Free Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa, J.S. Bernstein Page A

out at the street again, watching the passers-by of the dusking city. For an instant there was a murky silence in the restaurant. A peacefulnessbroken only by José’s fiddling about in the cupboard. Suddenly the woman stopped looking out into the street and spoke with a tender, soft, different voice.
    ‘Do you really love me, Pepillo?’
    ‘I do,’ José said dryly, not looking at her.
    ‘In spite of what I’ve said to you?’ the woman asked.
    ‘What did you say to me?’ José asked, still without any inflection in his voice, still without lookingat her.
    ‘That business about a million pesos,’ the woman said.
    ‘I’d already forgotten,’ José said.
    ‘So do you love me?’ the woman asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said José.
    There was a pause. José kept moving about, his face turned towards the cabinets, still not looking at the woman. She blew out another mouthful of smoke, rested her bust on the counter, and then, cautiously roguishly, biting her tongue beforesaying it, as if speaking on tiptoe:
    ‘Even if you didn’t go to bed with me?’ she asked.
    And only then did José turn to look at her.
    ‘I love you so much that I wouldn’t go to bed with you,’ he said. Then he walked over to where she was. He stood looking into her face, his powerful arms leaning on the counter in front of her, looking into her eyes. He said: ‘I love you so much that every nightI’d kill the man who goes with you.’
    At the first instant the woman seemed perplexed. Then she looked at the man attentively, with a wavering expression of compassion and mockery. Then she had a moment of brief disconcerted silence. And then she laughed noisily.
    ‘You’re jealous, José. That’s wild, you’re jealous!’
    José blushed again with frank, almost shameful timidity, as might have happenedto a child who’d revealed all his secrets all of a sudden. He said:
    ‘This afternoon you don’t seem to understand anything, queen.’ And he wiped himself with the rag. He said:
    ‘This bad life is brutalizing you.’
    But now the woman had changed her expression.
    ‘So, then,’ she said. And she looked into his eyes again, with a strange glow in her look, confused and challenging at the same time.
    ‘So you’re not jealous.’
    ‘In a way I am,’ José said. ‘But it’s not the way you think.’
    He loosened his collar and continued wiping himself, drying his throat with the cloth.
    ‘So?’ the woman asked.
    ‘The fact is I love you so much that I don’t like your doing it,’ José said.
    ‘What?’ the woman asked.
    ‘This business of going with a different man every day,’ José said.
    ‘Would you really killhim to stop him from going with me?’ the woman asked.
    ‘Not to stop him from going with you, no,’ José said. ‘I’d kill him because he
went
with you.’
    ‘It’s the same thing,’ the woman said.
    The conversation had reached an exciting density. The woman was speaking in a soft, low, fascinated voice. Her face was almost stuck up against the man’s healthy, peaceful face, as he stood motionless, asif bewitched by the vapor of the words.
    ‘That’s true,’ José said.
    ‘So,’ the woman said, and reached out her hand to stroke the man’s rough arm. With the other she tossed away her butt. ‘So you’re capable of killing a man?’
    ‘For what I told you, yes,’ José said. And his voice took on an almost dramatic stress.
    The woman broke into convulsive laughter, with an obvious mocking intent.
    ‘How awful,José. How awful,’ she said, still laughing. ‘José killing a man. Who would have known that behind the fat and sanctimonious man who never makes me pay, who cooks me a steak every day and has fun talking to me until I find a man, there lurks a murderer. How awful, José! You scare me!’
    José was confused. Maybe he felt a little indignation. Maybe, when the woman started laughing, he felt defrauded.
    ‘You’re drunk, silly,’ he said. ‘Go get some sleep. You don’t even feel like