Tuesday Rest translated from Gabriel García Márquez's story in Spanish, "La siesta del martes" The train left the forbidding passageway of russet-colored rocks, cut through the symmetrical and seemingly-endless banana plantations, and the air became humid, and the gentle gust of the sea breeze never returned. A stifling cloud of smoke entered through the small window of the train car. On the narrow road that ran parallel to the railway were teams of oxen, burdened with bunches of green bananas. On the other side of the road, in unfortunate spaces where seeds had not been sown, there were office buildings with electric vents, red-brick campgrounds, and homes with chairs and little white tables on the terraces, among dusty palm trees and rose bushes. It was eleven in the morning and it had not even begun to get hot. "You better open the window," the woman said. "Your hair’s going to get full of soot." The girl tried to do so but the shutters were jammed with rust. They were the only passengers in the plain, third class car. As the smoke of the locomotive continued coming in the window, the girl left her position and put, in her place, the only items she had brought: a plastic bag with things to eat, and a bouquet of flowers wrapped in newspaper. She sat in the opposite seat, furthest from the window, in front of her mother. Both of them maintained were in rigorous mourning. The girl was twelve years old and it was the first time she had gone traveling. The woman seemed too old to be her mother, because of the blue veins that marked her eyelids and her tiny body, bland and shapeless, clad in a suit cut like a priest's cassock. She traveled with her spine firmly supported against the back of the seat, holding in her lap with both hands a pocketbook of chipped leather. There was an air of scrupulous serenity about her, which those who are used to poverty usually possess. At two it began to get hot. The train was delayed ten minutes in a station that was not located at a town, to replenish its provisions of water. Outside, in the mysterious silence of the plantations, the shadows had a sterile quality about them. But the stale air inside the train car reeked of uncured leather. The train did not resume accelerating. It stopped in two other towns like the one before, ones that had wooden houses painted bright colors. The woman tilted her head and immersed herself in the languid air. The girl took off her shoes. Afterwards, the cleanup crew came to put the bouquet of dead flowers in water. When she returned to her seat, the mother waited for the girl so they could eat. She gave her a piece of cheese, half a roll of cornbread, and a sweet cookie, and took out an equal-sized serving from the plastic bag for herself. While they ate, the train traversed very slowly over an iron bridge and slowly passed a town just like the previous ones, only this one had a crowd in its plaza. A band of musicians played a joyful piece under the setting sun. On the other side of the town, in flatness broken by the dryness of the air, the stretch of plantations ceased. The woman stopped eating. "Put your shoes on," she said. The girl looked outside. She did not see anything more than the flatness of the desert through which the train began to run again, but she put the last bit of her cookie back in her bag and hastily put her shoes back on. Her mother handed her a comb. "Comb your hair," she said. The train's whistle began to blow as the girl combed her hair. The woman dried the sweat from her neck and wiped off the oil on her face with her fingers. When the girl finished combing her hair the train passed in front of the first houses of a town that was bigger, but sadder, than the ones before it. "If you feel like doing anything, do it now," said the woman. "After this, you can't have even a drop of water, not even if you're dying of thirst. Most of all, don't cry." The girl nodded. A gust of burning, dry wind came through the window, combined with the train whistle and the creak of the old train cars.The woman rolled up her bag with the rest of the food and put it in the purse. For an instant, the total picture of the town, on a glowing Tuesday in August, glimmered in the window. The girl wrapped the flowers in the drenched newspaper, opened the window a little more, and stared pointedly at her mother. She returned her stare with a placid expression. The train just finished whistling and slowed its pace. A moment later, it stopped. There was no one in the station. On the other side of the street, in the sidewalk lined with almond trees, the only thing open was the pool hall. The town floated in the heat. The woman and the girl got off the train, went into the abandoned station whose tiled floor was beginning to break apart from the pressure of the weeds, and they crossed the street toward the shadowy sidewalk. It was almost two. The town, exhausted with fatigue by this hour, would rest. Department stores, public offices, the public school, they would close at eleven and not open until a little before four, when the returning train would pass. The only buildings that would remain open were the hotel in front of the station, its cantina and its pool hall, and the telegraph office beside the plaza. The houses, the majority of which were constructed by the banana company, had doors which closed from the inside and lowered Venetian blinds. In some houses, it was so hot that the residents would dine on the patio. Others reclined in a seat in the shadow of the almond trees and rested sitting in the middle of the street. Constantly seeking the protection of the shade of the almond trees, the woman and the girl entered the town without disturbing its rest. They went directly to the priest's residence. With one nail, the woman scratched the metal screen door, waited a woman, and started to call out. Inside was the whirring of an electric ventilator. No steps could be heard. One could barely hear the light creak of a door, and afterwards, a wary voice very near the metal screen: "Who is it?" The woman tried to see beyond the metal screen. "I need to see the priest," she said. "He's asleep right now." "It's urgent," the woman insisted. Her voice contained a self-possessed tenacity. Quietly, the door opened halfway, and from it appeared a chubby, middle-aged woman, with a pale complexion and hair the color of iron. Her eyes seemed much too small behind the thick lenses of her eyeglasses. "Come in," she said, and finished opening the door. They entered a room replete with the stale smell of flowers. The woman of the house led them to a wooden bench and gestured to them to sit down. The girl did so, but the woman remained standing, occupied, pressing her purse in both her hands. No sound could be heard over the electric ventilator. The woman of the house appeared from the backdoor. "He says come back after three," she said. "He just went to bed five minutes ago." "The train leaves at three-thirty," the