Living to Tell the Tale (21 page)

I never shared the malicious view that the patience with which my father dealt with poverty showed a good deal of irresponsibility. On the contrary: I believe these were Homeric
tests of an unfailing complicity between him and his wife that allowed them to maintain their courage even at the edge of the abyss. He knew that she managed panic even better than despair,
and that this was the secret of our survival. What he did not think of, perhaps, is that she alleviated his sorrows while leaving the best of her life behind her. We never could understand the reason for his
trips. It would often happen that we would be awakened at midnight on a Saturday and taken to the local office of an oil encampment on the Catatumbo, where a call from my father was waiting for us on the radiotelephone. I will never forget my mother bathed in tears during a conversation made more difficult by technology.

“Oh, Gabriel,” my mother said, “look how you’ve left me with this army of
children, when it’s so bad sometimes we have nothing to eat.”

He replied with the bad news that he had an enlarged liver. It often happened to him, but my mother did not worry too much because on occasion he used it to hide his cheating.

“That always happens to you when you don’t behave,” she said to him as a joke.

She spoke looking at the microphone as if Papá were there, and at the end she
became confused trying to send him a kiss and kissed the microphone. She herself could not control her giggles, and she never could tell the entire story because she always ended up bathed in tears of laughter. However, that day she was distracted, and at last she said at the table as if talking to no one in particular:

“I noticed something strange in Gabriel’s voice.”

We explained that the
radio system not only distorts voices but masks personalities. The next night she said when she was half asleep: “In any event, his voice sounded as if he were much thinner.” Her nose had grown sharper because of those bad times, and she asked herself between sighs what those towns without God or laws were like where her man was wandering untethered. Her hidden motives were more apparent in a second
conversation by radio, when she made my father promise that he would return home without delay if nothing was resolved in two weeks. But before the time was up, we received a dramatic one-word telegram from Altos del Rosario: “Undecided.” My mother saw in the message a confirmation of her most lucid forebodings, and she dictated her unappealable verdict:

“Either you come home before Monday, or
I’m going there right now with all our offspring.”

A holy remedy. My father knew the power of her threats, and before the week was out he was back in Barranquilla. We were struck by the way he came in, dressed without care, his skin greenish and unshaved, so that my mother thought he was ill. But it was a momentary impression, because in two days’ time he salvaged his youthful project of opening
a multipurpose pharmacy in the town of Sucre, an idyllic and prosperous corner that was a night and a day’s sail from Barranquilla. He had been there in his youth as a telegraph operator, and his heart stood still when he remembered the trip through crepuscular canals and golden swamps, and the eternal dances. At one time he had persisted in trying to obtain the store there, but without the luck
he had in obtaining others he had wanted even more, like Aracataca. He thought about it again some five years later, during the third banana crisis, but he found it had been taken over by wholesalers from Magangué. However, a month before returning to Barranquilla, he happened to meet one of them who not only described a different reality but offered him good credit for Sucre. He did not accept
because he was about to achieve the golden dream of Altos del Rosario, but when he was surprised by his wife’s sentence, he found the wholesaler from Magangué, who was still wandering the river towns, and they concluded the deal.

After some two weeks of studies and arrangements with wholesalers who were friends of his, he left with his appearance and disposition reestablished, and his impression
of Sucre was so intense that he wrote in his first letter: “The reality was better than the memory.” He rented a house with a balcony on the main square, and from there he regained his friends from long ago, who opened their doors wide to him. The family had to sell what it could, pack up the rest, which was not very much, and take it along on one of the steamboats that made a regular trip along
the Magdalena River. In the same letter he sent a money order well calculated to cover immediate expenses and announced another for the costs of the trip. I cannot imagine more attractive news for my mother’s illusory character, so that
her reply was intended not only to sustain her husband’s spirits but to sugarcoat the news that she was pregnant for the eighth time.

I filled out the forms and
made the reservations on the
Capitán de Caro,
a legendary ship that traveled the distance between Barranquilla and Magangué in a night and half a day. Then we would continue to our destination by motor launch along the San Jorge River and the idyllic Mojana Channel.

“As long as we leave here, even if it’s for hell,” exclaimed my mother, who always distrusted the Babylonian reputation of Sucre.
“You shouldn’t leave a husband alone in a town like that.”

She imposed so much haste on us that three days before the trip we were sleeping on the floor because we had already auctioned off the beds and all the furniture we could sell. Everything else was in boxes, and the money for our passage safe in one of my mother’s hiding places, counted and recounted a thousand times over.

The clerk who
took care of me in the shipping offices was so charming that I did not have to clench my jaws to get along with him. I have the absolute certainty that I made meticulous notes of the fares he quoted in the clear, proper diction of obliging Caribbean people. What made me most happy and what I remembered best was that under the age of twelve you paid only half the regular fare. In other words, all
the children except me. On that basis, my mother set aside the money for the trip and spent all the rest dismantling the house.

On Friday I went to buy the tickets and the clerk greeted me with the startling news that the discount for children under twelve was not half but only thirty percent, which made an irreparable difference to us. He claimed I had written it down wrong, because the information
was printed on an official notice that he placed in front of me. I went home devastated, and my mother made no comment but put on the dress she had worn when she was in mourning for her father, and we went to the riverboat agency. She wanted to be fair: someone had made a mistake and it very well might have been her son, but that did
not matter. The fact was that we had no more money. The agent
explained that there was nothing he could do.

“You must realize, Señora,” he said, “that it isn’t a question of wanting or not wanting to serve you, but these are the regulations of a serious firm that cannot be run like a weather vane.”

