Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  “That’s ten months from now,” she said.

  “Well, after all, it’s too late this year to arrange anything at the university,” I told her.

  “Do you really promise you’ll go?”

  “I promise.” And for the first time I detected a certain tension in her voice:

  “Can I tell your papá that you’re going to say yes?”

  “No,” was my categorical answer. “You can’t.”

  It was clear that she was looking for another way out. But I did not give it to her.

  “Then it’s better if I tell him the whole truth right away,” she said, “so it won’t seem like a deception.”

  “All right,” I said with relief. “Tell him.”

  We stopped there, and someone who did not know her very well would have thought it was over, but I knew this was only a pause so that she could catch her breath. A little while later she was sound asleep. A light wind blew away the mosquitoes and saturated the new air with a fragrance of flowers. Then the launch acquired the grace of a sailboat.

  We were in the great swamp, the Ciénaga Grande, another of the myths of my childhood. I had crossed it several times when my grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía—his grandchildren called him Papalelo—took me from Aracataca to Barranquilla to visit my parents. “You shouldn’t be afraid of the swamp, but you must respect it,” he had told me, speaking of the unpredictable moods of its waters, which could behave like either a pond or an untameable ocean. In the rainy season it was at the mercy of storms that came down from the sierra. From December to April, when the weather was supposed to be calm, the north winds attacked it with so much force that each night was an adventure. My maternal grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán—Mina—would not risk the crossing except in cases of dire emergency, after a terrifying trip when they’d had to seek shelter and wait until dawn at the mouth of the Riofrío.

  That night, to our good fortune, it was a still water. From the windows at the prow, where I went for a breath of air a little before dawn, the lights of the fishing boats floated like stars in the water. There were countless numbers of them, and the invisible fishermen conversed as if they were paying a call, for their voices had a phantasmal resonance within the boundaries of the swamp. As I leaned on the railing, trying to guess at the outline of the sierra, nostalgia’s first blow caught me by surprise.

  On another night like this, as we were crossing the Ciénaga Grande, Papalelo left me asleep in the cabin and went to the bar. I don’t know what time it was when, over the drone of the rusted fan and the clattering metal laths in the cabin, the raucous shouts of a crowd woke me. I could not have been more than five years old and was very frightened, but it soon grew quiet again and I thought it must have been a dream. In the morning, when we were already at the dock in Ciénaga, my grandfather stood shaving with his straight razor, the door open and the mirror hanging from the frame. The memory is exact: he had not yet put on his shirt, but over his undershirt he wore his eternal elastic suspenders, wide and with green stripes. While he shaved he kept talking to a man I could still recognize today at first glance. He had the unmistakable profile of a crow and a sailor’s tattoo on his right hand, and he wore several solid gold chains around his neck, and bracelets and bangles, also of gold, on both wrists. I had just gotten dressed and was sitting on the bed, putting on my boots, when the man said to my grandfather:

  “Don’t doubt it for a second, Colonel. What they wanted to do with you was throw you into the water.”

  My grandfather smiled and did not stop shaving, and with his typical haughtiness he replied:

  “Just as well for them they didn’t try.”

  Only then did I understand the uproar of the previous night, and I was very shaken by the idea that someone would have thrown my grandfather into the swamp.

  The recollection of this unexplained episode took me by surprise that dawn when I was going with my mother to sell the house, and was contemplating the sierra snows gleaming blue in the first rays of the sun. A delay in the channels allowed us to see in the full light of day the narrow bar of luminous sand that separates the sea from the swamp, where there were fishing villages with their nets laid out to dry in the sun and thin, grimy children playing soccer with balls made of rags. It was astounding to see on the streets the number of fishermen whose arms were mutilated because they had not thrown their sticks of dynamite in time. As the launch passed by, the children began to dive for the coins the passengers tossed to them.

  It was almost seven when we dropped anchor in a pestilential marsh a short distance from the town of Ciénaga. Teams of porters, up to their knees in mud, took us in their arms and carried us to the dock, splashing through wheeling turkey buzzards that fought over the unspeakable filth in the quagmire. We were sitting at the tables in the port, eating an unhurried breakfast of delicious mojarra fish from the swamp and slices of fried green plantain, when my mother resumed the offensive in her personal war.

  “So, tell me once and for all,” she said, not looking up, “what am I going to tell your papá?”

  I tried to gain some time to think.

  “About what?”

  “The only thing he cares about,” she said with some irritation. “Your studies.”

  It was my good fortune that a presumptuous fellow diner, intrigued by the intensity of our conversation, wanted to know my reasons. My mother’s immediate response not only intimidated me somewhat but also surprised me, for she was a woman who kept jealous watch over her private life.

  “He wants to be a writer,” she said.

  “A good writer can earn good money,” the man replied in all seriousness. “Above all if he works for the government.”

