‘You don’t have to ask anybody,’ old Jacob said with the greatest of calm. ‘I’ll put you there myself.’
‘Let’s go, then,’ she said, ‘because I’m going to die before very long.’
Old Jacob looked her over carefully. Her eyes were the only thing still young. Her bones had become knotted up at the joints and she had the same look of a plowed field which, when it came right down to it, she had always had.
‘You’re in better shape than ever,’ he told her.
‘Last night I caught a smell of roses,’ she sighed.
‘Don’t pay it any mind,’ old Jacob said to assure her. ‘Things like that are always happening to poor people like us.’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ she said. ‘I’ve always prayed that I’d know enough ahead of time when death would come so I could die far away from this sea. A smell of roses in this town can only be a message from God.’
All that old Jacob could think of was to ask for a little time to put things in order. He’d heard tell that people don’t die when they ought to but when they want to, and he was seriously worried by his wife’s premonition. He even wondered whether, when the moment came, he’d be up to burying her alive.
At nine o’clock he opened the place where he used to have a store. He put two chairs and a small table with the checkerboard on it by the door and he spent all morning playing opponents who happened by. From his house he looked at the ruined town, the shambles of a town with the traces of former colors that had been nibbled away by the sun and a chunk of sea at the end of the street.
Before lunch, as always, he played with Don Máximo Gómez. Old Jacob couldn’t imagine a more humane opponent than a man who had survived two civil wars intact and had only sacrificed an eye in the third. After losing one game on purpose, he held him back for another.
‘Tell me one thing, Don Máximo,’ he asked him then. ‘Would you be capable of burying your wife alive?’
‘Certainly,’ Don Máximo Gómez answered. ‘You can believe me when I say that my hand wouldn’t even tremble.’
Old Jacob fell into a surprised silence. Then, after letting himself be despoiled of his best pieces, he sighed:
‘Well, the way it looks, Petra is going to die.’
Don Máximo Gómez didn’t change his expression. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘there’s no reason to bury her alive.’ He gobbled up two pieces and crowned a king. Then he fastened an eye wet with sad waters on his opponent.
‘What’s she got?’
‘Last night,’ old Jacob explained, ‘she caught a smell of roses.’
‘Then half the town is going to die,’ Don Máximo Gómez said. ‘That’s all they’ve been talking about this morning.’
It was hard for old Jacob to lose again without offending him. He brought in the table and chairs, closed up the shop, and went about everywhere looking for someone who had caught the smell. In the end only Tobías was sure. So he asked him please to stop by his place, as if by chance, and tell his wife about it.
Tobías did as he was told. At four o’clock, all dressed up in his Sunday best, he appeared on the porch where the wife had spent all afternoon getting old Jacob’s widower’s outfit together.
He had come up so quietly that the woman was startled.
‘Mercy,’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought it was the archangel Gabriel.’
‘Well, you can see it’s not,’ Tobías said. ‘It’s only me and I’ve come to tell you something.’
She adjusted her glasses and went back to work.
‘I know what it’s all about,’ she said.
‘I bet you don’t,’ Tobías said.
‘You caught the smell of roses last night.’
‘How did you know?’ Tobías asked in desolation.
‘At my age,’ the woman said, ‘there’s so much time left over for thinking that a person can become a regular prophet.’
Old Jacob, who had his ear pressed against the partition wall in the back of the store, stood up in shame.
‘You see, woman,’ he shouted through the wall. He made a turn and appeared on the porch. ‘It wasn’t what you thought it was after all.’
‘This boy has been lying,’ she said without raising her head. ‘He didn’t smell anything.’
‘It was around eleven o’clock,’ Tobías said. ‘I was chasing crabs away.’
The woman finished mending a collar.
‘Lies,’ she insisted. ‘Everybody knows you’re a tricker.’ She bit the thread with her teeth and looked at Tobías over her glasses.
‘What I can’t understand is why you went to the trouble to put Vaseline on your hair and shine your shoes just to come and be so disrespectful to me.’
From then on Tobías began to keep watch on the sea. He hung his hammock up on the porch by the yard and spent the night waiting, surprised by the things that go on in the world while people are asleep. For many nights he could hear the desperate scrawling of the crabs as they tried to claw-climb up the supports of the house, until so many nights went by that they got tired of trying. He came to know Clotilde’s way of sleeping. He discovered how her fluty snores became more high-pitched as the heat grew more intense until they became one single languid note in the torpor of July.
At first Tobías kept watch on the sea the way people who know it well do, his gaze fixed on a single point of the horizon. He watched it change color. He watched it turn out its lights and become frothy and dirty and toss up its refuse-laden belches when great rainstorms agitated its digestion. Little by little he learned to keep watch the way people who know it better do, not even looking at it but unable to forget about it even in his sleep.
Old Jacob’s wife died in August. She died in her sleep and they had to cast her, like everyone else, into a flowerless sea. Tobías kept on waiting. He had waited so long that it was becoming his way of being. One night, while he was dozing in his hammock, he realized that something in the air had changed. It was an intermittent wave, like the time a Japanese ship had jettisoned a cargo of rotten onions at the harbor mouth. Then the smell thickened and was motionless until dawn. Only when he had the feeling that he could pick it up in his hands and exhibit it did Tobías leap out of his hammock and go into Clotilde’s room. He shook her several times.
