Living to Tell the Tale

by Gabriel García Márquez

  I believe the height of my mother’s desperation was sending me with a letter to a man who had a reputation for being the richest man and at the same time the most generous philanthropist in the city. Talk of his good heart was as widespread as news of his financial triumphs. My mother wrote him an anguished and direct letter to request urgent financial assistance, not in her name, because she was capable of enduring anything, but for love of her children. Only someone who knew her would understand what that humiliation meant in her life, but circumstances demanded it. She warned me that the secret had to remain between the two of us, and it did, until this moment when I am writing about it.

  I knocked at the large front door of the house, which somehow resembled a church, and almost without delay a small window opened and a woman looked out; all I remember about her was the ice in her eyes. She took the letter without saying a word and shut the window again. It must have been eleven in the morning, and I waited, sitting against the doorjamb, until three in the afternoon, when I decided to knock again and try to get an answer. The same woman opened the window, recognized me in surprise, and asked me to wait a moment. The answer was that I should come back at the same time on Tuesday of the following week. I did, but the only answer was that there would be no answer for another week. I had to go back three more times, always receiving the same answer, until a month and a half later, when a woman even harsher than the first responded, on behalf of her employer, that this was not a charitable establishment.

  I walked around the burning streets trying to find the courage to bring my mother an answer that would deliver her from her illusions. It was already dark when I faced her with an aching heart and said that the good philanthropist had died several months earlier. What grieved me most was the rosary my mother said for the eternal rest of his soul.

  Four or five years later, when we heard the factual report on the radio that the philanthropist had died the day before, I was petrified as I waited for my mother’s reaction. But I will never understand how it was that she heard it with sympathetic attention and said with a heartfelt sigh:

  “God keep him in His holy kingdom!”

  A block from the house we made friends with the Mosqueras, a family that spent fortunes on comic books and kept them piled to the ceiling in a shed in their courtyard. We were the only privileged beings who could spend entire days there reading Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers. Another fortunate discovery was an apprentice who painted movie posters for the nearby Las Quintas Theater. I helped him for the sheer pleasure of painting letters, and he got us in free two or three times a week for the good films with gun battles and fistfights. The only luxury that was missing was a radio so that we could listen to music at any time of day with just the touch of a button. Today it is difficult to imagine how rare they were in the houses of the poor. Luis Enrique and I would sit on a bench at the store on the corner where idle patrons could sit and chat, and we spent entire afternoons listening to the programs of popular music, which is what most of the programs were. In time we learned by heart a complete repertoire of Miguelito Valdés and the Casino de la Playa Orchestra, Daniel Santos and the Sonora Matancera, and the boleros of Agustín Lara in the voice of Toña la Negra. Our amusement at night, above all on the two occasions when they cut off our electricity for lack of payment, was to teach the songs to my mother and brothers and sisters, Ligia and Gustavo in particular, who learned them like parrots without understanding them and entertained us no end with their lyrical bits of nonsense. There were no exceptions. We all inherited from our father and mother a special memory for music and a good ear for learning a song the second time we heard it. Above all Luis Enrique, who was born a musician and specialized on his own in guitar solos for serenades of unrequited love. It did not take us long to discover that all the children without radios in the neighboring houses also learned the songs from my brothers and sisters, and most of all from my mother, who became one more sister in that house of children.

  My favorite program was The Little Bit of Everything Hour, with the composer, singer, and conductor Angel María Camacho y Cano, who held his audience captive starting at one in the afternoon with an ingenious miscellany, in particular his amateur hour for children under fifteen. All you had to do was register at the offices of La Voz de la Patria—The Voice of the Nation—and come to the program half an hour early. Maestro Camacho y Cano in person accompanied on the piano, and one of his assistants carried out the unappealable sentence of interrupting the song with a church bell when the amateur made the slightest mistake. The prize for the best-sung song was more than we could dream of—five pesos—but my mother was explicit: the most important thing was the glory of singing well on so prestigious a program.

  Until that time I had identified myself only with my father’s family name—García—and my two baptismal names—Gabriel José—but on that historic occasion my mother asked me to register with her family name too—Márquez—so that no one could have any doubt about my identity. It was an event at home. They made me dress in white as if it were my First Communion, and before I went out they gave me a dose of potassium bromide. I arrived at La Voz de la Patria two hours early, and the effect of the sedative soon passed as I waited in a nearby park because no one was allowed to enter the studios until a quarter of an hour before the program. As each minute passed I felt the spiders of terror growing inside me, and when I went in at last my heart was pounding. I had to make a supreme effort not to return home with the story that for some reason or other they had not allowed me to participate. The maestro did a quick test with me on the piano to establish my key. They called seven in the order in which they had registered, they rang the bell for three because of various mistakes, and they announced me with the simple name of Gabriel Márquez. I sang “El cisne,” a sentimental song about a swan whiter than a snowflake killed along with his lover by a pitiless hunter. After the first measures I realized that the key was very high for me in some notes that had not been tested in rehearsal, and I had a moment of panic when the assistant’s expression became doubtful and he got ready to pick up the bell. I do not know where I found the courage to make an energetic sign to him not to ring it, but it was too late: the bell rang without mercy. The five-peso prize, along with several gifts from advertisers, went to a very beautiful blonde who had massacred a selection from Madame Butterfly. I returned home crushed by defeat, and I never could console my mother for her disappointment. Many years passed before she confessed to me that the reason for her chagrin was that she had told her relatives and friends to listen to me sing and did not know how to avoid them.

