Innocent Erendira and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Gregory Rabassa

Author:Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Gregory Rabassa [Márquez, Gabriel García & Rabassa, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141917405
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Other Side of Death

WITHOUT KNOWING WHY, he awoke with a start. A sharp smell of violets and formaldehyde, robust and broad, was coming from the other room, mingling with the aroma of the newly opened flowers sent out by the dawning garden. He tried to calm down, to recover the spirit he had suddenly lost in sleep. It must have been dawn now, because outside, in the garden, the sprinkler had begun to sing amidst the vegetables and the sky was blue through the open window. He looked about the shadowy room, trying to explain that sudden, unexpected awakening. He had the impression, the physical certainty, that someone had come in while he had been asleep. Yet he was alone, and the door, locked from the inside, showed no signs of violence. Up above the air over the window a morning star was awakening. He was quiet for a moment, as if trying to loosen the nervous tension that had pushed him to the surface of sleep, and closing his eyes, face up, he began to seek the broken thread of serenity again. His clustered blood broke up in his throat and beyond that, in his chest, his heart despaired robustly, marking, marking an accentuated and light rhythm as if it were coming from some headlong running. He reviewed the previous minutes in his mind. Maybe he’d had a strange dream. It might have been a nightmare. No. There was nothing particular, no reason for any start in “that.”

They were traveling in a train—I remember it now—through a countryside—I’ve had this dream frequently—like a still life, sown with false, artificial trees bearing fruit of razors, scissors, and other diverse items—I remember now that I have to get my hair cut—barbershop instruments. He’d had that dream a lot of times but it had never produced that scare in him. There behind a tree was his brother, the other one, his twin, signaling—this happened to me somewhere in real life—for him to stop the train. Convinced of the futility of his message, he began to run after the coach until he fell, panting, his mouth full of froth. It was his absurd, irrational dream, of course, but there was no reason for it to have caused that restless awakening. He closed his eyes again, his temples still pounded by the current of blood that was rising firmly in him like a clenched fist. The train went into an arid, sterile, boring geography, and a pain he felt in his left leg made him turn his attention from the landscape. He observed that on his middle toe—I mustn’t keep on wearing these tight shoes—he had a tumor. In a natural way, and as if he were used to it, he took a screwdriver out of his pocket and extracted the head of the tumor with it. He placed it carefully in a little blue box—can you see colors in dreams?—and he glimpsed, peeping out of the wound, the end of a greasy, yellow string.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.