‘Here it is,’ he told her.
Clotilde had to brush the smell away like a cobweb in order to get up. Then she fell back down on her tepid sheets.
‘God curse it,’ she said.
Tobías leaped toward the door, ran into the middle of the street, and began to shout. He shouted with all his might, took a deep breath and shouted again, and then there was a silence and he took a deeper breath, and the smell was still on the sea. But nobody answered. Then he went about knocking on doors from house to house, even on houses that had no owners, until his uproar got entwined with that of the dogs and he woke everybody up.
Many of them couldn’t smell it. But others, especially the old ones, went down to enjoy it on the beach. It was a compact fragrance that left no chink for any odor of the past. Some, worn out from so much smelling, went back to their houses. Most of the people stayed to finish their night’s sleep on the beach. By dawn the smell was so pure that it was a pity even to breathe it.
Tobías slept most of the day. Clotilde caught up with him at siesta time and they spent the afternoon frolicking in bed without even closing the door to the yard. First they did it like earthworms, then like rabbits, and finally like turtles, until the world grew sad and it was dark again. There was still a trace of roses in the air. Sometimes a wave of music reached the bedroom.
‘It’s coming from Catarino’s,’ Clotilde said. ‘Someone must have come to town.’
Three men and a woman had come. Catarino thought that others might come later and he tried to fix his gramophone. Since he couldn’t do it, he asked Pancho Aparecido, who did all kinds of things because he’d never owned anything, and besides, he had a box of tools and a pair of intelligent hands.
; Catarino’s place was a wooden building set apart and facing the sea. It had one large room with benches and small tables, and several bedrooms in the rear. While they watched Pancho Aparecido working, the three men and the woman drank in silence, sitting at the bar and yawning in turn.
The gramophone worked well after several tries. When they heard the music, distant but distinct, the people stopped chatting. They looked at one another and for a moment had nothing to say, for only then did they realize how old they had become since the last time they’d heard music.
Tobías found everybody still awake after nine o’clock. They were sitting in their doorways listening to Catarino’s old records, with the same look of childish fatalism of people watching an eclipse. Every record reminded them of someone who had died, the taste of food after a long illness, or something they’d had to do the next day many years ago which never got done because they’d forgotten.
The music stopped around eleven o’clock. Many people went to bed, thinking it was going to rain because a dark cloud hung over the sea. But the cloud descended, floated for a while on the surface, and then sank into the water. Only the stars remained above. A short while later, the breeze went out from the town and came back with a smell of roses.
‘Just what I told you, Jacob,’ Don Máximo Gómez exclaimed. ‘Here it is back with us again. I’m sure now that we’re going to smell it every night.’
‘God forbid,’ old Jacob said. ‘That smell is the only thing in life that’s come too late for me.’
They’d been playing checkers in the empty store without paying any attention to the records. Their memories were so ancient that there weren’t records old enough to stir them up.
‘For my part, I don’t believe much of anything about this,’ Don Máximo Gómez said. ‘After so many years of eating dust, with so many women wanting a little yard to plant flowers in, it’s not strange that a person should end up smelling things like this and even thinking it’s all true.’
‘But we can smell it with our own noses,’ old Jacob said.
‘No matter,’ said Don Máximo Gómez. ‘During the war, when the revolution was already lost, we’d wanted a general so bad that we saw the Duke of Marlborough appear in flesh and blood. I saw him with my own eyes, Jacob.’
It was after midnight. When he was alone, old Jacob closed his store and took his lamp to the bedroom. Through the window, outlined against the glow of the sea, he saw the crag from which they threw their dead.
‘Petra,’ he called in a soft voice.
She couldn’t hear him. At that moment she was floating along almost on the surface of the water beneath a radiant noonday sun on the Bay of Bengal. She’d lifted her head to look through the water, as through an illuminated showcase, at a huge ocean liner. But she couldn’t see her husband, who at that moment on the other side of the world was starting to hear Catarino’s gramophone again.
‘Just think,’ old Jacob said. ‘Barely six months ago they thought you were crazy and now they’re the ones making a festival out of the smell that brought on your death.’
He put out the light and got into bed. He wept slowly with that graceless little whimper old people have, but soon he fell asleep.
‘I’d get away from this town if I could,’ he sobbed as he tossed. ‘I’d go straight to hell or anywhere else if I could only get twenty pesos together.’
From that night on and for several weeks, the smell remained on the sea. It impregnated the wood of the houses, the food, and the drinking water, and there was nowhere to escape the odor. A lot of people were startled to find it in the vapors of their own shit. The men and the woman who had come to Catarino’s place left one Friday, but they were back on Saturday with a whole mob. More people arrived on Sunday. They were in and out of everywhere like ants, looking for something to eat and a place to sleep, until it got to be impossible to walk the streets.
