Leaf Storm Read online

  And Águeda, the cripple, seeing Solita coming back from the station after seeing her boyfriend off; seeing her open her parasol as she turns the deserted corner; hearing her approach with the sexual rejoicing that she herself once had and which changed inside her into that patient religious sickness that makes her say: ‘You’ll wallow in your bed like a pig in its sty.’

  I can’t get rid of that idea. Stop thinking that it’s two-thirty; that the mule with the mail is going by cloaked in a burning cloud of dust and followed by the men who have interrupted their Wednesday siesta to pick up the bundles of newspapers. Father Ángel is dozing, sitting in the sacristy with an open breviary on his greasy stomach, listening to the mule pass and shooting away the flies that are bothering his sleep, belching, saying: ‘You poisoned me with your meatballs.’

  Papa’s cold-blooded about all this. Even to the point of telling them to open the coffin so they could put in the shoe that was left on the bed. Only he could have taken an interest in that man’s meanness. I wouldn’t be surprised if when we leave with the corpse the crowd will be waiting for us with all the excrement they could get together overnight and will give us a shower of filth for going against the will of the town. Maybe they won’t do it because of Papa. Maybe they will do it because it’s something as terrible as frustrating a pleasure the town had longed for over so many years, thought about on stifling afternoons whenever men and women passed this house and said to themselves: ‘Sooner or later we’ll lunch on that smell.’ Because that’s what they all said, from the first to the last.

  It’ll be three o’clock in a little while. The Señorita already knows it. Señora Rebeca saw her pass and called her, invisible behind the screen, and she came out from the orbit of the fan for a moment and said to her: ‘Señorita, it’s the devil, you know.’ And tomorrow it won’t be my son who goes to school but some other, completely different child; a child who will grow, reproduce, and die in the end with no one paying him the debt of gratitude which would give him Christian burial.

  I’d probably be peacefully at home right now if twenty-five years ago that man hadn’t come to my father’s home with a letter of recommendation (no one ever knew where he came from), if he hadn’t stayed with us, eating grass and looking at women with those eyes of a lustful dog that popped out of their sockets. But my punishment was written down from before my birth and it stayed hidden, repressed, until that fateful leap year when I would turn thirty and my father would tell me: ‘You have to go with me.’ And then, before I had time to ask anything, he pounded the floor with his cane: ‘We have to go through with this just the way it is, daughter. The doctor hanged himself this morning.’

  The men left and came back to the room with a hammer and a box of nails. But they hadn’t nailed up the coffin. They laid the things on the table and they sat on the bed where the dead man had been. My grandfather seems calm, but his calmness is imperfect and desperate. It’s not the calmness of the corpse in the coffin, it’s the calmness of an impatient man making an effort not to show how he feels. It’s a rebellious and anxious calm, the kind my grandfather has, walking back and forth across the room, limping, picking up the clustered objects.

  When I discover that there are flies in the room I begin to be tortured by the idea that the coffin’s become full of flies. They still haven’t nailed it shut, but it seems to me that the buzzing I thought at first was an electric fan in the neighborhood is the swarm of flies beating blindly against the sides of the coffin and the face of the dead man. I shake my head; I close my eyes; I see my grandfather open a trunk and take out some things and I can’t tell what they are; on the bed I can see the four embers but not the people with the lighted cigars. Trapped by the suffocating heat, by the minute that doesn’t pass, by the buzzing of the flies, I feel as if someone is telling me: That’s the way you’ll be. You’ll be inside a coffin filled with flies. You’re only a little under eleven years old, but someday you’ll be like that, left to the flies inside of a closed box. And I stretch my legs out side by side and look at my own black and shiny boots. One of my laces is untied, I think and I look at Mama again. She looks at me too and leans over to tie my shoelace.

  The vapor that rises up from Mama’s head, warm and smelling like a cupboard, smelling of sleeping wood, reminds me of the closed-in coffin again. It becomes hard for me to breathe, I want to get out of here; I want to breathe in the burning street air, and I use my last resort. When Mama gets up I say to her in a low voice: ‘Mama!’ She smiles, says: ‘Umm?’ And I lean toward her, toward her raw and shining face, trembling. ‘I feel like going out back.’

  Mama calls my grandfather, tells him something. I watch his narrow, motionless eyes behind his glasses when he comes over and tells me: ‘That’s impossible right now.’ I stretch and then remain quiet, indifferent to my failure. But things start to pass too slowly again. There’s a rapid movement, another, and another. And then Mama leans over my shoulder again, saying: ‘Did it go away yet?’ And she says it with a serious and solid voice, as if it was a scolding more than a question. My stomach is tight and hard, but Mama’s question softens it, leaves it full and relaxed, and then everything, even her seriousness, becomes aggressive and challenging to me. ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘It still hasn’t gone away.’ I squeeze in my stomach and try to beat the floor with my feet (another last resort), but I only find empty space below, the distance separating me from the floor.

  Someone comes into the room. It’s one of my grandfather’s men, followed by a policeman and a man who is wearing green denim pants. He has a belt with a revolver on it and in his hand he’s holding a hat with a broad, curled brim. My grandfather goes over to greet him. The man in the green pants coughs in the darkness, says something to my grandfather, coughs again; and still coughing he orders the policeman to open the window.

  The wooden walls have a slippery look. They seem to be built of cold, compressed ash. When the policeman hits the latch with the butt of his rifle, I have the feeling that the shutters will not open. The house will fall down, the walls will crumble, but noiselessly, like a palace of ash collapsing in the wind. I feel that with a second blow we’ll be in the street, in the sunlight, sitting down, our heads covered with debris. But with the second blow the shutter opens and light comes into the room; it bursts in violently, as when a gate is opened for a disoriented animal, who runs and smells, mute; who rages and scratches on the walls, slavering, and then goes back to flop down peacefully in the coolest corner of the cage.

  With the window open things become visible, but consolidated in their strange unrealness. Then Mama takes a deep breath, takes me by the hand, and tells me: ‘Come, let’s take a look at our house through the window.’ And I see the town again, as if I were returning to it after a trip. I can see our house, faded and run down, but cool under the almond trees; and I feel from here as if I’d never been inside that green and cordial coolness, as if ours were the perfect imaginary house promised by my mother on nights when I had bad dreams. And I see Pepe, who passes by without seeing us, lost in his thoughts. The boy from the house next door, who passes whistling, changed and unknown, as if he’d just had his hair cut off.

  Then the mayor gets up, his shirt open, sweaty, his expression completely upset. He comes over to me all choked up by the excitement brought on by his own argument. ‘We can’t be sure that he’s dead until he starts to smell,’ he says, and he finishes buttoning up his shirt and lights a cigarette, his face turned toward the coffin again, thinking perhaps: Now they can’t say that I don’t operate inside the law. I look into his eyes and I feel that I’ve looked at him with enough firmness to make him understand that I can penetrate his deepest thoughts. I tell him: ‘You’re operating outside the law in order to please the others.’ And he, as if that had been exactly what he had expected to hear, answers: ‘You’re a respectable man, colonel. You know that I’m within my rights.’ I tell him: ‘You, more than anyone else, know that he’s dead.’ And he says: ‘That’s right, but afte
r all, I’m only a public servant. The only legal way would be with a death certificate.’ And I tell him: ‘If the law is on your side, take advantage of it and bring a doctor who can make out the death certificate.’ And he, with his head lifted but without haughtiness, calmly too, but without the slightest show of weakness or confusion, says: ‘You’re a respectable person and you know that it would be an abuse of authority.’ When I hear him I see that his brains are not addled so much by liquor as by cowardice.

  Now I can see that the mayor shares the anger of the town. It’s a feeling fed for ten years, ever since that stormy night when they brought the wounded men to the man’s door and shouted to him (because he didn’t open the door, he spoke from inside); they shouted to him: ‘Doctor, take care of these wounded men because there aren’t enough doctors to go around,’ and still without opening (because the door stayed closed with the wounded lying in front of it). ‘You’re the only doctor left. You have to do a charitable act’; and he replied (and he didn’t open the door then either), imagined by the crowd to be standing in the middle of the living room, the lamp held high lighting up his hard yellow eyes: ‘I’ve forgotten everything I knew about all that. Take them somewhere else,’ and he kept the door closed (because from that time on the door was never opened again) while the anger grew, spread out, turned into a collective disease which gave no respite to Macondo for the rest of his life, and in every ear the sentence shouted that night – the one that condemned the doctor to rot behind these walls – continued echoing.

