Living to Tell the Tale (3 page)

The world changed. Stretching away on both sides of the track were the symmetrical, interminable
avenues of the plantations, along which oxcarts loaded with green stalks of bananas were moving. In uncultivated spaces there were sudden red brick camps, offices with burlap at the windows and fans hanging from the ceilings, and a solitary hospital in a field of poppies. Each river had its village and its iron bridge that the train crossed with a blast of its whistle, and the girls bathing
in the icy water leaped like shad as it passed, unsettling travelers with their fleeting breasts.

In the town of Riofrío several Arawak families got on the train carrying packs filled with avocados from the sierra, the most delicious in the country. They made their timid way up and down the car looking for a place to sit, but when the train started to move again the only people left were two
white women with an infant, and a young priest. The baby did not stop crying for the rest of the trip. The priest wore an explorer’s boots and helmet, and a rough linen cassock darned in square patches like a sail, and he spoke at the same time that the baby cried and always as if he were in the pulpit. The subject of his
sermon was the possibility that the banana company would return. Ever since
it left nothing else was talked about in the region, and opinion was divided between those who wanted it to come back and those who did not, but everyone considered it a certainty. The priest was against it and expressed his position with so personal an argument that the women thought it was nonsense:

“The company leaves ruin wherever it goes.”

It was the only original thing he said but he was
not able to explain it, and in the end the woman with the baby confounded him by saying that God could not be in agreement with him.

Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away bad memories and magnified the good ones. No one was safe from its onslaught. Through the train window you could see men sitting in the doorways of their houses, and you only had to look at their faces to know what they were
waiting for. Women washing clothes on the gravel beaches watched the train go by with the same hope. They thought every stranger who arrived carrying a briefcase was the man from the United Fruit Company coming back to reestablish the past. At every encounter, on every visit, in every letter, sooner or later the sacramental sentence would make its appearance: “They say the company’s coming back.”
Nobody knew who said it, or when, or why, but nobody doubted it was true.

My mother thought herself free of those ghosts, for when her parents died she had cut all connections to Aracataca. But her dreams betrayed her. At least, when she had one interesting enough to recount at breakfast, it was always related to her nostalgic memories of the banana region. She survived her most difficult times
without selling the house, hoping to quadruple the price when the company came back. At last the irresistible pressure of reality had defeated her. But when she heard the priest on the train say that the company was about to return, she made a disconsolate gesture and whispered in my ear:

“What a shame we can’t wait just a little longer and sell the house for more money.”

While the priest was
talking, we passed a town where a
crowd filled the square and a band played a lively concert under the oppressive sun. All those towns always appeared identical to me. When Papalelo would take me to Don Antonio Daconte’s brand-new Olympia Cinema, I noticed that the railroad depots in cowboy movies looked like our stations. Later, when I began to read Faulkner, the small towns in his novels seemed
like ours, too. And it was not surprising, for they had been built under the messianic inspiration of the United Fruit Company and in the same provisional style of a temporary camp. I remembered them all, with the church on the square and little fairy-tale houses painted in primary colors. I remembered the gangs of black laborers singing at twilight, the shanties on the estates where field hands
sat to rest and watch freight trains go by, the ditches where morning found the cutters whose heads had been hacked off in drunken Saturday-night brawls. I remembered the private cities of the gringos in Aracataca and Sevilla, on the other side of the railroad tracks, surrounded, like enormous electrified chicken yards, by metal fences that on cool summer dawns were black with charred swallows.
I remembered their slow blue lawns with peacocks and quail, the residences with red roofs and wire grating on the windows and little round tables with folding chairs for eating on the terraces among palm trees and dusty rosebushes. Sometimes, through the wire fence, you could see beautiful languid women in muslin dresses and wide gauze hats cutting the flowers in their gardens with golden scissors.

Even in my childhood it was not easy to distinguish some towns from others. Twenty years later it was even more difficult, because the boards with their idyllic names—Tucurinca, Guamachito, Neerlandia, Guacamayal—had fallen down from the station porticoes, and they were all more desolate than in memory. At about eleven-thirty in the morning the train stopped in Sevilla for fifteen interminable
minutes to change locomotives and take on water. That was when the heat began. When we started to move again, the new locomotive kept sending back blasts of soot that blew in the paneless windows and left us covered in black snow. The priest and the women had gotten off in some town without our realizing it, and this
heightened my feeling that my mother and I were traveling all alone in a ghost
train. Sitting across from me, looking out the window, she had nodded off two or three times, but then she was wide awake and once again asked me the dreaded question:

“So, what shall I tell your papá?”

I thought she would never give up her search for the flank where she could break through my decision. Earlier she had suggested a few compromises that I rejected out of hand, but I knew her withdrawal
would not last long. Even so, this new assault took me by surprise. Prepared for another long, fruitless battle, I answered with more calm than I had shown before:

“Tell him the only thing I want in life is to be a writer, and that’s what I’m going to be.”

“He isn’t opposed to your being what you want to be,” she said, “as long as you have a degree in something.”

She spoke without looking at
me, pretending to be less interested in our conversation than in the life passing by the window.

“I don’t know why you insist so much when you know very well I won’t give in,” I said to her.

Then she looked into my eyes and asked, intrigued:

“Why do you believe I know that?”

“Because you and I are just alike,” I said.

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later
it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate:
Macondo.
This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant. I had already used it in three books as the name of an imaginary
town when I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the ceiba, that it produces no flowers or fruit, and that its light, porous wood is used for making canoes and carving cooking implements. Later, I discovered in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
that in Tanganyika there is a nomadic people called the Makonde, and I thought this might be the origin of the word. But
I never confirmed it, and I never saw the tree, for
though I often asked about it in the banana region, no one could tell me anything about it. Perhaps it never existed.

The train would go past the Macondo plantation at eleven o’clock, and stop ten minutes later in Aracataca. On the day I went with my mother to sell the house, the train was an hour and a half late. I was in the lavatory when
it began to accelerate, and a dry burning wind came in the broken window, mixing with the din of the old cars and the terrified whistle of the locomotive. My heart pounded in my chest and an icy nausea froze my belly. I rushed out, driven by the kind of fear you feel in an earthquake, and I found my mother imperturbable in her seat, reciting aloud the places she saw moving past the window like instantaneous
flashes of the life that once was and never would be again.

“That’s the land they sold my father with the story that there was gold on it,” she said.

The house of the Adventist teachers passed like a shooting star, with its flower garden and a sign in English over the door:
The sun shines for all.

“That was the first thing you learned in English,” my mother said.

“Not the first thing,” I told
her, “the only thing.”

The cement bridge passed by, and the muddy waters of the irrigation ditch from the days when the gringos diverted the river to bring it to the plantations.

“The neighborhood of the easy women, where the men spent the whole night dancing the
cumbiamba
with rolls of bills burning instead of candles,” she said.

The benches along the promenade, the almond trees rusted by
the sun, the yard of the little Montessori school where I learned to read. For an instant the total image of the town on that luminous Sunday in February shone through the window.

“The station!” my mother exclaimed. “How the world has changed if nobody’s waiting for the train.”

Then the locomotive stopped whistling, slowed down, and came to a halt with a long lament.

The first thing that struck
me was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the other
silences in the world. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through undulating glass. As far as the eye could see there was no recollection of human life, nothing that was not covered by a faint sprinkling of burning dust. My mother stayed in her seat
for a few more minutes, looking at the dead town laid out along empty streets, and at last she exclaimed in horror:

“My God!”

That was the only thing she said before she got off.

While the train stood there I had the sensation that we were not altogether alone. But when it pulled away, with an immediate, heart-wrenching blast of its whistle, my mother and I were left forsaken beneath the infernal
sun, and all the heavy grief of the town came down on us. But we did not say anything to each other. The old wooden station with its tin roof and running balcony was like a tropical version of the ones we knew from westerns. We crossed the deserted station whose tiles were beginning to crack under the pressure of grass, and we sank into the torpor of siesta as we sought the protection of the
almond trees.

Since I was a boy I had despised those inert siestas because we did not know what to do. “Be quiet, we’re sleeping,” the sleepers would murmur without waking. Stores, public offices, and schools closed at twelve and did not open again until a little before three. The interiors of the houses floated in a limbo of lethargy. In some it was so unbearable that people would hang their
hammocks in the courtyard or place chairs in the shade of the almond trees and sleep sitting up in the middle of the street. Only the hotel across from the station, with its bar and billiard room, and the telegraph office behind the church remained open. Everything was identical to my memories, but smaller and poorer, and leveled by a windstorm of fatality: the decaying houses themselves, the tin
roofs perforated by rust, the levee with its crumbling granite benches and melancholy almond trees, and all of it transfigured by the invisible burning dust that deceived the eye and calcinated the skin. On the other side of the train tracks the private paradise of the banana company, stripped now of its electrified wire fence, was a vast thicket
with no palm trees, ruined houses among the poppies,
and the rubble of the hospital destroyed by fire. There was not a single door, a crack in a wall, a human trace that did not find a supernatural resonance in me.

My mother held herself very erect as she walked with her light step, almost not perspiring in her funereal dress, and in absolute silence, but her mortal pallor and sharpened profile revealed what was happening to her on the inside.
At the end of the levee we saw the first human being: a tiny woman with an impoverished air who appeared at the corner of Jacobo Beracaza and walked beside us holding a small pewter pot whose ill-fitting lid marked the rhythm of her step. My mother whispered without looking at her:

“It’s Vita.”

I had recognized her. From the time she was a small girl she had worked in my grandparents’ kitchen,
and no matter how much we had changed she would have recognized us if she had deigned to look at us. But no: she walked in another world. Even today I ask myself if Vita had not died long before that day.

When we turned the corner, the dust burned my feet through the weave of my sandals. The feeling of being forsaken became unbearable. Then I saw myself and I saw my mother, just as I saw, when
I was a boy, the mother and sister of the thief whom María Consuegra had killed with a single shot one week earlier, when he tried to break into her house.

At three in the morning the sound of someone trying to force the street door from the outside had wakened her. She got up without lighting the lamp, felt around in the armoire for an archaic revolver that no one had fired since the War of
a Thousand Days, and located in the darkness not only the place where the door was but also the exact height of the lock. Then she aimed the weapon with both hands, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger. She had never fired a gun before, but the shot hit its target through the door.

He was the first dead person I had seen. When I passed by at seven in the morning on my way to school, the
body was still lying on the sidewalk in a patch of dried blood, the face destroyed
by the lead that had shattered its nose and come out one ear. He was wearing a sailor’s T-shirt with colored stripes and ordinary trousers held up by a rope instead of a belt, and he was barefoot. At his side, on the ground, they found the homemade picklock with which he had tried to jimmy the lock.