No One Writes to the Colonel (6 page)

‘Don’t wake up, friend,’ she said. ‘I’m going to draw the blinds because this office is an inferno.’

The colonel followed
her with a blank look. She spoke in the shadow when she closed the window.

‘Do you dream often?’

‘Sometimes,’ replied the colonel, ashamed of having fallen asleep. ‘Almost always I dream that I’m getting tangled up in spider webs.’

‘I have nightmares every night,’ the woman said. ‘Now I’ve got it in my head to find out who those unknown people are whom one meets in one’s dreams.’

She plugged
in the fan. ‘Last week a woman appeared at the head of my bed,’ she said. ‘I managed to ask her who she was and she replied, “I am the woman who died in this room twelve years ago.” ’

‘But the house was built barely two years ago,’ the colonel said.

‘That’s right,’ the woman said. ‘That means that even the dead make mistakes.’

The hum of the fan solidified the shadow. The colonel felt impatient,
tormented by sleepiness and by the rambling woman who went directly from dreams to the mystery of the reincarnation. He was waiting for a pause to say goodbye when Sabas entered the office with his foreman.

‘I’ve
warmed up your soup four times,’ the woman said.

‘Warm it up ten times if you like,’ said Sabas. ‘But stop nagging me now.’

He opened the safe and gave his foreman a roll of bills
together with a list of instructions. The foreman opened the blinds to count the money. Sabas saw the colonel at the back of the office but didn’t show any reaction. He kept talking with the foreman. The colonel straightened up at the point when the two men were getting ready to leave the office again. Sabas stopped before opening the door.

‘What can I do for you, friend?’

The colonel saw that
the foreman was looking at him.

‘Nothing, friend,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘Make it fast, whatever it is,’ said Sabas. ‘I don’t have a minute to spare.’

He hesitated with his hand resting on the doorknob. The colonel felt the five longest seconds of his life passing. He clenched his teeth.

‘It’s about the rooster,’ he murmured.

Then Sabas finished opening the door. ‘The question
of the rooster,’ he repeated, smiling, and pushed the foreman toward the hall. ‘The sky is falling in and my friend is worrying about that rooster.’ And then, addressing the colonel:

‘Very well, friend. I’ll be right back.’

The colonel stood motionless in the middle of the office until he could no longer hear the footsteps of the two men at the end of the hall. Then he went out to
walk around
the town which was paralyzed in its Sunday siesta. There was no one at the tailor’s. The doctor’s office was closed. No one was watching the goods set out at the Syrians’ stalls. The river was a sheet of steel. A man at the waterfront was sleeping across four oil drums, his face protected from the sun by a hat. The colonel went home, certain that he was the only thing moving in town.

His wife
was waiting for him with a complete lunch.

‘I bought it on credit; promised to pay first thing tomorrow,’ she explained.

During lunch, the colonel told her the events of the last three hours. She listened to him impatiently.

‘The trouble is you lack character,’ she said finally. ‘You present yourself as if you were begging alms when you ought to go there with your head high and take our friend
aside and say, “Friend, I’ve decided to sell you the rooster.” ’

‘Life is a breeze the way you tell it,’ the colonel said.

She assumed an energetic attitude. That morning she had put the house in order and was dressed very strangely, in her husband’s old shoes, an oilcloth apron, and a rag tied around her head with two knots at the ears. ‘You haven’t the slightest sense for business,’ she said.
‘When you go to sell something, you have to put on the same face as when you go to buy.’

The colonel found something amusing in her figure.

‘Stay just the way you are,’ he interrupted her, smiling. ‘You’re identical to the little Quaker Oats man.’

She took the rag off her head.

‘I’m speaking seriously,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take the rooster to our friend right now, and I’ll bet whatever
you want that I come back inside of half an hour with the nine hundred pesos.’

‘You’ve got zeros on the brain,’ the colonel said. ‘You’re already betting with the money from the rooster.’

It took a lot of trouble for him to dissuade her. She had spent the morning mentally organizing the budget for the next three years without their Friday agony. She had made a list of the essentials they needed,
without forgetting a pair of new shoes for the colonel. She set aside a place in the bedroom for the mirror. The momentary frustration of her plans left her with a confused sensation of shame and resentment.

She took a short siesta. When she got up, the colonel was sitting in the patio.

‘Now what are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m thinking,’ the colonel said.

‘Then the problem is solved. We will
be able to count on that money fifty years from now.’

But in reality the colonel had decided to sell the rooster that very afternoon. He thought of Sabas, alone in his office, preparing himself for his daily injection in front of the electric fan. He had his answer ready.

‘Take the rooster,’ his wife advised him as he went out. ‘Seeing him in the flesh will work a miracle.’

The colonel objected.
She followed him to the front door with desperate anxiety.

‘It doesn’t matter if the whole army is in the office,’ she said. ‘You grab him by the arm and don’t let him move until he gives you the nine hundred pesos.’

‘They’ll think we’re planning a hold-up.’

She paid no attention.

‘Remember that you are the owner of the rooster,’
she insisted. ‘Remember that you are the one who’s going to
do him the favor.’

‘All right.’

Sabas was in the bedroom with the doctor. ‘Now’s your chance, friend,’ his wife said to the colonel. ‘The doctor is getting him ready to travel to the ranch, and he’s not coming back until Thursday.’ The colonel struggled with two opposing forces: in spite of his determination to sell the rooster, he wished he had arrived an hour later and missed Sabas.

‘I can
wait,’ he said.

But the woman insisted. She led him to the bedroom where her husband was seated on the throne-like bed, in his underwear, his colorless eyes fixed on the doctor. The colonel waited until the doctor had heated the glass tube with the patient’s urine, sniffed the odor, and made an approving gesture to Sabas.

‘We’ll have to shoot him,’ the doctor said, turning to the colonel. ‘Diabetes
is too slow for finishing off the wealthy.’

‘You’ve already done your best with your damned insulin injections,’ said Sabas, and he gave a jump on his flaccid buttocks. ‘But I’m a hard nut to crack.’ And then, to the colonel:

‘Come in, friend. When I went to look for you this afternoon, I couldn’t even see your hat.’

‘I don’t wear one, so I won’t have to take if off for anyone.’

Sabas began
to get dressed. The doctor put a glass tube with a blood sample in his jacket pocket. Then he straightened out the things in his bag. The colonel thought he was getting ready to leave.

‘If
I were in your shoes, I’d send my friend a bill for a hundred thousand pesos, doctor,’ the colonel said. ‘That way he wouldn’t be so worried.’

‘I’ve already suggested that to him, but for a million,’ the doctor
said. ‘Poverty is the best cure for diabetes.’

‘Thanks for the prescription,’ said Sabas, trying to stuff his voluminous belly into his riding breeches. ‘But I won’t accept it, to save you from the catastrophe of becoming rich.’ The doctor saw his own teeth reflected in the little chromed lock of his bag. He looked at the clock without showing impatience. Sabas, putting on his boots, suddenly
turned to the colonel: ‘Well, friend, what’s happening with the rooster?’

The colonel realized that the doctor was also waiting for his answer. He clenched his teeth.

‘Nothing, friend,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve come to sell him to you.’

Sabas finished putting on his boots.

‘Fine, my friend,’ he said without emotion. ‘It’s the most sensible thing that could have occurred to you.’

‘I’m too old now
for these complications,’ the colonel said to justify himself before the doctor’s impenetrable expression. ‘If I were twenty years younger it would be different.’

‘You’ll always be twenty years younger,’ the doctor replied.

The colonel regained his breath. He waited for Sabas to say something more, but he didn’t. Sabas put on a leather zippered jacket and got ready to leave the bedroom.

‘If
you like, we’ll talk about it next week, friend,’ the colonel said.

‘That’s what I was going to say,’ said Sabas. ‘I have a
customer who might give you four hundred pesos. But we have to wait till Thursday.’

‘How much?’ the doctor asked.

‘Four hundred pesos.’

‘I had heard someone say that he was worth a lot more,’ the doctor said.

‘You were talking in terms of nine hundred pesos,’ the colonel
said, backed by the doctor’s perplexity. ‘He’s the best rooster in the whole province.’

Sabas answered the doctor.

‘At some other time, anyone would have paid a thousand,’ he explained. ‘But now no one dares pit a good rooster. There’s always the danger he’ll come out of the pit shot to death.’ He turned to the colonel, feigning disappointment: ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, friend.’