  In the midst of that regimen of laughter and tears, I never missed school. Even when I had not eaten. But my time for reading at home was spent in household chores, and we did not have a budget for electricity that would allow reading until midnight. In any event, I resolved the problem. On the way to school there were several garages for passenger buses, and I would spend hours at one of them watching how they painted signs on the sides announcing routes and destinations. One day I asked the painter to let me paint a few letters to see if I could do it. Surprised by my natural aptitude, he sometimes allowed me to assist him for a few pesos that helped the family budget a little. Another hopeful thing was my casual friendship with the three García brothers, the children of a sailor on the Magdalena River, who had organized a popular-music trio to enliven their friends’ parties for pure love of the art. I joined them to form the García Quartet that would compete in the amateur hour on the Atlántico radio station. We won the first day to thunderous applause, but they did not pay us the prize of five pesos because of an irreparable error in our registration. We continued rehearsing together for the rest of the year and singing as a favor at family parties, until life at last dispersed us.

  I never shared the malicious view that the patience with which my father dealt with poverty showed a good deal of irresponsibility. On the contrary: I believe these were Homeric tests of an unfailing complicity between him and h
is wife that allowed them to maintain their courage even at the edge of the abyss. He knew that she managed panic even better than despair, and that this was the secret of our survival. What he did not think of, perhaps, is that she alleviated his sorrows while leaving the best of her life behind her. We never could understand the reason for his trips. It would often happen that we would be awakened at midnight on a Saturday and taken to the local office of an oil encampment on the Catatumbo, where a call from my father was waiting for us on the radiotelephone. I will never forget my mother bathed in tears during a conversation made more difficult by technology.

  “Oh, Gabriel,” my mother said, “look how you’ve left me with this army of children, when it’s so bad sometimes we have nothing to eat.”

  He replied with the bad news that he had an enlarged liver. It often happened to him, but my mother did not worry too much because on occasion he used it to hide his cheating.

  “That always happens to you when you don’t behave,” she said to him as a joke.

  She spoke looking at the microphone as if Papá were there, and at the end she became confused trying to send him a kiss and kissed the microphone. She herself could not control her giggles, and she never could tell the entire story because she always ended up bathed in tears of laughter. However, that day she was distracted, and at last she said at the table as if talking to no one in particular:

  “I noticed something strange in Gabriel’s voice.”

  We explained that the radio system not only distorts voices but masks personalities. The next night she said when she was half asleep: “In any event, his voice sounded as if he were much thinner.” Her nose had grown sharper because of those bad times, and she asked herself between sighs what those towns without God or laws were like where her man was wandering untethered. Her hidden motives were more apparent in a second conversation by radio, when she made my father promise that he would return home without delay if nothing was resolved in two weeks. But before the time was up, we received a dramatic one-word telegram from Altos del Rosario: “Undecided.” My mother saw in the message a confirmation of her most lucid forebodings, and she dictated her unappealable verdict:

  “Either you come home before Monday, or I’m going there right now with all our offspring.”

  A holy remedy. My father knew the power of her threats, and before the week was out he was back in Barranquilla. We were struck by the way he came in, dressed without care, his skin greenish and unshaved, so that my mother thought he was ill. But it was a momentary impression, because in two days’ time he salvaged his youthful project of opening a multipurpose pharmacy in the town of Sucre, an idyllic and prosperous corner that was a night and a day’s sail from Barranquilla. He had been there in his youth as a telegraph operator, and his heart stood still when he remembered the trip through crepuscular canals and golden swamps, and the eternal dances. At one time he had persisted in trying to obtain the store there, but without the luck he had in obtaining others he had wanted even more, like Aracataca. He thought about it again some five years later, during the third banana crisis, but he found it had been taken over by wholesalers from Magangué. However, a month before returning to Barranquilla, he happened to meet one of them who not only described a different reality but offered him good credit for Sucre. He did not accept because he was about to achieve the golden dream of Altos del Rosario, but when he was surprised by his wife’s sentence, he found the wholesaler from Magangué, who was still wandering the river towns, and they concluded the deal.

  After some two weeks of studies and arrangements with wholesalers who were friends of his, he left with his appearance and disposition reestablished, and his impression of Sucre was so intense that he wrote in his first letter: “The reality was better than the memory.” He rented a house with a balcony on the main square, and from there he regained his friends from long ago, who opened their doors wide to him. The family had to sell what it could, pack up the rest, which was not very much, and take it along on one of the steamboats that made a regular trip along the Magdalena River. In the same letter he sent a money order well calculated to cover immediate expenses and announced another for the costs of the trip. I cannot imagine more attractive news for my mother’s illusory character, so that her reply was intended not only to sustain her husband’s spirits but to sugarcoat the news that she was pregnant for the eighth time.

  I filled out the forms and made the reservations on the Capitán de Caro, a legendary ship that traveled the distance between Barranquilla and Magangué in a night and half a day. Then we would continue to our destination by motor launch along the San Jorge River and the idyllic Mojana Channel.

  “As long as we leave here, even if it’s for hell,” exclaimed my mother, who always distrusted the Babylonian reputation of Sucre. “You shouldn’t leave a husband alone in a town like that.”

  She imposed so much haste on us that three days before the trip we were sleeping on the floor because we had already auctioned off the beds and all the furniture we could sell. Everything else was in boxes, and the money for our passage safe in one of my mother’s hiding places, counted and recounted a thousand times over.

  The clerk who took care of me in the shipping offices was so charming that I did not have to clench my jaws to get along with him. I have the absolute certainty that I made meticulous notes of the fares he quoted in the clear, proper diction of obliging Caribbean people. What made me most happy and what I remembered best was that under the age of twelve you paid only half the regular fare. In other words, all the children except me. On that basis, my mother set aside the money for the trip and spent all the rest dismantling the house.

  On Friday I went to buy the tickets and the clerk greeted me with the startling news that the discount for children under twelve was not half but only thirty percent, which made an irreparable difference to us. He claimed I had written it down wrong, because the information was printed on an official notice that he placed in front of me. I went home devastated, and my mother made no comment but put on the dress she had worn when she was in mourning for her father, and we went to the riverboat agency. She wanted to be fair: someone had made a mistake and it very well might have been her son, but that did not matter. The fact was that we had no more money. The agent explained that there was nothing he could do.

  “You must realize, Señora,” he said, “that it isn’t a question of wanting or not wanting to serve you, but these are the regulations of a serious firm that cannot be run like a weather vane.”

  “But they’re only babies,” said my mother, and she pointed at me as an example. “Imagine, this one’s the oldest, and he just turned twelve.” And with her hand she indicated:

  “They’re this big.”

  It was not a question of height, claimed the agent, but age. No one paid any less except newborns, who traveled free. My mother looked to a higher authority:

  “Whom do I have to see to straighten this out?”

  The clerk did not have the chance to answer. The manager, an older man with a maternal belly, came to the door of the office in the middle of the discussion, and the clerk rose to his feet when he saw him. He was immense, and his appearance respectable, and his authority, even in shirtsleeves and soaked with perspiration, was more than evident. He listened to my mother with attention and responded in a serene voice that a decision of this kind was possible only through a revision of regulations at a meeting of the partners.

  “Believe me, I am very sorry,” he concluded.

  My mother sensed a moment of power and refined her argument.

  “You are correct, Señor,” she said, “but the problem is that your clerk did not explain it with care to my son, or my son did not understand him, and I proceeded on that error. Now I have everything packed and ready to go on board, we are sleeping on the blessed floor, our money for the market will be finished today, and on Monday I turn the house over to the new tenants.” She realized that the clerks in the room were listening to her with great in
terest, and then she addressed them: “What can this mean to so important a company?” And without waiting for an answer, she asked the manager, looking him straight in the eye:

  “Do you believe in God?”

  The manager became confused. The entire office was in suspense during a silence that lasted too long. Then my mother stirred in her chair, pressed together her knees, which had begun to tremble, held her handbag in her lap with both hands, and said with a determination typical of her great causes:

  “Well, I’m not moving until this is resolved.”

  The manager was horrified, and the entire staff stopped working to look at my mother. She was impassive, her nose sharp, her skin pale and pearly with sweat. She had stopped wearing mourning for her father, but had put it back on because it seemed the most suitable dress for the task. The manager did not look at her again but looked at his employees without knowing what to do, and at last he exclaimed to everyone:

  “This is unprecedented!”

  My mother did not blink. “I had a knot of tears in my throat but I had to resist because it would have ended in disaster,” she told me. Then the manager asked the clerk to bring the documents to his office. He did, and in five minutes he came out again, grumbling and furious, but with all the tickets in order for the trip.

  The following week we disembarked in the town of Sucre as if we had been born there. It must have had some sixteen thousand inhabitants, like so many of the country’s municipalities in those days, and they all knew one another, not so much by their names as by their secret lives. Not only the town but the entire region was a sea of gentle water that changed colors on account of the blankets of flowers that covered it according to the time, the place, and our own state of mind. Its splendor recalled that of the dreamlike still waters in Southeast Asia. During the many years the family lived in Sucre there was not a single automobile. It would have been impractical, since the unswerving streets of flattened earth seemed drawn in a straight line for bare feet, and many houses had a private dock in the kitchen with household canoes for local transportation.