Living to Tell the Tale Read online

  I have the impression that she got along better with children than with adults. It was she who took care of Sara Emilia until she moved alone into the room with the Calleja books. Then, to replace her, she sheltered me and my sister Margot, though my grandmother was still in charge of my personal cleanliness and my grandfather concerned himself with my formation as a man.

  My most unsettling memory of those times is Aunt Petra, my grandfather’s older sister, who went to Riohacha to live with them when she lost her sight. She lived in the room next to the office, where the workshop was later, and she developed a magical skill for moving around in her darkness without anyone’s help. I still remember her as if it were yesterday, walking without a stick as if she had both eyes, slow but without hesitation, guided only by different smells. She recognized her room by the vapor of muriatic acid in the workshop next door, the hallway by the perfume of jasmines in the garden, my grandparents’ bedroom by the smell of the wood alcohol they both would rub on their bodies before they went to sleep, Aunt Mama’s room by the odor of oil in the lamps on the altar, and, at the end of the hallway, the succulent smell of the kitchen. She was slim and silent, with skin like withered lilies and shining hair the color of mother-of-pearl, which she wore hanging down to her waist and cared for herself. Her green, limpid adolescent’s eyes changed their light to match her states of mind. In any event these were casual walks, for she spent the entire day in her room with the door half closed, and she was almost always alone. Sometimes she sang in whispers to herself, and her voice could be confused with Mina’s, but her songs were different and sadder. I heard someone say they were romanzas from Riohacha, but I discovered only as an adult that in reality she invented them herself as she sang them. Two or three times I could not resist the temptation of going into her room without anyone knowing, but I did not find her. Years later, during one of my vacations from secondary school, I recounted these memories to my mother, and she did all she could to persuade me of my error. Her reasoning was absolute, and I could confirm it beyond the shadow of a doubt: Aunt Petra had died before I was two years old.

  We called Aunt Wenefrida Nana, and she was the happiest and most amiable of the tribe, but I can recall her only in her sickbed. She was married to Rafael Quintero Ortega—Uncle Quinte—a poor people’s lawyer who had been born in Chía, some fifteen leagues from Bogotá and at the same altitude above sea level. But he adapted so well to the Caribbean that in the inferno of Cataca he needed hot-water bottles at his feet to sleep in the cool December weather. The family had already recovered from the misfortune of Medardo Pacheco when it was Uncle Quinte’s turn to suffer his own for killing the opposing lawyer in a lawsuit. He had the image of being a good and peaceable man, but his adversary harassed him without letup, and he had no recourse but to arm himself. He was so small and thin that he wore children’s shoes, and his friends made cordial jokes because the revolver bulged as big as a cannon under his shirt. My grandfather gave him a serious warning with his celebrated phrase: “You don’t know how heavy a dead man is.” But Uncle Quinte did not have time to think about it when his enemy, shouting like a lunatic, blocked his way in the antechamber of the court and rushed at him with his giant’s body. “I didn’t even know how I pulled out the revolver and shot into the air with both hands and my eyes closed,” Uncle Quinte told me a short while before he died at the age of one hundred. “When I opened my eyes,” he told me, “I could see him, big and pale and still standing, and then he began a slow collapse until he was sitting on the floor.” Until that moment Uncle Quinte did not know he had hit him in the middle of his forehead. I asked him what he had felt when he saw him fall, and his frankness surprised me:

  “Immense relief!”

  My last memory of his wife, Wenefrida, was on a night of pouring rain when a sorceress exorcised her. This was not a conventional witch but an amiable woman, well dressed in stylish clothes, who used a branch of nettles to drive evil humors out of the body while she sang an incantation that was like a lullaby. All of a sudden Nana writhed in a deep convulsion, and a bird the size of a chicken and with iridescent feathers escaped from between the sheets. The woman caught it in midair with a masterful blow of her hand and wrapped it in a black cloth she had prepared. She ordered a fire lit in the backyard and without any ceremony tossed the bird into the flames. But Nana did not recover from her ailments.

