Leaf Storm Read online

  Gabriel García Márquez

  LEAF STORM

  Translated by Gregory Rabassa

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927. He studied at the National University of Colombia at Bogotá and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947), Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1958), In Evil Hour (1962), Big Mama’s Funeral (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories (1972), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). Many of his books are published by Penguin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LEAF STORM

  ‘A hypnotic, mysterious tale. You know at once you are in the presence of an arresting writer’ Guardian

  ‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do’ Salman Rushdie

  ‘Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel García Márquez’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘The most important writer of fiction in any language’

  Bill Clinton

  ‘An imaginative writer of genius, the topmost pinnacle of an entire generation of Latin American novelists of cathedral-like proportions’ Guardian

  ‘One of this century’s most evocative writers’ Anne Tyler

  ‘Márquez is a retailer of wonders’ Sunday Times

  ‘Sentence for sentence, there is hardly another writer in the world so generous with incidental pleasures’ Independent

  – Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. A whirling leaf storm had been stirred up, formed out of the human and material dregs of other towns, the chaff of a civil war that seemed ever more remote and unlikely. The whirlwind was implacable. It contaminated everything with its swirling crowd smell, the smell of skin secretion and hidden death. In less than a year it sowed over the town the rubble of many catastrophes that had come before it, scattering its mixed cargo of rubbish in the streets. And all of a sudden that rubbish, in time to the mad and unpredicted rhythm of the storm, was being sorted out, individualized, until what had been a narrow street with a river at one end and a corral for the dead at the other was changed into a different and more complex town, created out of the rubbish of other towns.

  Arriving there, mingled with the human leaf storm, dragged along by its impetuous force, came the dregs of warehouses, hospitals, amusement parlors, electric plants; the dregs made up of single women and men who tied their mules to hitching posts by the hotel, carrying their single piece of baggage, a wooden trunk or a bundle of clothing, and in a few months each had his own house, two mistresses, and the military title that was due him for having arrived late for the war.

  Even the dregs of the cities’ sad love came to us in the whirlwind and built small wooden houses where at first a corner and a half-cot were a dismal home for one night, and then a noisy clandestine street, and then a whole inner village of tolerance within the town.

  In the midst of that blizzard, that tempest of unknown faces, of awnings along the public way, of men changing clothes in the street, of women with open parasols sitting on trunks, and of mule after abandoned mule dying of hunger on the block by the hotel, the first of us came to be the last; we were the outsiders, the newcomers.

  After the war, when we came to Macondo and appreciated the good quality of its soil, we knew that the leaf storm was sure to come someday, but we did not count on its drive. So when we felt the avalanche arrive, the only thing we could do was set a plate with a knife and fork behind the door and sit patiently waiting for the newcomers to get to know us. Then the train whistled for the first time. The leaf storm turned about and went out to greet it, and by turning it lost its drive. But it developed unity and mass; and it underwent the natural process of fermentation, becoming incorporated into the germination of the earth.

  Macondo, 1909

  I

  I’ve seen a corpse for the first time. It’s Wednesday but I feel as if it was Sunday because I didn’t go to school and they dressed me up in a green corduroy suit that’s tight in some places. Holding Mama’s hand, following my grandfather, who feels his way along with a cane with every step he takes so he won’t bump into things (he doesn’t see well in the dark and he limps), I went past the mirror in the living room and saw myself full length, dressed in green and with this white starched collar that pinches me on one side of the neck. I saw myself in the round mottled looking-glass and I thought: That’s me, as if today was Sunday.

  We’ve come to the house where the dead man is.

  The heat won’t let you breathe in the closed room. You can hear the sun buzzing in the streets, but that’s all. The air is stagnant, like concrete; you get the feeling that it could get all twisted like a sheet of steel. In the room where they’ve laid out the corpse there’s a smell of trunks, but I can’t see any anywhere. There’s a hammock in the corner hanging by one end from a ring. There’s a smell of trash. And I think that the things around us, broken down and almost falling apart, have the look of things that ought to smell like trash even though they smell like something else.

  I always thought that dead people should have hats on. Now I can see that they shouldn’t. I can see that they have a head like wax and a handkerchief tied around their jawbone. I can see that they have their mouth open a little and that behind the purple lips you can see the stained and irregular teeth. I can see that they keep their tongue bitten over to one side, thick and sticky, a little darker than the color of their face, which is like the color of fingers clutching a stick. I can see that they have their eyes open much wider than a man’s, anxious and wild, and that their skin seems to be made of tight damp earth. I thought that a dead man would look like somebody quiet and asleep and now I can see that it’s just the opposite. I can see that he looks like someone awake and in a rage after a fight.

