Living to Tell the Tale (4 page)

The town dignitaries
came to María Consuegra’s house to offer her their condolences for having killed the thief. I went that night with Papalelo, and we found her sitting in an armchair from Manila that looked like an enormous wicker peacock, surrounded by the fervor of her friends who listened to the story she had repeated a thousand times. Everyone agreed with her that she had fired out of sheer fright. It
was then that my grandfather asked her if she had heard anything after the shot, and she answered that first she had heard a great silence, then the metallic sound of the picklock falling on the cement, and then a faint, anguished voice: “Mother, help me!” María Consuegra, it seemed, had not been conscious of this heartbreaking lament until my grandfather asked her the question. Only then did she
burst into tears.

This happened on a Monday. On Tuesday of the following week, during siesta, I was playing tops with Luis Carmelo Correa, my oldest friend in life, when we were surprised by the sleepers waking before it was time and looking out the windows. Then we saw in the deserted street a woman dressed in strict mourning and a girl about twelve years old who was carrying a bouquet of faded
flowers wrapped in newspaper. They protected themselves from the burning sun with a black umbrella and were quite oblivious to the effrontery of the people who watched them pass by. They were the mother and younger sister of the dead thief, bringing flowers for his grave.

That vision pursued me for many years, like a single dream that the entire town watched through its windows as it passed,
until I managed to exorcise it in a story. But the truth is that I did not become aware of the drama of the woman and the girl, or their imperturbable dignity, until the day I went with my mother to sell the house and surprised myself walking down the same deserted street at the same lethal hour.

“I feel as if I were the thief,” I said.

My mother did not understand me. In fact, when we passed
the house of María Consuegra she did not even glance at the door where you could still see the patched bullet hole in the wood. Years later, recalling that trip with her, I confirmed that she did remember the tragedy but would have given her soul to forget it. This was even more evident when we passed the house where Don Emilio, better known as the Belgian, had lived, a veteran of the First World
War who had lost the use of both legs in a minefield in Normandy and who, one Pentecostal Sunday, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide. I was no older than six, but I remember as if it were yesterday the upheaval this news caused at seven in the morning. It was so memorable that when we returned to the town to sell the house, my mother at last broke her silence
after twenty years.

“The poor Belgian,” she said with a sigh, “just as you said, and he never played chess again.”

Our intention was to go straight to the house. But when we were no more than a block away, my mother stopped without warning and turned the corner.

“It’s better if we go this way,” she said. And since I wanted to know why, she answered: “Because I’m afraid.”

This was how I learned
the reason for my nausea: it was fear, not only of confronting my ghosts but fear of everything. And so we walked down a parallel street, making a detour whose only purpose was to avoid passing our house. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to see it without talking to somebody first,” my mother would tell me afterward. That is what she did. Almost dragging me along, she walked unannounced into
the pharmacy of Dr. Alfredo Barboza, a corner house less than a hundred paces from ours.

Adriana Berdugo, the pharmacist’s wife, was so absorbed in working at her primitive hand-cranked Domestic sewing machine that she did not know my mother was standing in front of her; my mother said, almost in a whisper:

“Comadre.”

Adriana looked up, her eyes rarefied by the thick lenses of
the farsighted,
then she took off her glasses, hesitated for a moment, and jumped up with a sob, her arms open wide:

“Ay, Comadre!”

My mother was already behind the counter, and without saying anything else they embraced and wept. I stood watching them from the other side of the counter, not knowing what to do, shaken by the certainty that this long embrace with its silent tears was something irreparable that
was happening forever in my own life.

The pharmacy had been the leading one in the days of the banana company, but all that was left of the old bottles and jars in the empty cabinets were a few porcelain flagons marked with gilt letters. The sewing machine, the pharmaceutical balance, the caduceus, the clock with the pendulum that still moved, the linocut of the Hippocratic Oath, the rickety
rocking chairs, all the things I had seen as a boy were still the same, and in the same place, but transfigured by the rust of time.

Adriana herself was a victim. Although she wore a dress with large tropical flowers, as she once had, you could detect almost nothing of the impulsiveness and mischief that had made her famous well into her maturity. The only thing about her that was still intact
was the odor of valerian that drove cats mad and that I continued to recall for the rest of my life with a feeling of calamity.

When Adriana and my mother had no more tears left, we heard a thick, short cough behind the thin wooden partition that separated us from the back of the store. Adriana recovered something of her charm from another time and spoke so that she could be heard through the
partition.

“Doctor,” she said, “guess who’s here.”

From the other side the rasping voice of a hard man asked without interest:

“Who?”

Adriana did not answer but signaled to us to go into the back room. A childhood terror paralyzed me on the spot, and my mouth filled with a livid saliva, but I walked with my mother into the crowded space that once had been the pharmacy’s
laboratory, and had
been outfitted as an emergency bedroom. There was Dr. Alfredo Barboza, older than all the old men and animals on land and in the water, lying faceup on his eternal hemp hammock, without shoes, and wearing his legendary pajamas of raw cotton that looked more like a penitent’s tunic. He was staring up at the ceiling, but when he heard us come in he turned his head and fixed his limpid yellow eyes on
us until he recognized my mother at last.

“Luisa Santiaga!” he exclaimed.

He sat up in the hammock with the fatigue of an old piece of furniture, became altogether humanized, and greeted us with a rapid squeeze of his burning hand. He noticed my surprise and told me: “I’ve had a fever for a year.” Then he left the hammock, sat on the bed, and said to us in a single breath:

“You cannot imagine
what this town has gone through.”

That single sentence, which summarized an entire life, was enough for me to see him as what he may always have been: a sad, solitary man. He was tall, thin, with beautiful hair, the color of metal, that had been cut with indifference, and intense yellow eyes that had been the most fearsome of my childhood terrors. In the afternoon, on our way home from school,
we would go up to his bedroom window, attracted by the fascination of fear. There he was, swaying in the hammock with violent lurches to ease the heat he felt. The game consisted in staring at him until he realized we were there and turned without warning to look at us with his burning eyes.

I had seen him for the first time when I was five or six years old, one morning when I sneaked into the
backyard of his house with some classmates to steal the enormous mangoes from his trees. Then the door of the wooden outhouse standing in one corner of the yard opened and out he came, fastening his linen underdrawers. I saw him as an apparition from the next world in his white hospital nightshirt, pale and bony and with those yellow hellhound’s eyes that looked at me forever. The others escaped
through openings in the fence, but I was petrified by his unmoving eyes. He stared at the mangoes I had just pulled from the tree and extended his hand toward me.

“Give them to me!” he ordered, and he added as he looked
me up and down with great contempt: “Miserable backyard thief!”

I tossed the mangoes at his feet and escaped in terror.

He was my personal phantom. If I was alone, I would go
far out of my way not to pass by his house. If I was with adults, I dared a furtive glance at the pharmacy. I would see Adriana serving her life sentence at the sewing machine behind the counter, and I would see him through the bedroom window swinging with great lurches in the hammock, a sight that was enough to make my hair stand on end.

He had come to town at the beginning of the century, one
of the countless Venezuelans who managed to escape the savage despotism of Juan Vicente Gómez by crossing the border in La Guajira. The doctor had been one of the first to be driven by two contrary forces: the ferocity of the despot in his country, and the illusion of the banana bonanza in ours. From the time of his arrival he acquired a reputation for his clinical eye—as they used to say then—and
his soul’s good manners. He was one of the most frequent visitors to my grandparents’ house, where the table was always set without knowing who was arriving on the train. My mother was godmother to his oldest child, whom my grandfather taught to defend himself. I grew up among them, as I continued to grow up later among the exiles from the Spanish Civil War.

The last vestiges of fear that this
forgotten outcast had caused in me as a child dissipated as my mother and I, sitting next to his bed, listened to the details of the tragedy that had crushed the town. He had a power of evocation so intense that each thing he recounted seemed to become visible in the room rarefied by heat. The origin of all the misfortunes, of course, had been the massacre of the workers by the forces of law and
order, but doubts still persisted regarding the historical truth: three dead, or three thousand? Perhaps there had not been so many, he said, but people raised the number according to their own grief. Now the company had gone forever.

“The gringos are never coming back,” he concluded.

The only certainty was that they took everything with them: money, December breezes, the bread knife, thunder
at three in
the afternoon, the scent of jasmines, love. All that remained were the dusty almond trees, the reverberating streets, the houses of wood and roofs of rusting tin with their taciturn inhabitants, devastated by memories.

The first time the doctor paid attention to me that afternoon was when he saw me surprised by the sharp crackle like a scattered rain shower on the tin roof. “It’s
the turkey buzzards,” he told me. “They spend the whole day walking on the roofs.” Then he pointed with a languid index finger toward the closed door and concluded:

“At night it’s worse, because you can hear the dead wandering up and down those streets.”

He invited us to lunch and there was no reason not to accept, since the sale of the house needed only to be formalized. The tenants were the
buyers, and the details had been agreed upon by telegram. Would we have time?

“More than enough,” said Adriana. “Now nobody even knows when the train comes back.”

And so we shared with them a local meal whose simplicity had nothing to do with poverty but with a regimen of sobriety that he practiced and advocated not only for the table but for all of life’s activities. From the moment I tasted
the soup I had the sensation that an entire sleeping world was waking in my memory. Tastes that had been mine in childhood and that I had lost when I left the town reappeared intact with each spoonful, and they gripped my heart.

From the beginning of the conversation with the doctor I felt the same age I had been when I mocked him through the window, and so he intimidated me when he spoke to
me with the same seriousness and affection he used with my mother. When I was a boy, in difficult situations, I tried to hide my confusion behind a rapid, continual blinking of my eyes. That uncontrollable reflex returned without warning when the doctor looked at me. The heat had become unbearable. I remained on the margins of the conversation for a while, asking myself how it was possible that this
affable and nostalgic old man had been the terror of my childhood. Then, after a long pause and
some trivial reference, he looked at me with a grandfather’s smile.

“So you’re the great Gabito,” he said. “What are you studying?”

I hid my confusion with a spectral recounting of my studies: a secondary-school baccalaureate degree completed with good grades at a government boarding school, two years
and a few months of chaotic law, and empirical journalism. My mother listened and immediately sought the doctor’s support.

“Imagine, Compadre,” she said, “he wants to be a writer.”

The doctor’s eyes shone in his face.

“Comadre, how wonderful!” he said. “It’s a gift from heaven.” And he turned to me: “Poetry?”

“Novels and stories,” I told him, my heart in my mouth.

He became enthusiastic:

“Have you read
Doña Bárbara
?”

“Of course,” I replied, “and almost everything else by Rómulo Gallegos.”

As if revived by a sudden enthusiasm, he told us that he had met him when he delivered a lecture in Maracaibo, and he seemed a worthy author of his books. The truth is, at that moment, with my fever of 104 degrees for the sagas of Mississippi, I was beginning to see the seams in our native novel.
But such easy and cordial communication with the man who had been the terror of my childhood seemed like a miracle to me, and I preferred to go along with his enthusiasm. I spoke to him about “La Jirafa,” or “The Giraffe”—my daily commentary in
El Heraldo
—and offered him the news that very soon we intended to publish a magazine for which we had great hopes. Feeling more sure of myself, I told
him about the project and even gave him its proposed name:
Crónica.

He scrutinized me from head to toe.

“I don’t know how you write,” he said, “but you already talk like a writer.”

My mother hurried to explain the truth: no one was opposed to my being a writer as long as I pursued academic studies that would give me a firm foundation. The doctor minimized
everything and spoke about the writer’s
career. He too had wanted one, but his parents, with the same arguments she was using, had obliged him to study medicine when they failed to make him a soldier.