“You don’t like birds,” he said softly but affirmatively.
The widow raised her eyelids in a gesture of impatience and hostility. “Although I liked them once,” she said, “I detest them now that they’ve taken to dying inside of our houses.”
“Many have died,” he said implacably. One might have thought that there was a great deal of cleverness in the even tone of his voice.
“All of them,” said the widow. And she added, as she squeezed the animal with repugnance and placed him under the dish, “And even that wouldn’t bother me if they hadn’t torn my screens.”
And it seemed to him that he had never known such hardness of heart. A moment later, holding the tiny and defenseless body in his own hand, the priest realized that it had ceased breathing. Then he forgot everything—the humidity of the house, the concupiscence, the unbearable smell of gunpowder on José Arcadio Buendía’s body—and he realized the prodigious truth which had surrounded him since the beginning of the week. Right there, while the widow watched him leave the house with a menacing gesture and the dead bird in his hands, he witnessed the marvelous revelation that a rain of dead birds was falling over the town, and that he, the minister of God, the chosen one, who had known happiness when it had not been hot, had forgotten entirely about the Apocalypse.
That day he went to the station, as always, but he was not fully aware of his actions. He knew vaguely that something was happening in the world, but he felt muddled, dumb, unequal to the moment. Seated on the bench in the station, he tried to remember if there was a rain of dead birds in the Apocalypse, but he had forgotten it entirely. Suddenly he thought that his delay at Rebecca’s house had made him miss the train, and he stretched his head up over the dusty and broken glass and saw on the clock in the ticket office that it was still twelve minutes to one. When he returned to the bench, he felt as if he were suffocating. At that moment he remembered it was Saturday. He moved his woven palm fan for a while, lost in his dark interior fog. Then he fretted over the buttons on his soutane and the buttons on his boots and over his long, snug, clerical trousers, and he noticed with alarm that he had never in his life been so hot.
Without moving from the bench he unbuttoned the collar of his soutane, took his handkerchief out of his sleeve, and wiped his flushed face, thinking, in a moment of illuminated pathos, that perhaps he was witnessing the unfolding of an earthquake. He had read that somewhere. Nevertheless the sky was clear: a transparent blue sky from which all the birds had mysteriously disappeared. He noticed the color and the transparency, but for a moment forgot about the dead birds. Now he was thinking about something else, about the possibility that a storm would break. Nevertheless the sky was diaphanous and tranquil, as if it were the sky over some other town, distant and different, where he had never felt the heat, and as if they were other eyes, not his own, which were looking at it. Then he looked toward the north, above the roofs of palms and rusted zinc, and saw the slow, silent, rhythmic blot of the buzzards over the dump.
For some mysterious reason, he relived at that moment the emotions he felt one Sunday in the seminary, shortly before taking his minor orders. The rector had given him permission to make use of his private library and he often stayed for hours and hours (especially on Sundays) absorbed in the reading of some yellowed books smelling of old wood, with annotations in Latin in the tiny, angular scrawl of the rector. One Sunday, after he had been reading for the whole day, the rector entered the room and rushed, shocked, to pick up a card which evidently had fallen from the pages of the book he was reading. He observed his superior’s confusion with discreet indifference, but he managed to read the card. There was only one sentence, written in purple ink in a clean, straightforward hand: “Madame Ivette est morte cette nuit.”[Footnote:“Madame Ivette died last night”;Source:French] More than half a century later, seeing a blot of buzzards over a forgotten town, he remembered the somber expression of the rector seated in front of him, purple against the dusk, his breathing imperceptibly quickened.
Shaken by that association, he did not then feel the heat, but rather exactly the reverse, the sting of ice in his groin and in the soles of his feet. He was terrified without knowing what the precise cause of that terror was, tangled in a net of confused ideas, among which it was impossible to distinguish a nauseating sensation, from Satan’s hoof stuck in the mud, from a flock of dead birds falling on the world, while he, Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, remained indifferent to that event. Then he straightened up, raised an awed hand, as if to begin a greeting which was lost in the void, and cried out in horror, “The Wandering Jew!”
At that moment the train whistled. For the first time in many years he did not hear it. He saw it pull into the station, surrounded by a dense cloud of smoke, and heard the rain of cinders against the sheets of rusted zinc. But that was like a distant and undecipherable dream from which he did not awaken completely until that afternoon, a little after four, when he put the finishing touches on the imposing sermon he would deliver on Sunday. Eight hours later, he was called to administer extreme unction to a woman.
With the result that the Father did not find out who arrived that afternoon on the train. For a long time he had watched the four cars go by, ramshackle and colorless, and he could not recall anyone’s getting off to stay, at least in recent years. Before it was different, when he could spend a whole afternoon watching a train loaded with fruit, passing endlessly until, well on toward nightfall, the last car passed with a man dangling a green lantern. Then he saw the town on the other side of the track—the lights were on now—and it seemed to him that, by merely watching the train pass, it had taken him to another town. Perhaps from that came his habit of being present at the station every day, even after they shot the workers to death and the banana plantations were finished, and with them the hundred-and-forty-car trains, and there was left only that yellow, dusty train which neither brought anyone nor took anyone away.
But that Saturday someone did come. When Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar left the station, a quiet boy with nothing particular about him except his hunger saw the priest from the window of the last car at the precise moment that he remembered he had not eaten since the previous day. He thought. If there’s a priest, there must be a hotel. And he got off the train and crossed the street, which was blistered by the metallic August sun, and entered the cool shade of a house located opposite the station whence issued the sound of a worn gramophone record. His sense of smell, sharpened by his two-day-old hunger, told him that was the hotel. And he went in without seeing the sign “HOTEL MACONDO,” a sign which he was never to read in his life.
