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1. The Time of the Denizens
- Duke University Press
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one | The Time of the Denizens ‘‘Shit’’ is the last word in Gabriel García Márquez’s short and moving novel No One Writes to the Colonel (1979). The colonel, awaiting the outcome of an upcoming cockfight, is replying to his wife who impatiently wants to know what they will eat. As the cock’s owner, who is also its feeder and trainer, the colonel will be entitled to 20 percent of the winning bet. The colonel refuses to sell the rooster to pay for food. Instead, he asks his wife to wait forty-four more days and to place her trust in the rooster that ‘‘can’t lose.’’ The colonel’s reply, mierda, can be read as a foul response to an anxious and demanding wife. Yet the meaning of that answer transcends the specific moment in the narrative. The colonel feels ‘‘pure, explicit, and invincible’’ (62), Márquez tells us, because he is articulating his feelings after so many years of su√ering, disappointments, frustrations , and fifteen years of waiting for the government pension to which he is entitled ‘‘after risking [his] neck in the civil war’’ (60). Every Friday, after visiting the postmaster, he realizes that ‘‘no one writes to the colonel.’’ His expectations for the pension barely sustain him, and he and his wife continue to have di≈culty in making ends meet, so he hangs his hopes on the rooster’s victory. Márquez’s emotive tale can be read as a realistic and illustrative narrative of many people’s experiences in Latin America. The governments that fail to deliver promised protection to their citizens but are swift in delivering terror against dissenters are represented in the story by the pension that never arrives and the loss of a son to state repression . The story also expresses the region’s political instability: ‘‘Just 24 chapter one think about it, [in the last fifteen years] there have been seven Presidents , and each President changes his Cabinet at least ten times, and each Minister changes his sta√ at least a hundred times’’ (26). Finally, the book can also be read as a highly perceptive account of the meanings and feelings at work in the experience of waiting. No One Writes to the Colonel chronicles endless waiting from the point of view of the colonel and his wife and masterfully describes the changing import of that waiting time from hopefulness to resignation. The central characters are not given names, which increases the reader’s sense of their insignificance in the light of such bureaucratic indi√erence (‘‘Those documents have passed through thousands and thousands of hands, in thousands and thousands of o≈ces, before they reached God knows which department’’ [26]). Yet the lack of names also points to the fact that anybody can be the colonel. Never-ending waiting, sometimes hopeful, other times resigned, characterizes the lives of the dispossessed . It defines their identity, much like that of the colonel who becomes ‘‘a man with no other occupation than waiting for the mail every Friday’’ (17). The poor may stubbornly defend their dignity while they retain hope for a better future. But in their daily lives, ‘‘it is always the same story’’ (24); they are forced to wait for powerful others to make good on their promises. ‘‘Wait’’ is a command that, to paraphrase this book’s opening quote by Martin Luther King Jr., rings in the ear of every poor person with piercing familiarity. Waiting, in other words, is a recurring, almost modal, experience among the destitute. Waiting Inscribed in Space ‘‘Early in the morning of October 10, 1970, in the midst of a cold rain,’’ writes the urbanist Janice Perlman in her four-decade-long study of three favelas in Rio de Janeiro, ‘‘the military police and several large garbage trucks (note symbolism) arrived in front of Catacumba and proceeded to remove everyone and everything’’ (2010: 78). What was once a thriving community climbing up the hills facing the Lagoa Rodrigo Freitas is now the place of a ‘‘little-used park and million dollar condos’’ (63). Eviction was swiftly accomplished ; not so much relocation of favelados. Fourteen hundred and twenty [52.90.50.252] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:36 GMT) the time of the denizens 25 families were sent to the adjacent conjuntos [government-run apartment complexes] of Guaporé and Quitungo, 350 to Cidade de Deus, 87 to Vila Kennedy, and 350, too poor for apartments, were sent...