Collected Stories (18 page)

The Father thoughtfully contemplated his shaven blue skull, with its prominent sutures. Now it was he who blinked:

‘Say that it is to expel the Wandering Jew,’ he said, and he felt as he said it that he was supporting a great weight in his heart. For a moment he heard nothing but the guttering of the candles
in the silent temple and his own excited and labored breathing. Then, putting his hand on the acolyte’s shoulder, while the acolyte looked at him with his round eyes aghast, he said:

‘Then take the money and give it to the boy who was alone at the beginning, and you tell him that it’s from the priest, and that he should buy a new hat.’

Feeling her way in the gloom of dawn, Mina put on the sleeveless dress which the night before she had hung next to the bed, and rummaged in the trunk for the detachable sleeves. Then she looked for them on the nails on the wall, and behind the doors, trying not to make noise so as not to wake her blind grandmother, who was sleeping in the same room. But when she got used
to the darkness, she noticed that the grandmother had got up, and she went into the kitchen to ask her for the sleeves.

‘They’re in the bathroom,’ the blind woman said. ‘I washed them yesterday afternoon.’

There they were, hanging from a wire with two wooden clothespins. They were still wet. Mina went back into the kitchen and stretched the sleeves out on the stones of the fireplace. In front
of her, the blind woman was stirring the coffee, her dead pupils fixed on the stone border of the veranda, where there was a row of flowerpots with medicinal herbs.

‘Don’t take my things again,’ said Mina. ‘These days, you can’t count on the sun.’

The blind woman moved her face toward the voice.

‘I had forgotten that it was the first Friday,’ she said.

After testing with a deep breath to see
if the coffee was ready, she took the pot off the fire.

‘Put a piece of paper underneath, because these stones are dirty,’ she said.

Mina ran her index finger along the fireplace stones.
They were dirty, but with a crust of hardened soot which would not dirty the sleeves if they were not rubbed against the stones.

‘If they get dirty you’re responsible,’ she said.

The blind woman had poured
herself a cup of coffee. ‘You’re angry,’ she said, pulling a chair toward the veranda. ‘It’s a sacrilege to take Communion when one is angry.’ She sat down to drink her coffee in front of the roses in the patio. When the third call for Mass rang, Mina took the sleeves off the fireplace and they were still wet. But she put them on. Father Ángel would not give her Communion with a bare-shouldered dress
on. She didn’t wash her face. She took off the traces of rouge with a towel, picked up the prayer book and shawl in her room, and went into the street. A quarter of an hour later she was back.

‘You’ll get there after the reading of the gospel,’ the blind woman said, seated opposite the roses in the patio.

Mina went directly to the toilet. ‘I can’t go to Mass,’ she said. ‘The sleeves are wet,
and my whole dress is wrinkled.’ She felt a knowing look follow her.

‘First Friday and you’re not going to Mass,’ exclaimed the blind woman.

Back from the toilet, Mina poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down against the whitewashed doorway, next to the blind woman. But she couldn’t drink the coffee.

‘You’re to blame,’ she murmured, with a dull rancor, feeling that she was drowning in tears.

‘You’re crying,’ the blind woman exclaimed.

She put the watering can next to the pots of oregano and went out into the patio, repeating, ‘You’re crying.’ Mina put her cup on the ground before sitting up.

‘I’m crying from anger,’ she said. And added, as she passed next to her grandmother, ‘You must go to confession because you made me miss the first-Friday Communion.’

The blind woman remained
motionless, waiting for Mina to close the bedroom door. Then she walked to the end of the veranda. She bent over haltingly until she found the untouched
cup in one piece on the ground. While she poured the coffee into the earthen pot, she went on:

‘God knows I have a clear conscience.’

Mina’s mother came out of the bedroom.

‘Who are you talking to?’ she asked.

‘To no one,’ said the blind woman.
‘I’ve told you already that I’m going crazy.’

Ensconced in her room, Mina unbuttoned her bodice and took out three little keys which she carried on a safety pin. With one of the keys she opened the lower drawer of the armoire and took out a miniature wooden trunk. She opened it with another key. Inside there was a packet of letters written on colored paper, held together by a rubber band. She
hid them in her bodice, put the little trunk in its place, and locked the drawer. Then she went to the toilet and threw the letters in.

‘I thought you were at church,’ her mother said when Mina came into the kitchen.

‘She couldn’t go,’ the blind woman interrupted. ‘I forgot that it was first Friday, and I washed the sleeves yesterday afternoon.’

‘They’re still wet,’ murmured Mina.

‘I’ve had
to work hard these days,’ the blind woman said.

‘I have to deliver a hundred and fifty dozen roses for Easter,’ Mina said.

The sun warmed up early. Before seven Mina set up her artificial-rose shop in the living room: a basket full of petals and wires, a box of crêpe paper, two pairs of scissors, a spool of thread, and a pot of glue. A moment later Trinidad arrived, with a pasteboard box under
her arm, and asked her why she hadn’t gone to Mass.

‘I didn’t have any sleeves,’ said Mina.

‘Anyone could have lent some to you,’ said Trinidad.

She pulled over a chair and sat down next to the basket of petals.

‘I was too late,’ Mina said.

She finished a rose. Then she pulled the basket closer to
shirr the petals with the scissors. Trinidad put the pasteboard box on the floor and joined
in the work.

Mina looked at the box.

‘Did you buy shoes?’ she asked.

‘They’re dead mice,’ said Trinidad.

Since Trinidad was an expert at shirring petals, Mina spent her time making stems of wire wound with green paper. They worked silently without noticing the sun advance in the living room, which was decorated with idyllic prints and family photographs. When she finished the stems, Mina turned
toward Trinidad with a face that seemed to end in something immaterial. Trinidad shirred with admirable neatness, hardly moving the petal tip between her fingers, her legs close together. Mina observed her masculine shoes. Trinidad avoided the look without raising her head, barely drawing her feet backward, and stopped working.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

Mina leaned toward her.

‘He went
away,’ she said.

Trinidad dropped the scissors in her lap.

‘No.’

‘He went away,’ Mina repeated.

Trinidad looked at her without blinking. A vertical wrinkle divided her knit brows.

‘And now?’ she asked.

Mina replied in a steady voice.

‘Now nothing.’

Trinidad said goodbye before ten.

Freed from the weight of her intimacy, Mina stopped her a moment to throw the dead mice into the toilet.
The blind woman was pruning the rosebush.

‘I’ll bet you don’t know what I have in this box,’ Mina said to her as she passed.

She shook the mice.

The blind woman began to pay attention. ‘Shake it again,’ she said. Mina repeated the movement, but the blind woman could not identify the objects after listening for a
third time with her index finger pressed against the lobe of her ear.

‘They are
the mice which were caught in the church traps last night,’ said Mina.

When she came back, she passed next to the blind woman without speaking. But the blind woman followed her. When she got to the living room, Mina was alone next to the closed window, finishing the artificial roses.

‘Mina,’ said the blind woman. ‘If you want to be happy, don’t confess with strangers.’

Mina looked at her without
speaking. The blind woman sat down in the chair in front of her and tried to help with the work. But Mina stopped her.

‘You’re nervous,’ said the blind woman.

‘Why didn’t you go to Mass?’ asked the blind woman.

‘You know better than anyone.’

‘If it had been because of the sleeves, you wouldn’t have bothered to leave the house,’ said the blind woman. ‘Someone was waiting for you on the way
who caused you some disappointment.’

Mina passed her hands before her grandmother’s eyes, as if cleaning an invisible pane of glass.

‘You’re a witch,’ she said.

‘You went to the toilet twice this morning,’ the blind woman said. ‘You never go more than once.’

Mina kept making roses.

‘Would you dare show me what you are hiding in the drawer of the armoire?’ the blind woman asked.

Unhurriedly,
Mina stuck the rose in the window frame, took the three little keys out of her bodice, and put them in the blind woman’s hand. She herself closed her fingers.

‘Go see with your own eyes,’ she said.

The blind woman examined the little keys with her fingertips.

‘My eyes cannot see down the toilet.’

Mina raised her head and then felt a different sensation: she felt that the blind woman knew that
she was looking at her.

‘Throw yourself down the toilet if what I do is so interesting to you,’ she said.

The blind woman ignored the interruption.

‘You always stay up writing in bed until early morning,’ she said.

‘You yourself turn out the light,’ Mina said.

‘And immediately you turn on the flashlight,’ the blind woman said. ‘I can tell that you’re writing by your breathing.’

Mina made
an effort to stay calm. ‘Fine,’ she said without raising her head. ‘And supposing that’s the way it is. What’s so special about it?’

‘Nothing,’ replied the blind woman. ‘Only that it made you miss first-Friday Communion.’

With both hands Mina picked up the spool of thread, the scissors, and a fistful of unfinished stems and roses. She put it all in the basket and faced the blind woman. ‘Would
you like me to tell you what I went to do in the toilet, then?’ she asked. They both were in suspense until Mina replied to her own question:

‘I went to take a shit.’

The blind woman threw the three little keys into the basket. ‘It would be a good excuse,’ she murmured, going into the kitchen. ‘You would have convinced me if it weren’t the first time in your life I’ve ever heard you swear.’
Mina’s mother was coming along the corridor in the opposite direction, her arms full of bouquets of thorned flowers.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘I’m crazy,’ said the blind woman. ‘But apparently you haven’t thought of sending me to the madhouse so long as I don’t start throwing stones.’

This is, for all the world’s unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived for ninety-two years, and died in the odor of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope.

Now that the nation, which was shaken to its vitals, has recovered its balance; now that the bagpipers of San Jacinto,
the smugglers of Guajira, the rice planters of Sinú, the prostitutes of Caucamayal, the wizards of Sierpe, and the banana workers of Aracataca have folded up their tents to recover from the exhausting vigil and have regained their serenity, and the President of the Republic and his Ministers and all those who represented the public and supernatural powers on the most magnificent funeral occasion
recorded in the annals of history have regained control of their estates; now that the Holy Pontiff has risen up to Heaven in body and soul; and now that it is impossible to walk around in Macondo because of the empty bottles, the cigarette butts, the gnawed bones, the cans and rags and excrement that the crowd which came to the burial left behind; now is the time to lean a stool against the front
door and relate from the beginning the details of this national commotion, before the historians have a chance to get at it.

Fourteen weeks ago, after endless nights of poultices, mustard plasters, and leeches, and weak with the delirium of her death agony, Big Mama ordered them to seat her in her old rattan rocker so she could express her last wishes. It was
the only thing she needed to do before
she died. That morning, with the intervention of Father Anthony Isabel, she had put the affairs of her soul in order, and now she needed only to put her worldly affairs in order with her nine nieces and nephews, her sole heirs, who were standing around her bed. The priest, talking to himself and on the verge of his hundredth birthday, stayed in the room. Ten men had been needed to take him up
to Big Mama’s bedroom, and it was decided that he should stay there so they should not have to take him down and then take him up again at the last minute.

Nicanor, the eldest nephew, gigantic and savage, dressed in khaki and spurred boots, with a .38-caliber long-barreled revolver holstered under his shirt, went to look for the notary. The enormous two-story mansion, fragrant from molasses and
oregano, with its dark apartments crammed with chests and the odds and ends of four generations turned to dust, had become paralyzed since the week before, in expectation of that moment. In the long central hall, with hooks on the walls where in another time butchered pigs had been hung and deer were slaughtered on sleepy August Sundays, the peons were sleeping on farm equipment and bags of salt,
awaiting the order to saddle the mules to spread the bad news to the four corners of the huge hacienda. The rest of the family was in the living room. The women were limp, exhausted by the inheritance proceedings and lack of sleep; they kept a strict mourning which was the culmination of countless accumulated mournings. Big Mama’s matriarchal rigidity had surrounded her fortune and her name with
a sacramental fence, within which uncles married the daughters of their nieces, and the cousins married their aunts, and brothers their sisters-in-law, until an intricate mesh of consanguinity was formed, which turned procreation into a vicious circle. Only Magdalena, the youngest of the nieces, managed to escape it. Terrified by hallucinations, she made Father Anthony Isabel exorcise her, shaved
her head, and renounced the glories and vanities of the world in the novitiate of the Mission District.

On the margin of the official family, and in exercise of the
jus primae noctis
, the males had fertilized ranches, byways, and settlements with an entire bastard line, which circulated among the servants without surnames, as godchildren, employees, favorites, and protégés of Big Mama.

