Living to Tell the Tale (20 page)

A friend of my papá’s whom we never met got me a vacation job at a printing shop near the house. The salary was just a little more than nothing, and my only incentive was the idea of learning the trade. But I did not have a minute to look at the press because
my work, in another section, consisted of arranging lithographed plates for binding. A consolation was that my mother authorized me to use my salary to buy the Sunday supplement of
La Prensa
that had the comic strips of
Tarzan, Buck Rogers,
called
Rogelio el Conquistador,
and
Mutt and Jeff,
called
Benitín y Eneas.
During my leisure time on Sundays I learned to draw them from memory and would continue
the week’s episodes on my own. I managed to waken the enthusiasm of some adults on the block and sold them for as much as two centavos.

The job was tiring and sterile, and no matter how many pains I took, the reports of my superiors accused me of a lack of enthusiasm in my work. It must have been out of consideration for my family that they relieved me of the routine of the shop and made me a
street distributor of illustrated advertisements for a cough syrup recommended by the most famous movie stars. That seemed fine to me because the fliers were attractive with full-color photographs of the actors on glossy paper. From the beginning, however, I realized that handing them out was not as easy as I thought, since people viewed them with suspicion because they were being given away, and
most contorted and twitched as if they had been electrified in order not to accept them. On the first few days I went back to the shop with what I had left over so that they would make up the amount I had distributed. Until I ran into some school friends from Aracataca, whose mother was horrified to see me doing what she considered work for beggars. She was almost shouting when she berated me for
walking around the street in cloth sandals that my mother had bought so I would not wear out my full-dress half boots.

“You tell Luisa Márquez,” she said, “to think about what her parents would say if they saw their favorite grandchild in the market handing out advertisements for consumptives.”

I did not give my mother the message in order to spare her the grief, but I cried into my pillow with
rage and shame for several nights. The end of the drama was that I did not hand out fliers again but tossed them into the gutters in the market, not foreseeing that the water was gentle and the glossy papers stayed afloat until they formed a quilt of beautiful colors on the surface, a very unusual sight from the bridge.

My mother must have received a message from her beloved dead in a revelatory
dream, because in less than two months she took me out of the printing shop without any explanations. I resisted because I did not want to miss the Sunday edition of
La Prensa
that we received in the family like a blessing from heaven, but my mother continued buying it even when she had to put one less potato in the soup. Another means of salvation was the consolatory sum that Uncle Juanito sent
to us during the harshest months. He still lived in Santa Marta on his scant earnings as a certified accountant, and he imposed upon himself the duty of sending us a letter every week with two one-peso bills inside. The captain of the launch
Aurora,
an old friend of the family, would give it to me at seven in the morning, and I would go home with basic foodstuffs for several days.

One Wednesday
I could not run the errand and my mother entrusted it to Luis Enrique, who could not resist the temptation of multiplying the two pesos in the slot machine in a Chinese tavern. He did not have the resolve to stop when he lost the first two slugs, and he kept trying to get them back until he was down to the last one. “I was in such a panic,” he told me as an adult, “that I decided never to go home
again.” He knew very well that two pesos bought basic food for a week. By a stroke of luck, with the last slug something happened in the machine, it shuddered with the metal earthquake in its gut, and in an unstoppable stream it vomited up all the slugs for the two lost pesos. “Then the devil inspired me,” Luis Enrique told me, “and I dared risk another slug.” He won. He risked another and won,
and another and another and he won. “The terror I
felt then was worse than when I was losing, and my guts turned to water,” he told me, “but I went on playing.” In the end he won twice the original two pesos in five-centavo coins, and he did not dare exchange them for bills at the register for fear the Chinese owner would involve him in some deceit. They were so bulky in his pockets that before
he gave Mamá the two pesos from Uncle Juanito in five-centavo coins, he buried the four he had won at the back of the courtyard where he hid every stray centavo he found. Little by little he spent them without confessing the secret to anyone until many years later, in torment for having fallen into the temptation of risking his last five centavos in the Chinese shop.

His relationship with money
was very personal. Once when my mother caught him scratching at the money for the market in her purse, his defense was somewhat savage but lucid: the money one takes without permission from the purses of one’s parents cannot be a theft because the money belongs to everybody in common and they deny it to us out of envy because they can not do with it what their children do. I defended his argument
to the extreme of confessing that I, too, had sacked her domestic hiding places when the need was urgent. My mother lost her temper. “Don’t be so stupid,” she almost shouted at me. “You and your brother don’t steal anything from me, because I leave the money where I know you’ll find it when you’re in trouble.” In an attack of rage I once heard her murmur in despair that God ought to allow the theft
of certain things in order to feed one’s children.

Luis Enrique’s natural talent for mischief was very useful in solving mutual problems, but he never made me an accomplice in his misconduct. On the contrary, he always arranged matters so that not even the slightest suspicion would fall on me, which strengthened a true affection for him that has lasted my whole life. On the other hand, I never
let him know how much I envied his audacity and suffered on account of the beatings Papá gave him. My behavior was very different from his, though at times it was hard for me to temper my envy. But I was troubled by Mamá’s parents’ house in Cataca, where they took me to sleep only when they were going to give me purges for worms,
or castor oil. To the point where I despised the twenty-centavo
coins they paid me for the dignity with which I took them.

I believe the height of my mother’s desperation was sending me with a letter to a man who had a reputation for being the richest man and at the same time the most generous philanthropist in the city. Talk of his good heart was as widespread as news of his financial triumphs. My mother wrote him an anguished and direct letter to request
urgent financial assistance, not in her name, because she was capable of enduring anything, but for love of her children. Only someone who knew her would understand what that humiliation meant in her life, but circumstances demanded it. She warned me that the secret had to remain between the two of us, and it did, until this moment when I am writing about it.

I knocked at the large front door
of the house, which somehow resembled a church, and almost without delay a small window opened and a woman looked out; all I remember about her was the ice in her eyes. She took the letter without saying a word and shut the window again. It must have been eleven in the morning, and I waited, sitting against the doorjamb, until three in the afternoon, when I decided to knock again and try to get an
answer. The same woman opened the window, recognized me in surprise, and asked me to wait a moment. The answer was that I should come back at the same time on Tuesday of the following week. I did, but the only answer was that there would be no answer for another week. I had to go back three more times, always receiving the same answer, until a month and a half later, when a woman even harsher than
the first responded, on behalf of her employer, that this was not a charitable establishment.

I walked around the burning streets trying to find the courage to bring my mother an answer that would deliver her from her illusions. It was already dark when I faced her with an aching heart and said that the good philanthropist had died several months earlier. What grieved me most was the rosary my
mother said for the eternal rest of his soul.

Four or five years later, when we heard the factual report on the radio that the philanthropist had died the day before, I was
petrified as I waited for my mother’s reaction. But I will never understand how it was that she heard it with sympathetic attention and said with a heartfelt sigh:

“God keep him in His holy kingdom!”

A block from the house
we made friends with the Mosqueras, a family that spent fortunes on comic books and kept them piled to the ceiling in a shed in their courtyard. We were the only privileged beings who could spend entire days there reading
Dick Tracy
and
Buck Rogers.
Another fortunate discovery was an apprentice who painted movie posters for the nearby Las Quintas Theater. I helped him for the sheer pleasure of
painting letters, and he got us in free two or three times a week for the good films with gun battles and fistfights. The only luxury that was missing was a radio so that we could listen to music at any time of day with just the touch of a button. Today it is difficult to imagine how rare they were in the houses of the poor. Luis Enrique and I would sit on a bench at the store on the corner where
idle patrons could sit and chat, and we spent entire afternoons listening to the programs of popular music, which is what most of the programs were. In time we learned by heart a complete repertoire of Miguelito Valdés and the Casino de la Playa Orchestra, Daniel Santos and the Sonora Matancera, and the boleros of Agustín Lara in the voice of Toña la Negra. Our amusement at night, above all on the
two occasions when they cut off our electricity for lack of payment, was to teach the songs to my mother and brothers and sisters, Ligia and Gustavo in particular, who learned them like parrots without understanding them and entertained us no end with their lyrical bits of nonsense. There were no exceptions. We all inherited from our father and mother a special memory for music and a good ear for
learning a song the second time we heard it. Above all Luis Enrique, who was born a musician and specialized on his own in guitar solos for serenades of unrequited love. It did not take us long to discover that all the children without radios in the neighboring houses also learned the songs from my brothers and sisters, and most of all from my mother, who became one more sister in that house of
children.

My favorite program was
The Little Bit of Everything Hour,
with the composer, singer, and conductor Angel María Camacho y Cano, who held his audience captive starting at one in the afternoon with an ingenious miscellany, in particular his amateur hour for children under fifteen. All you had to do was register at the offices of La Voz de la Patria—The Voice of the Nation—and come to
the program half an hour early. Maestro Camacho y Cano in person accompanied on the piano, and one of his assistants carried out the unappealable sentence of interrupting the song with a church bell when the amateur made the slightest mistake. The prize for the best-sung song was more than we could dream of—five pesos—but my mother was explicit: the most important thing was the glory of singing well
on so prestigious a program.

Until that time I had identified myself only with my father’s family name—García—and my two baptismal names—Gabriel José—but on that historic occasion my mother asked me to register with her family name too—Márquez—so that no one could have any doubt about my identity. It was an event at home. They made me dress in white as if it were my First Communion, and before
I went out they gave me a dose of potassium bromide. I arrived at La Voz de la Patria two hours early, and the effect of the sedative soon passed as I waited in a nearby park because no one was allowed to enter the studios until a quarter of an hour before the program. As each minute passed I felt the spiders of terror growing inside me, and when I went in at last my heart was pounding. I had to
make a supreme effort not to return home with the story that for some reason or other they had not allowed me to participate. The maestro did a quick test with me on the piano to establish my key. They called seven in the order in which they had registered, they rang the bell for three because of various mistakes, and they announced me with the simple name of Gabriel Márquez. I sang “El cisne,” a
sentimental song about a swan whiter than a snowflake killed along with his lover by a pitiless hunter. After the first measures I realized that the key was very high for me in some notes that had not been tested in rehearsal, and I had a moment of panic when the assistant’s expression
became doubtful and he got ready to pick up the bell. I do not know where I found the courage to make an energetic
sign to him not to ring it, but it was too late: the bell rang without mercy. The five-peso prize, along with several gifts from advertisers, went to a very beautiful blonde who had massacred a selection from
Madame Butterfly.
I returned home crushed by defeat, and I never could console my mother for her disappointment. Many years passed before she confessed to me that the reason for her chagrin
was that she had told her relatives and friends to listen to me sing and did not know how to avoid them.

In the midst of that regimen of laughter and tears, I never missed school. Even when I had not eaten. But my time for reading at home was spent in household chores, and we did not have a budget for electricity that would allow reading until midnight. In any event, I resolved the problem. On
the way to school there were several garages for passenger buses, and I would spend hours at one of them watching how they painted signs on the sides announcing routes and destinations. One day I asked the painter to let me paint a few letters to see if I could do it. Surprised by my natural aptitude, he sometimes allowed me to assist him for a few pesos that helped the family budget a little. Another
hopeful thing was my casual friendship with the three García brothers, the children of a sailor on the Magdalena River, who had organized a popular-music trio to enliven their friends’ parties for pure love of the art. I joined them to form the García Quartet that would compete in the amateur hour on the Atlántico radio station. We won the first day to thunderous applause, but they did not
pay us the prize of five pesos because of an irreparable error in our registration. We continued rehearsing together for the rest of the year and singing as a favor at family parties, until life at last dispersed us.