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

disappearing). He was surprised at his own behavior, standing in front of the mirror and making faces like an idiot. Nevertheless, he thought that everybody behaved the same way in front of a mirror and hisindignation was greater then with the certainty that since the world was idiotic, he was only rendering tribute to vulgarity. Eight-seventeen.
    He knew that he would have to hurry if he didn’t want to be fired from the agency. From that agency that for some time now had been changed into the starting point of his singular daily funeral cortege.
    The shaving cream, in contact with the brush, hadnow raised a bluish whiteness that brought him back from his worries. It was the moment in which the suds came up through his body, through the network of arteries, and facilitated the functioning of his whole vital mechanism. … Thus, returning to normality, it seemed more comfortable to search his soaped-up brain for the word he wanted to compare Mabel’s shop with. Peldora. Mabel’s junk shop. Paldora.Provisions or drugs. Or everything at the same time: Pendora.
    There were enough suds in the mug. But he kept on rubbing the brush, almost with passion. The childish spectacle of the bubbles gave him the clear joy of a big child as it crept up into his heart, heavy and hard, like cheap liquor. A new effort in search of the syllable would have been sufficient then for the word to burst forth, ripeand brutal; for it to come to the surface in that thick, murky water of his flighty memory. But that time, as on other occasions, the scattered, detached pieces of a single system would not adjust themselves exactly in order to gain organic totality, and he was ready to give up the word forever: Pendora!
    And now it was time to desist in that useless search, because – they both raised their eyes,which met – his twinbrother, with his frothy brush, had begun to cover his chin with blue-white coolness, letting his left hand move – he imitated him with the right – with smoothness and precision, until the delineated zone had been covered. He glanced away, and the geometry of the hands on the clock showed itself to him, intent on the solution of a new theorem of anguish: eight-eighteen. Hewas moving too slowly. So that with the firm aim of finishing quickly, he gripped the razor as the horn handle obeyed the mobility of his little finger.
    Calculating that in three minutes the task would be done, he raised his right arm (left arm) to the level of his right ear (left ear), making the observation along the way that nothing should turn out to be as difficult as shaving oneself theway the image in the mirror was doing. From that he had derived a whole series of very complicated calculations with an aim to verifying the speed of the light which,
almost
simultaneously, was making the trip back and forth and reproducing that movement. But the aesthete in him, after a struggle approximately equal to the square root of the velocity he might have found, overcame the mathematicianand the artist’s thoughts went toward the movements of the blade that greenblue-whited with the various touches of the light. Rapidly – and the mathematician and the aesthete were at peace now – he brought the edge down along the right cheek (left cheek) to the meridian of the lip and observed with satisfaction that the left cheek on the image showed clean between its edges of lather.
    He hadstill not shaken the blade clean when a smokiness loaded with the bitter smell of roasting meat began to arrive from the kitchen. He felt the quiver under his tongue and the torrent of easy, thin saliva that filled his mouth with the energetic taste of hot fat. Fried kidneys. There was finally a change in Mabel’s damned store. Pendora. Not that either. The sound of the gland in the midst of the saucebroke in his ear with a memory of hammering rain, which was, in effect, the same from the recent early dawn. Therefore he mustn’t forget his galoshes and his raincoat. Kidneys in