Collected Stories (21 page)

Toward the end of January the sea was growing harsh, it was beginning to dump its heavy garbage on the town, and a few weeks later everything was contaminated with its unbearable mood. From that time on the world wasn’t worth living in, at least until the following December, so no one stayed awake after eight o’clock. But the year Mr Herbert came the sea didn’t change,
not even in February. On the contrary, it became smoother and more phosphorescent and during the first nights of March it gave off a fragrance of roses.

Tobías smelled it. His blood attracted crabs and he spent half the night chasing them off his bed until the breeze rose up again and he was able to sleep. During his long moments of lying awake he learned how to distinguish all the changes in
the air. So that when he got a smell of roses he didn’t have to open up the door to know that it was a smell from the sea.

He got up late. Clotilde was starting a fire in the courtyard. The breeze was cool and all the stars were in place, but it was hard to count them down to the horizon because of the lights from the sea. After having his coffee, Tobías could still taste a trace of night on
his palate.

‘Something very strange happened last night,’ he remembered.

Clotilde, of course, had not smelled it. She slept so heavily that she didn’t even remember her dreams.

‘It was a smell of roses,’ Tobías said, ‘and I’m sure it came from the sea.’

‘I don’t know what roses smell like,’ said Clotilde.

She could have been right. The town was arid, with a hard soil furrowed by saltpeter,
and only occasionally did someone bring a bouquet of flowers from outside to cast into the sea where they threw their dead.

‘It’s the smell that drowned man from Guacamayal had,’ Tobías said.

‘Well,’ Clotilde said, smiling ‘if it was a good smell, then you can be sure it didn’t come from this sea.’

It really was a cruel sea. At certain times, when the nets brought in nothing but floating garbage,
the streets of the town were still full of dead fish when the tide went out. Dynamite only brought the remains of old shipwrecks to the surface.

The few women left in town, like Clotilde, were boiling up with bitterness. And like her, there was old Jacob’s wife, who got up earlier than usual that morning, put the house in order, and sat down to breakfast with a look of adversity.

‘My last wish,’
she said to her husband, ‘is to be buried alive.’

She said it as if she were on her deathbed, but she was sitting across the table in a dining room with windows through which the bright March light came pouring in and spread throughout the house. Opposite her, calming his peaceful hunger, was old Jacob, a man who had loved her so much and for so long that he could no longer conceive of any suffering
that didn’t start with his wife.

‘I want to die with the assurance that I’ll be laid beneath the ground like proper people,’ she went on. ‘And the only way to be sure of it is to go around asking people to do me the blessed charity of burying me alive.’

‘You don’t have to ask anybody,’ old Jacob said with the greatest of calm. ‘I’ll put you there myself.’

‘Let’s go, then,’ she said, ‘because
I’m going to die before very long.’

Old Jacob looked her over carefully. Her eyes were the only thing still young. Her bones had become knotted up at the joints and she had the same look of a plowed field which,
when it came right down to it, she had always had.

‘You’re in better shape than ever,’ he told her.

‘Last night I caught a smell of roses,’ she sighed.

‘Don’t pay it any mind,’ old
Jacob said to assure her. ‘Things like that are always happening to poor people like us.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ she said. ‘I’ve always prayed that I’d know enough ahead of time when death would come so I could die far away from this sea. A smell of roses in this town can only be a message from God.’

All that old Jacob could think of was to ask for a little time to put things in order. He’d
heard tell that people don’t die when they ought to but when they want to, and he was seriously worried by his wife’s premonition. He even wondered whether, when the moment came, he’d be up to burying her alive.

At nine o’clock he opened the place where he used to have a store. He put two chairs and a small table with the checkerboard on it by the door and he spent all morning playing opponents
who happened by. From his house he looked at the ruined town, the shambles of a town with the traces of former colors that had been nibbled away by the sun and a chunk of sea at the end of the street.

Before lunch, as always, he played with Don Máximo Gómez. Old Jacob couldn’t imagine a more humane opponent than a man who had survived two civil wars intact and had only sacrificed an eye in the
third. After losing one game on purpose, he held him back for another.

