Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  That was the first time my mother laid eyes on him. He, on the other hand, had seen her the previous Sunday at eight o’clock Mass, guarded by her aunt, Francisca Simodosea, who had been her companion since her return from school. He had seen them again the following Tuesday, sewing beneath the almond trees at the door to the house, so that on the night of the wake he already knew she was the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, for whom he had several letters of introduction. After that night she also learned that he was a bachelor with a propensity for falling in love who had an immediate success because of his inexhaustible gift for conversation, his ease in writing verse, the grace with which he danced to popular music, and the premeditated sentimentality with which he played the violin. My mother would tell me that when you heard him playing in the small hours of the morning, the urge to weep was irresistible. His calling card in society had been “After the Ball Is Over,” a waltz of consummate romanticism that was part of his repertoire and had become indispensable in his serenades. These amiable safe-conducts and his personal charm opened the doors of the house to him and earned him a frequent place at family lunches. Aunt Francisca, a native of Carmen de Bolívar, adopted him without reservation when she learned he had been born in Sincé, a town near her birthplace. Luisa Santiaga was entertained at social gatherings by his seducer’s stratagems, but it never occurred to her that he would want anything more. On the contrary: their good relations were based above all on her serving as a screen for the secret love between him and a classmate of hers, and she had agreed to act as his godparent at the wedding. From then on he called her godmother and she called him godson. It is easy, then, to imagine Luisa Santiaga’s surprise one night at a dance when the audacious telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and said to her:

  “I give you my life in this rose.”

  This was not a spontaneous gesture, he told me many times, but after meeting all the girls he had concluded that Luisa Santiaga was the one for him. She interpreted the rose as another of the playful gallantries he used with her friends. To the extent that when she left the dance, she also left the flower somewhere, and he knew it. She’d had only one secret suitor, a luckless poet and good friend who had never touched her heart with his ardent verses. But Gabriel Eligio’s rose disturbed her sleep with inexplicable fury. In our first formal conversation about their love, when she already had a good number of children, she confessed to me: “I couldn’t sleep because I was angry thinking about him, but what made me even angrier was that the angrier I became the more I thought about him.” For the rest of the week it was all she could do to endure the terror that she might see him and the torment that she might not. From the godmother and godson they had once been, they began to treat each other as strangers. One afternoon, as they were sewing beneath the almond trees, Aunt Francisca teased her niece with mischievous guile:

  “I heard somebody gave you a rose.”

  Well, as usual, Luisa Santiaga would be the last to know that the torments of her heart were already common knowledge. In the numerous conversations I had with her and my father, they both agreed that their explosive love had three decisive moments. The first was on a Palm Sunday during High Mass. She was sitting with Aunt Francisca on a bench on the side of the epistolary when she recognized the sound of his flamenco heels on the floor tiles and saw him pass so close that she felt the warm gust of his bridegroom’s cologne. Aunt Francisca appeared not to have noticed him, and he appeared not to have noticed them either. But the truth was that it had all been premeditated by him, and he had been following them since they walked past the telegraph office. He remained standing next to the column closest to the door so that he could observe her from the back but she could not see him. After a few intense minutes Luisa Santiaga could not bear the suspense, and she looked over her shoulder toward the door. Then she thought she would die of rage because he was looking at her, and their eyes met. “It was just what I had planned,” my father would say with pleasure when he repeated the story to me in his old age. My mother, on the other hand, never tired of saying that for three days she had not been able to control her fury at falling into the trap.

  The second moment was a letter he wrote to her. Not the kind she might have expected from a poet and violinist of furtive serenades, but an imperious note demanding a reply before he traveled to Santa Marta the following week. She did not reply. She locked herself in her room, determined to kill the worm that did not leave her enough breath to live, until Aunt Francisca tried to persuade her to capitulate once and for all before it was too late. In an effort to overcome her resistance, she told Luisa Santiaga the exemplary tale of Juventino Trillo, the suitor who stood guard every night from seven to ten under the balcony of his impossible beloved. She attacked him with every insult that occurred to her, and in the end she stood on the balcony night after night and emptied a chamber-pot of urine on his head. But she could not drive him away. After every kind of baptismal assault—moved by the self-sacrifice of that invincible love—she married him. My parents’ story did not reach those extremes.

  The third moment in the siege was a grand wedding to which both had been invited as patrons of honor. Luisa Santiaga could find no excuse not to attend an event of such importance to her family. But Gabriel Eligio had the same thought, and he attended the celebration prepared for anything. She could not control her heart when she saw him crossing the room with the obvious intention of asking her to dance the first dance. “My blood was pounding so hard in my body I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or fear,” she told me. He realized this and delivered a brutal blow: “Now you don’t have to say yes because your heart is saying it for you.”

  Without a word, she left him standing in the middle of the room while the music was still playing. But my father understood this in his own way.

  “It made me happy,” he told me.

  Luisa Santiaga could not endure the rancor she felt toward herself when she was awakened before dawn by the strains of the poisoned waltz, “After the Ball Is Over.” The first thing she did the next morning was to return all Gabriel Eligio’s gifts to him. This undeserved rebuff, and the gossip about her walking away from him at the wedding, like feathers tossed into the air had no winds to bring them back. Everyone assumed it was the inglorious end of a summer storm. This impression was strengthened when Luisa Santiaga suffered a recurrence of the tertian fevers of her childhood, and her mother took her away to recuperate in the town of Manaure, an Edenic spot in the foothills of the sierra. Both always denied having any communication during those months, but this is not very credible, for when she returned, recovered from her ailments, both also seemed to have recovered from their misgivings. My father would say that he went to meet her at the station because he had read the telegram in which Mina announced their return, and when Luisa Santiaga shook his hand in greeting, he felt something like a Masonic sign that he interpreted as a message of love. She always denied this with the same modesty and shyness she brought to her evocations of those years. But the truth is that from then on they were less reticent about being seen together. All she needed was the ending that Aunt Francisca provided the following week while they were sewing in the hallway of begonias:

  “Mina knows everything.”

  Luisa Santiaga always said it was her family’s opposition that made her leap across the dikes of the torrent she had kept hidden in her heart since the night she left her suitor standing in the middle of the dance floor. It was a bitter war. The colonel attempted to stay on the sidelines, but he could not elude the blame that Mina threw in his face when she realized he was not as innocent as he appeared. It seemed clear to everyone that the intolerance was not his but hers, when in reality it was inscribed in the law of the tribe, for whom every suitor is an interloper. This atavistic prejudice, whose embers still smolder, has turned us into a vast community of unmarried women and men with their flies unzipped and numerous children born out of wedlock.

  Friends were divided, for or aga
inst the lovers, according to age, and those who did not have a firm position had one imposed by events. The young became their enthusiastic accomplices. His above all, for he relished his position as the sacrificial victim of social prejudices. The majority of adults, however, viewed Luisa Santiaga as the precious jewel of a rich and powerful family whom a parvenu telegraph operator was courting not for love but self-interest. She herself, once obedient and submissive, confronted her opponents with the ferocity of a lioness that has just given birth. In the most corrosive of their many domestic disputes, Mina lost her temper and threatened her daughter with the bread knife. An impassive Luisa Santiaga stood her ground. When she became aware of the criminal impetus of her wrath, Mina dropped the knife and screamed in horror: “Oh my God!” And placed her hand on the hot coals of the stove as a brutal penance.

  Among the powerful arguments against Gabriel Eligio was his status as the love child of an unmarried woman who had given birth to him at the tender age of fourteen after a casual misstep with a schoolteacher. She was called Argemira García Paternina, a slender, free-spirited white girl who had another five sons and two daughters by three different fathers whom she never married or lived with under the same roof. She resided in the town of Sincé, where she had been born, and scratched out a living for her offspring with an independent and joyful spirit that we, her grandchildren, might well have wanted for a Palm Sunday. Gabriel Eligio was a distinguished example of that ragged breed. Since the age of seventeen he’d had five virgin lovers, as he revealed to my mother in an act of penance on their wedding night aboard the hazardous Riohacha schooner as it was lashed by a squall. He confessed that with one of them, when he was eighteen and the telegraph operator in Achí, he’d had a son, Abelardo, who was almost three. With another, when he was twenty and the telegraph operator in Ayapel, he had a daughter a few months old, whom he had never seen and whose name was Carmen Rosa. He had promised the baby’s mother that he would come back and marry her, and he had intended to fulfill the commitment until his life changed course because of his love for Luisa Santiaga. He had recognized his older child before a notary and later would do the same with his daughter, but these were no more than byzantine formalities without consequence in the eyes of the law. It is surprising that his irregular conduct could cause moral uneasiness in Colonel Márquez, who had fathered, in addition to his three official children, nine more with different mothers, both before and after his marriage, all of them welcomed by his wife as if they were her own.

  It is not possible for me to establish when I first heard about these events, but in any case the transgressions of my forebears did not interest me in the slightest. On the other hand, the names in the family attracted my notice because they seemed unique. First those on my mother’s side: Tranquilina, Wenefrida, Francisca Simodosea. Then that of my paternal grandmother: Argemira, and those of her parents: Lozana and Aminadab. Perhaps this is the origin of my firm belief that the characters in my novels cannot walk on their own feet until they have a name that can be identified with their natures.

  The arguments against Gabriel Eligio were made worse because he was an active member of the Conservative Party, against which Colonel Nicolás Márquez had fought his wars. The peace declared by the signing of the Neerlandia and Wisconsin accords was only tenuous, for a fledgling centralism was still in power and a good deal of time would have to pass before the Goths and the Liberals stopped baring their teeth at one another. Perhaps the suitor’s Conservatism was more a matter of familial contagion than ideological conviction, but for her family it outweighed other attributes of his good character, such as his always keen intelligence and proven integrity.

  Papá was a difficult man to see into or to please. He was always very much poorer than he seemed and considered poverty a hateful enemy he could never accept and never defeat. With the same courage and dignity he endured the opposition to his love for Luisa Santiaga, in the back room of the telegraph office in Aracataca, where he hung a hammock for sleeping alone. But next to it he also had a bachelor’s cot with well-oiled springs for whatever the night might offer him. At one time I was somewhat tempted by his furtive hunter’s ways, but life taught me that it is the most arid form of solitude, and I felt great compassion for him.

  Until a short while before his death I would hear him say that on one of those difficult days he had to go with several friends to the colonel’s house, and everyone was invited to sit down except him. Her family always denied the story and attributed it to the embers of my father’s resentment, or at least to a false memory, but once my grandmother let it slip in the confessional ravings of her almost one hundred years, which did not seem evoked so much as relived.

  “There’s that poor man standing in the doorway of the living room, and Nicolasito hasn’t asked him to sit down,” she said with true regret.

  Always attentive to her dazzling revelations, I asked who the man was, and her simple reply was:

  “García, the one with the violin.”

  Amid so many absurdities, the one most uncharacteristic of my father was his buying a revolver because of what might happen with a warrior at rest like Colonel Márquez. It was a venerable long-barreled Smith & Wesson .38, with who knows how many previous owners or how many deaths it was accountable for. The only certainty is that he never fired it, not even as a warning or out of curiosity. Years later his oldest children found it with its original five bullets in a cupboard full of useless trash, next to the violin of his serenades.

  Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga were not intimidated by the harshness of her family. At first they met on the sly, in the houses of friends, but when the blockade was closed around her their only communication was by letters sent through ingenious channels. When she was not permitted to attend parties where he might be a guest, they saw each other at a distance. Then the repression became so severe that no one dared defy the wrath of Tranquilina Iguarán, and the lovers disappeared from public view. When not even a crack was left open for furtive letters, they invented the stratagems of the shipwrecked. She managed to hide a greeting card in a cake that someone had ordered for Gabriel Eligio’s birthday, and he lost no opportunity to send her false and innocuous telegrams with the real message in code or written in invisible ink. Aunt Francisca’s complicity then became so evident, despite her categorical denials, that for the first time her authority in the house was affected, and she was allowed to accompany her niece only when she was sewing in the shade of the almond trees. Then Gabriel Eligio sent messages of love from the window of Dr. Alfredo Barboza, whose house was across the street, using the manual telegraphy of deaf-mutes. She learned it so well that when her aunt’s attention wandered she held intimate conversations with her sweetheart. It was only one of the countless tricks devised by Adriana Berdugo, a comadre of Luisa Santiaga’s and her most inventive and daring accomplice.

  These consoling devices would have been enough for them to survive over a slow fire, until Gabriel Eligio received an alarming letter from Luisa Santiaga that obliged him to think in a decisive way. She had written in haste, on toilet paper, giving him the bad news that her parents had resolved to take her to Barrancas, stopping in each town along the way, as a brutal cure for her lovesickness. It would not be the ordinary journey of one bad night aboard the schooner to Riohacha, but the barbarous route along the spurs of the Sierra Nevada, on mules and in carts, across the vast province of Padilla.

  “I would rather have died,” my mother told me on the day we went to sell the house. And she had in fact tried to die, barring her bedroom door and eating nothing but bread and water for three days, until she was overcome by the reverential terror she felt for her father. Gabriel Eligio realized that the tension had reached its limits, and he made a decision that was also extreme, but manageable. He strode across the street from Dr. Barboza’s house to the shade of the almond trees and stopped in front of the two women who waited for him in terror, their work in their laps.

  “Please leave me alone for
a moment with the señorita,” he said to Aunt Francisca. “I have something important to say that only she can hear.”

  “What insolence!” her aunt replied. “There’s nothing that has to do with her that I can’t hear.”

  “Then I won’t say it,” he said, “but I warn you that you will be responsible for whatever happens.”

  Luisa Santiaga begged her aunt to leave them alone and took responsibility. Then Gabriel Eligio expressed his view that she should take the trip with her parents, in the manner they chose and for the time it might take, but only on the condition that she give her promise as a solemn oath that she would marry him. She was happy to do so and added on her own account that only death could prevent their marriage.

  They both had almost a year to demonstrate the seriousness of their promises, but neither one imagined how much it would cost them. The first part of the journey in a caravan of mule drivers, riding on muleback along the precipices of the Sierra Nevada, took two weeks. They were accompanied by Wenefrida’s maid Chon—an affectionate diminutive of Encarnación—who joined the family after they left Barrancas. The colonel knew that steep, rocky route all too well, for he had left a trail of children there on the dissipated nights of his wars, but his wife had chosen it without knowing that, because she had bad memories of the schooner. For my mother, who was riding a mule for the first time, it was a nightmare of naked suns and ferocious downpours, her soul dangling by a thread in the soporific breath that rose from the gorges. The thought of an uncertain sweetheart, with his midnight clothes and sunrise violin, seemed like a trick of the imagination. By the fourth day, incapable of surviving, she warned her mother that she would throw herself over a cliff if they did not return home. Mina, more frightened than her daughter, agreed. But the head drover showed her on the map that returning or continuing would take the same amount of time. Relief came in eleven days, when they saw from the final cornice the radiant plain of Valledupar.