No One Writes to the Colonel (2 page)

‘It’s just for a few months,’ he said. ‘We already know that there will be fights in January. Then we can sell him for more.’

The pants needed pressing. The woman stretched them out over the stove with two irons
heated over the coals.

‘What’s your hurry to go out?’ she asked.

‘The mail.’

‘I had forgotten that today is Friday,’ she commented, returning to the bedroom. The colonel was dressed but pants-less. She observed his shoes.

‘Those shoes are ready to throw out,’ she said. ‘Keep wearing your patent-leather ones.’

The colonel felt desolate.

‘They look like the shoes of an orphan,’ he protested.
‘Every time I put them on I feel like a fugitive from an asylum.’

‘We are the orphans of our son,’ the woman said.

This time, too, she persuaded him. The colonel walked toward the harbor before the whistles of the launches blew. Patent-leather shoes, beltless white ducks, and the shirt without the detachable collar, closed at the neck with the copper stud. He observed the docking of the launches
from the shop of Moses the Syrian. The travelers got off, stiff from eight hours of
immobility. The same ones as always: traveling salesmen, and people from the town who had left the preceding week and were returning as usual.

The last one was the mail launch. The colonel saw it dock with an anguished uneasiness. On the roof, tied to the boat’s smokestacks and protected by an oilcloth, he spied
the mailbag. Fifteen years of waiting had sharpened his intuition. The rooster had sharpened his anxiety. From the moment the postmaster went on board the launch, untied the bag, and hoisted it up on his shoulder, the colonel kept him in sight.

He followed him through the street parallel to the harbor, a labyrinth of stores and booths with colored merchandise on display. Every time he did it,
the colonel experienced an anxiety very different from, but just as oppressive as, fright. The doctor was waiting for the newspapers in the post office.

‘My wife wants me to ask you if we threw boiling water on you at our house,’ the colonel said.

He was a young physician with his skull covered by sleek black hair. There was something unbelievable in the perfection of his dentition. He asked
after the health of the asthmatic. The colonel supplied a detailed report without taking his eyes off the postmaster, who was distributing the letters into cubbyholes. His indolent way of moving exasperated the colonel.

The doctor received his mail with the packet of newspapers. He put the pamphlets of medical advertising to one side. Then he scanned his personal letters. Meanwhile the postmaster
was handing out mail to those who were present. The colonel watched the compartment which corresponded to his letter in the alphabet.
An air-mail letter with blue borders increased his nervous tension.

The doctor broke the seal on the newspapers. He read the lead items while the colonel – his eyes fixed on the little box – waited for the postmaster to stop in front of it. But he didn’t. The doctor
interrupted his reading of the newspapers. He looked at the colonel. Then he looked at the postmaster seated in front of the telegraph key, and then again at the colonel.

‘We’re leaving,’ he said.

The postmaster didn’t raise his head.

‘Nothing for the colonel,’ he said.

The colonel felt ashamed.

‘I wasn’t expecting anything,’ he lied. He turned to the doctor with an entirely childish look.
‘No one writes to me.’

They went back in silence. The doctor was concentrating on the newspapers. The colonel with his habitual way of walking which resembled that of a man retracing his steps to look for a lost coin. It was a bright afternoon. The almond trees in the plaza were shedding their last rotted leaves. It had begun to grow dark when they arrived at the door of the doctor’s office.

‘What’s in the news?’ the colonel asked.

The doctor gave him a few newspapers.

‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to read between the lines which the censor lets them print.’

The colonel read the main headlines. International news. At the top, across four columns, a report on the Suez Canal. The front page was almost completely covered by paid funeral announcements.

‘There’s no hope of elections,’
the colonel said.

‘Don’t
be naïve, colonel,’ said the doctor. ‘We’re too old now to be waiting for the Messiah.’

The colonel tried to give the newspapers back, but the doctor refused them.

‘Take them home with you,’ he said. ‘You can read them tonight and return them tomorrow.’

A little after seven the bells in the tower rang out the censor’s movie classifications. Father Ángel used this means
to announce the moral classification of the film in accordance with the ratings he received every month by mail. The colonel’s wife counted twelve bells.

‘Unfit for everyone,’ she said. ‘It’s been about a year now that the movies are bad for everyone.’

She lowered the mosquito netting and murmured, ‘The world is corrupt.’ But the colonel made no comment. Before lying down, he tied the rooster
to the leg of the bed. He locked the house and sprayed some insecticide in the bedroom. Then he put the lamp on the floor, hung his hammock up, and lay down to read the newspapers.

He read them in chronological order, from the first page to the last, including the advertisements. At eleven the trumpet blew curfew. The colonel finished his reading a half-hour later, opened the patio door on the
impenetrable night, and urinated, besieged by mosquitoes, against the wall studs. His wife was awake when he returned to the bedroom.

‘Nothing about the veterans?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ said the colonel. He put out the lamp before he got into the hammock. ‘In the beginning at least they published the list of the new pensioners. But it’s been about five years since they’ve said anything.’

It
rained after midnight. The colonel managed to get to sleep but woke up a moment later, alarmed by his intestines. He discovered a leak in some part of the roof. Wrapped in a wool blanket up to his ears, he tried to find the leak in the darkness. A trickle of cold sweat slipped down his spine. He had a fever. He felt as if he were floating in concentric circles inside a tank of jelly. Someone spoke.
The colonel answered from his revolutionist’s cot.

‘Who are you talking to?’ asked his wife.

‘The Englishman disguised as a tiger who appeared at Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s camp,’ the colonel answered. He turned over in his hammock, burning with his fever. ‘It was the Duke of Marlborough.’

The sky was clear at dawn. At the second call for Mass, he jumped from the hammock and installed himself
in a confused reality which was agitated by the crowing of the rooster. His head was still spinning in concentric circles. He was nauseous. He went out into the patio and headed for the privy through the barely audible whispers and the dark odors of winter. The inside of the little zinc-roofed wooden compartment was rarefied by the ammonia smell from the privy. When the colonel raised the lid,
a triangular cloud of flies rushed out of the pit.

It was a false alarm. Squatting on the platform of unsanded boards, he felt the uneasiness of an urge frustrated. The oppressiveness was substituted by a dull ache in his digestive tract. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he murmured. ‘It’s the same every October.’ And again he assumed his posture of confident and innocent expectation until the fungus in his
innards was pacified. Then he returned to the bedroom for the rooster.

‘Last
night you were delirious from fever,’ his wife said.

She had begun to straighten up the room, having recovered from a week-long attack. The colonel made an effort to remember.

‘It wasn’t fever,’ he lied. ‘It was the dream about the spider webs again.’

As always happened, the woman emerged from her attack full of nervous
energy. In the course of the morning she turned the house upside down. She changed the position of everything, except the clock and the picture of the young girl. She was so thin and sinewy that when she walked about in her cloth slippers and her black dress all buttoned up she seemed as if she had the power of walking through the walls. But before twelve she had regained her bulk, her human
weight. In bed she was an empty space. Now, moving among the flowerpots of ferns and begonias, her presence overflowed the house. ‘If Agustín’s year were up, I would start singing,’ she said while she stirred the pot where all the things to eat that the tropical land is capable of producing, cut into pieces, were boiling.

‘If you feel like singing, sing,’ said the colonel. ‘It’s good for your
spleen.’

The doctor came after lunch. The colonel and his wife were drinking coffee in the kitchen when he pushed open the street door and shouted:

‘Everybody dead?’

The colonel got up to welcome him.

‘So it seems, doctor,’ he said, going into the living room. ‘I’ve always said that your clock keeps time with the buzzards.’

The
woman went into the bedroom to get ready for the examination.
The doctor stayed in the living room with the colonel. In spite of the heat, his immaculate linen suit gave off a smell of freshness. When the woman announced that she was ready, the doctor gave the colonel three sheets of paper in an envelope. He entered the bedroom, saying, ‘That’s what the newspapers didn’t print yesterday.’

The colonel had assumed as much. It was a summary of the events in
the country, mimeographed for clandestine circulation. Revelations about the state of armed resistance in the interior of the country. He felt defeated. Ten years of clandestine reports had not taught him that no news was more surprising than next month’s news. He had finished reading when the doctor came back into the living room.

