At seven the heat began. In the hotel, the only guest was waiting for his breakfast. The gramophone girl had not yet got up. The proprietress approached, and at that moment it seemed as if the seven strokes of the clock’s bell were sounding inside her swollen belly.
“So you missed the train,” she said in a tone of belated commiseration. And then she brought the breakfast: coffee with milk, a fried egg, and slices of green banana.
He tried to eat, but he wasn’t hungry. He was alarmed that the heat had come on. He was sweating buckets. He was suffocating. He had slept poorly, with his clothes on, and now he had a little fever. He felt the panic again, and remembered his mother just as the proprietress came to the table to pick up the dishes, radiant in her new dress with the large green flowers. The proprietress’s dress reminded him that it was Sunday.
“Is there a Mass?” he asked.
“Yes, there is,” the woman said. “But it’s just as if there weren’t, because almost nobody goes. The fact is they haven’t wanted to send us a new priest.”
“And what’s wrong with this one?”
“He’s about a hundred years old, and he’s half crazy,” the woman said; she stood motionless, pensive, with all the dishes in one hand. Then she said, “The other day, he swore from the pulpit that he had seen the devil, and since then no one goes to Mass.”
So he went to the church, in part because of his desperation and in part out of curiosity to meet a person a hundred years old. He noticed that it was a dead town, with interminable, dusty streets and dark wooden houses with zinc roofs, which seemed uninhabited. That was the town on Sunday: streets without grass, houses with screens, and a deep, marvelous sky over a stifling heat. He thought that there was no sign there which would permit one to distinguish Sunday from any other day, and while he walked along the deserted street he remembered his mother: “All the streets in every town lead inevitably to the church or the cemetery.” At that moment he came out into a small cobblestoned plaza with a whitewashed building that had a tower and a wooden weathercock on the top, and a clock which had stopped at ten after four.
Without hurrying he crossed the plaza, climbed the three steps of the atrium, and immediately smelled the odor of aged human sweat mixed with the odor of incense, and he went into the warm shade of the almost empty church.
Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar had just risen to the pulpit. He was about to begin the sermon when he saw a boy enter with his hat on. He saw him examining the almost empty temple with his large, serene, and clear eyes. He saw him sit down in the last pew, his head to one side and his hands on his knees. He noticed that he was a stranger to the town. He had been in town for thirty years, and he could have recognized any of its inhabitants just by his smell. Therefore, he knew that the boy who had just arrived was a stranger. In one intense, brief look, he observed that he was a quiet soul, and a little sad, and that his clothes were dirty and wrinkled. It’s as if he had spent a long time sleeping in them, he thought with a feeling that was a combination of repugnance and pity. But then, seeing him in the pew, he felt his heart overflowing with gratitude, and he got ready to deliver what was for him the greatest sermon of his life. Lord, he thought in the meantime, please let him remember his hat so I don’t have to throw him out of the temple. And he began his sermon.
At the beginning he spoke without realizing what he was saying. He wasn’t even listening to himself. He hardly heard the clear and fluent melody which flowed from a spring dormant in his soul ever since the beginning of the world. He had the confused certainty that his words were flowing forth precisely, opportunely, exactly, in the expected order and place. He felt a warm vapor pressing his innards. But he also knew that his spirit was free of vanity, and that the feeling of pleasure which paralyzed his senses was not pride or defiance or vanity but, rather, the pure rejoicing of his spirit in Our Lord.
In her bedroom, Rebecca felt faint, knowing that within a few moments the heat would become impossible. If she had not felt rooted to the town by a dark fear of novelty, she would have put her odds and ends in a trunk with mothballs and would have gone off into the world, as her great-grandfather did, so she had been told. But she knew inside that she was destined to die in the town, amid those endless corridors and the nine bedrooms, whose screens she thought she would have replaced by translucent glass when the heat stopped. So she would stay there, she decided (and that was a decision she always took when she arranged her clothes in the closet), and she also decided to write “My Eminent Cousin” to send them a young priest, so she could attend church again with her hat with the tiny velvet flowers, and hear a coherent Mass and sensible and edifying sermons again. Tomorrow is Monday, she thought, beginning to think once and for all about the salutation of the letter to the Bishop (a salutation which Colonel Buendía had called frivolous and disrespectful), when Argenida suddenly opened the screened door and shouted:
“Senora, people are saying that the Father has gone crazy in the pulpit!”
The widow turned a not characteristically withered and bitter face toward the door. “He’s been crazy for at least five years,” she said. And she kept on arranging her clothing, saying:
“He must have seen the devil again.”
“It’s not the devil this time,” said Argenida.
“Then who?” Rebecca asked, prim and indifferent.
“Now he says that he saw the Wandering Jew.”
The widow felt her skin crawl. A multitude of confused ideas, among which she could not distinguish her torn screens, the heat, the dead birds, and the plague, passed through her head as she heard those words which she hadn’t remembered since the afternoons of her distant girlhood: “The Wandering Jew.” And then she began to move, enraged, icily, toward where Argenida was watching her with her mouth open.
“It’s true” Rebecca said in a voice which rose from the depths of her being. “Now I understand why the birds are dying off.”
Impelled by terror, she covered herself with a black embroidered shawl and, in a flash, crossed the long corridor and the living room stuffed with decorative objects, and the street door, and the two blocks to the church, where Father Anthony Isabel of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, transfigured, was saying, “I swear to you that I saw him. I swear to you that he crossed my path this morning when I was coming back from administering the holy unction to the wife of Jonas the carpenter. I swear to you that his face was blackened with the malediction of the Lord, and that he left a track of burning embers in his wake.”
His sermon broke off, floating in the air. He realized that he couldn’t restrain the trembling of his hands, that his whole body was shaking, and that a thread of icy sweat was slowly descending his spinal column. He felt ill, feeling the trembling, and the thirst, and a violent wrenching in his gut, and a noise which resounded like the bass note of an organ in his belly. Then he realized the truth.
He saw that there were people in the church, and that Rebecca, pathetic, showy, her arms open, and her bitter, cold face turned toward the heavens, was advancing up the central nave. Confusedly he understood what was happening, and he even had enough lucidity to understand that it would have been vanity to believe that he was witnessing a miracle. Humbly he rested his trembling hands on the wooden edge of the pulpit and resumed his speech.
“Then he walked toward me,” he said. And this time he heard his own voice, convincing, impassioned. “He walked toward me and he had emerald eyes, and shaggy hair, and the smell of a billy goat. And I raised my hand to reproach him in the name of Our Lord, and I said to him: ‘Halt, Sunday has never been a good day for sacrificing a lamb.’”
When he finished, the heat had set in. That intense, solid, burning heat of that unforgettable August. But Father Anthony Isabel was no longer aware of the heat. He knew that there, at his back, the town was again humbled, speechless with his sermon, but he wasn’t even pleased by that. He wasn’t even pleased with the immediate prospect that the wine would relieve hi
s ravaged throat. He felt uncomfortable and out of place. He felt distracted and he could not concentrate on the supreme moment of the sacrifice. The same thing had been happening to him for some time, but now it was a different distraction, because his thoughts were filled by a definite uneasiness. Then, for the first time in his life, he knew pride. And just as he had imagined and defined it in his sermons, he felt that pride was an urge the same as thirst. He closed the tabernacle energetically and said:
“Pythagoras”
The acolyte, a child with a shaven and shiny head, godson of Father Anthony Isabel, who had named him, approached the altar.
“Take up the offering,” said the priest.
The child blinked, turned completely around, and then said in an almost inaudible voice, “I don’t know where the plate is.”
It was true. It had been months since an offering had been collected.
“Then go find a big bag in the sacristy and collect as much as you can,” said the Father.
“And what shall I say?” said the boy.
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.”
artificial roses
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 walls, 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 flower pots 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 Angel 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 crepe 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 looke
d 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.
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories Page 14
