The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa

the evil air he was breathing was perverted by the glare of the sun or by anxiety, he waited without even thinking of his own state until Manuela Sanchez’s mother had him come into the cool fishleftover smell of the shadows in the broad stark living room of a house asleep that was largerinside than out, he examined the scope of his frustration from the leather stool he had sat on while Manuela Sanchez’s mother woke her from her siesta, he saw the walls and the dribbles of past raindrops, a broken sofa, two other stools with leather bottoms, a stringless piano in the corner, nothing else, shit, so much suffering for this trouble, he sighed, when Manuela Sanchez’s mother cameback with a sewing basket and sat down to make lace while Manuela Sanchez got dressed, combed her hair, put on her best shoes to attend with proper dignity the unexpected old man who wondered perplexed where can you be Manuela Sanchez of my misfortune that I came looking for you and cannot find you in this house of beggars, where is your licorice smell in this pesthole of lunch leftovers, where isyour rose, where your love, release me from the dungeon of these dog doubts, he sighed, when he saw her appear at the rear door like the image of a dream reflected in the mirror of another dream wearing a dress of etamine that cost a penny a yard, her hair tied back hurriedly with a back comb, her shoes shabby, but she was the most beautiful and haughtiest woman on earth with the rose glowing inher hand, a sight so dazzling that he barely got sufficient control of himself to bow when she greeted him with her lifted head God preserve your excellency, and she sat down on the sofa opposite him, where the gush of his fetid body odor would not reach her, and then I dared to look at him face to face for the first time spinning the glow of the rose with two fingers so that he would not notice myterror, I pitilessly scrutinized the bat lips, the mute eyes that seemed to be looking at me from the bottom of a pool, the hairless skin like clods of earth tamped down with gall oil which became tighter and more intense on the right hand and the ring with the presidential seal exhausted on his knee, his baggy linen suit as if there were nobody inside, his enormous dead man’s shoes, his invinciblethought, his occult powers, the oldest ancient on earth, the most fearsome, the most hated, and the least pitied in the nation who was fanning himself with his foreman’s hat contemplatingme in silence from his other shore, good lord, such a sad man, I thought with surprise, and she asked without compassion what can I do for you your excellency, and he answered with a solemn air that I’ve onlycome to ask a favor of you, your majesty, that you accept this visit of mine. He visited her without cease month after month, every day during the dead hours of the heat when he used to visit his mother so that the security service would think he was at the suburban mansion, for only he was unaware of what everyone knew that General Rodrigo de Aguilar’s riflemen were protecting him crouched on therooftops, they raised hell with traffic, they used their rifle butts to clear the streets he would pass along, they put them off limits so that they would seem deserted from two until five with orders to shoot if anyone tried to come out onto a balcony, but even the least curious found some way to spy on the fleeting passage of the presidential limousine painted to look like a taxi with the canicularold man disguised as a civilian inside the innocent linen suit, they saw his orphan paleness, his face that had seen it dawn so many mornings, that had wept in secret, no longer bothered about what they might have thought of the hand on his chest, the archaic taciturn animal who went along leaving a trail of illusions of look at him go since he can’t make, it any more in the glassy heat of theforbidden streets, until the suspicions of strange illnesses became so loud and repeated they finally