lawyer lost his patience.

‘And moreover if those papers are removed from the Ministry now, they will have to wait for a new place on the rolls.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’
the colonel said.

‘It’ll take centuries.’

‘It doesn’t matter. If you wait for the big things, you can wait for the little ones.’