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

make out the sound of rotting wood, the flutter of the air becoming old in the closed bedrooms. That was when she came.She had stood in the door with a suitcase in her hand, wearing a green hat and the same little cotton jacket that she hadn’t taken off ever since then. She was still a girl. She hadn’t begun to get fat and her ankles didn’t swell under her stockings as they do now. I was covered with dust and cobwebs when she opened the door, and, somewhere in the room, the cricket who’d been singing for twentyyears fell silent. But in spite of that, in spite of the cobwebs and the dust, the sudden reluctance of the cricket and the new age of the new arrival, I recognized in her the girl who on that stormy August afternoon had gone with me to collect nests in the stable. Just the way she was, standing in the doorway with the suitcase in her hand and her green hat on, she looked as if she were suddenly goingto shout, say the same thing she’d said when they found me face up on the hay-covered stable floor still grasping the railing of the broken stairs. When she opened the door wide the hinges creaked and the dust from the ceiling fell in clumps, as if someone had started hammering on the ridge of the roof, then she paused on the threshold, coming halfway into the room after, and with the voice ofsomeone calling a sleeping person she said: ‘Boy! Boy!’ And I remained still in the chair, rigid, with my feet stretched out.
    I thought she had come only to see the room, but she continued living in the house. She aired out the room and it was as if she had opened her suitcase and her old smell of musk had come from it. The others had taken the furniture and clothing away in trunks. She had takenaway only the smells of the room, and twenty years later she brought them back again, put them in their place, and rebuilt the little altar, just the way it was before. Her presence alone was enough to restore what the implacable industry of time had destroyed. Since then she has eaten and slept in the room next door, but she spends the day in this one, conversing silently with the saints. Inthe afternoons she sits in the rocker next to the door and mends clothing. And when someone comes for a bouquet of roses, she puts the money in the corner of the kerchief that she ties to her belt and invariably says: ‘Pick the ones on the right, those on the left are for the saints.’
    That’s the way she’s been for twenty years, in the rocker, darning her things, rocking, looking at the chairas if now she weren’t taking care of the boy with whom she had shared her childhood afternoons but the invalid grandson who has been sitting here in the corner ever since the time his grandmother was five years old.
    It’s possible that now, when she lowers her head again, I can approach the roses. If I can manage to do so I’ll go to the knoll, lay them on the grave, and come back to my chair towait for the day when she won’t return to the room and the sounds will cease in all the rooms.
    On that day there’ll be a change in all this, because I’ll have to leave the house again in order to tell someone that the rose woman, the one who lives in the tumble-down house, is in need of four men to take her to the knoll. Then I’ll be alone forever in the room. But, on the other hand, she’ll besatisfied. Because on that day she’ll learn that it wasn’t the invisible wind that came to her altar every Sunday and disarranged the roses.

The Night of the Curlews
    We were sitting, the three of us, around the table, when someone put a coin in the slot and the Wurlitzer played once more the record that had been going all night. The rest happened so fast that we didn’t have time to think. It happened before we could remember where we were, before we could get back our sense of location. One of us reached his hand out over thecounter, groping (we couldn’t see the hand, we heard it), bumped into a glass, and then was still, with both hands