Some time passed before I found out that Meme had gone to live with the doctor as his mistress. In those days the shop was open and she still went to Mass like the finest of ladies, not bothered by what was thought or said, as if she’d forgotten what had happened that first Sunday. Still, two months later, she wasn’t ever seen in church again.
I remember the doctor when he was staying at our house. I remember his black and twisted mustache and his way of looking at women with his lustful, greedy dog eyes. But I remember that I never got close to him, maybe because I thought of him as the strange animal that stayed seated at the table after everyone had gotten up and ate the same kind of grass that donkeys eat. During Papa’s illness three years ago, the doctor didn’t leave his corner the same as he hadn’t left it one single time after the night he refused to attend to the wounded men, just as six years before that he’d denied the woman who two days later would be his concubine. The small house had been shut up before the town passed sentence on the doctor. But I do know that Meme was still living here for several months or several years after the store was closed. It must have been much later when people found out that she’d disappeared, because that was what the anonymous note tacked on this door said. According to that note, the doctor had murdered his mistress and buried her in the garden because he was afraid the town would use her to poison him. But I’d seen Meme before I was married. It was eleven years ago, when I was coming back from rosary and the Guajiro woman came to the door of her shop and said to me in her jolly and somewhat ironic way: ‘Chabela, you’re getting married and you didn’t even tell me.’
‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘that’s how it must have been.’ Then I tug on the noose, where on one of the ends the living flesh of the newly cut rope can be seen. I retie the knot my men had cut in order to take the body down and I toss one of the ends over the beam until the noose is hanging, held with enough strength to contribute many deaths just like this man’s. While he fans himself with his hat, his face altered by shortness of breath and liquor, looking at the noose, calculating its strength, he says: ‘A noose as thin as that couldn’t possibly have held his body.’ And I tell him: ‘That same rope held up his hammock for many years.’ And he pulls a chair over, hands me his hat, and hangs from the noose by his hands, his face flushed by the effort. Then he stands on the chair again, looking at the end of the hanging rope. He says: ‘Impossible. That noose doesn’t reach down to my neck.’ And then I can see that he’s being illogical deliberately, looking for ways to hold off the burial.
I look at him straight in the face, scrutinizing him. I tell him: ‘Didn’t you ever notice that he was at least a head taller than you?’ And he turns to look at the coffin. He says: ‘All the same, I’m not sure he did it with this noose.’
I’m sure it was done that way. And he knows it too, but he has a scheme for wasting time because he’s afraid of compromising himself. His cowardice can be seen in the way he moves around in no direction. A double and contradictory cowardice: to hold off the ceremony and to set it up. Then, when he gets to the coffin, he turns on his heels, looks at me, and says: ‘I’d have to see him hanging to be convinced.’
I would have done it. I would have told my men to open the coffin and put the hanged man back up again the way he was until a moment ago. But it would be too much for my daughter. It would be too much for the child, and she shouldn’t have brought him. Even though it upsets me to treat a dead man that way, offending defenseless flesh, disturbing a man who’s at rest for the first time; even though the act of moving a corpse who’s lying peacefully and deservedly in his coffin is against my principles, I’d hang him up again just to see how far this man will go. But it’s impossible. And I tell him so: ‘You can rest assured that I won’t tell them to do that. If you want to, hang him up yourself, and you can be responsible for what happens. Remember that we don’t know how long he’s been dead.’
He hasn’t moved. He’s still beside the coffin, looking at me, then looking at Isabel and then at the child, and then at the coffin again. Suddenly his expression becomes somber and menacing. He says: ‘You must know what can happen because of this.’ And I can see what he means by his threat. I tell him: ‘Of course I do. I’m a responsible person.’ And he, his arms folded now, sweating, walking toward me with studied and comical movements that pretend to be threatening, says: ‘May I ask you how you found out that this man had hanged himself last night?’
I wait for him to get in front of me. I remain motionless, looking at him until my face is hit by his hot, harsh breath, until he stops, his arms still folded, moving his hat behind one armpit. Then I say to him: ‘When you ask me that in an official capacity, I’ll be very pleased to give you an answer.’ He stands facing me in the same position. When I speak to him he doesn’t show the least bit of surprise or upset. He says: ‘Naturally, colonel, I’m asking you officially.’
I’ll give him all the rope he wants. I’m sure that no matter how much he tries to twist it, he’ll have to give in to an ironclad position, but one that’s patient and calm. I tell him: ‘These men cut the body down because I couldn’t let it stay hanging there until you decided to come. I told you to come two hours ago and you took all this time to walk two blocks.’
He still doesn’t move. I face him, resting on my cane, leaning forward a little. I say: ‘In the second place, he was my friend.’ Before I can finish speaking he smiles ironically, but without changing position, throwing his thick and sour breath into my face. He says: ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, isn’t it?’ And suddenly he stops smiling. He says: ‘So you knew this man was going to hang himself.’
