Collected Stories (17 page)

Caring for the chickens was his first contact with reality. And it had been the only one until the month of July, when his mother thought about her retirement and deemed her son wise enough to undertake to petition for it. He collaborated in an effective way in the preparation of the documents, and even had the necessary tact to convince the parish priest to change his mother’s
baptismal certificate by six months, since she still wasn’t old enough to retire. On Thursday he received the final instructions, scrupulously detailing his mother’s teaching experience, and he began the trip to the city with twelve pesos, a change of clothing, the file of documents, and an entirely rudimentary idea of the word ‘retirement,’ which
he interpreted crudely as a certain sum of money
which the government ought to give him so he could set himself up in pig breeding.

Dozing on the hotel veranda, dulled by the sweltering heat, he had not stopped to think about the gravity of his situation. He supposed that the mishap would be resolved the following day, when the train returned, so that now his only worry was to wait until Sunday to resume his trip and forget forever about this
town where it was unbearably hot. A little before four, he fell into an uncomfortable and sluggish sleep, thinking while he slept that it was a shame not to have brought his hammock. Then it was that he realized everything, that he had forgotten his bundle of clothes and the documents for the retirement on the train. He woke up with a start, terrified, thinking of his mother, and hemmed in again
by panic.

When he dragged his seat back to the dining room, the lights of the town had been lit. He had never seen electric lights, so he was very impressed when he saw the poor spotted bulbs of the hotel. Then he remembered that his mother had spoken to him about them, and he continued dragging the seat toward the dining room, trying to dodge the horseflies which were bumping against the mirrors
like bullets. He ate without appetite, confused by the clear evidence of his situation, by the intense heat, by the bitterness of that loneliness which he was suffering for the first time in his life. After nine o’clock he was led to the back of the house to a wooden room papered with newspapers and magazines. At midnight he had sunk into a miasmic and feverish sleep while, five blocks away,
Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, lying face down on his cot, was thinking that the evening’s experiences reinforced the sermon which he had prepared for seven in the morning. A little before twelve he had crossed the town to administer extreme unction to a woman, and he felt excited and nervous, with the result that he put the sacramental objects next to his cot and lay down
to go over his sermon. He stayed that way for several hours, lying face down on the cot until he heard the distant call of a plover at dawn. Then he
tried to get up, sat up painfully, stepped on the little bell, and fell headlong on the cold, hard floor of his room.

He had hardly regained consciousness when he felt the trembling sensation which rose up his side. At that instant he was aware of
his entire weight: the weight of his body, his sins, and his age all together. He felt against his cheek the solidity of the stone floor which so often when he was preparing his sermons had helped him form a precise idea of the road which leads to Hell. ‘Lord,’ he murmured, afraid; and he thought, I shall certainly never be able to get up again.

He did not know how long he lay prostrate on the
floor, not thinking about anything, without even remembering to pray for a good death. It was as if, in reality, he had been dead for a minute. But when he regained consciousness, he no longer felt pain or fear. He saw the bright ray beneath the door; he heard, far off and sad, the raucous noise of the roosters, and he realized that he was alive and that he remembered the words of his sermon perfectly.

When he drew back the bar of the door, dawn was breaking. He had ceased feeling pain, and it even seemed that the blow had unburdened him of his old age. All the goodness, the misconduct, and the sufferings of the town penetrated his heart when he swallowed the first mouthful of that air which was a blue dampness full of roosters. Then he looked around himself, as if to reconcile himself to the
solitude, and saw, in the peaceful shade of the dawn, one, two, three dead birds on the veranda.

For nine minutes he contemplated the three bodies, thinking, in accord with his prepared sermon, that the birds’ collective death needed some expiation. Then he walked to the other end of the corridor, picked up the three dead birds and returned to the pitcher, and one after the other threw the birds
into the green, still water without knowing exactly the purpose of that action. Three and three are half a dozen, in one week, he thought, and a miraculous flash of lucidity told him that he had begun to experience the greatest day of his life.

