Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon

“Ursula had not paid any attention to it until then. She was annoyed because her husband had neglected the work of his carpenter’s shop to devote himself entirely to the cage, and for two weeks he had slept poorly, turning over, and muttering incoherence, and hadn’t thought of shaving.” 

While the cage threatens Balthazar’s livelihood, Ursula’s annoyance with the cage provides another, quieter tension. Others fawn and gossip over the cage, but Ursula is more pragmatic, pleased that Balthazar has finished the work and eager to help him profit from it. Ursula represents the material concerns of the world that Balthazar seems unable to grasp. 

“‘How much will you charge?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know,’ Balthazar answered. ‘I’m going to ask for thirty pesos to see if they’ll give me twenty.’ ‘Ask for fifty,’ said Ursula. ‘You’ve lost a lot of sleep in these two weeks.” 

Ursula presses Balthazar to ask for more money for the cage. One of the story’s main dramatic questions is how to assign monetary value to time. Ironically, Balthazar receives nothing for the cage and yet continues to use the rate of sixty pesos that Ursula suggests in the story he tells the townspeople. His return to this sum demonstrates Balthazar’s naivety and his dependence on external voices to appraise his worth. 

“The cage was on display on the table: with its enormous dome of wire, three stories inside, with passageways and compartments especially for eating and sleeping and swings in the space set aside for the birds’ recreation, it seemed like a small-scale model of a gigantic ice factory.” 

When Dr. Octavio Giraldo comes to see Balthazar’s cage, García Márquez provides the first detailed description of the artifact. The sleeping spaces and rooms for recreation put Balthazar’s creativity in clear focus. The passage ends with the absurdist simile that marks the cage as simultaneously “small-scale” and “gigantic.” This description disrupts seemingly objective scales of space, just as Balthazar’s creative investment in the cage disrupts the purportedly objective scales of time used to determine pay rates.

“‘There’s no proof that this is the one you were asked to make.’ ‘It’s this very one,’ said Balthazar, confused. ‘That’s why I made it.’” 

When Dr. Giraldo learns that Balthazar has already sold the cage to the Montiels, he suggests that Balthazar sell it to him anyway and build another for them. Balthazar’s confused reaction to this idea exemplifies how his integrity as an artist overpowers his ability to function in a capitalistic business model. 

“But he never felt at ease among the rich. He used to think about them, about their ugly and argumentative wives, about their tremendous surgical operations, and he always experienced a feeling of pity.” 

When Balthazar takes the cage to the Montiels, the narrator provides insight into his feelings of pity for the rich. Status symbols and the ability to spend money on surgeries mean nothing to Balthazar. This passage suggests that Balthazar has trouble identifying a monetary value for this work because he does not care about the end result of earning lots of money. 

“‘I’m very sorry, Balthazar,’ he said. ‘But you should have consulted me before going on. Only to you would it occur to contract with a minor.’ As he spoke, his face recovered its serenity. He lifted the cage without looking at it and gave it to Balthazar. ‘Take it away at once, and try to sell it to whomever you can,’ he said. ‘Above all, I beg you not to argue with me.’ He patted him on the back, and explained, ‘The doctor has forbidden me to get angry.’” 

In the home of the Montiels, the reader learns that Balthazar took the commission for the cage from José Montiel’s son, Pepe. As a result, José refuses to pay Balthazar for the cage. Montiel’s doctor’s order not to become angry silences Balthazar’s right as a worker to set his fee. Balthazar and Montiel are so far removed from one another’s respective worlds that communication between them is impossible.

“Balthazar observed the child as he would have observed the death throes of a rabid animal. It was almost four o’clock. At that hour, at his house, Ursula was singing a very old song and cutting slices of onion.” 

When Pepe learns that he cannot have the cage, he has a tantrum and begins to strike his face against the ground. His dangerous show of emotion echoes his father’s struggles with anger. In contrast, Balthazar considers the tranquility of his own home and of Ursula singing and preparing dinner. Later, Ursula’s finished dish goes uneaten by Balthazar, who drinks instead with the crowd of townspeople, suggesting that Balthazar may have traded the enduring tranquility of his home for his afternoon of fame. 

“He approached the child, smiling, and held the cage out to him. The child jumped up, embraced the cage, which was almost as big as he was, and stood looking at Balthazar through the wire work without knowing what to say. He hadn’t shed one tear.”

Instead of responding to Montiel’s insults, or taking the cage to Dr. Giraldo, Balthazar gives the cage to Pepe Montiel. Framing Pepe with the cage creates the image of a boy standing inside a cage, an allusion to the boy’s turbulent home life. The image continues the motif of children drawn to the cage, which begins in the scene when Dr. Giraldo comes to Balthazar’s home and children gather around Balthazar as he displays the cage. From Pepe’s perspective, Balthazar would also appear to be standing in the cage, an image that underscores both the social impingement that prevents Balthazar from acting freely, and how José and Pepe’s emotional volatility and social status have trapped him. Balthazar sees that Pepe has not been crying, despite his tantrum, indicating that Balthazar may have given the cage away in response to a faked emotional response, rather than to someone who truly admires the cage for its artistry.

“‘I made it expressly as a gift for Pepe. I didn’t expect to charge anything for it.’ As Balthazar made his way through the spectators who were blocking the door, José Montiel was shouting in the middle of the living room. He was very pale, and his eyes were beginning to get red. ‘Idiot!’ he was shouting. ‘Take your trinket out of here. The last thing we need is for some nobody to give orders in my house [...].’” 

Balthazar’s gift to Pepe brings the confrontation with José Montiel to a climax. Although Balthazar says he intended the cage as a gift for Pepe, the reader knows that he told Ursula he intended to ask for at least thirty pesos for it. His claim that he intended the cage as a free gift all along suggests for the first time that Balthazar is not as stalwart and honest as he has seemed, and even that Balthazar may have left the cage to infuriate José Montiel.  

“But then he realized that all of this had a certain importance for many people, and he felt a little excited. ‘So, they gave you fifty pesos for the cage.’ ‘Sixty,’ said Balthazar. ‘Score one for you,’ someone said. ‘You’re the only one who has managed to get that pile of money out of Mr. Chepe Montiel. We have to celebrate.’” 

The narrator identifies Balthazar’s response to the crowd’s excitement as his reason for lying about the payment for the sage. This causal link suggests that Balthazar’s “marvelous afternoon” comes about because he allows himself to believe the lie he tells the crowd. In entering his own illusion, Balthazar mirrors José Montiel’s carefully curated image of himself as a wealthy socialite.

“Since it was the first time he had ever been out drinking, by dusk he was completely drunk, and he was talking about a fabulous project of a thousand cages, at sixty pesos each, and then of a million cages, till he had sixty million pesos. ‘We have to make a lot of things to sell to the rich before they die,’ he was saying, blind drunk. ‘All of them are sick, and they’re going to die. They’re so screwed up they can’t even get angry anymore.’” 

At the pool hall celebration, Balthazar’s arc as an artist takes an ironic turn as he schemes about a business model to produce one million cages so that he can make sixty million pesos. Balthazar’s drunken business model contrasts the singular artistic impulse that created the cage with Balthazar’s self-serving ambition to mass-produce a profitable product.

“Ursula had waited for him until eight, with a dish of friend meat covered with slices of onion. Someone told her that her husband was in the pool hall, delirious with happiness, buying beers for everyone, but she didn’t believe it, because Balthazar had never gotten drunk.” 

At the same time that Balthazar is drinking at the pool hall, the short story’s omniscient narrator shifts focus to show Ursula waiting with the steak and sliced onions from Balthazar’s earlier daydream. The detail of the onions suggests a magical synchronicity: that when Balthazar pictured Ursula cutting onions and singing in the kitchen, she had in fact been doing those things. Flights of imagination like these, small eruptions of the fantastic in otherwise mundane circumstances, are characteristic of magical realism.

“Balthazar was in a lighted room where there were little tables, each with four chairs, and an outdoor dance floor, where the plovers were walking around. His face was smeared with rouge, and since he couldn’t take one more step, he thought he wanted to lie down with two women in the same bed.” 

Balthazar perceiving the lighted room is the first of two abrupt shifts that create the sense that Balthazar has had so much to drink he is experiencing lapses in consciousness. (The second appears in quote 15, below.) The passage focuses on a series of details that seem to reflect Balthazar’s gaze moving from one thing to the next. The “little” scale of the furniture, combined with the sight of plovers (the only appearance of birds outside of character dialogue), creates a surreal mirror to the description of the bird cage.