Gabriel García Márquez
Translated by J.S.Bernstein
[1] Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave.Red and white roses, the kind that she grows to decorate altars and wreaths.The morning that has set me to remembering the knoll where the townspeople abandon their dead.It’s a bare, treeless place, swept passed.Now that it’s stopped raining and the noonday sun reach the grave where my child’s body rests, mingled now, dispersed among snails and roots.
[2] She is prostrate before her saints.She’s remained abstracted since I stopped moving in the room, when I failed in the first attempt to reach the altar and pick the brightest and freshest roses.Maybe I could have done it today, but the little lamp blinked and she, recovered from her ecstasy, raised her head and looked toward the corner where the chair is.She must have thought: ‘It’s the wind again,’ because it’s true that something creaked beside the altar and the room rocked for an instant, as if the level of the stagnant memories in it for so long had shifted.Then I understood that I would have to wait for another occasion to get the roses because she was still awake, looking at the chair, and she would have heard the sound of my hands beside her face.Now I’ve got to wait until she leaves the room in a moment and goes to the one next door to sleep her measured and invariable Sunday siesta.Maybe then I can leave with the roses and be back before she returns to this room and remains looking at the chair.
[3] Last Sunday was more difficult.I had to wait almost two hours for her to fall into ecstasy.She seemed restless, preoccupied, as if she had been tormented by the certainty that her solitude in the house had suddenly become less intense.She took several turns about the room with the bouquet of roses before leaving it on the altar.Then she went out into the hallway, turned in, and went to the next room.I knew that she was looking for the lamp.And later, when she passed by the door again and I saw her in the light of the hall with her dark little jacket and her pink stockings, it seemed to me now that she was still the girl who forty years ago had leaned over my bed in that same room and said: “Now that they’ve put in the toothpicks your eyes are open and hard.” She was just the same, as if time hadn’t passed since that remote August afternoon when the women brought her into the room and showed her the corpse and told her: “Weep, he was like a brother to you,” and she leaned against the wall, weeping, obeying, still soaked from the rain.