No One Writes to the Colonel (4 page)

He took a pad of lined paper, the pen, the inkwell, and a blotter to the little table in the living room, and left the bedroom door open in case he had to ask his wife anything. She was saying her beads.

‘What’s today’s date?’

‘October
27th.’

He wrote with a studious
neatness, the hand that held the pen resting on the blotter, his spine straight to ease his breathing, as he’d been taught in school. The heat became unbearable in the closed living room. A drop of perspiration fell on the letter. The colonel picked it up on the blotter. Then he tried to erase the letters which had smeared but he smudged them. He didn’t lose his patience. He wrote an asterisk
and noted in the margin, ‘acquired rights.’ Then he read the whole paragraph.

‘When was I put on the rolls?’

The woman didn’t interrupt her prayer to think.

‘August 12, 1949.’

A moment later it began to rain. The colonel filled a page with large doodlings which were a little childish, the same ones he learned in public school at Manaure. Then he wrote on a second sheet down to the middle,
and he signed it.

He read the letter to his wife. She approved each sentence with a nod. When he finished reading, the colonel sealed the envelope and turned off the lamp.

‘You could ask someone to type it for you.’

‘No,’ the colonel answered. ‘I’m tired of going around asking favors.’

For half an hour he heard the rain against the palm roof. The town sank into the deluge. After curfew sounded,
a leak began somewhere in the house.

‘This should have been done a long time ago,’ the woman said. ‘It’s always better to handle things oneself.’

‘It’s never too late,’ the colonel said, paying attention
to the leak. ‘Maybe all this will be settled when the mortgage on the house falls due.’

‘In two years,’ the woman said.

He lit the lamp to locate the leak in the living room. He put the rooster’s
can underneath it and returned to the bedroom, pursued by the metallic noise of the water in the empty can.

‘It’s possible that to save the interest on the money they’ll settle it before January,’ he said, and he convinced himself. ‘By then, Agustín’s year will be up and we can go to the movies.’

She laughed under her breath. ‘I don’t even remember the cartoons any more,’ she said. ‘They were
showing
The Dead Man’s Will
.’

‘Was there a fight?’

‘We never found out. The storm broke just when the ghost tried to rob the girl’s necklace.’

The sound of the rain put them to sleep. The colonel felt a slight queasiness in his intestines. But he wasn’t afraid. He was about to survive another October. He wrapped himself in a wool blanket, and for a moment heard the gravelly breathing of his
wife – far away – drifting on another dream. Then he spoke, completely conscious.

The woman woke up.

‘Who are you speaking to?’

‘No one,’ the colonel said. ‘I was thinking that at the Macondo meeting we were right when we told Colonel Aureliano Buendía not to surrender. That’s what started to ruin everything.’

It rained the whole week. The second of November – against the colonel’s wishes
– the woman took flowers to Agustín’s grave. She returned from the cemetery and had another attack. It was a hard week. Harder than the four weeks of October which the colonel hadn’t thought he’d survive. The doctor came to see the sick woman, and came out of the room shouting. ‘With asthma like that, I’d be able to bury the whole town!’ But he spoke to the colonel alone and prescribed a special diet.

The
colonel also suffered a relapse. He strained for many hours in the privy, in an icy sweat, feeling as if he were rotting and that the flora in his vitals was falling to pieces. ‘It’s winter,’ he repeated to himself patiently. ‘Everything will be different when it stops raining.’ And he really believed it, certain that he would be alive at the moment the letter arrived.

This time it was he
who had to repair their household economy. He had to grit his teeth many times to ask for credit in the neighborhood stores. ‘It’s just until next week,’ he would say, without being sure himself that it was true. ‘It’s a little money which should have arrived last Friday.’ When her attack was over, the woman examined him in horror.

‘You’re nothing but skin and bones,’ she said.

‘I’m taking care
of myself so I can sell myself,’ the colonel said. ‘I’ve already been hired by a clarinet factory.’

But in reality his hoping for the letter barely sustained him. Exhausted, his bones aching from sleeplessness, he couldn’t attend to his needs and the rooster’s at the same time. In the second half of November, he thought that the animal would die after two days without corn. Then he remembered
a handful of beans
which he had hung in the chimney in July. He opened the pods and put down a can of dry seeds for the rooster.

‘Come here,’ she said.

