Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa, J.S. Bernstein

scratching the ground under the hay, saying: ‘The comb must still be here.’ And the man said: ‘They closed up the stable fifteen years ago. It’s full of rubbish now.’ And Nabo said: ‘Rubbish doesn’tcollect in one afternoon. Until I find the comb I won’t move out of here.’
    On the following day, after they’d fastened the door again, they heard the difficult movements inside once more. No one moved afterward. No one said anything again when the first creaks were heard and the door began to give way under unusual pressure. Inside something like the panting of a penned animal was heard. Finallythe groan of rusty hinges was heard as they broke when Nabo shook his head again. ‘Until I find the comb, I won’t go to the choir,’ he said. ‘It must be around here somewhere.’ And he dug in the hay, breaking it, scratching the ground, until the man said: ‘All right Nabo. If the only thing you’re waiting for to come to the choir is to find the comb, go look for it.’ He leaned forward, his facedarkened by a patient haughtiness. He put his hands against the barrier and said: ‘Go ahead Nabo. I’ll see that nobody stops you.’
    And then the door gave way and the huge bestial Negro with the harsh scar marked on his forehead (in spite of the fact that fifteen years had passed) came out stumbling over the furniture, his fists raised and menacing, still with the rope theyhad tied him with fifteenyears before (when he was a little black boy who looked after the horses); and (before reaching the courtyard) he passed by the girl, who remained seated, the crank of the gramophone still in her hand since the night before (when she saw the unchained black force she remembered something that at one time must have been a word) and he reached the courtyard (before finding the stable), afterhaving knocked down the living-room mirror with his shoulder, but without seeing the girl (neither beside the gramophone nor in the mirror), and he stood with his face to the sun, his eyes closed, blind (while inside the noise of the broken mirror was still going on), and he ran aimlessly, like a blindfolded horse instinctively looking for the stable door that fifteen years of imprisonment had erasedfrom his memory but not from his instincts (since that remote day when he had combed the horse’s tail and was left befuddled for the rest of his life), and leaving behind catastrophe, dissolution, and chaos like a blindfolded bull in a roomful of lamps, he reached the back yard (still without finding the stable), and scratched on the ground with the tempestuous fury with which he had knocked downthe mirror, thinking perhaps that by scratching on the ground he could make the smell of mare’s urine rise up again, until he finally reached the stable doors and pushed them too soon, falling inside on his face, in his death agony perhaps, but still confused by that fierce animalness that a half-second before had prevented him from hearing the girl, who raised the crank when she heard him passand remembered, drooling, but without moving from the chair, without moving her mouth but twirling the crank of the gramophone in the air, remembered the only word she had ever learned to say in her life, and shouted it from the living room: ‘Nabo! Nabo!’

Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses
    Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave. Red and white roses, the kind that she grows to decorate altars and wreaths. The morning has been saddened by the taciturn and overwhelming winter that has set me to remembering the knoll where the townspeople abandon their dead. It’s a bare, treeless place,swept only by the providential crumbs that return after the wind has passed. Now that it’s stopped raining and the noonday sun has probably hardened the soapy slope, I should be able to reach the grave where my child’s body rests, mingled now, dispersed among snails and roots.
    She is prostrate