Leaf Storm Read online

  ‘As for Meme, have them rub her with alcohol. But they shouldn’t give her any physics.’

  X

  My grandfather’s come back beside Mama. She’s sitting down, completely lost in her thoughts. The dress and the hat are here, on the chair, but my mother’s not in them anymore. My grandfather comes closer, sees that her mind’s somewhere else, and he moves his cane in front of her eyes, saying: ‘Wake up, child.’ My mother blinks, shakes her head. ‘What were you thinking about?’ my grandfather asks. And she, smiling with great effort: ‘I was thinking about the Pup.’

  My grandfather sits down beside her again, his chin resting on his cane. He says: ‘That’s a coincidence. I was thinking about him too.’

  They understand their words. They talk without looking at each other, Mama leaning back in her chair and my grandfather sitting next to her, his chin still resting on his cane. But even like that they understand each other’s words, the way Abraham and I can understand each other when we go to see Lucrecia.

  I tell Abraham: ‘Now I’m tecky-tacking.’ Abraham always walks in front, about three steps ahead of me. Without turning around to look, he says: ‘Not yet, in a minute.’ And I say to him: ‘When I teck somebum hoblows up.’ Abraham doesn’t turn his head but I can hear him laugh softly with a foolish and simple laugh that’s like the thread of water that trembles down from the snout of an ox when he’s finished drinking. He says: ‘It must be around five o’clock.’ He runs a little more and says: ‘If we go now somebum might hoblow.’ But I insist: ‘In any case, there’s always tecky-tacking.’ And he turns to me and starts to run, saying: ‘All right, then, let’s go.’

  In order to see Lucrecia you have to go through five yards full of trees and bushes. You have to go over the low wall that’s green with lizards where the midget with a woman’s voice used to sing. Abraham goes running along, shining like a sheet of metal in the strong light, his heels harried by the dog’s barking. Then he stops. At that point we’re by the window. We say: ‘Lucrecia,’ making our voices low as if Lucrecia was sleeping. But she’s awake, sitting on the bed, her shoes off, wearing a loose nightgown, white and starched, that reaches down to her ankles.

  When we speak, Lucrecia lifts her eyes and makes them turn around the room, fastening a round, large eye like that of a curlew on us. Then she laughs and begins to move toward the center of the room. Her mouth is open and she shows her small, broken teeth. She has a round head, with the hair cut like a man’s. When she gets to the center of the room she stops laughing, squats down, and looks at the door until her hands reach her ankles, and she slowly begins to lift her gown, with a calculated slowness, cruel and challenging at the same time. Abraham and I are still looking in the window while Lucrecia lifts up her gown, her lips sticking out in a panting and anxious frown, her big curlew eyes staring and shining. Then we can see her white stomach, which turns deep blue farther down, when she covers her face with the nightgown and stays that way, stretched out in the center of the bedroom, her legs together and tight with a trembling force that comes up from her ankles. All of a sudden she quickly uncovers her face, points at us with her forefinger, and the shining eye pops out in the midst of terrible shrieks that echo all through the house. Then the door of the room opens and the woman comes in shouting: ‘Why don’t you go screw the patience of your own mothers?’

  We haven’t been to see Lucrecia for days. Now we go to the river along the road to the plantations. If we get out of this early, Abraham will be waiting for me. But my grandfather doesn’t move. He’s sitting next to Mama with his chin on his cane. I keep watching him, watching his eyes behind his glasses, and he must feel that I’m looking at him, because all of a sudden he gives a deep sigh, shakes himself, and says to my mother in a low, sad voice: ‘The Pup would have made them come if he had to whip them.’

  Then he gets up from his chair and walks over to where the dead man is.

  It’s the second time that I’ve been in this room. The first time, ten years ago, things were just the same. It’s as if they hadn’t been touched since then or as if since that remote dawn when he came here to live with Meme he hadn’t worried about his life anymore. The papers were in the same place. The table, the few cheap articles of clothing, everything was in the same place it’s in today. As if it were yesterday when the Pup and I came to make peace between this man and the authorities.