‘Tell me one thing, Don Máximo,’ he asked him then. ‘Would you be capable of burying your wife alive?’

‘Certainly,’ Don Máximo Gómez answered. ‘You can believe me when I say that my hand wouldn’t even tremble.’

Old Jacob fell into a surprised silence. Then, after letting himself be despoiled of his best pieces, he sighed:

‘Well, the way it looks, Petra is going to die.’

Don Máximo Gómez didn’t change his expression. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘there’s no reason to bury her alive.’ He gobbled
up two pieces and crowned a king. Then he fastened an eye wet with sad waters on his opponent.

‘What’s she got?’

‘Last night,’ old Jacob explained, ‘she caught a smell of roses.’

‘Then half the town is going to die,’ Don
Máximo Gómez said. ‘That’s all they’ve been talking about this morning.’

It was hard for old Jacob to lose again without offending him. He brought in the table and chairs, closed up the shop, and went about everywhere looking for someone who had caught the smell. In the end only Tobías was sure. So he asked him please to stop by his place, as if by chance, and tell his wife about it.

Tobías
did as he was told. At four o’clock, all dressed up in his Sunday best, he appeared on the porch where the wife had spent all afternoon getting old Jacob’s widower’s outfit together.

He had come up so quietly that the woman was startled.

‘Mercy,’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought it was the archangel Gabriel.’

‘Well, you can see it’s not,’ Tobías said. ‘It’s only me and I’ve come to tell you something.’

She adjusted her glasses and went back to work.

‘I know what it’s all about,’ she said.

‘I bet you don’t,’ Tobías said.

‘You caught the smell of roses last night.’

‘How did you know?’ Tobías asked in desolation.

‘At my age,’ the woman said, ‘there’s so much time left over for thinking that a person can become a regular prophet.’

Old Jacob, who had his ear pressed against the partition wall
in the back of the store, stood up in shame.

‘You see, woman,’ he shouted through the wall. He made a turn and appeared on the porch. ‘It wasn’t what you thought it was after all.’

‘This boy has been lying,’ she said without raising her head. ‘He didn’t smell anything.’

‘It was around eleven o’clock,’ Tobías said. ‘I was chasing crabs away.’

The woman finished mending a collar.

‘Lies,’ she
insisted. ‘Everybody knows you’re a tricker.’ She bit the thread with her teeth and looked at Tobías over her glasses.

‘What I can’t understand is why you went to the trouble to put Vaseline on your hair and shine your shoes just to come and be so disrespectful to me.’

From then on Tobías began to keep watch on the sea. He hung his hammock up on the porch by the yard and spent the night waiting,
surprised by the things that go on in the world while people are asleep. For many nights he could hear the desperate scrawling of the crabs as they tried to claw-climb up the supports of the house, until so many nights went by that they got tired of trying. He came to know Clotilde’s way of sleeping. He discovered how her fluty snores became more high-pitched as the heat grew more intense until
they became one single languid note in the torpor of July.

At first Tobías kept watch on the sea the way people who know it well do, his gaze fixed on a single point of the horizon. He watched it change color. He watched it turn out its lights and become frothy and dirty and toss up its refuse-laden belches when great rainstorms agitated its digestion. Little by little he learned to keep watch
the way people who know it better do, not even looking at it but unable to forget about it even in his sleep.

Old Jacob’s wife died in August. She died in her sleep and they had to cast her, like everyone else, into a flowerless sea. Tobías kept on waiting. He had waited so long that it was becoming his way of being. One night, while he was dozing in his hammock, he realized that something in
the air had changed. It was an intermittent wave, like the time a Japanese ship had jettisoned a cargo of rotten onions at the harbor mouth. Then the smell thickened and was motionless until dawn. Only when he had the feeling that he could pick it up in his hands and exhibit it did Tobías leap out of his
hammock and go into Clotilde’s room. He shook her several times.

‘Here it is,’ he told her.

Clotilde had to brush the smell away like a cobweb in order to get up. Then she fell back down on her tepid sheets.

‘God curse it,’ she said.

