Living to Tell the Tale (7 page)

But the unforgettable colony for us was the Venezuelan; in one of their houses two adolescent students
on vacation would bathe with bucketsful of water from the icy cisterns of dawn: half a century later, Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni would be successive presidents of their country. Among the Venezuelans, the closest to us was Miz Juana de Freytes, a striking matron with a biblical gift for narration. The first formal story I knew was “Genoveva of Brabante,” which I heard from her along with the
masterpieces of world literature that she reduced
to children’s stories: the
Odyssey, Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo,
and many episodes from the Bible.

My grandfather’s lineage was one of the most respectable but also the least powerful. But he was distinguished by a respectability recognized even by the native-born dignitaries of the banana company. It was that of the
Liberal veterans of the civil wars who remained there after the last two treaties, following the good example of General Benjamín Herrera, on whose farm in Neerlandia one could hear in the afternoons melancholy waltzes from his peacetime clarinet.

My mother became a woman in that hellhole and filled the space in everybody’s heart after typhus carried off Margarita María Miniata. She, too, was
sickly. She had spent an uncertain childhood plagued by tertian fevers, but when she was treated for the last one the cure was complete and forever, and her health allowed her to celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday with eleven of her children and four more of her husband’s, sixty-five grandchildren, eighty-eight great-grandchildren, and fourteen great-great-grandchildren. Not counting those no
one ever knew about. She died of natural causes on June 9, 2002, at eight-thirty in the evening, when we were already preparing to celebrate her first century of life, and on the same day and almost at the same hour that I put the final period to these memoirs.

She was born in Barrancas on July 25, 1905, when the family was just beginning to recover from the disaster of the wars. She was given
her first name in honor of Luisa Mejía Vidal, the colonel’s mother, who had been dead for a month on the day she was born. She got her second name because it was the day of the apostle Santiago el Mayor, decapitated in Jerusalem. She hid this name for half her life because she thought it masculine and ostentatious, until a disloyal son betrayed her in a novel.

She was a diligent student except
for the piano class that her mother imposed on her because she could not conceive of a respectable young lady who was not an accomplished pianist. Luisa Santiaga studied for three years out of obedience and
dropped it in a day because of the tedium of daily exercises in the sultry heat of siesta. But the only virtue of use to her in the flower of her twenty years was the strength of her character
when the family discovered that she was mad with love for the young and haughty telegraph operator from Aracataca.

The history of their forbidden love was another of the wonders of my youth. Having heard it told so often by my parents—sometimes by both of them together and sometimes by each one alone—I knew almost the entire story when I wrote
Leaf Storm,
my first novel, at the age of twenty-seven,
even though I was also aware that I still had a good deal to learn about the art of writing novels. They were both excellent storytellers and had a joyful recollection of their love, but they became so impassioned in their accounts that when I was past fifty and had decided at last to use their story in
Love in the Time of Cholera,
I could not distinguish between life and poetry.

According to
my mother’s version, they met for the first time at the wake for a child that neither one could identify for me. She was singing in the courtyard with her friends, following the popular custom of singing love songs to pass the time during the nine nights of mourning for innocents. Out of nowhere, a man’s voice joined the choir. All the girls turned to stare and were stunned by his good looks. “He’s
the one we’re going to marry,” they sang in chorus to the rhythm of their clapping hands. He did not impress my mother, and she said so: “He looked like just another stranger to me.” And he was. He had just arrived from Cartagena de Indias after interrupting his medical and pharmaceutical studies for lack of funds, and had begun a somewhat commonplace life in several towns of the region in the
recent profession of telegraph operator. A photograph from those days shows him with the equivocal air of an impoverished gentleman. He was wearing a suit of dark taffeta with a four-button jacket, very close-fitting in the style of the day, a high stiff collar and wide tie, and a flat-brimmed straw hat. He also wore fashionable round spectacles with thin wire frames and clear lenses. Those who knew
him at the time saw him as a hard-living, womanizing bohemian who nonetheless never drank alcohol or smoked a cigarette in his long life.

That was the first time my mother laid eyes on him. He, on the other hand, had seen her the previous Sunday at eight o’clock Mass, guarded by her aunt, Francisca Simodosea, who had been her companion since her return from school. He had seen them again the
following Tuesday, sewing beneath the almond trees at the door to the house, so that on the night of the wake he already knew she was the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, for whom he had several letters of introduction. After that night she also learned that he was a bachelor with a propensity for falling in love who had an immediate success because of his inexhaustible gift for conversation,
his ease in writing verse, the grace with which he danced to popular music, and the premeditated sentimentality with which he played the violin. My mother would tell me that when you heard him playing in the small hours of the morning, the urge to weep was irresistible. His calling card in society had been “After the Ball Is Over,” a waltz of consummate romanticism that was part of his repertoire
and had become indispensable in his serenades. These amiable safe-conducts and his personal charm opened the doors of the house to him and earned him a frequent place at family lunches. Aunt Francisca, a native of Carmen de Bolívar, adopted him without reservation when she learned he had been born in Sincé, a town near her birthplace. Luisa Santiaga was entertained at social gatherings by his seducer’s
stratagems, but it never occurred to her that he would want anything more. On the contrary: their good relations were based above all on her serving as a screen for the secret love between him and a classmate of hers, and she had agreed to act as his godparent at the wedding. From then on he called her godmother and she called him godson. It is easy, then, to imagine Luisa Santiaga’s surprise
one night at a dance when the audacious telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and said to her:

“I give you my life in this rose.”

This was not a spontaneous gesture, he told me many times, but after meeting all the girls he had concluded that Luisa Santiaga was the one for him. She interpreted the rose as another
of the playful gallantries he used with her friends. To the extent
that when she left the dance, she also left the flower somewhere, and he knew it. She’d had only one secret suitor, a luckless poet and good friend who had never touched her heart with his ardent verses. But Gabriel Eligio’s rose disturbed her sleep with inexplicable fury. In our first formal conversation about their love, when she already had a good number of children, she confessed to me: “I
couldn’t sleep because I was angry thinking about him, but what made me even angrier was that the angrier I became the more I thought about him.” For the rest of the week it was all she could do to endure the terror that she might see him and the torment that she might not. From the godmother and godson they had once been, they began to treat each other as strangers. One afternoon, as they were
sewing beneath the almond trees, Aunt Francisca teased her niece with mischievous guile:

“I heard somebody gave you a rose.”

Well, as usual, Luisa Santiaga would be the last to know that the torments of her heart were already common knowledge. In the numerous conversations I had with her and my father, they both agreed that their explosive love had three decisive moments. The first was on a
Palm Sunday during High Mass. She was sitting with Aunt Francisca on a bench on the side of the epistolary when she recognized the sound of his flamenco heels on the floor tiles and saw him pass so close that she felt the warm gust of his bridegroom’s cologne. Aunt Francisca appeared not to have noticed him, and he appeared not to have noticed them either. But the truth was that it had all been premeditated
by him, and he had been following them since they walked past the telegraph office. He remained standing next to the column closest to the door so that he could observe her from the back but she could not see him. After a few intense minutes Luisa Santiaga could not bear the suspense, and she looked over her shoulder toward the door. Then she thought she would die of rage because he was
looking at her, and their eyes met. “It was just what I had planned,” my father would say with pleasure when he repeated the story to me in his old age.
My mother, on the other hand, never tired of saying that for three days she had not been able to control her fury at falling into the trap.

The second moment was a letter he wrote to her. Not the kind she might have expected from a poet and violinist
of furtive serenades, but an imperious note demanding a reply before he traveled to Santa Marta the following week. She did not reply. She locked herself in her room, determined to kill the worm that did not leave her enough breath to live, until Aunt Francisca tried to persuade her to capitulate once and for all before it was too late. In an effort to overcome her resistance, she told Luisa
Santiaga the exemplary tale of Juventino Trillo, the suitor who stood guard every night from seven to ten under the balcony of his impossible beloved. She attacked him with every insult that occurred to her, and in the end she stood on the balcony night after night and emptied a chamber-pot of urine on his head. But she could not drive him away. After every kind of baptismal assault—moved by the
self-sacrifice of that invincible love—she married him. My parents’ story did not reach those extremes.

The third moment in the siege was a grand wedding to which both had been invited as patrons of honor. Luisa Santiaga could find no excuse not to attend an event of such importance to her family. But Gabriel Eligio had the same thought, and he attended the celebration prepared for anything.
She could not control her heart when she saw him crossing the room with the obvious intention of asking her to dance the first dance. “My blood was pounding so hard in my body I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or fear,” she told me. He realized this and delivered a brutal blow: “Now you don’t have to say yes because your heart is saying it for you.”

Without a word, she left him standing in
the middle of the room while the music was still playing. But my father understood this in his own way.

“It made me happy,” he told me.

Luisa Santiaga could not endure the rancor she felt toward herself when she was awakened before dawn by the strains of the poisoned waltz, “After the Ball Is Over.” The first thing she
did the next morning was to return all Gabriel Eligio’s gifts to him. This
undeserved rebuff, and the gossip about her walking away from him at the wedding, like feathers tossed into the air had no winds to bring them back. Everyone assumed it was the inglorious end of a summer storm. This impression was strengthened when Luisa Santiaga suffered a recurrence of the tertian fevers of her childhood, and her mother took her away to recuperate in the town of Manaure, an Edenic
spot in the foothills of the sierra. Both always denied having any communication during those months, but this is not very credible, for when she returned, recovered from her ailments, both also seemed to have recovered from their misgivings. My father would say that he went to meet her at the station because he had read the telegram in which Mina announced their return, and when Luisa Santiaga
shook his hand in greeting, he felt something like a Masonic sign that he interpreted as a message of love. She always denied this with the same modesty and shyness she brought to her evocations of those years. But the truth is that from then on they were less reticent about being seen together. All she needed was the ending that Aunt Francisca provided the following week while they were sewing
in the hallway of begonias:

“Mina knows everything.”

Luisa Santiaga always said it was her family’s opposition that made her leap across the dikes of the torrent she had kept hidden in her heart since the night she left her suitor standing in the middle of the dance floor. It was a bitter war. The colonel attempted to stay on the sidelines, but he could not elude the blame that Mina threw in
his face when she realized he was not as innocent as he appeared. It seemed clear to everyone that the intolerance was not his but hers, when in reality it was inscribed in the law of the tribe, for whom every suitor is an interloper. This atavistic prejudice, whose embers still smolder, has turned us into a vast community of unmarried women and men with their flies unzipped and numerous children
born out of wedlock.

Friends were divided, for or against the lovers, according to age, and those who did not have a firm position had one
imposed by events. The young became their enthusiastic accomplices. His above all, for he relished his position as the sacrificial victim of social prejudices. The majority of adults, however, viewed Luisa Santiaga as the precious jewel of a rich and powerful
family whom a parvenu telegraph operator was courting not for love but self-interest. She herself, once obedient and submissive, confronted her opponents with the ferocity of a lioness that has just given birth. In the most corrosive of their many domestic disputes, Mina lost her temper and threatened her daughter with the bread knife. An impassive Luisa Santiaga stood her ground. When she became
aware of the criminal impetus of her wrath, Mina dropped the knife and screamed in horror: “Oh my God!” And placed her hand on the hot coals of the stove as a brutal penance.