Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  Their closest friends were, before anyone else, those who came from the Province. Their domestic language was the one their grandparents had brought from Spain across Venezuela in the previous century, revitalized by Caribbean localisms, the Africanisms of slaves, and fragments of the Goajiro language that filtered into ours, drop by drop. My grandmother would use it to conceal things from me, not realizing I understood it better than she because of my direct dealings with the servants. I still remember many terms: atunkeshi, I’m sleepy; jamusaitshi taya, I’m hungry; ipuwots, the pregnant woman; aríjuna, the stranger, which my grandmother used in a certain sense to refer to the Spaniard, the white man, in short, the enemy. The Goajiro, for their part, always spoke a kind of boneless Castilian with brilliant flashes, like Chon’s own dialect, and a perverse precision that my grandmother forbade her to use because it always led to an inescapable ambiguity: “The lips of the mouth.”

  The day was incomplete until they received the news of who had been born in Barrancas, how many the bull had killed in the arena in Fonseca, who had been married in Manaure or had died in Riohacha, and the condition of General Socarrás, who was very ill in San Juan del César. California apples wrapped in tissue paper, red snapper frozen in ice, hams from Galicia, Greek olives were all on sale at bargain prices in the commissary of the banana company. But nothing was eaten in the house that was not seasoned in the broth of longing: malanga for the soup had to be from Riohacha and corn for the breakfast arepas needed to come from Fonseca, goats were raised with salt from La Guajira, and turtles and lobsters were brought in live from Dibuya.

  And so most of the visitors who arrived every day on the train came from the Province or had been sent by someone from there. Always the same family names: Riasco, Noguera, Ovalle, often crossed with the sacramental tribes of Cotes and Iguarán. They were passing through, with nothing but a knapsack on their back, and though their visits were not announced it was expected that they would stay for lunch. I have never forgotten my grandmother’s almost ritualized phrase when she entered the kitchen: “We have to make everything, because we don’t know what the people who are coming will like.”

  That spirit of perpetual evasion was sustained by a geographical reality. The Province had the autonomy of a separate world and a compact and ancient cultural unity in a fertile canyon between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Sierra de Perijá, on the Colombian Caribbean. Its communication with the world was easier than with the rest of the country, for its daily life was identified more with the Antilles because of easy commerce with Jamaica or Curaçao, and was almost confused with Venezuela’s because of a border of open doors that made no distinctions of class or color. The rust of power barely reached it from the interior of the country, stewing in its own broth over a slow fire: laws, taxes, soldiers, bad news incubated at an altitude of twenty-five hundred meters and eight days of navigation along the Magdalena River in a steamboat fueled by wood.

  That insular nature had generated a watertight culture with its own character that my grandparents implanted in Cataca. More than a home, the house was a town. There were always several sittings at the table, but from the time I was three, the first two were sacred: the colonel at the head and I at the corner to his right. The remaining places were occupied first by the men and then by the women, but never at the same time. These rules were broken during the July 20 patriotic holiday, and lunch by shifts lasted until everyone had eaten. At night the table was not laid, but large cups of café con leche were given out in the kitchen, along with my grandmother’s exquisite pastries. When the doors were closed, people hung their hammocks where they could, at different levels, even from the trees in the courtyard.

  I lived one of the great fantasies of those years one day when a group of men came to the house, dressed alike in gaiters and spurs, and all of them with a cross of ash drawn on their foreheads. They were the sons fathered by the colonel across the entire length of the Province during the War of a Thousand Days, and they had come from their towns almost a month late to congratulate him on his birthday. Before coming to the house they had heard Ash Wednesday Mass, and the cross that Father Angarita drew on their foreheads seemed like a supernatural emblem whose mystery would pursue me for years, even after I became familiar with the liturgy of Holy Week.

  Most of them had been born after my grandparents’ marriage. After she had heard of their births, Mina wrote their first and family names in a notebook, and in the end, with an awkward indulgence, she included them with all her heart in the family records. But neither she nor anyone else found it easy to distinguish one from the other before that memorable visit, when each of them revealed his peculiar nature. They were serious and hardworking, family men, peaceable people, yet not afraid to lose their heads in the vertigo of drunken revelry. They broke dishes, trampled rosebushes chasing a calf in order to toss it in a blanket, shot chickens for the stew, and set loose a greased pig that ran over the women embroidering in the hallway, but no one lamented these mishaps because of the gusts of joy they brought with them.

  With some frequency I continued to see Esteban Carrillo, Aunt Elvira’s twin brother, who was skilled in the manual arts and traveled with a toolbox for making repairs as a favor in the houses he visited. With his sense of humor and good memory he filled in numerous gaps in the family history that had seemed impassable to me. In my adolescence I also visited my uncle Nicolás Gómez, an intense blond with reddish freckles who always held in very high esteem his respectable trade as a shopkeeper in the former penal colony at Fundación. Struck by my excellent reputation as a lost cause, he would say goodbye to me with a well-stocked shopping bag for my journey. Rafael Arias always arrived in a hurry on his way to somewhere else, on the back of a mule and in riding clothes, with only enough time to drink a cup of coffee standing in the kitchen. I found the others scattered among the towns in the Province on the nostalgic trips I made later to write my first novels, and I always missed the cross of ash on their foreheads as an incontrovertible sign of family identity.

  Years after my grandparents had died and the family manor had been abandoned to its fate, I came to Fundación on the night train and sat at the only food stand open at that hour in the station. There was little left to eat, but the owner improvised a nice dish in my honor. She was witty and obliging, and behind these gentle virtues I thought I could detect the strong character of the women in the tribe. I confirmed this years later: the good-looking proprietor was Sara Noriega, another of my unknown aunts.

  Apolinar, the small, solid former slave whom I always recalled as an uncle, disappeared from the house for years, and one afternoon he reappeared for no reason, dressed in mourning in a black suit and an enormous black hat pulled down to his melancholy eyes. As he passed through the kitchen he said that he had come for the funeral, but no one understood him until the next day, when the news arrived that my grandfather had just died in Santa Marta, where he had been taken with great urgency and in secret.

  The only one of my uncles who achieved public recognition was the oldest and the only Conservative, José María Valdeblánquez, who had been a senator of the Republic during the War of a Thousand Days and in that capacity was present at the signing of the Liberal surrender at the nearby farm in Neerlandia. Facing him, on the side of the defeated, was his father.

  I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood. They had strong characters and tender hearts, and they treated me with the naturalness of the Earthly Paradise. Of the many I remember, Lucía was the only one who surprised me with her youthful perversity when she took me to the alley of the toads and lifted her dress to her waist to show me her copper-colored thatch of hair. But what in reality attracted my attention was the patch of pinta that extended along her belly like a map of the world, with purple dunes and yellow oceans. The others seemed like archangels of purity: they changed their clothes in front of me, bath
ed me when they bathed, sat me on my chamber pot and sat on theirs facing me to relieve themselves of their secrets, their sorrows, their rancors, as if I did not understand, not realizing I knew everything because I tied up the loose ends that they themselves left dangling.

  Chon belonged to the servants and to the street. She had come from Barrancas with my grandparents when she was still a girl, had grown up in the kitchen but was assimilated into the family, and had been treated like a chaperoning aunt ever since her pilgrimage to the Province with my infatuated mother. In her final years she moved to her own room in the poorest part of town, simply because she wanted to, and lived by selling on the street, starting at dawn, balls of ground corn for arepas, and her peddler’s cry became familiar in the silence of the small hours: “Old Chon’s chilled dough …”

  She had a beautiful Indian color and always seemed nothing but skin and bones, and she went barefoot, wearing a white turban and wrapped in starched sheets. Her pace was very slow as she walked down the middle of the street with an escort of tamed, silent dogs who advanced as they circled around her. In the end she became part of the town’s folklore. At a Carnival celebration someone appeared as Chon, with her sheets and her vendor’s cry, although they could not train a guard of dogs like hers. Her cry of “chilled dough” became so popular that it was the subject of an accordion players’ song. One ill-fated morning two wild dogs attacked hers, who defended themselves with so much ferocity that Chon fell to the ground with a fractured spine. She did not survive despite the numerous medical resources my grandfather provided for her.

  Another revealing memory from that time was when Matilde Armenta gave birth; she was a laundress who worked in the house when I was about six years old. I went into her room by mistake and found her naked and lying with her legs spread on a canvas bed, howling with pain, surrounded by a disordered and irrational band of midwives who had divided up her body among themselves to help her give birth with tremendous shouts. One wiped the sweat from her face with a damp towel, others held down her arms and legs and massaged her belly to speed up the birth. Santos Villero, impassive in the midst of the disorder, murmured prayers for a calm sea with closed eyes as she seemed to dig between the thighs of the woman in labor. The heat was unbearable in the room filled with steam from the pots of boiling water they had brought in from the kitchen. I stayed in a corner, torn between fear and curiosity, until the midwife pulled out by the ankles something raw like an unborn calf with a bloody length of intestine hanging from its navel. Then one of the women discovered me in the corner and dragged me from the room.

  “You’re in mortal sin,” she said. And ordered with a menacing finger: “Don’t think again about what you saw.”

  On the other hand, the woman who in reality took away my innocence did not intend to and never knew she had. Her name was Trinidad, she was the daughter of someone who worked in the house, and one fatal spring she began to blossom. She was thirteen but still used the dresses she had worn when she was nine, and they were so tight to her body that she seemed more naked than if she had been undressed. One night we were alone in the courtyard, band music erupted without warning from the house next door, and Trinidad began to dance with me, and she held me so tight she took my breath away. I do not know what became of her, but even today I still wake up in the middle of the night agitated by the upheaval, and I know I could recognize her in the dark by the touch of every inch of her skin and her animal odor. In an instant I became conscious of my body with a clarity of instincts that I have never felt again, and that I dare to recall as an exquisite death. After that I knew in a confused and illusory fashion that there was an unfathomable mystery I did not know but that agitated me as if I did. The women of the family, however, always led me along the arid path of chastity.

  The loss of innocence taught me at the same time that it was not Baby Jesus who brought us toys at Christmas, but I was careful not to say so. When I was ten, my father revealed this to me as a secret for adults because he assumed I already knew it, and he took me to the stores on Christmas Eve to select toys for my brothers and sisters. The same thing had happened with the mystery of childbirth even before I witnessed Matilde Armenta: I choked with laughter when people said that a stork brought babies from Paris. But I should confess that neither then nor now have I succeeded in connecting childbirth with sex. In any case, I think my intimacy with the maids could be the origin of a thread of secret communication that I believe I have with women and that throughout my life has allowed me to feel more comfortable and sure with them than with men. It may also be the source of my conviction that they are the ones who maintain the world while we men throw it into disarray with our historic brutality.

  Sara Emilia Márquez, without knowing it, had something to do with my destiny. Pursued from the time she was very young by suitors she did not even deign to notice, she decided, and for the rest of her life, on the first one who looked all right to her. The chosen one had something in common with my father, for he was a stranger who arrived, no one knew how or from where, with a good background but no known resources. His name was José del Carmen Uribe Vergel, but at times he signed only J. del C. Some time passed before anyone knew who he was in reality and where he came from, until it was learned from the speeches he was hired to write for public functionaries, and from the love poems he published in his own cultural magazine whose frequency depended on the will of God. From the time he appeared in the house, I felt a great admiration for his fame as a writer, the first I had met in my life. On the spot I wanted to be like him and was not content until Aunt Mama learned to comb my hair like his.

  I was the first one in the family who learned of their secret love, one night when he came into the house across the way where I was playing with friends. He called me aside, in a state of evident tension, and gave me a letter for Sara Emilia. I knew she was sitting in the door of our house waiting for one of her friends to visit. I crossed the street, hid behind one of the almond trees, and threw the letter with so much precision that it fell into her lap. Frightened, she raised her hands, but the scream remained in her throat when she recognized the handwriting on the envelope. Sara Emilia and J. del C. were my friends from then on.

  Elvira Carrillo, the twin sister of my uncle Esteban, would twist and squeeze a stalk of cane with both hands and get out the juice with the strength of a sugar mill. She was better known for her brutal frankness than for the tenderness with which she treated children, above all my brother Luis Enrique, a year younger than I, for whom she was both sovereign and accomplice, and who gave her the inscrutable name of Aunt Pa. Impossible problems were always her specialty. She and Esteban were the first to come to the house in Cataca, but while he found his path in all kinds of fruitful trades and businesses, she remained as an indispensable aunt in the family without ever realizing that she was. She would disappear when she was not needed, but when she was, no one ever knew where she came from or how. In her bad moments she would talk to herself while she stirred the pot, and reveal in a loud voice the location of things that were thought to be lost. She stayed on in the house after she had buried the older people, while weeds devoured the place little by little, and animals wandered the bedrooms, and she was disturbed after midnight by a cough from beyond the grave in the next room.

  Francisca Simodosea—Aunt Mama—the commander of the tribe, who died a virgin at the age of seventy-nine, differed from the others in her habits and language. For her culture was not from the Province but from the feudal paradise of the savannas of Bolívar, where her father, José María Mejía Vidal, had migrated from Riohacha with his silversmith’s skills when he was very young. She had allowed her wiry dark hair, which resisted turning white until she was very old, to grow down to her knees. She would wash it with perfumed water once a week and sit to comb it in the doorway of her bedroom in a sacred ritual that took several hours, consuming without pause cigarettes made of harsh tobacco that she smoked backwards, with the lit end inside her mouth, as the Liber
al troops did so as not to be seen by the enemy in the dark of night. Her style of dress was different, too, with underskirts and bodices of immaculate linen, and velveteen mules.

  As opposed to the uncorrupted purism of my grandmother, Mama’s language was the loosest popular slang. She did not hide it from anyone or under any circumstances, and she said what she thought to everyone’s face. Including a nun, one of my mother’s teachers at the boarding school in Santa Marta, whom she stopped short because of a trivial impertinence: “You’re one of those women who doesn’t know her ass from a day of fasting.” But she always managed not to seem coarse or insulting.

  For half her life she was the keeper of the keys to the cemetery, and she filled out and issued death certificates and made the hosts for Mass at home. She was the only person in the family, of either sex, who did not seem to have a heart pierced by the sorrow of thwarted love. We became aware of that one night when the doctor was preparing to insert a catheter, and she stopped him with an argument I did not understand at the time: “I want you to know, Doctor, that I’ve never known a man.”

  From then on I often heard her say this, yet it never seemed boastful or regretful to me but like a simple fact that left no trace at all in her life. On the other hand, she was an artful matchmaker who must have suffered in her double game of acting as lookout for my parents without being disloyal to Mina.