The Weeper of Las Garzas

by Gabriel García Márquez, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Eufemia Carrascal charged by the night for weeping, two pesos for the first night and one peso fifty for every night after, coffee and cigarettes to be provided by the house, and for the death of a child she charged nothing at all. She worked in Las Garzas for sixty-two years, and in all that time the town buried no one without her except a German engineer who died of fever in the ice factory, whose people sent for him from Barranquilla in a zinc box that nobody was allowed to open. She stood beside the zinc box for one hour with her hands folded and her eyes as dry as salt, and afterwards she said that it had been like weeping at the door of a locked house.

She had found the trade at nine years old, at the wake of her grandmother. The women of the family wept as women wept at wakes on that coast, with the high practised sobs that rose and fell like the cicadas in the almond trees and stopped politely when the coffee came round, and the men played dominoes in the yard under a lamp that drew every moth in the ciénaga. Eufemia sat on a stool at the foot of the coffin because there was nowhere else to put her. She was not crying. She was listening to the house: to the hammock creaking in the next room with nobody in it, to the pot of beans her grandmother had left soaking on the Friday and that nobody had remembered to cook, to the scissors hanging from their nail by the window, which went on swinging a little in the breeze from the water as if somebody had just put them back. At midnight, when the women had gone hoarse and quiet, a weeping came out of the girl that was neither loud nor shrill, a weeping as level as the rain on a zinc roof, and it did not stop until the cocks. The men left their dominoes standing on the table. Her grandmother's sister, who had not spoken to the dead woman for eleven years over a question of a sewing machine, came in from the kitchen with her hands still wet and knelt on the bare tiles and asked the dead woman's pardon aloud. When the girl finished at dawn, with her face clean and her voice entire, the old woman took the mother aside in the yard.

"That child weeps the truth," she said. "You will have to charge for it."

They charged from the following year, and the price did not change in sixty-two years, though money did.

She never asked who the dead person had been. She arrived after dark, took off her sandals at the door as if the house were a church, sat on her stool at the foot of the coffin and listened, not to the mourners, who said what mourners always say, but to the house. A house goes on talking about a dead man for three or four days before it forgets him: the shoes under the bed with the shape of his feet still in them, the comb with three of his hairs, the shirt hanging on the back of the door that keeps his smell after the body has lost it, the rooster that crows at the hour he used to get up. Eufemia listened the way the fishermen of the ciénaga listened to the water before dawn to know where the mullet were running, and the weeping came of its own accord, and it came in exactly the quantity that was owed.

For Don Fermín Ospino, who kept the pharmacy for thirty-eight years and sold quinine on credit to anybody with a fever and never sent a bill, she wept three nights and two days without stopping to eat, and the women of the town came to the pharmacy with bottles to collect her tears, which were known to be good for sore eyes and for babies cutting their teeth. The rainwater cistern in the pharmacy yard, which had stood half empty since the dry season, rose two fingers in the three nights, and the pharmacist's son measured it with a carpenter's rule and wrote the figure in pencil on the whitewashed wall, where it could still be read when the house was sold. For a drowned fisherman whom nobody knew, who came in with the tide one Sunday with his net still wound round his legs, she wept for eleven minutes, and the town agreed that it was correct.

Widows learned from her what they had lost. Doña Remedios Fontalvo, who had always considered her husband a tolerable man who snored, heard Eufemia weep for him into the second night and put on black the following morning and wore it for the next twenty-six years. Another widow, who had been dressed in black in advance for the four months her husband took to die, watched Eufemia sit until past midnight with her eyes perfectly dry, and the next morning she quietly ordered a dress in a blue the colour of the herons' eggs from the Syrian's shop, and married again before the year was out, and was happy.

For the death of a child she charged nothing, and wept nothing either, because everybody on the coast knew that tears wet the wings of a dead child, and a child with wet wings cannot fly up to heaven and must stay hanging about the house. She sat by the small white coffins all night with her hands in her lap and her eyes open and dry, while the other women sang the verses that are sung for angels and the men let off rockets in the yard, and it was the only work she did for nothing, and the only work that cost her anything. She went home from those wakes walking very straight, and slept until the afternoon of the next day.

So her weeping became the town's verdict, and the families of the dead began to be afraid of it.

---

Don Celedonio Barraza died in the April of the great drought, the year the ciénaga dried up so far that people walked across it to Pueblo Viejo with their shoes in their hands, and the boats lay on their sides in the cracked mud with the crabs living in them. He had bought the ice factory from the German's heirs. He lent money at ten per cent a month to anybody who signed, and he kept the deeds of nearly half the houses of Las Garzas in an iron strongbox under his bed, and slept above it for thirty years like a hen on her eggs.

His three sons came to Eufemia's house at noon, the hour when no one in Las Garzas goes out of doors, with forty pesos knotted in a handkerchief, twenty times her price. She untied the handkerchief on the kitchen table, took two pesos, knotted the rest up again exactly as it had been, and gave it back to the eldest.

"Tonight," she said.

That night the whole town went to the Barrazas', the ones who owed because they were afraid not to, and the ones who did not owe because they wanted to see. The family had laid the coffin on three blocks of ice from the dead man's own factory, because of the heat and because they could, and the ice melted all night and ran in a thin sheet across the tiles and out of the front door into the street, so that the mourners sat with their feet in cold water and the dogs of the town came to drink at the step. Eufemia took off her sandals, put them on a chair out of the wet, sat on her stool with her bare feet in the melting ice of Don Celedonio and listened.

The house told her what it had to tell. It told her about the strongbox, which the sons had already opened that afternoon and locked again, and about the account book with the green cloth covers, in which there was a column for the amount and a column for the date and no column for the name, because Don Celedonio knew every name by heart. It told her about the parrot in the kitchen, which in twenty years had learned only two words and said them all night, one month, one month, in the dead man's voice. It told her about the second bedroom, where his wife had slept alone since the year of the comet. Eufemia sat until dawn with her eyes as dry as the ciénaga that April, and at every hour the people sitting in the water looked at her face, and then looked away at the coffin, and then looked at her face again.

At first light she stood up, dried her feet on the hem of her skirt, put on her sandals and laid the two pesos on the lid of the coffin next to the crucifix. Then she went home and made her coffee.

Nobody had said a word, but by seven o'clock the whole town knew, and by nine the people who owed the Barrazas had stopped paying them, not from malice, but from a kind of good sense that came to all of them on the same morning. By the feast of San Isidro the sons had sold the ice factory to a cousin from Ciénaga at half its value. The eldest denounced Eufemia to the mayor for slander. The mayor sent for her, and she came in the clean dress she wore for wakes and stood in front of his desk.

"What did you say about the deceased?" asked the mayor.

"Nothing," said Eufemia.

The mayor wrote it down, and read it over, and dismissed the case on the spot, because there was no law in the Republic of Colombia against not crying.

A month later, after dark, the widow came. Doña Otilia Barraza walked to Eufemia's house with a black mantilla over her head so as not to be seen, and sat at the kitchen table, and drank the coffee she was given, and for a whole hour she said nothing while the moths beat against the lamp. Then she said:

"For thirty-one years I have cried for that man every Sunday after Mass, and I never knew what for."

She stood up and left a ripe mango on the table, and went home without the mantilla, by the main street.

---

When she was past sixty Eufemia Carrascal began to notice that she was alone. It was not that she lived alone, which she always had, nor that the people of her own age were going into the ground one after another, which she had expected, and for which she had wept them each the exact amount. It was that she was the one who wept. In the whole of Las Garzas there was no one else who could do it. The other women of the wakes sobbed as their mothers had taught them, high and practised, and stopped for the coffee, and she had heard them do it for fifty years and knew to the minute how long it lasted and what it was worth. She lay awake at night under her mosquito net counting it up. When it was her turn, there would be nobody on the stool.

On a Monday in July she went to the workshop of Aniceto Pacheco, who had made the coffins of Las Garzas for as long as she had wept in them, and ordered one for herself, in cedar, to her measure, and paid for it in advance out of a tin she kept under the floor. Aniceto, who had never been asked such a thing by a living customer, measured her standing up against the workshop wall with his tape, and wrote the figures on a plank with a carpenter's pencil, and did not ask her anything. When it was finished she came back in her wake dress and climbed into it among the shavings, and lay down with her hands folded and her eyes closed for as long as it takes to say a Creed, while Aniceto waited with his hat in his hands.

"It's good," she said, climbing out. "It doesn't pinch at the elbows."