  Mama is dressed up as if it was Sunday too. She put on the old straw hat that comes down over her ears and a black dress closed at the neck and with sleeves that come down to her wrists. Since today is Wednesday she looks to me like someone far away, a stranger, and I get the feeling that she wants to tell me something when my grandfather gets up to receive the men who’ve brought the coffin. Mama is sitting beside me with her back to the closed door. She’s breathing heavily and she keeps pushing back the strands of hair that fall out from under the hat that she put on in a hurry. My grandfather has told the men to put the coffin down next to the bed. Only then did I realize that the dead man could really fit into it. When the men brought in the box I had the impression that it was too small for a body that took up the whole length of the bed.

  I don’t know why they brought me along. I’ve never been in this house before and I even thought that nobody lived here. It’s a big house, on the corner, and I don’t think the door has ever been opened. I always thought that nobody lived in the house. Only now, after my mother told me, ‘You won’t be going to school this afternoon,
’ and I didn’t feel glad because she said it with a serious and reserved voice, and I saw her come back with my corduroy suit and she put it on me without saying a word and we went to the door to join my grandfather, and we walked past the three houses that separated this one from ours, only now do I realize that someone lived on the corner. Someone who died and who must be the man my mother was talking about when she said: ‘You have to behave yourself at the doctor’s funeral.’

  When we went in I didn’t see the dead man. I saw my grandfather at the door talking to the men, and then I saw him telling us to go on in. I thought then that there was somebody in the room, but when I went in I felt it was dark and empty. The heat beat on my face from the very first minute and I got that trash smell that was solid and permanent at first and now, like the heat, comes in slow-spaced waves and disappears. Mama led me through the dark room by the hand and seated me next to her in a corner. Only after a moment could I begin to make things out. I saw my grandfather trying to open a window that seemed stuck to its frame, glued to the wood around it, and I saw him hitting his cane against the latches, his coat covered with the dust that came off with every blow. I turned my head to where my grandfather was moving as he said he couldn’t open the window and only then did I see there was someone on the bed. There was a dark man stretched out, motionless. Then I spun my head to my mother’s side where she sat serious and without moving, looking off somewhere else in the room. Since my feet don’t touch the floor and hang in the air half a foot away, I put my hands under my thighs, placing the palms on the chair, and I began to swing my legs, not thinking about anything until I remembered that Mama had told me: ‘You have to behave yourself at the doctor’s funeral.’ Then I felt something cold behind me. I turned to look and I only saw the wall of dry and pitted wood. But it was as if someone had said to me from the wall: Don’t move your legs. The man on the bed is the doctor and he’s dead. And when I looked toward the bed I didn’t see him the way I had before. I didn’t see him lying down, I saw him dead.

  From then on, as much as I try not to look, I feel as if someone is forcing my face in that direction. And even if I make an effort to look at other places in the room, I see him just the same, everywhere, with his bulging eyes and his green, dead face in the shadows.

  I don’t know why no one has come to the wake. The ones who came are us, my grandfather, Mama, and the four Guajiro Indians who work for my grandfather. The men brought a sack of lime and emptied it inside the coffin. If my mother hadn’t been strange and far away I would have asked her why they did it. I don’t understand why they have to sprinkle lime inside the box. When the bag was empty one of the men shook it over the coffin and a few last flakes fell out, looking more like sawdust than lime. They lifted the dead man by the shoulders and feet. He’s wearing a pair of cheap pants tied at the waist by a wide black cord, and a gray shirt. He only has his left shoe on. As Ada says, he’s got one foot a king and the other one a slave. The right shoe is at one end of the bed. On the bed the dead man seemed to be having trouble. In the coffin he looks more comfortable, more peaceful, and his face, which had been like the face of a man who was alive and awake after a fight, has taken on a restful and secure look. His profile is softer. It’s as if in the box there he now felt he was in his proper place as a dead man.

  My grandfather’s been moving around the room. He’s picked up some things and put them in the box. I look at Mama again hoping that she’ll tell me why my grandfather is tossing things into the coffin. But my mother is unmoved in her black dress and she seems to be making an effort not to look where the dead man is. I try to do the same thing but I can’t. I stare at him. I examine him. My grandfather throws a book inside the coffin, signals the men, and three of them put the lid over the corpse. Only then do I feel free of the hands that were holding my head toward that side and I begin to look the room over.

  I look at my mother again. For the first time since we came to the house she looks at me and smiles with a forced smile, with nothing inside; and in the distance I can hear the train whistle as it disappears around the last bend. I hear a sound from the corner where the corpse is. I see one of the men lift one edge of the lid and my grandfather puts the dead man’s shoe into the coffin, the shoe they had forgotten on the bed. The train whistles again, farther off, and suddenly I think: It’s two-thirty. I remember that it’s the time (when the train whistles at the last bend in town) when the boys line up at school to go in for the first class in the afternoon.

