Collected Stories (15 page)

When José Montiel died, everyone felt avenged except his widow; but it took several hours for everyone to believe that he had indeed died. Many continued to doubt it after seeing the corpse in the sweltering room, crammed along with pillows and linen sheets into a yellow coffin, with sides as rounded as a melon. He was very closely shaved, dressed in white, with patent-leather
boots, and he looked so well that he had never seemed as alive as at that moment. It was the same Mr Chepe Montiel as was present every Sunday at eight-o’clock Mass, except that instead of his riding quirt he had a crucifix in his hands. It took screwing the lid on the coffin and walling him up in the showy family mausoleum for the whole town to become convinced that he wasn’t playing dead.

After the burial, the only thing which seemed incredible to everyone except his widow was that José Montiel had died a natural death. While everyone had been hoping he would be shot in the back in an ambush, his widow was certain she would see him die an old man in his bed, having confessed, and painlessly, like a modern-day saint. She was mistaken in only a few details. José Montiel died in his hammock,
the second of August, 1951, at two in the afternoon, as a result of a fit of anger which the doctor had forbidden. But his wife also was hoping that the whole town would attend the funeral and that the house would be too small to hold all the flowers. Nevertheless only the members of his own party and of his religious brotherhood attended, and the only wreaths they received were those from
the municipal government. His son,
from his consular post in Germany, and his two daughters, from Paris, sent three-page telegrams. One could see that they had written them standing up, with the plentiful ink of the telegraph office, and that they had torn up many telegram forms before finding twenty dollars’ worth of words. None of them promised to come back. That night, at the age of sixty-two,
while crying on the pillow upon which the head of the man who had made her happy had rested, the widow of Montiel knew for the first time the taste of resentment. I’ll lock myself up forever, she was thinking. For me, it is as if they had put me in the same box as José Montiel. I don’t want to know anything more about this world.

She was sincere, that fragile woman, lacerated by superstition,
married at twenty by her parents’ will to the only suitor they had allowed her to see at less than thirty feet; she had never been in direct contact with reality. Three days after they took her husband’s body out of the house, she understood through her tears that she ought to pull herself together, but she could not find the direction of her new life. She had to begin at the beginning.

Among
the innumerable secrets José Montiel had taken with him to the grave was the combination of the safe. The Mayor took on the problem. He ordered the safe put in the patio, against the wall, and two policemen fired their rifles at the lock. All morning long the widow heard from the bedroom the muffled reports successively ordered by the Mayor’s shouts.

That’s the last straw, she thought. Five years
spent praying to God to end the shooting, and now I have to thank them for shooting in my house.

That day, she made a concerted effort to summon death, but no one replied. She was beginning to fall asleep when a tremendous explosion shook the foundations of the house. They had had to dynamite the safe.

Montiel’s widow heaved a sigh. October was interminable with its swampy rains, and she felt
lost, sailing without direction in the chaotic and fabulous hacienda of José
Montiel. Mr Carmichael, an old and diligent friend of the family, had taken charge of the estate. When at last she faced the concrete fact that her husband had died, Montiel’s widow came out of the bedroom to take care of the house. She stripped it of all decoration, had the furniture covered in mourning colors, and put
funeral ribbons on the portraits of the dead man which hung on all the walls. In the two months after the funeral, she had acquired the habit of biting her nails. One day – her eyes reddened and swollen from crying so much – she realized that Mr Carmichael was entering the house with an open umbrella.

‘Close that umbrella, Mr Carmichael,’ she told him. ‘After all the misfortune we’ve had, all
we need is for you to come into the house with your umbrella open.’

Mr Carmichael put the umbrella in the corner. He was an old Negro, with shiny skin, dressed in white, and with little slits made with a knife in his shoes to relieve the pressure of his bunions.

‘It’s only while it’s drying.’

For the first time since her husband died, the widow opened the window.

‘So much misfortune and, in
addition, this winter,’ she murmured biting her nails. ‘It seems as though it will never clear up.’

‘It won’t clear up today or tomorow,’ said the executor. ‘Last night my bunions wouldn’t let me sleep.’

She trusted the atmospheric predictions of Mr Carmichael’s bunions. She contemplated the desolate little plaza, the silent houses whose doors did not open to witness the funeral of José Montiel,
and then she felt desperate, with her nails, with her limitless lands, and with the infinite number of obligations which she inherited from her husband and which she would never manage to understand.

‘The world is all wrong,’ she said, sobbing.