‘Just a minute,’ the colonel answered, watching the rooster’s reaction. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

He found his wife trying to sit up in bed. Her ravaged body gave off the aroma of medicinal herbs. She spoke her words, one by one, with calculated
precision:

‘Get rid of that rooster right now.’

The colonel had foreseen that moment. He had been waiting for it ever since the afternoon when his son was shot down, and he had decided to keep the rooster. He had had time to think.

‘It’s not worth it now,’ he said. ‘The fight will be in two months and then we’ll be able to sell him at a better price.’

‘It’s not a question of the money,’ the
woman said. ‘When the boys come, you’ll tell them to take it away and do whatever they feel like with it.’

‘It’s for Agustín,’ the colonel said, advancing his prepared argument. ‘Remember his face when he came to tell us the rooster won.’

The woman, in fact, did think of her son.

‘Those accursed roosters were his downfall!’ she shouted. ‘If he’d stayed home on January 3rd, his evil hour wouldn’t
have come.’ She held out a skinny forefinger toward the door and exclaimed: ‘It seems as if I can see him when he left with the rooster under his arm. I warned him not to go looking for trouble at the cockfights, and he smiled and told me: “Shut up; this afternoon we’ll be rolling in money.” ’

She
fell back exhausted. The colonel pushed her gently toward the pillow. His eyes fell upon other eyes
exactly like his own. ‘Try not to move,’ he said, feeling her whistling within his own lungs. The woman fell into a momentary torpor. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her breathing seemed more even.

‘It’s because of the situation we’re in,’ she said. ‘It’s a sin to take the food out of our mouths to give it to a rooster.’

The colonel wiped her forehead with the sheet.

‘Nobody
dies in three months.’

‘And what do we eat in the meantime?’ the woman asked.

‘I don’t know,’ the colonel said. ‘But if we were going to die of hunger, we would have died already.’

The rooster was very much alive next to the empty can. When he saw the colonel, he emitted an almost human, guttural monologue and tossed his head back. He gave him a smile of complicity:

‘Life is tough, pal.’

The colonel went into the street. He wandered about the town during the siesta, without thinking about anything, without even trying to convince himself that his problem had no solution. He walked through forgotten streets until he found he was exhausted. Then he returned to the house. The woman heard him come in and called him into the bedroom.

‘What?’

She replied without looking at him.

‘We
can sell the clock.’

The colonel had thought of that. ‘I’m sure Alvaro will give you forty pesos right on the spot,’ said the woman.
‘Think how quickly he bought the sewing machine.’

She was referring to the tailor whom Agustín had worked for.

‘I could speak to him in the morning,’ admitted the colonel.

‘None of that “speak to him in the morning,” ’ she insisted. ‘Take the clock to him this
minute. You put it on the counter and you tell him, “Alvaro, I’ve brought this clock for you to buy from me.” He’ll understand immediately.’

The colonel felt ashamed.

‘It’s like walking around with the Holy Sepulcher,’ he protested. ‘If they see me in the street with a showpiece like that, Rafael Escalona will put me into one of his songs.’

But this time, too, his wife convinced him. She herself
took down the clock, wrapped it in newspaper, and put it into his arms. ‘Don’t come back here without the forty pesos,’ she said. The colonel went off to the tailor’s with the package under his arm. He found Agustín’s companions sitting in the doorway.

One of them offered him a seat. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay.’ Alvaro came out of the shop. A piece of wet duck hung on a wire stretched between
two hooks in the hall. He was a boy with a hard, angular body and wild eyes. He also invited him to sit down. The colonel felt comforted. He leaned the stool against the door-jamb and sat down to wait until Alvaro was alone to propose his deal. Suddenly he realized that he was surrounded by expressionless faces.

‘I’m not interrupting?’ he said.

They said he wasn’t. One of them leaned toward
him.
He said in a barely audible voice: ‘Agustín wrote.’

The colonel observed the deserted street.

‘What does he say?’

‘The same as always.’

They gave him the clandestine sheet of paper. The colonel put it in his pants pocket. Then he kept silent, drumming on the package, until he realized that someone had noticed it. He stopped in suspense.

‘What have you got there, colonel?’

The colonel
avoided Hernán’s penetrating green eyes.

‘Nothing,’ he lied. ‘I’m taking my clock to the German to have him fix it for me.’

