The Scandal of the Century by Gabriel García Márquez

Author:Gabriel García Márquez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

June 6, 1958: Caracas Without Water

If a downpour falls this morning, this feature is telling a lie. But if it does not rain before June, read it…

After listening to the 7:00 a.m. radio news bulletin, Samuel Burkart, a German engineer who lives alone in a penthouse on Avenida Caracas, in San Bernardino, went to the corner store to buy a bottle of mineral water to shave with. It was June 6, 1958. Unlike every other day since Samuel Burkart arrived in Caracas, ten years ago, that morning seemed mortally calm. From the nearby Avenida Urdaneta, the noise of cars or the explosions of scooters could not be heard. Caracas seemed like a ghost town. The sweltering heat of recent days had eased a little, but in the high, dense blue sky, not a single cloud moved. In the gardens of the country houses, in the little island of the Plaza de la Estrella, the shrubs were dead. The trees of the avenues, ordinarily covered in red and yellow flowers at this time of year, stretched long bare branches up to the sky.

Samuel Burkart had to wait in line in the store to be served by the two Portuguese shopkeepers who were talking to their frightened clientele about the same topic, the only topic over the last forty days, which that morning had burst out of the radio and the newspapers like a dramatic explosion: Caracas had run out of water. The previous night they had announced dramatic restrictions imposed by INOS (National Institute of Sanitation Works) on the last 100,000 cubic meters stored in La Mariposa reservoir. As of that morning, as a consequence of the most intense summer Caracas has suffered for seventy-nine years, the water supply had been suspended. The last reserves were destined for strictly essential services. The government had been making arrangements of extreme urgency for the last twenty-four hours to keep the population from dying of thirst. To guarantee public order, they had taken emergency measures, which civic brigades composed of students and professionals would be in charge of fulfilling. Newspapers, reduced to editions of four pages, were allocated the task of disclosing official instructions to the civilian population about the way they should proceed to overcome the crisis and prevent panic.

One thing hadn’t occurred to Burkart: his neighbors had to make coffee with mineral water and had used up the store’s entire supply in an hour. As a precaution against what might happen over the following days, he decided to stock up on fruit juice. But the Portuguese shopkeeper told him that the sale of fruit juice and soft drinks was rationed by order of the authorities. Each customer had the right to a quota limited to one can of fruit juice and one soda per day, until further orders. Burkart bought a can of orange juice and opted for a bottle of lemonade to shave with. Only when he attempted it did he discover that lemonade curdles the soap and does not produce foam.

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