Those who visited her in those days had many reasons to think she had gone mad. But she was never more lucid than then. Since before the political slaughter
began, she had spent
the sad October mornings in front of the window in her room, sympathizing with the dead and thinking that if God had not rested on Sunday He would have had time to finish the world properly. ‘He should have used that day to tie up a few of the loose ends,’ she used to say. ‘After all, He had all eternity to rest.’ The only difference, after the death of her husband, was that
then she had a concrete reason for harboring such dark thoughts.

Thus, while Montiel’s widow ate herself up in desperation, Mr Carmichael tried to prevent the shipwreck. Things weren’t going well. Free of the threat of José Montiel, who had monopolized local business through terror, the town was taking reprisals. Waiting for the customers who never came, the milk went sour in the jugs lined up
in the patio, and the honey spoiled in its combs, and the cheese fattened worms in the dark cabinets of the cheesehouse. In his mausoleum adorned with electric-light bulbs and imitation-marble archangels, José Montiel was paying for six years of murders and oppression. No one in the history of the country had got so rich in so short a time. When the first Mayor of the dictatorship arrived in town,
José Montiel was a discreet partisan of all regimes who had spent half of his life in his underwear seated in front of his rice mill. At one time he enjoyed a certain reputation as a lucky man, and a good believer, because he promised out loud to give the Church a life-size image of Saint Joseph if he won the lottery, and two weeks later he won himself a fat prize and kept his promise. The first
time he was seen to wear shoes was when the new Mayor, a brutish, underhanded police sergeant, arrived with express orders to liquidate the opposition. José Montiel began by being his confidential informer. That modest businessman, whose fat man’s quiet humor never awakened the least uneasiness, segregated his enemies into rich and poor. The police shot down the poor in the public square. The rich
were given a period of twenty-four hours to get out of town. Planning the massacre, José Montiel was closeted together with the Mayor in his stifling office for days on end, while his
wife was sympathizing with the dead. When the Mayor left the office, she would block her husband’s way. ‘That man is a murderer,’ she would tell him. ‘Use your influence with the government to get them to take that
beast away; he’s not going to leave a single human being in town alive.’ And José Montiel, so busy those days, put her aside without really looking at her, saying, ‘Don’t be such a fool.’ In reality, his business was not the killing of the poor but the expulsion of the rich. After the Mayor riddled their doors with gunfire and gave them their twenty-four hours to get out of town, José Montiel bought
their lands and cattle from them for a price which he himself set. ‘Don’t be silly,’ his wife told him. ‘You’ll ruin yourself helping them so that they won’t die of hunger someplace else, and they will never thank you.’ And José Montiel, who now didn’t even have time to smile, brushed her aside, saying, ‘Go to your kitchen and don’t bother me so much.’ At this rate, in less than a year the opposition
was liquidated, and José Montiel was the richest and most powerful man in town. He sent his daughters to Paris, found a consular post in Germany for his son, and devoted himself to consolidating his empire. But he didn’t live to enjoy even six years of his outrageous wealth.

After the first anniversary of his death, the widow heard the stairs creak only with the arrival of bad news. Someone always
came at dusk. ‘Again the bandits,’ they used to say. ‘Yesterday they made off with a herd of fifty heifers.’ Motionless in her rocker, biting her nails, Montiel’s widow fed on nothing but resentment.

‘I told you José Montiel,’ she was saying, talking to herself. ‘This is an unappreciative town. You are still warm in your grave, and already everyone has turned their backs on us.’

No one came
to the house again. The only human being whom she saw in those interminable months when it did not stop raining was the persistent Mr Carmichael, who never entered the house with his umbrella closed. Things were going no better. Mr Carmichael had written several letters to José Montiel’s son. He suggested that it would be convenient if he
came to take charge of affairs, and he even allowed himself
to make some personal observations about the health of the widow. He always received evasive answers. At last, the son of José Montiel replied that frankly he didn’t dare return for fear he would be shot. Then Mr Carmichael went up to the widow’s bedroom and had to confess to her that she was ruined.

‘Better that way,’ she said. ‘I’m up to here with cheese and flies. If you want, take what you
need and let me die in peace.’

