Living to Tell the Tale (32 page)

The only thing that really disturbed me during this vacation was the certainty that in the depths of their hearts my family was basing their future on what they were hoping for from me, and only I knew with certainty that these were vain illusions.
Two or three casual remarks of my father’s halfway through the meal indicated
to me that there was much to say about our common fate, and my mother hurried to confirm this. “If things go on this way,” she said, “sooner or later we’ll have to go back to Cataca.” But a rapid glance from my father induced her to correct that:

“Or wherever we go.”

Then it was clear: the possibility of a new move anywhere was a topic that had already been introduced in the family, not because
of the moral atmosphere but in order to find a larger future for the children. Until that moment I had consoled myself with the idea of attributing to the city and its people, and even to my family, the spirit of defeat I suffered from myself. But my father’s drama revealed once again that it is always possible to find someone who is guilty so you do not have to take the blame.

What I perceived
in the air was something much more dense. My mother seemed to care only about the health of Jaime, her youngest, who had not managed to overcome his premature birth. She spent most of the day lying with him in her bedroom hammock, oppressed by sadness and humiliating heat, and the house began to resent her neglect. My brothers and sisters seemed to have no supervision. The order of our meals had
relaxed so much that we ate without schedule whenever we were hungry. My father, the most home-loving of men, spent the day contemplating the square from the pharmacy and the evenings playing idle games at the billiard club. One day I could not bear the tension any longer. I lay down next to my mother in the hammock, as I had not been able to do when I was a child, and asked her what the mystery
was that we were breathing in along with the air in the house. She swallowed an entire sigh so that her voice would not tremble and opened her heart to me:

“Your papá has a son by another woman.”

From the relief I detected in her voice I realized the disquiet with which she had been waiting for my question. She had discovered the truth through the clairvoyance of jealousy, when a young maid
came home filled with excitement because she
had seen Papá talking on the phone in the telegraph office. A jealous woman did not need to know anything else. It was the one telephone in town, employed only for long-distance calls arranged ahead of time, and it had uncertain delays and minutes so expensive that it was used only in cases of extreme gravity. Each call, no matter how simple, aroused
a malicious alarm in the community of the square. And so when Papá came home my mother watched him without saying anything to him, until he tore up a piece of paper he was carrying in his pocket that was the announcement of a judicial complaint because of professional abuse. My mother waited for the chance to ask him point-blank whom he had been talking to on the telephone. The question was so revealing
that my papá could not find an immediate answer more credible than the truth:

“I was talking to a lawyer.”

“I know that already,” said my mother. “What I need is for you to tell me about it with the frankness I deserve.”

My mother admitted afterward that she was the one who was terrified at the can of worms she might have opened without realizing it, for if he dared tell her the truth it was
because he thought she already knew everything, or that he would have to tell her everything.

That was the case. Papá confessed that he had received notification of a criminal complaint against him for having abused in his consulting room a sick woman whom he had drugged with an injection of morphine. It must have happened in a forgotten jurisdiction where he had spent brief periods of time to
attend patients without money. And he gave immediate proof of his rectitude: the melodramatic tale of anesthesia and rape was a criminal slander by his enemies, but the boy was his, conceived under normal circumstances.

It was not easy for my mother to avoid the scandal, because someone very influential was standing in the shadows and manipulating the strings of the plot. There was the precedent
of Abelardo and Carmen Rosa, who had lived with us at various times and had everyone’s affection, but both of them had been born before her marriage. Yet my mother overcame her rancor at the bitter pill of a new child and her husband’s infidelity, and
fought at his side in a public way until they had discredited the lie about the rape.

Peace returned to the family. However, a short while later,
confidential news came from the same region about a little girl with a different mother whom Papá had recognized as his, and who was living in deplorable conditions. My mother wasted no time on quarrels and suppositions, but did battle to bring her to the house. “Mina did the same thing with all of Papá’s scattered children,” she said on that occasion, “and she never had any reason to regret it.”
And so she succeeded on her own in having the girl sent to her, with no public furor, and she mixed her into the already numerous family.

All of this was past history when my brother Jaime met a boy identical to our brother Gustavo at a party in another town. It was the son who had caused the legal complaint, well brought up and pampered by his mother. But our mother took all kinds of measures
and brought him home to live with the family—when there already were eleven of us—and helped him to learn a trade and become established in life. Then I could not hide my astonishment that a woman whose jealousy was hallucinatory could have been capable of such actions, and she herself responded with a sentence that I have preserved ever since as if it were a diamond:

“Well, the same blood that’s
in my children’s veins just can’t go wandering around out there.”

I saw my brothers and sisters only on my annual vacations. After each trip it was harder for me to recognize them and take a new memory away with me. In addition to our baptismal name, we all had another that the family gave us to make daily life easier, and it was not a diminutive but a casual nickname. From the moment I was born
they called me Gabito—an unusual diminutive of Gabriel along the Guajira coast—and I have always felt it was my given name, and that Gabriel is the diminutive. Someone surprised by this capricious saints’ calendar used to ask why our parents had not decided once and for all to baptize all their children with nicknames.

However, this liberal feeling of my mother’s seemed contrary to her attitude
toward her two oldest daughters, Margot
and Aida, on whom she tried to impose the same severity that her mother had imposed on her because of her obstinate love for my father. She wanted to move to another town. Papá, on the other hand, who did not need to hear that twice to pack his suitcases and begin roaming the world, was reluctant this time. Several days went by before I learned that the
problem was that the two oldest girls were in love with two different men, of course, but who both had the same name: Rafael. When I heard about it I could not control my laughter because of the memory of the horror novel that Papá and Mamá had lived through, and I told her so.

“It’s not the same,” she said.

