Living to Tell the Tale (14 page)

My sister Margot must have been very unhappy in that school, though I do not remember her ever mentioning it. She would sit in her chair in the elementary class and remain there without speaking—even during recess—and not moving her eyes from an indeterminate point until the last bell rang. I never knew at the time that while she was alone in the empty room she chewed on earth from the garden
at home that she had hidden in the pocket of her pinafore.

It was very hard for me to learn how to read. It did not seem logical for the letter
m
to be called
em
, and yet with some vowel following it you did not say
ema
but
ma
. It was impossible for me to read that way. At last, when I went to the Montessori school, the teacher did not teach me the names of the consonants but their sounds. In
this way I could read the first book I found in a dusty chest in the storeroom of the house. It was tattered and incomplete, but it involved me in so intense a way that Sara’s fiancé had a terrifying premonition as he walked by: “Damn! This kid’s going to be a writer.”

Said by someone who earned his living as a writer, it made a huge impression on me. Several years went by before I knew that
the book was
The Thousand and One Nights
. The story I liked best—one of the shortest, and the simplest one I read—continued to seem the best one for the rest of my life, though now I am not sure that was where I read it, something no one has been able to clarify for me. The story is this: a fisherman promised a neighbor that he would give her the first fish he
caught if she would lend him a lead
weight for his casting net, and when the woman opened the fish to fry it, she found a diamond the size of an almond.

I have always related the war with Peru with the decadence of Cataca, for once peace was declared my father became lost in a labyrinth of uncertainties that ended at last with the family moving to his hometown of Sincé. For Luis Enrique and me, who accompanied him on his exploratory
trip, it was in reality a new school of life, with a culture so different from ours that they seemed to come from two different planets. Beginning on the day after our arrival, we were taken to nearby farms, and there we learned to ride burros, milk cows, geld calves, set traps for quail, fish with a baited hook, and understand why male and female dogs became stuck together. Luis Enrique was
always far ahead of me in discovering the world that Mina had forbidden to us, and that my grandmother Argemira told us about in Sincé without the least malice. So many uncles and aunts, so many cousins of varying colors, so many relatives with strange last names speaking so many different argots at first conveyed more confusion than surprise, until we understood it as another way to love. Papá’s
papá, Don Gabriel Martínez, a legendary schoolteacher, received Luis Enrique and me in his courtyard with its immense trees and the most famous mangoes in town for their taste and size. He counted them one by one every day from the beginning of the annual harvest, and he picked them one by one with his own hand at the moment he sold them at the fabulous price of a centavo each. When he said goodbye
to us after a friendly chat about his good teacher’s memory, he picked a mango from the leafiest tree for the two of us.

Papá had sold us that trip as an important step in familial unification, but after we arrived we realized that his secret purpose was to open a pharmacy on the large main square. My brother and I were matriculated in the school of Maestro Luis Gabriel Mesa, where we felt freer
and better integrated into a new community. We rented an enormous house on the best corner in town, with two stories and a running balcony facing the square, and desolate bedrooms where the invisible ghost of a stone curlew spent the entire night singing.

Everything was ready for the joyous landing of my mother and sisters when the telegram arrived with the news that my grandfather Nicolás Márquez
had died. He had been caught off guard by a throat ailment that was diagnosed as terminal cancer, and there was almost no time to take him to Santa Marta to die. The only one of us he saw as he was dying was my brother Gustavo, born six months earlier, whom someone had put into my grandfather’s bed so that he could say goodbye. My dying grandfather gave him a farewell caress. I needed many years
before I realized what that inconceivable death meant to me.

The move to Sincé was made in any event, not only with all the children but with my grandmother Mina and Aunt Mama, who was already ill, both of them in the good care of Aunt Pa. But the joy of the change and the failure of the project occurred almost at the same time, and in less than a year we all returned to the old house in Cataca,
“flogging our hats,” as my mother would say in hopeless situations. Papá stayed in Barranquilla studying the way to set up his fourth pharmacy.