Her only contacts with the world, from then on, were the letters which she wrote to her daughters at the end of very month. ‘This is a blighted town,’ she told them. ‘Stay there forever, and don’t worry about me. I am happy knowing that you are happy.’ Her daughters took turns answering her. Their letters were always happy, and one could see that they had been written
in warm, well-lit places, and that the girls saw themselves reflected in many mirrors when they stopped to think. They didn’t wish to return either. ‘This is civilization,’ they would say. ‘There, on the other hand, it’s not a good atmosphere for us. It’s impossible to live in a country so savage that people are killed for political reasons.’ Reading the letters, Montiel’s widow felt better,
and she nodded her head in agreement at every phrase.

On a certain occasion, her daughters wrote her about the butcher shops of Paris. They told her about the pink pigs that were killed there and then hung up whole in the doorways, decorated with wreaths and garlands of flowers. At the end of the letter, a hand different from her daughters’ had added, ‘Imagine! They put the biggest and prettiest
carnation in the pig’s ass.’

Reading that phrase, for the first time in two years Montiel’s widow smiled. She went up to her bedroom without turning out the lights in the house and, before lying down, turned the electric fan over against the wall. Then, from the night-table drawer she took some scissors, a can of Band-Aids, and a rosary, and she bandaged the nail of her right thumb, which was
irritated by her biting. Then she began to pray, but
at the second mystery she put the rosary into her left hand, because she couldn’t feel the beads through the bandage. For a moment she heard the vibration of distant thunder. Then she fell asleep with her head bent on her breast. The hand with the rosary fell to her side, and then she saw Big Mama in the patio, with a white sheet and a comb
in her lap, squashing lice with her thumbnails. She asked her:

‘When am I going to die?’

Big Mama raised her head.

‘When the tiredness begins in your arm.’

The trouble began in July, when Rebecca, an embittered widow who lived in an immense house with two galleries and nine bedrooms, discovered that the screens were torn as if they had been stoned from the street. She made the first discovery in her bedroom and thought that she must speak to Argenida, her servant and confidante since her husband died. Later, moving things
around (for a long time Rebecca had done nothing but move things around), she noticed that not only the screens in her bedroom but those in all the rest of the house were torn, too. The widow had an academic sense of authority, inherited perhaps from her paternal great-grandfather, a creole who in the War of Independence had fought on the side of the Royalists and later made an arduous journey
to Spain with the sole purpose of visiting the palace which Charles III built in San Ildefonso. So that when she discovered the state of the other screens, she thought no more about speaking to Argenida about it but, rather, put on her straw hat with the tiny velvet flowers and went to the town hall to make a report about the attack. But when she got there, she saw that the Mayor himself, shirtless,
hairy, and with a solidity which seemed bestial to her, was busy repairing the town hall screens, torn like her own.

Rebecca burst into the dirty and cluttered office, and the first thing she saw was a pile of dead birds on the desk. But she was disconcerted, in part by the heat and in part by the indignation which the destruction of her screens had produced in her, so that she did not have time
to shudder at the
unheard-of spectacle of the dead birds on the desk. Nor was she scandalized by the evidence of authority degraded, at the top of a stairway, repairing the metal threads of the window with a roll of screening and a screwdriver. She was not thinking now of any other dignity than her own, mocked by her own screens, and her absorption prevented her even from connecting the windows
of her house with those of the town hall. She planted herself with discreet solemnity two steps inside the door and, leaning on the long ornate handle of her parasol, said:

‘I have to register a complaint.’

From the top of the stairway, the Mayor turned his head, flushed from the heat. He showed no emotion before the gratuitous presence of the widow in his office. With gloomy nonchalance he
continued untacking the ruined screen, and asked from up above:

‘What is the trouble?’

‘The boys from the neighborhood broke my screens.’

The Mayor took another look at her. He examined her carefully, from the elegant little velvet flowers to her shoes the color of old silver, and it was as if he were seeing her for the first time in his life. He descended with great economy of movement, without
taking his eyes off her, and when he reached the bottom, he rested one hand on his belt, motioned with the screwdriver toward the desk, and said:

‘It’s not the boys, Señora. It’s the birds.’

And it was then that she connected the dead birds on the desk with the man at the top of the stairs, and with the broken screens of her bedrooms. She shuddered, imagining all the bedrooms in her house full
of dead birds.

‘The birds!’ she exclaimed.

‘The birds,’ the Mayor concurred. ‘It’s strange you haven’t noticed, since we’ve had this problem with the birds breaking windows and dying inside the houses for three days.’