More people came. The women who had left when the town died came back to Catarino’s. They were fatter and wore heavier make-up, and they brought the latest records, which didn’t remind anyone of anything. Some of the former inhabitants of the town returned. They’d gone off to get filthy rich somewhere else and they came back talking about their fortunes but wearing the same clothes they’d left with. Music and side shows arrived, wheels of chance, fortunetellers and gunmen and men with snakes coiled about their necks who were selling the elixir of eternal life. They kept on coming for many weeks, even after the first rains had come and the sea became rough and the smell disappeared.
A priest arrived among the last. He walked all over, eating bread dipped in light coffee, and little by little, he banned everything that had come before him: games of chance, the new music and the way it was danced, and even the recent custom of sleeping on the beach. One evening, at Melchor’s house, he preached a sermon about the smell of the sea.
‘Give thanks to heaven, my children,’ he said, ‘for this is the smell of God.’
Someone interrupted him.
‘How can you tell, Father? You haven’t smelled it yet.’
‘The Holy Scriptures,’ he said, ‘are quite explicit in regard to this smell. We are living in a chosen village.’
Tobías went about back and forth in the festival like a sleepwalker. He took Clotilde to see what money was. They made believe they were betting enormous sums at roulette, and then they figured things up and felt extremely rich with all the money they could have won. But one night not just they, the whole multitude occupying the town, saw more money in one place than they could possibly have imagined.
That was the night Mr Herbert arrived. He appeared suddenly, set up a table in the middle of the street, and on top of the table placed two large trunks brimful with bank notes. There was so much money that no one noticed it at first, because they couldn’t believe it was true. But when Mr Herbert started ringing a little bell, the people had to believe him, and they went over to listen.
‘I’m the richest man in the world,’ he said. ‘I’ve got so much money I haven’t got room to keep it any more. And besides, since my heart’s so big that there’s no room for it in my chest, I have decided to travel the world over solving the problems of mankind.’
He was tall and ruddy. He spoke in a loud voice and without any pauses, and simultaneously he waved about a pair of lukewarm, languid hands that always looked as if they’d just been shaved. He spoke for fifteen minutes and rested. Then he rang the little bell and began to speak again. Halfway through his speech, someone in the crowd waved a hat and interrupted him.
‘Come on, mister, don’t talk so much and start handing out the money.’
‘Not so fast,’ Mr Herbert replied. ‘Handing out money with no rhyme or reason, in addition to being an unfair way of doing things, doesn’t make any sense at all.’
With his eyes he located the man who had interrupted him, and motioned him to come forward. The crowd let him through.
‘On the other hand,’ Mr Herbert went on, ‘this impatient friend of ours is going to give us a chance to explain the most equitable system of the distribution of wealth.’ He reached out a hand and helped him up.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Patricio.’
‘All right, Patricio,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘Just like everybody else, you’ve got some problem you haven’t been able to solve for some time.’
Patricio took off his hat and confirmed it with a nod.
‘What is it?’
‘Well, my problem is this,’ Patricio said. ‘I haven’t got any money.’
‘How much do you need?’
‘Forty-eight pesos.’
Mr Herbert gave an exclamation of triumph. ‘Forty-eight pesos,’ he repeated. The crowd accompanied him in clapping.
‘Very well, Patricio,’ Mr Herbert went on. ‘Now, tell us one thing: what can you do?’
‘Lots of things.’
‘Decide on one,’ Mr Herbert said. ‘The thing you do best.’
‘Well,’ Patricio said, ?
??I can do birds.’
Applauding a second time, Mr Herbert turned to the crowd.
‘So, then, ladies and gentlemen, our friend Patricio, who does an extraordinary job at imitating birds, is going to imitate forty-eight different birds and in that way he will solve the great problem of his life.’
To the startled silence of the crowd, Patricio then did his birds. Sometimes whistling, sometimes with his throat, he did all known birds and finished off the figure with others that no one was able to identify. When he was through, Mr Herbert called for a round of applause and gave him forty-eight pesos.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘come up one by one. I’m going to be here until tomorrow at this time solving problems.’
Old Jacob learned about the commotion from the comments of people walking past his house. With each bit of news his heart grew bigger and bigger until he felt it burst.
‘What do you think about this gringo?’ he asked.
Don Máximo Gómez shrugged his shoulders. ‘He must be a philanthropist.’
‘If I could only do something,’ old Jacob said, ‘I could solve my little problem right now. It’s nothing much: twenty pesos.’
‘You play a good game of checkers,’ Don Máximo Gómez said.
Old Jacob appeared not to have paid any attention to him, but when he was alone, he wrapped up the board and the box of checkers in a newspaper and went off to challenge Mr Herbert. He waited until midnight for his turn. Finally Mr Herbert had them pack up his trunks and said good-bye until the next morning.
He didn’t go off to bed. He showed up at Catarino’s place with the men who were carrying his trunks and the crowd followed him all the way there with their problems. Little by little, he went on solving them, and he solved so many that finally, in the store, the only ones left were the women and some men with their problems already solved. And in the back of the room there was a solitary woman fanning herself slowly with a cardboard advertisement.