My final memory of the house in Cataca during those awful days was the fire in the courtyard where they burned my grandfather’s clothes. His
liquiliques
and the white linen he wore as a civilian colonel resembled him as if he were still alive inside them
while they burned. Above all the many cloth caps of different colors that had been the identifying sign that best distinguished him at a distance. Among them I recognized my Scotch plaid one, burned by mistake, and I was shaken by the revelation that this ceremony of extermination had conferred upon me a certain role in my grandfather’s death. Today it seems clear: something of mine had died with
him. But I also believe, beyond any doubt, that at that moment I was already an elementary-school writer who needed only to learn how to write.

It was the same state of mind that encouraged me to go on living when my mother and I left the house we could not sell. Since the return train could arrive at any time, we went to the station without even thinking about seeing anyone else. “We’ll come
back another day when we have more time,” she said,
using the only euphemism she could think of to say she would never come back. As for me, I knew then that for the rest of my life I would never stop missing the thunder at three in the afternoon.

We were the only phantoms at the station, apart from the employee in overalls who sold the tickets as well as doing what in our time had required twenty
or thirty hurried men. The heat was merciless. On the other side of the tracks there were only the remains of the forbidden city of the banana company, its old mansions without their red tile roofs, the withered palms among the weeds, the ruins of the hospital, and at the far end of the promenade, the Montessori schoolhouse abandoned among decrepit almond trees, and the little square of gravel
facing the station without the slightest trace of historical greatness.

Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die. I had suffered this on other occasions, but only on that morning did I recognize it as a crisis of inspiration, that word, abominable but so real, that demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its ashes in time.

I do not remember if we spoke further, not even on the return train. When we were already on the launch, in the small hours of Monday and with the cool breeze of the sleeping swamp, my mother realized I was not asleep either, and she asked me:

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m writing,” I answered. And I rushed to be more amiable: “I mean, I’m thinking about what I’m going to write when I
get to the office.”

“Aren’t you afraid your papá will die of grief?”

I eluded the charge with a long pass of the cape.

“He’s had so many reasons to die, this one must be the least fatal.”

It was not the most propitious time for me to attempt a second novel, after having been mired in the first one and attempting other forms of fiction, with luck or without it, but that night I imposed it on
myself like a vow made in war: I would write it or die. Or as Rilke had said: “If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write.”

From the taxi that took us to the dock for launches, my old city of Barranquilla looked strange and sad in the first light of that providential February. The captain of the launch
Eline Mercedes
invited me to accompany my mother to the town of Sucre,
where the family had lived for the past ten years. I did not even think about it. I said goodbye to her with a kiss, and she looked into my eyes, smiled at me for the first time since the previous afternoon, and asked me with her usual mischievousness:

“So, what shall I tell your papá?”

I answered with my heart in my hand:

“Tell him I love him very much and that thanks to him I’m going to be
a writer.” And without compassion I anticipated any other alternatives: “Nothing but a writer.”

I liked saying it, sometimes as a joke and sometimes in all seriousness, but never with so much conviction as on that day. I remained on the dock responding to the slow goodbyes my mother waved to me from the railing, until the launch disappeared among the debris of other ships. Then I hurried to the
office of
El Heraldo
, excited by the yearning that gnawed in my belly, and almost without breathing I began the new novel with my mother’s sentence: “I’ve come to ask you to please go with me to sell the house.”

My method back then was different from the one I adopted later as a professional writer. I typed only with my index fingers—as I still do—but did not break each paragraph until I was
satisfied with it—as I do now—but poured out everything, rough and raw, that was inside me. I think this system was imposed by the size of the sheets of paper, vertical strips cut from the rolls for printing, that could be five meters long. The result was originals as long and narrow as papyrus cascading out of the typewriter and extending along the floor as one wrote. The editor-in-chief did not
assign articles by the page, or by words or letters, but by centimeters of paper. “A piece a meter and a half long,” he would say. In my maturity I began to miss this format until I realized that in practice it was the same as the computer screen.

The impetus with which I began the novel was so irresistible that I lost my sense of time. At ten in the morning I must have
had more than a meter
written when all of a sudden Alfonso Fuenmayor pushed open the main door and stood there like stone, with the key still in the lock, as if he had confused it with the key to the bathroom. Until he recognized me.

“What the hell are you doing here at this time of day?” he said to me in surprise.

“I’m writing the novel of my life,” I told him.

“Another one?” Alfonso said with his irreverent humor.
“You have more lives than a cat.”

“It’s the same one, but in another way,” I said in order not to give him useless explanations.

We did not use the familiar
tú
with each other because of the strange Colombian custom of using
tú
from the first greeting and changing to
usted
only when greater intimacy is achieved—as married couples do.

He took books and papers out of his shabby briefcase and
put them on the desk. In the meantime, he listened with his insatiable curiosity to the emotional upheaval I tried to convey to him with the frenetic story of my trip. At last, by way of synthesis, I could not avoid my unfortunate tendency to reduce to an irreversible phrase what I am not capable of explaining.

“It’s the biggest thing that’s happened to me in my life,” I said.

“Let’s hope it
won’t be the last,” said Alfonso.

He did not even think that, for he, too, was not capable of accepting an idea without first having reduced it to its proper size. Still, I knew him well enough to realize that perhaps my emotion regarding the trip had not moved him as much as I had hoped, but it had no doubt intrigued him. That was true: beginning the next day he began to ask me all sorts of
casual but very lucid questions about how the writing was going, and a simple facial expression of his was enough to make me think that something ought to be corrected.

While we were talking I had gathered my papers together in order to clear the desk, since that morning Alfonso had to write the first editorial for
Crónica
. But he had news that cheered my day: the first issue, expected for the
following week, was being
postponed a fifth time because of inadequate supplies of paper. With luck, Alfonso said, we would have the first issue in three weeks.

I thought this providential delay would be enough time for me to complete the beginning of the book, for I was still too green to realize that novels do not begin the way you want them to, but the way they want to. In fact, six months
later, when I believed I was working on the final version, I had to do a complete rewrite of the first ten pages so that the reader would believe them, and today they still do not seem valid to me. The delay must have been a relief for Alfonso as well, because instead of complaining about it he took off his jacket and sat down at the desk to continue correcting the recent edition of the
Dictionary
of the Royal Academy of the Language,
which we had received during this time. It had been his favorite pastime since he happened to come across an error in an English dictionary and had sent the documented correction to the publishers in London, perhaps with no other gratification than including one of our jokes in his letter: “At last England owes us, the Colombians, a favor.” The publishers
responded with a very cordial letter in which they recognized their mistake and asked him to continue collaborating with them. He did, for several years, and he not only found more slips in the same dictionary but in others as well, in various languages. When that relationship ended, he had already contracted the solitary vice of correcting dictionaries in Spanish, English, or French, and if someone
was late, or he had to wait for a bus or stand in any of the other lines that fill our lives, he passed the time in the millimetric task of hunting down errors in the thickets of languages.

By twelve o’clock the heat was unbearable. The smoke from our cigarettes had clouded the small amount of light that came in through the two windows, but neither of us took the trouble to ventilate the office,
perhaps because of the secondary addiction to smoking the same smoke over again until you died. With the heat it was different. I have the inherent good fortune of being able to ignore it until it is ninety degrees in the shade. Alfonso, on the other hand, without interrupting his work, was
taking off his clothing piece by piece as the heat began to press in on him: tie, shirt, undershirt. With
the added advantage that his clothing remained dry while he was drowning in perspiration, and he could put it on again when the sun went down, as unwrinkled and fresh as it had been at breakfast. This must have been the secret that allowed him to always appear anywhere with his linen white, his ties knotted, and his coarse Indian hair divided in the center of his skull by a mathematical line. That
is how he looked at one o’clock, when he walked out of the bathroom as if he had just awakened from a restorative sleep. When he walked past me he asked: