Living to Tell the Tale (19 page)

It was not difficult to carry out his charge to me. My mother was becoming accustomed to inopportune and uncertain times alone, and she managed them with reluctance, but with
great facility. Cooking and keeping the house in order made it necessary for even the youngest children to help in domestic duties, which they did well. During this time I felt like an adult for the first time when I realized that my brothers and sisters had begun to treat me like an uncle.

I never could overcome my shyness. When I had to confront the raw responsibility our wandering father had
left with us, I learned that shyness is an invincible phantom. Each time I had to ask for credit, even when it had been agreed to ahead of time in stores owned by friends, I put it off for hours in the vicinity of the house, repressing my desire to cry and the cramps in my stomach, until at last I dared to go in with my jaws clenched so tight I could not speak. There was always some heartless shopkeeper
who would leave me in utter confusion: “You moronic kid, you can’t talk with your mouth shut.” More than once I returned home with empty hands and some excuse I had invented. But never again was I as wretched as the first time I tried to talk on the telephone in the store at the corner. The owner helped me with the operator, for automatic service did not exist yet. I felt the winds of death
when he gave me the receiver. I was hoping for an
obliging voice and what I heard was the barking of someone who spoke into the darkness at the same time I did. I thought my interlocutor could not understand me either and I raised my voice as loud as I could. In a fury, he raised his too:

“What the hell are you shouting at me for?”

I hung up, terrified. I must admit that despite my fever to
communicate I still have to repress my fear of telephones and airplanes, and I do not know if it is something left over from those days. How did I ever do anything? It was my good fortune that Mamá often repeated the answer: “You must suffer in order to serve.”

Our first news of Papá came two weeks later in a letter intended more to entertain than to inform us about anything. My mother understood
it in this way and she sang that day as she washed the dishes to raise our morale. Without my papá she was different: she identified with her daughters as if she were an older sister. She fit in with them so well that she was the best at their children’s games, even dolls, and would lose her temper and fight with them as equals. Another two letters in the same vein as the first came from my papá,
and they were filled with such promising projects that they helped us to sleep better.

A serious problem was the speed with which we outgrew our clothes. No one got hand-me-downs from Luis Enrique, it would not even have been possible because he would come home in miserable condition, his clothes ruined, and we never knew why. My mother said it was if he had walked through barbed wire. My sisters—seven
and nine years old—helped each other with miracles of ingenuity, and I always have believed that the pressing needs of those days turned them into premature adults. Aida was resourceful and Margot had, for the most part, overcome her shyness and was affectionate and obliging with her newborn sister. I was the most difficult, not only because I had to perform distinctive tasks but because
my mother, protected by everyone’s enthusiasm, took the risk of reducing the household funds in order to matriculate me in the Cartagena de Indias School, a ten-block walk from the house.

In accordance with the notification we had received, some
twenty applicants showed up at eight in the morning for the admissions procedure. To our good fortune it was not a written examination, but three teachers
called us in the order we had enrolled the previous week and gave us a brief examination based on our certificates of previous study. I was the only one who did not have any, since there had not been time to request them from the Montessori and elementary schools in Aracataca, and my mother thought I would not be admitted without papers. But I decided to take a chance. One of the teachers removed
me from the line when I confessed I did not have them, but another took charge of my fate and led me to his office to examine me without prerequisites. He asked me what quantity was a gross, how many years were in a lustrum and a millennium, he had me repeat the departmental capitals, the principal rivers of the nation, and the countries that bordered it. Everything seemed routine until he asked
me what books I had read. He found it noteworthy that at my age I cited so many and so great a variety of books, and had read
The Thousand and One Nights
in an adult edition that had not suppressed some of the scabrous episodes that scandalized Father Angarita. It surprised me to learn that it was an important book, for I always had thought that serious adults could not believe that genies came
out of bottles or doors opened at the incantation of magic words. The applicants who had gone before me had taken no more than a quarter of an hour, and were admitted or rejected, but I spent more than half an hour conversing with the teacher about all kinds of subjects. Together we looked at a bookcase that stood behind his desk and was crowded with volumes, and there, distinguished by their number
and splendor, was the series
The Young Person’s Treasury,
which I had heard about, but the teacher convinced me that at my age,
Don Quixote
was more useful. He did not find it in his library but promised to lend it to me later. After half an hour of rapid commentaries on
Sinbad the Sailor
or
Robinson Crusoe,
he accompanied me to the exit without telling me if I had been admitted. I thought I had
not been, of course, but on the terrace he shook my hand and said goodbye until Monday at eight in the morning, when I would matriculate in
the most advanced course in the primary school: the fourth year.

He was the headmaster. His name was Juan Ventura Casalins and I remember him as a friend of my childhood, with nothing of the fearsome image that people had of teachers at the time. His unforgettable
virtue was treating all of us as equal adults, though I still think he paid particular attention to me. In classes he would ask me more questions than he did the others, and he helped me so that my answers would be accurate and fluid. He allowed me to take books from the school library to read at home. Two of them,
Treasure Island
and
The Count of Monte Cristo,
were my happiness drug during those
rocky years. I devoured them letter by letter, longing to know what happened in the next line and at the same time longing not to know in order not to break the spell. With them, as with
The Thousand and One Nights,
I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them.

On the other hand, my reading of
Don Quixote
always deserved a separate chapter, because
it did not cause the upheaval in me foreseen by Maestro Casalins. The long learned speeches of the knight errant bored me, I did not find the stupidities of the squire at all amusing, and I even began to think it was not the same book that people talked so much about. But I told myself that a teacher as learned as ours could not be mistaken, and I forced myself to swallow it like spoonfuls of
a purgative. I made other attempts in secondary school, where I was obliged to study it as a requirement, and I had an irremediable aversion to it until a friend advised me to put it on the back of the toilet and try to read it while I took care of my daily needs. Only in this way did I discover it, like a conflagration, and relish it forward and back until I could recite entire episodes by heart.

That providential school also left me historic memories of an irretrievable city and time. It was the only building at the top of a green hill, and from its terrace the two ends of the world were visible. To the left, the Prado, the most distinguished and expensive district, which at first sight seemed a faithful copy of the electrified henhouse of the United Fruit Company. This was not a coincidence:
a firm of American
urban planners was building it with their imported tastes and norms and prices, and it was an infallible tourist attraction for the rest of the country. To the right, on the other hand, was the slum of our Barrio Abajo, with its streets of burning dust and houses of cane and mud with palm roofs, always reminding us that we were nothing more than flesh-and-blood mortals. It was
our good fortune that from the terrace of the school we had a panoramic vision of the future: the historic delta of the Magdalena River, which is one of the great rivers of the world, and the gray ocean of Bocas de Ceniza.

On May 28, 1935, we saw the oil tanker
Taralite,
flying a Canadian flag and under the command of Captain D. F. McDonald, which entered along the canals cut out of rock to roars
of jubilation and dropped anchor in the port of the city to the noise of music and fireworks. This was the culmination of a great civic achievement that had cost many years and many pesos and had converted Barranquilla into the only sea-and-river port in the country.

Not long afterward, a plane piloted by Captain Nicolás Reyes Manotas skimmed over the rooftops in search of a clear space for an
emergency landing, to save not only his own skin but that of the souls he might hit in his fall. He was one of the pioneers of Colombian aviation. The primitive airplane had been given to him as a gift in Mexico, and he flew it solo from one end of Central America to the other. The crowd gathered at the airport in Barranquilla had prepared a triumphant welcome for him with handkerchiefs and flags
and a band, but Reyes Manotas wanted to fly over the city another two times as a greeting, and his engine failed. He managed to recover with miraculous skill and land on the roof of a building in the business center, but the plane was caught in electric cables and was dangling from a post. My brother Luis Enrique and I followed him in a tumultuous crowd as far as we could, but we managed to see
the pilot only after they got him out with great difficulty, though he was safe and sound and had a hero’s ovation.

The city also had its first radio station, a modern aqueduct that became a touristic and pedagogical attraction for displaying the new process of water purification, and a fire department
whose sirens and bells were a fiesta for children and adults from the first moment they were
heard. At about the same time the first convertible automobiles came in, racing along the streets at lunatic velocities and smashing into smithereens on the new paved highways. The undertaking establishment La Equitativa, inspired by the humor of death, set up an enormous sign at the exit from the city: “Take your time, we’re waiting for you.”

At night, when there was no other refuge but the
house, my mother would gather us together to read us Papá’s letters. Most of them were masterpieces of distraction, but one was very explicit about the enthusiasm that homeopathy awakened in older people along the lower Magdalena. “There are cases here that would seem like miracles,” my father said. At times he left us with the impression that very soon he would reveal something wonderful, but what
followed was another month of silence. During Holy Week, when two of my younger brothers contracted pernicious cases of chicken pox, we had no way to communicate with him because not even the most expert scouts could pick up his trail.

It was during those months that I understood in real life one of the words used most by my grandparents: poverty. I interpreted it as the situation we experienced
in their house when the banana company began to be dismantled. They were always complaining about it. There were no longer two or even three shifts at the table, as there once had been, but only one. In order not to renounce the sacred ritual of lunches, even when they no longer had the resources to maintain them, they began to buy food prepared at the stands in the market, which was good and
much cheaper and had the added surprise that we children liked it better. But the lunches ended forever when Mina learned that some frequent guests had resolved not to return to the house because the food was not as good as it once had been.

The poverty of my parents in Barranquilla, on the contrary, was exhausting, but it allowed me the good fortune of establishing an exceptional relationship
with my mother. More than the expected filial love, I felt an astounding admiration for her
because she had the character of a lioness, silent but fierce when faced with adversity, and a relationship with God that seemed more combative than submissive: two exemplary virtues that imbued her life with a confidence that never failed. At the worst moments she would laugh at her own providential resources.
Like the time she bought an ox knee and boiled it day after day for our increasingly watery daily broth until it had no more to give. One night during a terrifying storm she used up the month’s supply of lard to make rag candles, because the electricity was off until dawn and she herself had inculcated a fear of the dark in the younger ones to keep them from leaving their beds.

At first my parents
visited families they knew who had emigrated from Aracataca because of the banana crisis and the decline of public order. They were circular visits that always revolved around the topic of the misfortunes that had raged through the town. But when poverty squeezed us in Barranquilla we did not complain again in anyone else’s house. My mother reduced her reticence to a single phrase: “You can
see poverty in the eyes.”

Until I was five, death had been for me a natural end that happened to other people. The delights of heaven and the torments of hell seemed only lessons to be memorized in Father Astete’s catechism class. They had nothing to do with me, until I learned in passing at a wake that lice were escaping from the hair of the dead man and wandering along the pillows. What disturbed
me after that was not the fear of death but embarrassment that lice would escape my head too in the presence of all my relatives at my wake. But in primary school in Barranquilla, I did not realize I was crawling with lice until I had infected the entire family. Then my mother gave yet another proof of her character. She disinfected her children one by one with insecticide for cockroaches,
in thorough cleansings that she baptized with a name of noble lineage: the police. The problem was that no sooner were we clean than we began to crawl again, because I became reinfected at school. Then my mother decided to use drastic remedies and she forced me to have my head shaved. It was an act of heroism to appear at
school on Monday wearing a cloth cap, but I survived the mockery of my classmates
with honor and completed the final year with the highest grades. I never saw Maestro Casalins again, but my eternal gratitude remained.