The
colonel nodded.

‘Fine,’ he said.

He followed him down the hall. The doctor stayed in the living room, detained by Sabas’s wife, who asked him for a remedy ‘for those things which come over one suddenly and which one doesn’t know what they are.’ The colonel waited for him in the office. Sabas opened the safe, stuffed money into all his pockets, and held out four bills to the colonel.

‘There’s
sixty pesos, friend,’ he said. ‘When the rooster is sold we’ll settle up.’

The colonel walked with the doctor past the stalls at the waterfront, which were beginning to revive in the cool of the afternoon. A barge loaded with sugar cane was moving down the thread of current. The colonel found the doctor strangely impervious.

‘And
you, how are you, doctor?’

The doctor shrugged.

‘As usual,’
he said. ‘I think I need a doctor.’

‘It’s the winter,’ the colonel said. ‘It eats away my insides.’

The doctor examined him with a look absolutely devoid of any professional interest. In succession he greeted the Syrians seated at the doors of their shops. At the door of the doctor’s office, the colonel expressed his opinion of the sale of the rooster.

‘I couldn’t do anything else,’ he explained.
‘That animal feeds on human flesh.’

‘The only animal who feeds on human flesh is Sabas,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m sure he’d resell the rooster for the nine hundred pesos.’

‘You think so?’

‘I’m sure of it,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s as sweet a deal as his famous patriotic pact with the mayor.’

The colonel refused to believe it. ‘My friend made that pact to save his skin,’ he said. ‘That’s how he
could stay in town.’

‘And that’s how he could buy the property of his fellow-partisans whom the mayor kicked out at half their price,’ the doctor replied. He knocked on the door, since he didn’t find his keys in his pockets. Then he faced the colonel’s disbelief.

‘Don’t be so naïve,’ he said. ‘Sabas is much more interested in money than in his own skin.’

The colonel’s wife went shopping that
night. He accompanied her to the Syrians’ stalls, pondering the doctor’s revelations.

‘Find the boys immediately and tell them that the
rooster is sold,’ she told him. ‘We mustn’t leave them with any hopes.’

‘The rooster won’t be sold until my friend Sabas comes back,’ the colonel answered.

He found Alvaro playing roulette in the pool hall. The place was sweltering on Sunday night. The heat
seemed more intense because of the vibrations of the radio turned up full blast. The colonel amused himself with the brightly colored numbers painted on a large black oilcloth cover and lit by an oil lantern placed on a box in the center of the table. Alvaro insisted on losing on twenty-three. Following the game over his shoulder, the colonel observed that the eleven turned up four times in nine
spins.

‘Bet on eleven,’ he whispered into Alvaro’s ear. ‘It’s the one coming up most.’

Alvaro examined the table. He didn’t bet on the next spin. He took some money out of his pants pocket, and with it a sheet of paper. He gave the paper to the colonel under the table.

‘It’s from Agustín,’ he said.

The colonel put the clandestine note in his pocket. Alvaro bet heavily on the eleven.

‘Start
with just a little,’ the colonel said.

‘It may be a good hunch,’ Alvaro replied. A group of neighboring players took their bets off the other numbers and bet on eleven after the enormous colored wheel had already begun to turn. The colonel felt oppressed. For the first time he felt the fascination, agitation, and bitterness of gambling.

The five won.

‘I’m sorry,’ the colonel said, ashamed,
and, with an
irresistible feeling of guilt, followed the little wooden rake which pulled in Alvaro’s money. ‘That’s what I get for butting into what doesn’t concern me.’

Alvaro smiled without looking at him.

‘Don’t worry, colonel. Trust to love.’

The trumpets playing a mambo were suddenly interrupted. The gamblers scattered with their hands in the air. The colonel felt the dry snap, articulate
and cold, of a rifle being cocked behind his back. He realized that he had been caught fatally in a police raid with the clandestine paper in his pocket. He turned halfway around without raising his hands. And then he saw, close up, for the first time in his life, the man who had shot his son. The man was directly in front of him, with his rifle barrel aimed at the colonel’s belly. He was small,
Indian-looking, with weather-beaten skin, and his breath smelled like a child’s. The colonel gritted his teeth and gently pushed the rifle barrel away with the tips of his fingers.