‘This patient is healthier than I am,’ he said. ‘With asthma
like that, I could live to be a hundred.’

The colonel glowered at him. He gave him back the envelope without saying a word, but the doctor refused to take it.

‘Pass it on,’ he said in a whisper.

The colonel put the envelope in his pants pocket. The woman came out of the bedroom, saying, ‘One of these days I’ll up and die, and carry you with me, off to hell, doctor.’ The doctor responded silently
with the stereotyped enamel of his teeth. He pulled a chair up to the little table and took several jars of free samples out of his bag. The woman went on into the kitchen.

‘Wait and I’ll warm up the coffee.’

‘No, thank you very much,’ said the doctor. He wrote
the proper dosage on a prescription pad. ‘I absolutely refuse to give you the chance to poison me.’

She laughed in the kitchen. When
he finished writing, the doctor read the prescription aloud, because he knew that no one could decipher his handwriting. The colonel tried to concentrate. Returning from the kitchen, the woman discovered in his face the toll of the previous night.

‘This morning he had a fever,’ she said, pointing at her husband. ‘He spent about two hours talking nonsense about the civil war.’

The colonel started.

‘It wasn’t a fever,’ he insisted, regaining his composure. ‘Furthermore,’ he said, ‘the day I feel sick I’ll throw myself into the garbage can on my own.’

He went into the bedroom to find the newspapers.

‘Thank you for the compliment,’ the doctor said.

They walked together toward the plaza. The air was dry. The tar on the streets had begun to melt from the heat. When the doctor said goodbye,
the colonel asked him in a low voice, his teeth clenched: ‘How much do we owe you, doctor?’

‘Nothing, for now,’ the doctor said, and he gave him a pat on the shoulder. ‘I’ll send you a fat bill when the cock wins.’

The colonel went to the tailor shop to take the clandestine letter to Agustín’s companions. It was his only refuge ever since his co-partisans had been killed or exiled from town
and he had been converted into a man with no other occupation than waiting for the mail every Friday.

The afternoon heat stimulated the woman’s energy.
Seated among the begonias in the veranda next to a box of worn-out clothing, she was again working the eternal miracle of creating new apparel out of nothing. She made collars from sleeves, and cuffs from the backs and square patches, perfect
ones, although with scraps of different colors. A cicada lodged its whistle in the patio. The sun faded. But she didn’t see it go down over the begonias. She raised her head only at dusk when the colonel returned home. Then she clasped her neck with both hands, cracked her knuckles, and said:

‘My head is as stiff as a board.’

‘It’s always been that way,’ the colonel said, but then he saw his
wife’s body covered all over with scraps of color. ‘You look like a magpie,’

‘One has to be half a magpie to dress you,’ she said. She held out a shirt made of three different colors of material except for the collar and cuffs, which were of the same color. ‘At the carnival all you have to do is take off your jacket.’

The six-o’clock bells interrupted her. ‘The Angel of the Lord announced unto
Mary,’ she prayed aloud, heading into the bedroom. The colonel talked to the children who had come to look at the rooster after school. Then he remembered that there was no corn for the next day, and entered the bedroom to ask his wife for money.

‘I think there’s only fifty cents,’ she said.

She kept the money under the mattress, knotted into the corner of a handkerchief. It was the proceeds
of Agustín’s sewing machine. For nine months, they had spent that money penny by penny, parceling it out between their needs and the rooster’s. Now there were only two twenty-cent pieces and a ten-cent piece left.

‘Buy
a pound of corn,’ the woman said. ‘With the change, buy tomorrow’s coffee and four ounces of cheese.’

‘And a golden elephant to hang in the doorway,’ the colonel went on. ‘The
corn alone costs forty-two.’

They thought for a moment. ‘The rooster is an animal, and therefore he can wait,’ said the woman at first. But her husband’s expression caused her to reflect. The colonel sat on the bed, his elbows on his knees, jingling the coins in his hands. ‘It’s not for my sake,’ he said after a moment. ‘If it depended on me I’d make a rooster stew this very evening. A fifty-peso
indigestion would be very good.’ He paused to squash a mosquito on his neck. Then his eyes followed his wife around the room.