No One Writes to the Colonel Read online

  ‘Nothing?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ the colonel answered.

  The following Friday he went down to the launches again. And, as on every Friday, he returned home without the longed-for letter. ‘We’ve waited long enough,’ his wife told him that night. ‘One must have the patience of an ox, as you do, to wait for a letter for fifteen years.’ The colonel got into his hammock to read the newspapers.

  ‘We have to wait our turn,’ he said. ‘Our number is 1823.’

  ‘Since we’ve been waiting, that number has come up twice in the lottery,’ his wife replied.

  The colonel read, as usual, from the first page to the last, including the advertisements. But this time he didn’t concentrate. During his reading, he thought about his veteran’s pension. Nineteen years before, when Congress passed the law, it took him eight years to prove his claim. Then it took him six more years to get himself included on the rolls. That was the last letter the colonel had received.

  He finished after curfew sounded. When he went to turn off the lamp, he realized that his wife was awake.

  ‘Do you still have that clipping?’

  The woman thought.

  ‘Yes. It must be with the other papers.’

  She got out of her mosquito netting and took a wooden chest out of the closet, with a packet of letters arranged by date and held together by a rubber band. She located the advertisement of a law firm which promised quick action on war pensions.

  ‘We could have spent the money in the time I’ve wasted trying to convince you to change lawyers,’ the woman said, handing her husband the newspaper clipping. ‘We’re not getting anything out of their putting us away on a shelf as they do with the Indians.’

  The colonel read the clipping dated two years before. He put it in the pocket of his jacket which was hanging behind the door.

  ‘The problem is that to change lawyers you need money.’

  ‘Not at all,’ the woman said decisively. ‘You write them telling them to discount whatever they want from the pension itself when they collect it. It’s the only way they’ll take the case.’

  So Saturday afternoon the colonel went to see his lawyer. He found him stretched out lazily in a hammock. He was a monumental negro, with nothing but two canines in his upper jaw. The lawyer put his feet into a pair of wooden-soled slippers and opened the office window on a dusty pianola with papers stuffed into the compartments where the rolls used to go: clippings from the Official Gazette, pasted into old accounting ledgers, and a jumbled collection of accounting bulletins. The keyless pianola did double duty as a desk. The lawyer sat down in a swivel chair. The colonel expressed his uneasiness before revealing the purpose of his visit.

  ‘I warned you that it would take more than a few days,’ said the lawyer when the colonel paused. He was sweltering in the heat. He adjusted the chair backward and fanned himself with an advertising brochure.

  ‘My agents write to me frequently, saying not to get impatient.’

  ‘It’s been that way for fifteen years,’ the colonel answered. ‘This is beginning to sound like the story about the capon.’

  The lawyer gave a very graphic description of the administrative ins and outs. The chair was too narrow for his sagging buttocks. ‘Fifteen years ago it was easier,’ he said. ‘Then there was the city’s veterans’ organization, with members of both parties.’ His lungs filled with stifling air and he pronounced the sentence as if he had just invented it: ‘There’s strength in numbers.’

  ‘There wasn’t in this case,’ the colonel said, realizing his aloneness for the first time. ‘All my comrades died waiting for the mail.’

  The lawyer didn’t change his expression.

  ‘The law was passed too late,’ he said. ‘Not everybody was as lucky as you to be a colonel at the age of twenty. Furthermore, no special allocation was included, so the government has had to make adjustments in the budget.’

  Always the same story. Each time the colonel listened to him, he felt a mute resentment. ‘This is not charity,’ he said. ‘It’s not a question of doing us a favor. We broke our backs to save the Republic.’ The lawyer threw up his hands.

  ‘That’s the way it is,’ he said. ‘Human ingratitude knows no limits.’

