The Autumn of the Patriarch (32 page)

have studied to be a donkey, and he felt more relieved with that moan of pain than with the most frenetic dithyrambs of his official adulators and he assigned the washerwoman a lifetime pension for the education of her children, he sang again after so many years when he gave the cows their fodder in the milking stalls, bright January moon, he sang, without thinking about death, because not even
on the last night of his life would he allow himself the weakness of thinking about anything that didn’t make common sense, he counted the cows twice again while he sang you are the light of my darkened path, you are my northern star, and he discovered that four were missing, he went back into the building counting along the way the hens sleeping on the viceroys’
coatracks, covering the cages
with the sleeping birds which he counted as he put the cloth covers over them forty-eight, he set fire to the droppings scattered by the cows during the day from the vestibule to the audience room, he remembered a remote childhood which for the first time was his own image shivering on the icy barrens and the image of his mother Bendición Alvarado who stole the innards of a ram away from the garbage-heap
buzzards for lunch, it had struck eleven when he covered the whole building again in the opposite direction lighting his way with the lamp as he put out the lights down to the vestibule, he saw himself one by one fourteen generals walking with a lamp repeated in the dark mirrors, he saw a cow collapsed on her back in the rear of the mirror in the music room, so boss, so boss, he said, she
was dead, what a mess, he went through the sleeping quarters of the guard to tell them that there was a dead cow inside a mirror, he ordered them to take it out early tomorrow, without fail, before the building fills up with vultures, he ordered, inspecting with the light the former offices on the ground floor in search of the other lost cows, there were three of them, he looked for them in the toilets,
under the tables, inside every mirror, he went up to the main floor searching the rooms room by room and all he found was a hen lying under the pink embroidered mosquito netting of a novice from other times whose name he had forgotten, he took his spoonful of honey before going to bed, he put the bottle back in the hiding place where there was one of his little pieces of paper with the date
of some birthday of the famous poet Rubén Darío whom God keep on the highest seat in his kingdom, he rolled the piece of paper up again and left it in its place while he recited from memory the well-aimed prayer of our father and celestial lyrophorous master who keepeth afloat airplanes in the heavens and liners on the seas, dragging his great feet of a hopeless insomniac through the last fleeting
dawns of green sunrises from the turns of the lighthouse, he heard the winds sorrowing for the sea that had gone away, he heard the lively music of a wedding party that was about to die struck from behind by some carelessness of God, he
found a strayed cow and he cut off its path without touching it, so boss, so boss, he went back to his bedroom, seeing as he passed by the windows the block of
lights of the city without a sea in every window, he smelled the hot vapor of the mystery of its insides, the secret of its unanimous breathing, he contemplated it twenty-three times without stopping and he suffered forever as ever the uncertainty of the vast and inscrutable ocean of people sleeping with their hands on their hearts, he knew himself to be hated by those who loved him most, he felt
himself illuminated by the candles of saints, he heard his name invoked to straighten the fortunes of women in childbirth and to change the destiny of those dying, he felt his memory exalted by the same ones who cursed his mother when they saw the taciturn eyes, the sad lips, the hand of a pensive bride behind the panes of transparent steel in the remote times of the somnambulant limousine and we
would kiss the mark of his boot in the mud and we sent him fetishes for an evil death on hot nights when from our courtyards we saw the wandering lights in the soulless windows of government house, no one loves us, he sighed, looking into the old bedroom of the lifeless birdwoman painter of orioles his mother Bendición Alvarado her body strewn with sawdust, have a good death mother, he said to her,
a very good death son, she answered him in the crypt, it was exactly twelve o’clock when he hung the lamp on the doorway wounded inside by the fatal twisting of the tenuous whistles of the hernia, there was no space in the world except that of his pain, he ran the three bolts of the bedroom for the last time, closed the three locks, the three bars, he suffered the final holocaust of his scant micturition
in the portable latrine, he stretched out on the bare floor in the pants of rough burlap which he wore at home ever since he had put an end to audiences, the striped shirt without the artificial collar, and the slippers of an invalid, he lay face down with his right arm doubled under his head as a pillow and he fell asleep immediately, but at ten minutes after two he awoke with his mind
aground and his clothes soaked in the pale and warm sweat of the eye of a cyclone, who’s there, he asked shaken
by the certainty that someone had called him in his sleep by a name that was not his, Nicanor, and once again, Nicanor, someone who was able to get into his room without taking down the bars because he came and went as he wished going through the walls, and then he saw her, it was death
general sir, his, dressed in a penitent’s tunic of pita fiber cloth, with a long-poled hook in her hand and her skull sown with the tufts of sepulchral algae and flowers of the earth in the fissures of her bones and her eyes archaic and startled in the fleshless sockets, and only when he saw her full length did he understand that she had called him Nicanor Nicanor which is the name by which death
knows all of us men at the moment of death, but he said no, death, it still wasn’t his time, it was to be during his sleep in the shadows of the office as it had always been announced in the premonitory waters of the basins, but she replied no, general, it’s been here, barefoot and with the beggar’s clothes you’re wearing, although those who found the body were to say that it was on the floor
of the office with the denim uniform without insignia and the gold spur on the left heel so as not to go against the auguries of their Pythians, it had been when he least wanted it, when after so many long years of sterile illusions he had begun to glimpse that one doesn’t live, God damn it, he lives through, he survives, one learns too late that even the broadest and most useful of lives only reach
the point of learning how to live, he had learned of his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands and in the invisible code of the cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power, he had made himself victim of his own sect to be immolated on the flames of that infinite holocaust, he had fed on fallacy
and crime, he had flourished in impiety and dishonor and he had put himself above his feverish avarice and his congenital fear only to keep until the end of time the little glass ball in his hand without knowing that it was an endless vice the satiety of which generated its own appetite until the end of all times general sir, he had known since his beginnings that they deceived him in order to
please him, that they collected from him by fawning on him, that they recruited by force of arms the dense crowds along his route with shouts of jubilation and venal signs of eternal life to the magnificent one who is more ancient than his age, but he learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than
doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his power, that he was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to
decipher the seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting even too late that the only livable life was one of show, the one we saw from this side which wasn’t his general sir, this poor people’s side with the trail of yellow leaves of our uncountable years of misfortune and our ungraspable instants of happiness, where love was
contaminated by the seeds of death but was all love general sir, where you yourself were only an uncertain vision of pitiful eyes through the dusty peepholes of the window of a train, only the tremor of some taciturn lips, the fugitive wave of a velvet glove on the no man’s hand of an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment
of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn’t any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft
whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death’s hooded cassock and
alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his
death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.

1968–1975

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

COLLECTED STORIES

IN EVIL HOUR

INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

LEAF STORM

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

OF LOVE AND OTHER
DEMONS

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

STRANGE PILGRIMS

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

www.penguin.com

‘My favourite book by one of the world’s greatest authors. You’re in the hands of a master’ Mariella Frostrup

‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop
was coming on …’

When newly-wed Ángela Vicario and Bayardo San Román are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Ángela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.

As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night’s
revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Ángela’s brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.

‘A masterpiece’
Evening Standard

‘A work of high explosiveness – the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel’
The Times

‘Brilliant writer, brilliant book’
Guardian

www.penguin.com