Leaf Storm Read online

  He did absolutely nothing now. He spent his time in the hammock, rocking. Through the half-open door he could be seen in the darkness and his thin and inexpressive face, his tangled hair, the sickly vitality of his hard yellow eyes gave him the unmistakable look of a man who has begun to feel defeated by circumstances.

  During the first years of his stay in our house, Adelaida appeared to be indifferent or appeared to go along with me or really did agree with my decision that he should stay in the house. But when he closed his office and left his room only at mealtime, sitting at the table with the same silent and painful apathy as always, my wife broke the dikes of her tolerance. She told me: ‘It’s heresy to keep supporting him. It’s as if we were feeding the devil.’ And I, always inclined in his behalf out of a complex feeling of pity, amazement, and sorrow (because even though I may try to change the shape of it now, there was a great deal of sorrow in that feeling), insisted: ‘We have to take care of him. He’s a man who doesn’t have anybody in the world and he needs understanding.’

  Shortly afterward the railroad began to operate. Macondo was a prosperous town, full of new faces, with a movie theater and several amusement places. At that time there was work for everyone, except for him. He kept shut up, aloof, until that morning when, all of a sudden, he made an appearance in the dining room at breakfast-time and spoke spontaneously, even with enthusiasm, about the magnificent prospects for the town. That morning I heard the words for the first time. He said: ‘All of this will pass when we get used to the leaf storm.’

  Months later he was frequently seen going out into the street before dusk. He would sit by the barbershop until the last hours of daylight, taking part in the conversation of the groups that gathered by the door, beside the portable dressing table, beside the high stool that the barber brought out into the street so that his customers could enjoy the coolness of dusk.

  The company doctors were not satisfied with depriving him of his means of life and in 1907, when there was no longer a single patient in Macondo who remembered him and when he himself had ceased expecting any, one of the banana company doctors suggested to the mayor’s office that they require all professionals in town to register their degrees. He must not have felt that he was the one they had in mind when the edict appeared one Monday on the four corners of the square. It was I who spoke to him about the convenience of complying with the requirement. But he, tranquil, indifferent, limited himself to replying: ‘Not me, colonel. I’m not going to get involved in any of that again.’ I’ve never been able to find out whether his papers were really in order or not. I couldn’t find out if he was French, as we supposed, or if he had any remembrance of a family, which he must have had but about which he never said a word. A few weeks later, when the mayor and his secretary appeared at my house to demand of him the presentation and registration of his license, he absolutely refused to leave his room. That day – after five years of living in the same house – I suddenly realized that we didn’t even know his name.

  One probably didn’t have to be seventeen years old (as I was then) in order to observe – from the time I saw Meme all decked out in church and afterward, when I spoke to her in the shop – that the small room in our house off the street was closed up. Later on I found out that my stepmother had padlocked it, was opposed to anyone’s touching the things that were left inside: the bed that the doctor had used until he bought the hammock; the small table with medicines from which he had removed only the money accumulated during his better years (which must have been quite a bit, because he never had any expenses in the house and it was enough for Meme to open the shop with); and, in addition, in the midst of a pile of trash and old newspapers written in his language, the washstand and some useless personal items. It seemed as if all those things had been contaminated by something my stepmother considered evil, completely diabolical.

  I must have noticed that the room was closed in October or November (three years after Meme and he had left the house), because early in the following year I began to dream about Martín staying in that room. I wanted to live in it after my marriage; I prowled about it; in conversation with my stepmother I even suggested that it was already time to open the padlock and lift the unbreakable quarantine imposed on one of the most intimate and friendly parts of the house. But before the time we began sewing my wedding dress, no one spoke to me directly about the doctor and even less about the small room that was still like something of his, a fragment of his personality which could not be detached from our house while anyone who might have remembered him still lived in it.

  I was going to be married before the year was up. I don’t know if it was the circumstances under which my life had developed during childhood and adolescence that gave me an imprecise notion of happenings and things at that time, but what was certain was that during those months when the preparations for my wedding were going forward, I still didn’t know the secret of many things. A year before I married him, I would recall Martín through a vague atmosphere of unreality. Perhaps that was why I wanted him close by, in the small room, so that I could convince myself that it was a question of a concrete man and not a fiancé I had met in a dream. But I didn’t feel I had the strength to speak to my stepmother about my project. The natural thing would have been to say: ‘I’m going to take off the padlock. I’m going to put the table next to the window and the bed against the inside wall. I’m going to put a pot of carnations on the shelf and an aloe branch over the lintel.’ But my cowardice, my absolute lack of decision, was joined by the foggy image of my betrothed. I remembered him as a vague, ungraspable figure whose only concrete elements seemed to be his shiny mustache, his head tilting slightly to the left, and the ever-present four-button jacket.