“But they’re only babies,” said my mother, and she pointed at me as an example. “Imagine, this one’s the oldest, and he just turned twelve.” And with her hand
she indicated:

“They’re this big.”

It was not a question of height, claimed the agent, but age. No one paid any less except newborns, who traveled free. My mother looked to a higher authority:

“Whom do I have to see to straighten this out?”

The clerk did not have the chance to answer. The manager, an older man with a maternal belly, came to the door of the office in the middle of the discussion,
and the clerk rose to his feet when he saw him. He was immense, and his appearance respectable, and his authority, even in shirtsleeves and soaked with perspiration, was more than evident. He listened to my mother with attention and responded in a serene voice that a decision of this kind was possible only through a revision of regulations at a meeting of the partners.

“Believe me, I am very
sorry,” he concluded.

My mother sensed a moment of power and refined her argument.

“You are correct, Señor,” she said, “but the problem is that your clerk did not explain it with care to my son, or my son did not understand him, and I proceeded on that error. Now I have everything packed and ready to go on board, we are sleeping on the blessed floor, our money for the market will be finished
today, and on Monday I turn the house over to the new tenants.” She realized that the clerks in the room were listening to her with great interest, and then she addressed them: “What can this mean to so important a company?” And without waiting for an answer, she asked the manager, looking him straight in the eye:

“Do you believe in God?”

The manager became confused. The entire office was in
suspense during a silence that lasted too long. Then my mother stirred in her chair, pressed together her knees, which had begun to tremble, held her handbag in her lap with both hands, and said with a determination typical of her great causes:

“Well, I’m not moving until this is resolved.”

The manager was horrified, and the entire staff stopped working to look at my mother. She was impassive,
her nose sharp, her skin pale and pearly with sweat. She had stopped wearing mourning for her father, but had put it back on because it seemed the most suitable dress for the task. The manager did not look at her again but looked at his employees without knowing what to do, and at last he exclaimed to everyone:

“This is unprecedented!”

My mother did not blink. “I had a knot of tears in my throat
but I had to resist because it would have ended in disaster,” she told me. Then the manager asked the clerk to bring the documents to his office. He did, and in five minutes he came out again, grumbling and furious, but with all the tickets in order for the trip.

The following week we disembarked in the town of Sucre as if we had been born there. It must have had some sixteen thousand inhabitants,
like so many of the country’s municipalities in those days, and they all knew one another, not so much by their names as by their secret lives. Not only the town but the entire region was a sea of gentle water that changed colors on account of the blankets of flowers that covered it according to the time, the place, and our own state of mind. Its splendor recalled that of the dreamlike still
waters in Southeast Asia. During the many years the family lived in Sucre there was not a single automobile. It would have been impractical, since the unswerving streets of flattened earth seemed drawn in a straight line for bare feet, and many houses had a private dock in the kitchen with household canoes for local transportation.

My first emotion was of inconceivable liberty. Everything that
we children had not had or had longed for was soon within reach. We ate when we were hungry or slept when we wanted to, and it was not easy to worry about anyone, for despite the
harshness of their laws, adults were so caught up in their own time that they did not have enough left over to even worry about themselves. The only condition for the safety of children was that they learn to swim before
they walked, for the town was divided in two by a channel of dark waters that served as both aqueduct and sewer. From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preservers so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death. Years later, my brother Jaime and my sister Ligia, who
survived the dangers of initiation, excelled in children’s swimming championships.

What made Sucre an unforgettable town for me was the feeling of freedom we children had moving through the streets. In two or three weeks we knew who lived in each house, and we behaved as if we had always known them. Social customs—simplified by use—were those of modern life within a feudal culture: the wealthy—cattle
ranchers and sugar industrialists—lived on the main square, and the poor wherever they could. As for ecclesiastical administration, it was a territory of missions with jurisdiction and control in a vast lacustrine empire. In the center of that world, the parish church on the main square of Sucre was a pocket version of the Cologne cathedral, copied from memory by a Spanish priest doubling
as architect. The wielding of power was immediate and absolute. Every night, after the rosary, they rang the bells in the church tower the number of times that corresponded to the moral classification of the film being shown in the nearby theater, in accordance with the catalogue of the Catholic Office for Films. The missionary on duty, sitting in the door of his office, watched those who entered
the theater across the street so that transgressors would be sanctioned.

My great frustration was my age when I came to Sucre. I still had three months to go before crossing the fateful line of thirteen, and in the house they no longer tolerated me as a child but neither did they recognize me as an adult, and in that limbo of my age I turned out to be the only one of my brothers and sisters who
did not learn to swim. They did not know whether to seat me at the children’s table or with the grownups. The
maids no longer changed their clothes in front of me, even with the lights out, but one of them slept naked in my bed several times without disturbing my sleep. I had not had time to become sated with that excess of free will when I had to go back to Barranquilla in January of the following
year in order to begin my baccalaureate, because in Sucre there was no secondary school good enough for the excellent grades of Maestro Casalins.

After long discussions and consultations, with very scant participation from me, my parents decided on the Colegio San José de la Compañía de Jesús in Barranquilla. I cannot explain where they found so many resources in so few months, when the pharmacy
and homeopathic consulting room were still in the future. My mother always gave a reason that required no proofs: “God is very great.” In the expenses of the move there must have been provision for the installation and support of the family, but not for my school fees. From having only one pair of torn shoes and one change of clothes that I wore while the other was being washed, my mother furnished
me with new clothes in a trunk the size of a catafalque, not foreseeing that in six months I would have grown a span. She was also the one who decided on her own that I would begin to wear long pants, in opposition to the social provision respected by my father that they could not be worn until one’s voice started to change.