No One Writes to the Colonel

by Gabriel García Márquez

  They said he wasn’t. One of them leaned toward him. He said in a barely audible voice: ‘Agustín wrote.’

  The colonel observed the deserted street.

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘The same as always.’

  They gave him the clandestine sheet of paper. The colonel put it in his pants pocket. Then he kept silent, drumming on the package, until he realized that someone had noticed it. He stopped in suspense.

  ‘What have you got there, colonel?’

  The colonel avoided Hernán’s penetrating green eyes.

  ‘Nothing,’ he lied. ‘I’m taking my clock to the German to have him fix it for me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, colonel,’ said Hernán, trying to take the package. ‘Wait and I’ll look at it.’

  The colonel held back. He didn’t say anything, but his eyelids turned purple. The others insisted.

  ‘Let him, colonel. He knows mechanical things.’

  ‘I just don’t want to bother him.’

  ‘Bother, it’s no bother,’ Hernán argued. He seized the clock. ‘The German will get ten pesos out of you and it’ll be the same as it is now.’

  Hernán went into the tailor shop with the clock. Alvaro was sewing on a machine. At the back, beneath a guitar hanging on a nail, a girl was sewing buttons on. There was a sign tacked up over the guitar: ‘TALKING POLITICS FORBIDDEN.’ Outside, the colonel felt as if his body were superfluous. He rested his feet on the rail of the stool.

  ‘Goddamn it, colonel.’

  He was startled. ‘No need to swear,’ he said.

  Alfonso adjusted his eyeglasses on his nose to examine the colonel’s shoes.

  ‘It’s because of your shoes,’ he said. ‘You’ve got on some goddamn new shoes.’

  ‘But you can say that without swearing,’ the colonel said, and showed the soles of his patent-leather shoes. ‘These monstrosities are forty years old, and it’s the first time they’ve ever heard anyone swear.’

  ‘All done,’ shouted Hernán, inside, just as the clock’s bell rang. In the neighboring house, a woman pounded on the partition; she shouted: ‘Let that guitar alone! Agustín’s year isn’t up yet.’

  Someone guffawed.

  ‘It’s a clock.’

  Hernán came out with the package.

  ‘It wasn’t anything,’ he said. ‘If you like I’ll go home with you to level it.’

  The colonel refused his offer.

  ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, colonel,’ replied Hernán, taking his place in the group. ‘In January, the rooster will pay for it.’

  The colonel now found the chance he was looking for.

  ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll give you the rooster.’ He examined the circle of faces. ‘I’ll give the rooster to all of you.’

  Hernán looked at him in confusion.

  ‘I’m too old now for that,’ the colonel continued. He gave his voice a convincing severity. ‘It’s too much responsibility for me. For days now I’ve had the impression that the animal is dying.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, colonel,’ Alfonso said. ‘The trouble is that the rooster is molting now. He’s got a fever in his quills.’

  ‘He’ll be better next month,’ Hernán said.

  ‘I don’t want him anyway,’ the colonel said.

  Hernán’s pupils bore into his.

  ‘Realize how things are, colonel,’ he insisted. ‘The main thing is for you to be the one who puts Agustín’s rooster into the ring.’

  The colonel thought about it. ‘I realize,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve kept him until now.’ He clenched his teeth, and felt he could go on: ‘The trouble is there are still two months.’

  Hernán was the one who understood.

  ‘If it’s only because of that, there’s no problem,’ he said.

  And he proposed his formula. The other accepted. At dusk, when he entered the house with the package under his arm, his wife was chagrined.

  ‘Nothing?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ the colonel answered. ‘But now it doesn’t matter. The boys will take over feeding the rooster.’

  ‘Wait and I’ll lend you an umbrella, friend.’

  Sabas opened a cupboard in the office wall. He uncovered a jumbled interior: riding boots piled up, stirrups and reins, and an aluminum pail full of riding spurs. Hanging from the upper part, half a dozen umbrellas and a lady’s parasol. The colonel was thinking of the debris from some catastrophe.

  ‘Thanks, friend,’ the colonel said, leaning on the window. ‘I prefer to wait for it to clear.’ Sabas didn’t close the cupboard. He settled down at the desk within range of the electric fan. Then he took a little hypodermic syringe wrapped in cotton out of the drawer. The colonel observed the grayish almond trees through the rain. It was an empty afternoon.

  ‘The rain is different from this window,’ he said. ‘It’s as if it were raining in another town.’

  ‘Rain is rain from whatever point,’ replied Sabas. He put the syringe on to boil on the glass desk top. ‘This town stinks.’

  The colonel shrugged his shoulders. He walked toward the middle of the office: a green-tiled room with furniture upholstered in brightly colored fabrics. At the back, piled up in disarray, were sacks of salt, honeycombs, and riding saddles. Sabas followed him with a completely vacant stare.

  ‘If I were in your shoes I wouldn’t think that way,’ said the colonel.

  He sat down and crossed his legs, his calm gaze fixed on the man leaning over his desk. A small man, corpulent, but with flaccid flesh, he had the sadness of a toad in his eyes.

  ‘Have the doctor look at you, friend,’ said Sabas. ‘You’ve been a little sad since the day of the funeral.’

  The colonel raised his head.

  ‘I’m perfectly well,’ he said.

  Sabas waited for the syringe to boil. ‘I wish I could say the same,’ he complained. ‘You’re lucky because you’ve got a cast-iron stomach.’ He contemplated the hairy backs of his hands which were dotted with dark blotches. He wore a ring with a black stone next to his wedding band.

  ‘That’s right,’ the colonel admitted.

  Sabas called his wife through the door between the office and the rest of the house. Then he began a painful explanation of his diet. He took a little bottle out of his shirt pocket and put a white pill the size of a pea on the desk.

  ‘It’s torture to go around with this everyplace,’ he said. ‘It’s like carrying death in your pocket.’

  The colonel approached the desk. He examined the pill in the palm of his hand until Sabas invited him to taste it.

  ‘It’s to sweeten coffee,’ he explained. ‘It’s sugar, but without sugar.’

  ‘Of course,’ the colonel said, his saliva impregnated with a sad sweetness. ‘It’s something like a ringing but without bells.’

  Sabas put his elbows on the desk with his face in his hands after his wife gave him the injection. The colonel didn’t know what to do with his body. The woman unplugged the electric fan, put it on top of the safe, and then went to the cupboard.

  ‘Umbrellas have something to do with death,’ she said.

  The colonel paid no attention to her. He had left his house at four to wait for the mail, but the rain made him take refuge in Sabas’s office. It was still raining when the launches whistled.

  ‘Everybody says death is a woman,’ the woman continued. She was fat, taller than her husband, and had a hairy mole on her upper lip. Her way of speaking reminded one of the hum of the electric fan. ‘But I don’t think it’s a woman,’ she said. She closed the cupboard and looked into the colonel’s eyes again.

  ‘I think it’s an animal with claws.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ the colonel admitted. ‘At times very strange things happen.’

  He thought of the postmaster jumping onto the launch in an oilskin slicker. A month had passed since he had changed la
wyers. He was entitled to expect a reply. Sabas’s wife kept speaking about death until she noticed the colonel’s absent-minded expression.

  ‘Friend,’ she said. ‘You must be worried.’

  The colonel sat up.

  ‘That’s right friend,’ he lied. ‘I’m thinking that it’s five already and the rooster hasn’t had his injection.’

  She was confused.

  ‘An injection for a rooster, as if he were a human being!’ she shouted. ‘That’s a sacrilege.’

  Sabas couldn’t stand any more. He raised his flushed face.

  ‘Close your mouth for a minute,’ he ordered his wife. And in fact she did raise her hands to her mouth. ‘You’ve been bothering my friend for half an hour with your foolishness.’

  ‘Not at all,’ the colonel protested.

  The woman slammed the door. Sabas dried his neck with a handkerchief soaked in lavender. The colonel approached the window. It was raining steadily. A long-legged chicken was crossing the deserted plaza.

  ‘Is it true the rooster’s getting injections?’