Then she went to the priest and told him she wanted a wake.

"You are not dead, Eufemia," said Father Anselmo.

"That's why, Father," she said. "Afterwards I won't be able to hear."

The priest would not say a rosary over a living woman, so she paid the woman who led the rosaries at the wakes, who would. She set the night for the Saturday after the feast of the Virgen del Carmen, and she sent word round the town herself, door by door, and at every door she gave the date and the hour and said that the coffee would be provided by the house. She bought the coffee and four packets of cigarettes with her own money, and a bottle of aguardiente for the men, which she had never allowed at any wake of hers, and a sack of ice, which she gave to the children, because there was no need for it.

The whole town came. There was nobody in Las Garzas whose dead she had not wept for, or kept dry for, and they came the way people go to pay a debt, with their best clothes on and a little ashamed. They put the coffin in the front room on two chairs, and she lay in it in the wake dress with her hands folded and her mother's rosary between her fingers, and her eyes closed, and she listened.

It was not what she had paid for. She had expected to hear the house, and instead she heard the town, which sat on the benches and the doorstep and the edges of the street and told stories about her, and every story was wrong. They said that she had wept the river into flood the year Don Fermín died, when everyone knew it had been the cistern and two fingers. They said that a dead man in San Sebastián had sat up in his coffin to hear her better and had asked for a glass of water. They said that the German in the zinc box had not been German, nor dead, nor alone. They said that a man had once offered to marry her, a man from Mompox with a gramophone, and that she had refused him because a woman who weeps for a whole town cannot afford to be happy, it dries her out. That last one was true, but it had been a man from Magangué, and he had had a bicycle and not a gramophone. She lay in the cedar with her eyes shut and her hands folded and corrected nothing, though her fingers tightened once on the rosary, and the woman leading the prayers saw it and lost her place in the third sorrowful mystery.

At midnight the women of the wakes began their sobbing, high and practised, rising and falling, and stopped when the coffee came. Eufemia, in the coffin, judged it. Badly done, too loud at the beginning, nothing left at the end, worth one peso and no more. In the yard the men played dominoes under the lamp and drank her aguardiente, and the moths came in from the ciénaga, and a child fell asleep against the leg of one of the chairs that held her up.

A little before dawn the door opened and Doña Otilia Barraza came in. She was very old by then and nearly blind, and she came in on the arm of a grandson, who sat her down and went back out into the street to smoke. Nobody had told her where the stool was, but she found it with her hand, at the foot of the coffin, where it had always been. She took off her sandals. She sat. For a long time she did nothing at all, with her old face lifted a little, the way the blind lift their faces, listening, and the room went quiet around her, and the men in the yard put down the dominoes one by one without finishing the game.

Then Doña Otilia began to weep. It was not good weeping. It was small and uneven and pitched too high, like a cracked cup, and it stopped and started again, and twice she had to blow her nose on her sleeve. Eufemia lay in the cedar and listened to it with her whole professional attention, waiting for the fault, and she found nothing to correct. It went on until the cocks. Somewhere in the middle of it two tears came out of the corners of Eufemia Carrascal's own closed eyes, which had wept for the whole town and never once for anything of her own, and because she was lying on her back they did not run down her cheeks as tears should but sideways, one into each ear, and stayed there, cold, until morning.

At first light she sat up. The people who had fallen asleep on the benches woke and saw her and crossed themselves out of habit, and then remembered and did not know what to do with their hands. Eufemia climbed out of the coffin without help, shook out the skirt of her wake dress and put on her sandals. Then she took two pesos out of her bodice and put them into Doña Otilia's hand, and Doña Otilia closed her fingers on them and put them away, because it was the correct price.

---

She lived nine more years, and worked for every one of them, and nobody in Las Garzas went into the ground without her. She died on a Tuesday in October, in the middle of the rains, in her hammock, with the coffee on the fire. The town had already held her wake and saw no reason to hold another. Aniceto's coffin was ready in her bedroom, and paid for. Father Anselmo said the Mass at eight and they buried her before eleven, between the rain of the morning and the rain of the afternoon, and when the men came back from the cemetery, shaking the water from their hats, the coffee she had put on the fire was not yet cold.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Īdibus Octōbribus (15 October 2026), ā Gabriēle Garciā Mārquez per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Gabriel García Márquez, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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