In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Page A

I’m sure that I won’t have the means to prevent it.”
    A moment later they sat down at the table. A barefoot servant girl brought rice and beans, stewed vegetables, and a platter of meatballs covered with a thick brown sauce. Father Ángel served himself in silence. The hot peppers, the profound silence of the house, and the feeling of uneasiness that filled his heart at that moment carried him back to his narrow little neophyte’s room in the burning noon of Macondo. On a day like that, dusty and hot, he had denied Christian burial to a hanged man whom the stiff-necked inhabitants of Macondo had refused to bury. He unbuttoned the collar of his cassock to let the sweat out.
    “All right,” he said to the widow. “Then make sure that Roberto Asís doesn’t miss mass on Sunday.”
    The widow Asís promised him.
    Dr. Giraldo and his wife, who never took a siesta, spent the afternoon reading a story by Dickens. They were on the inside terrace, he in a hammock, listening with his fingers interlaced behind his neck, she with the book in her lap, reading with her back to the lozenges of light where the geraniums glowed. She was reading dispassionately, with a professional emphasis, not shifting her position in the chair. She didn’t raise her head until the end, but even then she remained with the book open on her knees while her husband washed in the basin of the washstand. The heat foretold a storm.
    “Is it a long short story?” she asked, after thinking about it carefully.
    With scrupulous movements learned in the operating room, the doctor withdrew his head from the basin. “They say it’s a short novel,” he said in front of the mirror, putting brilliantine on his hair. “I would say, rather, that it’s a long
short story.” With his fingers he rubbed the vaseline into his scalp and concluded:
    “Critics might say that it’s a short story, but a long one.”
    He got dressed in white linen, helped by his wife. She could have been mistaken for an older sister, not only because of the peaceful devotion with which she attended him, but from the coldness of her eyes, which made her look like an older person. Before leaving, Dr. Giraldo showed her the list and order of his visits, should an urgent case come up, and he moved the hands on the clock chart in the waiting room:
The doctor will return at 5 o’clock
.
    The street was buzzing with heat. Dr. Giraldo walked along the shady sidewalk pursued by a foreboding: in spite of the harshness of the air, it wouldn’t rain that afternoon. The buzz of the harvest flies intensified the solitude of the port, but the cow had been removed and dragged off by the current, and the rotten smell had left an enormous gap in the atmosphere.
    The telegrapher called to him from the hotel.
    “Did you get a telegram?”
    Dr. Giraldo hadn’t.
    “ ‘Advise conditions office, signed Arcofán,’ ” the telegrapher quoted from memory.
    They went to the telegraph office together. While the physician was writing a reply, the civil servant began to nod.
    “It’s the muriatic acid,” the doctor explained with great scientific conviction. And in spite of his foreboding, he added as consolation when he’d finished writing: “Maybe it’ll rain tonight.”
    The telegrapher counted the words. The doctor didn’t pay any attention to him. He was hanging on a fat book lying open by the key. He asked if it was a novel.
    “
Les Misérables
, Victor Hugo,” telegraphed the telegrapher. He stamped the copy of the message and came back
to the railing with the book. “I think this should last us until December.”
    For years Dr. Giraldo had known that the telegrapher spent his free time transmitting poems to the lady telegrapher in San Bernardo del Viento. He hadn’t known that he also read her novels.
    “Now, this is serious,” he said, thumbing through the well-used tome which awoke in his memory the confused emotions of an adolescent. “Alexandre Dumas would have been more