On the landing of the stairs, the country-fair bustle of her courtyard came up to meet her. To one side of the railing there was a scaffolding with cheeses wrapped in fresh leaves; farther on, in an outside gallery, sacks of salt and skins full of honey were piled up; and to the rear of the courtyard, a stable with mules and horses, and saddles on the crossbeams. The house was impregnated with a persistent beast-of-burden smell mingled with another smell, of tanning and the grinding of cane.
In the office the widow said good morning to Mr. Carmichael, who was laying out bundles of banknotes on the desk while he jotted down the amounts in the ledger. When she opened the window onto the river, the nine o'clock light entered the living room, which was overloaded with cheap decorations, great overstuffed chairs upholstered in gray, and an enlarged portrait of Jose Montiel, with a funeral wreath around the frame. The widow noticed the whiff of rottenness before she saw the boats on the dunes of the far shore.
"What's going on on the other bank?" she asked.
"They're trying to float a dead cow," Mr. Carmichael answered.
"So that's it," the widow said. "All night long I was dreaming about that smell." She looked at Mr. Carmichael, absorbed in his work, and added: "Now all we need is the deluge."
Mr. Carmichael spoke without raising his head.
"It started two weeks ago."
"That's right," the widow admitted. "Now we've reached the end. All that's left to do is to lie down in a grave in the sun and the dew until death comes for us."
Mr. Carmichael listened to her without interrupting his accounts. "For years we've been complaining that nothing ever happened in this town," the widow went on. "All of a sudden the tragedy starts, as if God had fixed everything so that what had stopped happening for so many years would begin to happen."
Mr. Carmichael turned to look at her from the safe and saw her with her elbows on the window, her eyes fixed on the opposite shore. She was wearing a black dress with long sleeves and was biting her nails.
"When the rain stops, things will get better," Mr. Carmichael said.
"It won't stop," the widow predicted. "Misfortunes never come alone. Didn't you see Rosario Montero?"
Mr. Carmichael had seen her. "All this is a meaningless scandal," he said. "If a person pays attention to lampoons he ends up going crazy."
"The lampoons," sighed the widow.
"They've already put mine up," Mr. Carmichael said.
"Yours?"
"Mine," Mr. Carmichael confirmed. "They put it up, quite large and quite complete, on Saturday of last week. It looked like a movie poster."
The widow pulled a chair over to the desk. "This is infamous," she exclaimed. "There's nothing that can be said about a family as exemplary as yours." Mr. Carmichael wasn't alarmed.
"Since my wife is white, the kids have come out all colors," he explained. "Just imagine, eleven of them."
"Of course," the widow said.
"Well, the lampoon said that I'm only the father of the black ones. And they listed the fathers of the others. They even involved Don Chepe Montiel, may he rest in peace."
"My husband!"
"Yours and those of four other ladies," Mr. Carmichael said.
The widow began to sob. "Luckily my daughters are far away," she said. "They say they don't ever want to come back to this savage country where students are murdered in the street, and I tell them that they're right, that they should stay in Paris for good." Mr. Carmichael turned his chair half around, understanding that the embarrassing daily episode had begun once more.
"You've got no reason to worry," he said.
"Quite the contrary," the widow sobbed. "I'm the first one who should have packed up her goods and got away from this town, even if this land and the business that are so tied up with our misfortune are lost. No, Mr. Carmichael: I don't want gold basins to spit blood into."
Mr. Carmichael tried to console her.
"You have to face up to your responsibilities," he said. "You can't throw a fortune out the window."
"Money is the devil's dung," the widow said.
"But in this case it's also the result of Don Chepe Montiel's hard work."
The widow bit her fingers.
"You know that's not true," she replied. "It's ill-gotten wealth and the first to pay for it by dying without confession was Jose Montiel."
It wasn't the first time she'd said it.
"The blame, naturally, belongs to that criminal," she exclaimed, pointing to the mayor, who was going along the opposite sidewalk on the arm of the circus impresario. "But I'm the one who suffers the expiation."
Mr. Carmichael left her. He put the bundles of bills, fastened with rubber bands, into a cardboard box, and from the door to the courtyard, he called out the names of the peasants in alphabetical order.
While the men were receiving their Wednesday pay, the widow Montiel heard them pass without answering their greetings. She lived alone in the gloomy nine-room house where Big Mama had died and which Jose Montiel had bought without imagining that his widow would have to endure her solitude in it until death. At night, while she went about through the empty rooms with the insecticide bomb, she would find Big Mama squashing lice in the hallways, and she would ask her: "When am I going to die?" But that happy communication with the beyond only managed to increase her uncertainty, because the answers, like those of all the dead, were silly and contradictory.
A little after eleven o'clock, through her tears, the widow saw Father Angel crossing the square. "Father, Father," she called, feeling that she was taking a final step with that call. But Father Angel didn't hear her. He had knocked at the door of the widow Asis, on the opposite sidewalk, and the door had opened partway in a surreptitious manner to let him in.
On the porch that overflowed with the song of birds, the widow Asis was lying on a canvas chair, her face covered with a handkerchief soaked in Florida water. From the way he knocked on the door she knew it was Father Angel, but she prolonged the momentary relief until she heard the greeting. Then she uncovered her face, devastated by insomnia.
"Forgive me, Father," she said. "I didn't expect you so early."
Father Angel ignored the fact that he had been invited to lunch. He excused himself, a little confused, saying that he, too, had spent the morning with a headache and had preferred to cross the square before the heat began.
"It doesn't matter," the widow said. "I just meant that I didn't want you to find me looking like a wreck."
The priest took from his pocket a breviary that was losing its binding. "If you want, you can rest a while more and I'll pray," he said. The widow objected.
"I feel better," she said.
She walked to the end of the porch, her eyes closed, and on the way back she laid out the handkerchief with extreme tidiness on the arm of the folding chair. When she sat down opposite Father Angel she looked several years younger.
"Father," she said then, without any drama, "I have need of your help."
Father Angel put his breviary into his pocket.
"At your service."
"It's Roberto Asis again."
Against his promise to forget about the lampoon, Roberto Asis the day before had departed until Saturday, and returned home unexpectedly that same night. Since then, until dawn, when fatigue overcame him, he had been sitting in the darkness of the room, waiting for his wife's supposed lover.
Father Angel listened to her, perplexed.
"There's no basis for that," he said.
"You don't know the Asises, Father," the widow replied. "They carry hell in their imaginations."
"Rebeca knows my view of the lampoons," he said. "But if you want, I can talk to Roberto Asis too."
"By no means," said the widow. "That would just be stoking the coals. On the other hand, if you could talk about the lampoons in your Sunday sermon, I'm sure that Roberto Asis would feel called upon to reflect."
Father Angel opened his arms.
"Impossible," he exclaimed. "It wo
uld be giving the thing an importance that it doesn't have."
"Nothing's more important than avoiding a crime."
"Do you think it can reach those extremes?"
"Not only do I think so," the widow said, "but I'm sure that I won't have the means to prevent it."
A moment later they sat down at the table. A barefoot servant girl brought rice and beans, stewed vegetables, and a platter of meatballs covered with a thick brown sauce. Father Angel served himself in silence. The hot peppers, the profound silence of the house, and the feeling of uneasiness that filled his heart at that moment carried him back to his narrow little neophyte's room in the burning noon of Macondo. On a day like that, dusty and hot, he had denied Christian burial to a hanged man whom the stiff-necked inhabitants of Macondo had refused to bury. He unbuttoned the collar of his cassock to let the sweat out.
"All right," he said to the widow. "Then make sure that Roberto Asis doesn't miss mass on Sunday."
The widow Asis promised him.
