The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez & Gregory Rabassa

Author:Gabriel García Márquez & Gregory Rabassa
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141917252
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

SHORTLY BEFORE NIGHTFALL, when we finished taking out the rotten husks of the cows and putting a little order into that fabulous disarray, we were still unable to tell if the corpse looked like its legendary image. We scraped it with fish scalers to get the deep-sea shark suckers off, we washed it down with creolin and rock salt to fix up the marks of putrefaction, we powdered his face with starch to hide the burlap repairs and paraffin stuffing that we had to use to restore the face that had been pecked away by dung-heap birds, we gave him back the color of life with woman’s rouge and lipstick, but not even the glass eyes stuck into the empty sockets could give him the stamp of authority he needed if we were to put him on display for the masses. In the cabinet room meanwhile we called for the unity of all against the despotism of centuries so we could divide up the booty of his power in equal parts, because everyone had come home under the spell of the surreptitious news of his death that could not be contained, liberals and conservatives had returned in reconciliation with the embers of so many years of postponed ambitions, generals of the high command who had lost their compass of authority, the last three civilian ministers, the archbishop primate, all those whom he would not have wanted there were sitting around the long walnut table trying to come to an agreement on the manner in which the news of that enormous death was to be released so as to avoid the premature explosion of mobs in the street, first a bulletin number one at the start of the first night concerning a slight indisposition which had obliged him to cancel all of his excellency’s public appearances and civilian and military audiences, then a second medical bulletin in which it was announced that the illustrious patient had been obliged to remain in his private quarters due to an indisposition in keeping with his years, and lastly, without any announcement, the heavy tolling of the cathedral bells on the radiant dawn of the hot August Tuesday of an official death which no one was ever to know for certain that really was his or not. We were defenseless against that evidence, compromised by a pestilential corpse that we were incapable of replacing in the world because he had refused in his senile insistence to take any decision concerning the destiny of the nation after he was gone, with the invincible stubbornness of an old man he had resisted all suggestions made to him ever since the government had been moved to the ministry buildings with their sundrenched glass and he had stayed behind living alone in the deserted palace of his absolute power, we would find him walking about in dreams, waving his arms in the midst of the cows’ destruction with no one to command except the blind men, the lepers and

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