Tobías leaped toward the door, ran into the middle of the street, and began to shout. He shouted with all his might, took a deep breath and shouted again, and then there was a silence and he took a deeper breath, and the smell was still on the sea. But
nobody answered. Then he went about knocking on doors from house to house, even on houses that had no owners, until his uproar got entwined with that of the dogs and he woke everybody up.

Many of them couldn’t smell it. But others, especially the old ones, went down to enjoy it on the beach. It was a compact fragrance that left no chink for any odor of the past. Some, worn out from so much smelling,
went back to their houses. Most of the people stayed to finish their night’s sleep on the beach. By dawn the smell was so pure that it was a pity even to breathe it.

Tobías slept most of the day. Clotilde caught up with him at siesta time and they spent the afternoon frolicking in bed without even closing the door to the yard. First they did it like earthworms, then like rabbits, and finally
like turtles, until the world grew sad and it was dark again. There was still a trace of roses in the air. Sometimes a wave of music reached the bedroom.

‘It’s coming from Catarino’s,’ Clotilde said. ‘Someone must have come to town.’

Three men and a woman had come. Catarino thought that others might come later and he tried to fix his gramophone. Since he couldn’t do it, he asked Pancho Aparecido,
who did all kinds of things because he’d never owned anything, and besides, he had a box of tools and a pair of intelligent hands.

Catarino’s place was a wooden building set apart and facing the sea. It had one large room with benches and small
tables, and several bedrooms in the rear. While they watched Pancho Aparecido working, the three men and the woman drank in silence, sitting at the bar
and yawning in turn.

The gramophone worked well after several tries. When they heard the music, distant but distinct, the people stopped chatting. They looked at one another and for a moment had nothing to say, for only then did they realize how old they had become since the last time they’d heard music.

Tobías found everybody still awake after nine o’clock. They were sitting in their doorways
listening to Catarino’s old records, with the same look of childish fatalism of people watching an eclipse. Every record reminded them of someone who had died, the taste of food after a long illness, or something they’d had to do the next day many years ago which never got done because they’d forgotten.

The music stopped around eleven o’clock. Many people went to bed, thinking it was going to
rain because a dark cloud hung over the sea. But the cloud descended, floated for a while on the surface, and then sank into the water. Only the stars remained above. A short while later, the breeze went out from the town and came back with a smell of roses.

‘Just what I told you, Jacob,’ Don Máximo Gómez exclaimed. ‘Here it is back with us again. I’m sure now that we’re going to smell it every
night.’

‘God forbid,’ old Jacob said. ‘That smell is the only thing in life that’s come too late for me.’

They’d been playing checkers in the empty store without paying any attention to the records. Their memories were so ancient that there weren’t records old enough to stir them up.

‘For my part, I don’t believe much of anything about this,’ Don Máximo Gómez said. ‘After so many years of eating
dust, with so many women wanting a little yard to plant flowers in, it’s not strange that a person should end up smelling things like this and even thinking it’s all true.’

‘But we can smell it with our own noses,’ old Jacob said.

‘No matter,’ said Don Máximo Gómez. ‘During the war, when the revolution was already lost, we’d wanted a general
so bad that we saw the Duke of Marlborough appear
in flesh and blood. I saw him with my own eyes, Jacob.’

It was after midnight. When he was alone, old Jacob closed his store and took his lamp to the bedroom. Through the window, outlined against the glow of the sea, he saw the crag from which they threw their dead.

‘Petra,’ he called in a soft voice.

She couldn’t hear him. At that moment she was floating along almost on the surface of the
water beneath a radiant noonday sun on the Bay of Bengal. She’d lifted her head to look through the water, as through an illuminated showcase, at a huge ocean liner. But she couldn’t see her husband, who at that moment on the other side of the world was starting to hear Catarino’s gramophone again.

‘Just think,’ old Jacob said. ‘Barely six months ago they thought you were crazy and now they’re
the ones making a festival out of the smell that brought on your death.’

He put out the light and got into bed. He wept slowly with that graceless little whimper old people have, but soon he fell asleep.