  He had come to our house toward the end of July. He spent the day with us and chatted with my father in the office, going over some mysterious business that I was never able to find out about. In the afternoon Martín and I would go to the plantations with my stepmother. But when I looked at him on the way back in the mellow light of sunset, when he was closer to me, walking alongside my shoulder, then he became even more abstract and unreal. I knew that I would never be capable of imagining him as human or of finding in him the solidity that was indispensable if his memory was to give me courage, strengthen me at the moment of saying: ‘I’m going to fix the room up for Martín.’

  Even the idea that I was going to marry him seemed odd to me a year before the wedding. I had met him in February, during the wake for the Paloquemado child. Several of us girls were singing and clapping, trying to use up every drop of the only fun allowed us. There was a movie theater in Macondo, there was a public phonograph, and other places for amusement existed, but my father and stepmother were opposed to girls my age making use of them. ‘They’re amusements from out of the leaf storm,’ they said.

  Noontime was hot in February. My stepmother and I were sitting on the veranda, backstitching some white cloth while my father took his siesta. We sewed until he went by, dragging along in his clogs, to soak his head in the washbasin. But February was cool and deep at night and in the whole town one could hear the voices of women singing at wakes for children.

  The night we went to the Paloquemado child’s wake Meme Orozco’s voice was probably louder than ever. She was thin, graceless, and stiff, like a broom, but she knew how to make her voice carry better than anyone. And in the first pause Genoveva García said: ‘There’s a stranger sitting outside.’ I think that all of us stopped singing except Remedios Orozco. ‘Just think, he’s wearing a jacket,’ Genoveva García said. ‘He’s been talking all night and the others are listening to him without saying a peep. He’s wearing a four-button jacket and when he crosses his legs you can see his socks and garters and his shoes have laces.’ Meme Orozco was still singing when we clapped our hands and said: ‘Let’s marry him.’

  Afterward, when I thought about it at home, I couldn’t find any correspondence between those words and reality. I remembered them as if they h
ad been spoken by a group of imaginary women clapping hands and singing in a house where an unreal child had died. Other women were smoking next to us. They were serious, vigilant, stretching out their long buzzard necks toward us. In the back, against the coolness of the doorstep, another woman, bundled up to her head in a wide black cloth, was waiting for the coffee to boil. Suddenly a male voice joined ours. At first it was disconcerted and directionless, but then it was vibrant and metallic, as if the man were singing in church. Veva García nudged me in the ribs. Then I raised my eyes and saw him for the first time. He was young and neat, with a hard collar and a jacket with all four buttons closed. And he was looking at me.

  I heard about his return in December and I thought that no place would be more appropriate for him than the small locked room. But I hadn’t thought of it yet. I said to myself: ‘Martín, Martín, Martín.’ And the name, examined, savored, broken down into its essential parts, lost all of its meaning for me.

  When we came out of the wake he put an empty cup in front of me. He said: ‘I read your fortune in the coffee.’ I was going to the door with the other girls and I heard his voice, deep, convincing, gentle: ‘Count seven stars and you’ll dream about me.’ When we passed by the door we saw the Paloquemado child in his small coffin, his face powdered, a rose in his mouth, and his eyes held open with toothpicks. February was sending us warm gusts of death, and the breath of the jasmines and the violets toasted by the heat floated in the room. But in that silence of a dead person, the other voice was constant and different: ‘Remember. Only seven stars.’

  He came to our house in July. He liked to lean back against the flowerpots along the railing. He said: ‘Remember, I never looked into your eyes. That’s the secret of a man who’s begun to sense the fear of falling in love.’ And it was true, I couldn’t remember his eyes. In July I probably couldn’t have said what color the eyes of the man I was going to marry in December were. Still, six months earlier, February was only a deep silence at noontime, a pair of congorocho worms, male and female, coiled on the bathroom floor, the Tuesday beggar woman asking for a branch of lemon balm, and he, leaning back, smiling, his jacket buttoned all the way up, saying: ‘I’m going to make you think about me every minute of the day. I put a picture of you behind the door and I stuck two pins in your eyes.’ And Genoveva García, dying with laughter: ‘That’s the kind of nonsense men pick up from the Guajiro Indians.’

  Toward the end of March he would be going through the house. He would spend long hours in the office with my father, convincing him of the importance of something I could never decipher. Eleven years have passed now since my marriage; nine since the time I watched him say good-bye from the window of the train, making me promise I would take good care of the child until he came back for us. Those nine years would pass with no one’s hearing a word from him, and my father, who had helped him get ready for that endless trip, never said another word about his return. But not even during the two years that our marriage lasted was he more concrete and touchable than he was at the wake for the Paloquemado child or on that Sunday in March when I saw him for the second time as Veva García and I were coming home from church. He was standing in the doorway of the hotel, alone, his hands in the side pockets of his four-button jacket. He said: ‘Now you’re going to think about me for the rest of your life because the pins have fallen out of the picture.’ He said it in such a soft and tense voice that it sounded like the truth. But even that truth was strange and different. Genoveva insisted: ‘That’s silly Guajiro stuff.’ Three months later she ran away with the head of a company of puppeteers, but she still seemed scrupulous and serious on that Sunday. Martín said: ‘It’s nice to know that someone will remember me in Macondo.’ And Genoveva García, looking at him with a face that showed exasperation, said:

  ‘Airyfay! That four-button coat’s going to rot with you inside of it.’

