Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  Before the first stage of the journey was over, Gabriel Eligio had secured permanent communication with his wandering sweetheart, thanks to the complicity of the telegraph operators in the seven towns where she and her mother would stay before reaching Barrancas. Luisa Santiaga made her own arrangements, too. The entire Province was saturated with people named Iguarán and Cotes, whose tribal consciousness had the strength of an impenetrable jungle, and she succeeded in bringing them over to her side. This allowed her to maintain a feverish correspondence with Gabriel Eligio from Valledupar, where she spent three months, until the trip ended almost a year later. She had only to pass by each town’s telegraph office, and with the complicity of her young and enthusiastic kinswomen she would receive and respond to his messages. Chon, the silent one, played an invaluable role because she carried messages hidden in her clothes without making Luisa Santiaga uneasy or offending her modesty, for she could not read or write, and would die to keep a secret.

  Almost sixty years later, when I tried to plunder these memories for Love in the Time of Cholera, my fifth novel, I asked my papá if in the professional jargon of telegraph operators there existed a specific word for the act of linking one office to another. He did not have to think about it: pegging in. The word is in the dictionary, though not with the specific meaning I needed, but it seemed perfect since communication between different offices was established by connecting a peg on a panel of telegraphic terminals. I never discussed it with my father. But not long before his death he was asked in a newspaper interview if he had ever wanted to write a novel, and he answered that he had but gave it up when I asked him about the verb pegging in, because he realized then that the book I was writing was the same one he had planned to write.

  On that occasion he also revealed a secret that could have changed the course of our lives. And it was that after six months of traveling, when my mother was in San Juan del César, Gabriel Eligio was told in confidence that Mina had the responsibility of preparing for the definitive return of the family to Barrancas provided the rancor caused by the death of Medardo Pacheco had healed over. It seemed absurd to him, now that the bad times had been left behind and the absolute imperium of the banana company was beginning to resemble the dream of the promised land. But it was also reasonable that the intractability of the Márquez Iguarán family would lead them to sacrifice their own happiness if they could free their daughter from the talons of the hawk. Gabriel Eligio’s immediate decision was to request a transfer to the telegraph office in Riohacha, some twenty leagues from Barrancas. The position was not open but they promised to keep his application in mind.

  Luisa Santiaga could not determine her mother’s secret intentions, but she did not dare deny them either, for she had noticed that the closer they came to Barrancas, the calmer and more peaceful Tranquilina Iguarán seemed. Chon, everyone’s confidante, gave her no clues. To get to the truth, Luisa Santiaga told her mother that she would love to stay in Barrancas and live there. The mother had a moment’s hesitation but decided not to say anything, and the daughter was left with the impression that she had come very close to the secret. Troubled, she escaped into the destiny of the cards with a street Gypsy who gave her no clues about her future in Barrancas. On the other hand, she did tell her that there would be no obstacle to a long and happy life with a distant man she did not know well, but who would love her until death. Her description of the man returned Luisa Santiaga’s soul to her body, for she found many qualities in him that she saw in her beloved, above all in his temperament. At the end the Gypsy predicted without a shred of doubt that she would have six children with him. “I died of fright,” my mother said the first time she told me the story, not even imagining that her children would number five more than that. The two of them accepted the prediction with so much enthusiasm that their telegraphic correspondence stopped being a concert of illusory intentions and became methodical, practical, and more intense than ever. They set dates, established means, and devoted their lives to the shared determination to marry without consulting anyone when they met again, wherever and however that might be.

  Luisa Santiaga was so faithful to their commitment that in the town of Fonseca she did not think it correct to attend a gala ball without her sweetheart’s consent. Gabriel Eligio was in the hammock sweating out a fever of 104 when he heard the signal for an urgent incoming telegram. It was his colleague in Fonseca. To guarantee complete security, she asked who was operating the key at the end of the chain of telegraph offices. More astonished than gratified, her sweetheart transmitted an identifying phrase: “Tell her I’m her godson.” My mother recognized the password and stayed at the dance until seven in the morning, when she had to change her clothes in a rush so she would not be late for Mass.

  In Barrancas they did not find the slightest trace of animosity toward the family. On the contrary, seventeen years after the misfortune, a Christian spirit of forgiving and forgetting prevailed among the relatives of Medardo Pacheco. They gave mother and daughter so warmhearted a welcome that now it was Luisa Santiaga who thought about the possibility of the family returning to that mountain oasis so different from the heat and dust, the bloodthirsty Saturdays, the decapitated phantoms of Aracataca. She managed to suggest this to Gabriel Eligio, provided he obtained his transfer to Riohacha, and he agreed. However, she also learned at this time that the story of the move was not only without foundation but that no one had wanted it except Mina. This was established in a letter Mina sent to her son Juan de Dios after he wrote to her, frightened of their returning to Barrancas when it was still not twenty years since Medardo Pacheco’s death. For he was always so convinced of the inescapability of the law of La Guajira that half a century later he was opposed to his son Eduardo joining the public health service in Barrancas.