The imminence
of her death stirred the exhausting expectation. The dying woman’s voice, accustomed to homage and obedience, was no louder than a bass organ pipe in the closed room, but it echoed in the most far-flung corners of the hacienda. No one was indifferent to this death. During this century, Big Mama had been Macondo’s center of gravity, as had her brothers, her parents, and the parents of her
parents in the past, in a dominance which covered two centuries. The town was founded on her surname. No one knew the origin, or the limits or the real value of her estate, but everyone was used to believing that Big Mama was the owner of the waters, running and still, of rain and drought, and of the district’s roads, telegraph poles, leap years, and heat waves, and that she had furthermore a hereditary
right over life and property. When she sat on her balcony in the cool afternoon air, with all the weight of her belly and authority squeezed into her old rattan rocker, she seemed, in truth, infinitely rich and powerful, the richest and most powerful matron in the world.

It had not occurred to anyone to think that Big Mama was mortal, except the members of her tribe, and Big Mama herself, prodded
by the senile premonitions of Father Anthony Isabel. But she believed that she would live more than a hundred years, as did her maternal grandmother, who in the War of 1885 confronted a patrol of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s, barricaded in the kitchen of the hacienda. Only in April of this year did Big Mama realize that God would not grant her the privilege of personally liquidating, in an open
skirmish, a horde of Federalist Masons.

During the first week of pain, the family doctor maintained her with mustard plasters and woolen stockings. He was a hereditary doctor, a graduate of Montpellier, hostile by philosophical conviction to the progress of his science, whom Big Mama had accorded the lifetime privilege of preventing the
establishment in Macondo of any other doctors. At one time
he covered the town on horseback, visiting the doleful, sick people at dusk, and Nature had accorded him the privilege of being the father of many another’s children. But arthritis kept him stiff-jointed in bed, and he ended up attending to his patients without calling on them, by means of suppositions, messengers, and errands. Summoned by Big Mama, he crossed the plaza in his pajamas, leaning
on two canes, and he installed himself in the sick woman’s bedroom. Only when he realized that Big Mama was dying did he order a chest with porcelain jars labeled in Latin brought, and for three weeks he besmeared the dying woman inside and out with all sorts of academic salves, magnificent stimulants, and masterful suppositories. Then he applied bloated toads to the site of her pain, and leeches
to her kidneys, until the early morning of that day when he had to face the dilemma of either having her bled by the barber or exorcised by Father Anthony Isabel.

Nicanor sent for the priest. His ten best men carried him from the parish house to Big Mama’s bedroom, seated on a creaking willow rocker, under the mildewed canopy reserved for great occasions. The little bell of the Viaticum in the
warm September dawn was the first notification to the inhabitants of Macondo. When the sun rose, the little plaza in front of Big Mama’s house looked like a country fair.

It was like a memory of another era. Until she was seventy, Big Mama used to celebrate her birthday with the most prolonged and tumultuous carnivals within memory. Demijohns of rum were placed at the townspeople’s disposal,
cattle were sacrificed in the public plaza, and a band installed on top of a table played for three days without stopping. Under the dusty almond trees, where, in the first week of the century, Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s troops had camped, stalls were set up which sold banana liquor, rolls, blood puddings, chopped fried meat, meat pies, sausage, yucca breads, crullers, buns, corn breads, puff pastes,
longanizas
, tripes, coconut nougats, rum toddies, along with all sorts of trifles, gewgaws, trinkets, and knicknacks, and cockfights and lottery tickets. In
the midst of the confusion of the agitated mob, prints and scapularies with Big Mama’s likeness were sold.

The festivities used to begin two days before and end on the day of her birthday, with the thunder of fireworks and a family dance
at Big Mama’s house. The carefully chosen guests and the legitimate members of the family, generously attended by the bastard line, danced to the beat of the old pianola which was equipped with the rolls most in style. Big Mama presided over the party from the rear of the hall in an easy chair with linen pillows, imparting discreet instructions with her right hand, adorned with rings on all her fingers.
On that night the coming year’s marriages were arranged, at times in complicity with the lovers, but almost always counseled by her own inspiration. To finish off the jubilation, Big Mama went out to the balcony, which was decorated with diadems and Japanese lanterns, and threw coins to the crowd.