  VII

  Even though he hoped it would be the opposite, he was a strange person in town, apathetic in spite of his obvious efforts to seem sociable and cordial. He lived among the people of Macondo, but at a distance from them because of the memory of a past against which any attempt at rectification seemed useless. He was looked on with curiosity, like a gloomy animal who had spent a long time in the shadows and was reappearing, conducting himself in a way that the town could only consider as superimposed and therefore suspect.

  He would come back from the barbershop at nightfall and shut himself up in his room. For some time he had given up his evening meal and at first the impression at home was that he was coming back fatigued and going directly to his hammock to sleep until the following day. But only a short time passed before I began to realize that something extraordinary was happening to him at night. He could be heard moving about in his room with a tormented and maddening insistence, as if on those nights he was receiving the ghost of the man he had been until then, and both of them, the past man and the present one, were locked in a silent struggle in which the past one was defending his wrathful solitude, his invulnerable standoffish way, his intransigent manners; and the present one his terrible and unchangeable will to free himself from his own previous man. I could hear him pacing about the room until dawn, until the time his own fatigue had exhausted the strength of his invisible adversary.

  I was the only one who noticed the true measure of his change, from the time he stopped wearing leggings and began to take a bath every day and perfume his clothing with scented water. And a few months later his transformation had reached the level where my feelings toward him stopped being a simple understanding tolerance and changed into compassion. It was not his new look on the street that moved me. It was thinking of him shut up in his room at night, scraping the mud off his boots, wetting a rag in the washstand, spreading polish on the shoes that had deteriorated through many years of continuous use. It moved me to think of the brush and box of shoe polish kept under the mattress, hidden from the eyes of the world as if they were the elements of a secret and shameful vice contracted at an age when the majority of men were becoming serene and methodical. For all practical purposes, he was going through a tardy and sterile adolescence and, like an adolescent, he took great care in his dress, smoothing out his clothing every night with the edge of his hand, coldly, and he was not young enough to have a friend to whom he could communicate his illusions or his disillusions.

  The town must have noticed his change too, for a short time later it began to be said about that he was in love with the barber’s daughter. I don’t know whether there was any basis for that, but what was certain was that the bit of gossip made me realize his tremendous sexual loneliness, the biological fury that must have tormented him in those years of filth and abandonment.

  Every afternoon he could be seen passing by on his way to the barbershop, more and more fastidious in his dress. A shirt with an artificial collar, gold cuff links, and his pants clean and pressed, except that he still wore his belt outside the loops. He looked like an afflicted suitor, enveloped in the aura of cheap lotions; the eternal frustrated suitor, the sunset lover who would always lack the bouquet of flowers on the first visit.

  That was how he was during the first months of 1909, with still no basis for the gossip in town except for the fact that he would be seen sitting in the barbershop every afternoon chatting with strangers, but with no one’s having been able to be sure that he’d ever seen him a single time with the barber’s daughter. I discovered the cruelty of that gossip. Everyone in town knew that the barber’s daughter would always be an old maid after going through a year of suffering, as she was pursued by a spirit, an invisible lover who spread dirt on her food and muddied the water in the pitcher and fogged the mirrors in the barbershop and beat her until her face was green and disfigured. The efforts of the Pup, with a stroke of his stole, the complex therapy of holy water, sacred relics, and psalms administered with dramatic solicitude, were useless. As an extreme measure, the barber’s wife locked her bewitched daughter up in her room, strew
ed rice about the living room, and turned her over to the invisible lover in a solitary and dead honeymoon, after which even the men of Macondo said that the barber’s daughter had conceived.

  Not even a year had passed when people stopped waiting for the monstrous event of her giving birth and public curiosity turned to the idea that the doctor was in love with the barber’s daughter, in spite of the fact that everyone was convinced that the bewitched girl would lock herself up in her room and crumble to pieces in life long before any possible suitors would be transformed into marriageable men.

  That was why I knew that rather than a supposition with some basis, it was a piece of cruel gossip, maliciously premeditated. Toward the end of 1909 he was still going to the barbershop and people were talking, organizing the wedding, with no one able to say that the girl had ever come out when he was present or that they had ever had a chance to speak to each other.

  One September that was as broiling and as dead as this one, thirteen years ago, my stepmother began sewing on my wedding dress. Every afternoon while my father took his siesta, we would sit down to sew beside the flowerpots on the railing, next to the burning stove that was the rosemary plant. September has been like this all of my life, since thirteen years ago and much longer. As my wedding was to take place in a private ceremony (because my father had decided on it), we sewed slowly, with the minute care of a person who is in no hurry and has found the best measure of her time in her imperceptible work. We would talk during those times. I was still thinking about the street room, gathering up the courage to tell my stepmother that it was the best place to put up Martín. And that afternoon I told her.