  By that time the banana company had stopped squeezing us and had left Macondo with the rubbish of the rubbish they’d brought us. And with them went the leaf storm, the last traces of what prosperous Macondo had been like in 1915. A ruined village was left here, with four poor, dark stores; occupied by unemployed and angry people who were tormented by a prosperous past and the bitterness of an overwhelming and static present. There was nothing in the future at that time except a gloomy and threatening election Sunday.

  Six months before an anonymous note had been found nailed to the door of this house one morning. No one was interested in it and it stayed nailed here for a long time until the final drizzle washed away its dark letters and the paper disappeared, hauled off by the last winds of February. But toward the end of 1918, when the closeness of the elections made the government think about the necessity of keeping the tension of its voters awake and irritated, someone spoke to the new authorities concerning this solitary doctor, about whose existence there would have to be some valid evidence after such a long time. They had to be told that during the first years the Indian woman who lived with him ran a shop that shared in the same prosperity that favored even the most insignificant enterprises in Macondo during those times. One day (no one remembers the date, not even the year) the door of the shop didn’t open. It was imagined that Meme and the doctor were still living here, shut up, living on the vegetables they grew themselves in the yard. But in the note that appeared on this corner it said that the physician had murdered his concubine and buried her in the garden, afraid that the town would use her to poison him. The inexplicable thing is that it was said during a time when no one could have had any reason to plot the doctor’s death. I think that the authorities had forgotten about his existence until that year when the government reinforced the police and the reserves with men they could trust. Then they dug up the forgotten legend of the anonymous note and the authorities violated these doors, searched the house, dug up the yard, and probed in the privy trying to locate Meme’s body. But they couldn’t find a trace of her.

  On that occasion they would have dragged the doctor out, beaten him, and he most surely would have been one more sacrifice on the public square in the name of official order. But the Pup stepped in; he came to my house and invited me to visit the doctor, certain that I’d be able to get a satisfactory explanation from him.

  When we went in the back way we found the ruins of a man abandoned in the hammock. Nothing in this world can be more fearsome than the ruins of a man. And those of this citizen of nowhere who sat up in the hammock when he saw us come in were even worse, and he himself seemed to be covered by the coat of dust that covered everything in the room. His head was steely and his hard yellow eyes still had the powerful inner strength that I had seen in them in my house. I had the impression that if we’d scratched him with our nails his body would have fallen apart, turning into a pile of human sawdust. He’d cut his mustache but he hadn’t shaved it off. He’d used shears on his beard so that his chin didn’t seem to be sown with hard and vigorous sprouts but with soft, white fuzz. Seeing him in the hammock I thought: He doesn’t look like a man now. Now he looks like a corpse whose eyes still haven’t died.

  When he spoke his voice was the same parsimonious ruminant voice that he’d brought to our house. He said that he had nothing to say. He said, as if he thought that we didn’t know about it, that the police had violated his doors and had dug in his yard without his consent. But that wasn’t a protest. It was only a complaining and melancholy confidence.

  As for Meme, he gave us an explanation that might have seemed pue
rile, but which was said by him with the same accent with which he would have told the truth. He said that Meme had left, that was all. When she closed the shop she began to get restless in the house. She didn’t speak to anyone, she had no communication at all with the outside world. He said that one day he saw her packing her bag and he didn’t say anything to her. He said that he still didn’t say anything when he saw her in her street clothes, high heels, with the suitcase in her hand, standing in the doorway but not speaking, only as if she were showing herself like that so that he would know that she was leaving. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘I got up and gave her the money that was left in the drawer.’

  I asked him: ‘How long ago was that, doctor?’

  And he said: ‘You can judge by my hair. She was the one who cut it.’

  The Pup didn’t say much on that visit. From the time he’d entered the room he seemed impressed by the sight of the only man he hadn’t met after being in Macondo fifteen years. That time I noticed (and more than ever, maybe because the doctor had cut his mustache) the extraordinary resemblance between those two men. They weren’t exact, but they looked like brothers. One was several years older, thinner and more emaciated. But there was the community of features between them that exists between two brothers, even if one looks like the father and the other like the mother. Then I recalled that last night on the veranda. I said: ‘This is the Pup, doctor. You promised me you’d visit him once.’

