For a moment she didn’t hear anything more than distant voices. Noel’s remote and happy talk, sitting on the barrel, giving her news about God and his parrot. She heard the creaking of the wheel in the courtyard, when Papá Laurel opened the gate so the two oxen could pull in the cart. She heard Genoveva disturbing the house as usual, because always, “I always find this blessed bathroom in use.” And then again Papá Laurel, shouting his soldier’s swearwords, bringing down swallows with the same shotgun he used in the last civil war to defeat, all by himself, an entire government division. She even got to thinking that this time the episode would go no further than the knocks at the door, as before it went no further than the boots scraped at the threshold; and she was thinking that the other woman had opened the door and had seen only the flowerpots beneath the rain, and the sad and deserted street.
But then she began to distinguish voices in the darkness. And she heard again the familiar footsteps and saw the shadows stretched up the wall of the entrance hall. Then she knew that after many years of apprenticeship, after many years of vacillation and regret, the man who opened the iron gate had decided to come in.
The other woman returned with the lamp, followed by the recent arrival; she put it down on the table, and he—without leaving the orbit of light—took off his raincoat, turned his face, punished by the storm, to the wall. Then she saw him for the first time. She looked at him solidly at first. Then she deciphered him from head to toe, taking in each limb, with a persevering, conscientious, and serious gaze, as if instead of a man she were examining a bird. Finally she turned her eyes back to the lamp and began to think, “It’s him, in any case. Even if I imagined him a little bit taller.”
The other woman rolled a chair over to the table. The man sat down, crossed one leg, and untied his bootlace. The other woman sat beside him, speaking spontaneously to him about something that she, in the rocking chair, did not manage to understand. But at the wordless gestures she felt redeemed of her abandonment and noticed that the dusty and sterile air smelled again as it used to, as if it were again the time when there were men who came into the bedrooms sweating, and Úrsula, scatterbrained and healthy, went running every afternoon at five past four, to wave goodbye to the train from the window. She saw him gesticulate and was pleased that the stranger was behaving like that; that he understood that after a difficult and often-altered trip, he had at last found the house lost in the storm.
The man began to unbutton his shirt. He had taken off his boots and was leaning over the table, trying to dry out by the heat of the lamp. Then the other woman stood up, walked over to the cupboard, and returned to the table with a half-full bottle and a glass. The man grasped the bottle by the neck, pulled the cork out with his teeth, and poured himself half a glass of the thick green liqueur. Then he drank without a breath, with an exalted haste. And she, from the rocking chair, watching him, remembered that night when the gate creaked for the first time—so long ago…!—and she thought that there was nothing in the house to give the visitor, except that bottle of crème de menthe. She had said to her companion, “We must leave that bottle in the cupboard. Someone might need it sometime.”
The other had said, “Who?” And she had answered, “Anyone. It’s always good to be prepared in case anyone comes when it rains.” Many years had passed since then. And now the predicted man was there, pouring more liqueur into the glass.
But this time the man didn’t drink. When he was about to, his eyes got lost in the shadows, over the top of the lamp, and she felt for the first time the warm contact of his gaze. She understood that up until that instant the man had not realized there was another woman in the house; and then she began to rock.
For a moment the man examined her with indiscreet attention. A possibly deliberate indiscretion. She was disconcerted at first, but then she noticed that this gaze was also familiar, and despite its penetrating and somewhat impertinent obstinacy there was much in it of Noel’s mischievous goodness and also a bit of the patient and honorable awkwardness of his parrot. That’s why she began to rock, thinking, “Even if it’s not the same one who opened the iron gate, it’s as if he were, anyway.” And still rocking, while he watched her, she thought, “Papá Laurel would have invited him to hunt rabbits in the garden.”
Before midnight the storm grew stronger. The other woman had moved her chair over to the rocking chair and the two women sat still in silence, contemplating the man drying off by the lamp. A branch from the almond tree next door banged against the window several times without clinging, and the air in the room grew humid invaded by a gust of the elements. She felt on her face the sharp edge of the hailstorm, but she didn’t move, until she saw the man drain the last drop of the crème de menthe. She thought there was something symbolic in that spectacle. And then she remembered Papá Laurel, fighting on his own, entrenched in the corral, picking off government soldiers with a pellet gun meant for swallows. And she remembered a letter Colonel Aureliano Buendía had written him and the title of captain Papá Laurel turned down, saying, “Tell Aureliano I didn’t do that for the war, but to keep those savages from eating my rabbits.” It was as if with that memory she too had drained the last drop of the past that was left in the house.
“Is there anything in the cupboard?” she asked somberly.
And the other, in the same accent, in the same tone, which she supposed he wouldn’t be able to hear, said:
“Nothing else. Remember on Monday we ate the last handful of kidney beans.”
And then, fearing that the man had heard them, they looked toward the table again, but saw only darkness, not the table or the man. Nevertheless, they knew the man was there, invisible beside the extinguished lamp. They knew he wouldn’t leave the house while it was still raining, and the darkness had shrunken the room so much that it would not be at all strange if he’d heard them.
May 9, 1954, El Espectador, Bogotá
The House of the Buendías
(Notes for a Novel)
The house is cool; damp at night, even in the summer. It is in the north, at the end of the village’s only street, built on a high and solid concrete sidewalk. The tall doorframe, without steps; the long living room sensitively and sparsely furnished, with two full-sized windows onto the street, is perhaps the only thing that sets it apart from other houses in the village. No one remembers having seen the doors closed during the day. No one remembers having seen the four wicker rocking chairs in any other place or in different positions: placed in a square, in the middle of the room, with the appearance of having lost their ability to provide rest and now having only a simple and useless ornamental function. Now there is a gramophone in the corner, beside the disabled girl. But before, during the early years of the century, the house was silent, desolate; perhaps the most silent and desolate in the village, with that immense living room barely occupied by the four […] (now the water jar has a stone filter, with moss) in the opposite corner from the girl.
On either side of the door that leads to the only bedroom, there are two old portraits, marked with funerary ribbons. The air itself, inside the living room, has a cold but elemental and healthy severity, like the small bundle of wedding clothes that swings on the lintel of the bedroom or like the dry sprig of aloe vera that decorates the inside of the threshold of the door to the street.
When Aureliano Buendía returned to the village, the civil war had ended. Maybe the new colonel had nothing left from his harsh pilgrimage. He was left with only the military title and a vague unawareness of his disaster. But he was also left with half the death of the last Buendía and a full portion of hunger. He was left with nostalgia for domesticity and the desire to have a calm, peaceful house, without any war, that would have a tall doorframe to let the sun in and a hammock in the courtyard, between two posts.
In the village, where the house of his elders had been, the colonel and his wife found nothing but the incinerated stumps of the
posts and the high terrace, now swept every day by the wind. No one would have recognized the place where a house had once been. “So clear, everything so clean,” the colonel had said, remembering. But among the ashes where the backyard had been the almond tree still grew green, like a crucifix among the rubble, beside the little wooden outhouse. The tree, on one side, was the same that had shaded the old Buendías’ yard. But on the other, the side that fell over the house, funereal, charred branches stretched out, as if half the almond tree was in autumn and the other half in springtime. The colonel remembered the destroyed house. He remembered it for its light, for its disorganized music, made by the scraps of all the noises that inhabited it to overflowing. But he also remembered the sour and penetrating smell of the latrine beside the almond tree and the inside of the little room weighed down by profound silences, divided up into vegetal spaces. Among the rubble, stirring up the dirt as she swept, Doña Soledad found a plaster Saint Raphael with a broken wing, and the glass of a lamp. There they built the house, facing the sunset; in the opposite direction from the Buendías killed in the war.
Construction began when it stopped raining, without preparations, without any preconceived order. In the hole where the first post would stand, they fit in the plaster Saint Rafael, without any ceremony. Maybe the colonel didn’t think about it like that when he drew the plan in the dirt, but beside the almond tree, where the outhouse was, the air kept the same density of coolness it had when this place was the backyard. So when they dug the four holes and he said, “This is how the house will be, with a big room where the children can play,” the best of it was already made. It was as if the men who took the measurements outdoors had marked out the limits of the house exactly where the silence of the courtyard ended. Because when the four support posts were erected, the enclosed space was already clean and humid, as the house is now. Within it were enclosed the freshness of the tree and the profound and mysterious silence of the latrine. Outside was the village, with the heat and the noise. And three months later, when the roof was built, when the walls were plastered and the doors hung, the inside of the house—still—had something of the courtyard about it.
June 3, 1954, Crónica, Barranquilla
Literaturism
There are still those who protest at the gruesomeness of those high-flying melodramas, in which there is more blood than there are protagonists per square mile, and whose readers or spectators should take precautions in order not to become victims themselves of the tragedy. However, real life is on occasion even more gruesome.
There is the case that happened in the municipality of San Rafael, Antioquia, which any literary critic would condemn for its exaggeration and for not being true to life. In the foreground it seems to be a case of rivalry between two families, which might seem to disqualify it literarily, because very few people are disposed to attribute the validity to such a situation that it had two centuries ago. However, the bloody drama of San Rafael originated in a rivalry between families, and those to whom this situation seems false will have no choice but to condemn life for its lack of imagination and excessive fondness for conventionalism.
As is to be expected, there was a crime. Not a simple crime, but a spectacular homicide, in which the killer, to begin with, fired a shotgun at the victim. And then all hell broke loose for literature: after firing the weapon at the victim, the killer attacked the corpse with a machete, and finally, in an excess of impiety that could lead to thinking in a certain way of the Tartar ancestry of some Colombians, he severed the tongue without stopping to think what he would do with it, as in fact he did nothing.