  The colonel also knew that story. He had begun hearing it the day after the Treaty of Neerlandia, when the government promised travel assistance and indemnities to two hundred revolutionary officers. Camped at the base of the gigantic silk-cotton tree at Neerlandia, a revolutionary battalion, made up in great measure of youths who had left school, waited for three months. Then they went back to their homes by their own means, and they kept on waiting there. Almost sixty years later, the colonel was still waiting.

  Excited by these memories, he adopted a transcendental attitude. He rested his right hand on his thigh – mere bone sewed together with nerve tissue – and murmured:

  ‘Well, I’ve decided to take action.’

  The lawyer waited.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘To change lawyers.’

  A mother duck, followed by several little ducklings, entered the office. The lawyer sat up to chase them out. ‘As you wish, colonel,’ he said, chasing the animals. ‘It will be just as you wish. If I could work miracles, I wouldn’t be living in this barnyard.’ He put a wooden grille across the patio door and returned to his chair.

  ‘My son worked all his life,’ said the colonel. ‘My house is mortgaged. That retirement law has been a lifetime pension for lawyers.’

  ‘Not for me,’ the lawyer protested. ‘Every last cent has gone for my expenses.’

  The colonel suffered at the thought that he had been unjust.

  ‘That’s what I meant,’ he corrected himself. He dried his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘This heat is enough to rust the screws in your head.’

  A moment later the lawyer was turning the office upside down looking for the power of attorney. The sun advanced toward the center of the tiny room, which was built of unsanded boards. After looking futilely everywhere, the lawyer got down on all fours, huffing and puffing, and picked up a roll of papers from under the pianola.

  ‘Here it is.’

  He gave the colonel a sheet of paper with a seal on it. ‘I have to write my agents so they can cancel the copies,’ he concluded. The colonel shook the dust off the paper and put it in his shirt pocket.

  ‘Tear it up yourself,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘No,’ the colonel answered. ‘These are twenty years of memories.’ And he waited for the lawyer to keep on looking. But the lawyer didn’t. He went to the hammock to wipe off his sweat. From there he looked at the colonel through the shimmering air.

  ‘I need the documents also,’ the colonel said.

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘The proof of claim.’

  The lawyer threw up his hands.

  ‘Now, that would be impossible, colonel.’

  The colonel became alarmed. As Treasurer of the revolution in the district of Macondo, he had undertaken a difficult six-day journey with the funds for the civil war in two trunks roped to the back of a mule. He arrived at the camp of Neerlandia dragging the mule, which was dead from hunger, half an hour before the treaty was signed. Colonel Aureliano Buendía – quarter-master general of the revolutionary forces on the Atlantic coast – held out the receipt for the funds, and included the two trunks in his inventory of the surrender.

  ‘Those documents have an incalculable value,’ the colonel said. ‘There’s a receipt from Colonel Aureliano Buendía, written in his own hand.’

  ‘I agree,’ said the lawyer. ‘But those documents have passed through thousands and thousands of hands, in thousands and thousands of offices, before they reached God knows which department in the War Ministry.’

  ‘No official could fail to notice documents like those,’ the colonel said.

  ‘But the officials have changed many times in the last fifteen years,’ the lawyer pointed out. ‘Just think about i
t; there have been seven presidents, and each president changed his cabinet at least ten times, and each minister changed his staff at least a hundred times.’

  ‘But nobody could take the documents home,’ said the colonel. ‘Each new official must have found them in the proper file.’

  The lawyer lost his patience.

  ‘And moreover if those papers are removed from the Ministry now, they will have to wait for a new place on the rolls.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the colonel said.

  ‘It’ll take centuries.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. If you wait for the big things, you can wait for the little ones.’

  He took a pad of lined paper, the pen, the inkwell, and a blotter to the little table in the living room, and left the bedroom door open in case he had to ask his wife anything. She was saying her beads.

  ‘What’s today’s date?’

  ‘October 27th.’

  He wrote with a studious neatness, the hand that held the pen resting on the blotter, his spine straight to ease his breathing, as he’d been taught in school. The heat became unbearable in the closed living room. A drop of perspiration fell on the letter. The colonel picked it up on the blotter. Then he tried to erase the letters which had smeared but he smudged them. He didn’t lose his patience. He wrote an asterisk and noted in the margin, ‘acquired rights.’ Then he read the whole paragraph.

  ‘When was I put on the rolls?’

  The woman didn’t interrupt her prayer to think.

  ‘August 12, 1949.’

  A moment later it began to rain. The colonel filled a page with large doodlings which were a little childish, the same ones he learned in public school at Manaure. Then he wrote on a second sheet down to the middle, and he signed it.

  He read the letter to his wife. She approved each sentence with a nod. When he finished reading, the colonel sealed the envelope and turned off the lamp.

  ‘You could ask someone to type it for you.’

  ‘No,’ the colonel answered. ‘I’m tired of going around asking favors.’

  For half an hour he heard the rain against the palm roof. The town sank into the deluge. After curfew sounded, a leak began somewhere in the house.

  ‘This should have been done a long time ago,’ the woman said. ‘It’s always better to handle things oneself.’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ the colonel said, paying attention to the leak. ‘Maybe all this will be settled when the mortgage on the house falls due.’

  ‘In two years,’ the woman said.

  He lit the lamp to locate the leak in the living room. He put the rooster’s can underneath it and returned to the bedroom, pursued by the metallic noise of the water in the empty can.

  ‘It’s possible that to save the interest on the money they’ll settle it before January,’ he said, and he convinced himself. ‘By then, Agustín’s year will be up and we can go to the movies.’

  She laughed under her breath. ‘I don’t even remember the cartoons any more,’ she said. ‘They were showing The Dead Man’s Will.’

  ‘Was there a fight?’

  ‘We never found out. The storm broke just when the ghost tried to rob the girl’s necklace.’

  The sound of the rain put them to sleep. The colonel felt a slight queasiness in his intestines. But he wasn’t afraid. He was about to survive another October. He wrapped himself in a wool blanket, and for a moment heard the gravelly breathing of his wife – far away – drifting on another dream. Then he spoke, completely conscious.

  The woman woke up.

  ‘Who are you speaking to?’

  ‘No one,’ the colonel said. ‘I was thinking that at the Macondo meeting we were right when we told Colonel Aureliano Buendía not to surrender. That’s what started to ruin everything.’

  It rained the whole week. The second of November – against the colonel’s wishes – the woman took flowers to Agustín’s grave. She returned from the cemetery and had another attack. It was a hard week. Harder than the four weeks of October which the colonel hadn’t thought he’d survive. The doctor came to see the sick woman, and came out of the room shouting. ‘With asthma like that, I’d be able to bury the whole town!’ But he spoke to the colonel alone and prescribed a special diet.

  The colonel also suffered a relapse. He strained for many hours in the privy, in an icy sweat, feeling as if he were rotting and that the flora in his vitals was falling to pieces. ‘It’s winter,’ he repeated to himself patiently. ‘Everything will be different when it stops raining.’ And he really believed it, certain that he would be alive at the moment the letter arrived.

  This time it was he who had to repair their household economy. He had to grit his teeth many times to ask for credit in the neighborhood stores. ‘It’s just until next week,’ he would say, without being sure himself that it was true. ‘It’s a little money which should have arrived last Friday.’ When her attack was over, the woman examined him in horror.

  ‘You’re nothing but skin and bones,’ she said.

  ‘I’m taking care of myself so I can sell myself,’ the colonel said. ‘I’ve already been hired by a clarinet factory.’

  But in reality his hoping for the letter barely sustained him. Exhausted, his bones aching from sleeplessness, he couldn’t attend to his needs and the rooster’s at the same time. In the second half of November, he thought that the animal would die after two days without corn. Then he remembered a handful of beans which he had hung in the chimney in July. He opened the pods and put down a can of dry seeds for the rooster.

  ‘Come here,’ she said.

  ‘Just a minute,’ the colonel answered, watching the rooster’s reaction. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  He found his wife trying to sit up in bed. Her ravaged body gave off the aroma of medicinal herbs. She spoke her words, one by one, with calculated precision:

  ‘Get rid of that rooster right now.’

  The colonel had foreseen that moment. He had been waiting for it ever since the afternoon when his son was shot down, and he had decided to keep the rooster. He had had time to think.

  ‘It’s not worth it now,’ he said. ‘The fight will be in two months and then we’ll be able to sell him at a better price.’

  ‘It’s not a question of the money,’ the woman said. ‘When the boys come, you’ll tell them to take it away and do whatever they feel like with it.’

  ‘It’s for Agustín,’ the colonel said, advancing his prepared argument. ‘Remember his face when he came to tell us the rooster won.’

  The woman, in fact, did think of her son.

  ‘Those accursed roosters were his downfall!’ she shouted. ‘If he’d stayed home on January 3rd, his evil hour wouldn’t have come.’ She held out a skinny forefinger toward the door and exclaimed: ‘It seems as if I can see him when he left with the rooster under his arm. I warned him not to go looking for trouble at the cockfights, and he smiled and told me: “Shut up; this afternoon we’ll be rolling in money.” ’

  She fell back exhausted. The colonel pushed her gently toward the pillow. His eyes fell upon other eyes exactly like his own. ‘Try not to move,’ he said, feeling her whistling within his own lungs. The woman fell into a momentary torpor. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her breathing seemed more even.

  ‘It’s because of the situation we’re in,’ she said. ‘It’s a sin to take the food out of our mouths to give it to a rooster.’

  The colonel wiped her forehead with the sheet.

  ‘Nobody dies in three months.’

  ‘And what do we eat in the meantime?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the colonel said. ‘But if we were going to die of hunger, we would have died already.’

  The rooster was very much alive next to the empty can. When he saw the colonel, he emitted an almost human, guttural monologue and tossed his head back. He gave him a smile of complicity:

  ‘Life is tough, pal.’

  The colonel went into th
e street. He wandered about the town during the siesta, without thinking about anything, without even trying to convince himself that his problem had no solution. He walked through forgotten streets until he found he was exhausted. Then he returned to the house. The woman heard him come in and called him into the bedroom.

  ‘What?’

  She replied without looking at him.

  ‘We can sell the clock.’

  The colonel had thought of that. ‘I’m sure Alvaro will give you forty pesos right on the spot,’ said the woman. ‘Think how quickly he bought the sewing machine.’

  She was referring to the tailor whom Agustín had worked for.

  ‘I could speak to him in the morning,’ admitted the colonel.

  ‘None of that “speak to him in the morning,” ’ she insisted. ‘Take the clock to him this minute. You put it on the counter and you tell him, “Alvaro, I’ve brought this clock for you to buy from me.” He’ll understand immediately.’

  The colonel felt ashamed.

  ‘It’s like walking around with the Holy Sepulcher,’ he protested. ‘If they see me in the street with a showpiece like that, Rafael Escalona will put me into one of his songs.’

  But this time, too, his wife convinced him. She herself took down the clock, wrapped it in newspaper, and put it into his arms. ‘Don’t come back here without the forty pesos,’ she said. The colonel went off to the tailor’s with the package under his arm. He found Agustín’s companions sitting in the doorway.

  One of them offered him a seat. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay.’ Alvaro came out of the shop. A piece of wet duck hung on a wire stretched between two hooks in the hall. He was a boy with a hard, angular body and wild eyes. He also invited him to sit down. The colonel felt comforted. He leaned the stool against the door-jamb and sat down to wait until Alvaro was alone to propose his deal. Suddenly he realized that he was surrounded by expressionless faces.

  ‘I’m not interrupting?’ he said.