‘Don’t be silly, colonel,’ said Hernán, trying to take the package. ‘Wait and I’ll look at it.’

The colonel held back. He didn’t say anything, but his eyelids turned purple. The others insisted.

‘Let him, colonel. He knows mechanical things.’

‘I just don’t want to bother
him.’

‘Bother, it’s no bother,’ Hernán argued. He seized the clock. ‘The German will get ten pesos out of you and it’ll be the same as it is now.’

Hernán went into the tailor shop with the clock. Alvaro was sewing on a machine. At the back, beneath a guitar hanging on a nail, a girl was sewing buttons on. There was a sign tacked up over the guitar: ‘
TALKING POLITICS FORBIDDEN
.’ Outside, the
colonel felt as if his body were superfluous. He rested his feet on the rail of the stool.

‘Goddamn it, colonel.’

He was startled. ‘No need to swear,’ he said.

Alfonso adjusted his eyeglasses on his nose to examine the colonel’s shoes.

‘It’s
because of your shoes,’ he said. ‘You’ve got on some goddamn new shoes.’

‘But you can say that without swearing,’ the colonel said, and showed the soles
of his patent-leather shoes. ‘These monstrosities are forty years old, and it’s the first time they’ve ever heard anyone swear.’

‘All done,’ shouted Hernán, inside, just as the clock’s bell rang. In the neighboring house, a woman pounded on the partition; she shouted: ‘Let that guitar alone! Agustín’s year isn’t up yet.’

Someone guffawed.

‘It’s a clock.’

Hernán came out with the package.

‘It wasn’t anything,’ he said. ‘If you like I’ll go home with you to level it.’

The colonel refused his offer.

‘How much do I owe you?’

‘Don’t worry about it, colonel,’ replied Hernán, taking his place in the group. ‘In January, the rooster will pay for it.’

The colonel now found the chance he was looking for.

‘I’ll make you a deal,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ll give you the rooster.’ He examined
the circle of faces. ‘I’ll give the rooster to all of you.’

Hernán looked at him in confusion.

‘I’m too old now for that,’ the colonel continued. He gave his voice a convincing severity. ‘It’s too much responsibility for me. For days now I’ve had the impression that the animal is dying.’

‘Don’t worry about it, colonel,’ Alfonso said. ‘The
trouble is that the rooster is molting now. He’s got
a fever in his quills.’

‘He’ll be better next month,’ Hernán said.

‘I don’t want him anyway,’ the colonel said.

Hernán’s pupils bore into his.

‘Realize how things are, colonel,’ he insisted. ‘The main thing is for you to be the one who puts Agustín’s rooster into the ring.’

The colonel thought about it. ‘I realize,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve kept him until now.’ He clenched his teeth, and
felt he could go on: ‘The trouble is there are still two months.’

Hernán was the one who understood.

‘If it’s only because of that, there’s no problem,’ he said.

And he proposed his formula. The other accepted. At dusk, when he entered the house with the package under his arm, his wife was chagrined.

‘Nothing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ the colonel answered. ‘But now it doesn’t matter. The boys
will take over feeding the rooster.’

‘Wait and I’ll lend you an umbrella, friend.’

Sabas opened a cupboard in the office wall. He uncovered a jumbled interior: riding boots piled up, stirrups and reins, and an aluminum pail full of riding spurs. Hanging from the upper part, half a dozen umbrellas and a lady’s parasol. The colonel was thinking of the debris from some catastrophe.

‘Thanks, friend,’
the colonel said, leaning on the window. ‘I prefer to wait for it to clear.’ Sabas didn’t close the cupboard. He settled down at the desk within
range of the electric fan. Then he took a little hypodermic syringe wrapped in cotton out of the drawer. The colonel observed the grayish almond trees through the rain. It was an empty afternoon.

‘The rain is different from this window,’ he said. ‘It’s
as if it were raining in another town.’

‘Rain is rain from whatever point,’ replied Sabas. He put the syringe on to boil on the glass desk top. ‘This town stinks.’

The colonel shrugged his shoulders. He walked toward the middle of the office: a green-tiled room with furniture upholstered in brightly colored fabrics. At the back, piled up in disarray, were sacks of salt, honeycombs, and riding
saddles. Sabas followed him with a completely vacant stare.