Living to Tell the Tale (8 page)

Among the powerful arguments against Gabriel Eligio was his status as the love child of an unmarried woman who had given birth to him at the tender age of fourteen after a casual misstep with a schoolteacher. She was called
Argemira García Paternina, a slender, free-spirited white girl who had another five sons and two daughters by three different fathers whom she never married or lived with under the same roof. She resided in the town of Sincé, where she had been born, and scratched out a living for her offspring with an independent and joyful spirit that we, her grandchildren, might well have wanted for a Palm
Sunday. Gabriel Eligio was a distinguished example of that ragged breed. Since the age of seventeen he’d had five virgin lovers, as he revealed to my mother in an act of penance on their wedding night aboard the hazardous Riohacha schooner as it was lashed by a squall. He confessed that with one of them, when he was eighteen and the telegraph operator in Achí, he’d had a son, Abelardo, who was almost
three. With another, when he was twenty and the telegraph operator in Ayapel, he had a daughter a few months old, whom he had never seen and whose name was Carmen Rosa. He had promised the baby’s mother that he would come back and marry her, and he had intended to fulfill the commitment until his life changed course because of his love for Luisa Santiaga. He had
recognized his older child before
a notary and later would do the same with his daughter, but these were no more than byzantine formalities without consequence in the eyes of the law. It is surprising that his irregular conduct could cause moral uneasiness in Colonel Márquez, who had fathered, in addition to his three official children, nine more with different mothers, both before and after his marriage, all of them welcomed by
his wife as if they were her own.

It is not possible for me to establish when I first heard about these events, but in any case the transgressions of my forebears did not interest me in the slightest. On the other hand, the names in the family attracted my notice because they seemed unique. First those on my mother’s side: Tranquilina, Wenefrida, Francisca Simodosea. Then that of my paternal
grandmother: Argemira, and those of her parents: Lozana and Aminadab. Perhaps this is the origin of my firm belief that the characters in my novels cannot walk on their own feet until they have a name that can be identified with their natures.

The arguments against Gabriel Eligio were made worse because he was an active member of the Conservative Party, against which Colonel Nicolás Márquez had
fought his wars. The peace declared by the signing of the Neerlandia and Wisconsin accords was only tenuous, for a fledgling centralism was still in power and a good deal of time would have to pass before the Goths and the Liberals stopped baring their teeth at one another. Perhaps the suitor’s Conservatism was more a matter of familial contagion than ideological conviction, but for her family
it outweighed other attributes of his good character, such as his always keen intelligence and proven integrity.

Papá was a difficult man to see into or to please. He was always very much poorer than he seemed and considered poverty a hateful enemy he could never accept and never defeat. With the same courage and dignity he endured the opposition to his love for Luisa Santiaga, in the back room
of the telegraph office in Aracataca, where he hung a hammock for sleeping alone. But next to it he also had a bachelor’s cot with well-oiled springs for whatever the night might offer him. At one time I was somewhat
tempted by his furtive hunter’s ways, but life taught me that it is the most arid form of solitude, and I felt great compassion for him.

Until a short while before his death I would
hear him say that on one of those difficult days he had to go with several friends to the colonel’s house, and everyone was invited to sit down except him. Her family always denied the story and attributed it to the embers of my father’s resentment, or at least to a false memory, but once my grandmother let it slip in the confessional ravings of her almost one hundred years, which did not seem
evoked so much as relived.

“There’s that poor man standing in the doorway of the living room, and Nicolasito hasn’t asked him to sit down,” she said with true regret.

Always attentive to her dazzling revelations, I asked who the man was, and her simple reply was:

“García, the one with the violin.”

Amid so many absurdities, the one most uncharacteristic of my father was his buying a revolver
because of what might happen with a warrior at rest like Colonel Márquez. It was a venerable long-barreled Smith & Wesson .38, with who knows how many previous owners or how many deaths it was accountable for. The only certainty is that he never fired it, not even as a warning or out of curiosity. Years later his oldest children found it with its original five bullets in a cupboard full of useless
trash, next to the violin of his serenades.

Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga were not intimidated by the harshness of her family. At first they met on the sly, in the houses of friends, but when the blockade was closed around her their only communication was by letters sent through ingenious channels. When she was not permitted to attend parties where he might be a guest, they saw each other
at a distance. Then the repression became so severe that no one dared defy the wrath of Tranquilina Iguarán, and the lovers disappeared from public view. When not even a crack was left open for furtive letters, they invented the stratagems of the shipwrecked. She managed to hide a greeting card in a cake that someone had ordered for Gabriel Eligio’s birthday, and he lost no opportunity to send
her false and innocuous telegrams with the real message in code or written in invisible ink. Aunt Francisca’s complicity then became so evident, despite her categorical denials, that for the first time her authority in the house was affected, and she was allowed to accompany her niece only when she was sewing in the shade of the almond trees. Then Gabriel Eligio sent messages of love from the window
of Dr. Alfredo Barboza, whose house was across the street, using the manual telegraphy of deaf-mutes. She learned it so well that when her aunt’s attention wandered she held intimate conversations with her sweetheart. It was only one of the countless tricks devised by Adriana Berdugo, a
comadre
of Luisa Santiaga’s and her most inventive and daring accomplice.

These consoling devices would have
been enough for them to survive over a slow fire, until Gabriel Eligio received an alarming letter from Luisa Santiaga that obliged him to think in a decisive way. She had written in haste, on toilet paper, giving him the bad news that her parents had resolved to take her to Barrancas, stopping in each town along the way, as a brutal cure for her lovesickness. It would not be the ordinary journey
of one bad night aboard the schooner to Riohacha, but the barbarous route along the spurs of the Sierra Nevada, on mules and in carts, across the vast province of Padilla.

“I would rather have died,” my mother told me on the day we went to sell the house. And she had in fact tried to die, barring her bedroom door and eating nothing but bread and water for three days, until she was overcome by
the reverential terror she felt for her father. Gabriel Eligio realized that the tension had reached its limits, and he made a decision that was also extreme, but manageable. He strode across the street from Dr. Barboza’s house to the shade of the almond trees and stopped in front of the two women who waited for him in terror, their work in their laps.

“Please leave me alone for a moment with
the señorita,” he said to Aunt Francisca. “I have something important to say that only she can hear.”

“What insolence!” her aunt replied. “There’s nothing that has to do with her that I can’t hear.”

“Then I won’t say it,” he said, “but I warn you that you will be responsible for whatever happens.”

Luisa Santiaga begged her aunt to leave them alone and took responsibility. Then Gabriel Eligio
expressed his view that she should take the trip with her parents, in the manner they chose and for the time it might take, but only on the condition that she give her promise as a solemn oath that she would marry him. She was happy to do so and added on her own account that only death could prevent their marriage.

They both had almost a year to demonstrate the seriousness of their promises,
but neither one imagined how much it would cost them. The first part of the journey in a caravan of mule drivers, riding on muleback along the precipices of the Sierra Nevada, took two weeks. They were accompanied by Wenefrida’s maid Chon—an affectionate diminutive of Encarnación—who joined the family after they left Barrancas. The colonel knew that steep, rocky route all too well, for he had left
a trail of children there on the dissipated nights of his wars, but his wife had chosen it without knowing that, because she had bad memories of the schooner. For my mother, who was riding a mule for the first time, it was a nightmare of naked suns and ferocious downpours, her soul dangling by a thread in the soporific breath that rose from the gorges. The thought of an uncertain sweetheart, with
his midnight clothes and sunrise violin, seemed like a trick of the imagination. By the fourth day, incapable of surviving, she warned her mother that she would throw herself over a cliff if they did not return home. Mina, more frightened than her daughter, agreed. But the head drover showed her on the map that returning or continuing would take the same amount of time. Relief came in eleven days,
when they saw from the final cornice the radiant plain of Valledupar.

Before the first stage of the journey was over, Gabriel Eligio had secured permanent communication with his wandering sweetheart, thanks to the complicity of the telegraph operators in the seven towns where she and her mother would stay before reaching Barrancas. Luisa Santiaga made her own arrangements, too. The entire Province
was saturated with people
named Iguarán and Cotes, whose tribal consciousness had the strength of an impenetrable jungle, and she succeeded in bringing them over to her side. This allowed her to maintain a feverish correspondence with Gabriel Eligio from Valledupar, where she spent three months, until the trip ended almost a year later. She had only to pass by each town’s telegraph office, and
with the complicity of her young and enthusiastic kinswomen she would receive and respond to his messages. Chon, the silent one, played an invaluable role because she carried messages hidden in her clothes without making Luisa Santiaga uneasy or offending her modesty, for she could not read or write, and would die to keep a secret.

Almost sixty years later, when I tried to plunder these memories
for
Love in the Time of Cholera,
my fifth novel, I asked my papá if in the professional jargon of telegraph operators there existed a specific word for the act of linking one office to another. He did not have to think about it:
pegging in.
The word is in the dictionary, though not with the specific meaning I needed, but it seemed perfect since communication between different offices was established
by connecting a peg on a panel of telegraphic terminals. I never discussed it with my father. But not long before his death he was asked in a newspaper interview if he had ever wanted to write a novel, and he answered that he had but gave it up when I asked him about the verb
pegging in,
because he realized then that the book I was writing was the same one he had planned to write.

On that occasion
he also revealed a secret that could have changed the course of our lives. And it was that after six months of traveling, when my mother was in San Juan del César, Gabriel Eligio was told in confidence that Mina had the responsibility of preparing for the definitive return of the family to Barrancas provided the rancor caused by the death of Medardo Pacheco had healed over. It seemed absurd
to him, now that the bad times had been left behind and the absolute imperium of the banana company was beginning to resemble the dream of the promised land. But it was also reasonable that the intractability of the Márquez Iguarán family would lead them to sacrifice their own happiness if they could free
their daughter from the talons of the hawk. Gabriel Eligio’s immediate decision was to request
a transfer to the telegraph office in Riohacha, some twenty leagues from Barrancas. The position was not open but they promised to keep his application in mind.

Luisa Santiaga could not determine her mother’s secret intentions, but she did not dare deny them either, for she had noticed that the closer they came to Barrancas, the calmer and more peaceful Tranquilina Iguarán seemed. Chon, everyone’s
confidante, gave her no clues. To get to the truth, Luisa Santiaga told her mother that she would love to stay in Barrancas and live there. The mother had a moment’s hesitation but decided not to say anything, and the daughter was left with the impression that she had come very close to the secret. Troubled, she escaped into the destiny of the cards with a street Gypsy who gave her no clues
about her future in Barrancas. On the other hand, she did tell her that there would be no obstacle to a long and happy life with a distant man she did not know well, but who would love her until death. Her description of the man returned Luisa Santiaga’s soul to her body, for she found many qualities in him that she saw in her beloved, above all in his temperament. At the end the Gypsy predicted without
a shred of doubt that she would have six children with him. “I died of fright,” my mother said the first time she told me the story, not even imagining that her children would number five more than that. The two of them accepted the prediction with so much enthusiasm that their telegraphic correspondence stopped being a concert of illusory intentions and became methodical, practical, and more
intense than ever. They set dates, established means, and devoted their lives to the shared determination to marry without consulting anyone when they met again, wherever and however that might be.

Luisa Santiaga was so faithful to their commitment that in the town of Fonseca she did not think it correct to attend a gala ball without her sweetheart’s consent. Gabriel Eligio was in the hammock
sweating out a fever of 104 when he heard the signal for an urgent incoming telegram. It was his colleague in Fonseca. To guarantee complete security, she asked who was operating
the key at the end of the chain of telegraph offices. More astonished than gratified, her sweetheart transmitted an identifying phrase: “Tell her I’m her godson.” My mother recognized the password and stayed at the dance
until seven in the morning, when she had to change her clothes in a rush so she would not be late for Mass.