When children are told the first story that in reality appeals to them, it is very difficult to get them to listen to another. I believe this is not true for children who are storytellers, and it was not true for me. I wanted more. The voracity with which I listened to stories always left me hoping for a better one the next day, above all those that had to do with the mysteries of sacred history.
Everything that happened to me in the street had an enormous resonance in the house. The women in the kitchen would tell the stories to the strangers arriving on the train, who in turn brought other stories to be told, and all of it was incorporated into the torrent of oral tradition. Some events were first learned through the accordion players who sang about them at fairs, and travelers would retell them and enhance them. But the most striking story of my childhood occurred very early one Sunday, on our way to Mass, in an ill-advised sentence spoken by my grandmother:
“Poor Nicolasito is going to miss Pentecost Mass.”
I was happy, because Sunday Mass was too long for a boy my age, and the sermons of Father Angarita, whom I loved so much as a child, seemed soporific. But it was a vain illusion, for my grandfather almost dragged me to the Belgian’s studio, in the green velveteen suit I had been dressed in for Mass and that was too tight for me in the crotch. The police officers recognized my grandfather from a distance and opened the door for him with the ritual formula:
“Go in, Colonel.”
Only then did I learn that the Belgian had inhaled a solution of gold cyanide—which he shared with his dog—after seeing All Quiet on the Western Front, the picture by Lewis Milestone based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Popular intuition, which always finds the truth even when it seems impossible, understood and proclaimed that the Belgian had not been able to endure the shock of seeing himself crushed with his decimated patrol in a morass of mud in Normandy.
The small reception room was in darkness because of the closed windows, but the early light from the courtyard illuminated the bedroom, where the mayor and two more police officers were waiting for my grandfather. There was the body covered with a blanket on a campaign cot, the crutches within reach, where their owner had left them before he lay down to die. Beside him, on a wooden stool, was the tray where he had vaporized the cyanide, and a sheet of paper with large letters written in pencil: “Don’t blame anyone, I’m killing myself because I’m a fool.” The legal formalities and the details of the funeral, soon resolved by my grandfather, did not take more than ten minutes. For me, however, they were the most affecting ten minutes I would remember in my life.
The first thing that shook me when I came in was the smell in the bedroom. I learned only much later that it was the bitter almond smell of the cyanide that the Belgian had inhaled in order to die. But not that or any other impression would be more intense and long-lasting than the sight of the corpse when the mayor moved the blanket aside to show him to my grandfather. He was naked, stiff and twisted, his rough skin covered with yellow hair, his eyes like still pools looking at us as if they were alive. That horror of being seen by the dead shook me for years afterward whenever I passed the graves without crosses of suicides buried outside the cemetery by order of the Church. But what I remembered with greatest clarity, along with a charge of horror when I saw the body, was the boredom of nights in his house. Perhaps that was why I said to my grandfather when we left the house:
“The Belgian won’t be playing chess anymore.”
It was a simple idea, but my grandfather told it to the family as if it were a brilliant witticism. The women repeated it with so much enthusiasm that for some time I ran from visitors for fear they would say it in front of me or oblige me to repeat it. This also revealed to me a characteristic of adults that would be very useful to me as a writer: each of them told the story with new details that they added on their own, until the various versions became different from the original. No one can imagine the compassion I have felt since then for the poor children whose parents have declared them geniuses, who make them sing for visitors, imitate birds, even lie in order to entertain. Today I realize, however, that this simple sentence was my first literary success.
That was my life in 1932, when it was announced that Peruvian troops, under the military regime of General Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro, had taken the undefended town of Leticia, on the banks of the Amazon River in the extreme south of Colombia. The news resounded throughout the country. The government ordered national mobilization and a public drive that would go from house to house and collect the most valuable family jewels. Patriotism exacerbated by the duplicitous attack of the Peruvian troops provoked an unprecedented popular response. The collectors could not cope with the number of voluntary contributions from all the houses, above all the wedding rings, as esteemed for their real price as for their symbolic value.
For me, on the other hand, it was one of the happiest times because of its disorder. The sterile rigor of schools was broken and replaced by popular creativity on the streets and in the houses. A civic battalion was formed from the cream of the young boys without distinctions of class or color, the feminine brigades of the Red Cross were created, anthems of war to the death against the evil aggressor were improvised, and a unanimous shout resounded throughout the country: “Long live Colombia, down with Peru!”
I never knew how these epic achievements ended because after a certain period of time spirits calmed without sufficient explanations. Peace was achieved with the assassination of General Sánchez Cerro at the hands of someone opposed to his bloody rule, and the war cry became routine when celebrating soccer victories at school. But my parents, who had contributed their wedding rings for the war, never recovered from their naïveté.
As far as I can remember, my vocation for music was revealed in those years by the fascination I felt for the accordion players with their travelers’ songs. I knew some of them by heart, like the ones the women in the kitchen sang in secret because my grandmother considered them vulgar. Still, my need to sing in order to feel alive was inspired by the tangos of Carlos Gardel that infected half the world. I would dress like him, with a felt hat and silk scarf, and I did not need too many requests to burst into a tango at the top of my voice. Until the ill-fated morning when Aunt Mama woke me with the news that Gardel had died in the collision of two planes in Medellín. Months earlier I had sung “Cuesta abajo” at a charitable evening, accompanied by the Echeverri sisters, pure Bogotáns who were the teachers of teachers and the soul of every charitable evening and patriotic commemoration celebrated in Cataca. And I sang with so much character that my mother did not dare contradict me when I told her I wanted to learn the piano instead of the accordion that had been repudiated by my grandmother.
That same night she took me to the Señoritas Echeverri for lessons. While they were talking I looked at the piano from the other side of the room with the devotion of a stray dog, estimated if my feet could reach the pedals, and wondered if my thumb and little finger would be able to stretch for extraordinary intervals, or if I would be capable of deciphering the hieroglyphics of the staff. It was a visit of beautiful hopes that lasted for two hours. But in vain, for in the end the teachers told us that the piano was out of service and they did not know for how long. The idea was postponed until the return of the annual tuner, but it was not mentioned again until half a lifetime later, when in a casual conversation I reminded my mother of the sorrow I had felt at not learning the piano. She sighed.
“And the worst thing,” she said, “is that there was nothing wrong with it.”
Then I learned that she had arranged the excuse of the damaged piano with the teachers to spare me the torture she had suffered during five years of imbecilic exercises at the Colegio de la Presentación. The consolation was that during this time the Montessori school had opened in Cataca, and its teachers stimulated the five senses by means of practical exercises, and taught singing. With the talent and beauty of the director, Rosa Elena Fergusson, studying was something as marvelou
s as the joy of being alive. I learned to appreciate my sense of smell, whose power of nostalgic evocation is overwhelming. And taste, which I refined to the point where I have had drinks that taste of window, old bread that tastes of trunk, infusions that taste of Mass. In theory it is difficult to comprehend subjective pleasures, but those who have experienced them will understand right away.
I do not believe there is a method better than the Montessorian for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life. It has been rebuked for encouraging a sense of independence and individualism, and perhaps in my case this was true, but on the other hand I never learned to divide or find a square root or handle abstract ideas. We were so young that I remember only two classmates. One was Juanita Mendoza, who died of typhus at the age of seven, soon after the school opened, and this made so strong an impression on me that I have never been able to forget her wearing a crown and bridal veil in her coffin. The other is Guillermo Valencia Abdala, my friend since our first recess, and my infallible physician for Monday hangovers.
My sister Margot must have been very unhappy in that school, though I do not remember her ever mentioning it. She would sit in her chair in the elementary class and remain there without speaking—even during recess—and not moving her eyes from an indeterminate point until the last bell rang. I never knew at the time that while she was alone in the empty room she chewed on earth from the garden at home that she had hidden in the pocket of her pinafore.
It was very hard for me to learn how to read. It did not seem logical for the letter m to be called em, and yet with some vowel following it you did not say ema but ma. It was impossible for me to read that way. At last, when I went to the Montessori school, the teacher did not teach me the names of the consonants but their sounds. In this way I could read the first book I found in a dusty chest in the storeroom of the house. It was tattered and incomplete, but it involved me in so intense a way that Sara’s fiancé had a terrifying premonition as he walked by: “Damn! This kid’s going to be a writer.”
Said by someone who earned his living as a writer, it made a huge impression on me. Several years went by before I knew that the book was The Thousand and One Nights. The story I liked best—one of the shortest, and the simplest one I read—continued to seem the best one for the rest of my life, though now I am not sure that was where I read it, something no one has been able to clarify for me. The story is this: a fisherman promised a neighbor that he would give her the first fish he caught if she would lend him a lead weight for his casting net, and when the woman opened the fish to fry it, she found a diamond the size of an almond.
I have always related the war with Peru with the decadence of Cataca, for once peace was declared my father became lost in a labyrinth of uncertainties that ended at last with the family moving to his hometown of Sincé. For Luis Enrique and me, who accompanied him on his exploratory trip, it was in reality a new school of life, with a culture so different from ours that they seemed to come from two different planets. Beginning on the day after our arrival, we were taken to nearby farms, and there we learned to ride burros, milk cows, geld calves, set traps for quail, fish with a baited hook, and understand why male and female dogs became stuck together. Luis Enrique was always far ahead of me in discovering the world that Mina had forbidden to us, and that my grandmother Argemira told us about in Sincé without the least malice. So many uncles and aunts, so many cousins of varying colors, so many relatives with strange last names speaking so many different argots at first conveyed more confusion than surprise, until we understood it as another way to love. Papá’s papá, Don Gabriel Martínez, a legendary schoolteacher, received Luis Enrique and me in his courtyard with its immense trees and the most famous mangoes in town for their taste and size. He counted them one by one every day from the beginning of the annual harvest, and he picked them one by one with his own hand at the moment he sold them at the fabulous price of a centavo each. When he said goodbye to us after a friendly chat about his good teacher’s memory, he picked a mango from the leafiest tree for the two of us.
Papá had sold us that trip as an important step in familial unification, but after we arrived we realized that his secret purpose was to open a pharmacy on the large main square. My brother and I were matriculated in the school of Maestro Luis Gabriel Mesa, where we felt freer and better integrated into a new community. We rented an enormous house on the best corner in town, with two stories and a running balcony facing the square, and desolate bedrooms where the invisible ghost of a stone curlew spent the entire night singing.
Everything was ready for the joyous landing of my mother and sisters when the telegram arrived with the news that my grandfather Nicolás Márquez had died. He had been caught off guard by a throat ailment that was diagnosed as terminal cancer, and there was almost no time to take him to Santa Marta to die. The only one of us he saw as he was dying was my brother Gustavo, born six months earlier, whom someone had put into my grandfather’s bed so that he could say goodbye. My dying grandfather gave him a farewell caress. I needed many years before I realized what that inconceivable death meant to me.
The move to Sincé was made in any event, not only with all the children but with my grandmother Mina and Aunt Mama, who was already ill, both of them in the good care of Aunt Pa. But the joy of the change and the failure of the project occurred almost at the same time, and in less than a year we all returned to the old house in Cataca, “flogging our hats,” as my mother would say in hopeless situations. Papá stayed in Barranquilla studying the way to set up his fourth pharmacy.
My final memory of the house in Cataca during those awful days was the fire in the courtyard where they burned my grandfather’s clothes. His liquiliques and the white linen he wore as a civilian colonel resembled him as if he were still alive inside them while they burned. Above all the many cloth caps of different colors that had been the identifying sign that best distinguished him at a distance. Among them I recognized my Scotch plaid one, burned by mistake, and I was shaken by the revelation that this ceremony of extermination had conferred upon me a certain role in my grandfather’s death. Today it seems clear: something of mine had died with him. But I also believe, beyond any doubt, that at that moment I was already an elementary-school writer who needed only to learn how to write.
It was the same state of mind that encouraged me to go on living when my mother and I left the house we could not sell. Since the return train could arrive at any time, we went to the station without even thinking about seeing anyone else. “We’ll come back another day when we have more time,” she said, using the only euphemism she could think of to say she would never come back. As for me, I knew then that for the rest of my life I would never stop missing the thunder at three in the afternoon.
We were the only phantoms at the station, apart from the employee in overalls who sold the tickets as well as doing what in our time had required twenty or thirty hurried men. The heat was merciless. On the other side of the tracks there were only the remains of the forbidden city of the banana company, its old mansions without their red tile roofs, the withered palms among the weeds, the ruins of the hospital, and at the far end of the promenade, the Montessori schoolhouse abandoned among decrepit almond trees, and the little square of gravel facing the station without the slightest trace of historical greatness.
Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die. I had suffered this on other occasions, but only on that morning did I recognize it as a crisis of inspiration, that word, abominable but so real, that demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its ashes in time.
I do not remember if we spoke further, not even on the return train. When we were already on the launch, in the small hours of Monday and with the cool breeze of the sleeping swamp, my mother realized I was not asleep either, and she asked me:
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m writing
,” I answered. And I rushed to be more amiable: “I mean, I’m thinking about what I’m going to write when I get to the office.”
“Aren’t you afraid your papá will die of grief?”
I eluded the charge with a long pass of the cape.
“He’s had so many reasons to die, this one must be the least fatal.”
It was not the most propitious time for me to attempt a second novel, after having been mired in the first one and attempting other forms of fiction, with luck or without it, but that night I imposed it on myself like a vow made in war: I would write it or die. Or as Rilke had said: “If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write.”
From the taxi that took us to the dock for launches, my old city of Barranquilla looked strange and sad in the first light of that providential February. The captain of the launch Eline Mercedes invited me to accompany my mother to the town of Sucre, where the family had lived for the past ten years. I did not even think about it. I said goodbye to her with a kiss, and she looked into my eyes, smiled at me for the first time since the previous afternoon, and asked me with her usual mischievousness:
“So, what shall I tell your papá?”
I answered with my heart in my hand:
“Tell him I love him very much and that thanks to him I’m going to be a writer.” And without compassion I anticipated any other alternatives: “Nothing but a writer.”
Living to Tell the Tale Page 11