  He smiled. He looked at the priest and said: ‘That’s right, colonel. I don’t know why I didn’t.’ And he continued looking at him, examining him, until the Pup spoke.

  ‘It’s never too late for a good beginning,’ he said. ‘I’d like to be your friend.’

  At once I realized that facing the stranger, the Pup had lost his usual strength. He spoke timidly, without the inflexible assurance with which his voice thundered from the pulpit reading the atmospheric predictions of the Bristol Almanac in a transcendental and threatening tone.

  That was the first time they’d seen each other. And it was also the last. Still, the doctor’s life was prolonged until this morning because the Pup had intervened again in his favor on the night they begged him to take care of the wounded and he wouldn’t even open the door, and they shouted that terrible sentence down on him, the fulfillment of which I’ve now undertaken to prevent.

  We were getting ready to leave the house when I remembered something that I’d wanted to ask him for years. I told the Pup I was going to stay awhile with the doctor while he interceded with the authorities. When we were alone I asked him:

  ‘Tell me something, doctor. What was the child?’

  He didn’t change his expression. ‘What child, colonel?’ he asked. And I said: ‘Yours. Meme was pregnant when you left my house.’ And he, tranquil, imperturbable:

  ‘You’re right, colonel. I’d even forgotten about that.’

  My father was silent. Then he said: ‘The Pup would have made them come if he had to whip them.’ My father’s eyes show a restrained nervousness. And while this waiting goes on, it’s been a half hour already (because it must be around three o’clock), I’m worried about the child’s perplexity, his absorbed expression, which doesn’t seem to be asking anything, his abstract and cold indifference, which makes him just like his father. My son’s going to dissolve in the boiling air of this Wednesday just as it happened to Martín nine years ago, when he waved from the train window and disappeared forever. All my sacrifices for this son will be in vain if he keeps on looking like his father. It won’t be of any use for me to beg God to make him a man of flesh and blood, one who has volume, weight, and color like other men. Everything will be in vain as long as he has the seeds of his father in his blood.

  Five years ago the child didn’t have anything of Martín’s. Now he’s getting to have it all, ever since Genoveva García came back to Macondo with her six children, with two sets of twins among them. Genoveva was fat and old. Blue veins had come out around her eyes, giving a certain look of dirtiness to her face, which had been clean and firm before. She showed a noisy and disordered happiness in the midst of her flock of small white shoes and organdy frills. I knew that Genoveva had run away with the head of a company of puppeteers and I felt some kind of repugnance at seeing those children of hers, who seemed to have automatic movements, as if run by some single central mechanism; small and upsettingly alike, all six with identical shoes and identical frills on their clothing. Genoveva’s disorganized happiness seemed painful and sad to me, as did her presence, loaded with urban accessories, in a ruined town that was annihilated by dust. There was something bitter, something inconsolably ridiculous, in her way of moving, of seeming fortunate and of feeling sorry for our way of life, which was so different, she said, from the one she had known in the company of the puppeteers.

  Looking at her I remembered other times. I said to her: ‘You’ve gotten very fat.’ And then she became sad. She said: ‘It must be that memories make a person fat.’ And she stood there looking closely at the child. She said: ‘And what happened to the wizard with four buttons?’ And I answered her right out, because I knew that she knew: ‘He went away.’ And Genoveva said: ‘And didn’t he leave you anything but that?’ And I told her no, he’d only left me the child. Genoveva laughed with a loose and vulgar laugh. ‘He must have been pretty sloppy to make only one child in five years,’ she said, and she went on, still moving about and cackling in the midst of her confused flock: ‘And I was mad about him. I swear I would have taken him away from you if it hadn’t been that we’d met him at a child’s wake. I was very superstitious in those days.’

  It was before she said good-bye that Genoveva stood looking at the child and said: ‘He’s really just like him. All he needs is the four-button jacket.’ And from that moment on the child began to look just like his father to me, as if Genoveva had brought on the curse of his identity. On certain occasions I would catch him with his elbows on the table, his head leaning over his left shoulder, and his foggy look turned nowhere. He was just like Martín when he leaned against the carnation pots on the railing and said: ‘Even if it hadn’t been for you, I’d like to spend the rest of my life in Macondo.’ Sometimes I get the impression that he’s going to say it; how could he say it now that he’s sitting next to me, silent, touching his nose that’s stuffed up with the heat? ‘Does it hurt you?’ I asked him. And he says no, that he was thinking that he couldn’t keep glasses on. ‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ I tell him, and I undo his tie. I say: ‘When we get home you can rest and have a bath.’ And then I look toward where my father has just said: ‘Cataure,’ calling the oldest of the Guajiros. He’s a heavyset and short Indian, who was smoking on the bed, and when he hears his name he lifts his head and looks for my father’s face with his small somber eyes. But when my father is about to speak again the steps of the mayor are heard in the back room as he staggers into the bedroom.

  XI

  This noon has been terrible for our house. Even though the news of his death was no surprise to me, because I was expecting it for a long time, I couldn’t imagine that it would bring on such an upset in my house. Someone had to go to this burial with me and I thought that one would be my wife, especially since my illness three years ago and that afternoon when she found the cane with the silver handle and the wind-up dancer when she was looking through the drawers of my desk. I think that we’d forgotten about the toy by then. But that afternoon we made the mechanism work and the ballerina danced as on other occasions, animated by the music that had been festive before and which then, after the long silence in the drawer, sounded quiet and nostalgic. Adelaida watched it dance and remembered. Then she turned to me, her look moistened by simple sadness:

  ‘Who does it remind you of?’ she asked.

  And I knew who Adelaida was thinking about, while the toy saddened the room with its worn-out little tune.

  ‘I wonder what’s become of him?’ my wife asked, remembering, shaken perhaps by the breath of those days
when he’d appeared at the door of the room at six in the afternoon and hung the lamp in the doorway.

  ‘He’s on the corner,’ I said. ‘One of these days he’ll die and we’ll have to bury him.’

  Adelaida remained silent, absorbed in the dance of the toy, and I felt infected by her nostalgia. I said to her: ‘I’ve always wanted to know who you thought he was the day he came. You set that table because he reminded you of someone.’

  And Adelaida said with a gray smile:

  ‘You’d laugh at me if I told you who he reminded me of when he stood there in the corner with the ballerina in his hand.’ And she pointed to the empty space where she’d seen him twenty-two years before, with full boots and a costume that looked like a military uniform.

  I thought on that afternoon they’d been reconciled in memory, so today I told my wife to get dressed in black to go with me. But the toy is back in the drawer. The music has lost its effect. Adelaida is wearing herself out now. She’s sad, devastated, and she spends hours on end praying in her room. ‘Only you would have thought of a burial like that,’ she told me. ‘After all the misfortunes that befell us, all we needed was that cursed leap year. And then the deluge.’ I tried to persuade her that my word of honor was involved in this undertaking.

  ‘We can’t deny that I owe my life to him,’ I said.

  And she said:

  ‘He’s the one who owes his to us. All he did when he saved your life was to repay a debt for eight years of bed, board, and clean clothes.’

  Then she brought a chair over to the railing. And she must be there still, her eyes foggy with grief and superstition. Her attitude seemed so decided that I tried to calm her down. ‘All right. In that case I’ll go with Isabel,’ I said. And she didn’t answer. She sat there, inviolable, until we got ready to leave and I told her, thinking to please her: ‘Until we get back, go to the altar and pray for us.’ Then she turned her head toward the door, saying: ‘I’m not even going to pray. My prayers will still be useless just as long as that woman comes every Tuesday to ask for a branch of lemon balm.’ And in her voice there was an obscure and overturned rebellion: