The Other Rib of Death

 

The Other Rib of Death (illustrated translation)

Gabriel García Márquez (1948)

Without knowing why, he woke up with a start. A sharp scent of violets and formaldehyde drifted strongly from the other room, mingling with the aroma of freshly opened flowers coming from the dawn-lit garden. He tried to calm himself, to regain the composure that had suddenly vanished in his sleep. It must have been early morning, for outside, in the orchard, the water jet had begun to sing among the vegetables, and the sky was already blue through the open window.

He scanned the shadowy room, trying to understand the cause of his abrupt, unexpected awakening. He had the distinct, physical certainty that someone had entered while he slept. And yet, he was alone, and the door—locked from the inside—showed no signs of being forced. A star flickered over the window’s edge. He remained still for a moment, attempting to loosen the nervous tension that had pushed him to the surface of sleep. Closing his eyes, lying on his back, he tried to follow the thread of serenity once more.

His blood, gathered in a knot, dislodged in his throat, while beyond, in his chest, his heart pounded wildly, beating in a light, accentuated rhythm, as if it had just finished a frenzied race. He reviewed the moments leading up to his awakening. Perhaps he had a strange dream. A nightmare, maybe? No, nothing out of the ordinary—no reason for alarm in that.

He had been on a train (now he could remember) traveling through a landscape (he had dreamed this often) of still lifes, scattered with artificial trees, their branches bearing razors, scissors, and other assorted barber instruments (I must remember to get a haircut). He had often had this dream, but it had never startled him before.

Behind one of the trees stood his brother—the other one, his twin, the one who had been buried that afternoon—gesturing (this had happened to him once in real life), trying to make the train stop. Realizing the futility of his message, his brother began running after the car until, breathless, foaming at the mouth, he collapsed.

It was certainly an absurd, irrational dream, but it didn’t justify this anxious awakening. He closed his eyes again, his temples still pounding with the blood rising steadily like a clenched fist. The train moved into an arid, barren geography, and a pain in his left leg drew his attention away from the landscape. He saw that he had (I should stop wearing these tight shoes) a tumor on the middle toe of his foot.

Without hesitation, as if accustomed to such things, he pulled a screwdriver from his pocket and extracted the head of the tumor. He placed it carefully in a small blue box (Do colors appear in dreams?), and through the wound, he saw the end of a greasy yellow cord emerging. Unperturbed, as if expecting it, he slowly pulled the cord with careful precision. A long, endless ribbon surfaced painlessly, effortlessly.

A moment later, he looked up and saw that the train car had been emptied and that in another compartment, his brother—dressed as a woman—stood before a mirror, attempting to extract his left eye with a pair of scissors.

Yes, the dream disturbed him, but he couldn’t explain why it unsettled his circulation when previous nightmares, far more horrifying, had not robbed him of his calm. His hands felt cold. The scent of violets and formaldehyde lingered, turning unpleasant, almost aggressive.

With his eyes closed, trying to steady his breath, he sought a trivial thought to lull himself back to sleep. He could think, for example, In three hours, I have to go to the funeral home to settle the expenses.

In the corner, a sleepless cricket struck up its chime, filling the room with its sharp, cutting voice. His nervous tension began to ease, slowly but effectively, and he once again noticed the looseness, the relaxation of his muscles. He felt himself sinking into the thick, soft quilt, while his body, light, weightless, pierced by a sweet sensation of bliss and fatigue, lost consciousness of its own material structure—of that heavy, earthly substance that defined him, that placed him at a precise and unmistakable point on the zoological scale, bearing within its fragile architecture an entire sum of systems, geometrically defined organs that elevated him to the arbitrary rank of rational animals.

His eyelids, now docile, closed over his corneas with the same naturalness with which his arms and legs merged into a single mass, his limbs slowly losing their independence. It was as if his entire organism had fused into a single, vast organ, and he—the man—had abandoned his mortal roots to sink into deeper, firmer roots, into the eternal roots of a complete and final sleep.

Outside, on the other side of the world, he heard the cricket’s song fade until it vanished from his senses, which had turned inward, submerging him into a new and uncomplicated notion of time and space, erasing the presence of that material, physical, painful world, filled with insects and the sharp scent of violets and formaldehyde.

At peace, wrapped in the warm climate of coveted serenity, he felt the weightlessness of his artificial and daily death. He sank into a gentle geography, into an easy, ideal world—a world designed by a child, without algebraic equations, without sorrowful farewells, without gravity.

He couldn’t tell how long he remained in that noble space between dreams and reality. But he did remember that suddenly, as if his throat had been slit by a knife, he leaped in his bed and felt that his twin brother, his dead brother, was sitting at the edge of the mattress.

Once more, like before, his heart became a fist in his mouth, forcing him to jump. The emerging light, the cricket grinding solitude with its off-key organ, the fresh air rising from the garden’s universe—everything conspired to pull him back to the real world.

But this time, he understood the reason for his fright.

During those brief moments of drowsiness and (now he realized) throughout the entire night when he had believed he was having a peaceful, simple, thoughtless sleep, his memory had been fixed on a single image—constant, unchanging.

A dominant image had taken hold of his mind, imposing itself despite his will, against the resistance of thought itself. Yes. Almost without his noticing, that thought had seized him, filled him, inhabited him completely, becoming the backdrop against which all other thoughts played out.

The idea of his twin brother’s corpse had embedded itself at the very core of his existence.

And now, after having left him behind, buried in his patch of earth, his eyelids quivering with rain, now—he was afraid of him.