“It is the same,” I insisted.

“All right,” she conceded, “it is the same, but two at
the same time.”

As had been the case in her day, reasons and arguments were of no use. No one ever learned how our parents found out, because each sister, on her own, had taken precautions not to be discovered. But the witnesses were the most unexpected ones, because these same sisters had sometimes arranged to be accompanied by younger siblings who could vouch for their innocence. Most surprising
of all was that Papá also participated in the ambush, not with direct actions but with the same passive resistance that my grandfather Nicolás had used against his daughter.

“We would go to a dance and my papá would come in and take us home if he found that the Rafaels were there,” Aida Rosa has recounted in a newspaper interview. They did not have permission to take a walk in the country or
go to the movies, or they were sent with people who would not let them out of their sight. Each girl, on her own, invented useless pretexts for keeping their romantic appointments, and that was where an invisible phantom appeared and betrayed them. Ligia, who was younger than they, earned a reputation as a spy and an informer, but she excused herself with the argument that jealousy among siblings
is another form of love.

During that vacation I tried to intercede with my parents so they would not repeat the mistakes that my mother’s parents
had made with her, and they always found complicated reasons for not understanding. The most terrible was the one about the
pasquines,
the anonymous scandal sheets that were posted in public and disclosed horrifying secrets—real or invented—even in
the least suspect families. They revealed hidden paternities, shameful adulteries, perversions in bed that somehow had entered the public domain by paths less straightforward than the
pasquines.
But none of them had ever denounced anything that in some way was not known, no matter how hidden it had been kept, or that was not bound to happen sooner or later. “You yourself make your own
pasquines,
” one of their victims used to say.

What my parents did not foresee was that their daughters would defend themselves with the same means they had used. They sent Margot to study in Montería, and Aida made the decision to go to Santa Marta. They were boarders, and on their free days there was someone who had been forewarned to accompany them, but they always arranged to communicate with their distant
Rafaels. But my mother achieved what her parents did not achieve with her. Aida spent half her life in the convent and lived there without grief or glory until she felt safe from men. Margot and I were always united by memories of our shared childhood when I would keep an eye on the adults so they would not catch her eating dirt. In the end she became like a second mother to everyone, in particular
Cuqui, the one who needed her most, and she kept him with her until his last breath.

Only today do I realize how much my mother’s unhappy state of mind and the internal tensions in the house were in accord with the fatal contradictions in the country that had not surfaced yet but did exist. President Lleras would have to hold elections in the new year, and the future looked dark. The Conservatives,
who had managed to bring down López, played a double game with his successor: they flattered him for his mathematical impartiality but fomented discord in the Province in order to regain power either by persuasion or by force.

Sucre had remained immune to violence, and the few cases that anyone recalled had nothing to do with politics. One had
been the murder of Joaquín Vega, a very sought-after
musician who played the saxhorn in the local band. They were playing at seven in the evening at the entrance to the movie theater, and a relative of his cut his throat when it was puffed out by the pressure of the music he was playing, and he bled to death on the ground. Both men were well loved in the town, and the only known but unconfirmed explanation was that it had been an affair of honor.
The birthday of my sister Rita was being celebrated at the same time, and the shock of the bad news ruined the party that had been scheduled to last for many more hours.

The other duel, which occurred much earlier but was indelible in the town’s memory, was the one between Plinio Balmaceda and Dionisiano Barrios. The first was a member of an old and respectable family, an enormous, charming man
but also a troublemaker with a wicked temper when he crossed paths with alcohol. In his right mind he had the airs and graces of a gentleman, but when he drank too much he was transformed into a bully with an easy revolver and a riding whip in his belt to use on anyone he took a dislike to. Even the police tried to keep him at a distance. The members of his good family, tired of dragging him home
each time he had too much to drink, at last abandoned him to his fate.

Dionisiano Barrios was just the opposite: a timid, impaired man, an enemy of brawls and abstemious by nature. He never had problems with anyone until Plinio Balmaceda began to provoke him with vile jokes about his impairment. He did what he could to avoid him, until the day Balmaceda crossed paths with him and cut his face
with the whip because he felt like it. Then Dionisiano overcame his timidity, his hump, and his bad luck, and he confronted the aggressor with a gun. It was an instantaneous duel in which both men received serious wounds, but only Dionisiano died.

The historic duel in the town, however, caused the twin deaths of this same Plinio Balmaceda and Tasio Ananías, a police sergeant famous for his ethical
behavior, the exemplary son of Mauricio Ananías, who played drums in the same band in which Joaquín Vega played the saxhorn. It was a formal duel in the middle of the street, each man’s wounds were grave, and
each endured a long death agony in his house. Plinio regained consciousness almost at once, and his immediate concern was with Ananías’s fate. Tasio, in turn, was struck by the concern with
which Plinio asked about him. Each began to pray that the other not die, and their families kept them informed as long as their souls were in their bodies. The entire town lived in suspense while all kinds of efforts were made to prolong both their lives.

After forty-eight hours of their death agony, the church bells tolled for a woman who had just died. The dying men heard the bells, and each
in his bed believed they were tolling for the death of the other. Ananías died of grief almost at once, weeping over the death of Plinio. Plinio learned this and died two days later, weeping copious tears for Sergeant Ananías.

In a town of peaceable friends like this one, violence during those years had a less fatal but no less harmful expression:
pasquines.
Terror lived in the houses of the
great families, who waited for the next morning as if it were a fateful lottery. Where least expected a punitive sheet of paper would appear, which was a relief for what it did not say about you, and at times a secret fiesta for what it did say about others. My father, perhaps the most peaceable man I have ever known, oiled the venerable revolver he had never fired and loosened his tongue in the billiard
hall.