No One Writes to the Colonel Read Online Free PDF

taught in school. The heat became unbearable in the closed living room. A drop of perspiration fell on the letter. The colonel picked it up on the blotter. Then he tried to erase the letters which had smeared but he smudged them. He didn’t lose his patience. He wrote an asteriskand noted in the margin, ‘acquired rights.’ Then he read the whole paragraph.
    ‘When was I put on the rolls?’
    The woman didn’t interrupt her prayer to think.
    ‘August 12, 1949.’
    A moment later it began to rain. The colonel filled a page with large doodlings which were a little childish, the same ones he learned in public school at Manaure. Then he wrote on a second sheet down to the middle,and he signed it.
    He read the letter to his wife. She approved each sentence with a nod. When he finished reading, the colonel sealed the envelope and turned off the lamp.
    ‘You could ask someone to type it for you.’
    ‘No,’ the colonel answered. ‘I’m tired of going around asking favors.’
    For half an hour he heard the rain against the palm roof. The town sank into the deluge. After curfew sounded,a leak began somewhere in the house.
    ‘This should have been done a long time ago,’ the woman said. ‘It’s always better to handle things oneself.’
    ‘It’s never too late,’ the colonel said, paying attentionto the leak. ‘Maybe all this will be settled when the mortgage on the house falls due.’
    ‘In two years,’ the woman said.
    He lit the lamp to locate the leak in the living room. He put the rooster’scan underneath it and returned to the bedroom, pursued by the metallic noise of the water in the empty can.
    ‘It’s possible that to save the interest on the money they’ll settle it before January,’ he said, and he convinced himself. ‘By then, Agustín’s year will be up and we can go to the movies.’
    She laughed under her breath. ‘I don’t even remember the cartoons any more,’ she said. ‘They wereshowing
The Dead Man’s Will
.’
    ‘Was there a fight?’
    ‘We never found out. The storm broke just when the ghost tried to rob the girl’s necklace.’
    The sound of the rain put them to sleep. The colonel felt a slight queasiness in his intestines. But he wasn’t afraid. He was about to survive another October. He wrapped himself in a wool blanket, and for a moment heard the gravelly breathing of hiswife – far away – drifting on another dream. Then he spoke, completely conscious.
    The woman woke up.
    ‘Who are you speaking to?’
    ‘No one,’ the colonel said. ‘I was thinking that at the Macondo meeting we were right when we told Colonel Aureliano Buendía not to surrender. That’s what started to ruin everything.’
    It rained the whole week. The second of November – against the colonel’s wishes– the woman took flowers to Agustín’s grave. She returned from the cemetery and had another attack. It was a hard week. Harder than the four weeks of October which the colonel hadn’t thought he’d survive. The doctor came to see the sick woman, and came out of the room shouting. ‘With asthma like that, I’d be able to bury the whole town!’ But he spoke to the colonel alone and prescribed a special diet.
    Thecolonel also suffered a relapse. He strained for many hours in the privy, in an icy sweat, feeling as if he were rotting and that the flora in his vitals was falling to pieces. ‘It’s winter,’ he repeated to himself patiently. ‘Everything will be different when it stops raining.’ And he really believed it, certain that he would be alive at the moment the letter arrived.
    This time it was hewho had to repair their household economy. He had to grit his teeth many times to ask for credit in the neighborhood stores. ‘It’s just until next week,’ he would say, without being sure himself that it was true. ‘It’s a little money which should have arrived last Friday.’ When her attack was over, the woman examined him in horror.
    ‘You’re nothing but skin and bones,’