At seven the heat began. In the hotel, the only guest was waiting for his breakfast. The gramophone girl had not yet got up. The proprietress approached,
and at that moment it seemed as if the seven strokes of the clock’s bell were sounding inside her swollen belly.

‘So you missed the train,’ she said in a tone of belated commiseration. And then she brought the breakfast: coffee with milk, a fried egg, and slices of green banana.

He tried to eat, but he wasn’t hungry. He was alarmed that the heat had come on. He was sweating buckets. He was suffocating.
He had slept poorly, with his clothes on, and now he had a little fever. He felt the panic again, and remembered his mother just as the proprietress came to the table to pick up the dishes, radiant in her new dress with the large green flowers. The proprietress’s dress reminded him that it was Sunday.

‘Is there a Mass?’ he asked.

‘Yes, there is,’ the woman said. ‘But it’s just as if there weren’t,
because almost nobody goes. The fact is they haven’t wanted to send us a new priest.’

‘And what’s wrong with this one?’

‘He’s about a hundred years old, and he’s half crazy,’ the woman said; she stood motionless, pensive, with all the dishes in one hand. Then she said, ‘The other day, he swore from the pulpit that he had seen the devil, and since then no one goes to Mass.’

So he went to the
church, in part because of desperation and in part out of curiosity to meet a person a hundred years old. He noticed that it was a dead town, with interminable, dusty streets and dark wooden houses with zinc roofs, which seemed uninhabited. That was the town on Sunday: streets without grass, houses with screens, and a deep, marvelous sky over a stifling heat. He thought that there was no sign there
which would permit one to distinguish Sunday from any other day, and while he walked along the deserted street he remembered his mother: ‘All the streets in every town lead inevitably to the church or the cemetery.’ At that moment he came out
into a small cobblestoned plaza with a whitewashed building that had a tower and a wooden weathercock on the top, and a clock which had stopped at ten after
four.

Without hurrying he crossed the plaza, climbed the three steps of the atrium, and immediately smelled the odor of aged human sweat mixed with the odor of incense, and he went into the warm shade of the almost empty church.

Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar had just risen to the pulpit. He was about to begin the sermon when he saw a boy enter with his hat on. He saw
him examining the almost empty temple with his large, serene, and clear eyes. He saw him sit down in the last pew, his head to one side and his hands on his knees. He noticed that he was a stranger to the town. He had been in town for thirty years, and he could have recognized any of its inhabitants just by his smell. Therefore, he knew that the boy who had just arrived was a stranger. In one intense,
brief look, he observed that he was a quiet soul, and a little sad, and that his clothes were dirty and wrinkled. It’s as if he had spent a long time sleeping in them, he thought with a feeling that was a combination of repugnance and pity. But then, seeing him in the pew, he felt his heart overflowing with gratitude, and he got ready to deliver what was for him the greatest sermon of his
life. Lord, he thought in the meantime, please let him remember his hat so I don’t have to throw him out of the temple. And he began his sermon.

At the beginning he spoke without realizing what he was saying. He wasn’t even listening to himself. He hardly heard the clear and fluent melody which flowed from a spring dormant in his soul ever since the beginning of the world. He had the confused
certainty that his words were flowing forth precisely, opportunely, exactly, in the expected order and place. He felt a warm vapor pressing his innards. But he also knew that his spirit was free of vanity, and that the feeling of pleasure which paralyzed his senses was not pride or defiance or vanity but, rather, the pure rejoicing of his spirit in Our Lord.

In her bedroom, Rebecca felt faint,
knowing that within a few moments the heat would become impossible. If she had not felt rooted to the town by a dark fear of novelty, she would have put her odds and ends in a trunk with mothballs and would have gone off into the world, as her great-grandfather did, so she had been told. But she knew inside that she was destined to die in the town, amid those endless corridors and the nine bedrooms,
whose screens she thought she would have replaced by translucent glass when the heat stopped. So she would stay there, she decided (and that was a decision she always took when she arranged her clothes in the closet), and she also decided to write ‘My Eminent Cousin’ to send them a young priest, so she could attend church again with her hat with the tiny velvet flowers, and hear a coherent Mass
and sensible and edifying sermons again. Tomorrow is Monday, she thought, beginning to think once and for all about the salutation of the letter to the Bishop (a salutation which Colonel Buendía had called frivolous and disrespectful), when Argenida suddenly opened the screened door and shouted:

‘Señora, people are saying that the Father has gone crazy in the pulpit!’

