Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  “At night it’s worse, because you can hear the dead wandering up and down those streets.”

  He invited us to lunch and there was no reason not to accept, since the sale of the house needed only to be formalized. The tenants were the buyers, and the details had been agreed upon by telegram. Would we have time?

  “More than enough,” said Adriana. “Now nobody even knows when the train comes back.”

  And so we shared with them a local meal whose simplicity had nothing to do with poverty but with a regimen of sobriety that he practiced and advocated not only for the table but for all of life’s activities. From the moment I tasted the soup I had the sensation that an entire sleeping world was waking in my memory. Tastes that had been mine in childhood and that I had lost when I left the town reappeared intact with each spoonful, and they gripped my heart.

  From the beginning of the conversation with the doctor I felt the same age I had been when I mocked him through the window, and so he intimidated me when he spoke to me with the same seriousness and affection he used with my mother. When I was a boy, in difficult situations, I tried to hide my confusion behind a rapid, continual blinking of my eyes. That uncontrollable reflex returned without warning when the doctor looked at me. The heat had become unbearable. I remained on the margins of the conversation for a while, asking myself how it was possible that this affable and nostalgic old man had been the terror of my childhood. Then, after a long pause and some trivial reference, he looked at me with a grandfather’s smile.

  “So you’re the great Gabito,” he said. “What are you studying?”

  I hid my confusion with a spectral recounting of my studies: a secondary-school baccalaureate degree completed with good grades at a government boarding school, two years and a few months of chaotic law, and empirical journalism. My mother listened and immediately sought the doctor’s support.

  “Imagine, Compadre,” she said, “he wants to be a writer.”

  The doctor’s eyes shone in his face.

  “Comadre, how wonderful!” he said. “It’s a gift from heaven.” And he turned to me: “Poetry?”

  “Novels and stories,” I told him, my heart in my mouth.

  He became enthusiastic:

  “Have you read Doña Bárbara?”

  “Of course,” I replied, “and almost everything else by Rómulo Gallegos.”

  As if revived by a sudden enthusiasm, he told us that he had met him when he delivered a lecture in Maracaibo, and he seemed a worthy author of his books. The truth is, at that moment, with my fever of 104 degrees for the sagas of Mississippi, I was beginning to see the seams in our native novel. But such easy and cordial communication with the man who had been the terror of my childhood seemed like a miracle to me, and I preferred to go along with his enthusiasm. I spoke to him about “La Jirafa,” or “The Giraffe”—my daily commentary in El Heraldo—and offered him the news that very soon we intended to publish a magazine for which we had great hopes. Feeling more sure of myself, I told him about the project and even gave him its proposed name: Crónica.

  He scrutinized me from head to toe.

  “I don’t know how you write,” he said, “but you already talk like a writer.”

  My mother hurried to explain the truth: no one was opposed to my being a writer as long as I pursued academic studies that would give me a firm foundation. The doctor minimized everything and spoke about the writer’s career. He too had wanted one, but his parents, with the same arguments she was using, had obliged him to study medicine when they failed to make him a soldier.

  “And look, Comadre,” he concluded. “I’m a doctor, and here I am, not knowing how many of my patients have died by the will of God and how many because of my medicines.”

  My mother felt lost.

  “The worst thing,” she said, “is that he stopped studying law after all the sacrifices we made to support him.”

  But the doctor thought this was splendid proof of an overwhelming vocation: the only force capable of competing with the power of love. And more than any other the artistic vocation, the most mysterious of all, to which one devotes one’s entire life without expecting anything in return.

  “It is something that one carries inside from the moment one is born, and opposing it is the worst thing for one’s health,” he said. And he put on the finishing touches with the enchanting smile of an irredeemable Mason: “A priest’s vocation must be like this.”

  I was dazzled by the manner in which he explained what I had never been able to clarify. My mother must have felt it too, because she looked at me in slow silence and surrendered to her fate.

  “What will be the best way to tell all this to your papá?” she asked me.

  “The way we just heard it,” I said.

  “No, that won’t do any good,” she said. And after more reflection she concluded: “But don’t you worry, I’ll find a good way to tell him.”

  I do not know if she did, or if she did something else, but that was the end of the debate. The clock told the hour with two bell strokes like two drops of glass. My mother gave a start. “My God,” she said. “I had forgotten why we came.” And she rose to her feet:

  “We have to go.”

  The first sight of the house, just across the street, had very little to do with my memory and nothing at all with my nostalgia. The two tutelary almond trees that for years had been an unequivocal sign of identity had been cut down to the roots and the house left exposed to the elements. What remained beneath the fiery sun had no more than thirty meters of facade: one half of adobe with a tile roof that made you think of a doll-house, and the other half of rough planks. My mother gave a few slow taps on the closed door, then some louder ones, and she asked through the window:

  “Is anybody home?”

  The door opened just a little, in a very hesitant way, and from the shadows a woman asked:

  “What can I do for you?”

  My mother responded with an authority that may have been unconscious:

  “I’m Luisa Márquez.”

  Then the street door opened all the way, and a pale, bony woman dressed in mourning looked out at us from another life. At the back of the living room, an older man rocked in an invalid’s chair. These were the tenants who after many years had proposed buying the house, but they did not have the look of buyers, and the house was in no condition to interest anyone. According to the telegram my mother had received, the tenants agreed to pay half the price in cash, for which she would sign a receipt, and pay the rest when the deeds were signed over the course of the year, but nobody remembered arranging a visit. After a long conversation among the deaf, the only thing made clear was that no agreement existed. Overwhelmed by this folly and the dreadful heat, my mother, bathed in sweat, glanced around her and let escape with a sigh:

  “This poor house can’t last much longer.”

  “It’s worse than that,” said the man. “If it hasn’t fallen down around us it’s because of what we’ve spent to maintain it.”

  They had a list of pending repairs in addition to others that had been deducted from the rent, to the point where we were the ones who owed them money. My mother, who always cried without difficulty, was also capable of a fearsome courage in facing life’s snares. She argued well, but I did not intervene because after the first stumbling block I understood that the buyers were right. Nothing was clear in the telegram regarding the date and manner of the sale, yet it was understood that it had been arranged. It was a situation typical of the family’s conjectural vocation. I could imagine how the decision had been made, at the lunch table and at the very moment the telegram arrived. Not counting me, there were ten brothers and sisters with the same rights. In the end, my mother scraped together a few pesos here and a few there, packed her schoolgirl’s bag, and left with nothing but her return passage.

  My mother and the woman went over everything again from the beginning, and in less than half an hour we had reached the conclusion that there would be no deal.
Among other irremediable reasons because we had not remembered a lien against the house that would not be taken care of until many years later, when a firm sale was made at last. And so when the woman tried to repeat one more time the same vicious argument, my mother used drastic measures in her unappealable manner.

  “The house is not for sale,” she said. “Let’s remember that we were born here, and here we’ll all die.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon, until the return train arrived, collecting nostalgic memories in the spectral house. All of it was ours, but only the rented portion that faced the street, where my grandfather’s offices had been, was in use. The rest was a shell of decaying walls and rusted tin roofs at the mercy of lizards. My mother, taken aback in the doorway, exclaimed in a categorical way:

  “This isn’t the house!”

  But she did not say which one it was, for in the course of my childhood it was described in so many different ways that there were at least three houses that changed shape and direction according to the person who was speaking. The original, according to what I heard my grandmother say in her disparaging way, was an Indian hut. The second, constructed by my grandparents, was made of cane and mud with a roof of bitter palm, and it had a large, well-lit living room, a dining room like a terrace with gaily colored flowers, two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut tree, a well-tended vegetable garden, and a corral where the goats lived in peaceful fellowship with the pigs and chickens. According to the most frequent version, this house was reduced to ashes by fireworks that fell on the palm roof during the celebrations one July 20, Independence Day, of who knows which year of so many different wars. All that remained were the cement floors and the suite of two rooms with a door to the street where Papalelo had his offices on the several occasions when he was a public official.

  On the still-warm ruins the family built its definitive shelter. A linear house with eight successive rooms along a hallway with an alcove filled with begonias where the women in the family would sit to embroider on frames and talk in the cool of the evening. The rooms were simple and did not differ from one another, but a single glance was enough for me to know that in each of their countless details lay a crucial moment of my life.

  The first room served as a reception room and personal office for my grandfather. It had a rolltop desk, a padded swivel chair, an electric fan, and an empty bookcase with a single enormous, tattered book: a dictionary of the Spanish language. Right next to it was the workshop where my grandfather spent his best hours making the little gold fish with articulated bodies and tiny emerald eyes, which provided him with more joy than food. Certain notable personages were received there, in particular politicians, unemployed public officials, and war veterans. Among them, on different occasions, two historic visitors: Generals Rafael Uribe Uribe and Benjamín Herrera, both of whom had lunch with the family. But what my grandmother remembered about Uribe Uribe for the rest of her life was his moderation at the table: “He ate like a bird.”

  Because of our Caribbean culture, the space shared by the office and workshop was forbidden to women, just as the town taverns were forbidden to them by law. Still, in time it was turned into a hospital room where Aunt Petra died and Wenefrida Márquez, Papalelo’s sister, endured the last months of a long illness. That initiated the hermetic paradise of the many resident and transient women who passed through the house during my childhood. I was the only male who enjoyed the privileges of both worlds.

  The dining room was simply a widened section of the hallway with the alcove where the women of the house sat to sew, and a table for sixteen expected or unexpected diners who would arrive every day on the noon train. From there my mother contemplated the broken pots of begonias, the rotted stubble, the trunk of the jasmine plant eaten away by ants, and she recovered her breath.

  “Sometimes we couldn’t breathe because of the jasmines’ hot perfume,” she said, looking at the brilliant sky, and she sighed with all her heart. “But what I’ve missed most since then is the three o’clock thunder.”

  That moved me, because I also remembered the single crash like a torrent of stones that woke us from our siesta, but I never had been aware that it happened only at three.

  After the hallway there was a parlor reserved for special occasions, while ordinary visitors were greeted with cold beer in the office if they were men, or in the hallway with the begonias if they were women. Then began the mythic world of the bedrooms. First my grandparents’ room, with a large door to the garden, and a woodcut of flowers with the date of construction: 1925. There, out of the blue, my mother gave me the most unexpected surprise with a triumphant emphasis:

  “Here’s where you were born!”

  I had not known that before, or I had forgotten it, but in the next room we found the crib where I slept until I was four years old and that my grandmother kept forever. I had forgotten it, but as soon as I saw it I remembered myself in the overalls with little blue flowers that I was wearing for the first time, screaming for somebody to come and take off my diapers that were filled with shit. I could barely stand as I clutched at the bars of the crib that was as small and fragile as Moses’ basket. This has been a frequent cause of discussion and joking among relatives and friends, for whom my anguish that day seems too rational for one so young. Above all when I have insisted that the reason for my suffering was not disgust at my own filth but fear that I would soil my new overalls. That is, it was not a question of hygienic prejudice but esthetic concern, and because of the manner in which it persists in my memory, I believe it was my first experience as a writer.

  In that bedroom there was also an altar with life-size saints, more realistic and gloomy than those of the Church. Aunt Francisca Simodosea Mejía always slept there, a first cousin of my grandfather’s whom we called Aunt Mama, who had lived in the house as its lady and mistress since the death of her parents. I slept in a hammock off to the side, terrified by the blinking of the saints in the light of the perpetual lamp that was not extinguished until everyone had died, and my mother slept there, too, when she was single, tormented by her terror of the saints.

  At the end of the hallway there were two rooms that were forbidden to me. In the first lived my cousin Sara Emilia Márquez, a daughter my uncle Juan de Dios had fathered before he was married, who was brought up by my grandparents. In addition to a natural distinction that was hers from the time she was very little, she had a strong personality that woke my first literary appetites with a wonderful collection of stories, illustrated in full color and published by Calleja, to which she never gave me access for fear I would leave it in disarray. It was my first bitter frustration as a writer.

  The last room was a repository for old furniture and trunks that sparked my curiosity for years but which I was never allowed to explore. Later I learned that also stored there were the seventy chamber pots my grandparents bought when my mother invited her classmates to spend their vacations in the house.

  Facing these two rooms, along the same hallway, was the large kitchen with primitive portable ovens of calcinated stone, and my grandmother’s large work oven, for she was a professional baker and pastry chef whose little candy animals saturated the dawn with their succulent aroma. This was the realm of the women who lived or served in the house, and they sang in a chorus with my grandmother as they helped her in her many tasks. Another voice was that of Lorenzo el Magnífico, the hundred-year-old parrot inherited from my great-grandparents, who would shout anti-Spanish slogans and sing songs from the War for Independence. He was so shortsighted that he had fallen into a pot of stew and was saved by a miracle because the water had only just begun to heat. One July 20, at three in the afternoon, he roused the house with shrieks of panic:

  “The bull, the bull! The bull’s coming!”

  Only the women were in the house, for the men had gone to the local bullfight held on the national holiday, and they thought the parrot’s screams were no more than a delirium of his senile dementia. The women of the hous
e, who knew how to talk to him, understood what he was shouting only when a wild bull that had escaped the bull pens on the square burst into the kitchen, bellowing like a steamship and in a blind rage charging the equipment in the bakery and the pots on the stoves. I was going in the opposite direction when the gale of terrified women lifted me into the air and took me with them into the storeroom. The bellowing of the runaway bull in the kitchen and the galloping of his hooves on the cement floor of the hallway shook the house. Without warning he appeared at a ventilation skylight, and the fiery panting of his breath and his large reddened eyes froze my blood. When his handlers succeeded in taking him back to the bull pen, the revelry of the drama had already begun in the house and would last more than a week, with endless pots of coffee and sponge cakes to accompany the tale, repeated a thousand times and each time more heroic than the last, of the agitated survivors.

  The courtyard did not seem very large, but it had a great variety of trees, an uncovered bath with a cement tank for rain-water, and an elevated platform that one reached by climbing a fragile ladder some three meters high. The two large barrels that my grandfather filled at dawn with a manual pump were located there. Beyond that was the stable made of rough boards and the servants’ quarters, and at the very end the enormous backyard with fruit trees and the only latrine, where day and night the Indian maids emptied the chamber pots from the house. The leafiest and most hospitable tree was a chestnut at the edge of the world and of time, under whose ancient branches more than two colonels retired from the many civil wars of the previous century must have died while urinating.

  The family had come to Aracataca seventeen years before my birth, when the United Fruit Company began its intrigues to take control of the banana monopoly. They brought their son Juan de Dios, who was twenty-one, and their two daughters, Margarita María Miniata de Alacoque, who was nineteen, and Luisa Santiaga, my mother, who was five. Before her they had lost twin girls by miscarriage four months into the pregnancy. When she had my mother, my grandmother announced that she had given birth for the last time, for she was now forty-two years old. Almost half a century later, at the same age and under identical circumstances, my mother said the same thing when her eleventh child, Eligio Gabriel, was born.