Living to Tell the Tale (2 page)

“It’s more comfortable,” I said. “Two shirts and two pairs of undershorts: you wear one while the other’s drying. What else does anyone need?”

“A little dignity,” she said. But she softened this at once by saying in a different tone: “I’m telling you this because of how much we love you.”

“I know,” I said. “But tell me something: wouldn’t you
do the same thing in my place?”

“I wouldn’t,” she said, “not if it meant upsetting my parents.”

Recalling the tenacity with which she had broken down her family’s opposition to her marriage, I said with a laugh:

“I dare you to look me in the eye.”

But she was somber as she avoided my glance because she knew all too well what I was thinking.

“I didn’t marry until I had my parents’ blessing,”
she said. “Unwilling, I grant you, but I had it.”

She interrupted the discussion, not because my arguments had defeated her but because she wanted to use the toilet and did not trust the state of its hygiene. I spoke to the bosun to
find out if there was a more sanitary place, but he explained that he himself used the public lavatory. And concluded, as if he had just been reading Conrad: “At
sea we are all equal.” And so my mother submitted to the law of equality. Contrary to what I had feared, when she came out it was all she could do to control her laughter.

“Can you imagine,” she said to me, “what your papá will think if I come back with a social disease?”

Sometime after midnight we were delayed for three hours because clumps of anemones growing in the channel slowed down the
propellers, the launch ran aground in a thicket of mangroves, and many passengers had to stand on the banks and pull it free with the cords of their hammocks. The heat and mosquitoes became excruciating, but my mother eluded them with her instantaneous and intermittent catnaps, famous in our family, which allowed her to rest without losing the thread of the conversation. When we resumed our journey
and a fresh breeze began to blow, she was wide awake.

“In any case,” she said with a sigh, “I have to bring your papá some kind of answer.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said with the same innocence. “In December I’ll go myself and explain everything to him.”

“That’s ten months from now,” she said.

“Well, after all, it’s too late this year to arrange anything at the university,” I told her.

“Do you really promise you’ll go?”

“I promise.” And for the first time I detected a certain tension in her voice:

“Can I tell your papá that you’re going to say yes?”

“No,” was my categorical answer. “You can’t.”

It was clear that she was looking for another way out. But I did not give it to her.

“Then it’s better if I tell him the whole truth right away,” she said, “so it won’t seem like
a deception.”

“All right,” I said with relief. “Tell him.”

We stopped there, and someone who did not know her very well would have thought it was over, but I knew this was only a pause so that she could catch her breath. A little while later she
was sound asleep. A light wind blew away the mosquitoes and saturated the new air with a fragrance of flowers. Then the launch acquired the grace of
a sailboat.

We were in the great swamp, the Ciénaga Grande, another of the myths of my childhood. I had crossed it several times when my grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía—his grandchildren called him Papalelo—took me from Aracataca to Barranquilla to visit my parents. “You shouldn’t be afraid of the swamp, but you must respect it,” he had told me, speaking of the unpredictable
moods of its waters, which could behave like either a pond or an untameable ocean. In the rainy season it was at the mercy of storms that came down from the sierra. From December to April, when the weather was supposed to be calm, the north winds attacked it with so much force that each night was an adventure. My maternal grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán—Mina—would not risk the crossing except in
cases of dire emergency, after a terrifying trip when they’d had to seek shelter and wait until dawn at the mouth of the Riofrío.

That night, to our good fortune, it was a still water. From the windows at the prow, where I went for a breath of air a little before dawn, the lights of the fishing boats floated like stars in the water. There were countless numbers of them, and the invisible fishermen
conversed as if they were paying a call, for their voices had a phantasmal resonance within the boundaries of the swamp. As I leaned on the railing, trying to guess at the outline of the sierra, nostalgia’s first blow caught me by surprise.