  I don’t know if it was discretion that made my mother change the subject or fear of the arguments offered by this unexpected interlocutor, but the outcome was that the two of them sympathized with each other over the unpredictability of my generation and shared their nostalgic memories. In the end, by following the trail of names of mutual acquaintances, they discovered that we were doubly related through the Cotes and Iguarán lines. In those days this happened to us with two out of three people we met along the Caribbean coast, and my mother always celebrated it as an extraordinary event.

  We drove to the railroad station in a one-horse victoria, perhaps the last of a legendary line already extinct in the rest of the world. My mother was lost in thought, looking at the arid plain calcinated by nitrate that began at the mudhole of the port and merged with the horizon. For me it was a historic spot: one day when I was three or four years old and making my first trip to Barranquilla, my grandfather had led me by the hand across that burning wasteland, walking fast and not telling me where we were going, and then, without warning, we found ourselves facing a vast extension of green water belching foam, where an entire world of drowned chickens lay floating.

  “It’s the ocean,” he said.

  Disenchanted, I asked him what was on the other shore, and without a moment’s hesitation he answered:

  “There is no shore on the other side.”

  Today, after seeing so many oceans front and back, I still think that was one of his great responses. In any case, none of my earlier images of the ocean corresponded to that sordid mass of water with its nitrate-encrusted beach where the tangled branches of rotting mangroves and sharp fragments of shell made it impossible to walk. It was horrible.

  My mother must have had the same opinion of the ocean at Ciénaga, for as soon as she saw it appear to the left of the carriage, she said with a sigh:

  “There’s no ocean like the one at Riohacha.”

  On that occasion I told her my memory of the drowned chickens, and like all adults, she thought it was a childhood hallucination. Then she continued her contemplation of each place along the way, and I knew what she thought of them by the changes in her silence. We passed the red-light district on the other side of the railroad tracks, with its little painted houses and rusty roofs and o
ld parrots from Paramaribo that sat on rings hanging from the eaves and called out to clients in Portuguese. We passed the watering site for the locomotives, with its immense iron dome where migratory birds and lost seagulls took shelter to sleep. We rode around the edge of the city without entering it, but we saw the wide, desolate streets and the former splendor of one-story houses with floor-to-ceiling windows, where endless exercises on the piano began at dawn. Without warning, my mother pointed her finger.

  “Look,” she said. “That’s where the world ended.”

  I followed the direction of her index finger and saw the station: a building of peeling wood, sloping tin roofs, and running balconies, and in front of it an arid little square that could not hold more than two hundred people. It was there, my mother told me that day, where in 1928 the army had killed an undetermined number of banana workers. I knew the event as if I had lived it, having heard it recounted and repeated a thousand times by my grandfather from the time I had a memory: the soldier reading the decree by which the striking laborers were declared a gang of lawbreakers; the three thousand men, women, and children motionless under the savage sun after the officer gave them five minutes to evacuate the square; the order to fire, the clattering machine guns spitting in white-hot bursts, the crowd trapped by panic as it was cut down, little by little, by the methodical, insatiable scissors of the shrapnel.

  The train would arrive at Ciénaga at nine in the morning, pick up passengers from the launches and those who had come down from the sierra, and continue into the interior of the banana region a quarter of an hour later. My mother and I reached the station after eight, but the train had been delayed. Still, we were the only passengers. She realized this as soon as she entered the empty car, and she exclaimed with festive humor:

  “What luxury! The whole train just for us!”

  I have always thought it was a false gaiety to hide her disillusionment, for the ravages of time were plain to see in the condition of the cars. They were old second-class cars, but instead of cane seats or glass windowpanes that could be raised or lowered, they had wooden benches polished by the warm, unadorned bottoms of the poor. Compared to what it had been before, not only that car but the entire train was a ghost of itself. The train had once had three classes. Third class, where the poorest people rode, consisted of the same boxcars made of planks used to transport bananas or cattle going to slaughter, modified for passengers with long benches of raw wood. Second class had cane seats and bronze trim. First class, for government officials and executives of the banana company, had carpets in the corridor and upholstered seats, covered in red velvet, that could change position. When the head of the company took a trip, or his family, or his distinguished guests, a luxury car was coupled to the end of the train, with tinted glass in the windows and gilded cornices and an outdoor terrace with little tables for drinking tea on the journey. I never met a single mortal who had seen the inside of this unimaginable coach. My grandfather had twice been mayor and had a frivolous idea of money, but he traveled in second class only if he was with a female relative. And when asked why he traveled in third class, he would answer: “Because there’s no fourth.” However, at one time the most memorable aspect of the train had been its punctuality. Clocks in the towns were set by its whistle.

  That day, for one reason or another, it left an hour and a half late. When it began to move, very slow and with a mournful creaking, my mother crossed herself but then made an immediate return to reality.

  “This train needs to have its springs oiled,” she said.

  We were the only passengers, perhaps in the entire train, and so far nothing had been of any real interest to me. I sank into the lethargy of Light in August, smoking without pause, but with occasional, rapid glances to identify the places we were leaving behind. With a long whistle the train crossed the salt marshes of the swamp and raced at top speed along a bone-shaking corridor of bright red rock, where the deafening noise of the cars became intolerable. But after about fifteen minutes it slowed down and entered the shadowy coolness of the plantations with discreet silence, and the atmosphere grew denser and the ocean breeze was not felt again. I did not have to interrupt my reading to know we had entered the hermetic realm of the banana region.

  The world changed. Stretching away on both sides of the track were the symmetrical, interminable avenues of the plantations, along which oxcarts loaded with green stalks of bananas were moving. In uncultivated spaces there were sudden red brick camps, offices with burlap at the windows and fans hanging from the ceilings, and a solitary hospital in a field of poppies. Each river had its village and its iron bridge that the train crossed with a blast of its whistle, and the girls bathing in the icy water leaped like shad as it passed, unsettling travelers with their fleeting breasts.

  In the town of Riofrío several Arawak families got on the train carrying packs filled with avocados from the sierra, the most delicious in the country. They made their timid way up and down the car looking for a place to sit, but when the train started to move again the only people left were two white women with an infant, and a young priest. The baby did not stop crying for the rest of the trip. The priest wore an explorer’s boots and helmet, and a rough linen cassock darned in square patches like a sail, and he spoke at the same time that the baby cried and always as if he were in the pulpit. The subject of his sermon was the possibility that the banana company would return. Ever since it left nothing else was talked about in the region, and opinion was divided between those who wanted it to come back and those who did not, but everyone considered it a certainty. The priest was against it and expressed his position with so personal an argument that the women thought it was nonsense:

  “The company leaves ruin wherever it goes.”

  It was the only original thing he said but he was not able to explain it, and in the end the woman with the baby confounded him by saying that God could not be in agreement with him.

  Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away bad memories and magnified the good ones. No one was safe from its onslaught. Through the train window you could see men sitting in the doorways of their houses, and you only had to look at their faces to know what they were waiting for. Women washing clothes on the gravel beaches watched the train go by with the same hope. They thought every stranger who arrived carrying a briefcase was the man from the United Fruit Company coming back to reestablish the past. At every encounter, on every visit, in every letter, sooner or later the sacramental sentence would make its appearance: “They say the company’s coming back.” Nobody knew who said it, or when, or why, but nobody doubted it was true.

  My mother thought herself free of those ghosts, for when her parents died she had cut all connections to Aracataca. But her dreams betrayed her. At least, when she had one interesting enough to recount at breakfast, it was always related to her nostalgic memories of the banana region. She survived her most difficult times without selling the house, hoping to quadruple the price when the company came back. At last the irresistible pressure of reality had defeated her. But when she heard the priest on the train say that the company was about to return, she made a disconsolate gesture and whispered in my ear:

  “What a shame we can’t wait just a little longer and sell the house for more money.”

  While the priest was talking, we passed a town where a crowd filled the square and a band played a lively concert under the oppressive sun. All those towns always appeared identical to me. When Papalelo would take me to Don Antonio Daconte’s brand-new Olympia Cinema, I noticed that the railroad depots in cowboy movies looked like our stations. Later, when I began to read Faulkner, the small towns in his novels seemed like ours, too. And it was not surprising, for they had been built under the messianic inspiration of the United Fruit Company and in the same provisional style of a temporary camp. I remembered them all, with the church on the square and little fairy-tale houses painted in primary colors. I remembered the gangs of black laborers singing at twilight, the shanties on the estates whe
re field hands sat to rest and watch freight trains go by, the ditches where morning found the cutters whose heads had been hacked off in drunken Saturday-night brawls. I remembered the private cities of the gringos in Aracataca and Sevilla, on the other side of the railroad tracks, surrounded, like enormous electrified chicken yards, by metal fences that on cool summer dawns were black with charred swallows. I remembered their slow blue lawns with peacocks and quail, the residences with red roofs and wire grating on the windows and little round tables with folding chairs for eating on the terraces among palm trees and dusty rosebushes. Sometimes, through the wire fence, you could see beautiful languid women in muslin dresses and wide gauze hats cutting the flowers in their gardens with golden scissors.

  Even in my childhood it was not easy to distinguish some towns from others. Twenty years later it was even more difficult, because the boards with their idyllic names—Tucurinca, Guamachito, Neerlandia, Guacamayal—had fallen down from the station porticoes, and they were all more desolate than in memory. At about eleven-thirty in the morning the train stopped in Sevilla for fifteen interminable minutes to change locomotives and take on water. That was when the heat began. When we started to move again, the new locomotive kept sending back blasts of soot that blew in the paneless windows and left us covered in black snow. The priest and the women had gotten off in some town without our realizing it, and this heightened my feeling that my mother and I were traveling all alone in a ghost train. Sitting across from me, looking out the window, she had nodded off two or three times, but then she was wide awake and once again asked me the dreaded question:

  “So, what shall I tell your papá?”

  I thought she would never give up her search for the flank where she could break through my decision. Earlier she had suggested a few compromises that I rejected out of hand, but I knew her withdrawal would not last long. Even so, this new assault took me by surprise. Prepared for another long, fruitless battle, I answered with more calm than I had shown before: