Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  The move to Aracataca was seen by my grandparents as a journey into forgetting. In their service they brought two Goajiro Indians—Alirio and Apolinar—and an Indian woman—Meme—purchased in their own region for a hundred pesos each when slavery had already been abolished. The colonel, pursued by sinister remorse for having killed a man in an affair of honor, brought everything necessary for recreating the past as far away as possible from his bad memories. He had seen the area many years earlier in a campaign, when he passed through on his way to Ciénaga, and in his capacity as quartermaster general he was present at the signing of the Treaty of Neerlandia.

  The new house did not give them back their tranquility, because his remorse was so pernicious it would still infect an errant great-great-grandson. The most frequent and intense evocations, with which we had shaped an ordered version of events, were those of my grandmother Mina, who by this time was blind and half crazed. However, in the midst of implacable gossip regarding the imminent tragedy, she was the only one who did not hear about the duel until after it had been fought.

  The drama took place in Barrancas, a peaceful and prosperous town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the colonel learned the goldsmith’s craft from his father and grandfather, and where he had returned to live when the peace treaties had been signed. His adversary was a giant sixteen years younger than he, a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal like him, a militant Catholic and a poor farmer who had recently married and had two children and a good man’s name: Medardo Pacheco. The saddest thing for the colonel must have been that it was not any of the numerous faceless enemies he had confronted on battlefields but an old friend, ally, and fellow soldier in the War of a Thousand Days whom he had to fight to the death when both of them believed that peace had been won.

  This was the first incident from real life that stirred my writer’s instincts, and I still have not been able to exorcise it. Ever since I gained the use of my reason, I had been aware of the magnitude and weight that the drama had in our house, but its details remained foggy. My mother, who had just turned three, always remembered it as an improbable dream. In front of me the adults would complicate the story to confuse me, and I never could assemble the complete puzzle because everyone, on both sides, would place the pieces in their own way. The most reliable version was that Medardo Pacheco’s mother had provoked him into avenging her honor, which had been offended by a base remark attributed to my grandfather. He denied it, saying it was a lie, and gave public explanations to those who had been offended, but Medardo Pacheco persisted in his ill will and then moved from offended to offender with a serious insult to my grandfather concerning his conduct as a Liberal. I never found out what it was. His honor wounded, my grandfather challenged him to a fight to the death, without a fixed date.

  An exemplary indication of the colonel’s nature was the time he allowed to pass between the challenge and the duel. He arranged his affairs with absolute discretion in order to guarantee his family’s security in the only choice destiny offered him: death or prison. He began by selling without haste the little he had to live on after the last war: the goldsmith’s workshop and a small farm he had inherited from his father, where he raised goats for slaughter and cultivated a field of sugarcane. After six months he put the money he had gotten at the back of a closet and waited in silence for the day he himself had chosen: October 12, 1908, the anniversary of the discovery of America.

  Medardo Pacheco lived on the outskirts of town, but my grandfather knew he could not miss the procession of the Virgen del Pilar that afternoon. Before he went out to find him, he wrote a brief, tender letter to his wife in which he told her where he had hidden his money and gave her some final instructions concerning the children’s future. He placed it under the pillow they shared, where his wife no doubt would find it when she lay down to sleep, and with no goodbyes of any kind he went out to the encounter with his evil hour.

  Even the least valid versions agree that it was a typical Monday in a Caribbean October, with a sad rain, low clouds, and a funereal wind. Medardo Pacheco, dressed for Sunday, had just entered a dead-end alley when Colonel Márquez waylaid him. Both were armed. Years later, in her lunatic ramblings, my grandmother would say: “God gave Nicolasito the opportunity to pardon the life of that poor man, but he didn’t know how to take it.” Perhaps she thought this because the colonel told her he had seen a flash of regret in the eyes of his adversary, who had been taken by surprise. He also told her that when the enormous body, as big as a ceiba tree, collapsed into the underbrush it emitted a wordless sob, “like a wet kitten.” Oral tradition attributed a rhetorical sentence to Papalelo at the moment he turned himself in to the mayor: “The bullet of honor conquered the bullet of power.” It is a sentence faithful to the Liberal style of the time, but I have not been able to reconcile it with my grandfather’s temperament. The truth is there were no witnesses. An authorized version would have been the legal testimony of my grandfather and his contemporaries from both factions, but if there ever was a file of documents, not even its shadow remains. Of the numerous versions I have heard so far, I have not found two that agreed.

  The incident divided the families in town, even the dead man’s. One side proposed avenging him, while the others took Tranquilina Iguarán and her children into their houses until the danger of retaliation subsided. These details made so strong an impression on me in my childhood that I not only assumed the weight of ancestral guilt as if it were my own, but even now, as I write this, I feel more compassion for the dead man’s family than for my own.

  Papalelo was moved to Riohacha for greater safety, and then to Santa Marta, where he was sentenced to a year in prison: the first half in solitary and the second half in the general population. As soon as he was free he traveled with the family for a brief time to the town of Ciénaga, then to Panama, where he had another daughter with a casual lover, and at last to the unhealthy and unwelcoming jurisdiction of Aracataca and a job as a tax collector for the departmental office of finance. Never again was he armed on the street, even in the worst times of the banana violence, and he kept his revolver under the pillow only to defend the house.

  Aracataca was very far from being the still water they had dreamed of after the nightmare of Medardo Pacheco. It was born as a Chimila Indian settlement and entered history on its left foot as a remote district without God or law in the municipality of Ciénaga, more debased than enriched by the banana fever. It bears the name not of a town but of a river: Ara in the Chimila language, and Cataca, the word with which the community recognized its leader. Therefore we natives do not call it Aracataca but use its correct name: Cataca.

  When my grandfather tried to awaken the family’s enthusiasm with the fantasy that the streets were paved with gold there, Mina had said: “Money is the devil’s dung.” For my mother it was the kingdom of all terrors. The earliest one she remembered was the plague of locusts that devastated the fields while she was still very young. “You could hear them pass like a wind of stones,” she told me when we went to sell the house. The terrorized residents had to entrench themselves in their rooms, and the scourge could be defeated only by the arts of witchcraft.

  In any season we would be surprised by dry hurricanes that blew the roofs off houses and attacked the new banana crop and left the town covered in astral dust. In summer terrible droughts vented their rage on the cattle, or in winter immeasurable rains fell that turned the streets into turbulent rivers. The gringo engineers navigated in rubber boats among drowned mattresses and dead cows. The United Fruit Company, whose artificial systems of irrigation were responsible for the unrestrained waters, diverted the riverbed when the most serious of the floods unearthed the bodies in the cemetery.

  The most sinister of the plagues, however, was the human one. A train that looked like a toy flung onto the town’s burning sands a leaf storm of adventurers from all over the world who took control of the streets by force of arms. The sudden prosperity brought with it excessive population growth a
nd extreme social disorder. It was only five leagues away from the Buenos Aires penal colony, on the Fundación River, whose inmates would escape on weekends to play at terrorizing Aracataca. From the time the palm and reed huts of the Chimilas began to be replaced by the wooden houses of the United Fruit Company, with their sloping tin roofs, burlap windows, and outhouses adorned with vines of dusty flowers, we resembled nothing so much as the raw towns in western movies. In the midst of that blizzard of unknown faces, of tents on public thoroughfares and men changing their clothes in the street, of women sitting on trunks with their parasols opened and mules and mules and mules dying of hunger in the hotel’s stables, those who had arrived first became the last. We were the eternal outsiders, the newcomers.

  The killings were not only because of Saturday brawls. One afternoon we heard shouts in the street and saw a headless man ride past on a donkey. He had been decapitated by a machete during the settling of accounts on the banana plantations, and his head had been carried away by the icy waters of the irrigation ditch. That night I heard my grandmother give her usual explanation: “Only a Cachaco could do something so horrible.”

  Cachacos were natives of the altiplano, and we distinguished them from the rest of humanity not only by their languid manners and depraved diction but by their presumption that they were the emissaries of Divine Providence. Their image became so hateful that after the ferocious repression of the banana strikes by soldiers from the interior, we called men in the military not soldiers but Cachacos. We viewed them as the sole beneficiaries of political power, and many of them behaved as if that were true. Only in this way can one explain the horror of the “Black Night of Aracataca,” a legendary slaughter with such uncertain traces in popular memory that there is no certain evidence it ever really happened.

  It began on a Saturday worse than the others when a respectable townsman whose identity did not pass into history went into a tavern to ask for a glass of water for a little boy whose hand he was holding. A stranger drinking alone at the bar wanted to force the boy to take a drink of rum instead of water. The father tried to stop him, but the stranger persisted until the frightened boy knocked over his drink without meaning to. Without hesitation, the stranger shot him dead.

  It was another of the phantoms of my childhood. Papalelo would often remind me of it when we entered the taverns together to have a cold drink, but in a manner so unreal that not even he seemed to believe the story. It must have happened soon after he came to Aracataca, since my mother remembered it only because of the horror it caused in the adults. The only thing known about the aggressor was that he spoke with the affected accent of the Andeans, so that the town’s reprisals were directed not only against him but any of the numerous despised strangers who spoke with that same accent. Bands of natives armed with harvesting machetes poured into the streets in the dark, seized the invisible shape they took by surprise in the gloom, and ordered:

  “Speak!”

  Only because of his diction they hacked him to pieces, not taking into account the impossibility of being accurate when there were so many different ways of speaking. Don Rafael Quintero Ortega, the husband of my aunt Wenefrida Márquez and the most boastful and beloved of Cachacos, was about to celebrate his hundredth birthday because my grandfather had locked him in a pantry until tempers had cooled.

  Family misfortunes reached their culmination after two years of living in Aracataca with the death of Margarita María Miniata, who was the light of the house. For years her daguerreotype hung in the living room, and her name has been repeated from one generation to the next as another of the many indications of family identity. Recent generations do not seem moved by that princess with the shirred skirts, little white boots, and a braid hanging down to her waist, which they will never make consonant with the rhetorical image of a great-grandmother, but I have the impression that beneath the weight of remorse and frustrated hopes for a better world, that state of perpetual alarm was the one that most resembled peace for my grandparents. Until their deaths they continued feeling like strangers no matter where they were.

  They were, to be precise, but in the crowds the train brought to us from the world, it was difficult to make immediate distinctions. With the same impulse as my grandparents and their progeny, the Fergussons, the Duráns, the Beracazas, the Dacontes, the Correas had also come in search of a better life. In turbulent avalanches Italians, Canary Islanders, Syrians—whom we called Turks—continued to arrive, filtering through the borders of the Province in search of freedom and other ways of living that they had lost in their homelands. They were of every condition and class. Some were escapees from Devils Island—the French penal colony in the Guianas—persecuted more for their ideas than for common crimes. One of them, René Belvenoit, a French journalist condemned for political reasons, was a fugitive in the banana region and wrote a masterful book about the horrors of his captivity. Thanks to all of them—good and bad—Aracataca was from the beginning a country without frontiers.

  But the unforgettable colony for us was the Venezuelan; in one of their houses two adolescent students on vacation would bathe with bucketsful of water from the icy cisterns of dawn: half a century later, Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni would be successive presidents of their country. Among the Venezuelans, the closest to us was Miz Juana de Freytes, a striking matron with a biblical gift for narration. The first formal story I knew was “Genoveva of Brabante,” which I heard from her along with the masterpieces of world literature that she reduced to children’s stories: the Odyssey, Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo, and many episodes from the Bible.

  My grandfather’s lineage was one of the most respectable but also the least powerful. But he was distinguished by a respectability recognized even by the native-born dignitaries of the banana company. It was that of the Liberal veterans of the civil wars who remained there after the last two treaties, following the good example of General Benjamín Herrera, on whose farm in Neerlandia one could hear in the afternoons melancholy waltzes from his peacetime clarinet.

  My mother became a woman in that hellhole and filled the space in everybody’s heart after typhus carried off Margarita María Miniata. She, too, was sickly. She had spent an uncertain childhood plagued by tertian fevers, but when she was treated for the last one the cure was complete and forever, and her health allowed her to celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday with eleven of her children and four more of her husband’s, sixty-five grandchildren, eighty-eight great-grandchildren, and fourteen great-great-grandchildren. Not counting those no one ever knew about. She died of natural causes on June 9, 2002, at eight-thirty in the evening, when we were already preparing to celebrate her first century of life, and on the same day and almost at the same hour that I put the final period to these memoirs.

  She was born in Barrancas on July 25, 1905, when the family was just beginning to recover from the disaster of the wars. She was given her first name in honor of Luisa Mejía Vidal, the colonel’s mother, who had been dead for a month on the day she was born. She got her second name because it was the day of the apostle Santiago el Mayor, decapitated in Jerusalem. She hid this name for half her life because she thought it masculine and ostentatious, until a disloyal son betrayed her in a novel.

  She was a diligent student except for the piano class that her mother imposed on her because she could not conceive of a respectable young lady who was not an accomplished pianist. Luisa Santiaga studied for three years out of obedience and dropped it in a day because of the tedium of daily exercises in the sultry heat of siesta. But the only virtue of use to her in the flower of her twenty years was the strength of her character when the family discovered that she was mad with love for the young and haughty telegraph operator from Aracataca.

  The history of their forbidden love was another of the wonders of my youth. Having heard it told so often by my parents—sometimes by both of them together and sometimes by each one alone—I knew almost the entire story when I wrote Leaf Storm, my
first novel, at the age of twenty-seven, even though I was also aware that I still had a good deal to learn about the art of writing novels. They were both excellent storytellers and had a joyful recollection of their love, but they became so impassioned in their accounts that when I was past fifty and had decided at last to use their story in Love in the Time of Cholera, I could not distinguish between life and poetry.

  According to my mother’s version, they met for the first time at the wake for a child that neither one could identify for me. She was singing in the courtyard with her friends, following the popular custom of singing love songs to pass the time during the nine nights of mourning for innocents. Out of nowhere, a man’s voice joined the choir. All the girls turned to stare and were stunned by his good looks. “He’s the one we’re going to marry,” they sang in chorus to the rhythm of their clapping hands. He did not impress my mother, and she said so: “He looked like just another stranger to me.” And he was. He had just arrived from Cartagena de Indias after interrupting his medical and pharmaceutical studies for lack of funds, and had begun a somewhat commonplace life in several towns of the region in the recent profession of telegraph operator. A photograph from those days shows him with the equivocal air of an impoverished gentleman. He was wearing a suit of dark taffeta with a four-button jacket, very close-fitting in the style of the day, a high stiff collar and wide tie, and a flat-brimmed straw hat. He also wore fashionable round spectacles with thin wire frames and clear lenses. Those who knew him at the time saw him as a hard-living, womanizing bohemian who nonetheless never drank alcohol or smoked a cigarette in his long life.