Living to Tell the Tale (9 page)

In Barrancas they did not find the slightest trace of animosity toward the family. On the contrary, seventeen years after the misfortune, a Christian spirit of forgiving and forgetting prevailed among the relatives of Medardo Pacheco. They gave mother and daughter so warmhearted a welcome
that now it was Luisa Santiaga who thought about the possibility of the family returning to that mountain oasis so different from the heat and dust, the bloodthirsty Saturdays, the decapitated phantoms of Aracataca. She managed to suggest this to Gabriel Eligio, provided he obtained his transfer to Riohacha, and he agreed. However, she also learned at this time that the story of the move was not
only without foundation but that no one had wanted it except Mina. This was established in a letter Mina sent to her son Juan de Dios after he wrote to her, frightened of their returning to Barrancas when it was still not twenty years since Medardo Pacheco’s death. For he was always so convinced of the inescapability of the law of La Guajira that half a century later he was opposed to his son Eduardo
joining the public health service in Barrancas.

Despite all these fears, that was where every knot in the situation was untied in three days. On the Tuesday when Luisa Santiaga confirmed to Gabriel Eligio that Mina did not intend to move to Barrancas, he was informed that the position in Riohacha was now available due to the sudden death of the operator. The next day, Mina emptied the drawers
in the pantry looking for poultry shears and happened to open the tin of English biscuits where her daughter hid her love telegrams. Her rage was so great that all she could say to her was one of the celebrated insults she would improvise at her worst moments: “God forgives everything except disobedience.” That weekend they traveled to Riohacha to board the Sunday schooner to Santa Marta. Neither
one was aware of the awful night of battering
February gales: the mother devastated by defeat and the daughter terrified but happy.

Solid ground restored to Mina the composure she had lost when she discovered the letters. The next day she returned alone to Aracataca and left Luisa Santiaga under the protection of her son Juan de Dios, certain she had rescued her from the demons of love. The opposite
was true: Gabriel Eligio traveled whenever he could from Aracataca to Santa Marta to see her. Uncle Juanito, who had endured the same intransigence from his parents in his love for Dilia Caballero, had resolved not to take sides in his sister’s love affair, but at the moment of truth he found himself trapped between his adoration of Luisa Santiaga and his veneration for his parents, and he
took refuge in a formula characteristic of his proverbial goodness: he allowed the sweethearts to see each other outside his house, but never alone or with his knowledge. Dilia Caballero, his wife, who forgave but did not forget, devised for her sister-in-law the same infallible coincidences and masterful stratagems she had used to undermine the vigilance of her in-laws. Gabriel and Luisa began by
seeing each other in the houses of friends, but little by little they risked public places that were not very crowded. In the end they dared to talk through the window when Uncle Juanito was not at home, she in the living room and he in the street, faithful to their commitment not to see each other in the house. The window seemed to be made for the purpose of forbidden love, with Andalusian grillwork
from top to bottom and a frame of climbing vines that even had its breath of jasmine in the torpor of the night. Dilia had anticipated everything, including the complicity of certain neighbors who would whistle in code to alert the lovers to imminent danger. One night, however, all the precautions failed, and Juan de Dios surrendered to the truth. Dilia took advantage of the occasion to invite
the sweethearts to sit in the living room with the windows open so they could share their love with the world. My mother never forgot her brother’s sigh: “What a relief!”

At this time Gabriel Eligio received his formal appointment to the telegraph office in Riohacha. Unsettled by a new separation,
my mother appealed to Monsignor Pedro Espejo, the vicar of the diocese, in the hope that he would
marry them without her parents’ consent. The respectability of the monsignor had reached such proportions that many of the faithful confused it with saintliness, and some attended his Masses only to confirm if it was true that at the moment of the Elevation he rose several centimeters off the ground. When Luisa Santiaga asked for his help, he gave yet another indication that intelligence is one
of the privileges of saintliness. He refused to interfere in the internal jurisdiction of a family so jealous of its privacy but chose instead to find out in secret about my father’s family through the curia. The parish priest in Sincé ignored the liberties taken by Argemira García and responded with a benevolent formula: “This is a respectable though not very devout family.” Then the monsignor spoke
with the sweethearts, as a couple and as individuals, and wrote a letter to Nicolás and Tranquilina in which he expressed his heartfelt certainty that there was no human power capable of overcoming this obdurate love. My grandparents, defeated by the power of God, agreed to turn the painful page, and they granted Juan de Dios full power to arrange the wedding in Santa Marta. But they did not attend,
although they sent Francisca Simodosea to be matron of honor.