On another night like this, as we were crossing the Ciénaga Grande, Papalelo left me asleep in the cabin and went to the bar. I don’t know what time it was
when, over the drone of the rusted fan and the clattering metal laths in the cabin, the raucous shouts of a crowd woke me. I could not have been more than five years old and was very frightened, but it soon grew quiet again and I thought it must have been a dream. In the morning, when we were already at the dock in Ciénaga, my grandfather stood shaving with his straight razor, the door open and
the mirror hanging from the frame. The memory is exact: he had not yet put on his shirt, but over his undershirt he wore his eternal elastic suspenders, wide and with green
stripes. While he shaved he kept talking to a man I could still recognize today at first glance. He had the unmistakable profile of a crow and a sailor’s tattoo on his right hand, and he wore several solid gold chains around
his neck, and bracelets and bangles, also of gold, on both wrists. I had just gotten dressed and was sitting on the bed, putting on my boots, when the man said to my grandfather:

“Don’t doubt it for a second, Colonel. What they wanted to do with you was throw you into the water.”

My grandfather smiled and did not stop shaving, and with his typical haughtiness he replied:

“Just as well for them
they didn’t try.”

Only then did I understand the uproar of the previous night, and I was very shaken by the idea that someone would have thrown my grandfather into the swamp.

The recollection of this unexplained episode took me by surprise that dawn when I was going with my mother to sell the house, and was contemplating the sierra snows gleaming blue in the first rays of the sun. A delay in
the channels allowed us to see in the full light of day the narrow bar of luminous sand that separates the sea from the swamp, where there were fishing villages with their nets laid out to dry in the sun and thin, grimy children playing soccer with balls made of rags. It was astounding to see on the streets the number of fishermen whose arms were mutilated because they had not thrown their sticks
of dynamite in time. As the launch passed by, the children began to dive for the coins the passengers tossed to them.

It was almost seven when we dropped anchor in a pestilential marsh a short distance from the town of Ciénaga. Teams of porters, up to their knees in mud, took us in their arms and carried us to the dock, splashing through wheeling turkey buzzards that fought over the unspeakable
filth in the quagmire. We were sitting at the tables in the port, eating an unhurried breakfast of delicious mojarra fish from the swamp and slices of fried green plantain, when my mother resumed the offensive in her personal war.

“So, tell me once and for all,” she said, not looking up, “what am I going to tell your papá?”

I tried to gain some time to think.

“About what?”

“The only thing
he cares about,” she said with some irritation. “Your studies.”

It was my good fortune that a presumptuous fellow diner, intrigued by the intensity of our conversation, wanted to know my reasons. My mother’s immediate response not only intimidated me somewhat but also surprised me, for she was a woman who kept jealous watch over her private life.

“He wants to be a writer,” she said.

“A good
writer can earn good money,” the man replied in all seriousness. “Above all if he works for the government.”

I don’t know if it was discretion that made my mother change the subject or fear of the arguments offered by this unexpected interlocutor, but the outcome was that the two of them sympathized with each other over the unpredictability of my generation and shared their nostalgic memories.
In the end, by following the trail of names of mutual acquaintances, they discovered that we were doubly related through the Cotes and Iguarán lines. In those days this happened to us with two out of three people we met along the Caribbean coast, and my mother always celebrated it as an extraordinary event.

We drove to the railroad station in a one-horse victoria, perhaps the last of a legendary
line already extinct in the rest of the world. My mother was lost in thought, looking at the arid plain calcinated by nitrate that began at the mudhole of the port and merged with the horizon. For me it was a historic spot: one day when I was three or four years old and making my first trip to Barranquilla, my grandfather had led me by the hand across that burning wasteland, walking fast and not
telling me where we were going, and then, without warning, we found ourselves facing a vast extension of green water belching foam, where an entire world of drowned chickens lay floating.

“It’s the ocean,” he said.

Disenchanted, I asked him what was on the other shore, and without a moment’s hesitation he answered:

“There is no shore on the other side.”

Today, after seeing so many oceans front
and back, I still
think that was one of his great responses. In any case, none of my earlier images of the ocean corresponded to that sordid mass of water with its nitrate-encrusted beach where the tangled branches of rotting mangroves and sharp fragments of shell made it impossible to walk. It was horrible.