woman said. It was a firm, succinct reply, but her voice remained calm and tenuous. The woman of the house smiled for the first time. "All right," she said. When the backdoor closed once more, the woman sat down beside her daughter. The narrow waiting room was stark, orderly, and clean. On the other side of the wooden railing that divided the house, there was a simple work table covered with an oilcloth, and on top of the table a primitive typewriter next to a vase of flowers. Behind those were the parish archives. One could see that it was an office arranged by a single woman. The backdoor opened and this time a priest appeared, cleaning his spectacles with a handkerchief. Only then was it evident that he was the brother of the woman who had opened the door. "Is there anything I can offer you?" he asked. "The keys to the cemetery," the woman said. The girl was seated with the flowers in her lap and her feet crossed under the bench. The priest looked at her, after looking at the woman, and afterwards, looked past the metal screen of the window, at the brilliant, cloudless sky. "In this heat," she said. "You could have waited until the sun set." The woman moved her head silently. The priest passed to the other side of the railing, taking out a folder covered with oilcloth, a wooden pencil case, and an inkwell, and sat down at the table. The hair which he lacked on his hair, he made up for with the hair on his hands. "Whose tomb will you be visiting?" he asked. "Carlos Centeno's," the woman answered. "Whose?" "Carlos Centeno's," the woman repeated. The priest continued, not understanding her. "The thief who was killed here last week," the woman said, in the same tone of voice. "I am his mother." The priest examined her face. She fixed her gaze on him, with serene control, and the priest blushed. He lowered his head so that he could write. As he filled out the paper he asked the woman the information about her identity, and she answered without wavering, with precise details, as if she were reading something in front of her. The priest began to sweat. The girl undid the strap of her left shoe, lifted it off her heel, and supported it against the rail. She did the same with the right. Everything had started last Monday, at three in the morning, just a few blocks away. Madame Rebecca, a widow who lived alone in a house full of rubbish, felt through the murmur of the drizzle that someone from the outside was trying to force the door open. She woke up, felt around in her dresser for her ancient revolver that no one had fired since the time of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, and went to the room without turning on the lights. Gaining her bearings not so much from the sound of the lock but from the terror growing in her from twenty-eight years of solitude, not only was the precise site of the door locked in her imagination, but the exact height of the lock as well. She gripped the gun with both hands, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger. It was the first time in her life that she had fired a revolver. Immediately after the detonation she heard nothing except the patter of the drizzle upon the zinc roof. Afterwards, she made out a metallic beat pavement, and a voice -- low and calm, but terribly fatigued: "Mama, help me." That morning, the man was found dead in front of the house, his nose shattered, dressed in flannel with colored stripes, plain pants with rope in place of a belt, wearing no shoes. No one in the town knew who he was. "So his name was Carlos Centeno," the priest murmured when he had finished writing. "Centeno Ayala," said the woman. "He was my only son." The priest returned to the desk. Hanging from a nail in the inside of the closet door were two large and rusty keys, that the girl had imagined the keys of St. Peter must have looked like, as the mother did when she was a girl, and priest must have done at one point in time. The priest took them off, put them in the open folder over the raining and pointed to a spot on the written page, looking at the woman. "Sign here." The woman scribbled her name, holding her purse under her armpit. The girl collected the flowers, headed for the railing dragging her shoes, and observed her mother attentively. The priest drew a breath. "You never tried to put him on the straight and narrow?" The mother answered when she finished signing. "He was a good man." The priest looked at the woman, then the girl, and back at the woman, and realized with a type of pious stupor that they were not about to cry. The woman continued unchangingly: "I told him never to rob anyone who was hungry themselves, and he listened. But, before, when he would box, he'd spent three days in bed put down by the blows." "They had to take out his teeth," the girl interceded. "That's what happened," the woman confirmed. "Every bite of food I took during that time made me think of the beatings my son took every Saturday night." "God works in mysterious ways," the priest said. But he said it without much conviction, partly because the experiences he'd had made him into a bit of a skeptic, partly because of the heat. He recommended that they protect their heads to avoid sunstroke. Yawning and almost asleep, he pointed out what they had to do to find the grave of Carlos Centeno. When they came back, they didn’t have to knock. They had to slip the key underneath the door, and if they had anything, leave some alms for the church. The woman listened to these explanations attentively, but thanked him without smiling. Before opening the door to the street the priest realized that there was someone staring inside the house, noses pressed against the metal screen. It was a group of children. When the door was opened completely the children scattered themselves. Now the children were not alone. There were crowds under the almond trees. The priest examined the street, distorted by reverberation, and then he understood. Softly, he turned to close the door. "Wait here a moment," he said, without looking at the woman. His sister appeared from the backdoor, with a black robe over her nightshirt and her hair loose and falling to her shoulders. She looked at the priest in silence. "Who was it?" he asked her. "The town's figured out who they are," his sister murmured. "It's better that they leave from the patio door," said the priest. "It's all the same," his sister said. "The whole town is peering through the windows." The woman seemed not to have understood until then. She tried to look at the street through the metal screen. Then she took away the bouquet of flowers from the girl and began to move towards the door. The girl followed her. "Wait till the sun sets," the priest said. "You're going to melt," said his sister, immobile in the background of the room. "Wait here and we'll lend you a parasol." "Thanks," the woman replied. "We'll be fine." She took the girl's hand and stepped out into the street. back to translations home