Tranquil, patient, convinced that he’s only going on like that to complicate things, I say to him: ‘I repeat. The first thing I did when I found out he’d hanged himself was to go to your place and that was two hours ago.’ And as if I’d asked him a question and not stated something, he says: ‘I was having lunch.’ And I say to him: ‘I know. I even think you took time out for a siesta.’
Then he doesn’t know what to say. He moves back. He looks at Isabel sitting beside the child. He looks at the men and finally at me. But his expression is changed now. He seems to be looking for something to occupy his thought for a moment. He turns his back on me, goes to where the policeman is, and tells him something. The policeman nods and leaves the room.
Then he comes back and takes my arm. He says: ‘I’d like to talk to you in the other room, colonel.’ Now his voice has changed completely. It’s tense and disturbed now. And while I walk into the next room, feeling the uncertain pressure of his hand on my arm, I’m taken with the idea that I know what he’s going to tell me.
This room, unlike the other one, is big and cool. The light from the courtyard flows into it. In here I can see his disturbed eyes, the smile that doesn’t match the expression of his eyes. I can hear his voice saying: ‘Colonel, maybe we can settle this another way.’ And without giving him time to finish, I ask him: ‘How much?’ And then he becomes a different man.
Meme had brought out a plate with jelly and two salt rolls, the kind that she’d learned to make from my mother. The clock had struck nine. Meme was sitting opposite me in the back of the store and was eating listlessly, as if the jelly and rolls were only something to hold together the visit. I understood that and let her lose herself in her labyrinths, sink into the past with that nostalgic and sad enthusiasm that in the light of the oil lamp burning on the counter made her look more withered and old than the day she’d come into church wearing the hat and high heels. It was obvious that Meme felt like recalling things that night. And while she was doing it, one had the impression that over the past years she’d held herself back in some unique and timeless static age and that as she recalled things that night she was putting her personal time into motion again and beginning to go through her long-postponed aging process.
Meme was stiff and somber, talking about the picturesque and feudal splendor of our family during the last years of the prev
ious century, before the great war. Meme recalled my mother. She recalled her that night when I was coming back from church and she told me in her somewhat mocking and ironic way: ‘Chabela, you’re getting married and you didn’t even tell me.’ Those were precisely the days when I’d wanted my mother and was trying to bring her back more strongly in my memory. ‘She was the living picture of you,’ she said. And I really believed it. I was sitting across from the Indian woman, who spoke with an accent mixed with precision and vagueness, as if there was a lot of incredible legend in what she was recalling but also as if she was recalling it in good faith and even with the conviction that the passage of time had changed legend into reality that was remote but hard to forget. She spoke to me about the journey my parents had made during the war, about the rough pilgrimage that would end with their settling in Macondo. My parents were fleeing the hazards of war and looking for a prosperous and tranquil bend in the road to settle down in, and they heard about the golden calf and came looking for it in what was then a town in formation, founded by several refugee families whose members were as careful about the preservation of their traditions and religious practices as the fattening of their hogs. Macondo was my parents’ promised land, peace, and the Parchment. Here they found the appropriate spot to rebuild the house that a few years later would be a country mansion with three stables and two guest rooms. Meme recalled the details without repentance, and spoke about the most extravagant things with an irrepressible desire to live them again or with the pain that came from the fact that she would never live them again. There was no suffering or privation on the journey, she said. Even the horses slept under mosquito netting, not because my father was a spendthrift or a madman, but because my mother had a strange sense of charity, of humanitarian feelings, and thought that the eyes of God would be just as pleased with the act of protecting an animal from the mosquitoes as protecting a man. Their wild and burdensome cargo was everywhere; the trunks full of clothing of people who had died before they’d been on earth, ancestors who couldn’t have been found twenty fathoms under the earth; boxes full of kitchen utensils that hadn’t been used for a long time and had belonged to my parents’ most distant relatives (my father and mother were first cousins), and even a trunk filled with the images of saints, which they used to reconstruct their family altar everywhere they stopped. It was a strange carnival procession with horses and hens and the four Guajiro Indians (Meme’s companions) who had grown up in the house and followed my parents all through the region like trained circus animals.
Meme recalled things with sadness. One had the impression that she considered the passage of time a personal loss, as if she noticed in that heart of hers, lacerated by memories, that if time hadn’t passed she’d still be on that pilgrimage, which must have been a punishment for my parents, but which was a kind of lark for the children, with strange sights like that of horses under mosquito netting.