  Despite all these fears, that was where every knot in the situation was untied in three days. On the Tuesday when Luisa Santiaga confirmed to Gabriel Eligio that Mina did not intend to move to Barrancas, he was informed that the position in Riohacha was now available due to the sudden death of the operator. The next day, Mina emptied the drawers in the pantry looking for poultry shears and happened to open the tin of English biscuits where her daughter hid her love telegrams. Her rage was so great that all she could say to her was one of the celebrated insults she would improvise at her worst moments: “God forgives everything except disobedience.” That weekend they traveled to Riohacha to board the Sunday schooner to Santa Marta. Neither one was aware of the awful night of battering February gales: the mother devastated by defeat and the daughter terrified but happy.

  Solid ground restored to Mina the composure she had lost when she discovered the letters. The next day she returned alone to Aracataca and left Luisa Santiaga under the protection of her son Juan de Dios, certain she had rescued her from the demons of love. The opposite was true: Gabriel Eligio traveled whenever he could from Aracataca to Santa Marta to see her. Uncle Juanito, who had endured the same intransigence from his parents in his love for Dilia Caballero, had resolved not to take sides in his sister’s love affair, but at the moment of truth he found himself trapped between his adoration of Luisa Santiaga and his veneration for his parents, and he took refuge in a formula characteristic of his proverbial goodness: he allowed the sweethearts to see each other outside his house, but never alone or with his knowledge. Dilia Caballero, his wife, who forgave but did not forget, devised for her sister-in-law the same infallible coincidences and masterful stratagems she had used to undermine the vigilance of her in-laws. Gabriel and Luisa began by seeing each other in the houses of friends, but little by little they risked public places that were not very crowded. In the end they dared to talk through the window when Uncle Juanito was not at home, she in the living room and he in the street, faithful to their commitment not to see each other in the house. The window seemed to be made for the purpose of forbidden love, with Andalusian grillwork from top to bottom and a frame of climbing vines that even had its breath of jasmine in th
e torpor of the night. Dilia had anticipated everything, including the complicity of certain neighbors who would whistle in code to alert the lovers to imminent danger. One night, however, all the precautions failed, and Juan de Dios surrendered to the truth. Dilia took advantage of the occasion to invite the sweethearts to sit in the living room with the windows open so they could share their love with the world. My mother never forgot her brother’s sigh: “What a relief!”

  At this time Gabriel Eligio received his formal appointment to the telegraph office in Riohacha. Unsettled by a new separation, my mother appealed to Monsignor Pedro Espejo, the vicar of the diocese, in the hope that he would marry them without her parents’ consent. The respectability of the monsignor had reached such proportions that many of the faithful confused it with saintliness, and some attended his Masses only to confirm if it was true that at the moment of the Elevation he rose several centimeters off the ground. When Luisa Santiaga asked for his help, he gave yet another indication that intelligence is one of the privileges of saintliness. He refused to interfere in the internal jurisdiction of a family so jealous of its privacy but chose instead to find out in secret about my father’s family through the curia. The parish priest in Sincé ignored the liberties taken by Argemira García and responded with a benevolent formula: “This is a respectable though not very devout family.” Then the monsignor spoke with the sweethearts, as a couple and as individuals, and wrote a letter to Nicolás and Tranquilina in which he expressed his heartfelt certainty that there was no human power capable of overcoming this obdurate love. My grandparents, defeated by the power of God, agreed to turn the painful page, and they granted Juan de Dios full power to arrange the wedding in Santa Marta. But they did not attend, although they sent Francisca Simodosea to be matron of honor.

  My parents married on June 11, 1926, in the Cathedral of Santa Marta, forty minutes late because the bride forgot the date and had to be awakened after eight in the morning. That same night they again boarded the fearful schooner so that Gabriel Eligio could take possession of the telegraph office in Riohacha, and they passed their first night together in chastity, overcome by seasickness.

  My mother was so nostalgic about the house where she spent her honeymoon that her older children could have described it room by room as if we had lived there, and even today it continues to be one of my false memories. Yet the first time I went to the peninsula of La Guajira in reality, not long before my sixtieth birthday, I was surprised that the telegraph office building had nothing to do with the one in my memory. And the idyllic Riohacha that I had carried in my heart since childhood, with its saltpeter streets going down to a sea of mud, was nothing more than fantasies borrowed from my grandparents. In fact, now that I know Riohacha, I cannot visualize it as it is but only as I constructed it stone by stone in my imagination.

  Two months after the wedding, Juan de Dios received a telegram from my papá announcing that Luisa Santiaga was pregnant. The news shook the very foundations of the house in Aracataca, where Mina had not yet recuperated from her bitterness, and both she and the colonel laid down their weapons so that the newlyweds would come back to stay with them. It was not easy. After a noble, reasoned resistance of several months’ duration, Gabriel Eligio agreed to his wife giving birth in her parents’ house.

  A short while later my grandfather greeted him at the train station with a sentence that remained like a gold frame around the family’s historical record: “I am prepared to give you all the satisfactions that may be necessary.” My grandmother renovated the bedroom that had been hers until then and installed my parents in it. Over the course of the year, Gabriel Eligio gave up his worthy profession of telegraph operator and devoted his autodidact’s talent to a science on the decline: homeopathy. My grandfather, out of gratitude or remorse, arranged with the authorities for the street where we lived in Aracataca to bear the name it still has: Avenida Monsignor Espejo.

  That was how and where the first of seven boys and four girls was born on Sunday, March 6, 1927, at nine in the morning and in an unseasonable torrential downpour, while the sky of Taurus rose on the horizon. I was almost strangled by the umbilical cord because the family midwife, Santos Villero, lost control of her art at the worst possible moment. But Aunt Francisca lost even more control, for she ran to the street door shouting as if there were a fire:

  “A boy! It’s a boy!” And then, as if sounding the alarm: “Rum, he’s choking!”

  The family supposes that the rum was not for celebrating but for rubbing on the newborn to revive him. Miz Juana de Freytes, who made her providential entrance into the bedroom, often told me that the most serious risk came not from the umbilical cord but from my mother’s dangerous position on the bed. She corrected it in time, but it was not easy to revive me, and so Aunt Francisca poured the emergency baptismal water over me. I should have been named Olegario, the saint whose day it was, but nobody had the saints’ calendar near at hand, and with a sense of urgency they gave me my father’s first name followed by that of José, the Carpenter, because he was the patron saint of Aracataca and March was his month. Miz Juana de Freytes proposed a third name in memory of the general reconciliation achieved among families and friends with my arrival into the world, but in the formal rite of baptism three years later they forgot to include it: Gabriel José de la Concordia.

  2

  ON THE DAY I went with my mother to sell the house, I remembered everything that had made an impression on my childhood but was not certain what came earlier and what came later, or what any of it signified in my life. I was not really aware that in the midst of the false splendor of the banana company, my parents’ marriage was already inscribed in the process that would put the final touches on the decadence of Aracataca. Once I began to remember, I heard—first with a good deal of discretion and then in a loud, alarmed voice—the fateful sentence repeated: “They say the company’s leaving.” But either nobody believed it, or nobody dared think of the devastation it would bring.

  My mother’s version had such meager numbers and a setting so abject for the imposing drama I had imagined that it caused a sense of frustration in me. Later, I spoke with survivors and witnesses and searched through newspaper archives and official documents, and I realized that the truth did not lie anywhere. Conformists said, in effect, that there had been no deaths. Those at the other extreme affirmed without a quaver in their voices that there had been more than a hundred, that they had been seen bleeding to death on the square, and that they were carried away in a freight train to be tossed into the ocean like rejected bananas. And so my version was lost forever at some improbable point between the two extremes. But it was so persistent that in one of my novels I referred to the massacre with all the precision and horror that I had brought for years to its incubation in my imagination. This was why I kept the number of the dead at three thousand, in order to preserve the epic proportions of the drama, and in the end real life did me justice: not long ago, on one of the anniversaries of the tragedy, the speaker of the moment in the Senate asked for a minute of silence in memory of the three thousand anonymous martyrs sacrificed by the forces of law and order.

  The massacre of the banana workers was the culmination of others that had occurred earlier, but with the added argument that the leaders were marked as Communists, and perhaps they were. I happened to meet the most prominent and persecuted of them, Eduardo Mahecha, in the Modelo Prison in Barranquilla at about the time I went with my mother to sell the house, and I maintained a warm friendship with him after I introduced myself as the grandson of Nicolás Márquez. It was he who revealed to me that my grandfather was not neutral but had been a mediator in the 1928 strike, and he considered him a just man. So that he rounded out the idea I always had of the massacre, and I formed a more objective conception of the social conflict. The only discrepancy among everyone’s memories concerned the number of dead, which in any event will not be the only unknown quantity in our history.

  So many contradictory vers
ions have been the cause of my false memories. The most persistent is of my standing in the doorway of the house with a Prussian helmet and a little toy rifle, watching the battalion of perspiring Cachacos marching past under the almond trees. One of the commanding officers in parade uniform greeted me as he passed:

  “Hello, Captain Gabi.”

  The memory is clear, but there is no possibility that it is true. The uniform, the helmet, and the toy rifle coexisted, but some two years after the strike and when there no longer were military forces in Cataca. Multiple incidents like this one gave me a bad name in the house for having intrauterine memories and premonitory dreams.

  That was the state of the world when I began to be aware of my family environment, and I cannot evoke it in any other way: sorrows, griefs, uncertainties in the solitude of an immense house. For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saints. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed this old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Cataca was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them the deeper they sank.

  In even simpler terms: they were in Cataca but continued living in the province of Padilla, which we still call the Province, with no other information, as if it were the only one in the world. Perhaps without even thinking about it, they had built the house in Cataca as a ceremonial replica of the house in Barrancas, from whose window you could see, on the other side of the street, the melancholy cemetery where Medardo Pacheco lay buried. In Cataca they were well liked and content, but their lives were subject to the servitude of the land where they had been born. They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different.