Living to Tell the Tale (33 page)

“Whoever even thinks about touching any of my daughters,” he shouted, “will taste the lead of an angry man.”

Several families began an exodus for fear the
pasquines
were a prelude to the police violence that was devastating entire towns in the interior of the country in order to intimidate the opposition.

Tension was transformed into another kind of daily bread. At first furtive patrols
were organized, not so much to discover the authors of the
pasquines
as to learn what the sheets said before they were destroyed at dawn. A group of us who were out late found a city official at three in the morning, enjoying the cool air in the doorway of his house but in reality watching to see who put up the
pasquines.
My brother said to him, half as a joke and half in a serious way, that some
told the truth. The
official took out his revolver and pointed it at him, the hammer cocked.

“Repeat that!”

Then we learned that on the previous night they had put up a truthful
pasquín
aimed at his unmarried daughter. But the facts were common knowledge, even in her own house, and the only person who did not know them was her father.

At first it was evident that the
pasquines
had been written
by the same person, with the same brush, on the same paper, but in a business district as small as the one on the square, only one store could sell these items, and the owner hastened to prove his innocence. Then I knew that one day I was going to write a novel about them, not because of what they said, which almost always were fantasies in the public domain, and with little wit, but because of
the unbearable tension they managed to create inside the houses.

In my third novel,
In Evil Hour,
written twenty years later, it seemed an act of simple decency not to use concrete or identifiable cases, even though some of the real ones were better than those invented by me. Besides, there was no need to, because I was always more interested in the social phenomenon than in the private lives
of the victims. I learned only after it had been published that in the poor districts, where those of us who lived on the main square were disliked, many
pasquines
were reasons for celebration.

The truth is that the
pasquines
served only as a point of departure for me in a plot I never managed to make real, because what I was writing demonstrated that the fundamental problem was political and
not moral, as people believed. I always thought that Nigromanta’s husband was a good model for the military magistrate in
In Evil Hour,
but while I was developing him as a character he was seducing me as a human being, and I had no reason to kill him, for I discovered that a serious writer cannot kill a character without a persuasive reason, and I did not have one.

Today I realize that the novel
itself could be another novel. I wrote it in a student hotel on the Rue Cujas, in the Latin Quarter in Paris, a hundred meters from the Boulevard Saint Michel,
while the days passed without mercy as I waited for a check that never arrived. When I thought it was finished, I rolled up the pages, tied them with one of the three neckties I had worn in better days, and buried it at the back of the
closet.

Two years later, in Mexico City, I did not even know where it was when I was asked to enter it in a novel competition sponsored by Esso Colombiana, with a prize of three thousand dollars in those times of famine. The emissary was the photographer Guillermo Angulo, my old Colombian friend, who knew about the existence of the first draft that I had been writing in Paris, and he took it
just as it was, still tied with the necktie, and there was not even time to smooth out the wrinkles with steam because of the pressures of the deadline. I submitted it without any hope for a prize that would have been enough money to buy a house. But just as I had submitted it, it was declared the winner by a distinguished panel of judges on April 16, 1962, almost at the exact moment that our second
son, Gonzalo, was born, his loaf of bread under his arm.
^*

We had not even had time to think about it when I received a letter from Father Félix Restrepo, the president of the Colombian Academy of the Language, an upright man who had presided over the panel for the prize but did not know the title of the novel. Only then did I realize that in our last-minute rush I had forgotten to write the title
on the first page:
This Shit-eating Town.

Father Restrepo was scandalized when he heard it, and through Germán Vargas he asked me in the most amiable way to change it for one less brutal and more in line with the atmosphere of the book. After many exchanges with him, I decided on a title that perhaps would not say much about the drama but would serve as a banner for navigating the seas of sanctimony:
In Evil Hour.

One week later, Dr. Carlos Arango Vélez, Colombia’s ambassador to Mexico and a recent candidate for the presidency of the Republic, made an appointment to see me in his office in
order to inform me that Father Restrepo was pleading that I change two words that seemed inadmissible in the text that had won the prize:
condom
and
masturbation.
The ambassador and I could not hide our
astonishment, but we agreed that we ought to satisfy Father Restrepo and bring the interminable competition to a happy conclusion with an even-tempered solution.

“Very well, Señor Ambassador,” I said. “I’ll eliminate one of the two words, but you’ll please choose which one.”

With a sigh of relief the ambassador eliminated the word
masturbation.
And so the conflict was resolved, and the book
was published by Editorial Iberoamericana in Madrid, with a large printing and a stellar launching. It was bound in leather, with impeccable print on excellent paper. But it was an ephemeral honeymoon, because I could not resist the temptation of doing an exploratory reading, and I discovered that the book written in my Indian language had been dubbed—like the movies in those days—into the purest
Madrid dialect.

I had written:
“Así como ustedes viven ahora, no sólo están en una situación insegura sino que constituyen un mal ejemplo para el pueblo.”
The transcription by the Spanish editor made my skin crawl:
“Así como vivís ahora, no sólo estáis en una situación insegura, sino que constituís un mal ejemplo para el pueblo.”
^*
Even more serious: since this sentence was said by a priest, the
Colombian reader might think it was the author’s sly way of indicating that the cleric was Spanish, which would complicate his behavior and altogether change an essential aspect of the drama. Not content with touching up the grammar in the dialogues, the proofreader permitted himself to change the style with a heavy hand, and the book was filled with Madrilenian patches that had nothing to do with
the original. As a consequence, I had no recourse but to withdraw my permission from
the edition because I considered it adulterated, and to retrieve and burn the copies that had not yet been sold. The reply of those responsible was absolute silence.

From that moment on I considered the novel unpublished, and I devoted myself to the difficult task of translating it back into my Caribbean dialect,
because the only original version was the one I had submitted to the competition, which had then been sent to Spain for the Iberoamericana edition. Once the original text had been reestablished, and corrected, in passing, one more time by me, Editorial Era in Mexico brought it out with the express printed notice that this was the first edition.

I have never known why
In Evil Hour
is the only
one of my books that transports me to its time and its place on a night with a full moon and spring breezes. It was Saturday, the clouds had gone, and there were too many stars for the sky. It had just struck eleven when I heard my mother in the dining room crooning a love
fado
to put the baby she was carrying to sleep. I asked her where the music came from and she answered in a manner that was
typical of her:

“From the houses of the bandit women.”

She gave me five pesos without my asking because she saw me dressing to go to the fiesta. Before I left she told me with her infallible foresight to leave the door to the courtyard unbarred so I could come back at any time without waking my father. I never got as far as the houses of the bandit women because there was a musicians’ rehearsal
in the carpentry shop of Maestro Valdés, whose group Luis Enrique had joined as soon as he returned home.

That year I joined them to play the
tiple
and sing with their six anonymous maestros until dawn. I always thought my brother was a good guitarist, but on my first night I learned that even his most bitter rivals considered him a virtuoso. There was no better group, and they were so sure of
themselves that when someone hired them for a serenade of reconciliation or apology, Maestro Valdés would reassure him ahead of time:

“Don’t worry, we’ll leave her biting her pillow.”

A vacation without him was not the same. He lit up the party when he arrived, and Luis Enrique and he, along with Filadelfo Velilla, played together like professionals. That was when I discovered the loyalty of
alcohol and learned to live in the proper way, sleeping by day and singing at night. As my mother said: I had let the dogs loose.

People said all kinds of things about me, and there was a rumor that my mail was delivered not to my parents’ address but to the houses of the bandit women. I became the most dependable client for their epic stews as strong-tasting as tiger bile and iguana fricassees
that gave you enough drive for three whole nights. I did not read again or join the routine of the family table. This corresponded to the idea expressed so often by my mother that in my own way I did whatever I wanted, but poor Luis Enrique was the one with the bad reputation. He, without knowing what my mother said, told me during this time: “The only thing they need to say now is that I’m corrupting
you and then they’ll send me back to the house of correction.”

At Christmas I decided to escape the annual float competition and fled with two complicit friends to the neighboring town of Majagual. I announced at home that I was going for three days but stayed for ten. The fault lay with María Alejandrina Cervantes, an unbelievable woman I met the first night, with whom I lost my head in the
most uproarious carousing of my life. Until the Sunday morning when she did not wake up in my bed, and disappeared forever. Years later I rescued her from my memories, not so much for her charms as for the resonance of her name, and I revived her, to protect another woman in one of my novels, as the owner and madam of a house of pleasure that never existed.

When I went home I found my mother
boiling the coffee in the kitchen at five in the morning. In a conspiratorial whisper she told me to stay with her, because my father had just awakened and was prepared to show me that not even on vacation was I as free as I thought. She served me a large cup of unsweetened coffee, even though she knew I did not like it, and
had me sit next to the stove. My father came in wearing his pajamas,
still in a mood of sleep, and he was surprised to see me with the steaming cup but asked me an oblique question:

“Didn’t you say you didn’t drink coffee?”

Not knowing how to answer him, I invented the first thing that passed through my head:

“I’m always thirsty at this time of day.”

“Like all drunkards,” he replied.

He did not look at me or mention the subject again. But my mother informed
me that my father, depressed after that day, had begun to consider me a lost cause though he never let me know it.

My expenses increased so much that I resolved to sack my mother’s reserves. Luis Enrique absolved me with his logical argument that money stolen from your parents, if it is used for the movies and not for whores, is legitimate. I suffered because of the awkwardness of my mother’s
complicity in keeping my father from knowing I was on the wrong path. She was right because it was all too obvious at home that at times I was still asleep for no reason at lunchtime, and had the voice of a hoarse rooster, and was so distracted that one day I did not hear two of Papá’s questions, and he assailed me with his harshest diagnosis:

“You have liver trouble.”

In spite of everything,
I managed to preserve social appearances. I was well dressed and better behaved at the gala dances and occasional lunches organized by the families on the main square, whose houses were kept closed the whole year and were opened for the Christmas holidays when the students came home.

That was the year of Cayetano Gentile, who celebrated his vacation with three splendid dances. For me they were
lucky dates, because at all three I danced with the same partner. I asked her to dance on the first night without bothering to ask who she was, or whose daughter, or who she had come with. She seemed so enigmatic that during the second number I proposed in all seriousness that she marry me, and her response was even more mysterious:

“My papá says that the prince who’s going to marry me hasn’t
been born yet.”

Days later I saw her crossing the promenade in the square under the fierce twelve o’clock sun, wearing a radiant organza dress and holding by the hand a boy and a girl about six or seven years old. “They’re mine,” she said, weak with laughter, without my even asking. And she said it with so much perversity that I began to suspect that my proposal of marriage had not been carried
away on the wind.

From the time I was an infant in the house in Aracataca I had learned to sleep in a hammock, but only in Sucre did I make it a part of my nature. There is nothing better for taking a siesta, for experiencing the hour of stars, for thinking without haste, for making love without prejudices. The day I came back from my week of dissipation I hung it between two trees in the courtyard,
as Papá used to do in other times, and slept with a clear conscience. But my mother, always tormented by her terror that her children would die in their sleep, woke me at the end of the afternoon to find out if I was alive. Then she lay down beside me and with no preambles approached the matter that made it difficult for her to live.