Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
She didn’t rot, of course. She set up her tent across from the mission and sat down to think, like a solitary warrior besieging a fortified city. The wandering photographer, who knew her quite well, loaded his gear onto the carrier of his bicycle and was ready to leave all alone when he saw her in the full sun with her eyes fixed on the mission.
‘Let’s see who gets tired first,’ the grandmother said, ‘they or I.’
‘They’ve been here for three hundred years and they can still take it,’ the photographer said. ‘I’m leaving.’
Only then did the grandmother notice the loaded bicycle.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Wherever the wind takes me,’ the photographer said, and he left. ‘It’s a big world.’
The grandmother sighed.
‘Not as big as you think, you ingrate.’
But she didn’t move her head in spite of her anger so as not to lose sight of the mission. She didn’t move it for many, many days of mineral heat, for many, many nights of wild winds, for all the time she was meditating and no one came out of the mission. The Indians built a lean-to of palm leaves beside the tent and hung their hammocks there, but the grandmother stood watch until very late, nodding on her throne and chewing the uncooked grain in her pouch with the invincible laziness of a resting ox.
One night a convoy of slow covered trucks passed very close to her and the only lights they carried were wreaths of colored bulbs which gave them the ghostly size of sleepwalking altars. The grandmother recognized them at once because they were just like the trucks of the Amadíses. The last truck in the convoy slowed, stopped, and a man got out of the cab to adjust something in back. He looked like a replica of the Amadíses, wearing a hat with a turned-up brim, high boots, two crossed cartridge belts across his chest, an army rifle, and two pistols. Overcome by an irresistible temptation, the grandmother called to the man.
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ she asked him.
The man lighted her pitilessly with a flashlight. For an instant he studied the face worn out by vigil, the eyes dim from fatigue, the withered hair of the woman who, even at her age, in her sorry state, and with that crude light on her face, could have said that she had been the most beautiful woman in the world. When he examined her enough to be sure that he had never seen her before, he turned out the light.
‘The only thing I know for sure is that you’re not the Virgin of Perpetual Help.’
‘Quite the contrary,’ the grandmother said with a very sweet voice. ‘I’m the Lady.’
The man put his hand to his pistol out of pure instinct.
‘What lady?’
‘Big Amadís’s.’
‘Then you’re not of this world,’ he said, tense. ‘What is it you want?’
‘For you to help me rescue my granddaughter, Big Amadís’s granddaughter, the daughter of our son Amadís, held captive in that mission.’
The man overcame his fear.
‘You knocked on the wrong door,’ he said. ‘If you think we’re about to get mixed up in God’s affairs, you’re not the one you say you are, you never knew the Amadíses, and you haven’t got the whoriest notion of what smuggling’s all about.’
Early that morning the grandmother slept less than before. She lay awake pondering things, wrapped in a wool blanket while the early hour got her memory all mixed up and the repressed raving struggled to get out even though she was awake, and she had to tighten her heart with her hand so as not to be suffocated by the memory of a house by the sea with great red flowers where she had been happy. She remained that way until the mission bell rang and the first lights went on in the windows and the desert became saturated with the smell of the hot bread of matins. Only then did she abandon her fatigue, tricked by the illusion that Eréndira had got up and was looking for a way to escape and come back to her.
Eréndira, however, had not lost a single night’s sleep since they had taken her to the mission. They had cut her hair with pruning shears until her head was like a brush, they put a hermit’s rough cassock on her and gave her a bucket of whitewash and a broom so that she could whitewash the stairs every time someone went up or down. It was mule work because there was an incessant coming and going of muddied missionaries and novice carriers, but Eréndira felt as if every day were Sunday after the fearsome galley that had been her bed. Besides, she wasn’t the only one worn out at night, because that mission was dedicated to fighting not against the devil but against the desert. Eréndira had seen the Indian novices bulldogging cows in the barn in order to milk them, jumping up and down on planks for days on end in order to press cheese, helping a goat through a difficult birth. She had seen them sweat like tanned stevedores hauling water from the cistern, watering by hand a bold garden that other novices cultivated with hoes in order to plant vegetables in the flintstone of the desert. She had seen the earthly inferno of the ovens for baking bread and the rooms for ironing clothes. She had seen a nun chase a pig through the courtyard, slide along holding the runaway animal by the ears, and roll in a mud puddle without letting go until two novices in leather aprons helped her get it under control and one of them cut its throat with a butcher knife as they all became covered with blood and mire. In the isolation ward of the infirmary she had seen tubercular nuns in their nightgown shrouds, waiting for God’s last command as they embroidered bridal sheets on the terraces while the men preached in the desert. Eréndira was living in her shadows and discovering other forms of beauty and horror that she had never imagined in the narrow world of her bed, but neither the coarsest nor the most persuasive of the novices had managed to get her to say a word since they had taken her to the mission. One morning, while she was preparing the whitewash in her bucket, she heard string music that was like a light even more diaphanous than the light of the desert. Captivated by the miracle, she peeped into an immense and empty salon with bare walls and large windows through which the dazzling June light poured in and remained still, and in the center of the room she saw a very beautiful nun whom she had never seen before playing an Easter oratorio on the clavichord. Eréndira listened to the music without blinking, her heart hanging by a thread, until the lunch bell rang. After eating, while she whitewashed the stairs with her reed brush, she waited until all the novices had finished going up and coming down, and she was alone, with no one to hear her, and then she spoke for the first time since she had entered the mission.
‘I’m happy,’ she said.
So that put an end to the hopes the grandmother had that Eréndira would run away to rejoin her, but she maintained her granite siege without having made any decision until Pentecost. During that time the missionaries were combing the desert in search of pregnant concubines in order to get them married. They traveled all the way to the most remote settlements in a broken-down truck with four well-armed soldiers and a chest of cheap cloth. The most difficult part of that Indian hunt was to convince the women, who defended themselves against divine grace with the truthful argument that men, sleeping in their hammocks with legs spread, felt they had the right to demand much heavier work from legitimate wives than from concubines. It was necessary to seduce them with trickery, dissolving the will of God in the syrup of their own language so that it would seem less harsh to them, but even the most crafty of them ended up being convinced by a pair of flashy earrings. The men, on the other hand, once the women’s acceptance had been obtained, were routed out of their hammocks with rifle butts, bound, and hauled away in the back of the truck to be married by force.
For several days the grandmother saw the little truck loaded with pregnant Indian women heading for the mission, but she failed to recognize her opportunity. She recognized it on Pentecost Sunday itself, when she heard the rockets and the ringing of the bells and saw the miserable and merry crowd that was going to the festival, and she saw that among the crowds there were pregnant women with the veil and crown of a bride holding the arms of their casual mates, whom they would legitimize in the collective wedding.
‘Tell me something, son,’ she asked with her smoothest voice. ‘What part do you have in this affair?’
The boy felt intimidated by the candle and it was hard for him to close his mouth because of his donkey teeth.
‘The priests are going to give me my first communion,’ he said.
‘How much did they pay you?’
‘Five pesos.’
The grandmother took a roll of bills from her pouch and the boy looked at them with surprise.
‘I’m going to give you twenty,’ the grandmother said. ‘Not for you to make your first communion, but for you to get married.’
‘Who to?’
‘My granddaughter.’
So Eréndira was married in the courtyard of the mission in her hermit’s cassock and a silk shawl that the novices gave her, and without even knowing the name of the groom her grandmother had bought for her. With uncertain hope she withstood the torment of kneeling on the saltpeter ground, the goat-hair stink of the two hundred pregnant brides, the punishment of the Epistle of Saint Paul hammered out in Latin under the motionless and burning sun, because the missionaries had found no way to oppose the wile of that unforeseen marriage, but had given her a promise as a last attempt to keep her in the mission. Nevertheless, after the ceremony in the presence of the apostolic prefect, the military mayor who shot at the clouds, her recent husband, and her impassive grandmother, Eréndira found herself once more under the spell that had dominated her since birth. When they asked her what her free, true, and definitive will was, she didn’t even give a sigh of hesitation.
‘I want to leave,’ she said. And she clarified things by pointing at her husband. ‘But not with him, with my grandmother.’
Ulises had wasted a whole afternoon trying to steal an orange from his father’s grove, because the older man wouldn’t take his eyes off him while they were pruning the sick trees, and his mother kept watch from the house. So he gave up his plan, for that day at least, and grudgingly helped his father until they had pruned the last orange trees.
The extensive grove was quiet and hidden, and the wooden house with a tin roof had copper grating over the windows and a large porch set on pilings, with primitive plants bearing intense flowers. Ulises’ mother was on the porch sitting back in a Viennese rocking chair with smoked leaves on her temples to relieve her headache, and her full-blooded-Indian look followed her son like a beam of invisible light to the most remote corners of the orange grove. She was quite beautiful, much younger than her husband, and not only did she still wear the garb of her tribe, but she knew the most ancient secrets of her blood.
When Ulises returned to the house with the pruning tools, his mother asked him for her four o’clock medicine, which was on a nearby table. As soon as he touched them, the glass and the bottle changed color. Then, out of pure play, he touched a glass pitcher that was on the table beside some tumblers and the pitcher also turned blue. His mother observed him while she was taking her medicine and when she was sure that it was not a delirium of her pain, she asked him in the Guajiro Indian language:
‘How long has that been happening to you?’
‘Ever since we came back from the desert,’ Ulises said, also in Guajiro. ‘It only happens with glass things.’
In order to demonstrate, one after the other he touched the glasses that were on the table and they all turned different colors.
‘Those things happen only because of love,’ his mother said. ‘Who is it?’
Ulises didn’t answer. His father, who couldn’t understand the Guajiro language, was passing by the porch at that moment with a cluster of oranges.
‘What are you two talking about?’ he asked Ulises in Dutch.
‘Nothing special,’ Ulises answered.
