Free In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Page B

mayor said.
    The woman didn’t answer. Without being invited, the mayor served himself a plate of soup. Then the woman went into the bedroom to get a chair and put it by the table for the mayor to sit on. While he was having his soup, he examined the yard with a kind of reverent terror. Yesterday it had been a barren vacant lot. Now there was clothing hung to dry and two pigs were wallowing in the mud.
    “You can even plant something,” he said.
    Without raising her head, the woman answered: “The pigs will eat it.” Then, in the same plate, she served a piece of stewed meat, two slices of cassava, and half a plantain and took it to the table. In an obvious way, into that act of generosity she put all the indifference she was capable of. The mayor, smiling, sought the woman’s eyes with his.
    “There’s enough for all,” he said.
    “May God give you indigestion,” the woman said without looking at him.
    He let the bad wish pass. He dedicated himself entirely to his lunch, not concerned with the stream of sweat pouring down his neck. When he had finished, the woman took the empty plate, still not looking at him.
    “How long are you people going to go on like this?” the mayor asked.
    The woman spoke without changing her apathetic expression.
    “Until you people bring the dead you killed back to life.”
    “It’s different now,” the mayor explained. “The new government is concerned with the well-being of its citizens. You people, on the other hand—”
    The woman interrupted him.
    “You’re the same people with the same—”
    “A district like this, built in twenty-four hours, was something you never saw before,” the mayor insisted. “We’re trying to build a decent town.”
    The woman took the clean clothes off the line and carried them into the bedroom. The mayor followed her with his eyes until he heard the answer:
    “This was a decent town before you people came.”
    He didn’t wait for any coffee. “Ingrates,” he said. “We’re giving you land and you still complain.” The woman didn’t answer. But when the mayor crossed the kitchen on his way
to the street, she muttered, leaning over the stove:
    “It’ll be worse here. But we’ll remember you people from the dead out back there.”
    The mayor tried to sleep a siesta while the launches were arriving. But he couldn’t fight the heat. The swelling on his cheek had begun to subside. Still, he didn’t feel well. He followed the imperceptible course of the river for two hours, listening to the buzz of a harvest fly inside the room. He didn’t think about anything.
    When he heard the motors of the launches he got undressed, dried his sweat with a towel, and changed his uniform. Then he hunted for the harvest fly, grabbed it between his thumb and forefinger, and went into the street. Out of the crowd waiting for the launches came a clean, well-dressed child who cut off his path with a plastic submachine gun. The mayor gave him the harvest fly.
    A moment later, sitting in Moisés the Syrian’s store, he watched the docking maneuvers of the launches. The port had been boiling for ten minutes. The mayor felt a heaviness in his stomach and a touch of headache, and he remembered the woman’s bad wishes. Then he calmed down and watched the passengers coming down the wooden gangplank, stretching their muscles after eight hours of immobility.
    “The same mess,” he said.
    Moisés the Syrian brought him to the realization of something new: a circus was coming. The mayor noticed that it was true, even though he couldn’t say why. Maybe because of the poles and colored cloth all piled up on the roof of the launch, and because of two women completely alike wrapped in identical flowered dresses, like a single person repeated.
    “At least a circus is coming,” he murmured.
    Moisés the Syrian talked about wild animals and jugglers.
But the mayor thought about the circus in a different way. With his legs stretched out, he looked at the tips of