No One Writes to the Colonel Read Online Free PDF Page A

as?’
    ‘To change lawyers.’
    A mother duck, followed by several little ducklings, entered the office. The lawyer sat up to chase them out.‘As you wish, colonel,’ he said, chasing the animals. ‘It will be just as you wish. If I could work miracles, I wouldn’t be living in this barnyard.’ He put a wooden grille across the patio door and returned to his chair.
    ‘My son worked all his life,’ said the colonel. ‘My house is mortgaged. That retirement law has been a lifetime pension for lawyers.’
    ‘Not for me,’ the lawyer protested. ‘Everylast cent has gone for my expenses.’
    The colonel suffered at the thought that he had been unjust.
    ‘That’s what I meant,’ he corrected himself. He dried his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘This heat is enough to rust the screws in your head.’
    Amoment later the lawyer was turning the office upside down looking for the power of attorney. The sun advanced toward the center of the tinyroom, which was built of unsanded boards. After looking futilely everywhere, the lawyer got down on all fours, huffing and puffing, and picked up a roll of papers from under the pianola.
    ‘Here it is.’
    He gave the colonel a sheet of paper with a seal on it. ‘I have to write my agents so they can cancel the copies,’ he concluded. The colonel shook the dust off the paper and put it in his shirtpocket.
    ‘Tear it up yourself,’ the lawyer said.
    ‘No,’ the colonel answered. ‘These are twenty years of memories.’ And he waited for the lawyer to keep on looking. But the lawyer didn’t. He went to the hammock to wipe off his sweat. From there he looked at the colonel through the shimmering air.
    ‘I need the documents also,’ the colonel said.
    ‘Which ones?’
    ‘The proof of claim.’
    The lawyerthrew up his hands.
    ‘Now, that would be impossible, colonel.’
    The colonel became alarmed. As Treasurer of the revolution in the district of Macondo, he had undertaken a difficult six-day journey with the funds for the civil war in two trunks roped to the back of a mule. He arrived at the camp of Neerlandia dragging the mule, which was dead from hunger, half an hour before the treaty was signed.Colonel Aureliano Buendía – quarter-master general of the revolutionary forces on the Atlantic coast – held out the receipt for the funds, and included the two trunks in his inventory of the surrender.
    ‘Thosedocuments have an incalculable value,’ the colonel said. ‘There’s a receipt from Colonel Aureliano Buendía, written in his own hand.’
    ‘I agree,’ said the lawyer. ‘But those documents havepassed through thousands and thousands of hands, in thousands and thousands of offices, before they reached God knows which department in the War Ministry.’
    ‘No official could fail to notice documents like those,’ the colonel said.
    ‘But the officials have changed many times in the last fifteen years,’ the lawyer pointed out. ‘Just think about it; there have been seven presidents, and each presidentchanged his cabinet at least ten times, and each minister changed his staff at least a hundred times.’
    ‘But nobody could take the documents home,’ said the colonel. ‘Each new official must have found them in the proper file.’
    The lawyer lost his patience.
    ‘And moreover if those papers are removed from the Ministry now, they will have to wait for a new place on the rolls.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’the colonel said.
    ‘It’ll take centuries.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. If you wait for the big things, you can wait for the little ones.’
    He took a pad of lined paper, the pen, the inkwell, and a blotter to the little table in the living room, and left the bedroom door open in case he had to ask his wife anything. She was saying her beads.
    ‘What’s today’s date?’
    ‘October27th.’
    He wrote with a studiousneatness, the hand that held the pen resting on the blotter, his spine straight to ease his breathing, as he’d been