It was Tuesday in Cali. The gentleman, for whom the weekend was a murky timeless period—three days without trace—had been decorously and obstinately raising glass after glass until midnight on Monday. On Tuesday morning, when he opened his eyes and felt his room was completely full of a giant headache, the gentleman believed that he had only been partying the night before and was waking up on Sunday morning. He didn’t remember anything. However, he felt a dignified regret over some mortal sin he might have committed, without knowing exactly to which of the seven his regret might correspond. It was just a regret. A lone, unconditional, rabidly independent, and incorruptibly anarchist regret.
The only thing the gentleman knew for sure was that he was in Cali. At least—he must have thought—while that building that stood outside his window was the Hotel Alférez Real and while no one proved to him mathematically that the building had been moved to another city on Saturday night, he could rest assured he was in Cali. When he opened his eyes all the way, the headache that was filling the room sat down beside his bed. Someone called the gentleman by his name, but he did not turn to look. He simply thought that someone, in the next room, was calling a person who was a complete stranger to him. The left side of the gap began on Saturday evening. The other side was this unpleasant daybreak. That was all. He tried asking himself who he really was. Only when he remembered his name did he realize it was he who was being called in the next room. However, he was too busy with his regret to worry about an unimportant call.
All of a sudden, something thin and flat and gleaming came in through the window and hit the floor, a short distance from his bed. The gentleman must have thought it was a leaf blown in by the wind, and kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling that had become mobile, floating, wrapped in the fog of his headache. But something was tapping on the floorboards beside his bed. The gentleman sat up, looked on the other side of the pillow, and saw a tiny fish in the middle of his room. He smiled sardonically; he stopped looking and turned his face to the wall. “How bizarre!” the gentleman thought. “A fish in my room, on the third floor, here in Cali so far away from the sea.” And he kept on laughing sardonically.
But all of a sudden, he leapt out of bed. “A fish,” he shouted. “A fish, a fish in my room.” And he fled panting, exasperated, toward the corner. Regret came out to meet him. He had always laughed at scorpions with umbrellas, pink elephants. But now he could not have the slightest doubt. What was jumping, what was struggling, what was gleaming in the middle of his room, was a fish!
The gentleman closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and judged the distance. Then came the vertigo, the endless void of the street. He had jumped out the window.
The next day, when the gentleman opened his eyes, he was in a hospital room. He remembered everything, but now he felt well. He wasn’t even feeling pain under the bandages. Within his reach was the day’s newspaper. The gentleman wanted something to do. Distractedly he picked up the newspaper and began to read:
“Cali. April 18. Today, in the early hours of the morning, a stranger jumped out the window of his apartment located on the third floor of a building in the city. The decision seemed to have been due to the nervous excitement produced by alcohol. The injured man is now in the hospital, where his condition does not appear to be serious.”
The gentleman recognized himself in the news item, but he now felt too calm, too serene, to worry about the previous day’s nightmare. He turned the page and carried on reading the local news. There was another article. And the gentleman, feeling again the headache that prowled around his bed, read the following information:
“Cali. April 18. Inhabitants of the capital of the Cauca Valley had an extraordinary surprise today, as they observed in a downtown city street the presence of hundreds of small silvery fish, approximately two inches long, that appeared strewn all over the place.”
April 20, 1950, El Heraldo, Barranquilla