Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  “Tell him the only thing I want in life is to be a writer, and that’s what I’m going to be.”

  “He isn’t opposed to your being what you want to be,” she said, “as long as you have a degree in something.”

  She spoke without looking at me, pretending to be less interested in our conversation than in the life passing by the window.

  “I don’t know why you insist so much when you know very well I won’t give in,” I said to her.

  Then she looked into my eyes and asked, intrigued:

  “Why do you believe I know that?”

  “Because you and I are just alike,” I said.

  The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant. I had already used it in three books as the name of an imaginary town when I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the ceiba, that it produces no flowers or fruit, and that its light, porous wood is used for making canoes and carving cooking implements. Later, I discovered in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that in Tanganyika there is a nomadic people called the Makonde, and I thought this might be the origin of the word. But I never confirmed it, and I never saw the tree, for though I often asked about it in the banana region, no one could tell me anything about it. Perhaps it never existed.

  The train would go past the Macondo plantation at eleven o’clock, and stop ten minutes later in Aracataca. On the day I went with my mother to sell the house, the train was an hour and a half late. I was in the lavatory when it began to accelerate, and a dry burning wind came in the broken window, mixing with the din of the old cars and the terrified whistle of the locomotive. My heart pounded in my chest and an icy nausea froze my belly. I rushed out, driven by the kind of fear you feel in an earthquake, and I found my mother imperturbable in her seat, reciting aloud the places she saw moving past the window like instantaneous flashes of the life that once was and never would be again.

  “That’s the land they sold my father with the story that there was gold on it,” she said.

  The house of the Adventist teachers passed like a shooting star, with its flower garden and a sign in English over the door: The sun shines for all.

  “That was the first thing you learned in English,” my mother said.

  “Not the first thing,” I told her, “the only thing.”

  The cement bridge passed by, and the muddy waters of the irrigation ditch from the days when the gringos diverted the river to bring it to the plantations.

  “The neighborhood of the easy women, where the men spent the whole night dancing the cumbiamba with rolls of bills burning instead of candles,” she said.

  The benches along the promenade, the almond trees rusted by the sun, the yard of the little Montessori school where I learned to read. For an instant the total image of the town on that luminous Sunday in February shone through the window.

  “The station!” my mother exclaimed. “How the world has changed if nobody’s waiting for the train.”

  Then the locomotive stopped whistling, slowed down, and came to a halt with a long lament.

  The first thing that struck me was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the other silences in the world. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through undulating glass. As far as the eye could see there was no recollection of human life, nothing that was not covered by a faint sprinkling of burning dust. My mother stayed in her seat for a few more minutes, looking at the dead town laid out along empty streets, and at last she exclaimed in horror:

  “My God!”

  That was the only thing she said before she got off.

  While the train stood there I had the sensation that we were not altogether alone. But when it pulled away, with an immediate, heart-wrenching blast of its whistle, my mother and I were left forsaken beneath the infernal sun, and all the heavy grief of the town came down on us. But we did not say anything to each other. The old wooden station with its tin roof and running balcony was like a tropical version of the ones we knew from westerns. We crossed the deserted station whose tiles were beginning to crack under the pressure of grass, and we sank into the torpor of siesta as we sought the protection of the almond trees.

  Since I was a boy I had despised those inert siestas because we did not know what to do. “Be quiet, we’re sleeping,” the sleepers would murmur without waking. Stores, public offices, and schools closed at twelve and did not open again until a little before three. The interiors of the houses floated in a limbo of lethargy. In some it was so unbearable that people would hang their hammocks in the courtyard or place chairs in the shade of the almond trees and sleep sitting up in the middle of the street. Only the hotel across from the station, with its bar and billiard room, and the telegraph office behind the church remained open. Everything was identical to my memories, but smaller and poorer, and leveled by a windstorm of fatality: the decaying houses themselves, the tin roofs perforated by rust, the levee with its crumbling granite benches and melancholy almond trees, and all of it transfigured by the invisible burning dust that deceived the eye and calcinated the skin. On the other side of the train tracks the private paradise of the banana company, stripped now of its electrified wire fence, was a vast thicket with no palm trees, ruined houses among the poppies, and the rubble of the hospital destroyed by fire. There was not a single door, a crack in a wall, a human trace that did not find a supernatural resonance in me.

  My mother held herself very erect as she walked with her light step, almost not perspiring in her funereal dress, and in absolute silence, but her mortal pallor and sharpened profile revealed what was happening to her on the inside. At the end of the levee we saw the first human being: a tiny woman with an impoverished air who appeared at the corner of Jacobo Beracaza and walked beside us holding a small pewter pot whose ill-fitting lid marked the rhythm of her step. My mother whispered without looking at her:

  “It’s Vita.”

  I had recognized her. From the time she was a small girl she had worked in my grandparents’ kitchen, and no matter how much we had changed she would have recognized us if she had deigned to look at us. But no: she walked in another world. Even today I ask myself if Vita had not died long before that day.

  When we turned the corner, the dust burned my feet through the weave of my sandals. The feeling of being forsaken became unbearable. Then I saw myself and I saw my mother, just as I saw, when I was a boy, the mother and sister of the thief whom María Consuegra had killed with a single shot one week earlier, when he tried to break into her house.

  At three in the morning the sound of someone trying to force the street door from the outside had wakened her. She got up without lighting the lamp, felt around in the armoire for an archaic revolver that no one had fired since the War of a Thousand Days, and located in the darkness not only the place where the door was but also the exact height of the lock. Then she aimed the weapon with both hands, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger. She had never fired a gun before, but the shot hit its target through the door.

  He was the first dead person I had seen. When I passed by at seven in the morning on my way to school, the body was still lying on the sidewalk in a patch of dried blood, the face destroyed by the lead that had shattered its nose and come out one ear. He was wearing a sailor’s T-shirt with colored stripes and ordinary trousers held up by a rope instead of a belt, and he was barefoot. At his side, on the ground, they found the homemade picklock with which he had tried to jimmy the lock.

  The town dignitaries came to María Consuegra’s house to offer her their condolences for having killed the thief. I went that night with Papalelo, and we found her
sitting in an armchair from Manila that looked like an enormous wicker peacock, surrounded by the fervor of her friends who listened to the story she had repeated a thousand times. Everyone agreed with her that she had fired out of sheer fright. It was then that my grandfather asked her if she had heard anything after the shot, and she answered that first she had heard a great silence, then the metallic sound of the picklock falling on the cement, and then a faint, anguished voice: “Mother, help me!” María Consuegra, it seemed, had not been conscious of this heartbreaking lament until my grandfather asked her the question. Only then did she burst into tears.

  This happened on a Monday. On Tuesday of the following week, during siesta, I was playing tops with Luis Carmelo Correa, my oldest friend in life, when we were surprised by the sleepers waking before it was time and looking out the windows. Then we saw in the deserted street a woman dressed in strict mourning and a girl about twelve years old who was carrying a bouquet of faded flowers wrapped in newspaper. They protected themselves from the burning sun with a black umbrella and were quite oblivious to the effrontery of the people who watched them pass by. They were the mother and younger sister of the dead thief, bringing flowers for his grave.

  That vision pursued me for many years, like a single dream that the entire town watched through its windows as it passed, until I managed to exorcise it in a story. But the truth is that I did not become aware of the drama of the woman and the girl, or their imperturbable dignity, until the day I went with my mother to sell the house and surprised myself walking down the same deserted street at the same lethal hour.

  “I feel as if I were the thief,” I said.

  My mother did not understand me. In fact, when we passed the house of María Consuegra she did not even glance at the door where you could still see the patched bullet hole in the wood. Years later, recalling that trip with her, I confirmed that she did remember the tragedy but would have given her soul to forget it. This was even more evident when we passed the house where Don Emilio, better known as the Belgian, had lived, a veteran of the First World War who had lost the use of both legs in a minefield in Normandy and who, one Pentecostal Sunday, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide. I was no older than six, but I remember as if it were yesterday the upheaval this news caused at seven in the morning. It was so memorable that when we returned to the town to sell the house, my mother at last broke her silence after twenty years.

  “The poor Belgian,” she said with a sigh, “just as you said, and he never played chess again.”

  Our intention was to go straight to the house. But when we were no more than a block away, my mother stopped without warning and turned the corner.

  “It’s better if we go this way,” she said. And since I wanted to know why, she answered: “Because I’m afraid.”

  This was how I learned the reason for my nausea: it was fear, not only of confronting my ghosts but fear of everything. And so we walked down a parallel street, making a detour whose only purpose was to avoid passing our house. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to see it without talking to somebody first,” my mother would tell me afterward. That is what she did. Almost dragging me along, she walked unannounced into the pharmacy of Dr. Alfredo Barboza, a corner house less than a hundred paces from ours.

  Adriana Berdugo, the pharmacist’s wife, was so absorbed in working at her primitive hand-cranked Domestic sewing machine that she did not know my mother was standing in front of her; my mother said, almost in a whisper:

  “Comadre.”

  Adriana looked up, her eyes rarefied by the thick lenses of the farsighted, then she took off her glasses, hesitated for a moment, and jumped up with a sob, her arms open wide:

  “Ay, Comadre!”

  My mother was already behind the counter, and without saying anything else they embraced and wept. I stood watching them from the other side of the counter, not knowing what to do, shaken by the certainty that this long embrace with its silent tears was something irreparable that was happening forever in my own life.

  The pharmacy had been the leading one in the days of the banana company, but all that was left of the old bottles and jars in the empty cabinets were a few porcelain flagons marked with gilt letters. The sewing machine, the pharmaceutical balance, the caduceus, the clock with the pendulum that still moved, the linocut of the Hippocratic Oath, the rickety rocking chairs, all the things I had seen as a boy were still the same, and in the same place, but transfigured by the rust of time.

  Adriana herself was a victim. Although she wore a dress with large tropical flowers, as she once had, you could detect almost nothing of the impulsiveness and mischief that had made her famous well into her maturity. The only thing about her that was still intact was the odor of valerian that drove cats mad and that I continued to recall for the rest of my life with a feeling of calamity.

  When Adriana and my mother had no more tears left, we heard a thick, short cough behind the thin wooden partition that separated us from the back of the store. Adriana recovered something of her charm from another time and spoke so that she could be heard through the partition.

  “Doctor,” she said, “guess who’s here.”

  From the other side the rasping voice of a hard man asked without interest:

  “Who?”

  Adriana did not answer but signaled to us to go into the back room. A childhood terror paralyzed me on the spot, and my mouth filled with a livid saliva, but I walked with my mother into the crowded space that once had been the pharmacy’s laboratory, and had been outfitted as an emergency bedroom. There was Dr. Alfredo Barboza, older than all the old men and animals on land and in the water, lying faceup on his eternal hemp hammock, without shoes, and wearing his legendary pajamas of raw cotton that looked more like a penitent’s tunic. He was staring up at the ceiling, but when he heard us come in he turned his head and fixed his limpid yellow eyes on us until he recognized my mother at last.

  “Luisa Santiaga!” he exclaimed.

  He sat up in the hammock with the fatigue of an old piece of furniture, became altogether humanized, and greeted us with a rapid squeeze of his burning hand. He noticed my surprise and told me: “I’ve had a fever for a year.” Then he left the hammock, sat on the bed, and said to us in a single breath:

  “You cannot imagine what this town has gone through.”

  That single sentence, which summarized an entire life, was enough for me to see him as what he may always have been: a sad, solitary man. He was tall, thin, with beautiful hair, the color of metal, that had been cut with indifference, and intense yellow eyes that had been the most fearsome of my childhood terrors. In the afternoon, on our way home from school, we would go up to his bedroom window, attracted by the fascination of fear. There he was, swaying in the hammock with violent lurches to ease the heat he felt. The game consisted in staring at him until he realized we were there and turned without warning to look at us with his burning eyes.

  I had seen him for the first time when I was five or six years old, one morning when I sneaked into the backyard of his house with some classmates to steal the enormous mangoes from his trees. Then the door of the wooden outhouse standing in one corner of the yard opened and out he came, fastening his linen underdrawers. I saw him as an apparition from the next world in his white hospital nightshirt, pale and bony and with those yellow hellhound’s eyes that looked at me forever. The others escaped through openings in the fence, but I was petrified by his unmoving eyes. He stared at the mangoes I had just pulled from the tree and extended his hand toward me.

  “Give them to me!” he ordered, and he added as he looked me up and down with great contempt: “Miserable backyard thief!”

  I tossed the mangoes at his feet and escaped in terror.

  He was my personal phantom. If I was alone, I would go far out of my way not to pass by his house. If I was with adults, I dared a furtive glance at the pharmacy. I would see Adriana serving her life sentence at the sewing machine behind the c
ounter, and I would see him through the bedroom window swinging with great lurches in the hammock, a sight that was enough to make my hair stand on end.

  He had come to town at the beginning of the century, one of the countless Venezuelans who managed to escape the savage despotism of Juan Vicente Gómez by crossing the border in La Guajira. The doctor had been one of the first to be driven by two contrary forces: the ferocity of the despot in his country, and the illusion of the banana bonanza in ours. From the time of his arrival he acquired a reputation for his clinical eye—as they used to say then—and his soul’s good manners. He was one of the most frequent visitors to my grandparents’ house, where the table was always set without knowing who was arriving on the train. My mother was godmother to his oldest child, whom my grandfather taught to defend himself. I grew up among them, as I continued to grow up later among the exiles from the Spanish Civil War.

  The last vestiges of fear that this forgotten outcast had caused in me as a child dissipated as my mother and I, sitting next to his bed, listened to the details of the tragedy that had crushed the town. He had a power of evocation so intense that each thing he recounted seemed to become visible in the room rarefied by heat. The origin of all the misfortunes, of course, had been the massacre of the workers by the forces of law and order, but doubts still persisted regarding the historical truth: three dead, or three thousand? Perhaps there had not been so many, he said, but people raised the number according to their own grief. Now the company had gone forever.

  “The gringos are never coming back,” he concluded.

  The only certainty was that they took everything with them: money, December breezes, the bread knife, thunder at three in the afternoon, the scent of jasmines, love. All that remained were the dusty almond trees, the reverberating streets, the houses of wood and roofs of rusting tin with their taciturn inhabitants, devastated by memories.

  The first time the doctor paid attention to me that afternoon was when he saw me surprised by the sharp crackle like a scattered rain shower on the tin roof. “It’s the turkey buzzards,” he told me. “They spend the whole day walking on the roofs.” Then he pointed with a languid index finger toward the closed door and concluded: