Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,Edith Grossman

Living to Tell the Tale (68 page)

“And now what the hell are we going to do?”

At that moment, dizzy with glory, we had no answer. Every topic seemed banal to us.

Fifteen years after the story had been published in
El Espectador,
Editorial Tusquets in Barcelona published it in a book with gilt-edge covers that sold as if it were something to eat. Inspired
by a sense of justice and by my admiration for the heroic sailor, at the end of the prologue I wrote: “There are books that do not belong to the person who writes them but to the one who suffers them, and this is one of those books. As a consequence, the author’s rights will be for the man who deserves them: our anonymous compatriot who had to endure ten days on a raft without food or water so
that this book would be possible.”

It was not an idle remark, for the book’s rights were paid in their entirety to Luis Alejandro Velasco by Tusquets, on my instructions, for fourteen years. Until the lawyer Guillermo Zea Fernández, of Bogotá, persuaded him that the rights belonged to him by law, knowing they were not his but the result of my decision, which had been made in tribute to his heroism,
his talent as a narrator, and his friendship.

The suit against me was presented in the Civil Court 22 of the Bogotá Circuit. Then my attorney and friend, Alfonso
Gómez Méndez, ordered Editorial Tusquets to suppress the final paragraph of the prologue in future editions and not pay Luis Alejandro Velasco a
céntimo
more of rights until a legal decision had been reached. This was done. After a long
court battle that included documentary, testimonial, and technical evidence, the court decided I was the sole author of the work and did not accede to the petitions submitted by Velasco’s lawyer. And therefore the payments made to him up to that time by my order had not had as their foundation the recognition of the sailor as coauthor but were the result of a voluntary and free decision by the
person who wrote the book. From that time on, the author’s rights, also by my order, were donated to an educational foundation.

It was not possible for us to find another story like that, because it was not one of those that are invented on paper. Life invents them, and almost always by dint of blows. We learned this later, when we attempted to write a biography of Ramón Hoyos, the formidable
Antioquian cyclist crowned national champion that year for the third time. We launched it to the kind of clamor learned in the series on the sailor, and we stretched it into nineteen installments before realizing that the public preferred Ramón Hoyos riding up mountains and reaching the finish line first, but in real life.

We caught sight of a minimal hope of recovery one afternoon when Salgar
phoned and told me to meet him right away in the bar of the Hotel Continental. He was there with an old friend of his, a serious man who had just introduced him to his companion, an absolute albino in laborer’s clothes, with hair and eyebrows so white he seemed dazzling even in the half-light of the bar. Salgar’s friend, a well-known entrepreneur, introduced the man as a mining engineer who was
excavating in an empty lot two hundred meters from
El Espectador,
searching for a legendary treasure that had belonged to General Simón Bolívar. His companion—a very good friend of Salgar’s, and of mine from that time on—guaranteed the truth of the story. It was suspect because of its simplicity: when the Liberator, defeated and dying, was preparing to leave Cartagena and continue his final journey,
it is assumed that he chose not to
take with him a substantial personal treasure, which he had acquired during the penuries of his wars as a well-deserved reserve for a decent old age. When he was preparing to continue his bitter journey—it is not known whether it was to Caracas or Europe—he had the prudence to leave the treasure hidden in Bogotá, under the protection of a system of Lacedaemonian
codes very typical of his time, so that he could find it whenever he needed to, from any part of the world. I recalled these reports with irresistible longing as I was writing
The General in His Labyrinth,
where the story of the treasure would have been essential, but I could not obtain enough facts to make it credible, and as fiction it seemed weak. That legendary fortune, never recovered by
its owner, was what the seeker was seeking with so much eagerness. I did not understand why they had revealed this to us until Salgar explained that his friend, impressed by the story of the shipwrecked sailor, wanted to give us background to this story so that we would follow it until it could be published with comparable publicity.

We went to the site. It was the only empty lot to the west
of the Parque de los Periodistas and very close to my new apartment. The friend explained with a colonial map the coordinates of the treasure in the real details of the hills of Monserrate and La Guadalupe. The story was fascinating, and the prize would be a news item as explosive as that of the shipwrecked sailor, and of greater significance worldwide.

We continued visiting the site with a certain
frequency to keep up-to-date, we listened to the engineer for endless hours founded on
aguardiente
and lemon, and we felt farther and farther away from the miracle, until so much time went by that we did not have even a hope left. The only thing we could suspect afterward was that the tale of the treasure was no more than a screen for exploiting without a permit a deposit of something very valuable
right in the center of the capital. Though it was possible that this too was another screen for keeping the Liberator’s treasure safe.

These were not the best times for dreaming. After the story of the shipwrecked sailor, I had been advised to spend some time outside Colombia until the situation eased, because of
death threats, real or fictitious, that reached us by various means. It was the
first thing I thought of when Luis Gabriel Cano asked me without any preamble what I was doing next Wednesday. Since I had no plans, he told me with his customary stolidity to prepare my papers for traveling as the paper’s special correspondent to the Big Four Conference that would convene the following week in Geneva.

The first thing I did was telephone my mother. The news seemed so huge that
she asked if I was referring to some farm called Geneva. “It’s a city in Switzerland,” I told her. Without agitation, with her interminable serenity in assimilating the most unexpected upheavals from children, she asked how long I would be there, and I said I would be back in two weeks at the latest. In reality I was going only for the four days of the conference. But for reasons that had nothing
to do with my will, I stayed not for two weeks but almost three years. Then I was the one who needed the lifeboat even if only to eat once a day, but I was very careful not to let the family know. Someone once tried to upset my mother with the lie that her son was living like a prince in Paris after deceiving her with the story that he would be there for only two weeks.

“Gabito isn’t deceiving
anyone,” she said with an innocent smile, “but sometimes it happens that even God needs to make weeks that are two years long.”

I never had realized that I was a stateless person, just as much as the millions displaced by violence. I had never voted because I did not have a citizen’s identity card. In Barranquilla I had identified myself with my reporter’s credentials from
El Heraldo,
where I
had given a false date of birth in order to avoid military service, and I had been delinquent for the past two years. In cases of emergency I identified myself with a postal card
^*that the telegraph operator in Zipaquirá had given to me. A providential friend put me in touch with the manager of a travel agency who agreed to get me on the plane on the appropriate date by means of the payment in
advance of two hundred dollars and my signature at the bottom of ten blank pages of
stamped paper. This was how I learned by chance that my bank balance was a surprising amount that I had not had time to spend because of my reporter’s zeal. My only expenditure, aside from personal expenses that were no more than those of a poor student, was the monthly dispatching of the lifeboat to the family.

On the eve of the flight, the manager of the travel agency chanted to me the name of each document as he placed them on the desk so that I would not confuse them: identity card, record of military service, notarized receipts from the tax office, and certificates of vaccination against smallpox and yellow fever. In the end he asked me for an additional tip for the skinny boy who had been vaccinated
twice in my name, as he had been vaccinated every day for years for clients in a hurry.

I traveled to Geneva in time for the inaugural meeting of Eisenhower, Bulganin, Eden, and Faure, with no languages but Spanish and an allowance for a third-class hotel, but backed up by my bank account. I was expected to return in a few weeks, but I do not know by what strange premonition I gave everything
I owned in the apartment to my friends, including a stupendous library on cinema that I had collected in two years with the advice of Álvaro Cepeda and Luis Vicens.

The poet Jorge Gaitán Durán came to say goodbye while I was tearing up old papers, and he had the curiosity to look through the wastebasket in case he found something he could use for his magazine. He rescued three or four sheets
ripped in half and skimmed over them as he put them together like a puzzle on the desk. He asked me where they were from and I said it was the “Monologue of Isabel Watching the Rain in Macondo,” deleted from the first draft of
Leaf Storm.
I told him it was not unpublished, because it had appeared in
Crónica
and in the
Magazine Dominical
of
El Espectador
under the same title, which I had made up
for it, and with an authorization I remembered giving in a hurry in an elevator. Gaitán Durán did not care, and he published it in the next issue of his magazine
Mito.

The farewell party at Guillermo Cano’s house was so tumultuous that when I arrived at the airport the plane had already
left for Cartagena, where I was to sleep that night in order to say goodbye to my family. By a stroke of luck
I boarded another one at noon. It was just as well, because the domestic atmosphere had expanded since the last time, and my parents and brothers and sisters felt capable of surviving without the lifeboat that I was going to need more than they in Europe.

I traveled to Barranquilla by highway very early the next day to take the flight to Paris at two in the afternoon. In the bus terminal in Cartagena
I ran into Lácides, the unforgettable porter at The Skyscraper, whom I had not seen since that time. He fell on me with a real embrace and his eyes full of tears, not knowing what to say or how to treat me. After a hurried exchange because his bus was arriving and mine was leaving, he said with a fervor that touched my soul:

“What I don’t understand, Don Gabriel, is why you never told me who
you were.”

“Ah, my dear Lácides,” I answered, more pained than he, “I couldn’t tell you because even I don’t know who I am yet.”

Hours later, in the taxi that took me to the airport in Barranquilla under the ungrateful sky, more transparent than any other in the world, I realized I was on the Avenida Veinte de Julio. In a reflex that had formed part of my life for the past five years, I looked
toward the house of Mercedes Barcha. And there she was, slim and distant, like a statue seated in the doorway, wearing a green dress with golden lace in that year’s style, her hair cut like swallows’ wings, and with the intense stillness of someone waiting for a person who will not arrive. I could not avoid the awful premonition that I was going to lose her forever on a Thursday in July at so early
an hour, and for an instant I thought about stopping the cab to say goodbye, but I preferred not to defy again a destiny as uncertain and persistent as mine.

On the plane I was still tortured by stomach spasms of remorse. At that time there was a fine custom of putting on the back of the seat in front of you something that in plain language was still called writing materials. A sheet of notepaper
with gold edges and a matching pink, cream, or blue envelope of the same linen paper, sometimes perfumed. In my few previous
trips I had used them to write farewell poems that I turned into little paper doves and sent flying when I got off the plane. I chose sky blue and wrote my first formal letter to Mercedes seated in the doorway of her house at seven in the morning, with the green dress of
a bride without a beloved and the hair of an uncertain swallow, not even suspecting for whom she had dressed at dawn. I had written her other playful notes that I improvised at random and had received only verbal and always elusive responses when we happened to run into each other. This was not meant to be more than five lines to give her official notice of my trip. But at the end I added a postscript
that blinded me like a flash of lightning at midday at the very instant I signed it: “If I do not receive an answer to this letter within a month, I will stay and live in Europe forever.” I did not allow myself time to think about it again before I put the letter in the mailbox at the desolate airport in Montego Bay at two in the morning. It was already Friday. On Thursday of the following week,
when I walked into the hotel in Geneva at the end of another useless day of international disagreements, I found her letter of reply.