  Ten years would still pass without his ever drinking the town water, haunted by the fear that it would be poisoned; feeding himself on the vegetables that he and his Indian mistress planted in the courtyard. Now the town feels that the time has come when they can deny him the pity that he denied the town ten years ago, and Macondo, which knows that he’s dead (because everyone must have awakened with a lighter feeling this morning), is getting ready to enjoy that longed-for pleasure which everyone considers to be deserved. Their only desire is to smell the odor of organic decomposition behind the doors that he didn’t open that other time.

  Now I can begin to believe that nothing can help my promise in the face of the ferocity of a town and that I’m hemmed in, surrounded by the hatred and impatience of a band of resentful people. Even the Church has found a way to go against my determination. Father Ángel told me a moment ago: ‘I won’t let them bury in consecrated ground a man who hanged himself after having lived sixty years without God. Our Lord would look upon you with good eyes too if you didn’t carry out what won’t be a work of charity but the sin of rebellion.’ I told him: ‘To bury the dead, as is written, is a work of charity.’ And Father Ángel said: ‘Yes. But in this case it’s not up to us to do it, it’s up to the sanitary authorities.’

  I came. I called the four Guajiros who were raised in my house. I made my daughter Isabel go with me. In that way the act becomes more family, more human, less personal and defiant than if I dragged the corpse to the cemetery through the streets of the town myself. I think Macondo is capable of doing anything after what I’ve seen happen in this century. But if they won’t respect me, not even because I’m old, a Colonel of the Republic, and, to top it off, lame in body and sound in conscience, I hope that at least they’ll respect my daughter because she’s a woman. I’m not doing it for myself. Maybe not for the peace of the dead man either. Just to fulfill a sacred promise. If I brought Isabel along it wasn’t out of cowardice but out of charity. She brought the child (and I can see that she did it for the same reason), and here we are now, the three of us, bearing the weight of this harsh emergency.

  We got here a moment ago. I thought we’d find the body still hanging from the ceiling, but the men got here first, laid him on the bed, and almost shrouded him with the secret conviction that the affair wouldn’t last more than an hour. When I arrive I hope they’ll bring the coffin, I see my daughter and the child sitting in the corner and I examine the room, thinking that the doctor may have left something that will explain why he did it. The desk is open, full of a confusion of papers, none written by him. On the desk I see the same bound formulary that he brought to my house twenty-five years ago when he opened that enormous trunk which could have held the clothing of my whole family. But there was nothing else in the trunk except two cheap shirts, a set of false teeth that couldn’t have been his for the simple reason that he still had his own, strong and complete, a portrait, and a formulary. I open the drawers and I find printed sheets of paper in all of them; just papers, old, dusty; and underneath, in the last drawer, the same false teeth that he brought twenty-five years ago, dusty, yellow from age and lack of use. On the small table beside the unlighted lamp there are several bundles of unopened newspapers. I examine them. They’re written in French, the most recent ones three months old: July, 1928. And there are others, also unopened: January, 1927; November, 1926. And the oldest ones: October, 1919. I think: It’s been nine years, since one year after the sentence had been pronounced, that he hadn’t opened the newspapers. Since that time he’s given up the last thing that linked him to his land and his people.

  The men bring the coffin and lower the corpse into it. Then I remember the day twenty-five years ago when he arrived at my house and gave me the letter of recommendation, written in Panama and addressed to me by the Intendant-General of the Atlantic Coast at the end of the great war, Colonel Aureliano Buendía. I search through various trifles in the darkness of the bottomless trunk. There’s no clue in the other corner, only the same things he brought twenty-five years ago. I remember: He had two cheap shirts, a set of teeth, a portrait, and that old bound formulary. I go about gathering up these things before they close the coffin and I put them inside. The portrait is still at the bottom of the trunk, almost in the same place where it had been that time. It’s the daguerreotype of a decorated officer. I throw the picture into the box. I throw in the false teeth and finally the formulary. When I finish I signal the men to close the coffin. I think: Now he’s on another trip. The most natural thing for him on his last trip is to take along the things that were with him on the next to the last one. At least that would seem to be the most natural. And then I seem to see him, for the first time, comfortably dead.

  I examine the room and I see that a shoe was forgotten on the bed. I signal my men again with the shoe in my hand and they lift up the lid at the precise moment when the train whistles, disappearing around the last bend in town. It’s two-thirty, I think. Two-thirty on September 12, 1928; almost the same hour of that day in 1903 when this man sat down for the first time at our table and asked for some grass to eat. Adelaida asked him that time: ‘What kind of grass, doctor?’ And he in his parsimonious ruminant voice, still touched by nasality: ‘Ordinary grass, ma’am. The kind that donkeys eat.’

  II

  The fact is that Meme isn’t in the house and that probably no one could say exactly when she stopped living here. The last time I saw her was eleven years ago. She still had the little botiquín on this corner that had been imperceptibly modified by the needs of the neighbors until it had become a variety store. Everything in order, neatly arranged by the scrupulous and hardworking Meme, who spent her day sewing for the neighbors on one of the four Domestics that there were in town in those days or behind the counter attending to customers with that pleasant Indian way which she never lost and which was at the same time both open and reserved; a mixed-up combination of innocence and mistrust.

  I hadn’t seen Meme since the time she left our house, but actually I can’t say exactly when she came here to live with the doctor on the corner or how she could have reached the extreme of degradation of becoming the mistress of a man who had refused her his services, in spite of everything and the fact that they shared my father’s house, she as a foster child and he as a permanent guest. I learned from my stepmother that the doctor wasn’t a good man, that he’d had a long argument with Papa, trying to convince him that what Meme had wasn’t anything serious, not even leav
ing his room. In any case, even if what the Guajiro girl had was only a passing illness, he should have taken a look at her, if only because of the consideration with which he was treated in our house during the eight years he lived there.

  I don’t know how things happened. I just know that one morning Meme wasn’t in the house anymore and he wasn’t either. Then my stepmother had them close up his room and she didn’t mention him again until years later when we were working on my wedding dress.

  Three or four Sundays after she’d left our house, Meme went to church, to eight o’clock mass, with a gaudy silk print dress and a ridiculous hat that was topped by a cluster of artificial flowers. She’d always been so simple when I saw her in our house, barefoot most of the time, so that the person who came into church that Sunday looked to me like a different Meme from the one we knew. She heard mass up front, among the ladies, stiff and affected under that pile of things she was wearing, which made her new and complicated, a showy newness made up of cheap things. She was kneeling down up front. And even the devotion with which she followed the mass was something new in her; even in the way she crossed herself there was something of that flowery and gaudy vulgarity with which she’d entered the church, puzzling people who had known her as a servant in our home and surprising those who’d never seen her.

  I (I couldn’t have been more than thirteen at the time) wondered what had brought on that transformation, why Meme had disappeared from our house and reappeared in church that Sunday dressed more like a Christmas tree than a lady, or with enough there to dress three women completely for Easter Sunday, and the Guajiro girl even had enough drippings and beads left over to dress a fourth one. When mass was over the men and women stopped by the door to watch her come out. They stood on the steps in a double row by the main door, and I think that there might even have been something secretly premeditated in that indolent and mockingly solemn way in which they were waiting, not saying a word until Meme came out the door, closed her eyes and opened them again in perfect rhythm to her seven-colored parasol. That was how she went between the double row of men and women, ridiculous in her high-heeled peacock disguise, until one of the men began to close the circle and Meme was in the middle, startled, confused, trying to smile with a smile of distinction that was as gaudy and false on her as her outfit. But when Meme came out, opened her parasol, and began to walk, Papa, who was next to me, pulled me toward the group. So when the men began closing the circle, my father opened a way out for Meme, who was hurriedly trying to get away. Papa took her by the arm without looking at the people there, and he led her through the center of the square with that haughty and challenging expression he puts on when he does something that other people don’t agree with.