  ‘True,’ said the colonel. ‘His training begins next week.’

  ‘That’s madness,’ said Sabas. ‘Those things are not for you.’

  ‘I agree,’ said the colonel. ‘But that’s no reason to wring his neck.’

  ‘That’s just idiotic stubbornness,’ said Sabas, turning toward the window. The colonel heard him sigh with the breath of a bellows. His friend’s eyes made him feel pity.

  ‘It’s never too late for anything,’ the colonel said.

  ‘Don’t be unreasonable,’ insisted Sabas. ‘It’s a two-edged deal. On one side you get rid of that headache, and on the other you can put nine hundred pesos in your pocket.’

  ‘Nine hundred pesos!’ the colonel exclaimed.

  ‘Nine hundred pesos.’

  The colonel visualized the figure.

  ‘You think they’d give a fortune like that for the rooster?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Sabas answered. ‘I’m absolutely sure.’

  It was the largest sum the colonel had had in his head since he had returned the revolution’s funds. When he left Sabas’s office, he felt a strong wrenching in his gut, but he was aware that this time it wasn’t because of the weather. At the post office he headed straight for the postmaster:

  ‘I’m expecting an urgent letter,’ he said. ‘It’s air mail.’

  The postmaster looked in the cubbyholes. When he finished reading, he put the letters back in the proper box but he didn’t say anything. He dusted off his hand and turned a meaningful look on the colonel.

  ‘It was supposed to come today for sure,’ the colonel said.

  The postmaster shrugged.

  ‘The only thing that comes for sure is death, colonel.’

  His wife received him with a dish of corn mush. He ate it in silence with long pauses for thought between each spoonful. Seated opposite him, the woman noticed that something had changed in his face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m thinking about the employee that pension depends on,’ the colonel lied. ‘In fifty years, we’ll be peacefully six feet under, while that poor man will be killing himself every Friday waiting for his retirement pension.’

  ‘That’s a bad sign,’ the woman said. ‘It means that you’re beginning to resign yourself already.’ She went on eating her mush. But a moment later she realized that her husband was still far away.

  ‘Now, what you should do is enjoy the mush.’

  ‘It’s very good,’ the colonel said. ‘Where’d it come from?’

  ‘From the rooster,’ the woman answered. ‘The boys brought him so much corn that he decided to share it with us. That’s life.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The colonel sighed. ‘Life is the best thing that’s ever been invented.’

  He looked at the rooster tied to the leg of the stove and this time he seemed a different animal. The woman also looked at him.

  ‘This afternoon I had to chase the children out with a stick,’ she said. ‘They brought an old hen to breed her with the rooster.’

  ‘It’s not the first time,’ the colonel said. ‘That’s the same thing they did in those towns with Colonel Aureliano Buendía. They brought him little girls to breed with.’

  She got a kick out of the joke. The rooster produced a guttural noise which sounded in the hall like quiet human conversation. ‘Sometimes I think that animal is going to talk,’ the woman said. The colonel looked at him again.

  ‘He’s worth his weight in gold,’ he said. He made some calculations while he sipped a spoonful of mush. ‘He’ll feed us for three years.’

  ‘You can’t eat hope,’ the woman said.

  ‘You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,’ the colonel replied. ‘It’s something like my friend Sabas’s miraculous pills.’

  He slept poorly that night trying to erase the figures from his mind. The following day at lunch, the woman served two plates of mush, and ate hers with her head lowered, without saying a word. The colonel felt himself catching her dark mood.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the woman said.

  He had the impression that this time it had been her turn to lie. He tried to comfort her. But the woman persisted.

  ‘It’s nothing unusual,’ she said. ‘I was thinking that the man has been dead for two months, and I still haven’t been to see the family.’

  So she went to see them that night. The colonel accompanied her to the dead man’s house, and then headed for the movie theater, drawn by the music coming over the loudspeakers. Seated at the door of his office, Father Ángel was watching the entrance to find out who was attending the show despite his twelve warnings. The flood of light, the strident music, and the shouts of the children erected a physical resistance in the area. One of the children threatened the colonel with a wooden rifle.

