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

before her saints. She’s remained abstracted since I stopped moving in the room, when I failed in thefirst attempt to reach the altar and pick the brightest and freshest roses. Maybe I could have done it today, but the little lamp blinked and she, recovered from her ecstasy, raised her head and looked toward the corner where the chair is. She must have thought: ‘It’s the wind again,’ because it’s true that something creaked beside the altar and the room rocked for an instant, as if the level ofthe stagnant memories in it for so long had shifted. Then I understood that I would have to wait for another occasion to get the roses because she was still awake, looking at the chair, and she would have heard the sound of my hands beside her face. Now I’ve got to wait until she leaves the room in a moment and goes to the one next door to sleep her measured and invariable Sunday siesta. Maybe thenI can leave with the roses and be back beforeshe returns to this room and remains looking at the chair.
    Last Sunday was more difficult. I had to wait almost two hours for her to fall into ecstasy. She seemed restless, preoccupied, as if she had been tormented by the certainty that her solitude in the house had suddenly become less intense. She took several turns about the room with the bouquetof roses before leaving it on the altar. Then she went out into the hallway, turned in, and went to the next room. I knew that she was looking for the lamp. And later, when she passed by the door again and I saw her in the light of the hall with her dark little jacket and her pink stockings, it seemed to me now that she was still the girl who forty years ago had leaned over my bed in that sameroom and said: ‘Now that they’ve put in the toothpicks your eyes are open and hard.’ She was just the same, as if time hadn’t passed since that remote August afternoon when the women brought her into the room and showed her the corpse and told her: ‘Weep, he was like a brother to you,’ and she leaned against the wall, weeping, obeying, still soaked from the rain.
    For three or four Sundays nowI’ve been trying to get to where the roses are, but she’s been vigilant in front of the altar, keeping watch over the roses with a frightened diligence that I hadn’t known in her during the twenty years she’s been living in the house. Last Sunday, when she went out to get the lamp, I managed to put a bouquet of the best roses together. At no moment had I been closer to fulfilling my desires. Butwhen I was getting ready to return to the chair, I heard her steps in the corridor again. I rearranged the roses on the altar quickly and then I saw her appear in the doorway with the lamp held high.
    She was wearing her dark little jacket and the pink stockings, but on her face there was something like the phosphorescence of a revelation. She didn’t seem then to be the woman who for twenty yearshas been growing roses in the garden, but the same child who on that August afternoon had been brought into the next room so that she could change her clothes and who was coming back now with a lamp, fat andgrown old, forty years later.
    My shoes still have the hard crust of clay that had formed on them that afternoon in spite of the fact that they’ve been drying beside the extinguished stovefor forty years. One day I went to get them. That was after they’d closed up the doors, taken down the bread and the sprig of aloe from the entrance-way, and taken away the furniture. All the furniture except for the chair in the corner which has served me as a seat all this time. I knew that the shoes had been set to dry and they didn’t even remember them when they abandoned the house. That’s whyI went to get them.
    She returned many years later. So much time had passed that the smell of musk in the room had blended in with the smell of the dust, with the dry and tiny breath of the insects. I was alone in the house, sitting in the corner, waiting. And I had learned to