No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez, J. S. Bernstein Page A

shoes, I’d send my friend a bill for a hundred thousand pesos, doctor,’ the colonel said. ‘That way he wouldn’t be so worried.’
    ‘I’ve already suggested that to him, but for a million,’ the doctorsaid. ‘Poverty is the best cure for diabetes.’
    ‘Thanks for the prescription,’ said Sabas, trying to stuff his voluminous belly into his riding breeches. ‘But I won’t accept it, to save you from the catastrophe of becoming rich.’ The doctor saw his own teeth reflected in the little chromed lock of his bag. He looked at the clock without showing impatience. Sabas, putting on his boots, suddenlyturned to the colonel: ‘Well, friend, what’s happening with the rooster?’
    The colonel realized that the doctor was also waiting for his answer. He clenched his teeth.
    ‘Nothing, friend,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve come to sell him to you.’
    Sabas finished putting on his boots.
    ‘Fine, my friend,’ he said without emotion. ‘It’s the most sensible thing that could have occurred to you.’
    ‘I’m too old nowfor these complications,’ the colonel said to justify himself before the doctor’s impenetrable expression. ‘If I were twenty years younger it would be different.’
    ‘You’ll always be twenty years younger,’ the doctor replied.
    The colonel regained his breath. He waited for Sabas to say something more, but he didn’t. Sabas put on a leather zippered jacket and got ready to leave the bedroom.
    ‘Ifyou like, we’ll talk about it next week, friend,’ the colonel said.
    ‘That’s what I was going to say,’ said Sabas. ‘I have acustomer who might give you four hundred pesos. But we have to wait till Thursday.’
    ‘How much?’ the doctor asked.
    ‘Four hundred pesos.’
    ‘I had heard someone say that he was worth a lot more,’ the doctor said.
    ‘You were talking in terms of nine hundred pesos,’ the colonelsaid, backed by the doctor’s perplexity. ‘He’s the best rooster in the whole province.’
    Sabas answered the doctor.
    ‘At some other time, anyone would have paid a thousand,’ he explained. ‘But now no one dares pit a good rooster. There’s always the danger he’ll come out of the pit shot to death.’ He turned to the colonel, feigning disappointment: ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, friend.’
    Thecolonel nodded.
    ‘Fine,’ he said.
    He followed him down the hall. The doctor stayed in the living room, detained by Sabas’s wife, who asked him for a remedy ‘for those things which come over one suddenly and which one doesn’t know what they are.’ The colonel waited for him in the office. Sabas opened the safe, stuffed money into all his pockets, and held out four bills to the colonel.
    ‘There’ssixty pesos, friend,’ he said. ‘When the rooster is sold we’ll settle up.’
    The colonel walked with the doctor past the stalls at the waterfront, which were beginning to revive in the cool of the afternoon. A barge loaded with sugar cane was moving down the thread of current. The colonel found the doctor strangely impervious.
    ‘Andyou, how are you, doctor?’
    The doctor shrugged.
    ‘As usual,’he said. ‘I think I need a doctor.’
    ‘It’s the winter,’ the colonel said. ‘It eats away my insides.’
    The doctor examined him with a look absolutely devoid of any professional interest. In succession he greeted the Syrians seated at the doors of their shops. At the door of the doctor’s office, the colonel expressed his opinion of the sale of the rooster.
    ‘I couldn’t do anything else,’ he explained.‘That animal feeds on human flesh.’
    ‘The only animal who feeds on human flesh is Sabas,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m sure he’d resell the rooster for the nine hundred pesos.’
    ‘You think so?’
    ‘I’m sure of it,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s as sweet a deal as his famous patriotic pact with the mayor.’
    The colonel refused to believe it. ‘My friend made that pact to save his skin,’ he said. ‘That’s how