When she left the town hall, Rebecca felt ashamed. And a little resentful of Argenida, who dragged all the town gossip into her house and who nevertheless had not spoken to her
about the birds. She opened her parasol, dazzled by the brightness of an impending August, and while she walked along the stifling and deserted street she had the impression that the bedrooms of all the houses were giving off a strong and penetrating stench of dead birds.

This was at the end of July, and never in the history of the town had it been so hot. But the inhabitants, alarmed by the death
of the birds, did not notice that. Even though the strange phenomenon had not seriously affected the town’s activities, the majority were held in suspense by it at the beginning of August. A majority among whom was not numbered His Reverence, Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar Castañeda y Montero, the bland parish priest who, at the age of ninety-four, assured people that he had
seen the devil on three occasions, and that nevertheless he had only seen two dead birds, without attributing the least importance to them. He found the first one in the sacristy, one Tuesday after Mass, and thought it had been dragged in there by some neighborhood cat. He found the other one on Wednesday, in the veranda of the parish house, and he pushed it with the point of his boot into the street,
thinking, Cats shouldn’t exist.

But on Friday, when he arrived at the railroad station, he found a third dead bird on the bench he chose to sit down on. It was like a lightning stroke inside him when he grabbed the body by its little legs; he raised it to eye level, turned it over, examined it, and thought astonishedly, Gracious, this is the third one I’ve found this week.

From that moment on
he began to notice what was happening in the town, but in a very inexact way, for Father Anthony Isabel, in part because of his age and in part also because he swore he had seen the devil on three occasions (something which seemed to the town just a bit out of place), was considered by his parishioners as a good man, peaceful and obliging, but with his head habitually in the clouds. He noticed that
something was happening with the birds, but even then he didn’t believe that it was so important as to deserve a sermon. He was the first one who experienced the
smell. He smelled it Friday night, when he woke up alarmed, his light slumber interrupted by a nauseating stench, but he didn’t know whether to attribute it to a nightmare or to a new and original trick of the devil’s to disturb his sleep.
He sniffed all around him, and turned over in bed, thinking that that experience would serve him for a sermon. It could be, he thought, a dramatic sermon on the ability of Satan to infiltrate the human heart through any of the five senses.

When he strolled around the porch the next day before Mass, he heard someone speak for the first time about the dead birds. He was thinking about the sermon,
Satan, and the sins which can be committed through the olfactory sense when he heard someone say that the bad nocturnal odor was due to the birds collected during the week; and in his head a confused hodgepodge of evangelical cautions, evil odors, and dead birds took shape. So that on Sunday he had to improvise a long paragraph on Charity which he himself did not understand very well, and he forgot
forever about the relations between the devil and the five senses.

Nevertheless, in some very distant spot in his thinking, those experiences must have remained lurking. That always happened to him, not only in the seminary, more than seventy years before, but in a very particular way after he passed ninety. At the seminary, one very bright afternoon when there was a heavy downpour with no thunder,
he was reading a selection from Sophocles in the original. When the rain was over, he looked through the window at the tired field, the newly washed afternoon, and forgot entirely about Greek theater and the classics, which he did not distinguish but, rather, called in a general way, ‘the little ancients of old.’ One rainless afternoon, perhaps thirty or forty years later, he was crossing the
cobblestone plaza of a town which he was visiting and, without intending to, recited the stanza from Sophocles which he had been reading in the seminary. That same week, he had a long conversation about ‘the little ancients of old’ with the apostolic deputy, a talkative and impressionable old man, who was fond of certain complicated puzzles which he
claimed to have invented and which became popular
years later under the name of crosswords.

That interview permitted him to recover at one stroke all his old heartfelt love for the Greek classics. At Christmas of that year he received a letter. And if it were not for the fact that by that time he had acquired the solid prestige of being exaggeratedly imaginative, daring in his interpretations, and a little foolish in his sermons, on that occasion
they would have made him a bishop.

But he had buried himself in the town long before the War of 1885, and at the time when the birds began dying in the bedrooms it had been a long while since they had asked for him to be replaced by a younger priest, especially when he claimed to have seen the devil. From that time on they began not paying attention to him, something which he didn’t notice in
a very clear way in spite of still being able to decipher the tiny characters of his breviary without glasses.

He had always been a man of regular habits. Small, insignificant, with pronounced and solid bones and calm gestures, and a soothing voice for conversation but too soothing for the pulpit. He used to stay in his bedroom until lunchtime daydreaming, carelessly stretched out in a canvas
chair and wearing nothing but his long twill trousers with the bottoms tied at the ankles.

He didn’t do anything except say Mass. Twice a week he sat in the confessional, but for many years no one confessed. He simply thought that his parishioners were losing the faith because of modern customs, and that’s why he would have thought it a very opportune occurrence to have seen the devil on three
occasions, although he knew that people gave very little credence to his words and although he was aware that he was not very convincing when he spoke about those experiences. For himself it would have been a surprise to discover that he was dead, not only during the last five years but also in those extraordinary moments when he found the first two birds. When he found the third, however, he came
back to life a little, so that in the last few days he was thinking with
appreciable frequency about the dead bird on the station bench.

He lived ten steps from the church in a small house without screens, with a veranda toward the street and two rooms which served as office and bedroom. He considered, perhaps in his moments of less lucidity, that it is possible to achieve happiness on earth
when it is not very hot, and this idea made him a little confused. He liked to wander through metaphysical obstacle courses. That was what he was doing when he used to sit in the bedroom every morning, with the door ajar, his eyes closed and his muscles tensed. However, he himself did not realize that he had become so subtle in his thinking that for at least three years in his meditative moments he
was no longer thinking about anything.

At twelve o’clock sharp a boy crossed the corridor with a sectioned tray which contained the same things every day: bone broth with a piece of yucca, white rice, meat prepared without onion, fried banana or a corn muffin, and a few lentils which Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar had never tasted.

The boy put the tray next to the chair
where the priest sat, but the priest didn’t open his eyes until he no longer heard steps in the corridor. Therefore, in town they thought that the Father took his siesta before lunch (a thing which seemed exceedingly nonsensical) when the truth was that he didn’t even sleep normally at night.

Around that time his habits had become less complicated, almost primitive. He lunched without moving
from his canvas chair, without taking the food from the tray, without using the dishes or the fork or the knife, but only the same spoon with which he drank his soup. Later he would get up, throw a little water on his head, put on his white soutane dotted with great square patches, and go to the railroad station precisely at the hour when the rest of the town was lying down for its siesta. He had
been covering this route for several months, murmuring the prayer which he himself had made up the last time the devil had appeared to him.

One Saturday – nine days after the dead birds began to fall – Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar was going to the station when a dying bird fell at his feet, directly in front of Rebecca’s house. A flash of intuition exploded in his
head, and he realized that this bird, contrary to the others, might be saved. He took it in his hands and knocked at Rebecca’s door at the moment when she was unhooking her bodice to take her siesta.

In her bedroom, the widow heard the knocking and instinctively turned her glance toward the screens. No bird had got into that bedroom for two days. But the screen was still torn. She had thought
it a useless expense to have it repaired as long as the invasion of birds, which kept her nerves on edge, continued. Above the hum of the electric fan, she heard the knocking at the door and remembered with impatience that Argenida was taking a siesta in the bedroom at the end of the corridor. It didn’t even occur to her to wonder who might be imposing on her at that hour. She hooked up her bodice
again, pushed open the screen door, and walked the length of the corridor, stiff and straight, then crossed the living room crowded with furniture and decorative objects and, before opening the door, saw through the metal screen that there stood taciturn Father Anthony Isabel, with his eyes closed and a bird in his hands. Before she opened the door, he said, ‘If we give him a little water and then
put him under a dish, I’m sure he’ll get well.’ And when she opened the door, Rebecca thought she’d collapse from fear.

He didn’t stay there for more than five minutes. Rebecca thought that it was she who had cut short the meeting. But in reality it had been the priest. If the widow had thought about it at that moment, she would have realized that the priest, in the thirty years he had been living
in the town, had never stayed more than five minutes in her house. It seemed to him that amid the profusion of decorations in the living room the concupiscent spirit of the mistress of the house showed itself clearly, in spite of her being related, however distantly, but as everyone was aware, to the Bishop. Furthermore, there had
been a legend (or a story) about Rebecca’s family which surely,
the Father thought, had not reached the episcopal palace, in spite of the fact that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a cousin of the widow’s whom she considered lacking in family affection, had once sworn that the Bishop had not come to the town in this century in order to avoid visiting his relation. In any case, be it history or legend, the truth was that Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of
the Altar did not feel at ease in this house, whose only inhabitant had never shown any signs of piety and who confessed only once a year but always replied with evasive answers when he tried to pin her down about the puzzling death of her husband. If he was there now, waiting for her to bring him a glass of water to bathe a dying bird, it was the result of a chance occurrence which he was not responsible
for.