The widow turned a not
characteristically withered and bitter face toward the door. ‘He’s been crazy for at least five years,’ she said. And she kept on arranging her clothing, saying:

‘He must have seen the devil again.’

‘It’s not the devil this time,’ said Argenida.

‘Then who?’ Rebecca asked, prim and indifferent.

‘Now he says that he saw the Wandering Jew.’

The widow felt her skin crawl. A multitude of confused
ideas, among which she could not distinguish her torn screens, the heat, the dead birds, and the plague, passed through her head as she heard those words which she hadn’t remembered since the afternoons of her distant girlhood: ‘The Wandering Jew.’ And then she began to move, enraged, icily, toward where Argenida was watching her with her mouth open.

‘It’s true,’ Rebecca said in a voice which
rose from the
depths of her being. ‘Now I understand why the birds are dying off.’

Impelled by terror, she covered herself with a black embroidered shawl and, in a flash, crossed the long corridor and the living room stuffed with decorative objects, and the street door, and the two blocks to the church, where Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, transfigured, was saying,
‘I swear to you that I saw him. I swear to you that he crossed my path this morning when I was coming back from administering the holy unction to the wife of Jonas the carpenter. I swear to you that his face was blackened with the malediction of the Lord, and that he left a track of burning embers in his wake.’

His sermon broke off, floating in the air. He realized that he couldn’t restrain the
trembling of his hands, that his whole body was shaking, and that a thread of icy sweat was slowly descending his spinal column. He felt ill, feeling the trembling, and the thirst, and a violent wrenching in his gut, and a noise which resounded like the bass note of an organ in his belly. Then he realized the truth.

He saw that there were people in the church, and that Rebecca, pathetic, showy,
her arms open, and her bitter, cold face turned toward the heavens, was advancing up the central nave. Confusedly he understood what was happening, and he even had enough lucidity to understand that it would have been vanity to believe that he was witnessing a miracle. Humbly he rested his trembling hands on the wooden edge of the pulpit and resumed his speech.

‘Then he walked toward me,’ he
said. And this time he heard his own voice, convincing, impassioned. ‘He walked toward me and he had emerald eyes, and shaggy hair, and the smell of a billy goat. And I raised my hand to reproach him in the name of Our Lord, and I said to him: “Halt, Sunday has never been a good day for sacrificing a lamb.” ’

When he finished, the heat had set in. That intense, solid, burning heat of that unforgettable
August. But Father Anthony Isabel was no longer aware of the heat. He knew that
there, at his back, the town was again humbled, speechless with his sermon, but he wasn’t even pleased by that. He wasn’t even pleased with the immediate prospect that the wine would relieve his ravaged throat. He felt uncomfortable and out of place. He felt distracted and he could not concentrate on the supreme moment
of the sacrifice. The same thing had been happening to him for some time, but now it was a different distraction, because his thoughts were filled by a definite uneasiness. Then, for the first time in his life, he knew pride. And just as he had imagined and defined it in his sermons, he felt that pride was an urge the same as thirst. He closed the tabernacle energetically and said:

‘Pythagoras.’

The acolyte, a child with a shaven and shiny head, godson of Father Anthony Isabel, who had named him, approached the altar.

‘Take up the offering,’ said the priest.

The child blinked, turned completely around, and then said in an almost inaudible voice, ‘I don’t know where the plate is.’

It was true. It had been months since an offering had been collected.

‘Then go find a big bag in the sacristy
and collect as much as you can,’ said the Father.

‘And what shall I say?’ said the boy.