Read Online Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa, J.S. Bernstein - Free Book Online

museum. Maybe that’s why you’re cold.’ And she said: ‘Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate.Then, when the blood beats inside me, it’s as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It’s like – what do you call it – laminated metal.’ She drew closer to the lamp. ‘I would have liked to hear you,’ I said. And she said: ‘If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you’ll hear me echoing. I’vealways wanted you to do it sometime.’ I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she’d done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:
    ‘I’m the one who comes into yourdreams every night and tells you: “Eyes of a blue dog.” ’ And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ And on the steamed-up windowsof hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smellthat she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. ‘He must be near,’ she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: ‘I always dream abouta man who says to me: “Eyes of a blue dog.” ’ And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: ‘As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that.’ And she said to him: ‘I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams.’ And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened herpurse and on the tiles, with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ The clerk came back from where he had been. He told her: ‘Madam, you have dirtied the tiles.’ He gave her a damp cloth, saying: ‘Clean it up.’ And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: ‘Eyes of a blue dog,’ until people gatheredat the door and said she was crazy.
    Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. ‘Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you,’ I said. ‘Now I don’t think I’ll forget it tomorrow. Still, I’ve always said the same thing and when I wake up I’ve always forgotten what the words I can find you with are.’ And she said: ‘You inventedthem yourself on the first day.’ And I said to her: ‘I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning.’ And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: ‘If you could at least remember now what city I’ve been writing it in.’
    Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. ‘I’d like to touch you now,’ I said. She raised the face that had been lookingat the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair. ‘You’d never told me that,’ she said. ‘I tell you now and it’s the truth,’ I said. From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I’d forgotten that Iwas smoking.She said: ‘I don’t know why I can’t remember where I wrote it.’ And I said to her: ‘For the same reason that