Then everything began to go backward, she said. Their arrival in the newborn village of Macondo during the last days of the century was that of a devastated family, still bound to a recent splendid past, disorganized by the war. The Indian woman recalled my mother’s arrival in town, sidesaddle on a mule, pregnant, her face green and malarial and her feet disabled by swelling. Perhaps the seeds of resentment were maturing in my father’s soul but he came ready to sink roots against wind and tide while he waited for my mother to bear the child that had been growing in her womb during the crossing and was progressively bringing death to her as the time of birth drew near.
The light of the lamp outlined her profile. Meme, with her stiff Indian expression, her hair straight and thick like a horse’s mane or tail, looked like a sitting idol, green and spectral in the small hot room behind the store, speaking the way an idol would have if it had set out to recall its ancient earthly existence. I’d never been close to her, but that night, after that sudden and spontaneous show of intimacy, I felt that I was tied to her by bonds tighter than those of blood.
Suddenly, during one of Meme’s pauses, I heard coughing in the next room, in this very bedroom where I am now with the child and my father. It was a short, dry cough, followed by a clearing of the throat, and then I heard the unmistakable sound that a man makes when he rolls over in bed. Meme stopped talking at once, and a gloomy, silent cloud darkened her face. I’d forgotten about him. During the time I was there (it was around ten o’clock) I had felt as if the Guajiro woman and I were alone in the house. Then the tension of the atmosphere changed. I felt fatigue in the arm with which I’d been holding the plate with the jelly and rolls, without tasting any. I leaned over and said: ‘He’s awake.’ She, expressionless now, cold and completely indifferent, said: ‘He’ll be awake until dawn.’ And suddenly I understood the disillusionment that could be seen in Meme when she recalled the past of our house. Our lives had changed, the times were good and Macondo was a bustling town where there was even enough money to squander on Saturday nights, but Meme was living tied to a past that had been better. While they were shearing the golden calf outside, inside, in the back of the store, her life was sterile, anonymous, all day behind the counter and spending the night with a man who didn’t sleep until dawn, who spent his time walking about the house, pacing, looking at her greedily with those lustful dog eyes that I’ve never been able to forget. It saddened me to think of Meme with that man who refused his services one night and went on being a hardened animal, without bitterness or compassion, all day long in ceaseless roaming through the house, enough to drive the most balanced person out of his mind.
Recovering the tone of my voice, knowing that he was in his room, awake, maybe opening his lustful dog eyes every time our words were heard in the rear of the store, I tried to give a different turn to the conversation.
‘How’s business been for you?’ I asked.
Meme smiled. Her laugh was sad and taciturn, seeming detached from any feeling of the moment, like something she kept in the cupboard and took out only when she had to, using it with no feeling of ownership, as if the infrequency of her smiles had made her forget the normal way to use them. ‘There it is,’ she said, moving her head in an ambiguous way, and she was silent, abstract again. Then I understood that it was time for me to leave. I handed Meme the plate without giving any explanation as to why it was untouched, and I watched her get up and put it on the counter. She looked at me from there and repeated: ‘You’re the living picture of her.’ I must have been sitting against the light before, clouded by it as it came in the opposite direction and Meme couldn’t see my face while she’d been talking. Then when she got up to put the plate on the counter she saw me frontward, from behind the lamp, and that was why she said: ‘You’re the living picture of her.’ And she came back to sit down.
Then she began to recall the days when my mother had arrived in Macondo. She’d gone directly from the mule to a rocking chair and stayed seated for three months, not moving, taking her food listlessly. Sometimes they would bring her lunch and she’d sit halfway through the afternoon with the plate in her hand, rigid, not rocking, her feet resting on a chair, feeling death growing inside of them until someone would come and take the plate from her hands. When the day came, the labor pains drew her out of her abandonment and she stood up by herself, although they had to help her walk the twenty steps between the porch and the bedroom, martyrized by the occupation of a death that had taken her over during nine months of silent suffering. Her crossing from the rocker to the bed had all the pain, bitterness, and penalties that had been absent during the journey taken a few months before, but she arrived where she knew she had to arrive before she fulfilled the last act of her life.
My father seemed desperate over my mother’s death, Meme said. But according to what he himself said afterward when he was alone in the house, ‘No one trusts the morality of a home where the man doesn’t have a legitimate wife by his side.’ And since he’d read somewhere that when a loved one dies we should set out a bed of jasmine to remember her every night, he p
lanted a vine against the courtyard wall, and a year later, in a second marriage, he was wedded to Adelaida, my stepmother.
Sometimes I thought that Meme was going to cry while she was speaking. But she remained firm, satisfied at expiating the loss of having been happy once and having stopped being so by her own free will. Then she smiled. Then she relaxed in her chair and became completely human. It was as if she’d drawn up mental accounts of her grief when she leaned forward and saw that she still had a favorable balance in good memories left, and then she smiled with her old wide and teasing friendliness. She said that the other thing had started five years later, when she came into the dining room where my father was having lunch and told him: ‘Colonel, Colonel, there’s a stranger to see you in your office.’