The Late Prodigious BaltazarBy Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The cage was finished. Baltazar hung it in the eaves, by force of habit, and when lunch was finished, it had already been decided by everyone that it was the most beautiful cage in the whole world. So many people came to see it that there was a large crowd in front of the house, and Baltazar had to take it down and close his carpentry shop.

“You need to shave,” said Ursula, his wife. “You look like a Capuchino.”“It’s bad luck to shave after lunch,” said Baltazar.He had a two-week beard, short hair, tough and idle like the mane of a mule, and a general expression of a

boy. But it was a false expression. In February, he turned 30, and had lived with Ursula for four, without marrying or having children, and life had given him every reason to be alert, but no reason to be afraid. He didn’t even know that, to some people, the cage he’d finished making was the most beautiful of its kind in the world. To him, who had been making cages since he was a boy, the new cage just seemed to be harder project than the others.

“Then you should rest a while,” said his wife. “With that beard, you can’t be shown in public.”            While he was resting, he had to abandon the hammock at various times to show the cage to the neighbors. Ursula wasn’t paying attention to him anyways. She was upset because her husband had neglected the carpentry business to dedicate himself entirely to the cage, and during the two weeks he’d slept little, stumbled and talked nonsense, and hadn’t thought of shaving. But her anger had dispersed before the cage was finished. When Baltazar awoke from his nap, she had ironed his pants and a shirt, and had placed them on a chair beside the hammock and had taken the cage to the dinner table. She gazed at it in silence.            “How much will you charge for it?” she asked.            “I don’t know,” answered Baltazar. “I’ll ask for thirty pesos to see if they give me twenty.”            “Ask for fifty,” said Ursula. “You stayed up late working on it a lot in the last two weeks. And it’s pretty big. I think this is the biggest cage I’ve ever seen in my life.”Baltazar began to shave.            “You think I could get fifty for it?”            “That’s nothing for Don Chepe Montiel, and the cage is worth more than that,” said Ursula. “You should ask for sixty.”            The house was covered by a suffocating darkness. It was the first week in April, and the heat seemed more unbearable because of the sound of cicadas. When he had finished dressing, Baltazar opened the door to the patio to bring fresh air into the house, and a group of children entered the dining room.            The news had spread. Doctor Octavio Giraldo, an old medic, happy with life, but tired of the profession, thought of Baltazar’s cage while having lunch with his ill wife. In the sunroom, where they ate on hot days, there were a lot of flower pots and two cages with canaries.            His wife liked birds, and she liked them so much that she hated cats because they were capable of eating the birds. Thinking of her, Doctor Giraldo went to visit a sick patient that afternoon, and upon his return, he passed Baltazar’s house to acquaint himself with the cage.            There were a lot of people in the dining room. On display on the table, the enormous dome of wire, with three interior floors, with special corridors and rooms for eating and sleeping, swings in the space reserved for recreation; it seemed like a scale model of an ice factory. The doctor examined it carefully, without touching it, thinking that the cage was better than its reputation, and much more beautiful than he had ever dreamed for his wife.            “This is an adventure of the imagination,” he said. He looked for Baltazar in the group, and he added, eyes fixed on him in a motherly fashion, “You would have been a wonderful architect.”            Baltazar blushed.            “Thank you,” he said.            “It’s true,” said the doctor. He was fat, yet smooth and tender, like a woman that was beautiful in her youth, and delicate hands. His voice was like a priest speaking Latin.

