No One Writes to the Colonel (8 page)

That afternoon he took the rooster to the pit. On his return he found his wife on the verge of an attack. She was walking up and down the hall, her hair down her back, her arms spread wide apart, trying to catch her breath above the whistling in her lungs. She was there until early
evening. Then she went to bed without speaking to her husband.

She mouthed prayers until a little after curfew. Then the colonel got ready to put out the lamp. But she objected.

‘I don’t want to die in the dark,’ she said.

The colonel left the lamp on the floor. He began to feel exhausted. He wished he could forget everything, sleep forty-four days in one stretch, and wake up on January 20th
at three in the afternoon, in the pit, and at the exact moment to let the rooster loose. But he felt himself threatened by the sleeplessness of his wife.

‘It’s the same story as always,’ she began a moment later. ‘We put up with hunger so others can eat. It’s been the same story for forty years.’

The colonel kept silent until his wife paused to ask him if he was awake. He answered that he was.
The woman continued in a smooth, fluent, implacable tone.

‘Everybody will win with the rooster except us. We’re the only ones who don’t have a cent to bet.’

‘The owner of the rooster is entitled to twenty per cent.’

‘You were also entitled to get a position when they made you break your back for them in the elections,’
the woman replied. ‘You were also entitled to the veteran’s pension after
risking your neck in the civil war. Now everybody has his future assured and you’re dying of hunger, completely alone.’

‘I’m not alone,’ the colonel said.

He tried to explain, but sleep overtook him. She kept talking dully until she realized that her husband was sleeping. Then she got out of the mosquito net and walked up and down the living room in the darkness. There she continued talking.
The colonel called her at dawn.

She appeared at the door, ghostlike, illuminated from below by the lamp which was almost out. She put it out before getting into the mosquito netting. But she kept talking.

‘We’re going to do one thing,’ the colonel interrupted her.

‘The only thing we can do is sell the rooster,’ said the woman.

‘We can also sell the clock.’

‘They won’t buy it.’

‘Tomorrow
I’ll try to see if Alvaro will give me the forty pesos.’

‘He won’t give them to you.’

‘Then we’ll sell the picture.’

When the woman spoke again, she was outside the mosquito net again. The colonel smelled her breath impregnated with medicinal herbs.

‘They won’t buy it,’ she said.

‘We’ll see,’ the colonel said gently, without a trace of change in his voice. ‘Now, go to sleep. If we can’t sell
anything tomorrow, we’ll think of something else.’

He
tried to keep his eyes open but sleep broke his resolve. He fell to the bottom of a substance without time and without space, where the words of his wife had a different significance. But a moment later he felt himself being shaken by the shoulder.

‘Answer me.’

The colonel didn’t know if he had heard those words before or after he had slept.
Dawn was breaking. The window stood out in Sunday’s green clarity. He thought he had a fever. His eyes burned and he had to make a great effort to clear his head.

‘What will we do if we can’t sell anything?’ the woman repeated.

‘By then it will be January 20th,’ the colonel said, completely awake. ‘They’ll pay the twenty per cent that very afternoon.’

‘If the rooster wins,’ the woman said.
‘But if he loses. It hasn’t occurred to you that the rooster might lose.’

‘He’s one rooster that can’t lose.’

‘But suppose he loses.’

‘There are still forty-four days left to begin to think about that,’ the colonel said.

The woman lost her patience.

‘And meanwhile what do we eat?’ she asked, and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel night shirt. She shook him hard.

It had taken
the colonel seventy-five years – the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute – to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:

‘Shit.’

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

COLLECTED STORIES

IN EVIL HOUR

INNOCENT ERÉNDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

LEAF STORM

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS

ONE HUNDRED YEARS
OF SOLITUDE

STRANGE PILGRIMS

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

www.penguin.com

‘My favourite book by one of the world’s greatest authors. You’re in the hands of a master’ Mariella Frostrup

‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop
was coming on …’

When newly-wed Ángela Vicario and Bayardo San Román are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Ángela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.

As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night’s
revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Ángela’s brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.

‘A masterpiece’
Evening Standard

‘A work of high explosiveness – the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel’
The Times

‘Brilliant writer, brilliant book’
Guardian

www.penguin.com

‘The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical’ John Updike

Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel García Márquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities
in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo’s revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Márquez’s stories are a delight.

‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Márquez’
Guardian

‘Of all the
living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel García Márquez’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do’ Salman Rushdie

www.penguin.com