  A short while later, the fire in the courtyard was lit again when a hen laid a fantastic egg that looked like a Ping-Pong ball with an appendage like that on a Phrygian cap. My grandmother identified it on the spot: “It’s a basilisk’s egg.” She threw it into the fire, murmuring prayers of conjuration.

  I never could conceive of my grandparents as being an age different from the age they were in my memories of this period. The same is true of the pictures taken of them in the dawn of their old age, and whose fading copies have been transmitted like a tribal ritual over four prolific generations. Above all those of my grandmother Tranquilina, the most credulous and impressionable woman I have ever known, because of the terror the mysteries of daily life caused in her. She would try to lighten her chores by singing old love songs in full voice, but all of a sudden she would interrupt them with her war cry against calamity:

  “Ave María Purísima!”

  For she saw that the rocking chairs rocked alone, that the phantom of puerperal fever was lurking in the bedrooms of women in labor, that the scent of jasmines from the garden was like an invisible ghost, that a cord dropped by accident on the floor had the shape of the numbers that might be the grand prize in the lottery, that a bird without eyes had wandered into the dining room and could be chased away by singing La Magnífica.* She believed she could decipher with secret keys the identity of the protagonists and places in the songs that reached her from the Province. She imagined misfortunes that happened sooner or later, she foresaw who was going to come from Riohacha in a white hat, or from Manaure with a colic that could be cured only with the bile of a turkey buzzard, for in addition to being a prophet by trade she was a furtive witch doctor.

  She had a very personal system for interpreting her own dreams and those of others, which governed the daily behavior of each one of us and controlled the life of the house. However, she almost died without any premonitions when she pulled the sheets off her bed in a single tug, and a revolver went off, one that the colonel kept hidden under his pillow so he would have it at hand when he slept. From the trajectory of the bullet embedded in the ceiling, it was established that it had passed very close to my grandmother’s face.

  From the time I had a memory I suffered the morning torture of Mina brushing my teeth, while she enjoyed the magical privilege of taking hers out to wash them and leaving them in a glass of water while she slept. Convinced they were her natural teeth that she took out and put in by Goajiro arts, I had her show me the inside of her mouth so I could see the back of her eyes, brain, nose, and ears from the inside, and I suffered the disappointment of not seeing anything but her palate. But no one deciphered the marvel for me, and for a long time I insisted that the dentist make the same thing for me that he had made for my grandmother so she could brush my teeth while I played on the street.

  We had a kind of secret code by means of which we both communicated with an invisible universe. By day her magical world was fascinating, but at night it caused me terror, pure and simple: the fear of the dark, older than we are, that has pursued me my whole life on lonely roads and even in cheap dance halls all over the world. In my grandparents’ house each saint had a room and each room had a dead person. But the only house known in an official way as “the dead man’s house” was the one next door to ours, and its dead man was the only one identified by his human name at a séance: Alfonso Mora. Someone close to him took the trouble of identifying him in the registries of baptisms and deaths and found numerous homonyms, but none showed signs of being ours. For many years that house had been the priest’s residence, and the lie flourished that the ghost was Fa
ther Angarita himself trying to frighten away the curious who spied on him during his nocturnal wanderings.

  I never knew Meme, the Goajiro slave whom the family brought from Barrancas and who, one stormy night, ran away with Alirio, her adolescent brother, but I always heard that they were the ones who most peppered the language of the house with their native tongue. Her convoluted Castilian was the wonder of poets, ever since the memorable day when she found the matches that Uncle Juan de Dios had lost and returned them to him with her triumphant argot:

  “Here I am, your match.”

  It was difficult to believe that my grandmother Mina, with her women gone astray, was the economic support of the house when resources began to fail. The colonel had some scattered properties occupied by Cachaco tenant farmers, but he refused to evict them. Obliged to save the honor of one of his children, he had to mortgage the house in Cataca, and it cost him a fortune not to lose it. When there was nothing left, Mina continued to support the family in her spirited way with the bakery, the little candy animals that were sold all over town, the spotted hens, the duck eggs, the vegetables from the backyard. She made a radical reduction in the number of servants and kept the most useful ones. Money as cash came to an end because it had no meaning in the oral tradition of the house. So that when they had to buy a piano for my mother when she returned from school, Aunt Pa made an exact calculation in domestic currency: “A piano costs five hundred eggs.”

  In the midst of that troop of evangelical women, my grandfather was complete security for me. My doubts disappeared only with him, and I felt I had my feet on the ground and was well established in real life. The strange thing, as I think about it now, is that I wanted to be like him, realistic, valiant, and sure, but I never could resist the constant temptation to peer into my grandmother’s world. I remember him as thickset and ruddy, with a few white hairs on his shining skull, a well-trimmed brush mustache, and round spectacles with gold wire frames. His speech was deliberate, understanding, and conciliatory in times of peace, but his Conservative friends remembered him as an enemy to be feared in the tribulations of war.

  He never used a military uniform, for his rank was revolutionary and not academic, but long after the wars he still wore the liquilique, a cotton shirt with pockets, in common use among veterans from the Caribbean. When the law on war pensions was passed he filled out the forms to obtain his, and he as well as his wife and closest heirs continued to wait for it until his death. My grandmother Tranquilina, who died far from that house, blind, decrepit, and half senile, told me in her final moments of lucidity: “I can die in peace because I know all of you will receive Nicolasito’s pension.”

  It was the first time I heard the mythic word that sowed the seed of eternal illusions in the family: retirement. It had come into the house before my birth, when the government established pensions for the veterans of the War of a Thousand Days. My grandfather in person organized the file with a surfeit of sworn testimonies and probative documents, and he took them himself to Santa Marta to sign the payment protocol. According to the least happy calculations, the amount would be sufficient for him and his descendants to the second generation. “Don’t worry,” my grandmother would tell us, “the retirement money will take care of everything.” Then the mail, which had never been anything urgent in the family, was transformed into an envoy of Divine Providence.

  With the burden of uncertainty I carried inside, I never could avoid it. On occasion, however, Tranquilina was in a mood that in no way corresponded to her name. In the War of a Thousand Days, my grandfather had been imprisoned in Riohacha by a first cousin of hers who was an officer in the Conservative army. Her Liberal relations, and she herself, understood this as an act of war before which familial power was of no avail. But when my grandmother learned that they had her husband in the stocks like a common criminal, she confronted her cousin with a whip and forced him to turn my grandfather over to her safe and sound.

  My grandfather’s world was quite different. Even in his final years he seemed very agile when he walked around with his toolbox making repairs to the house, or when he made water for the bath come up by spending hours at the manual pump in the backyard, or when he climbed tall ladders to see how much water was in the water barrels. On the other hand, he would ask me to tie his bootlaces for him because when he tried to do it himself it left him breathless. It was a miracle he did not die one morning when he tried to catch the shortsighted parrot, who had climbed as high as the water barrels. He had succeeded in grasping him by the neck when he slipped on the catwalk and fell to the ground from a height of four meters. Nobody could explain how he survived with his ninety kilos of weight and his fifty-some years. That was for me the memorable day when the doctor examined him from head to toe as he lay naked on the bed, and asked about the old half-inch scar that he found in his groin.

  “That’s a bullet wound from the war,” my grandfather said.

  I still have not recovered from my emotion. As I have not recovered from the day when he looked out into the street through his office window to see a famous ambler horse somebody wanted to sell him, and without warning he felt his eye filling with water. He tried to protect it with his hand and a few drops of transparent liquid were left on his palm. He not only lost his right eye, but my grandmother did not permit him to buy a horse inhabited by the devil. For a long time he wore a pirate’s patch over the clouded socket until the oculist changed it for a pair of graduated glasses and prescribed a walking stick of carreto wood that in the end became a sign of his identity, like the vest pocket watch with the gold chain whose cover was opened to unexpected music. It was always common knowledge that the betrayals of age that were beginning to disturb him did not in any way affect his arts as a secret seducer and admirable lover.

  In the ritual bath at six in the morning, which in his final years he always took with me, we would pour water from the tank over ourselves with a calabash and finish by splashing on the Agua Florida from Lanman & Kemps, which the smugglers from Curaçao delivered by the case to the home, like brandy and shirts of Chinese silk. Once he was heard to say that it was the only scent he used because only the person wearing it could smell it, but he did not believe that again when someone recognized him on another person’s pillow. Another story that I heard repeated for years had to do with the night when the light had gone out and my grandfather poured a bottle of ink on his head thinking it was his Agua Florida.

  For his daily tasks inside the house he wore drill trousers and his usual elastic suspenders, soft shoes, and a cloth cap with a visor. For Sunday Mass, which he almost never missed and only in unavoidable circumstances, or for any weekday anniversary or memorial, he wore a three-piece suit of white linen, with a celluloid collar and a black tie. Beyond any doubt these rare occasions earned him his reputation as a spendthrift and an arrogant man. The impression I have today is that the house and everything in it existed only for him, for it was an exemplary machista marriage in a matriarchal society, in which the man is absolute king of his house but the one who rules is his wife. In short, he was the macho. That is: in private a man of exquisite tenderness that he was ashamed of in public, while his wife burned to make him happy.

  My grandparents made another trip to Barranquilla when the first centenary of the death of Simón Bolívar was celebrated in December 1930, in order to be present at the birth of my sister Aida Rosa, the fourth child in the family. They brought Margot, who was a little more than a year old, back to Cataca with them, and my parents stayed in Barranquilla with Luis Enrique and the newborn. It was hard for me to get used to the change, because Margot came to the house like a creature from another life, rachitic and wild, and with an impenetrable interior world. When Abigaíl—the mother of Luis Carmelo Correa—saw her she could not understand why my grandparents had assumed the burden of that commitment. “The girl is dying,” she said. In any case, they had said the same thing about me, because I ate very little, because I blinked, because the things I recounted
seemed so outrageous that they thought they were lies, not thinking that most of them were true in another way. I learned only years later that Dr. Barboza was the only one who had defended me with a wise argument: “Children’s lies are signs of great talent.”

  A good deal of time passed before Margot surrendered to family life. She would sit in her little rocking chair to suck her finger in the most unexpected corner. Nothing attracted her attention except the chimes of the clock, which she looked at every hour with her large, hallucinatory eyes. For several days she would not eat. She rejected the food without dramatics, or sometimes she threw it into the corners. No one understood how she was still alive without eating, until they realized that she only liked the damp earth of the garden and the pieces of lime that she scratched off the walls with her nails. When my grandmother found out, she put cow bile in the most appetizing parts of the garden and hid hot peppers in the flowerpots. Father Angarita baptized her in the same ceremony with which he ratified the emergency baptism that had been performed on me when I was born. I received it standing on a chair and bore with courage the kitchen salt the priest put on my tongue and the pitcher of water he poured over my head. Margot, on the other hand, resisted for the two of us with the shriek of a wounded animal and a rebellion of her entire body that godfathers and godmothers barely managed to control over the baptismal font.

  Today I think that she, in her relationship to me, was more rational than the adults were with one another. Our complicity was so unusual that on more than one occasion we could each guess what the other was thinking. One morning she and I were playing in the garden when the train whistle blew, as it did every day at eleven. But this time when I heard it I experienced an inexplicable revelation: the doctor from the banana company, who months earlier had given me a rhubarb concoction that brought on a crisis of vomiting, was on that train. I ran through the house shouting the alarm, but no one believed it. Except my sister Margot, who remained hidden with me until the doctor had finished lunch and left on the return train. “Ave María Purísima!” my grandmother exclaimed when they found us hiding under her bed, “with these kids you don’t need telegrams.”