Until August by Gabriel García Márquez

Author:Gabriel García Márquez [García Márquez, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

5

The next August 16 was now set to be her destiny. She found the island in disarray due to an international tourism convention, not a single hotel room available, the beaches covered in tents and trailers. After spending two hours looking for anywhere to sleep, she turned to her forgotten Hotel del Senador, renovated, clean, and more expensive, but without any of the staff from her earlier visits.

There was no one to appeal to for a room. More than that: a respectable-looking guest was protesting indignantly because his twice-confirmed reservation did not appear on the list. He had the phlegmatic calm of an honorable chancellor, a deliberate and gentle voice, and a shocking talent for chivalrous insults. The only employee at the reception desk was phoning around trying to find him a room in another hotel. Eager to share his fury, the guest turned to Ana Magdalena. “This island is in chaos,” he said, and showed her the official proof of his confirmed reservation. She could not read it without her glasses, but understood his indignation. Finally the employee interrupted them with the triumphant news that there was one room available—only a two-star hotel, but it was clean and well situated. Ana Magdalena hurried to ask:

“There wouldn’t be another for me, would there?”

The employee asked over the phone and there was not. Then the guest picked up his suitcase with his left hand and with the other took Ana Magdalena by the arm with an unusual familiarity that struck her as rather outrageous.

“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll go and see.”

They went in a new car, and he drove along the very edge of the lagoon. He said he liked the Hotel del Senador. “I do, too, because of the lagoon,” she said, “and now I see they’ve renovated.” “Two years ago,” he said. She realized he was an assiduous visitor to the island, and she told him that she too had been coming here for years, to place a bouquet of gladioli on her mother’s grave.

“Gladioli?” he asked in surprise, as he hadn’t known there were any on the island. “I thought you could only find them in Holland.”

“Those are tulips,” she clarified.

She explained that gladioli are not very common, but someone had brought them to the island and they had thrived, just along the coast and in some other interior villages. For her they were so important, she concluded, that if the day came when there weren’t any she would arrange for someone to grow them.

It began to drizzle, but it didn’t look set to last. He thought the opposite, because the weather in August always seemed erratic. He looked her up and down, with her simple clothes for the ferry crossing, and suggested she would need something more for the cemetery. But she reassured him: she was used to it.

Their route took them around the lagoon to the poorest edge of the village. The hotel was deplorable, undoubtedly a place for assignations where they didn’t ask to see identification at reception.

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