Ulises’ mother didn’t know any Dutch. When her husband went into the house, she asked her son in Guajiro:
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing special,’ Ulises answered.
He lost sight of his father when he went into the house, but he saw him again through a window of the office. The mother waited until she was alone with Ulises and then repeated:
‘Tell me who it is.’
‘It’s nobody,’ Ulises said.
He answered without paying attention because he was hanging on his father’s movements in the office. He had seen him put the oranges on top of the safe when he worked out the combination. But while he was keeping an eye on his father, his mother was keeping an eye on him.
‘You haven’t eaten any bread for a long time,’ she observed.
‘I don’t like it.’
The mother’s face suddenly took on an unaccustomed liveliness. ‘That’s a lie,’ she said. ‘It’s because you’re lovesick and people who are lovesick can’t eat bread.’ Her voice, like her eyes, had passed from entreaty to threat.
‘It would be better if you told me who it was,’ she said, ‘or I’ll make you take some purifying baths.’
In the office the Dutchman opened the safe, put the oranges inside, and closed the armored door. Ulises moved away from the window then and answered his mother impatiently.
‘I already told you there wasn’t anyone,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe me, ask Papa.’
The Dutchman appeared in the office doorway lighting his sailor’s pipe and carrying his threadbare Bible under his arm. His wife asked him in Spanish:
‘Who did you meet in the desert?’
‘Nobody,’ her husband answered, a little in the clouds. ‘If you don’t believe me, ask Ulises.’
He sat down at the end of the hall and sucked on his pipe until the tobacco was used up. Then he opened the Bible at random and recited spot passages for almost two hours in flowing and ringing Dutch.
At midnight Ulises was still thinking with such intensity that he couldn’t sleep. He rolled about in his hammock for another hour, trying to overcome the pain of memories until the very pain gave him the strength he needed to make a decision. Then he put on his cowboy pants, his plaid shirt, and his riding boots, jumped through the window, and fled from the house in the truck loaded with birds. As he went through the groves he picked the three ripe oranges he had been unable to steal that afternoon.
He traveled across the desert for the rest of the night and at dawn he asked in towns and villages about the whereabouts of Eréndira, but no one could tell him. Finally they informed him that she was traveling in the electoral campaign retinue of Senator Onésimo Sánchez and that on that day he was probably in Nueva Castilla. He didn’t find him there but in the next town and Eréndira was no longer with him, for the grandmother had managed to get the senator to vouch for her morality in a letter written in his own hand, and with it she was going about opening the most tightly barred doors in the desert. On the third day he came across the domestic mailman and the latter told him what direction to follow.
‘They’re heading toward the sea,’ he said, ‘and you’d better hurry because the goddamned old woman plans to cross over to the island of Aruba.’
Following that direction, after half a day’s journey Ulises spotted the broad, stained tent that the grandmother had bought from a bankrupt circus. The wandering photographer had come back to her, convinced that the world was really not as large as he had thought, and he had set up his idyllic backdrops near the tent. A band of brass-blowers was captivating Eréndira’s clientele with a taciturn waltz.
Ulises waited for his turn to go in, and the first thing that caught his attention was the order and cleanliness of the inside of the tent. The grandmother’s bed had recovered its viceregal splendor, the statue of the angel was in its place beside the funerary trunk of the Amadíses, and in addition, there was a pewter bathtub with lion’s feet. Lying on her new canopied bed, Eréndira was naked and placid, irradiating a childlike glow
‘Arídnere.’
Eréndira woke up. She felt naked in front of Ulises, let out a squeak, and covered herself with the sheet up to her neck.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘I’m horrible.’
‘You’re the color of an orange all over,’ Ulises said. He raised the fruits to her eyes so that she could compare. ‘Look.’
Eréndira uncovered her eyes and saw that indeed the oranges did have her color.
‘I don’t want you to stay now,’ she said.
‘I only came to show you this,’ Ulises said. ‘Look here.’
He broke open an orange with his nails, split it in two with his hands, and showed Eréndira what was inside: stuck in the heart of the fruit was a genuine diamond.
‘These are the oranges we take across the border,’ he said.
‘But they’re living oranges!’ Eréndira exclaimed.
‘Of course.’ Ulises smiled. ‘My father grows them.’
Eréndira couldn’t believe it. She uncovered her face, took the diamond in her fingers and contemplated it with surprise.
‘With three like these we can take a trip around the world,’ Ulises said.
Eréndira gave him back the diamond with a look of disappointment. Ulises went on:
‘Besides, I’ve got a pickup truck,’ he said. ‘And besides that … Look!’
From underneath his shirt he took an ancient pistol.
‘I can’t leave for ten years,’ Eréndira said.
‘You’ll leave,’ Ulises said. ‘Tonight, when the white whale falls asleep, I’ll be outside there calling like an owl.’
He made such a true imitation of the call of an owl that Eréndira’s eyes smiled for the first time.
‘It’s my grandmother,’ she said.
‘The owl?’