  ‘What’s new with the rooster, colonel?’ he said in an authoritative voice.

  The colonel put his hands up.

  ‘He’s still around.’

  A four-color poster covered the entire front of the theater: Midnight Virgin. She was a woman in an evening gown, with one leg bared up to the thigh. The colonel continued wandering around the neighborhood until distant thunder and lightning began. Then he went back for his wife.

  She wasn’t at the dead man’s house. Nor at home. The colonel reckoned that there was little time left before curfew, but the clock had stopped. He waited, feeling the storm advance on the town. He was getting ready to go out again when his wife arrived.

  He took the rooster into the bedroom. She changed her clothes and went to take a drink of water in the living room just as the colonel finished winding the clock, and was waiting for curfew to blow in order to set it.

  ‘Where were you?’ the colonel asked.

  ‘Roundabout,’ the woman answered. She put the glass on the washstand without looking at her husband and returned to the bedroom. ‘No one thought it was going to rain so soon.’ The colonel made no comment. When curfew blew, he set the clock at eleven, closed the case, and put the chair back in its place. He found his wife saying her rosary.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ the colonel said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I stayed around there talking,’ she said. ‘It had been so long since I’d been out of the house.’

  The colonel hung up his hammock. He locked the house and fumigated the room. Then he put the lamp on the floor and lay down.

  ‘I understand,’ he said sadly. ‘The worst of a bad situation is that it makes us tell lies.’

  She let out a long sigh.

  ‘I was with Father Ángel,’ she said. ‘I went to ask him for a loan on our wedding rings.’

  ‘And what did he tell you?’

  ‘That it’s a sin to barter with sacred things.’

  She went on talking under her mosquito netting. ‘Two days ago I t
ried to sell the clock,’ she said. ‘No one is interested because they’re selling modern clocks with luminous numbers on the installment plan. You can see the time in the dark.’ The colonel acknowledged that forty years of shared living, of shared hunger, of shared suffering, had not been enough for him to come to know his wife. He felt that something had also grown old in their love.

  ‘They don’t want the picture, either,’ she said. ‘Almost everybody has the same one. I even went to the Turk’s.’

  The colonel felt bitter.

  ‘So now everyone knows we’re starving.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ the woman said. ‘Men don’t understand problems of the household. Several times I’ve had to put stones on to boil so the neighbors wouldn’t know that we often go for many days without putting on the pot.’

  The colonel felt offended.

  ‘That’s really a humiliation,’ he said.

  The woman got out from under the mosquito netting and went to the hammock. ‘I’m ready to give up affectation and pretense in this house,’ she said. Her voice began to darken with rage. ‘I’m fed up with resignation and dignity.’

  The colonel didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘Twenty years of waiting for the little colored birds which they promised you after every election, and all we’ve got out of it is a dead son,’ she went on. ‘Nothing but a dead son.’

  The colonel was used to that sort of recrimination.

  ‘We did our duty.’

  ‘And they did theirs by making a thousand pesos a month in the Senate for twenty years,’ the woman answered. ‘There’s my friend Sabas with a two-story house that isn’t big enough to keep all his money in, a man who came to this town selling medicines with a snake curled around his neck.’

  ‘But he’s dying of diabetes,’ the colonel said.

  ‘And you’re dying of hunger,’ the woman said. ‘You should realize that you can’t eat dignity.’

  The lightning interrupted her. The thunder exploded in the street, entered the bedroom, and went rolling under the bed like a heap of stones. The woman jumped toward the mosquito netting for her rosary.

  The colonel smiled.

  ‘That’s what happens to you for not holding your tongue,’ he said. ‘I’ve always said that God is on my side.’

  But in reality he felt embittered. A moment later he put out the light and sank into thought in a darkness rent by the lightning. He remembered Macondo. The colonel had waited ten years for the promises of Neerlandia to be fulfilled. In the drowsiness of the siesta he saw a yellow, dusty train pull in, with men and women and animals suffocating from the heat, piled up even on the roofs of the cars. It was the banana fever.