Dr. Giraldo and his wife, who never took a siesta, spent the afternoon reading a story by Dickens. They were on the inside terrace, he in a hammock, listening with his fingers interlaced behind his neck, she with the book in her lap, reading with her back to the lozenges of light where the geraniums glowed. She was reading dispassionately, with a professional emphasis, not shifting her position in the chair. She didn't raise her head until the end, but even then she remained with the book open on her knees while her husband washed in the basin of the washstand. The heat foretold a storm.
"Is it a long short story?" she asked, after thinking about it carefully.
With scrupulous movements learned in the operating room, the doctor withdrew his head from the basin. "They say it's a short novel," he said in front of the mirror, putting brilliantine on his hair. "I would say, rather, that it's a long short story." With his fingers he rubbed the vaseline into his scalp and concluded:
"Critics might say that it's a short story, but a long one."
He got dressed in white linen, helped by his wife. She could have been mistaken for an older sister, not only because of the peaceful devotion with which she attended him, but from the coldness of her eyes, which made her look like an older person. Before leaving, Dr. Giraldo showed her the list and order of his visits, should an urgent case come up, and he moved the hands on the clock chart in the waiting room: The doctor will return at 5 o'clock.
The street was buzzing with heat. Dr. Giraldo walked along the shady sidewalk pursued by a foreboding: in spite of the harshness of the air, it wouldn't rain that afternoon. The buzz of the harvest flies intensified the solitude of the port, but the cow had been removed and dragged off by the current, and the rotten smell had left an enormous gap in the atmosphere.
The telegrapher called to him from the hotel.
"Did you get a telegram?"
Dr. Giraldo hadn't.
" 'Advise conditions office, signed Arcofan,' " the telegrapher quoted from memory.
They went to the telegraph office together. While the physician was writing a reply, the civil servant began to nod.
"It's the muriatic acid," the doctor explained with great scientific conviction. And in spite of his foreboding, he added as consolation when he'd finished writing: "Maybe it'll rain tonight."
The telegrapher counted the words. The doctor didn't pay any attention to him. He was hanging on a fat book lying open by the key. He asked if it was a novel.
"Les Miserables, Victor Hugo," telegraphed the telegrapher. He stamped the copy of the message and came back to the railing with the book. "I think this should last us until December."
For years Dr. Giraldo had known that the telegrapher spent his free time transmitting poems to the lady telegrapher in San Bernardo del Viento. He hadn't known that he also read her novels.
"Now, this is serious," he said, thumbing through the well-used tome which awoke in his memory the confused emotions of an adolescent. "Alexandre Dumas would have been more appropriate."
"She likes this one," the telegrapher explained.
"Have you ever met her?"
The telegrapher shook his head no.
"But it doesn't matter," he said. "I'd recognize her in any part of the world by the little jumps she always puts on the R."
That afternoon Dr. Giraldo had reserved an hour for Don Sabas. He found him in bed exhausted, wrapped in a towel from the waist up.
"Was the candy good?" the doctor asked.
"It's the heat," Don Sabas lamented, turning his enormous grandmother's body toward the door. "I took my injection after lunch."
Dr. Giraldo opened his bag on a table placed by the window. The harvest flies were buzzing in the courtyard, and the house had a botanical heat. Seated in the courtyard, Don Sabas urinated like a languid spring. When the doctor put the amber liquid in the test tube, the patient felt comforted. He said, watching the analysis:
"Be very careful, Doctor. I don't want to die without finding out how this novel comes out."
Dr. Giraldo dropped a blue tablet into the sample.
"What novel?"
"The lampoons."
Don Sabas followed him with a mild look until he finished heating the tube on the alcohol lamp. He sniffed it. The faded eyes of the patient awaited him with a question.
"It's fine," the doctor said as he poured out the sample into the courtyard. Then he scrutinized Don Sabas. "Are you hung up on that business too?"
"Not me," the sick man said. "But I'm like a Jap enjoying the people's fright."
Dr. Giraldo prepared the hypodermic syringe.
"Besides," Don Sabas went on to say, "they already put mine up two days ago. The same nonsense: my sons' mess and the story about the donkeys."