  Abraham, I think.

  I shouldn’t have brought the child. A spectacle like this isn’t proper for him. Even for myself, turning thirty, this atmosphere thinned out by the presence of the corpse is harmful. We could leave now. We could tell Papa that we don’t feel well in a room where the remains of a man cut off from everything that could be considered affection or thanks have been accumulating for seventeen years. My father may be the only one who’s ever shown any feeling for him. An inexplicable feeling that’s been of use to him now so he won’t rot away inside these four walls.

  I’m bothered by how ridiculous all of this is. I’m upset by the idea that in a moment we’ll be going out into the street following a coffin that won’t inspire any feeling except pleasure in anyone. I can imagine the expression on the faces of the women in the windows, watching my father go by, watching me go by with the child behind a casket inside of which the only person the town has wanted to see that way is rotting away, on his way to the cemetery in the midst of unyielding abandonment, followed by three people who decided to perform a work of charity that’s been the beginning of his own vengeance. It could be that this decision of Papa’s could mean that tomorrow there won’t be anyone prepared to walk behind our funeral processions.

  Maybe that’s why I brought the child along. When Papa told me a moment ago: ‘You have to go with me,’ the first thing that occurred to me was to bring the child so that I would feel protected. Now here we are on this suffocating September afternoon, feeling that the things around us are the pitiless agents of our enemies. Papa’s got no reason to worry. Actually, he’s spent his whole life doing things like this; giving the town stones to chew on, keeping his most insignificant promises with his back turned to all convention. Since that time twenty-five years ago when this man came to our house, Papa must have imagined (when he noticed the visitor’s absurd manners) that today there wouldn’t be a single person in the whole town prepared even to throw his body to the buzzards. Maybe Papa foresaw all the obstacles and measured and calculated the possible inconveniences. And now, twenty-five years later, he must feel that this is just the fulfillment of a chore he’s thought about for a long time, one which had to be carried out in any case, since he would have had to haul the corpse through the streets of Macondo by himself.

  Still, when the time came, he didn’t have the courage to do it alone and he made me take part in that intolerable promise that he must have made long before I even had the use of reason. When he told me: ‘You have to go with me,’ he didn’t give me time to think about how far his words went; I couldn’t calculate how much shame and ridicule there would be in burying this man whom everyone had hoped to see turn to dust inside his lair. Because people hadn’t just expected that, they’d prepared themselves for things to happen that way and they’d hoped for it from the bottom of their hearts, without remorse, and even with the anticipated satisfaction of someday smelling the pleasant odor of his decomposition floating through the town without anyone’s feeling moved, alarmed, or scandalized, satisfied rather at seeing the longed-for hour come, wanting the situation to go on and on until the twirling smell of the dead man would satisfy even the most hidden resentments.

  Now we’re going to deprive Macondo of its long-desired pleasure. I feel as if in a certain way this determination of ours has given birth in the hearts of the people not to a melancholy feeling of frustration but to one of postponement.

  That’s another reason why I should have left the child at home; so as not t
o get him mixed up in this conspiracy which will center on us now the way it did on the doctor for ten years. The child should have been left on the sidelines of this promise. He doesn’t even know why he’s here, why we’ve brought him to this room full of rubbish. He doesn’t say anything, sitting, swinging his legs with his hands resting on the chair, waiting for someone to decipher this frightful riddle for him. I want to be sure that nobody will, that no one will open that invisible door that prevents him from going beyond the reach of his senses.

  He’s looked at me several times and I know that he finds me strange, somebody he doesn’t know, with this stiff dress and this old hat that I’ve put on so that I won’t be identified even by my own forebodings.

  If Meme were alive, here in the house, maybe it would have been different. They might have thought I came because of her. They might have thought I came to share in a grief that she probably wouldn’t have felt, but which she would have been able to pretend and which the town could have explained. Meme disappeared about eleven years ago. The doctor’s death has ended any possibility of finding out where she is or, at least, where her bones are. Meme isn’t here, but it’s most likely that if she were – if what happened and was never cleared up hadn’t happened – she would have taken the side of the town against the man who warmed her bed for six years with as much love and humanity as a mule might have had.

  I can hear the train whistling at the last bend. It’s two-thirty, I think; and I can’t get rid of the idea that at this moment all of Macondo is wondering what we’re doing in this house. I think about Señora Rebeca, thin and looking like parchment, with the touch of a family ghost in her look and dress, sitting beside her electric fan, her face shaded by the screens in her windows. As she hears the train disappearing around the last bend Señora Rebeca leans her head toward the fan, tormented by the heat and her resentment, the blades in her heart spinning like those on the fan (but in an opposite direction), and she murmurs: ‘The devil has a hand in all of this,’ and she shudders, fastened to life by the tiny roots of everyday things.