That tradition had been interrupted, in part because of the successive mournings of the family and
in part because of the political instability of the last few years. The new generations only heard stories of those splendid celebrations. They never managed to see Big Mama at High Mass, fanned by some functionary of the Civil Authority, enjoying the privilege of not kneeling, even at the moment of the elevation, so as not to ruin her Dutch-flounced skirt and her starched cambric petticoats. The
old people remembered, like a hallucination out of their youth, the two hundred yards of matting which were laid down from the manorial house to the main altar the afternoon on which Maria del Rosario Castañeda y Montero attended her father’s funeral and returned along the matted street endowed with a new and radiant dignity, turned into Big Mama at the age of twenty-two. That medieval vision belonged
then not only to the family’s past but also to the nation’s past. Ever more indistinct and remote, hardly visible on her balcony, stifled by the geraniums on hot afternoons, Big Mama was melting into her own legend. Her authority was exercised through Nicanor. The tacit promise existed, formulated by tradition, that the day Big Mama sealed her will
the heirs would declare three nights of public
merrymaking. But at the same time it was known that she had decided not to express her last wishes until a few hours before dying, and no one thought seriously about the possibility that Big Mama was mortal. Only this morning, awakened by the tinkling of the Viaticum, did the inhabitants of Macondo become convinced not only that Big Mama was mortal but also that she was dying.

Her hour had come.
Seeing her in her linen bed, bedaubed with aloes up to her ears, under the dust-laden canopy of Oriental crêpe, one could hardly make out any life in the thin respiration of her matriarchal breasts. Big Mama, who until she was fifty rejected the most passionate suitors, and who was well enough endowed by Nature to suckle her whole issue all by herself, was dying a virgin and childless. At the
moment of extreme unction, Father Anthony Isabel had to ask for help in order to apply the oils to the palms of her hands, for since the beginning of her death throes Big Mama had had her fists closed. The attendance of the nieces was useless. In the struggle, for the first time in a week, the dying woman pressed against her chest the hand bejeweled with precious stones and fixed her colorless look
on the nieces, saying, ‘Highway robbers.’ Then she saw Father Anthony Isabel in his liturgical habit and the acolyte with the sacramental implements, and with calm conviction she murmured, ‘I am dying.’ Then she took off the ring with the great diamond and gave it to Magdalena, the novice, to whom it belonged since she was the youngest heir. That was the end of a tradition: Magdalena had renounced
her inheritance in favor of the Church.

At dawn, Big Mama asked to be left alone with Nicanor to impart her last instructions. For half an hour, in perfect command of her faculties, she asked about the conduct of her affairs. She gave special instructions about the disposition of her body, and finally concerned herself with the wake. ‘You have to keep your eyes open,’ she said. ‘Keep everything
of value under lock and key, because many people come to wakes only to steal.’ A moment later, alone with the priest,
she made an extravagant confession, sincere and detailed, and later on took Communion in the presence of her nieces and nephews. It was then that she asked them to seat her in her rattan rocker so that she could express her last wishes.

Nicanor had prepared, on twenty-four folios
written in a very clear hand, a scrupulous account of her possessions. Breathing calmly, with the doctor and Father Anthony Isabel as witnesses, Big Mama dictated to the notary the list of her property, the supreme and unique source of her grandeur and authority. Reduced to its true proportions the real estate was limited to three districts, awarded by Royal Decree at the founding of the Colony;
with the passage of time, by dint of intricate marriages of convenience, they had accumulated under the control of Big Mama. In that unworked territory, without definite borders, which comprised five townships and in which not one single grain had ever been sown at the expense of the proprietors, three hundred and fifty-two families lived as tenant farmers. Every year, on the eve of her name day,
Big Mama exercised the only act of control which prevented the lands from reverting to the state: the collection of rent. Seated on the back porch of her house, she personally received the payment for the right to live on her lands, as for more than a century her ancestors had received it from the ancestors of the tenants. When the three-day collection was over, the patio was crammed with pigs,
turkeys, and chickens, and with the tithes and first fruits of the land which were deposited there as gifts. In reality, that was the only harvest the family ever collected from a territory which had been dead since its beginnings, and which was calculated on first examination at a hundred thousand hectares. But historical circumstances had brought it about that within those boundaries the six towns
of Macondo district should grow and prosper, even the county seat, so that no person who lived in a house had any property rights other than those which pertained to the house itself, since the land belonged to Big Mama, and the rent was paid to her, just as the government had to pay her for the use the citizens made of the streets.