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

impregnated with medicinal herbs.
    ‘They won’t buy it,’ she said.
    ‘We’ll see,’ the colonel said gently, without a trace of change in his voice. ‘Now, go to sleep. If we can’t sellanything tomorrow, we’ll think of something else.’
    Hetried to keep his eyes open but sleep broke his resolve. He fell to the bottom of a substance without time and without space, where the words of his wife had a different significance. But a moment later he felt himself being shaken by the shoulder.
    ‘Answer me.’
    The colonel didn’t know if he had heard those words before or after he had slept.Dawn was breaking. The window stood out in Sunday’s green clarity. He thought he had a fever. His eyes burned and he had to make a great effort to clear his head.
    ‘What will we do if we can’t sell anything?’ the woman repeated.
    ‘By then it will be January 20th,’ the colonel said, completely awake. ‘They’ll pay the twenty per cent that very afternoon.’
    ‘If the rooster wins,’ the woman said.‘But if he loses. It hasn’t occurred to you that the rooster might lose.’
    ‘He’s one rooster that can’t lose.’
    ‘But suppose he loses.’
    ‘There are still forty-four days left to begin to think about that,’ the colonel said.
    The woman lost her patience.
    ‘And meanwhile what do we eat?’ she asked, and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel night shirt. She shook him hard.
    It had takenthe colonel seventy-five years – the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute – to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:
    ‘Shit.’

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

    CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
    COLLECTED STORIES
    IN EVIL HOUR
    INNOCENT ERÉNDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
    LEAF STORM
    LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
    LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
    MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
    NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
    OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
    ONE HUNDRED YEARSOF SOLITUDE
    STRANGE PILGRIMS
    THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
    THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
    THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

    www.penguin.com

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
    ‘My favourite book by one of the world’s greatest authors. You’re in the hands of a master’ Mariella Frostrup
    ‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishopwas coming on …’
    When newly-wed Ángela Vicario and Bayardo San Román are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Ángela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.
    As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night’srevelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Ángela’s brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.
    ‘A masterpiece’
Evening Standard
    ‘A work of high explosiveness – the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel’
The Times
    ‘Brilliant writer, brilliant book’
Guardian

    www.penguin.com

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

COLLECTED STORIES
    ‘The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical’ John Updike
    Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel García Márquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communitiesin his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo’s revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Márquez’s stories are a delight.
    ‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Márquez’
Guardian
    ‘Of all theliving authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel García