It was an empty afternoon. As far as the eye noo see, fabriel town was carpeted with flowers. The old colonel has almost nothing left to lose. They might not have a ne I find this book very interesting.
I found this story charming and sad; and impregnated with the realities I have come to know in many years living all around Latin America. The colonel picked it up on the blotter. The colonel was getting ready to go out when his tthe seized him by the sleeve of his coat. Refresh and try again. I find this amazing because: Only then did she notice how much her husband had aged.
His wife noticed the change. As readers, it is our duty to not only love our favourite writers in all their guises and forms, but to be critical enough to be able to distinguish between their great works and truly exceptional works.
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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, classics lovers. The woman jumped toward the mosquito netting for her rosary. The colonel smiled. A moment later he put out the light and sank into thought in a darkness rent by the lightning. He remembered Macondo. The colonel had waited ten years for the promises of Neerlandia to be fulfilled. In the drowsiness of the siesta he saw yellow, dusty train pull in, with men and women and animals suffocating from the heat, piled up even on the roofs of the cars.
It was the banana fever. In twenty-four hours they had transformed the town. And he left Macondo on the return train, Wednesday, June 27, at 2. It took him nearly half a century to realize that he hadn't had a moment's peace since the surrender at Neerlandia. He opened his eyes. If he doesn't come in ten minutes I'll leave, the colonel promised himself after two hours of waiting. But he waited twenty minutes more. He was getting set to leave when Sabas entered the office followed by a group of workers.
He passed back and forth in front of the colonel without looking at him. Noon was stifling. The office shone with the shimmering of the street. Dulled by the heat, the colonel involuntarily closed his eyes and at once began to dream of his wife. Sabas's wife came in on tiptoe. She spoke in the shadow when she closed the window. The colonel felt impatient, tormented by sleepiness and by the rambling woman who went directly from dreams to the mystery of the reincarnation.
He was waiting for a pause to say goodbye when Sabas entered the office with his foreman. The foreman opened the blinds to count the money.
Sabas saw the colonel at the back of the office but didn't show an reaction. He kept talking with the foreman. The colonel straightened up at the point when the two men were getting ready to leave the office again. Sabas stopped before opening the door. The colonel felt the five longest seconds of his life passing. He clenched his teeth. Then Sabas finished opening the door. I'll be right back.
Then he went out to walk around the town which was paralyzed in its Sunday siesta. There was no one at the tailor's. The doctor's office was closed. No one was watching the goods set out at the Syrians' stalls.
The river was a sheet of steel. A man at the waterfront was sleeping across four oil drums, his face protected from the sun by a hat. The colonel went home, certain that he was the only thing moving in town. His wife was waiting for him with a complete lunch. During lunch, the colonel told her the events of the last three hours.
She listened to him impatiently. She assumed an energetic attitude. That morning, she had put the house in order and was dressed very strangely, in her husband's old shoes, an oilcloth apron, and a rag tied around her head with two knots at the ears. She had spent the morning mentally organizing the budget for the next three years without their Friday agony. She had made a list of the essentials they needed, without forgetting a pair of new shoes for the colonel. She set aside a place in the bedroom for the mirror.
The momentary frustration of her plans left her with a confused sensation of shame and resentment. She took a short siesta. When she got up, the colonel was sitting in the patio. We will be able to count on that money fifty years from now. He thought of Sabas, alone in his office, preparing himself for his daily injection in front of the electric fan.
He had his answer ready. She followed him to the front door with desperate anxiety. But the woman insisted. She led him to the bedroom where her husband was seated on the throne like bed, in his underwear, his colorless eyes fixed on the doctor.
The colonel waited until the doctor had heated the glass tube with the patient's urine, sniffed the odor, and made an approving gesture to Sabas. When I went to look for you this afternoon, I couldn't even see your hat.
The doctor put a glass tube with a blood sample in his jacket pocket. Then he straightened out the things in his bag. The colonel thought he was getting ready to leave. He looked at the clock without showing impatience. Sabas, putting on his boots, suddenly turned to the colonel: 'Well, friend, what's happening with the rooster? The colonel regained his breath. He waited for Sabas to say something more, but he didn't. Sabas put on a leather zippered jacket and got ready to leave the bedroom.
But we have to wait till Thursday. There's always the danger he'll come out the pit shot to death. The doctor stayed in the living room, detained by Sabas's wife, who asked him for a remedy 'for those things which come over one suddenly and which one doesn't know what they are.
Sabas opened the safe, stuffed money into all his pockets, and held out four bills to the colonel. A barge loaded with sugar cane, was moving down the thread of current. The colonel found the doctor strangely impervious. In succession he greeted the Syrians seated at the doors of their shops. At the door of the doctor's office, the colonel expressed his opinion of the sale of the rooster. He knocked on the door, since he didn't find his keys in his pockets.
Then he faced the colonel's disbelief. He accompanied her to the Syrians' stalls, pondering the doctor's revelations. He found Alvaro playing roulette in the pool hall. The place was sweltering on Sunday night.
The heat seemed more intense because of the vibrations of the radio turned up full blast. The colonel amused himself with the brightly colored numbers painted on a large black oilcloth cover and lit by an oil lantern placed on a box in the center of the table. Alvaro insisted on losing on twenty- three.
Following the game over his shoulder, the colonel observed that the eleven turned up four times in nine spins. He didn't bet on the next spin. He took some money out of his pants pocket, and with it a sheet of paper. He gave the paper to the colonel under the table. The colonel put the clandestine note in his pocket. Alvaro bet heavily on the eleven. A group of neighboring players took their bets off the other numbers and bet on eleven after the enormous colored wheel had already begun to turn.
The colonel felt oppressed. For the first time he felt the fascination, agitation, and bitterness of gambling. The five won. Trust to love. The gamblers scattered with their hands in the air. The colonel felt the dry snap, articulate and cold, of a rifle being cocked behind his back.
He realized that he had been caught fatally in a police raid with the clandestine paper in his pocket. He turned halfway around without raising his hands. And then he saw, close up, for the first time in his life, the man who had shot his son. The man was directly in front of him, with his rifle barrel aimed at the colonel's belly. He was small, Indian-looking, with weather-beaten skin, and his breath smelled like a child's. The colonel gritted his teeth and gently pushed the rifle barrel away with the tips of his fingers.
He confronted two round little bat eyes. In an instant, he felt himself being swallowed up by those eyes, crushed, digested, and expelled immediately.
He knew it in his bones when he was cutting up the fruit for the rooster's breakfast in the kitchen. Then he opened the door and the sight of the patio confirmed his feeling. It was a marvelous patio, with the grass and the trees, and the cubicle with the privy floating in the clear air, one millimeter above the ground.
His wife stayed in bed until nine. When she appeared in the kitchen, the colonel had already straightened up the housed and was talking to the children in a circle around the rooster. She had to make a detour to get to the stove. She glowered in the animal's direction. Nothing about the rooster deserved resentment. He was ready for training. His neck and his feathered purple thighs, his saw-toothed crest: the animal had taken on a slender figure, a defenseless air.
The colonel hung the mirror on the hook to shave. He tried to make his movements match those in the mirror. By the light of the fire her face seemed to be formed of the same material as the stove. Without noticing, his eyes fixed on her, the colonel continued shaving himself by touch as he had for many years. The woman thought, in a long silence. December had shriveled the flora in his gut.
He suffered a disappointment that morning trying to put on his new shoes. But after trying several times he realized that it was a wasted effort, and put on his patent-leather ones. His wife noticed the change. Since it still was not time for the launches, he waited for Sabas in his office. But they informed him that he wouldn't be back until Monday.
He didn't lose his patience despite having foreseen this setback. He was a placid Oriental, encased up to his ears in smooth, stretched skin, and he had the clumsy movements of a drowned man. In fact, he seemed as if he had just been rescued from the water.
And you? Only then did he discover the circus. He recognized the patched tent on the roof of the mail boat amid a pile of colored objects. For a second he lost the postmaster while he looked for the wild animals among the crates piled up on the other launches. He didn't find them. He spoke to his wife in a pidgin of Arabic and Spanish.
She replied from the back of the store. He made a comment to himself, and then translated his worry for the colonel. The boys will steal it to sell it to the circus. There the loud clamor from the cockfight took him by surprise. A passer-by said something to him about his rooster. Only then did he remember that this was the day set for the trials. He passed the post office. A moment later he had sunk into the turbulent atmosphere of the pit. His adversary was a sad ashen rooster.
The colonel felt no emotion. There was a succession of identical attacks. A momentary engagement of feathers and feet and necks in the middle of an enthusiastic ovation. Knocked against the planks of the barrier, the adversary did a somersault and returned to the attack. His rooster didn't attack. He rebuffed every attack, and landed again in exactly the same spot. But now his feet weren't trembling. Hernan jumped the barrier, picked him up with both hands, and showed him to the crowd in the stands.
There was a frenetic explosion of applause and shouting. The colonel noticed the disproportion between the enthusiasm of the applause and the intensity of the fight. It seemed to him a farce to which - voluntarily and consciously- the roosters had also lent themselves.
Impelled by a slightly disdainful curiosity, he examined the circular pit. An excited crowd was hurtling down the stands toward the pit. The colonel observed the confusion of hot, anxious, terribly alive faces. They were new people. All the new people in town.
He relived - with foreboding - an instant which had been erased on the edge of his memory. Then he leaped the barrier, made his way through the packed crowd in the pit, and confronted Hernan's calm eyes. They looked at each other without blinking. And he said nothing more because the warm deep throbbing of the animal made him shudder.
He thought that he had never had such an alive thing in his hands before. A new ovation interrupted him. The colonel felt intimidated.
He made his way again, without looking at anybody, stunned by the applause and the shouts, and went into the street with his rooster under his arm. The whole town - the lower-class people - came out to watch him go by followed by the school children. A gigantic negro standing on a table with a snake wrapped around his neck was selling medicine without a license at a corner of the plaza. A large group returning from the harbor had stopped to listen to his spiel.
But when the colonel passed with the rooster, their attention shifted to him. The way home had never been so long. He had no regrets. For a long time the town had a lain in a sort of stupor, ravaged by ten years of history. That afternoon- another Friday without a letter — the people had awakened. The colonel remembered another era. He saw himself with his wife and his son watching under an umbrella a show which was not interrupted despite the rain.
He remembered the party's leaders, scrupulously groomed, fanning themselves to the beat of the music in the patio, of his house. He almost relived the painful resonance of the bass drum in his intestines. He walked along the street parallel to the harbor and if there, too, found the tumultuous Election Sunday crowd of long ago. They were watching the circus unloading. He continued home, self-absorbed, still hearing scattered voices, as if the remnants of the ovation in the pit were pursuing him.
At the door he addressed the children: 'Everyone go home,' he said. His wife came out of the bedroom choking. He changed the water in the can, pursued by his wife's frantic voice. He discovered, without surprise, that it produced neither remorse nor compassion in him.
And then looking through his pockets, he added with a sort of bottomless sweetness: 'The rooster's not for sale. She felt him to be completely human, but untouchable, as if she were seeing him on a movie screen. The colonel took a roll of bills out of the closet, added what he had in his pockets to it, counted the total, and put it back in the closet. He went back to the closet for the box, cleaned the soles with a rag, and put the shoes in the box, just as his wife had brought them Sunday night.
She didn't move. The colonel waited for his wife to finish her rosary to turn out the lamp. But he couldn't sleep. He heard the bells for the movie classifications, and almost at once - three hours later- the curfew. The gravelly breathing of his wife became anguished with the chilly night air.
The colonel still had his eyes open when she spoke to him in a calm, conciliatory voice: 'You're awake. The action opens with the colonel preparing to go to the funeral of a town musician whose death is notable because he was the first to die from natural causes in many years. The novel is set during the years of 'La Violencia' in Colombia, when martial law and censorship prevail. The main characters of the novel are not named, adding to the feeling of insignificance of an individual living in Colombia.
The colonel and his wife, who have lost their son to political repression, are struggling with poverty and financial instability.
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