No One Writes to the Colonel

by Gabriel García Márquez

October was one of the few things which arrived.

The doctor stayed in the living room, detained by Sabas’s wife, who asked him for a remedy “for those things which come over one suddenly and which one doesn’t know what they are.”

He had the ability to forget his projects with as much enthusiasm as he needed to think them up.

He considered, perhaps in his moments of less lucidity, that it is possible to achieve happiness on earth when it is not very hot, and this idea made him a little confused.

However, he himself did not realize that he had become so subtle in his thinking that for at least three years in his meditative moments he was no longer thinking about anything.

All the goodness, the misconduct, and the sufferings of the town penetrated his heart when he swallowed the first mouthful of that air which was a blue dampness full of roosters.