A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

the third-floor landing and turned to wave to the others, who staggered, laughed, stopped, and had to sit down on the steps below.
    â€œTonight!” cried Gómez. “Tonight you move in with me, eh? Save rent as well as clothes, eh? Sure! Martínez, you got the suit?”
    â€œHave I?” Martínez lifted the white gift-wrapped box high. “From us to us! Ay-hah! ”
    â€œVamenos, you got the dummy?”
    â€œHere!”
    Vamenos, chewing an old cigar, scattering sparks, slipped. The dummy, falling, toppled, turned over twice, and banged down the stairs.
    â€œVamenos! Dumb! Clumsy!”
    They seized the dummy from him. Stricken, Vamenos looked about as if he’d lost something.
    Manulo snapped his fingers. “Hey, Vamenos, we got to celebrate! Go borrow some wine!”
    Vamenos plunged downstairs in a whirl of sparks.
    The others moved into the room with the suit, leaving Martínez in the hall to study Gómez’s face.
    â€œGómez, you look sick.”
    â€œI am,” said Gómez. “For what have I done?” He nodded to the shadows in the room working about the dummy. “I pick Domínguez, a devil with the women. All right. I pick Manulo, who drinks, yes, but who sings as sweet as a girl, eh? Okay. Villanazul reads books. You, you wash behind your ears. But then what do I do? Can I wait? No! I got to buy that suit! So the last guy I pick is a clumsy slob who has the right to wear my suit—” He stopped, confused. “Who gets to wear our suit one night a week, fall down in it, or not come in out of the rain in it! Why, why, why did I do it!”
    â€œGómez,” whispered Villanazul from the room. “The suit is ready. Come see if it looks as good using your light bulb.”
    Gómez and Martínez entered.
    And there on the dummy in the center of the room was the phosphorescent, the miraculously white-fired ghost with the incredible lapels, the precise stitching, the neat buttonholes. Standing with the white illumination of the suit upon his cheeks, Martínez suddenly felt he was in church. White! White! It was white as the whitest vanilla ice cream, as the bottled milk in tenement halls at dawn. White as a winter cloud all alone in the moonlit sky late at night. Seeing it here in the warm summer-night room made their breath almost show on the air. Shutting his eyes, he could see it printed on his lids. He knew what color his dreams would be this night.
    â€œWhite …” murmured Villanazul. “White as the snow on that mountain near our town in Mexico, which is called the Sleeping Woman.”
    â€œSay that again,” said Gómez.
    Villanazul, proud yet humble, was glad to repeat his tribute.
    â€œâ€¦ white as the snow on the mountain called—”
    â€œI’m back!”
    Shocked, the men whirled to see Vamenos in the door, wine bottles in each hand.
    â€œA party! Here! Now tell us, who wears the suit first tonight? Me?”
    â€œIt’s too late!” said Gómez.
    â€œLate! It’s only nine-fifteen!”
    â€œLate?” said everyone, bristling. “Late?”
    Gómez edged away from these men who glared from him to the suit to the open window.
    Outside and below it was, after all, thought Martínez, a fine Saturday night in a summer month and through the calm warm darkness the women drifted like flowers on a quiet stream. The men made a mournful sound.
    â€œGómez, a suggestion.” Villanazul licked his pencil and drew a chart on a pad. “You wear the suit from nine-thirty to ten, Manulo till ten-thirty, Domínguez till eleven, myself till eleven-thirty, Martínez till midnight, and—”
    â€œWhy me last? ” demanded Vamenos, scowling.
    Martínez thought quickly and smiled. “After midnight is the best time, friend.”
    â€œHey,” said Vamenos, “that’s right. I never thought of that. Okay.”
    Gómez sighed. “All