Living to Tell the Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

and jars in the empty cabinets were a few porcelain flagons marked with gilt letters. The sewing machine, the pharmaceutical balance, the caduceus, the clock with the pendulum that still moved, the linocut of the Hippocratic Oath, the ricketyrocking chairs, all the things I had seen as a boy were still the same, and in the same place, but transfigured by the rust of time.
    Adriana herself was a victim. Although she wore a dress with large tropical flowers, as she once had, you could detect almost nothing of the impulsiveness and mischief that had made her famous well into her maturity. The only thing about her that was still intactwas the odor of valerian that drove cats mad and that I continued to recall for the rest of my life with a feeling of calamity.
    When Adriana and my mother had no more tears left, we heard a thick, short cough behind the thin wooden partition that separated us from the back of the store. Adriana recovered something of her charm from another time and spoke so that she could be heard through thepartition.
    “Doctor,” she said, “guess who’s here.”
    From the other side the rasping voice of a hard man asked without interest:
    “Who?”
    Adriana did not answer but signaled to us to go into the back room. A childhood terror paralyzed me on the spot, and my mouth filled with a livid saliva, but I walked with my mother into the crowded space that once had been the pharmacy’slaboratory, and hadbeen outfitted as an emergency bedroom. There was Dr. Alfredo Barboza, older than all the old men and animals on land and in the water, lying faceup on his eternal hemp hammock, without shoes, and wearing his legendary pajamas of raw cotton that looked more like a penitent’s tunic. He was staring up at the ceiling, but when he heard us come in he turned his head and fixed his limpid yellow eyes onus until he recognized my mother at last.
    “Luisa Santiaga!” he exclaimed.
    He sat up in the hammock with the fatigue of an old piece of furniture, became altogether humanized, and greeted us with a rapid squeeze of his burning hand. He noticed my surprise and told me: “I’ve had a fever for a year.” Then he left the hammock, sat on the bed, and said to us in a single breath:
    “You cannot imaginewhat this town has gone through.”
    That single sentence, which summarized an entire life, was enough for me to see him as what he may always have been: a sad, solitary man. He was tall, thin, with beautiful hair, the color of metal, that had been cut with indifference, and intense yellow eyes that had been the most fearsome of my childhood terrors. In the afternoon, on our way home from school,we would go up to his bedroom window, attracted by the fascination of fear. There he was, swaying in the hammock with violent lurches to ease the heat he felt. The game consisted in staring at him until he realized we were there and turned without warning to look at us with his burning eyes.
    I had seen him for the first time when I was five or six years old, one morning when I sneaked into thebackyard of his house with some classmates to steal the enormous mangoes from his trees. Then the door of the wooden outhouse standing in one corner of the yard opened and out he came, fastening his linen underdrawers. I saw him as an apparition from the next world in his white hospital nightshirt, pale and bony and with those yellow hellhound’s eyes that looked at me forever. The others escapedthrough openings in the fence, but I was petrified by his unmoving eyes. He stared at the mangoes I had just pulled from the tree and extended his hand toward me.
    “Give them to me!” he ordered, and he added as he lookedme up and down with great contempt: “Miserable backyard thief!”
    I tossed the mangoes at his feet and escaped in terror.
    He was my personal phantom. If I was alone, I would gofar out of my way not to pass by his house. If I was with adults, I dared a furtive glance at the pharmacy. I would see Adriana serving her