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

beyond his measureless realm of gloom, and in all the skies of the nation one could hear at dusk that unanimous voice of fleeting multitudes who sang there comes my ever-loving general giving off crap through his mouth and laws through his poop, an endless song to which everybody even the parrots addedverses to mock the security services of the state who tried to capture it, military patrols in full battle dress broke down courtyard doors and shot down the subversive parrots on their perches, they threw whole bushels of parakeets alive to the dogs, a state of siege was declared in an attempt to extirpate the enemy song so that no one would discover that everybody knew that he was the one whoslipped like a fugitive of dusk through the doors of the presidential palace, went through the kitchens and disappeared into the manure smoke of the private rooms until tomorrow at four o’clock, queen, until every day at the same hour when he arrived at Manuela Sanchez’s house laden with so many unusual gifts that they had to take over the houses next door and knock down the intervening walls in orderto have room for them, so that the original parlor had become an immense and gloomy shed where there were uncountable clocks from every period,there was every type of phonograph from primitive ones with cylinders to those with a mirror diaphragm, there were all sorts of sewing machines with cranks, pedals, motors, whole bedrooms full of galvanometers, homeopathic pharmaceuticals, music boxes,optical-illusion instruments, showcases of dried butterflies, Asiatic herbariums, laboratories for physiotherapy and physical education, machines for astronomy, orthopedics and natural sciences, and a whole world of dolls with hidden mechanisms for human traits, forbidden rooms where no one entered not even to sweep because the things stayed where they had been placed when they were brought, no onewanted to hear about them and Manuela Sanchez least of all because she did not wish to know anything about life ever since that black Saturday when the misfortune of being queen befell me, on that afternoon the world ended for me, her former suitors had died one after the other struck down by unpunished collapses and strange illnesses, her girl friends disappeared without a trace, she’d been movedwithout leaving her house into a district full of strangers, she was alone, watched over in her most intimate aims, the captive of a trap of fate in which she did not have the courage to say no nor did she have sufficient courage to say yes to an abominable suitor who besieged her with a madhouse love, who looked at her with a kind of reverential stupor fanning himself with his white hat, drenchedin sweat, so far removed from himself that she had wondered whether he really was looking at her or whether it was only a vision of horror, she had seen him hesitating in broad daylight, she had seen him nibble at fruit juices, had seen him nod with sleep in the wicker easy chair with the glass in his hand when the copper buzz of the cicadas made the parlor shadows denser, she had seen him snore,careful your excellency, she had told him, he would wake up startled murmuring no, queen, I didn’t fall asleep, I just closed my eyes, he said, without realizing that she had taken the glass from his hand so that he wouldn’t drop it while he slept, she had amused him with subtle wiles until the incredible afternoon when he got to the house gasping with the news that todayI’m bringing you thegreatest gift in the universe, a miracle of heaven that’s going to pass by tonight at eleven-oh-six so that you can see it, queen, only so that you can see it, and it was the comet. It was one of our great moments of disappointment, because for some time a rumor had spread like so many others that the timetable of his life was not controlled by human time but by the cycles of the comet, that he hadbeen conceived to see it once but that he was not to see it again in spite of the arrogant