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

presidential seal or the supernatural size of his feet of an implacable walker or the strange evidence of the herniated testicle which thevultures had not dared peck, but there was always someone who had memories of other similar indications in the case of other less important dead men in the past. Nor did the meticulous scrutiny of the house bring forth any valid element to establish his identity. In the bedroom of Bendición Alvarado, about whom we only remembered the tale of her canonization by decree, we found broken-down birdcageswith little bird bones changed to stone by the years, we saw a wicker easy chair nibbled by the cows, we saw watercolor sets and glasses with paintbrushes of the kind used by bird-women of the plains so they could sell faded birds by passing them off as orioles, we saw a tub with a balm bush that had kept on growing in neglect and its branches had climbed up the wall and peeped out through theeyes of the portraits and had gone out through the window and ended up getting all entangled with the wild bushes in the rear courtyards, but we couldn’t find the most insignificant trace of his ever having been in that room. In the bridal bedroom of Leticia Nazareno, of whom we had a clearer image, not just because she had reigned in a more recent period but also because of the éclat of her publicacts, we saw a bed good for the outrages of love with the embroidered canopy converted into a nesting place for hens, in the closets we saw what the moths had left of blue-fox stoles, the wire framework of hoopskirts, the glacial powder of the petticoats, the Brussels lace bodices, the men’s high-cut shoes that she wore in the house and the velvet high-heeled pumps with straps that she wore atreceptions, the full-length shroud with felt violets and taffeta ribbons from her gala funeral as first lady and the homespun novice’s habitlike the hide of a gray sheep in which she had been kidnapped from Jamaica inside a crate of party crystal to be placed upon her throne as wife of a hidden president, but we didn’t find any vestige in that room either, nothing which would allow us to establishat least whether that kidnapping by corsairs had been inspired by love. In the presidential bedroom, which was the part of the house where he spent the greater part of his last years, we found only an unused barracks bed, a portable latrine of the kind that antiquarians removed from the mansions abandoned by the marines, an iron coffer with his ninety-two medals, and a denim suit just like theone the corpse had on, perforated by six large-caliber bullets that had left singe damage as they entered through the back and came out through the chest, which made us think there was truth to the legend going around that a bullet shot into his back would go right through without harming him, and if shot from the front it would rebound off his body back at the attacker, and that he was only vulnerableto a coup de grace fired by someone who loved him so much that he would die for him. Both uniforms were too small for the corpse, but it was not for that reason that we put aside the possibility that they were his, because it had also been said at one time that he had kept on growing until the age of one hundred and at one hundred fifty he grew a third set of teeth, although in truth thevulture-ravaged body was no larger than that of any average man of our day and it had some healthy teeth, small and stubby that looked like milk teeth, the skin was the color of gall speckled with liver spots without a single scar and empty pouches all over as if he had been quite fat in some other day, there were only empty sockets for the eyes that had been taciturn, and the only thing that seemedout of proportion, except for the herniated testicle, was the pair of enormous feet, square and flat with the calluses and twisted talons of a hawk. Contrary to what his clothing showed, the descriptions made by his historians made him very big and official