The proprietress was more than five months pregnant. She was the color of mustard, and looked exactly as her mother had when her mother was pregnant with her. He ordered, “Lunch, as quick as you can,” and she, not trying to hurry, served him a bowl of soup with a bare bone and some chopped green banana in it. At that moment the train whistled. Absorbed in the warm and healthful vapor of the soup, he calculated the distance which lay between him and the station, and immediately felt himself invaded by that confused sensation of panic which missing a train produces.
He tried to run. He reached the door, anguished, but he hadn’t even taken one step across the threshold when he realized that he didn’t have time to make the train. When he returned to the table, he had forgotten his hunger; he saw a girl next to the gramophone who looked at him pitifully, with the horrible expression of a dog wagging his tail. Then, for the first time that whole day, he took off his hat, which his mother had given him two months before, and lodged it between his knees while he finished eating. When he got up from the table, he didn’t seem bothered by missing the train, or by the prospect of spending a weekend in a town whose name he would not take the trouble to find out. He sat down in a corner of the room, the bones of his back supported by a hard, straight chair, and stayed there for a long time, not listening to the records until the girl who was picki
ng them out said:
“It’s cooler on the veranda.”
He felt ill. It took an effort to start conversation with strangers. He was afraid to look people in the face, and when he had no recourse but to speak, the words came out different from the way he thought them. “Yes,” he replied. And he felt a slight shiver. He tried to rock, forgetting that he was not in a rocker.
“The people who come here pull a chair to the veranda since it’s cooler,” the girl said. And, listening to her, he realized how anxiously she wanted to talk. He risked a look at her just as she was winding up the gramophone. She seemed to have been sitting there for months, years perhaps, and she showed not the slightest interest in moving from that spot. She was winding up the gramophone but her life was concentrated on him. She was smiling.
“Thank you,” he said, trying to get up, to put some ease and spontaneity into his movements. The girl didn’t stop looking at him. She said, “They also leave their hats on the hook.”
This time he felt a burning in his ears. He shivered, thinking about her way of suggesting things. He felt uncomfortably shut in, and again felt his panic over the missed train. But at that moment the proprietress entered the room.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“He’s pulling a chair onto the veranda, as they all do,” the girl said.
He thought he perceived a mocking tone in her words.
“Don’t bother” said the proprietress. “I’ll bring you a stool.”
The girl laughed and he felt disconcerted. It was hot. An unbroken, dry heat, and he was sweating. The proprietress dragged a wooden stool with a leather seat to the veranda. He was about to follow her when the girl spoke again.
“The bad part about it is that the birds will frighten him,” she said.
He managed to see the harsh look when the proprietress turned her eyes on the girl. It was a swift but intense look. “What you should do is be quiet,” she said, and turned smiling to him. Then he felt less alone and had the urge to speak.
“What was that she said?” he asked.
“That at this hour of the day dead birds fall onto the veranda,” the girl said.
“Those are just some notions of hers,” said the proprietress. She bent over to straighten a bouquet of artificial flowers on the little table in the middle of the room. There was a nervous twitch in her fingers.
“Notions of mine, no,” the girl said. “You yourself swept two of them up the day before yesterday.”
The proprietress looked exasperatedly at her. The girl had a pitiful expression, and an obvious desire to explain everything until not the slightest trace of doubt remained.
“What is happening, sir, is that the day before yesterday some boys left two dead birds in the hall to annoy her, and then they told her that dead birds were falling from the sky. She swallows everything people tell her.”
He smiled. The explanation seemed very funny to him; he rubbed his hands and turned to look at the girl, who was observing him in anguish. The gramophone had stopped playing. The proprietress withdrew to the other room, and when he went toward the hall the girl insisted in a low voice:
“I saw them fall. Believe me. Everyone has seen them.”
And he thought he understood then her attachment to the gramophone, and the proprietress’s exasperation. “Yes,” he said sympathetically. And then, moving toward the hall: “I’ve seen them, too.”
It was less hot outside, in the shade of the almond trees. He leaned the stool against the doorframe, threw his head back, and thought of his mother: his mother, exhausted, in her rocker, shooing the chickens with a long broomstick, while she realized for the first time that he was not in the house.
The week before, he could have thought that his life was a smooth straight string, stretching from the rainy dawn during the last civil war when he came into the world between the four mud-and-rush walls of a rural schoolhouse to that June morning on his twenty-second birthday when his mother approached his hammock and gave him a hat with a card: “To my dear son, on his day.” At times he shook off the rustiness of his inactivity and felt nostalgic for school, for the blackboard and the map of a country overpopulated by the excrement of the flies, and for the long line of cups hanging on the wall under the names of the children. It wasn’t hot there. It was a green, tranquil town, where chickens with ashen long legs entered the schoolroom in order to lay their eggs under the washstand. His mother then was a sad and uncommunicative woman. She would sit at dusk to take the air which had just filtered through the coffee plantations, and say, “Manaure is the most beautiful town in the world.” And then, turning toward him, seeing him grow up silently in the hammock: “When you are grown up you’ll understand.” But he didn’t understand anything. He didn’t understand at fifteen, already too tall for his age and bursting with that insolent and reckless health which idleness brings. Until his twentieth birthday his life was not essentially different from a few changes of position in his hammock. But around that time his mother, obliged by her rheumatism, left the school she had served for eighteen years, with the result that they went to live in a two-room house with a huge patio, where they raised chickens with ashen legs like those which used to cross the schoolroom.
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.<
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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.
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories Page 13
