Gabriel Garcia Marquez


 
   Eva Is Inside Her Cat


    All of a sudden she noticed that her beauty had fallen all  apart  on  her,
that it had begun to pain her physically like a tumor or a  cancer.  She  still
remembered the weight of the privilege she  had  borne  over  her  body  during
adolescence, which she had dropped now - who knows where? - with the  weariness
of resignation, with  the  final  gesture  of  a  declining  creature.  It  was 
impossible to bear that burden  any  longer.  She  had  to  drop  that  useless 
attribute of her personality somewhere; as she turned a  corner,  somewhere  in
the outskirts. Or leave it behind on the coatrack of a  second-rate  restaurant
like some old useless coat. She was tired of being the center of attention,  of
being under siege from men's long looks. At night, when insomnia stuck its pins 
into her eyes, she would have liked  to  be  an  ordinary  woman,  without  any 
special attraction. Everything was hostile to her within the four walls of  her
room. Desperate, she could feel her vigil spreading out under  her  skin,  into
her head, pushing the fever upward toward the roots of her hair. It was  as  if
her arteries had become peopled with hot, tiny insects who, with  the  approach
of dawn, awoke each day and ran  about  on  their  moving  feet  in  a  rending 
subcutaneous adventure in that place of clay made fruit  where  her  anatomical
beauty had found its home. In  vain  she  struggled  to  chase  those  terrible
creatures away. She couldn't. They were part of her own organism.  They'd  been
there, alive, since much before her physical  existence.  They  came  from  the
heart of her father, who had fed them painfully during his nights of  desperate
solitude. Or maybe they had poured into her  arteries  through  the  cord  that
linked her to her mother ever since the beginning of the world.  There  was  no
doubt that those insects had not been born spontaneously inside her  body.  She
knew that they came from back there, that all who bore her surname had to  bear
them, had to suffer them as she did when insomnia held unconquerable sway until 
dawn. It was those very  insects  who  painted  that  bitter  expression,  that 
unconsolable sadness on the faces of her forebears. She had seen  them  looking
out of their extinguished existence, out of their ancient portraits, victims of 
that  same  anguish.  She  still  remembered  the  disquieting  face   of   the 
greatgrandmother who, from her aged  canvas,  begged  for  a  minute  of  rest, 
a second of peace from those insects who there, in the channels of  her  blood,
kept on martyrizing her, pitilessly beautifying her. No. Those  insects  didn't
belong to her. They came, transmitted from generation to generation, sustaining 
with their tiny armor all the prestige of a select caste,  a  painfully  select 
group. Those insects had been born in the womb of the first woman who had had a 
beautiful daughter. But it was  necessary,  urgent,  to  put  a  stop  to  that 
heritage. Someone must renounce the eternal  transmission  of  that  artificial 
beauty. It was no good for women of her breed to admire themselves as they came 
back from their mirrors if during the night those  creatures  did  their  slow, 
effective, ceaseless work with a constancy  of  centuries.  It  was  no  longer 
beauty, it was a sickness that had to be halted, that had to be cut off in some 
bold and radical way.
    She still remembered the endless hours spent on  that  bed  sown  with  hot
needles. Those nights when she tried to speed  time  along  so  that  with  the 
arrival of daylight the beasts would stop hurting her.  What  good  was  beauty
like that? Night after night, sunken in her desperation, she thought  it  would
have been better for her to have been an ordinary woman, or  a  man.  But  that
useless virtue was denied her,  fed  by  insects  of  remote  origin  who  were
hastening the irrevocable arrival of her death. Maybe she would have been happy 
if she had had the same lack of grace, that  same  desolate  ugliness,  as  her 
Czechoslovakian friend who had a dog's name. She would  have  been  better  off 
ugly, so that she could sleep peacefully like any other Christian.
    She cursed her ancestors. They were to blame for  her  insomnia.  They  had
transmitted that exact, invariable beauty, as if after death mothers shook  and
renewed their heads in order to graft them onto the trunks of their  daughters.
It was as if the same head, a single head, had been  continuously  transmitted,
with the same ears, the same  nose,  the  identical  mouth,  with  its  weighty
intelligence, to all the  women  who  were  to  receive  it  irremediably  like 
a painful inheritance of beauty. It was there, in the transmission of the head,
that the  eternal  microbe  that  came  through  across  generations  had  been
accentuated, had taken on personality, strength, until it became an  invincible
being, an incurable illness, which  upon  reaching  her,  after  having  passed
through a complicated process of judgment, could no longer  be  borne  and  was 
bitter and painful... just like a tumor or a cancer.
    It was during those hours of wakefulness that  she  remembered  the  things
disagreeable to her fine sensibility. She remembered the objects that  made  up
the sentimental universe where, as  in  a  chemical  stew,  those  microbes  of 
despair had been cultivated. During those nights, with her big round eves  open
and frightened, she bore the weight of the darkness that fell upon her  temples
like molten lead. Everything was asleep around her. And  from  her  corner,  in
order to bring on sleep, she tried to go back over her childhood memories.
    But that remembering always ended with a terror  of  the  unknown.  Always, 
after wandering through the dark corners of the house, her thoughts would  find
themselves face to face with fear. Then the  struggle  would  begin.  The  real
struggle against three unmovable  enemies.  She  would  never - no,  she  would 
never - be able to shake the fear from her head. She would have to bear  it  as
it clutched at her throat. And all just to live in  that  ancient  mansion,  to
sleep alone in that corner, away from the rest of the world.
    Her thoughts always went down along the damp, dark passageways, shaking the
dry cobweb-covered dust off the portraits. That disturbing  and  fearsome  dust
that fell from above, from the place where the  bones  of  her  ancestors  were
falling apart. Invariably she remembered the "boy."  She  imagined  him  there,
sleepwalking under the grass in the courtyard beside the orange tree, a handful 
of wet earth in his mouth. She seemed to see him in his  clay  depths,  digging 
upward with his nails, his teeth, fleeing the cold  that  bit  into  his  back, 
looking for the exit into the courtyard through that small  tunnel  where  they 
had placed him along with the snails. In winter she would hear him weeping with 
his tiny sob, mud-covered, drenched with rain. She imagined him intact. Just as 
they had left him five years before in that  water-filled  hole.  She  couldn't 
think of him as having decomposed.  On  the  contrary,  he  was  probably  most 
handsome sailing along in that thick water as on a voyage with  no  escape.  Or 
she saw him alive but frightened, afraid of feeling himself  alone,  buried  in 
such a somber courtyard. She herself had been against their leaving him  there, 
under the orange tree, so close to the house. She was afraid of him.  She  knew 
that on nights when insomnia hounded her he would sense it. He would come  back 
along the wide corridors to ask her to stay with him, ask  her  to  defend  him 
against those other insects, who were eating at the roots of  his  violets.  He 
would come back to have her let him sleep beside her as  he  did  when  he  was 
alive. She was afraid of feeling him beside her again after he had leaped  over 
the wall of death. She was afraid of stealing those hands that the "boy"  would 
always keep closed to warm up his little piece of ice. She  wished,  after  she 
saw him turned into cement, like the statue of fear  fallen  in  the  mud,  she 
wished that they would take him far away so that she wouldn't remember  him  at 
night. And yet they had  left  him  there,  where  he  was  imperturbable  now, 
wretched, feeding his blood with the mud of earthworms. And she had  to  resign 
herself to seeing him return from the depths of his  shadows.  Because  always, 
invariably, when she lay awake she began to think about the "boy," who must  be 
calling her from his piece of earth to help him flee that absurd death.
    But now, in her new life, temporal and spaceless, she  was  more  tranquil. 
She knew that outside her world there, everything would keep going on with  the
same rhythm as before; that her room would still  be  sunken  in  early-morning
darkness, and her things, her furniture, her thirteen favorite  books,  all  in
place. And that on her unoccupied bed, the body aroma that filled the  void  of
what had been a whole woman was only now beginning to evaporate. But how  could
"that" happen? How could she, after being a beautiful woman, her blood  peopled
by insects, pursued by the fear of the total night, have the  immense,  wakeful
nightmare now of entering a strange, unknown world  where  all  dimensions  had
been eliminated? She remembered. That night - the night  of  her  passage - had
been colder than usual and she was alone in the house, martyrized by  insomnia.
No one disturbed the silence, and the smell  that  came  from  the  garden  was 
a smell of fear. Sweat broke out on her body as if the blood  in  her  arteries
were pouring out its cargo of insects. She wanted someone to  pass  by  on  the
street, someone who would shout, would  shatter  that  halted  atmosphere.  For
something to move in nature, for the earth to move around the sun again. But it 
was useless.
    There was no waking up even for those imbecilic men who had  fallen  asleep
under her ear, inside the pillow. She, too, was motionless. The walls gave  off
a strong smell of fresh paint, that thick, grand smell  that  you  don't  smell
with your nose but with your stomach.  And  on  the  table  the  single  clock, 
pounding on the silence with its mortal  machinery.  "Time...  oh,  time!"  she
sighed, remembering death. And there in the courtyard, under the  orange  tree,
the "boy" was still weeping with his tiny sob from the other world.
    She took refuge in all her beliefs. Why didn't it dawn right then and there 
or why didn't she die once and for all? She had never thought that beauty would
cost her so many sacrifices. At that moment - as usual - it still pained her on
top of her fear. And underneath her fear those implacable  insects  were  still
martyrizing her. Death had squeezed her into life like a spider, biting her  in
a rage, ready to make her succumb. But the final moment was  taking  its  time. 
Her hands, those hands that men squeezed like imbeciles  with  manifest  animal
nervousness, were motionless, paralyzed by fear, by that irrational terror that 
came from within, with no motive, just from knowing that she was  abandoned  in 
that ancient house. She tried to react and  couldn't.  Fear  had  absorbed  her 
completely and remained there, fixed, tenacious, almost  corporeal,  as  if  it 
were some invisible person who had made up his mind not to leave her room.  And 
the most upsetting part was that the fear had no justification at all, that  it 
was a unique fear, without any reason, a fear just because.
    The saliva had grown thick on her tongue. That hard gum that stuck  to  her
palate and flowed because she was unable to contain it was  bothersome  between
her teeth. It was a desire that was quite different  from  thirst.  A  superior
desire that she was feeling for the first time in her life. For  a  moment  she
forgot about her beauty, her insomnia, and  her  irrational  fear.  She  didn't
recognize herself. For an instant she thought that the microbes  had  left  her 
body. She felt that they'd come out stuck to her saliva. Yes, that was all very 
fine. It was fine that the insects no longer occupied her and  that  she  could 
sleep now, but she had to find a way to dissolve that  resin  that  dulled  her 
tongue. If she could only get to the pantry and... But what  was  she  thinking 
about? She gave a start of  surprise.  She'd  never  felt  "that  desire."  The 
urgency of the acidity had debilitated her, rendering  useless  the  discipline 
that she had faithfully followed for so many years ever since the day they  had 
buried the "boy." It was foolish,  but  she  felt  revulsion  about  eating  an 
orange. She knew that the "boy" had climbed up to the orange blossoms and  that 
the fruit of next autumn would  be  swollen  with  his  flesh,  cooled  by  the 
coolness of his death. No. She couldn't eat them. She  knew  that  under  every 
orange tree in the world there was a boy buried, sweetening the fruit with  the 
lime of his bones. Nevertheless, she had to eat an orange now. It was the  only 
thing for that gum that was smothering her. It was  the  foolishness  to  think 
that the "boy" was inside a fruit. She would take advantage of that  moment  in 
which beauty had stopped paining her to get to  the  pantry.  But  wasn't  that 
strange? It was the first time in her life that she'd felt a real urge  to  eat 
an orange. She became happy, happy. Oh, what pleasure! Eating  an  orange.  She 
didn't know why, but she'd never had such a demanding desire. She would get up, 
happy to be a normal woman again, singing merrily until she got to the  pantry, 
singing merrily like a new woman, newborn. She would,even get to the  courtyard 
and...
    Her memory was suddenly cut off. She remembered that she had tried  to  get  
up and that she was no longer in her bed, that her body had  disappeared,  that 
her thirteen favorite books were no longer there, that she was no  longer  she, 
now that she was bodiless, floating, drifting  over  an  absolute  nothingness,
changed into an amorphous dot, tiny,  lacking  direction.  She  was  unable  to 
pinpoint what had happened. She was confused. She just had the  sensation  that
someone had pushed her into space from the top of a precipice. She felt changed 
into an abstract, imaginary being. She felt changed into an in corporeal woman, 
something like her suddenly having entered that high and unknown world of  pure 
spirits.
    She was afraid again. But it was a different fear from what  she  had  felt 
a moment before. It was no longer the fear  of  the  "boy"'s  weeping.  It  was 
a terror of the strange, of what was mysterious and unknown in her  new  world.
And to think that all of it had happened so innocently, with so much naivete on 
her part. What would she tell her mother when she told her  what  had  happened 
when she got home? She began to think about how alarmed the neighbors would  be 
when they opened the door to her bedroom and discovered that the bed was empty, 
that the locks had not been touched, that no one had been able to enter  or  to 
leave, and that, nonetheless, she  wasn't  there.  She  imagined  her  mother's 
desperate movements as she searched through the room,  conjecturing,  wondering 
"what could have become of  that  girl?"  The  scene  was  clear  to  her.  The 
neighbors would arrive and begin to  weave  comments  together - some  of  them 
malicious - concerning her disappearance. Each would think according to his own
and particular way of thinking. Each  would  try  to  offer  the  most  logical 
explanation, the most acceptable, at least, while her mother  would  run  along
all the corridors in the big house, desperate, calling her by name.
    And there she would be. She would contemplate the moment, detail by detail,
from a corner, from the ceiling, from the chinks in the  wall,  from  anywhere;
from the best angle, shielded by her bodiless state, in her  spacelessness.  It
bothered her, thinking about it. Now she realized her mistake. She wouldn't  be
able to give any explanation, clear anything up,  console  anybody.  No  living
being could be informed of her transformation. Now - perhaps the only time that
she needed them - she wouldn't have a mouth, arms, so that everybody could know
that she was there, in her corner, separated from the  three-dimensional  world
by an unbridgeable distance. In her  new  life  she  was  isolated,  completely 
prevented from grasping emotions. But at every moment something  was  vibrating
in her, a shudder that ran through her, overwhelming her, making her  aware  of
that other physical universe that moved outside her world. She  couldn't  hear,
she couldn't see, but she knew about that sound and that sight. And  there,  in
the heights of her superior world, she began to know  that  an  environment  of
anguish surrounded her.
    Just a moment before - according to our temporal world - she had  made  the
passage, so that only now was she beginning  to  know  the  peculiarities,  the 
characteristics, of her new world. Around her  an  absolute,  radical  darkness
spun. How long would that darkness last? Would she have to get used to  it  for
eternity? Her anguish grew from her concentration as she saw herself sunken  in
that thick impenetrable  fog:  could  she  be  in  limbo?  She  shuddered.  She 
remembered everything she had heard about  limbo.  If  she  really  was  there,
floating beside her were other pure spirits, those of  children  who  had  died
without baptism, who had been dying for a thousand years. In the  darkness  she
tried to find next to her those beings who must have been much purer,  ever  so
much simpler, than she. Completely isolated from the physical world,  condemned
to a sleepwalking and eternal life. Maybe the "boy" was there  looking  for  an
exit that would lead him to his body.
    But no. Why should she be in limbo? Had  she  died,  perhaps?  No.  It  was 
simply a change in state, a normal  passage  from  the  physical  world  to  an 
easier, uncomplicated world, where all dimensions had been eliminated.
    Now she would not have to bear those subterranean insects. Her  beauty  had
collapsed on her. Now,  in  that  elemental  situation,  she  could  be  happy. 
Although - oh! - not completely happy, because now  her  greatest  desire,  the
desire to eat an orange, had become impossible. It  was  the  only  thing  that
might have caused her still to want to be in her first  life.  To  be  able  to
satisfy the urgency of the acidity that still persisted after the passage.  She
tried to orient herself so as to reach the pantry and feel,  if  nothing  else,
the cool and sour company of the oranges. It was then that she discovered a new 
characteristic of her world: she was everywhere in the house, in the courtyard, 
on the roof, even in the "boy" 's orange tree. She was in  the  whole  physical 
world there beyond. And yet she was nowhere. She became upset  again.  She  had 
lost control over herself. Now she was under a superior will, she was a useless 
being, absurd, good for nothing. Without knowing why, she began  to  feel  sad. 
She almost began to feel nostalgia for her beauty:  for  the  beauty  that  had 
foolishly ruined her.
    But one supreme idea reanimated her. Hadn't she heard, perhaps,  that  pure
spirits can penetrate any body at will? After  all,  what  harm  was  there  in
trying? She attempted to remember what inhabitant of the house could be put  to
the proof. If she could fulfill her aim she would be satisfied: she  could  eat
the orange. She remembered. At that time the servants were usually  not  there.
Her mother still hadn't arrived. But the need to eat an orange, joined  now  to
the curiosity of seeing herself incarnate in a body  different  from  her  own,
obliged her to act at once. And yet there was no one there in  whom  she  could
incarnate herself. It was a desolating bit of reason: there was nobody  in  the
house. She would have to live eternally isolated from the outside world, in her 
undimensional world, unable to  eat  the  first  orange.  And  all  because  of 
a foolish thing. It would have been better to go on bearing up for a  few  more
years under that hostile beauty  and  not  wipe  herself  out  forever,  making 
herself useless, like a conquered beast. But it was too late.
    She was going to withdraw, disappointed,  into  a  distant  region  of  the
universe, to a place where she  could  forget  all  her  earthly  desires.  But
something made her suddenly hold back. The  promise  of  a  better  future  had
opened up in her unknown region. Yes, there was someone in the  house  in  whom
she could reincarnate herself: the cat! Then she hesitated. It was difficult to 
resign herself to live inside an animal. She would have soft,  white  fur,  and 
a great energy for a leap would probably be concentrated in  her  muscles.  And 
she would feel her eyes glow in the dark like two green coals.  And  she  would 
have white, sharp teeth to smile at her  mother  from  her  feline  heart  with 
a broad and good animal smile. But no! It couldn't  be.  She  imagined  herself 
quickly inside the body of the cat, running through the corridors of the  house 
once more, managing four uncomfortable legs, and that tail would  move  on  its 
own, without rhythm, alien to her will. What would life look like through those 
green and luminous eyes? At night she would go to mew at the  sky  so  that  it 
would not pour its moonlit cement down on the face of the "boy," who  would  be 
on his back drinking in the dew. Maybe in her status as a cat  she  would  also 
feel fear. And maybe in the end, she would be unable to  eat  the  orange  with 
that carnivorous mouth. A coldness that came from right then and there, born of 
the very roots of her spirit quivered in her memory. No. It was  impossible  to 
incarnate herself in the cat. She was afraid of one day feeling in  her  palate 
in her throat in all her quadruped organism,  the  irrevocable  desire  to  eat 
a mouse. Probably when her spirit began to inhabit the cat's body she would  no 
longer feel any desire to eat an orange but the repugnant and urgent desire  to 
eat a mouse. She shuddered on thinking about it, caught between her teeth after 
the chase. She felt it struggling in its last attempts  at  escape,  trying  to 
free itself to get back to its hole  again.  No.  Anything  but  that.  It  was 
preferable to stay there for eternity in that distant and mysterious  world  of 
pure spirits. 
    But it was difficult to resign herself to live forgotten forever.  Why  did 
she have to feel the desire to eat a mouse? Who would rule in that synthesis of
woman and cat? Would the primitive animal instinct of the  body  rule,  or  the 
pure will of the woman? The answer was crystal clear. There was no reason to be 
afraid. She would incarnate herself in  the  cat  and  would  eat  her  desired 
orange. Besides, she would be a strange being, a cat with the  intelligence  of
a beautiful woman. She would be the center of all attention... It was then, for 
the first time, that she understood that above all  her  virtues  what  was  in 
command was the vanity of a metaphysical woman.
    Like an insect on the alert which raises its antennae, she put  her  energy 
to work throughout the house in search of the cat. It must still be on  top  of 
the stove at that time, dreaming  that  it  would  wake  up  with  a  sprig  of 
heliotrope between its teeth. But it wasn't there. She looked for it again, but 
she could no longer find the stove. The kitchen wasn't the same. The corners of 
the house were strange to her; they were no longer those dark corners  full  of
cobwebs. The cat was nowhere to be found. She looked on the roof, in the trees, 
in the drains, under the bed, in the pantry.  She  found  everything  confused. 
Where she expected to find the portraits of her ancestors again, she found only 
a bottle of arsenic. From there on she found arsenic all through the house, but 
the cat had disappeared. The house was no longer the same as before.  What  had 
happened to her things? Why were her thirteen favorite books now covered with a 
thick coat of arsenic? She remembered the orange tree  in  the  courtyard.  She 
looked for it, and tried to find the "boy" again in his pit of water.  But  the 
orange tree wasn't in its place and the "boy" was nothing now but a handful  of 
arsenic mixed with ashes underneath a heavy concrete platform. Now  she  really 
was going to sleep. Everything was different. And the house had a strong  smell 
of arsenic that beat on her nostrils as if from the depths of a pharmacy.
    Only then did she understand that three thousand years had passed since the
day she had had a desire to eat the first orange.

    1948