Read Online The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - Free Book Online

divide up the splendid residential district of the fugitive conservatives, except that Bendición Alvarado disdained the imperial decor whichmakes me feel I’m the wife of the Pope himself and she preferred the servants’ quarters next to the six barefoot maids who had been assigned to her, she set up her sewing machine and her cages of painted-up birds in a forgotten back room where the heat never reached and it was easier to drive off the six o’clock mosquitoes, she would sit down to sew across from the lazy light of the main courtyardand the medicinal breeze of the tamarinds while the hens wandered through the parlors and the soldiers of the guard layin wait for the housemaids in the empty bedrooms, she would sit down to paint orioles and lament with the servants over the misfortunes of my poor son whom the marines had set up in the presidential palace so far from his mother, lord, without a loving wife who could take careof him if he woke up with an ache in the middle of the night, and all involved with that job of president of the republic for a measly salary of three hundred pesos a month, poor boy. She knew quite well what she was talking about because he visited her every day while the city sloshed in the mire of siesta time, he would bring her the candied fruit she liked so much and he took advantage of theoccasion to unwind with her about his bitter position as the marines’ pratboy, he told her how he had to sneak out the sugar oranges and syrup figs in napkins because the occupation authorities had accountants who in their books kept track even of lunch leftovers, he lamented that the other day the captain of the battleship came to the presidential palace with some kind of land astronomers who tookmeasurements of everything and didn’t even say hello but put their tape measure around my head while they made their calculations in English and shouted at me through the interpreter to get out of here and he got out, for him to get out of the light, and he got out, go somewhere where you won’t be in the way, God damn it, and he didn’t know where to go without getting in the way because there weremeasurers measuring everything down to the size of the light from the balconies, but that wasn’t the worst, mother, they threw out the last two skinny concubines he had left because the admiral had said they weren’t worthy of a president, and he was really in such want of women that on some afternoons he would pretend that he was leaving the suburban mansion but his mother heard him chasing afterthe maids in the shadows of the bedrooms, and her sorrow was such that she roused up the birds in their cages so that no one would find out about her son’s troubles, she forced them to sing so that the neighbors would not hear the sounds of the attack, the shame of the struggle, the repressed threats of quiet down general or I’ll tell your mama, and she wouldruin the siesta of the troupials andmake them burst with song so that no one would hear his heartless panting of an urgent mate, his misfortune of a lover with all his clothes on, his doggish whine, his solitary tears that came on like dusk, as if rotting with pity amidst the cackling of the hens in the bedrooms aroused by that emergency love-making in the liquid glass air and the godforsaken August of three in the afternoon, mypoor son. That state of scarcity was to last until the occupation forces left the country frightened off by an epidemic when they still needed so many years to fulfill the terms of the landing, they broke down the officers’ residences into numbered pieces and packed them up in wooden crates, they dug up the blue lawns in one piece and carried them off all rolled up like carpets, they wrapped up therubber cisterns with the sterile water sent from their country so that they would not be eaten up inside by the water worms of our streams, they took their white hospitals apart, dynamited their barracks so that no one would know how they were