My parents married on June 11, 1926, in the Cathedral of Santa Marta, forty minutes late because the bride forgot the date and had to be awakened after eight in the morning. That same night they again boarded the fearful schooner so that Gabriel Eligio could take possession of the telegraph office in Riohacha, and they passed their
first night together in chastity, overcome by seasickness.

My mother was so nostalgic about the house where she spent her honeymoon that her older children could have described it room by room as if we had lived there, and even today it continues to be one of my false memories. Yet the first time I went to the peninsula of La Guajira in reality, not long before my sixtieth birthday, I was surprised
that the telegraph office building had nothing to do with the one in my memory. And the idyllic Riohacha that I had carried in my heart since childhood,
with its saltpeter streets going down to a sea of mud, was nothing more than fantasies borrowed from my grandparents. In fact, now that I know Riohacha, I cannot visualize it as it is but only as I constructed it stone by stone in my imagination.

Two months after the wedding, Juan de Dios received a telegram from my papá announcing that Luisa Santiaga was pregnant. The news shook the very foundations of the house in Aracataca, where Mina had not yet recuperated from her bitterness, and both she and the colonel laid down their weapons so that the newlyweds would come back to stay with them. It was not easy. After a noble, reasoned resistance
of several months’ duration, Gabriel Eligio agreed to his wife giving birth in her parents’ house.

A short while later my grandfather greeted him at the train station with a sentence that remained like a gold frame around the family’s historical record: “I am prepared to give you all the satisfactions that may be necessary.” My grandmother renovated the bedroom that had been hers until then and
installed my parents in it. Over the course of the year, Gabriel Eligio gave up his worthy profession of telegraph operator and devoted his autodidact’s talent to a science on the decline: homeopathy. My grandfather, out of gratitude or remorse, arranged with the authorities for the street where we lived in Aracataca to bear the name it still has: Avenida Monsignor Espejo.

That was how and where
the first of seven boys and four girls was born on Sunday, March 6, 1927, at nine in the morning and in an unseasonable torrential downpour, while the sky of Taurus rose on the horizon. I was almost strangled by the umbilical cord because the family midwife, Santos Villero, lost control of her art at the worst possible moment. But Aunt Francisca lost even more control, for she ran to the street
door shouting as if there were a fire:

“A boy! It’s a boy!” And then, as if sounding the alarm: “Rum, he’s choking!”

The family supposes that the rum was not for celebrating but for rubbing on the newborn to revive him. Miz Juana de Freytes, who made her providential entrance into the bedroom, often told me that the most serious risk came not from
the umbilical cord but from my mother’s dangerous
position on the bed. She corrected it in time, but it was not easy to revive me, and so Aunt Francisca poured the emergency baptismal water over me. I should have been named Olegario, the saint whose day it was, but nobody had the saints’ calendar near at hand, and with a sense of urgency they gave me my father’s first name followed by that of José, the Carpenter, because he was the patron saint
of Aracataca and March was his month. Miz Juana de Freytes proposed a third name in memory of the general reconciliation achieved among families and friends with my arrival into the world, but in the formal rite of baptism three years later they forgot to include it: Gabriel José de la Concordia.

O
N THE DAY
I went with my mother to sell the house, I remembered everything that had made an impression on my childhood but was not certain what came earlier and what came later, or what any of it signified in my life. I was not really aware that in the
midst of the false splendor of the banana company, my parents’ marriage was already inscribed in the process that would put the final touches on the decadence of Aracataca. Once I began to remember, I heard—first with a good deal of discretion and then in a loud, alarmed voice—the fateful sentence repeated: “They say the company’s leaving.” But either nobody believed it, or nobody dared think of
the devastation it would bring.

My mother’s version had such meager numbers and a setting so abject for the imposing drama I had imagined that it caused a sense of frustration in me. Later, I spoke with survivors and witnesses and searched through newspaper archives and official documents, and I realized that the truth did not lie anywhere. Conformists said, in effect, that there had been no
deaths. Those at the other extreme affirmed without a quaver in their voices that there had been more than a hundred, that they had been seen bleeding to death on the square, and that they were carried away in a freight train to be tossed into the ocean like rejected bananas. And so my version was lost forever at some
improbable point between the two extremes. But it was so persistent that in
one of my novels I referred to the massacre with all the precision and horror that I had brought for years to its incubation in my imagination. This was why I kept the number of the dead at three thousand, in order to preserve the epic proportions of the drama, and in the end real life did me justice: not long ago, on one of the anniversaries of the tragedy, the speaker of the moment in the Senate
asked for a minute of silence in memory of the three thousand anonymous martyrs sacrificed by the forces of law and order.

The massacre of the banana workers was the culmination of others that had occurred earlier, but with the added argument that the leaders were marked as Communists, and perhaps they were. I happened to meet the most prominent and persecuted of them, Eduardo Mahecha, in the
Modelo Prison in Barranquilla at about the time I went with my mother to sell the house, and I maintained a warm friendship with him after I introduced myself as the grandson of Nicolás Márquez. It was he who revealed to me that my grandfather was not neutral but had been a mediator in the 1928 strike, and he considered him a just man. So that he rounded out the idea I always had of the massacre,
and I formed a more objective conception of the social conflict. The only discrepancy among everyone’s memories concerned the number of dead, which in any event will not be the only unknown quantity in our history.

So many contradictory versions have been the cause of my false memories. The most persistent is of my standing in the doorway of the house with a Prussian helmet and a little toy rifle,
watching the battalion of perspiring Cachacos marching past under the almond trees. One of the commanding officers in parade uniform greeted me as he passed:

“Hello, Captain Gabi.”

The memory is clear, but there is no possibility that it is true. The uniform, the helmet, and the toy rifle coexisted, but some two years after the strike and when there no longer were military forces in Cataca.
Multiple incidents like this one gave me a bad name in the house for having intrauterine memories and premonitory dreams.

That was the state of the world when I began to be aware of my family environment, and I cannot evoke it in any other way: sorrows, griefs, uncertainties in the solitude of an immense house. For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I
had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saints. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed this old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Cataca was that they were always
mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them the deeper they sank.

In even simpler terms: they were in Cataca but continued living in the province of Padilla, which we still call the Province, with no other information, as if it were the only one in the world. Perhaps without even thinking about it, they had built the house in Cataca as a ceremonial replica
of the house in Barrancas, from whose window you could see, on the other side of the street, the melancholy cemetery where Medardo Pacheco lay buried. In Cataca they were well liked and content, but their lives were subject to the servitude of the land where they had been born. They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that
was different.

Their closest friends were, before anyone else, those who came from the Province. Their domestic language was the one their grandparents had brought from Spain across Venezuela in the previous century, revitalized by Caribbean localisms, the Africanisms of slaves, and fragments of the Goajiro language that filtered into ours, drop by drop. My grandmother would use it to conceal
things from me, not realizing I understood it better than she because of my direct dealings with the servants. I still remember many terms:
atunkeshi,
I’m sleepy;
jamusaitshi taya,
I’m hungry;
ipuwots,
the pregnant woman;
aríjuna,
the stranger, which my grandmother used in a certain sense to refer to the Spaniard, the white man, in short, the enemy. The Goajiro, for their part, always spoke a
kind of boneless Castilian with
brilliant flashes, like Chon’s own dialect, and a perverse precision that my grandmother forbade her to use because it always led to an inescapable ambiguity: “The lips of the mouth.”

The day was incomplete until they received the news of who had been born in Barrancas, how many the bull had killed in the arena in Fonseca, who had been married in Manaure or had
died in Riohacha, and the condition of General Socarrás, who was very ill in San Juan del César. California apples wrapped in tissue paper, red snapper frozen in ice, hams from Galicia, Greek olives were all on sale at bargain prices in the commissary of the banana company. But nothing was eaten in the house that was not seasoned in the broth of longing:
malanga
for the soup had to be from Riohacha
and corn for the breakfast
arepas
needed to come from Fonseca, goats were raised with salt from La Guajira, and turtles and lobsters were brought in live from Dibuya.

And so most of the visitors who arrived every day on the train came from the Province or had been sent by someone from there. Always the same family names: Riasco, Noguera, Ovalle, often crossed with the sacramental tribes of Cotes
and Iguarán. They were passing through, with nothing but a knapsack on their back, and though their visits were not announced it was expected that they would stay for lunch. I have never forgotten my grandmother’s almost ritualized phrase when she entered the kitchen: “We have to make everything, because we don’t know what the people who are coming will like.”

That spirit of perpetual evasion
was sustained by a geographical reality. The Province had the autonomy of a separate world and a compact and ancient cultural unity in a fertile canyon between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Sierra de Perijá, on the Colombian Caribbean. Its communication with the world was easier than with the rest of the country, for its daily life was identified more with the Antilles because of easy
commerce with Jamaica or Curaçao, and was almost confused with Venezuela’s because of a border of open doors that made no distinctions of class or color. The rust of power barely reached it from the interior of the country, stewing in its own broth over a slow fire: laws, taxes, soldiers, bad news incubated
at an altitude of twenty-five hundred meters and eight days of navigation along the Magdalena
River in a steamboat fueled by wood.

That insular nature had generated a watertight culture with its own character that my grandparents implanted in Cataca. More than a home, the house was a town. There were always several sittings at the table, but from the time I was three, the first two were sacred: the colonel at the head and I at the corner to his right. The remaining places were occupied
first by the men and then by the women, but never at the same time. These rules were broken during the July 20 patriotic holiday, and lunch by shifts lasted until everyone had eaten. At night the table was not laid, but large cups of café con leche were given out in the kitchen, along with my grandmother’s exquisite pastries. When the doors were closed, people hung their hammocks where they could,
at different levels, even from the trees in the courtyard.

I lived one of the great fantasies of those years one day when a group of men came to the house, dressed alike in gaiters and spurs, and all of them with a cross of ash drawn on their foreheads. They were the sons fathered by the colonel across the entire length of the Province during the War of a Thousand Days, and they had come from
their towns almost a month late to congratulate him on his birthday. Before coming to the house they had heard Ash Wednesday Mass, and the cross that Father Angarita drew on their foreheads seemed like a supernatural emblem whose mystery would pursue me for years, even after I became familiar with the liturgy of Holy Week.

Most of them had been born after my grandparents’ marriage. After she
had heard of their births, Mina wrote their first and family names in a notebook, and in the end, with an awkward indulgence, she included them with all her heart in the family records. But neither she nor anyone else found it easy to distinguish one from the other before that memorable visit, when each of them revealed his peculiar nature. They were serious and hardworking, family men, peaceable
people, yet not afraid to lose their heads in the vertigo of drunken revelry. They broke dishes, trampled rosebushes chasing a calf in order
to toss it in a blanket, shot chickens for the stew, and set loose a greased pig that ran over the women embroidering in the hallway, but no one lamented these mishaps because of the gusts of joy they brought with them.

With some frequency I continued to
see Esteban Carrillo, Aunt Elvira’s twin brother, who was skilled in the manual arts and traveled with a toolbox for making repairs as a favor in the houses he visited. With his sense of humor and good memory he filled in numerous gaps in the family history that had seemed impassable to me. In my adolescence I also visited my uncle Nicolás Gómez, an intense blond with reddish freckles who always
held in very high esteem his respectable trade as a shopkeeper in the former penal colony at Fundación. Struck by my excellent reputation as a lost cause, he would say goodbye to me with a well-stocked shopping bag for my journey. Rafael Arias always arrived in a hurry on his way to somewhere else, on the back of a mule and in riding clothes, with only enough time to drink a cup of coffee standing
in the kitchen. I found the others scattered among the towns in the Province on the nostalgic trips I made later to write my first novels, and I always missed the cross of ash on their foreheads as an incontrovertible sign of family identity.

Years after my grandparents had died and the family manor had been abandoned to its fate, I came to Fundación on the night train and sat at the only food
stand open at that hour in the station. There was little left to eat, but the owner improvised a nice dish in my honor. She was witty and obliging, and behind these gentle virtues I thought I could detect the strong character of the women in the tribe. I confirmed this years later: the good-looking proprietor was Sara Noriega, another of my unknown aunts.

Apolinar, the small, solid former slave
whom I always recalled as an uncle, disappeared from the house for years, and one afternoon he reappeared for no reason, dressed in mourning in a black suit and an enormous black hat pulled down to his melancholy eyes. As he passed through the kitchen he said that he had come for the funeral, but no one understood him until the next day, when the news arrived that my grandfather had just
died
in Santa Marta, where he had been taken with great urgency and in secret.

The only one of my uncles who achieved public recognition was the oldest and the only Conservative, José María Valdeblánquez, who had been a senator of the Republic during the War of a Thousand Days and in that capacity was present at the signing of the Liberal surrender at the nearby farm in Neerlandia. Facing him, on
the side of the defeated, was his father.

I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood. They had strong characters and tender hearts, and they treated me with the naturalness of the Earthly Paradise. Of the many I remember, Lucía was the only one who surprised me with her youthful
perversity when she took me to the alley of the toads and lifted her dress to her waist to show me her copper-colored thatch of hair. But what in reality attracted my attention was the patch of
pinta
that extended along her belly like a map of the world, with purple dunes and yellow oceans. The others seemed like archangels of purity: they changed their clothes in front of me, bathed me when they
bathed, sat me on my chamber pot and sat on theirs facing me to relieve themselves of their secrets, their sorrows, their rancors, as if I did not understand, not realizing I knew everything because I tied up the loose ends that they themselves left dangling.