My mother must have had the same opinion of the ocean at Ciénaga, for as soon as she
saw it appear to the left of the carriage, she said with a sigh:

“There’s no ocean like the one at Riohacha.”

On that occasion I told her my memory of the drowned chickens, and like all adults, she thought it was a childhood hallucination. Then she continued her contemplation of each place along the way, and I knew what she thought of them by the changes in her silence. We passed the red-light
district on the other side of the railroad tracks, with its little painted houses and rusty roofs and old parrots from Paramaribo that sat on rings hanging from the eaves and called out to clients in Portuguese. We passed the watering site for the locomotives, with its immense iron dome where migratory birds and lost seagulls took shelter to sleep. We rode around the edge of the city without entering
it, but we saw the wide, desolate streets and the former splendor of one-story houses with floor-to-ceiling windows, where endless exercises on the piano began at dawn. Without warning, my mother pointed her finger.

“Look,” she said. “That’s where the world ended.”

I followed the direction of her index finger and saw the station: a building of peeling wood, sloping tin roofs, and running balconies,
and in front of it an arid little square that could not hold more than two hundred people. It was there, my mother told me that day, where in 1928 the army had killed an undetermined number of banana workers. I knew the event as if I had lived it, having heard it recounted and repeated a thousand times by my grandfather from the time I had a memory: the soldier reading the decree by which
the striking laborers were declared a gang of lawbreakers; the three thousand men, women, and children motionless under the savage sun after the officer gave them five minutes to evacuate the square; the order to fire, the clattering machine guns spitting in white-hot bursts,
the crowd trapped by panic as it was cut down, little by little, by the methodical, insatiable scissors of the shrapnel.

The train would arrive at Ciénaga at nine in the morning, pick up passengers from the launches and those who had come down from the sierra, and continue into the interior of the banana region a quarter of an hour later. My mother and I reached the station after eight, but the train had been delayed. Still, we were the only passengers. She realized this as soon as she entered the empty car, and
she exclaimed with festive humor:

“What luxury! The whole train just for us!”

I have always thought it was a false gaiety to hide her disillusionment, for the ravages of time were plain to see in the condition of the cars. They were old second-class cars, but instead of cane seats or glass windowpanes that could be raised or lowered, they had wooden benches polished by the warm, unadorned bottoms
of the poor. Compared to what it had been before, not only that car but the entire train was a ghost of itself. The train had once had three classes. Third class, where the poorest people rode, consisted of the same boxcars made of planks used to transport bananas or cattle going to slaughter, modified for passengers with long benches of raw wood. Second class had cane seats and bronze trim.
First class, for government officials and executives of the banana company, had carpets in the corridor and upholstered seats, covered in red velvet, that could change position. When the head of the company took a trip, or his family, or his distinguished guests, a luxury car was coupled to the end of the train, with tinted glass in the windows and gilded cornices and an outdoor terrace with little
tables for drinking tea on the journey. I never met a single mortal who had seen the inside of this unimaginable coach. My grandfather had twice been mayor and had a frivolous idea of money, but he traveled in second class only if he was with a female relative. And when asked why he traveled in third class, he would answer: “Because there’s no fourth.” However, at one time the most memorable aspect
of the train had been its punctuality. Clocks in the towns were set by its whistle.

That day, for one reason or another, it left an hour and a half late. When it began to move, very slow and with a mournful creaking, my mother crossed herself but then made an immediate return to reality.

“This train needs to have its springs oiled,” she said.

We were the only passengers, perhaps in the entire
train, and so far nothing had been of any real interest to me. I sank into the lethargy of
Light in August,
smoking without pause, but with occasional, rapid glances to identify the places we were leaving behind. With a long whistle the train crossed the salt marshes of the swamp and raced at top speed along a bone-shaking corridor of bright red rock, where the deafening noise of the cars became
intolerable. But after about fifteen minutes it slowed down and entered the shadowy coolness of the plantations with discreet silence, and the atmosphere grew denser and the ocean breeze was not felt again. I did not have to interrupt my reading to know we had entered the hermetic realm of the banana region.