The news has not earned—at the current exchange rate of the journalistic peso—more than two columns on the regional news page. It is a bloody crime, like any other. With the difference that these days there is nothing extraordinary about it, since as a news item it is too common and as a novel too gruesome.
It would be best to recommend that real-life exercise a bit more discretion.
June 23, 1954, El Espectador, Bogotá
The Precursors
Without doubt the first sensational news produced—after creation—was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. It would have been an unforgettable front page: Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (across eight columns). “You’ll earn your bread by the sweat of your brow,” said God. “An angel with a flaming sword carried out the sentence yesterday and stood guard at the gates of Eden. An apple was the cause of the tragedy.”
How many years since that news happened? It is as difficult to answer that question as to predict when the moment will arrive to write the last great sensational feature story: the Last Judgment, which will be a sort of definitive evaluation of humanity. But before that hour arrives, who knows how many modifications journalism will undergo, that exhausting activity that began when a neighbor told another what a third did the previous night, and which has a curious variety in our towns, where a man who reads the newspapers every day comments in writing on the news, in an article with an unmistakable editorial tone or in the light and insignificant style of a press release, according to its importance, and reads it that afternoon in the drugstore, where public opinion considers itself to have a duty to get its bearings.
That commentator of the daily event, who can be found in at least forty percent of our towns, is the journalist without a newspaper, a man who exercises his profession against the hard and unalterable circumstance of not even having a hand press to express his ideas and expresses them out in public, with such obvious results that might be an incontrovertible demonstration that journalism is a biological necessity of humanity, which at the same time has the capacity to survive even newspapers themselves. There will always be a man reading an article in the corner of a drugstore, and there will always—because this is the funny thing—be a group of citizens ready to listen to him, even if just to feel the democratic pleasure of not agreeing with him.
August 10, 1954, El Espectador, Bogotá
The Postman Rings a Thousand Times
A Visit to the Cemetery of Lost Letters
Which Is the Destination of Correspondence That Can Never Be Delivered. Letters for the Invisible Man. An Office Where Nonsense Is Entirely Natural. The Only Persons with Legal Authorization to Open the Correspondence
Someone posted a letter that never reached its destination and was never returned to its sender. In the instant of writing it, the address was correct, the postage was stamped irreproachably, and the name of the addressee was perfectly legible. The postal workers processed it with scrupulous reliability. It did not miss a single connection. The complex administrative mechanism functioned with absolute precision, the same with that letter, which never arrived, as with thousands of letters that were posted that same day and arrived in good time at their destinations.
The postman rang several times, checked the address, asked around in the neighborhood, and received a reply: the addressee had moved house. He was provided with the new address, with precise particulars, and the letter was finally passed to the poste restante, where it was available to its addressee for thirty days. The thousands of persons who go to post offices daily in search of a letter that has never been written saw the letter there that had been written and never reached its destination.
The letter was returned to its sender. But the sender had also changed address. Thirty more days the returned letter waited for him in the post restante, while he wondered why he had not received a reply. Finally that simple message, those four lines that might not have said anything in particular or might have been decisive in a man’s life, were put into a sack, with another thousand anonymous letters, and sent to the poor and dusty house at number 567, on Carrera Octava. That is the cemetery of lost letters.
EPISTOLARY SLEUTHING
Thousands of unclaimed letters have passed through that single-story house, with its low roof and peeling walls where nobody seems to live. Some of them have
gone all around the world and returned to their destination, in hopes of a claimant who may have died while waiting for it.
The letter cemetery resembles a human cemetery. Tranquil, silent, with long and deep corridors and dark galleries full of letters crowded together. Nevertheless, unlike what happens at the human cemetery, in the letter cemetery a lot of time passes before all hope is lost. Six methodical, scrupulous civil servants, covered by the rust of routine, keep doing everything possible to find clues that might allow them to locate an unknown addressee.
Three of these six persons are the only ones in the country who can open a letter without being charged with violating correspondence. But even this legal recourse is futile in the majority of cases: the text of the letter gives no clue. And something stranger: of every hundred envelopes stamped and processed with a mistaken address, at least two have nothing inside. They are letters without letters.
WHERE DOES THE INVISIBLE MAN LIVE?
The change of address of both sender and receiver, although it seems far-fetched, is the simplest and most frequent. Those in charge of the office of unclaimed letters—the official name of the cemetery of lost letters—have lost count of the situations that can come up in the confusing labyrinth of messages gone astray. Of an average one hundred unclaimed letters received every day, at least ten have been properly franked and processed but the envelopes are perfectly blank. “Letters for the invisible man,” they call them, and they’ve been dropped into the mailbox by someone who had the idea of writing a letter to someone who does not exist and therefore lives nowhere.
The Scandal of the Century Page 5
