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

appropriate.”
    “She likes this one,” the telegrapher explained.
    “Have you ever met her?”
    The telegrapher shook his head no.
    “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’d recognize her in any part of the world by the little jumps she always puts on the
R
.”
    That afternoon Dr. Giraldo had reserved an hour for Don Sabas. He found him in bed exhausted, wrapped in a towel from the waist up.
    “Was the candy good?” the doctor asked.
    “It’s the heat,” Don Sabas lamented, turning his enormous grandmother’s body toward the door. “I took my injection after lunch.”
    Dr. Giraldo opened his bag on a table placed by the window. The harvest flies were buzzing in the courtyard, and the house had a botanical heat. Seated in the courtyard, Don Sabas urinated like a languid spring. When the doctor put the amber liquid in the test tube, the patient felt comforted. He said, watching the analysis:
    “Be very careful, Doctor. I don’t want to die without finding out how this novel comes out.”
    Dr. Giraldo dropped a blue tablet into the sample.
    “What novel?”
    “The lampoons.”
    Don Sabas followed him with a mild look until he finished heating the tube on the alcohol lamp. He sniffed it. The faded eyes of the patient awaited him with a question.
    “It’s fine,” the doctor said as he poured out the sample into the courtyard. Then he scrutinized Don Sabas. “Are you hung up on that business too?”
    “Not me,” the sick man said. “But I’m like a Jap enjoying the people’s fright.”
    Dr. Giraldo prepared the hypodermic syringe.
    “Besides,” Don Sabas went on to say, “they already put mine up two days ago. The same nonsense: my sons’ mess and the story about the donkeys.”
    The doctor tightened Don Sabas’s artery with a rubber hose. The patient insisted on the story about the donkeys; he had to retell it because the doctor didn’t think he’d heard it.
    “It was a donkey deal I made some twenty years ago,” he said. “It so happened that the donkeys I sold were found dead in the morning two days later, with no signs of violence.”
    He offered his arm with its flaccid flesh so that the doctor could take the blood sample. When Dr. Giraldo covered the prick with cotton, Don Sabas flexed his arm.
    “Well, do you know what people made up?”
    The doctor shook his head.
    “The rumor went around that I had gone into the yard myself at night and shot the donkeys on the inside, sticking the revolver up their assholes.”
    Dr. Giraldo put the glass tube with the blood sample into his pocket.
    “That story’s got every appearance of being true,” he said.
    “It was snakes,” Don Sabas said, sitting in bed like an Oriental idol. “But in any case, you have to be a fool to
write a lampoon about something that everybody knows.”
    “That’s always been a characteristic of lampoons,” the doctor said. “They say what everybody knows, which is almost always sure to be the truth.”
    Don Sabas suffered a momentary relapse. “Really,” he murmured, drying the sweat on his dizzy eyelids. He recovered immediately:
    “What’s happening is that there isn’t a single fortune in this country that doesn’t have some dead donkey behind it.”
    The doctor received the phrase leaning over the washstand. He saw his own reaction reflected in the water: a dental system so perfect that it didn’t seem natural. Looking at the patient over his shoulder, he said:
    “I’ve always believed, my dear Don Sabas, that shamelessness is your only virtue.”
    The patient grew enthusiastic. His doctor’s knocks had produced a kind of sudden youth in him. “That and my sexual prowess,” he said, accompanying the words with a bending of the arm that might have been a stimulant for the circulation, but which the doctor took as an express lewdness. Don Sabas gave a little bounce on his buttocks.
    “That’s why I die laughing at the lampoons,” he went on. “They say that my sons get carried away by