            “You don’t even need to put birds in it,” he said, spinning the cage in front of the watchful crowd, as if he were selling it. “It would be enough to hang it in the trees on its own.” He put it back on the table and thought a moment, looking at the cage, and said:            “Well, I’ll take it.”            “It’s sold,” said Ursula.            “It’s for Don Chepe Montiel’s son,” said Baltazar. “He specifically ordered it.”The doctor took on a respectable attitude.            “He asked for this design?”            “No,” said Baltazar. “He said he wanted a large cage, like this, for a pair of jays.”The doctor looked at the cage.            “But this isn’t for jays.”            “Of course, doctor,” said Baltazar, approaching the table. The children surrounded him.            “The measurements were carefully calculated,” he said, using his finger to show the different compartments. Then he struck the dome with his knuckles and the cage was filled with deep chords.            “This is the most resistant wire you can find, and each joint is welded inside and out,” he said.            “This is made for a parrot,” intervened one of the children.            “Yes, it is,” said Baltazar.            The doctor shook his head.            “Sure, but he didn’t give you the proper model,” he said. “He didn’t give you a precise order, apart from the fact that it was to be a large cage for jays. Is it not so?”            “Well, yes…” said Baltazar.            “Well, then there’s no problem,” said the doctor. “There is such a thing as a large cage for jays and then there is this cage. There is no evidence that this is the one you were asked to do.”            “But it is this same cage,” said Baltazar confusedly. “I made it for that purpose.”            The doctor made an impatient gesture.            “You could make another,” said Ursula, looking at her husband, and then the doctor. “You don’t need to worry.”            “I promised to bring it back for my wife this afternoon,” said the doctor.            “I’m very sorry, Doctor,” said Baltazar. “But I can’t sell something that’s already been sold.”            The doctor shrugged. Wiping the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief, he contemplated the cage in silence, without shifting his gaze to a definite point, as if he was looking as ship that had left the harbor.            “How much did they give you for it?”            Baltazar looked at Ursula without responding.            “Sixty pesos,” she said.            The doctor continued to stare at the cage.            “It’s very beautiful,” he sighed. “Extremely beautiful.”            Then, moving toward the door, he began to energetically fan himself, smiling, and the memory of the episode disappeared from his memory forever.            “Montiel is very rich,” she said.            Truthfully, Jose Montiel wasn’t has rich as he seemed, but had been able to become rich. A few blocks away, in a house filled with harnesses where one had never heard of not being able to purchase something, someone remained indifferent to the novelty of the cage. His wife, tortured by her obsession with death, had shut the doors and windows after lunch and fell asleep for two hours with her eyes open in the darkness of the room, while Jose Montiel was napping. She was surprised at the sound of so many voices. She then opened the door of the room and saw a crowd of people in front of the house, and Baltazar with the cage in the middle of the crowd, dressed in white and clean shaven, with a properly naïve expression with which the poor arrive at the homes of the rich.

            “What a marvelous thing!” exclaimed the wife of Jose Montiel, with a radiant expression, leading Baltazar inside the house. “I have never seen anything like it in all my life,” she said and added, annoyed with the crowd at the door, “But we’ll bring it inside before they convert the room into a gallery.”            Baltazar was not a stranger in Jose Montiel’s house. On several distinct occasions, due to his efficiency and good compliance, he had been called upon to do minor carpentry work. But he had never felt at ease among the wealthy. He rarely thought of them, of their ugly and difficult wives (or women), of their tremendous surgical operations, and he always experienced a feeling of pity from them. When he entered their homes, he couldn’t move without dragging his feet.            “Is Pepe home?” he asked.            He set the cage down on the dining room table.            “He’s at school,” said Jose Montiel’s wife. “But he shouldn’t be long,” she said, adding, “Mr. Montiel is bathing.”            In reality, Jose Montiel had not had time to bathe. [An urgent camphor alcohol rub had called him out to see what was going on.] He was a very careful man, who slept without an electric fan to remain aware of the sounds of the house in his sleep.            “Come look at this beautiful thing!” yelled his wife.            Jose Montiel—burly and hairy, with a towel draped around his neck—looked out the bedroom window.            “What’s this?”            “Pepe’s cage,” said Baltazar.            The wife looked at him, perplexed.            “Who’s cage?”            “Pepe’s,” confirmed Baltazar, then turning to Jose Montiel, “Pepe asked that I make it.”            Nothing happened in that instant, but Baltazar felt as if someone had opened the bathroom door. Jose Montiel came out of the bedroom in his underwear.            “Pepe!” he yelled.            “He hasn’t arrived yet,” murmured his wife, paralyzed.            Pepe appeared in the doorway. He was about twelve years old and had the same curly eyelashes and quiet character as his mother.            “Come here,” said Jose Montiel. “Did you order this cage to be made?”            The child lowered his head. Grabbing him by the hair, Jose Montiel forced him to look in his eyes.            “Answer me.”            The child bit his lip without replying.            “Montiel,” whispered his wife.            Jose Montiel dropped the boy and turned to Baltazar with an exalted expression.            “I’m very sorry, Baltazar,” he said. “But you should have consulted me before proceeding. You can’t contract with a minor.” As he spoke, his face recovered its serenity. He lifted the cage without looking at it and said to Baltazar, “Take it away and try to sell it to whoever will buy it,” he said. “And above all, please do not argue with me.” He gave Baltazar a pat on the back and explained, “The doctor has forbidden me to get angry.”            The child had remained motionless, without blinking, until Baltazar looked at him, perplexed, with the cage in his hand. Then he emitted a guttural sound, like the whine of a dog, and threw himself on the floor screaming.            Jose Montiel looked at him impassively, while his mother tried to calm him.            “Don’t help him,” he said. “Let him break his head on the floor, and later put salt and lemon on it so it infuriates the feeling.”            The child screamed without crying, while his mother held him by the wrists.            “Leave him,” insisted Jose Montiel.            Baltazar observed the child as if he were observing the agony of a contagious animal. It was almost four in the afternoon.            At this house, in her house, Ursula sang a very old song, while cutting an onion into slices.

            “Pepe,” said Baltazar.            He approached the child, smiling, and handed him the cage. The boy jumped up, embraced the cage, that was almost as big as he was, and stood staring at Baltazar through the metallic mesh, without knowing what to say. He hadn’t shed a tear.            “Baltazar,” said Montiel, smoothly, “I already told you to take it.”            “Give it back,” said the wife to the boy.            “Keep it,” said Baltazar, then to Jose Montiel, “After all, that’s what I made it for.”            Jose Montiel followed him out of the room.            “I don’t care,” said Baltazar. “I did it solely to give it to Pepe. I didn’t think of charging anything.”            When Baltazar made his way through the spectators that blocked the door, Jose Montiel was yelling from the center of the room. He was pallid and his eye began to widen.            “Idiot!” he yelled. “Take your useless object. The last thing we need is for someone to give orders in my house. Damn!”            In the pool hall, they received Baltazar with a satnding ovation. Up until this moment, he thought he’d made a cage better than the others, that he had to give it to Jose Montiel’s son to stop him from crying, and that none of these things was special.            But then he realized that all of this had a certain importance for a lot of people, and he felt a little excited.            “So they gave you fifty pesos for the cage.”            “Sixty,” said Baltazar.            “There is a ray of hope!” someone said. “You’re the only one who has succeeded in taking a pile of money from Don Jose Montiel. This is something to celebrate!”            They offered him a beer, and Baltazar responded with a round for everyone. Like the first time he drank, by nightfall he was completely drunk, and talking of a fabulous project of a thousand cages, selling each for sixty pesos, and after a million cages he’d have sixty million pesos.            “There are many things we must sell to the rich before they die,” he said, blind from drunkenness. “They are all sick and about to die. How fucked are they if they can’t get angry?”            During the two hours, the jukebox played its music without end. They drank to Baltazar’s health, to his luck and fortune, and for the death of the wealthy, but when the dinner hour came, it left the room empty.            Ursula had waited for him until eight, with a plate of fried meat covered with slices of onion. Someone had told her that her husband was in the pool hall, crazy with happiness, buying beers for everyone, but she didn’t believe it because Baltazar never got drunk. When she went to bed, at nearly midnight, Baltazar was in an illuminated room, where there were little tables with four settings with chairs around them, and an open-air dance floor where the birds (stone curlews) wandered. He had a flushed face with makeup on, and couldn’t walk a step more, thinking about how he wanted to sleep with two women in the same bed. He’d spent so much he’d had to leave his watch as payment, with the promise to pay the next day. A moment later, he was sprawled on the street, and realized they’d removed his shoes, but he refused to abandon his dream that was so much happier than his life. The women who passed him on their way to five o’clock mass didn’t dare to look, thinking he was dead.