Free No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez, J. S. Bernstein

the begonias.
    ‘It’s lunchtime,’ he said.
    ‘Thereis no lunch.’
    He shrugged. He tried to block up the holes in the patio wall to prevent the children coming into the kitchen. When he came back into the hall, lunch was on the table.
    During the course of lunch, the colonel realized that his wife was making an effort not to cry. This certainty alarmed him. He knew his wife’s character, naturally hard, and hardened even more by forty years of bitterness.The death of her son had not wrung a single tear out of her.
    He fixed a reproving look directly on her eyes. She bit her lips, dried her eyelids on her sleeve, and continued eating lunch.
    ‘You have no consideration,’ she said.
    The colonel didn’t speak.
    ‘You’re willful, stubborn, and inconsiderate,’ she repeated. She crossed her knife and fork on the plate, but immediately rectified their positionssuperstitiously. ‘An entire lifetime eating dirt just so that now it turns out that I deserve less consideration than a rooster.’
    ‘That’s different,’ the colonel said.
    ‘It’s the same thing,’ the woman replied. ‘You ought to realize that I’m dying; this thing I have is not a sickness but a slow death.’
    The colonel didn’t speak until he finished eating his lunch.
    ‘Ifthe doctor guarantees methat by selling the rooster you’ll get rid of your asthma, I’ll sell him immediately,’ he said. ‘But if not, not.’
    That afternoon he took the rooster to the pit. On his return he found his wife on the verge of an attack. She was walking up and down the hall, her hair down her back, her arms spread wide apart, trying to catch her breath above the whistling in her lungs. She was there until earlyevening. Then she went to bed without speaking to her husband.
    She mouthed prayers until a little after curfew. Then the colonel got ready to put out the lamp. But she objected.
    ‘I don’t want to die in the dark,’ she said.
    The colonel left the lamp on the floor. He began to feel exhausted. He wished he could forget everything, sleep forty-four days in one stretch, and wake up on January 20that three in the afternoon, in the pit, and at the exact moment to let the rooster loose. But he felt himself threatened by the sleeplessness of his wife.
    ‘It’s the same story as always,’ she began a moment later. ‘We put up with hunger so others can eat. It’s been the same story for forty years.’
    The colonel kept silent until his wife paused to ask him if he was awake. He answered that he was.The woman continued in a smooth, fluent, implacable tone.
    ‘Everybody will win with the rooster except us. We’re the only ones who don’t have a cent to bet.’
    ‘The owner of the rooster is entitled to twenty per cent.’
    ‘You were also entitled to get a position when they made you break your back for them in the elections,’the woman replied. ‘You were also entitled to the veteran’s pension afterrisking your neck in the civil war. Now everybody has his future assured and you’re dying of hunger, completely alone.’
    ‘I’m not alone,’ the colonel said.
    He tried to explain, but sleep overtook him. She kept talking dully until she realized that her husband was sleeping. Then she got out of the mosquito net and walked up and down the living room in the darkness. There she continued talking.The colonel called her at dawn.
    She appeared at the door, ghostlike, illuminated from below by the lamp which was almost out. She put it out before getting into the mosquito netting. But she kept talking.
    ‘We’re going to do one thing,’ the colonel interrupted her.
    ‘The only thing we can do is sell the rooster,’ said the woman.
    ‘We can also sell the clock.’
    ‘They won’t buy it.’
    ‘TomorrowI’ll try to see if Alvaro will give me the forty pesos.’
    ‘He won’t give them to you.’
    ‘Then we’ll sell the picture.’
    When the woman spoke again, she was outside the mosquito net again. The colonel smelled her breath