The doctor tightened Don Sabas's artery with a rubber hose. The patient insisted on the story about the donkeys; he had to retell it because the doctor didn't think he'd heard it.
"It was a donkey deal I made some twenty years ago," he said. "It so happened that the donkeys I sold were found dead in the morning two days later, with no signs of violence."
He offered his arm with its flaccid flesh so that the doctor could take the blood sample. When Dr. Giraldo covered the prick with cotton, Don Sabas flexed his arm.
"Well, do you know what people made up?"
The doctor shook his head.
"The rumor went around that I had gone into the yard myself at night and shot the donkeys on the inside, sticking the revolver up their assholes."
Dr. Giraldo put the glass tube with the blood sample into his pocket.
"That story's got every appearance of being true," he said.
"It was snakes," Don Sabas said, sitting in bed like an Oriental idol. "But in any case, you have to be a fool to write a lampoon about something that everybody knows."
"That's always been a characteristic of lampoons," the doctor said. "They say what everybody knows, which is almost always sure to be the truth."
Don Sabas suffered a momentary relapse. "Really," he murmured, drying the sweat on his dizzy eyelids. He recovered immediately:
"What's happening is that there isn't a single fortune in this country that doesn't have some dead donkey behind it."
The doctor received the phrase leaning over the washstand. He saw his own reaction reflected in the water: a dental system so perfect that it didn't seem natural. Looking at the patient over his shoulder, he said:
"I've always believed, my dear Don Sabas, that shamelessness is your only virtue."
The patient grew enthusiastic. His doctor's knocks had produced a kind of sudden youth in him. "That and my sexual prowess," he said, accompanying the words with a bending of the arm that might have been a stimulant for the circulation, but which the doctor took as an express lewdness. Don Sabas gave a little bounce on his buttocks.
"That's why I die laughing at the lampoons," he went on. "They say that my sons get carried away by every little girl who begins to blossom in these woods, and I say: they're their fat
her's sons."
Before taking his leave, Dr. Giraldo had to listen to a spectral recapitulation of Don Sabas's sexual adventures.
"Happy youth," the patient finally exclaimed. "Happy times, when a little girl of sixteen cost less than a heifer."
"Those memories will increase your sugar concentration," the doctor said.
Don Sabas opened his mouth.
"On the contrary," he replied. "They're better than your damned insulin shots."
When he reached the street the doctor had the impression that a delicious soup had begun to circulate in Don Sabas's arteries. But something else was worrying him then: the lampoons. For some days rumors had been reaching his office. That afternoon, after visiting Don Sabas, he realized that he really hadn't heard talk about anything else for a week.
He made several visits during the next hour and at every one they talked about the lampoons. He listened to the stories without making any comments, with an apparently indifferent little smile, but really trying to come to a conclusion. He was on his way back to his office when Father Angel, who was coming from the widow Montiel's, rescued him from his reflections.
"How are those patients doing, Doctor?" Father Angel asked.
"Mine are fine, Father," the doctor answered. "What about yours?"
Father Angel bit his lips. He took the doctor by the arm and they began to cross the square.
"Why do you ask?"
"I don't know," the doctor said. "I've heard that there's a serious epidemic among your clientele."
Father Angel made a deviation that to the doctor seemed deliberate.
"I've just come from the widow Montiel," he said. "That poor woman's nerves have got her worn out."
"It might be her conscience," the doctor diagnosed.
"It's an obsession with death."
Although they lived in opposite directions, Father Angel accompanied him to his office.
"Seriously, Father"--the doctor picked up the thread--"what do you think about the lampoons?"
"I don't think about them," the priest said. "But if you make me, I'd say that they're the work of envy in an exemplary town."
"We doctors didn't even diagnose like that in the Middle Ages," Dr. Giraldo replied.
They stopped in front of the office. Fanning himself slowly, Father Angel asserted for the second time that day that "one mustn't give things an importance they don't have." Dr. Giraldo felt shaken by a hidden desperation.